Short fiction

Fervently Do We Pray

            The lobby of the Hyatt Place was quiet, nearly deserted at half past nine.  A half-life of radiant urgency lingered around the complementary coffee station laid waste.  Tom tried the carafes; Starbucks Blonde, Dark and Breakfast Blend, bled dry.  A chocolate chip cookie lay forlorn beneath a clear plastic dome.  Through an arrangement of hushed sliding doors a family of five were framed, huddled at the curb waiting for the parking valet.  The mother elegant in some hybrid of contemporary Western fashion and traditional Indian dress.  Kids in Nike sandals and high performance sportswear.  Father trim in eggplant colored Polo and linen ecru slacks.  All of them fingering plus-size smart phones. 

            Tom stepped into the mounting heat of a September day, ushered out on a great palm of cold lobby air.  He smiled at one of the kids, a teenage girl, the only one to look up from her screen.  His sudden corporeal presence seemed to confound.  Her gaze plunged quickly back into the luminous pool of her device.  Tom angled into a breach in oncoming traffic, made the opposite curb licking the last bit of gooey chocolate chip from his thumb.  The refrigerated conference rooms of the hotel receding with every step, he strolled off bound for parts unknown.    

            Bridging The Chasm, a big three day educational conference, was in its second day.  A keynote speaker had kicked things off the previous morning, prowling the stage in a suit resplendent with patterned color.  The effect was jarring for that delicate hour.  Writer of books on revolutionary educational change, self-described “disrupter”, he had exhorted six thousand delegates to seize the levers of learning from a stultified old guard.  As he warmed to his message, a rhythmic cadence set in, punctuated by a bushy beard, trilby hat, and elaborate hand gestures.  His projected image loomed behind him, nose glazed by a sheen of perspiration.  Che meets Tupac by way of artisan urban pickle maker, Tom had thought.  He restrained himself from sharing this with a woman to his left who appeared in thrall to the performance piece. 

            What had followed was a long day of breakouts, make and takes, and round tables.  Technology playgrounds and tech hangouts radiated out from a humming vendor fair.  An onslaught of lunch options from gluten free to halal to vegan to non-GMO to tuna on rye tested delegates’ strained capacity to choose.  Battalions of icy tubs of soft drinks, coffee, tea, warm bottled water, and assorted cookies deployed to combat flagging late afternoon spirits.  Tom had gamely soldiered on, conference tote bag digging deep into the fingers of his left hand by the time he probed the card reader and gained entry to his room, green-lighted on the third try.     

            He had last visited Washington, D.C. to protest the invasion of Iraq.  He and his then wife, Denise, had boarded a packed charter bus for the ten hour overnight trip, arriving in College Park, Maryland, dawn breaking over the Chesapeake.  A short train ride later they joined a throng of people streaming from Union Station toward the Ellipse.  A carnival atmosphere had prevailed.  Rain threatened but never fell.  War had ensued nonetheless, wildfires of unintended consequences engulfing East and West for a generation.   The two of them had limped along for another two years.  The split was amicable, anticlimactic, like leaving the Church long after having given up on Mass.     

            Today promised sunshine and blue skies.  Tom walked west on K Street to Washington Circle, executing a full circumnavigation.  He wandered up New Hampshire N.W. to Dupont Circle, took an outdoor table at Le Pain Quotidian.  Neighboring tables turned over times three, clocking shadows in full retreat toward noon.  Tom paid the bill, and crossed P Street to browse the sidewalk carrels at Second Story Books.  He considered a dust jacketed Dalva, the fine novel by Jim Harrison, uncertain whether he already owned the paperback.   

Larry Donovan, Tom’s principal, had authorized his conference request months ago on the strength of a budget flush with school improvement funds. Tom and Larry went way back, over twenty years.  Larry had been elevated to his current position six years ago.  Tom had shepherded Larry through his own divorce a few years after he and Denise split.  They played golf on weekends Larry didn’t have visitation with his youngest daughter.  Both of them contemplated retirement.  The conference was, perhaps, a token of friendship, the gift of a last hurrah. 

            “You’re okay doing a twenty minute dog and pony at October school improvement,” Larry said as he signed the request. 

            “A small price to pay”, Tom said. 

            “I should go with you.  Great links course near Tysons Corner.”

            The rarified delights of Georgetown, a pleasant walk out P Street, were momentarily entertained.  Steep streets, glimpses of the river, grand antebellum architecture, he could explore for a couple of hours, find an outdoor place for a quiet beer.  Last evening he had sat in the hotel bar looking over today’s schedule with a trio from upstate New York, two language arts specialists and a school social worker.  The menu of offerings struck him as esoteric nonsense or old wine in new bottles.  He woke this morning to discover the day’s possibilities had flowered overnight into something altogether new and unexpected.  He took a long shower, aware midway that he was actually whistling.   He had set off then, conference badge left hanging from the desk lamp.  

            Tom commanded the classroom with soft spoken ease the way a veteran saloon singer claims and holds the room night after night.  His repertoire, the standards, delivered convincingly to an audience forever in need of selling.  He could still make it swing.  But these last few years, singing behind the beat fell increasingly flat on the ears of the note for note crowd. 

Tom’s step lightened with every block he put between himself and the conference center.  Terms like core competency, deep dive and synergistic were, he was willing to wager, being uttered into neck mics.  Earnest, well-meaning people were doubtless urging audiences to embrace the bleeding edge, spoken, pinged in the parlance, from their various wheelhouses.   One of the language arts specialists had seemed very keen on a two hour presentation on the disruptive possibilities of holographic interactive mimes in urban ESL classrooms. 

            High noon a distant memory, Tom waited for the light at 19^th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, trying to remember having crossed K.  George Washington University off to his right, White House blocks away on his left, his eyes searched high for the spire of the Washington Monument. 

Denise had remarried.  A Ford salesman who had sold her a new Explorer, loaded, a tick above sticker.  Dennis.  Denny and Denise.  Tom liked him, had even considered buying a new F-150 from the man.  Owen, the couple’s six year old son, had his mother’s eyes, her crooked smile.  Tom knew better, but on those rare occasions when they were in each other’s company, he would gaze at the boy searching for a betraying glimpse of himself. 

            Tom, as a young man, had missed the draft by a couple of years.  Years later he had taught with guys who spoke passionately of deferments, protests and high stakes lottery.  One guy, a business teacher, had been up north at a Marine firebase near the DMZ.  Memories of unrelenting squalor, fear, and rage sometimes slipped through perimeter wire weakened by Friday after work drinks.   Once, Tom had found the man weeping alone at his desk during planning period, lights off, door ajar.  He had quietly stepped back into the hall having decided he could make do without an overhead projector.  

Looking back, Tom would allow that perhaps the day’s circuitous route had been determined by the workings of some celestial clockworks.  The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, The Wall, that understated glyph carved into the earth just beyond the Reflecting Pool, ambushed him.  Tom had wandered onto a meander off Constitution Avenue NW.  A column of silvery tour busses, appearing coupled like train cars, lined the street.  Clots of tourists narrowed the veins of winding pathway.   He entered the memorial from the east, descending into a silent congregation set apart.  Treachery, vanity and hubris flocked overhead, the native fauna frustrated, unable to penetrate the veil.    

The man was standing near the apex, the panels there towering over the heads of those filing past.  He was stooped, a bit thick in the middle, dressed in a light jacket open over a blue button down shirt, hands burrowed deep in the pockets of his chinos.  He wore rimless spectacles, his grey hair combed straight back brushing the back of his collar.  Thin wisps on top lifting in the breeze were the only thing animating him.  Here and there people extended arms, pressed hands or fingers to the black marble.  A boy riding high on the shoulders of a tall man refused entreaties to look, arms twining and re-twining around a tow head, his malleable features at play.           

Tom found himself carried along, the man an immovable object parting the river of humanity.  He seemed not to register a presence at first, Tom fetched up behind him, snagged on some superseding contingency.  Tom was at a loss to discern what came next.  He studied the panel before him trying to divine which name had drawn the man, and from where, and why.  Letters seemed to float to the surface, shimmering into focus from the bottom of a very deep well.  In turn, the man studied Tom who stood a full head taller reflected in the polished surface.  Names of the dead overlaid their combined daguerreotype image.  The man’s moist eyes captured Tom’s own and held them for interminable minutes.  Something rare, wrenching, yet rendered dear with hard won grace, passed between them, or so it seemed to Tom.  Pinned there, specimen in some forlorn display, he gradually became aware of his now solitary reflection. Tourists and pilgrims streamed past in counter flow, the old man having slipped back into time, resumed.  Vanished, or had he only imagined him, Tom wondered.   

The nearby Lincoln Memorial promised a stolidity that Tom desperately craved, fixed as it is in the firmament.  How many steps?  He tried counting them, tried to recall whether their sum total symbolized some historical significance.  By now, the conference would be done for the day, presenters and delegates retired to their rooms, hotel bar, or regrouping for evening hijinks along U Street.  The Great Emancipator, having just eased himself down, it seemed to Tom, seemed to contemplate shedding those enormous boots before closing his weary eyes.   

Tom read the Second Inaugural Address a second time.  Sunlight chrome plated the Reflecting Pool.  A broad color palette of visitors struck selfie poses, wandered in thrall to screens.  “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right….”  So fortified, Tom nodded farewell to the President and made his way back to the hotel.  He had, at the very least, undertaken an extraordinary journey today, of that he felt certain.  If underlying intention was belatedly revealed, deeper revelation, if such a thing were even available to him, stubbornly demurred. 

The Indian family milled in the hotel lobby as Tom made his way to the bank of elevators.  Exhausted looking parents laden with shopping bags, the children whispering, laughing among themselves.  The girl Tom had greeted earlier that morning was absently dancing in place, her head bobbing, small glossy bag swinging at the end of her extended arm.  They exchanged glances as Tom skirted the throng.  The girl smiled shyly, then lost herself again in silent music, a melody Tom strained to hear, faint but gathering.       

The End