he’d spent three years in the Middle East mainly missing that specific food product. Other than the cheesesteak talk, he was pretty quiet. Unnaturally quiet. Elias was one who, in his ordinary life, would talk until your ears fell off. You had to get him started first, but if you said to him, say, “Elias, tell us again about that time in high school when you tripped and fell on your face on the track while the cheerleaders were practicing,” he’d stretch out the story to twenty or thirty minutes even if he knew you’d already heard it a dozen times. But today he couldn’t be provoked by that kind of stuff. He just wanted the cheesesteak.
So I filled the silence by talking about myself instead. After dinner I told him there was a place I wanted to show him. I drove west on the parkway until the hospital appeared above the trees. Took that exit, then the one onto a road that seemed to go nowhere, then an access road. With every turn we climbed higher up the hill. At the top was this gigantic blue water tower shaped like an upside-down teardrop. The sun was setting and the clouds were blazing pink, like radioactive cotton candy or a scene from Fantasia. Under the tower was a parking lot made out of rough construction sand, no painted lines. Nobody ever parked there except maintenance workers, but damn, was there ever a view. I got out, and Elias slammed his door at the same time I did.
We walked to the crest of the hill, that blue bulb looming above our heads. Electrical cables looped up and then down the hill, past some sort of concrete-block structure surrounded by razor wire, an electrical substation probably. But past that, way down in the distance where the land was low, there was D.C. Staggered roofs, a thousand lights—ten thousand—glowing like fireflies, double headlights cutting through the dusk. The memorials, white marble all lit up, made a compass rose: the Lincoln Memorial a cube, the one for Jefferson curved like a lens and farthest away, the needle of the Washington Monument pointing at the sky.
“Goddamn,” said Elias. “Terrorists’ wet dream, this little crow’s nest here. Can’t believe they don’t have it secured.”
“Nothing you can do from here.”
“You can look.” Elias took a few steps closer, then stopped and crossed his arms. A siren blazed down the parkway; the sound, from where we stood, was lonesome.
“That’s my city,” I told him. “Someday, man, that’s gonna be my fuckin’ chessboard. Not a room I can’t get into or a rope I can’t get past.”
“You planning on getting elected king?”
I laughed. “No, I’m gonna be like Ted Kennedy. Not right away. Not even real soon. But eventually, over time.” I pointed toward the Jefferson Memorial. “That’s where I proposed to Jill.”
Elias nodded. He slid a box of cigarettes from his pocket and clenched one at the side of his mouth, then asked, “You want one?”
I hesitated. Sophomore year I’d worked late nights on a contentious campaign for state delegate. That season, I’d picked up the habit from the other staffers. I told myself I’d quit as soon as the election was over, and I did. But goddamn—was it ever a murderous struggle. I didn’t have the money to support the addiction—that was the bottom line. Otherwise I would have kept it up forever. It gives you something mindless to do when you’re sitting around waiting for things to happen, and there’s a lot of that in politics. It helps you focus and relax at the same time. In no time flat I had gone from being a nonsmoker to the guy who rolled out of bed and lit up before he peed. I’d stayed away from the stuff ever since I quit, because it was so hard the first time I figured I couldn’t quit twice. But this was Elias. That’s the other thing smoking does—it helps people bond.
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
He handed me a Marlboro and his lighter. As soon as I lit up, the pleasure of it was visceral. Tasting the smoke in my mouth was like sex after months of jacking off. Sex with the wrong person. Right away I knew this had been a bad idea.
Elias exhaled through his nose like an angry bull. “Mind if we sit down?”
We sat on the bristly grass on the curve that overlooked the city. For a few minutes neither of us said a word. I asked,