The sky is a constant canopy of grey, the visible sun unseen. It seems to promise a shower that might relieve the tropical punishment, but relief never comes. It's probably for the best. Storms are hateful in this place, nail-hard rain driven by howling winds and lightning prodigal and ceaseless. As if the Earth were returning to its primordial form and scrubbing the works of man from its skin was the first order of business. Poets used to take inspiration from Nature and Nature's God. Anymore they just take shelter.
Our time traveller has materialized inside the Greyhound bus station some blocks north of the DC tourists know. The irony is lost on him, his attention consumed by more pressing matters. Safety, clothing, mission. Those three and in that order. Somewhere after comes irony.
There is safety, for now. The station is deserted, as are the streets outside and the buildings in the surrounds. Everywhere is evidence of an organized panic. Broken glass, charred dumpsters. Rows of blue plastic chairs torn from their bolts. Overturned suitcases line the floor like miniature church steeples, the contents scattered in every direction. A dead bus rests on its side at one of the gates, a gunmetal whale beached and left helpless.
He finds a mottled trench coat in a heap of clothes and slips it on, some innate sense of shame compelling him to cover his nakedness. He searches barefoot for a hundred feet before deciding shoes are unnecessary. Every surface here is buffered by a layer of green. Mold fills the cracks and crevices, lichens cover the walls, vines climb the buildings. The sidewalks and streets are overgrown with kudzu, that indomitable Dixie weed finally moving north of the Mason-Dixon. It's welcoming to the shoeless, if not exactly verdant. A country designed for the homeless.
He walks south, what he believes is south, haltingly at first then more confidently once assured he is unstalked. The rioters and riots are long gone. There's no gangs or National Guard. No police and thieves. Life exists here only on smaller scales. Slate-black pigeons. Feral cats. Rats and roaches and flies. Dangerous, but not cruel for cruelty's sake. He knows smaller beasts might soon murder him for his audacity, but that is the risk you take. It is a dangerous thing, speaking truth to power.
The way is not far but there are endless detours -- streets blocked by a collapsed building or a stubborn barricade. From time to time a sharp sudden noise breaks the monotony. The insects stop their trilling and he crouches in cover, alert and circumspect, until his mind sounds the all-clear. Just a flapping bird, just a falling windowpane loosed by decay. He moves on.
In time, modest hovels give way to fine government buildings, as if he were emerging from Aventine slums into the marble wonders of Octavian's Rome. He crosses behind the Eisenhower Office Building, moss cascading down its French architecture like the hanging gardens of Babylon. On the other side is the White House, plumes of soot visible above every empty window frame. Sacked for the first time since 1812. It is tempting, but he skips the penny tour. If there are any villains left in town, it is the one place they would surely still occupy. Instead, he continues west, passing the Red Cross building and the Department of the Interior, the Federal Reserve and the National Academy of Sciences. In DC, the farther you got from the Capitol, the more functional the offices became.
The husk of the Kennedy Center looms ahead. It rises from the water like a new Avalon, the Potomac having been pushed all the way to Dupont Circle by the encroaching Chesapeake. Attractions closest to its banks were first to be sacrificed. The Kennedy Center. Reagan Airport. The East Potomac Park Golf Course. The Pentagon even relocated, although its honored dead could not. The rising water table turned Arlington cemetery into a corpse soup, the stench drawing wolf pacs who dug up the graves. The brackish water now breeds every kind of communicable disease, typhoid and cholera chief among them but drug-resistant malaria also resurgent. The last time malaria threatened DC, Doughboys were heading to Ypres.
Ruined banners on the parapets of the Kennedy Center announce the last performance was Siegfried's Ring Cycle. Then sandbags could no longer hold back the tide and the building was condemned. Götterdämmerung, indeed.
Our traveler continues along the water's edge, passing an occasional memento torn from the sediment by the swirling currents. A discarded tire, a rogue grocery cart, a rusted 55 gallon drum containing mummified remains encased in shotcrete. Vince Foster or Zoe Barns, according to your preferred brand of fantasy. A few parts from a 737 have washed up, the one that hit the 14th Street bridge when it tried to takeoff in a blizzard. It doesn't snow in DC anymore.
Lettered cross streets lead him to Constitution Avenue. He turns left toward his destination, creeping past the great icons of Washington all in decline.
Lincoln stares out from behind unblinking eyes, still seated in the grand chair inside his memorial. His nose has been broken off for that is all contemporary barbarians could manage. If Lincoln had been burnable he would have been burned, if edible eaten. The colonnade is dotted with the telltale pockmarks of small-arms fire. Every other surface is covered in graffiti. This house cannot endure half rational and half wingnut, one reads. The rest is obscene and inchoate.
Outside, the reflecting pool is choked with overgrowth. The Cherry trees lining the sidewalks wilted and died years ago. To the south, the Roosevelt and Jefferson memorials have also succumbed. The half-submerged occupants hold a vigil; bronze FDR trapped by his wheelchair and Jefferson refusing to vacate on principle, loss of the beloved Republic he risked all to help bring forth too much to bear.
Farther east the Washington Monument stands askew, a waterspout having knocked it sideways after swelled groundwater weakened the foundations. Reaping the whirlwind, as they say. For a time it became a modern Pisa that amused the crowds, before the Corps of Engineers decided it was unsafe to enter. A few blocks to the left the lobbying firms on K-street are empty. Equipment and records were all carefully packaged and removed, almost as if they knew what was coming. A few blocks to the right the Holocaust museum lies in superfluous ruins. Now every museum is a Holocaust museum.
Our traveller crosses 14th Street and continues into the Mall. Each step forward sinks ankle deep into a fetid swamp that was once a manicured lawn. The Museum of Natural History, American History, and the National Gallery line the north ground; the Smithsonian and the Air and Space Museum hold the south. The Two Cultures, C.P. Snow once called them, liberal arts and STEM majors facing off across the quad. Whereas artifacts of the Smithsonian could be sold for scrap, the contents of the National Gallery were more viscerally useful. For it is an inconvenient truth that art burns. Cooking a rat over Elegy to the Spanish Republic or Napoleon in His Study must have seemed a giddy triumph. Remember when the liberals warned us about this? We sure showed them.
Finally, the Mall ends. Grant once sat here on his horse. Now there are only hacksawed forelocks.
Steps lead to the Capitol building. This is what he has come to see. He catches his breath, climbs, finds an open entrance, squeezes through a disinterested metal detector. The darkness inside is occasionally interrupted by broken windows, hallways alternating dim and dimmer. There is a sound of scurrying. The corners in this place still hide vermin.
Stairs lead to the visitor's gallery. Finally, he has arrived. The chamber of the House of Representatives. The People's House, it used to be called.
He inches to the balcony's edge and looks down. The layout is still discernible -- concentric semicircles deferring to an elevated center rostrum -- although the contents have been smashed. As if here some monster had been attended, and when it became aware its privileged life was no more it lost its mind. It thrashed and stomped and spit noise and venom until the chamber was nothing but poisonous wreckage. Its purpose forgotten, it broke free its restraints and flew off through the roof leaving behind a gaping hole that pours daylight and misery. First the looters came, then the squatters. Then death killed them all.
The Long Surf was unkind to Washington, but it was unkind to everyone. The entire history of humanity was built on coastlines and riverbanks. You don't have to be forced inland a thousand miles for this to be a problem. A hundred feet will do. The challenge was not fundamentally insurmountable, but it was in all places and all at once. Everywhere from Rio to Jerusalem and from the Bering Straits to the Cape of Good Hope was in retreat. The cost collapsed civilization. Behold a pale horse, and upon him sat a rider called Infrastructure.
For their part, Real America wasn't exactly welcoming of their littoral countrymen, not while they're still digging Auntie Em out of the root cellar. People forget America's heartland is crossed by tornado alley, that singular peculiarity of geography turned divine retribution when a few billion gigawatts were added to the climate. Daily cyclones made for great YouTube when was still an Internet. It was less great for growing food. it was a recipe for starvation on a scale not seen since Mao savaged China.
This time it was democracy's turn to suffer. China already had a practice run at mass population resettlement when they built Three Gorges. The Long Surf must have seemed eerily familiar to the millions of Chinese whose homes were already under the Yangtze. The government tells you to stack your belongings on an ox cart and relocate to higher ground? In the Middle Kingdom they call that "Tuesday."
But far away in America, Congress is still fighting over which of their campaign donors gets the no-bid contract for the oxen. Same as it ever was, feet dry in an undisclosed location. Like the one Eisenhower built in West Virginia during the Cold War in case the Russians dropped the big one on DC. They tried mass evacuations for that, too, before Duck and Cover became de rigueur. If you ever wondered why Duck and Cover became de rigueur, it was because mass evacuations didn't work. Eisenhower himself admitted they were hopeless, although never within earshot of the press.
Our time traveler steps away from the balcony and retraces his steps back to the hallway. He stacks a few pieces of furniture in front of the gallery entrance and carefully climbs up. The parts move like see-saws and he presses one hand to the wall to steady himself. In the other he holds a charred scrap of wood. He writes in large black letters above the empty doorframe, tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth in careful concentration.
Mission complete, he heads outside and circles around the western front of the Rotunda. He stands where presidential inaugurations were once held. The tradition began when Ronald Reagan moved the proceedings from the East Portico. The tradition ended when nature reclaimed DC, abetted by Congress. What the British, what the Soviets, what the Army of Northern Virginia could not accomplish by force of arms, we did to ourselves.
It's not hard to imagine cheering crowds stretching down the Mall as far as the eye can see. America was on top of the world once. We ended the Divine Right of Kings. Ended slavery. Beat back the Kaiser and the Nazis and the Reds. Broke the sound barrier. Eradicated polio. We went to the moon. Six times.
Now look at us. The shining city deserted and Ichabod written above the gates. The lingering spectacle more the punishment for the noble creature the thing once was. Yet somewhere in a smoky backroom men drink and slap backs. We will neither toil nor suffer, nor will our children's children.
Thus is our time traveler martyred, which does not mean to die but to witness. But death will come soon enough.
He does not have the constitution for this place.
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