2…that meant the second lane from the left. The lanes on any highway are numbered with the left one starting first. My mood brightened for a moment, something to do.
The Capital Beltway is an imperfect circle that goes around the city. Originally competed in 1964, it was redesigned several times to cope with the exploding population. On the West side, it’s a winding mass of hills, malls, trees and the American Legion Bridge. On the East side there are fewer trees but there is a stadium, Andrews Air Force Base and the highway that takes you to Annapolis. In morning and afternoon hours the road is a miserable clogged nightmare that never moves. Drivers get caught in a herd of melded metal that fart exhaust and heat for hours on end. If you’re lucky, you may eventually get to your destination. If it snows, you’ll most likely sleep where you stop.
The Beltway on the overnight was a dangerous calm. Cars freed of their gridlock cages could travel at incredible speeds, taking the turns on the empty, construction free lanes with abandon. Drivers use to commuting through a parking lot had the chance to feel like an F-1 racer.
The scanner beeped and spoke the same warning as the computer. “We got a disabled. Lane 2 after Old Georgetown on the Inner.”
I looked at the Old Georgetown camera. There it was but it was before Old Georgetown. It was a white car with some murky forms moving inside it, too dark to make out. You could see the small car clearly, the area behind it a curtain of black.
I tapped the keyboard and entered the disabled vehicle. I stared at the computer in front of me, reviewing the report. As happy as I had been at first to be at work, I began to think again about the isolation and the monotony grinding me down. I pushed this away as I pulled on my headphones just in time.
“Greg Harris in the Traffic Center.”
Chimes, I started speaking. “There’s a new report of a disabled vehicle on the Inner loop of the Beltway, right before you reach Old Georgetown road. The second lane from the left is blocked. Elsewhere on the Beltway through Maryland and the Woodrow Wilson bridge things are quiet...” I exhaled as I finished the report. I wondered if this would be the rest of my days, forever isolated in this dark room on the fifteenth floor of a nondescript building in Silver Spring.
I clicked the address bar in the browser and typed in Craig's list. I had used the site many times when I was in between rooms to rent. I clicked around, searching for some distraction, something that would calm me. I looked through the parts of the site that were selling ‘relaxation’. There were ads for massages and pictures of women missing key articles of clothing. Looking at the pictures, I felt a little warm down below. It had been a long time. A really, really, long time. It was far before the days I worked at the traffic center, the last time a woman had been intimate with me. I didn't really think about such things anymore but the thought certainly qualified as a distraction, a great distraction. I thought about calling one of these places, one of the massage ones.
I was looking at a photo of a woman with her lady parts hanging heavy out of a barely there dress when the phone rang. I stared at the picture, a smile on my face, the sound of the phone a distant annoyance that could not break my concentration on more important matters. The phone rang again, refusing to be ignored, and I picked it up with an absent hand. “Traffic Center,” I said with a grin.
“Hey, I am coming out of Virginia and my radio is messed up. Do I have anything ahead of me?”
In another picture, a woman with long brown hair and brown eyes was licking her fingers.
“Hello?” said the person on the phone.
“Yes?” I asked, still in a daze.
“I’m on the Beltway. Anything up ahead?”
“Where are you going?”
“I said I’m on 66 about to get on the Inner.”
“No, you are good near 66.”