Inside the restaurant, I found myself taking wrong turns, standing in awkward places, fumbling with my phone as I tried to find my friends.
Where are you? I messaged. I told them I needed to go to the back bar, and they sent me somewhere I don’t recognize.
This is how it is in a city that my heart clasps tightly, but my memory clasps loosely. Each building tells me a story, but I have lost all my navigational cues in this new era.
Do you consider it a win or a loss? She stared so hard into her drink, he wondered if her gaze might crush the ice.
He considered it a win that he wasn’t in the Congressman’s office, but was instead shoulder to shoulder with a raucous Friday night crowd. He considered it a win that she was talking to him in the first place.
I need to know if I should still talk to you, she said.
There are no winners at all right now, he said. Just people who can sleep at night and those who can’t.
We know what’s best for the women, the Congressman said.
We know what they don’t need, said another.
It was a day when aides brought water in clear glasses and briefing documents, and the world changed, slowly, after much discussion. But on this day, they talked about mammograms, births, deaths.
How are we going to make sure what we’re planning is enough if we haven’t talked to the women involved? asked the second Congressman.
One thought of his mother. Another of his sister. Another, his wife.
Well, said the first Congressman, they’d back us. They know we’re right.
The bridge soared high above the parkway, and she wondered why people never chose to jump from it, to leap toward the unforgiving landscape below. People ran, walked, stared straight ahead, but did not stop to consider what could be, how things could end so suddenly.
Above her, a military helicopter shredded the sky. The sunlight was growing soft and golden, but she could not let that distract her from the challenges at hand. It was time to hurtle toward whatever rushed at her. It was time, finally, to act.
Does she want another round? asked the bartender to the couple in their 60s, gesturing at the seat the wife had abandoned. Do you?
Sure, said the husband. And she probably does, too. She just went out to smoke.
The wife returned before her round appeared, and the two watched the TV play footage from so many years ago. They drank their drinks. They exchanged no words for a long time as the towers burned.
Tell me again why we should let them into the country? growled the wife.
They shook their heads. They left the bar.
I have been imagining the walks I’ll take when I return to my hometown. I imagine wandering down Connecticut Avenue, around Roosevelt Island. I have been visualizing the approach to National. I have checked to make sure a few favorite restaurants are still open.
Nothing has changed, a friend says. People still have to get up and go to work.
But I know I’m conjuring a memory, flimsy and slippery.
It’s Trump Country now, my husband says, and I sigh, knowing that the city I’ll recognize on the surface has been marred by darkly-cast stones.
Do you know why he hired him? she asked. The new employee in question had no relevant skills, and did not, it seem, even have the right skills to figure out how to do the job.
He’s a friend, her colleague said. They have trusted each other for a long time.
She thought about that awhile, about all the things that would go undone, and, even more troubling, about all the things that would be done wrong.
What does that mean for us? she asked, finally.
It means, no matter what, we’re screwed.
100 Proof 