NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
A tall man is climbing the long escalator ahead of me at Huntington Metro. He takes two steps at a time with ease.
I get to the top, well behind him. Taking one step at a time and then riding for the last few, as they flatten out. There is Maynard Keyes, at the top. Facing me and looking down the elevated track for an incoming train.
He takes off his sunglasses carefully with both hands.
“What brings you to Huntington, Fred?”
“Going to meet friends for lunch.”
He puts his glasses in a case and pockets it.
“I am going back to my digs.”
“Where is your magnificent pink car?”
“In the shop.”
“Sounds expensive.”
“It is hard to find replacement parts for a 1960 Buick!”
“Not surprising, it’s historical!”
“Yes, talk about expense, if all else fails I’ll have to get some custom made.”
A train pulls in and we board. After a few minutes, the train’s voice announces, “Yellow Line Train to Green Belt, doors closing” with a two-tone simulated gong.
The car is empty, and Maynard stretches out sideways across two seats with his feet extending to the seat across the aisle. He puts his sunglasses back on with the same care he took removing them.
I sit behind him, and he turns towards me.
“I’ve been lodging with the Sorrell sisters up in Northwest DC. Did you know them when you lived over there?”
“No, none of them.”
After a short ride, the train voice announces, “Eisenhower Avenue” and the doors open onto the platform high above the Hoffmann Center. Maynard watches two female soldiers get on wearing their four-color operational camouflage. They stand near the door in front of us. Maynard turns back to me.
“That Cami rather stands out, don’t you think?”
“Not designed for METRO.”
“I suppose it has its uses.”
“Are the Sorrells military women?”
“Good grief, no!”
“Perhaps they are too old to have followed that trend?”
“None of them would do well in a regimented society like that.”
“They sound interesting.”
“We go back a long way, There are three, with five marriages among them, all now divorced or separated.”
“Come home to roost, have they?”
“Exactly! To enjoy their unencumbered late middle age and regain their youth.”
“Oh, to regain my youth!”
“One or the other of them have been living there ever since old Sorrel died of heart failure in the late eighties, leaving them his mansion.”
“How lucky they are!”
“Yes, they grew up there, and are quite well known, or should I say notorious?”
“Perhaps you should. I wouldn’t know.”
“They were ahead of their time.”
“All three at once?”
“Yes, Ottoline was nonbinary before the term came into use. She was also “hooking up” long before the convenience of dating apps; and Lydia was painting illegal murals on city walls as a high school student, in the early eighties.”
“Impressive! What about the third sister?”
“Not so much ahead of her time, but she was as adventurous as her siblings.”
“Somebody must keep tradition alive!”
“True enough, teenage Lucinda’s affair with her sixty-three-year-old high school drama teacher made the papers and local TV.”
“So, is that where you took Boyd?”
“Yes, I thought he might feel more comfortable around people with unconventional lives and expectations.”
“Did he?”
“He got along well with Lucinda. I was never sure if he would sleep with her or with me. Lydia was polite and Ottoline ignored him completely.”
“Very complicated for Boyd!”
“Well, I should add that Ottoline was working to a deadline for a porn script.”
“So, she allowed that much.”
“No, Lucy told Boyd to console him.”
“This plot only thickens!”
“I think all this complexity led him to go home to Lark.”
“I seem to remember that disaster, by a huge puddle in front of the house.”
“You have that right.”
“Boyd has had a rough time these last few years.”
“He has. He tended to noctambulate.”
“You mean sleepwalking?”
“No, wide awake, he got out of bed and went for a stroll in the wee hours.”
“Much on his mind, no doubt.”
“Yes, he wanted to find his father, Harper; you know.”
“I believe that’s complicated by paternity issues.”
“So, he told Lucinda and dear Lucy told me.”
“As we drove back from the incident outside his mother’s house Boyd got a call telling him charges against him have been dropped.”
“That must have reduced his stress level!”
“He was so preoccupied, I wonder.”
“So, he got bale then?”
“Oh yes, thanks to dear Andy Sforzando’s smooth handling of the case.”
We stop at King Street and a lot of people crowd on at the back of the car. Some take to the hard blue seats and others stand holding the stainless-steel grab bars. Many in shorts and sleeveless tees revealing various kinds of leg and arm tattoos. Their golden piercings shine from their faces in the sunlight as they turn and gesture in conversation. When the train pulls out of the station, Maynard looks down at a gathering crowd on the huge concrete expanse of the new bus terminal.
“Look at all those Demonstrators!”
“They support, Lee Leavenworth Knox.”
“Isn’t he the guy trying to outlaw jeans for women?”
“Yes, he is also convinced that Hillary Clinton is a Cyborg.”
”She/it must be under the control of the Deep State.”
“Do cyborgs have gender?”
”That is a huge question, I can’t answer.”
” The term, ‘Deep State’ was once used by left-leaning conspiracy theorists.”
“Lee Leavenworth Knox was a coming young Democrat, in the nineties.”
”Lee must have smuggled the term over with him.”
”It has become a crowd pleaser.”
“He’s got nearly ten million Twitter followers and it’s only a month since the cyborg revelation.”
“I see all those gullible women for Knox are wearing sun dresses.”
“Doesn’t it look quaint!”
“My mother’s generation wore that style.”
“A lie is as good as a fact to those who believe it.”
“You remember that remark, ‘We make our own facts’?”
“Carl Rove wasn’t it?”
“He denies it.”
”Free speech is a wonderful thing and truth-free speech is truly fantastic.”
“Well, we in the ‘reality-based’ community are at a disadvantage!”
Our shiny stainless steel 7000 series car slows to a stop at Braddock Road. Outside we can see men spreading rolls of turf in front of new townhouses in the hot late morning sun.
“That grass will be cooked by evening!”
“No, Maynard, see the tank truck? It will be well watered.”
Sparkling droplets splash and spread among the green blades where the turf is already down.
“I think most of that water will evaporate before it does the grass any good.”
“Do we grow grass because it resembles a carpet or were carpets created to look like grass?”
“Sounds like a riddle!”
“Senator Knox has the answer.”
“He has ALL the answers!”
“Well, wool is made of grass by grazing sheep!”
“Is that supposed to be a clue, Fred?”
“Only as far as woolen carpets go.”
“We urban Westerners are growing more and more out of touch with nature.”
“That’s right, and she is showing her annoyance!”
“I believe rising methane levels are her latest attention getter.”
“Only if you subscribe to the climate change theory.”
“It’s a bit more than theoretical at this point!”
“Well, it depends on who, you ask.”
“Much depends on the entelechy, Fred.”
“I think that is probably obscure to most of us.”
The train voice announces ‘Calvin Coolidge National Airport’ as we go into a long curve in the track.
“Good God! I feel the train is about to fall off the tracks.”
Looking down to the right one sees no sign of the track bed only roads passing far underneath. The car tilts to the right as if it were going to tip over.
“I hope we don’t take to the air.”
“Maynard, it will be a brief descent!”
“Thankfully so.”
“Is this your first journey on Metro?”
“On this route it is.”
The two soldiers continue in conversation, leaning slightly in compensation for the tilting floor. Those chatting together at the other end of the car, seem to be oblivious.
The train voice announces Calvin Coolidge National AirPort as we stop.
People with luggage step aboard. After the two-tone gong, the train voice tells them, ‘Yellow Line to Green Belt’. Maynard must pull his legs back to give everyone room. He gets up to let a young man with a backpack sit by the window. He wears earbuds, and his black hair is shaved from the sides of his head. Maynard sits down again and extends his long leg down the aisle parallel to his row of seats. It becomes too difficult to talk without putting the plump Asian woman sitting next to me in the middle of it, as she scrolls through her phone, smiling to herself.
