A young woman was walking by herself along Clarendon Boulevard in Rosslyn, Virginia. She was about as tall as the average adult male, and, seen from a distance, might have been mistaken for one if she hadn’t been wearing a skirt—her mother had always described her as “big-boned” or “sturdy” or some other euphemism, even during her teen years when her summer labors on the family potato farm had brought her body-fat percentage down to a level she’d never see again.
For five years she had been doing a job here that involved no physical exertion whatsoever and left no time for extracurricular workouts. So now an extra layer of chunkiness had been laid over that solid frame. She moved down the sidewalk in a peculiar wide-based, stomping gait, tottering from side to side with each stride, head high, back straight. Her chin-length hair swung back and forth, and her eyes, which had not taken well to contacts, met the world from behind thick lenses.
A cold and a warm front were fighting like Democrats and Republicans for control of the Potomac Valley, and the conflict generated enormous billowing clouds, electric royal-blue skies, thundershowers, and alternating gusts of warm spring and chill winter winds that came in off the river. But the winds flowed around Betsy as if she were cast in solid bronze, peeling the vent of her Wal-Mart trench coat open to expose the not very distinctive plaid of its lining, but not diverting Betsy by even one arc second from her straight course down the sidewalk.
As always, however, the higher centers of Betsy’s brain were concentrated on her job. The only thing about the weather that Betsy bothered to take note of was the pollen. They hadn’t had much pollen in Nampa. Being a farm girl, she knew what it was. But when she’d first come to D.C. and seen the yellow film covering everything in the month of April, she’d mistaken it for dust—until her immune system had reacted to it, in much the same way that a city girl would react to a live rat on her bathroom floor.
It was April now, and the motley collection of professionals’ gleaming Acuras and illegal immigrants’ shambling Gremlins parked along Clarendon Boulevard were covered with that yellow film again. It was stuck down with static electricity or something, and no wind could take it off. A few minutes ago a spattering of rain had swept in off the river, swirling the film into abstract patterns.
Suddenly Betsy’s stomping gait faltered and slowed, and she came to a gradual stop, like a ship easing into a berth. She spread her broad shoulders and hunched over. She heaved two or three times, as if sobbing, and suddenly sneezed—not a polite “atchoo” but a thermonuclear explosion so powerful that she staggered in place, nearly losing her balance, and some loitering Hispanic men on the other side of the boulevard looked up alertly, ready for action. She reached into the pocket of her trench coat and found a Kleenex, which she used to clean up the aftermath. She stomped several paces down the street to an overflowing public wastebasket. She pushed its spring-loaded door open with the back of her hand, but as she was dropping in the soaked and ruined Kleenex, a McDonald’s extra-large french-fries container tumbled out, pocked against the pavement, and began to roll along the sidewalk, driven by the wind like a tumbleweed.
“Sorry,” Betsy said, and began to stomp after it, like a defensive lineman pursuing a puppy. She aimedseveral tremendous stomps at it as she made her way down the sidewalk, drawing amused and admiringstares from the young men across the street. Finally she flattened it, bent down, yanked it out from underher shoe, and carried it half a block to the next waste container.
A few miles down the road from there was the Pentagon, and among those military people you could find quite a few who were principled enough to chase other people’s litter down the street during a windstorm. But this kind of thinking was not common in other parts of the capital, and certainly not where Betsy worked. Betsy hewed to it anyway, because she had the feeling that it was the only anchor she had, and that if she gave it up, she would be torn loose like a used Kleenex in a howling tunnel of wind and end up God only knew where.
She worked in the Rutherford T. Castleman Building, near the Courthouse Metro Station in downtown Rosslyn, and lived at the Bellevue Apartments a few blocks down the hill. It took her ten minutes to walk up in the morning and eight to walk down in the evening, though she did it in seven today, because from her office window she had noticed that the citybound vehicles on I-66 had their headlights on, implying rain to the west. As she approached the front door of the Bellevue, she looked back over her shoulder and did one careful scan of the area, looking for predators. Finding none, she swept her key card out with one deft move and pressed it against the electronic pad, then shouldered the door open the moment the lock clicked. As badly as she wanted to get home, she stood there patiently watching the door until its hydraulic closer drew it shut and the lock snapped to.