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- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - It's been a wild and wonderful weekend, and now ...
August 7, 2007 The night train out of Washington's Union Station is jammed. Commuters going home to Baltimore, Philly, and New York. At BWI, the passengers from Thurgood Marshall Airport cram into an already jammed train, their rolling suitcases crashing through the aisle as people, fitfully asleep, rouse up only to shift position. A conductor waits at the end of the car as the last of the weighed-down passengers heft their assortment of duffel bags and fold-overs up above their heads into the racks. The air conditioning isn't strong enough to suck up the damp heat while the train is simply idling. This is the night run up the Northeast corridor to Boston, the train lugging to stay ahead of the rain storm that's swirling up the East Coast. It's August, and the air is heavy with a clingy humidity and a million different fragrances from blossoms that have already done their jobs, disgorged their pollen, and are getting ready, even how, to bed down for the fall. You're crammed into a seat amidst someone else's luggage and thirty different cell phone conversations going on at the same time. Roommates making sure the keys to apartments are where they're supposed to be, husbands and wives apologizing to each over for being away over the weekend, relationships being repaired or torsioned out even further over the invisible wireless wires that stretch from Virginia to Massachusetts. The train pulls out of Baltimore as the thunder in the distance recedes. You should take notes, you know it. You should capture the pieces of a forbidden conversation you've had with someone who thinks he knows of a witness, one of the last of a dying generation of witnesses, who was there: Roswell, Corona, Holloman, Wright Field, one of the places which, in the late 1940s were like fields of wild flowers with flying saucers like bees hovering overhead. This is supposedly a contact with superb inside information. This is someone who was there, who saw it, who typed a document, who filed it up to the next paygrade, and then was told to forget about it. This is someone who was in the loop, whatever loop that was, who is now sick enough that the yearly visits from the two military officers with attache cases and voice recorders don't frighten him any more the way they used to. This is someone who has seen "it" and "them," always there's that term -- Them -- the four-foot odd-looking strange human-like people with the oversized heads that belie their otherwise earthly look. Except this witness knew they were not from earth. This witness is only a contact, one of a long chain of people, most of whom are dead, who passed along the information to some office somewhere like a human conveyor belt of intelligence. Log it, stamp it, file it, dispatch it forget it. Will this witness talk to you? Will the phone number you're thumbing into your Blackberry be the number that unlocks the gate to another part of the truth? You keep your Blackberry twisted at an angle so the person next to you, too curious for your money, can't read it. That's stupid, of course, because why would some kid in oversized sandals and a Towson Athletics t-shirt even care about your stupid Blackberry when he's fiddling with his earbuds in an iPhone. But, hey, you never know. As Neal Stephenson says in Snow Crash, intel is valuable just because it's intel. So you pick away at the tiny keys, hoping that on Monday morning you can make the contact, arrange for yet another secret meeting somewhere, panning for the one piece of gold in the river of misinformation, faded memories, and paranoia so intense it paralyzes the story-teller into a catatonic stare. And you will follow the trail into obscure territory, hoping that the trail ends at a clearing instead of just a denser enchanted forest. And the conductor calls the stops while your battery clings to life in the darkness of the gathering summer storm. Bill Birnes |
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