“How so?” McPherson feels the familiar tightening in the stomach.
“Well, you make a request for an injunction to the judiciary system, and in the District of Columbia it goes to the federal court system and is given to one of four appellate courts, each with a different presiding judge. It’s not a regional thing, so someone in the system makes a decision and sends your request to one court or another. Mostly it’s a random process, as far as we can tell, but it doesn’t have to be. And in this case, our request for an injunction has been given to court four, Judge Andrew H. Tobiason presiding.”
Another sip of brandy. Goldman seems to have the habit of courtroom timing: a little dramatic pause, here. “So?” McPherson says.
“Well, you see,” says Goldman, “Judge Andrew H. Tobiason is also Air Force Colonel Andy Tobiason, retired.”
Stomach implosion. A peculiar sensation. “Hell,” says McPherson weakly, “how could that be?”
“The Air Force has its own lawyers, and many of them work in the District of Columbia. When they retire, some are made judges here. Tobiason is one. Giving him this particular case is probably a bit of mischief worked by the Air Force. A few phone calls, you know. Anyway, Tobiason has refused to make the injunction; he’s decided the contract is to be carried out as awarded, until the GAO finishes its investigation and its report is conveyed to him.” Goldman smiles a wry smile. “So, we’ve got a bit of an uphill battle. But we’ve also got a lot of ammunition, so… well, we’ll see how it goes.”
Still, he can’t deny it’s bad news. McPherson sits back, drains the brandy snifter. A terrible singer is moaning ballads over bad piano work, in the center of the revolving restaurant. Their table’s window is now facing out over the lit sprawl of Washington, D.C. The dark Mall is a strip across the lights, the Washington Monument white with its blinking red light on top, the Capitol like an architect’s model, same for the Lincoln Monument there in the trees… all far, far below them. Washington has kept its maximum height law for buildings, and everything over there is under ten stories, and far below them. And of course height means the same thing it always has; the isobars for altitude and prosperity, that is to say altitude and power, are an almost perfect match in every city on earth. Height = power. So that here in Crystal City they look down on the capital of the nation like gods looking down on the mortals. And it isn’t just a coincidence, McPherson thinks; it’s a symbol, it says something very real about the power relationship of the two areas, the massive Pentagon and its lofty crowd of luxury-hotel sycophants densepacked around it—looking across the river and down, on the lowly government of the people.…
“The Air Force has a lot of power in this town,” Goldman says, as if reading his mind. “But there’s a lot of power in other places as well. So much power here! And it’s scattered pretty well. Could be better, but there are some checks and balances still. All kinds of checks and balances. We’ll get our chance to manipulate them.”
To be sociable McPherson agrees. And they talk in an amiable way for another hour. He enjoys it, really. Still, on his way back to his hotel room, his mood is black. A retired Air Force colonel for a judge! For Christ’s sake!
A well-dressed woman gets into the elevator with him. Perfume, bright lipstick, glossy hair, backless yellow dress. And alone, at this hour. McPherson’s eyes widen as it occurs to him that she is probably one of the Crystal City prostitutes, off to fulfill a contract of her own. Stiffly McPherson returns her smile as she gets off. Just another military town.
38
Now Jim looks forward to seeing Hana Steentoft, but he certainly can’t count on it happening; she doesn’t seem quite as interested in getting together. Some nights she’s gone before Jim dismisses his class. Other nights she has work to do; “Sorry,” she says diffidently, looking at the ground. “Got to be done.” Then again there are the nights when she nods and looks up briefly to smile, and they’re off to the pathetic Coffee Hut, to talk and talk and talk.
One night she says, “They’ve given me a studio on campus. I’ve got to work in a while, but do you want to come see it first?”
“Sure do.”
They walk over dark paths, between concrete buildings lit from below. Sometimes they get wedge views of the great lightshow of southern OC. Nobody else is on campus; it’s like a big video set, the filming completed. One of the concrete blocks holds Hana’s studio, and she lets them in. Lights on, powerful glare, xenon/neon mix.
Piled against the walls are rows of canvases. Jim looks through one stack while Hana goes to work mixing some paints, in a harsh glare of light. The canvases are landscapes, faintly Chinese in style, but done in glossy blues and greens, with an overlay of dull gold for pagoda roofs, streams, pinecones, snowy mountaintops in the distance.
The results are… odd. No, Jim is not immediately bowled over, he does not suffer a mystical experience looking at them. That isn’t the way it works. First he has to get used to their strangeness, try to understand what’s going on in them.… One looks totally abstract, great stuff, then Jim realizes he’s got it upside down. Oops. Real art lover here. Reversed, it’s still interesting, and now he understands to look at them as abstract patterns as well as mountains, forests, streams, fields. “Whoah. They’re wonderful, Hana. But what about—well, what about Orange County?”
She laughs. “I knew you’d ask that. Try the stack in the corner. The short one.” Laughter. “It’s harder, of course.”
Well. Jim finds it extremely interesting. Because she’s used the same technique, but reversed the ratios of the colors. Here the paintings are mostly gold: gold darkened, whitened, bronzed, left itself, but all arranged in overlapping blocks, squares tumbled one on the next in true condomundo style. And then here and there are moldlike blotches of blue or green or blue-green, trees, empty hillside (with gold construction machinery), parks, the dry streambeds, a strip of sea in the distance, holding the gold bar of Catalina. “Whoah.” One has an elevated freeway, a fat gold band across a green sky, bronzed mallsprawl off to the side. Like his place, under the freeway! “Wow, Hana.” Another abstract pattern, Newport harbor, with the complex bay blue-green, boats and peninsula gold blocks. “So how much do you charge for these?”
“More than you can afford, Mr. Teacher.”
“Sandy could afford it. Bet he’d like one of these in his bedroom.”
“Uh-huh.”
Jim watches her mixing a couple of gold paints together in blue bowls, the paint sloshing bright and metallic in the light, Hana’s tangled black hair falling down over her face and almost into the bowl. It’s a picture in itself. Some unidentifiable feeling, stirring in him.…
As she mixes paints he talks about his friends. Here’s Tashi writing tales of his surfing with a clarity and vividness that put Jim’s work to shame. “Because he isn’t trying for art,” Hana says, and smiles at a bowl. “It’s a valuable state of mind.”
Jim nods. And he goes on to talk about Tashi’s great refusal, his secret generosity; about Sandy’s galvanic, enormous energy, his complex dealing exploits, his legendary lateness. And about Abe. Jim describes Abe’s haggard face as he comes into the party after a night’s work, transformed by an act of will into the funtime mask, full of harsh laughter. And the way he holds himself at a distance from Jim now, mocking Jim’s lack of any useful skills, teaming with Tash or Sandy in a sort of exclusion of Jim; this combined with flashes of the old sympathy and closeness that existed between them. “Sometimes I’ll be talking and Abe will give me a look like an arrow and throw back his head and laugh, and all of a sudden I realize how little any of us know what our friends are, what they’re thinking of us.”