Toby

A Washington story

It started as a gentle dusting of the Capitol Building. Then the sky darkened and the snow came down in earnest and the tourists fled the Mall. Motorists waited in vain for snowplows to clear the road. Maybe that city money, too, had been hoovered up like so many lines of cocaine. Public transportation ground to a halt and there was nothing left to do but walk.

Toby was with us, of course, she always was, hanging onto the fringes of conversations, scowling. Her real name was Alicia Granik although for reasons no one could remember, we called her Toby. We all wanted to change the world back then but Toby most of all.

“The Cold War is raging and we need foot soldiers,” Toby preached. “We can’t let Americans be taken hostage, not in Iran or anywhere else.”

But even she could find no evil in the snow that silenced the city. We walked from New Jersey to Massachusetts and then on to Logan Circle. There we parted ways, the adventurous ones heading east to the half-burnt houses leaning into 14^th Street, a row of sooty fists raised in protest against the White House glittering at the other end of town.

The rest of us headed west, where the more genteel neighborhoods lay. It was hard work walking, with the snow underfoot and more on the way, invisible in the night sky until the flakes hit your face. We no longer walked as a group but as a line of chain gang prisoners strung out along the fields. The slower ones wanted to stop, get a drink somewhere or wait for a bus to trundle up Connecticut. Then we heard the helicopters.

They came from all directions. They didn’t hover like the news choppers. They used no spotlights or bullhorns, though the roar was deafening as they swarmed south. What could it be? There was no one to ask. The bars and shops had closed down. There were no cars, no police, no one else out on the streets, nothing like Internet or a smartphone in those days to connect us with the rest of the world.

Toby took control.

“We’re under attack,” she decreed.

“From who,” one of us asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’ve got to find shelter and make a plan.”

She herded us into a playground. She made us huddle inside a jungle gym as if some invisible shield that stretched from bar to bar would protect us from all enemies. Toby drew a map in the snow with one mittened fist.

“Rock Creek Park,” she said, plunging her hand into the soft fresh flakes. “There’s water and wood to burn, plenty of places to hide, too.”

“What about food?” we asked.

“We’ll work that out later,” she replied. “There are stores along the way and if they’re closed, well, you do what you have to do.”

Nobody wanted to be naive. We understood what Toby was saying: the ends justify the means.

“Let’s go,” Toby suddenly barked.

We got out of our crouch, barely stopping to stretch our cramped legs. We had already turned into sheep, ready to follow our herder to the Calvert Street Bridge. We’d climb over the stone railing and rappel somehow into the undergrowth until we hit the creek’s bed.

Maybe it was Steve or Deb or even Maria who said it, although Maria’s Brazilian blood was so thin that she had long ago stopped talking in order to conserve heat. It was one of them, in any event, who decided, “Toby, you’re full of shit. I’m going home.”

And with those words, the spell was broken. We laughed out loud, at ourselves but mostly at Toby, little puffs of hilarity crystallizing in the winter night. We scattered then, each to our own room where we discovered heat and electricity and the evening news. The United States was not under attack though Toby was right about people dying. They were the unlucky ones on an unlucky plane, weighted down with so much ice that the plane with all its crew and passengers sank into the Potomac River.

For days afterward, the city remained quiet. It should have been in mourning for those whose bodies were still captured by that icy water or in honor of the rescuers who had saved the rest. But it was the snow that had conquered the city. Langlauf skis came out of the attic. Children went ice skating in moon boots. We were released from any obligation of attending classes.

We graduated that spring and most of us left DC. Some went to Wall Street; others went home to hang out a shingle. Toby was one of the first to leave town but she never said where she was going or what she would do. She never said goodbye.

When the Berlin Wall fell and the satellite states of the former Soviet Union spun, one by one, out of orbit, I knew where Toby would end up: the Republic of Georgia carved out of the heart of the USSR, still bloody and tender around the edges. It was Toby’s kind of place, where an old Cold War warrior would feel right at home.

With this short story from her unpublished work we want to honor the memory of Karen Kao.

The 14th Street Bridge crash occurred on January 13, 1982. The more recent collision of a military helicopter and a civilian plane, both tumbling into the Potomac, made all of us who were there at the time think of this earlier event that inspired Karen’s story.