Robert Baer - Blow the house down

"And by the way, Max, we're sorry to see you go."

I could no longer remember her name, but a few months earlier I'd wandered into an office party celebrating the birth of her second grandchild. The kid's photograph had been stuck on the end of a toothpick and pinned on top of the cake. Grandma cut me a slice herself. Maybe she really was sorry to see me go. But who knew in this insane asylum.

Out in the parking lot, the Armanis kept to the safety and comfort of their air-conditioned Cherokee as I climbed onto the worn seat of my vintage Norton Commando and prayed to all gods known and unknown that it would start. I had a vision that I would have to push the damn bike halfway across the parking lot to jump it-a spark plug needed replacing, or maybe it was the points. What I knew about fixing motorcycles I had picked up in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance three decades

back. Thank God for small favors, the Norton turned over on the first kick: the last bit of dignity I had left to me.

I could hear the Cherokee thrumming behind me as I passed under the sally port and pulled up to the stoplight at Route 123. Waiting there behind a Dodge Grand Caravan with a bumper sticker that read my son is an honor student at yorktown high, I felt certain I was doing this for the last time. The crap about putting me on unpaid leave was just that: crap. You don't read people out of compartmented clearances if you ever expect them back. Eventually, security would finish poking through my things and send them back to me, along with the money I'd put into retirement, and that would be it, a quarter-century, framed and out.

The Cherokee flashed its lights once to let me know the light had turned green. I slipped the Norton into first and pulled slowly away. In the mirror, I could see my wingmen already turning around, their job over. They were probably wondering, like me, just what the hell I'd done.

I downshifted hard at the bottom of Route 123, leaned into Chain Bridge Road, and followed it across the Potomac into D.C. Twenty yards ahead of me, a dump truck was bouncing its way along the ripped-up roadbed. With each new rut, the truck threw off more junk. An empty five-gallon tin of Bertoli extra virgin olive oil bounced high in the air, arced maybe within a foot of my visor, fell left, and careened into the windshield of a Camry in the oncoming lane. There was no safe place under the sun. I slowed to a crawl, stuck my feet out to either side of the Norton, and threaded my way through the debris. Inches behind me, some fuckwit in a jet-black Humvee leaned on his horn.

Washington's weather had entered its sultry season. The morning had been sunny, even dry, almost a spring day. But now you could cut the humidity with a knife. A downpour was coming. I'd take a sandstorm any day.

From Canal Road, I headed up Arizona. Across MacArthur Boulevard, I let the bike loose for three long blocks: a roar as beautiful as any jungle cat. I was fishtailing to a halt at the stop sign for Nebraska when a pair of fossils out for an early-evening constitutional gave me a cold stare as scary as anything I had seen that day. Off to my left was a mock Norman

chateau-it had to hold at least eight bedrooms-bathed entirely in green lights: lights woven along the wrought-iron fence that fronted the property, lights strung along a half dozen trees that filled the long lawn up to the house, lights looping from the eaves and curling around the whimsical chimneys. Christmas in June. Too weird.

American University was just taking shape in front of me when I veered off to the right and began working my way back over to Cathedral Avenue. I'd fallen in love for all of five days with a woman who lived in an apartment just off here-a magazine writer, an author of distinguished books. On the morning of the sixth day, she was still working on the same paragraph she'd been slaving over when we met. I was ready to move on to a new story line. Besides, I had to leave for Tashkent before the end of the month. Better to end it early. Chris Corsini was right: I do slink in and out of people's lives.

At the top of the hill, across Wisconsin Avenue, the cathedral shone in all its Gothic-Episcopal rectitude through what was fast becoming an evening mist. I've never been inside, I thought: something to do in retirement. If that's what this is.

The Norton Commando was the spoils of another dream gone sour. When our marriage finally fell apart, Marissa traded in our Istanbul apartment for a little stucco villa with its feet in the Adriatic, next to a lighthouse on a tiny Croatian island called Dugi Otok, a ninety-minute ferry ride out of Zadar. Rikki went off to Canterbury, in England, to middle school, just as her mother had done two decades before. And I got the bike, the only thing I kept. I'd always meant to ride it across Turkey into the Caucasus. Instead, this.

I turned right at Massachusetts, right again on Wisconsin, and left on Garfield. At the bottom of Cleveland Avenue, I threaded my way through two cabs on to Calvert, then shot across Connecticut just as the light was turning red. On Columbia Road, I slipped the bike under a tin outcropping on the building across the street from my first-floor apartment and secured the front wheel to the frame with a Kryptonite lock, implacable enemy of the inexhaustible bike thieves of Adams Morgan. The fat El Salvadoran kid who sat watching the space waited for me to dig a buck out of my jeans.

"Buenas tardes. Como estd?"

"Not so bad," the kid said with a yawn. He had a twelve-inch Quiznos sub in one hand, a Negro Modello in the other. Just another night's work.

The kid's mother and father and eight siblings lived in the basement apartment just below me. Next door to me was two-thirds of a wanna-be Krautrock band. In the floors above, where the apartments got bigger, were a gay menage a trois, two straight couples with little kids, three full floors of daddy's girls and mama's boys. I didn't exactly fit into Adams Morgan, but I didn't want to live anywhere else. The dim entries, the smell of rancid grease, the ambient din all reminded me of Lima.

I flipped on the television and flipped it off again. Brain poison. Took out a bottle of Johnny Walker and put it back again. Liver poison. Thought about the clubs all along the street and gave up on that as well. Too early. Too late. Too depressing. From the bottom drawer of the dresser I pulled out five years' worth of Riggs bank statements and settled down at the circular table stuck into the little bay at the front of the apartment. Outside, under the sodium streetlight the canary-yellow Norton gleamed through a halo of a steady drizzle.

When I looked up again, the drizzle had turned to rain. An RV blocked the view. i-800-rv-4-rent read the sign on the side. Below it, a fiery sunset lit a landscape of mesas and prong-horn antelope. Funny, you never see RVs in Adams Morgan. I went back to the statements: nothing, no surprises, not a thing out of the ordinary I could spot. My check was automatically deposited every two weeks. My savings account never seemed to go up or down. If there was a bubble anywhere, I couldn't see it.

I got the whiskey out again, got a glass-this time I meant it-and was just beginning to pour when I heard a punishing sound from outside: metal ground up and dragged along the macadam. The RV was just pulling away as I hit the street. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the El Salvadoran kid was gone. Just down the way, a Metrobus driver was cursing, trying to yank the wreck of a canary-yellow Norton Commando out from his undercarriage.

"Fuckin' just came out of nowhere!" he was yelling. "Right into the fuckin' middle of the fuckin' road. Nobody fuckin' gives a fuck about fuckin' nothin' no fuckin' more!"

I helped him drag the tangle of steel off to the side of the street, then waited while the gawkers drifted away. It didn't take long: These remains were artificial, not human.