DC By the Book

Excerpt: Or maybe what I’m hoping for is all those sad little things – perfume, kiss, cursive – not for me, but for my brother, like somehow she’d find it necessary to communicate to me that her love for him didn’t die when he chose to leave her for a war. What I read instead is a note. All business: Here’s my email, my new cell phone number, and the address where I’ll be living, it’s a studio in Georgetown, with Max.

Excerpt: Our final day’s walk doesn’t bring us to the DC I’ve imagined since lying in bed with strep throat in sixth grade. Now wide avenues or reflecting pools or cherry blossoms or white stone monuments. Our final day’s walk brings us six miles north all the way to the visitor check-in center at Walter Reed Memorial Hospital. I hesitate before following Bo inside. I hate hospitals. I mean, who doesn’t? Is there anybody out there who loves hospitals? Probably not. But I really hate them. The guy behind the desk is in uniform. Bo stands rigid but he doesn’t salute. “PFC Boaz Katznelson to see Staff Sergeant Jack Bradford.”

Excerpt: “So? Where to? And you’d better tell me, because I have to go on ahead, but I’ll catch up with you wherever it is you’re going. I’ve come all this way – all this way, Boaz, and I think I’ve earned the right to know, finally, where it is you’re going. He looks at me, and just as I start to think this is it, that he’ll give me one of those blank stares and say nothing at all, he says, “The Vietnam Memorial. At sundown.”

Excerpt: I don’t need a map. I’ve been looking at maps long enough to know my way. The closer I get to the Mall, the closer everything around me looks to the Washington, DC, of my imagination. I take it all in, despite the sweat pouring down my face and into my eyes. It’s muggy. And hot. But I don’t slow down. I keep pace. I have everything on my back, it’s weighing me down, but I run and I keep time.

Excerpt: I’m in the final stretch of the 10k. It’s a sprint now. Not a marathon. I run down Fourteenth Street until it dumps me into the Mall. I turn to my left and I continue to run. I’m coming up on the Museum of American History, and here just like I’d planned for hours earlier, sit Mom and Abba and Dov and Christina and Pearl and Zim, waiting. Gathered in a circle on the grass. And as I get closer I see they’re not alone.

Excerpt: We sit outside the Museum of American History on the mall, littered with blue and red flyers, used-up water bottles and hot dog wrappers. A lonely worker in a green vest stabs the trash on a stick and shoves it into the large bag he slowly drags behind him.

Excerpt: I tell everyone that we’ll see Bo later. At the Vietnam Memorial. I tell them that he’s come all this way for tonight, though I also know that the old fortune cookie wisdom of the journey being the destination probably bears some truth hear too. I lean back and close my eyes to the fading sun. I sit up again and look around the Mall and all the glorious buildings. I watch the lonely man in the green vest. He’s hardly made a dent in all the trash. I get up from the circle and I start to help him. Everyone follows. We all gather up those flyers and water bottles and hot dog wrappers because it’s easier to do something than it is to sit around waiting for sundown to come.

Excerpt: We finally leave our patch of grass in search of food and discover a restaurant where Abba orders a special bottle of wine. We toast Bo and Mitch and every man and woman who, for whatever personal reason, chooses to leave everything behind and pt on the uniform of his or her country. We walk to the Vietnam Memorial and by the time we get there it’s already dark. We come upon a crowd gathered around a small stage.