Midnight by Anna Dove (books for new readers .TXT) 📕

The door to his dormitory room opened and the Senator entered.

“Landon, I’m glad to see you here.”

The Senator approached, and began to change into his own attire.

“Joe, is he here?”

“Who?”

“Reed,” said Landon.

“Of course the Chief of Staff is here. Why wouldn’t he be here?”

The Senator looked very intently at Landon as he spoke this sentence.

“No--I was only wondering,” fumbled Landon, understanding that the Senator did not think it was wise to speak out loud on the matter.

The Senator, having donned the new garb, sat down beside Landon.

“We have work to do,” he said quietly.

11.  The Achilles’ Heel

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

---Abraham Lincoln, January 27, 1838

         For a moment, our lens falls away from the room in Arlington and moves upwards and outwards. We see the cities of Arlington, Alexandria, and Washington from above, jammed with cars and with little running pedestrians who from our aerial perspective are no bigger than ants on an anthill.  There are fires, there is smoke; crashed planes and cars ignite, and you can see the explosions. A smog begins to set in; it rests heavy in the air from all the smoke, and mixes with the still bright afternoon sunlight in a strange orange color. If we could smell it, smell the odor of terror, we would smell burning rubber, burning gas, burning cloth. If we could hear, we would hear screams from the pits of stomachs, cries from the old and the young, and then after a while we would also notice the particular silence in between the screams and the cries, the sort of silence that is desperate, that keeps the inhale inside its lungs because it does not know if it will draw another breath again. This is the silence of the family now waiting in their living room, locked inside for dear life with their arms around each other, lost as to what to do. It is the silence of the man running without his suit jacket, blind to all other pedestrians.

         Our lens climbs higher into the atmosphere, and we see that beyond Washington, in every direction, more cities are smoking. The smoke thins as we look over agricultural districts, over rivers and farms and woodland, but over every city there hangs a cloud of smoke and over every town the smog wisps thinly into the air. How far does this stretch? We must ascend further.

         Virginia, in smoke. Maryland, in smoke. Higher, we see the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware. Smoke. Now we can distinguish the curve of the earth; we see farther out west--Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin. Now we are to Kansas, we can see Alabama, Texas, and now even further. As our lens reaches far into the upper atmosphere, we can see California, stretching long, and a great heavy smog covers Los Angeles and San Diego.

         Could it be? Could the entire United States of America have fallen victim to attack? Could the great forerunner of democracy, the country on whom no one dared launch an attack since the turn of the century, could it be going up in smoke? We are skeptical; our lens must be flawed. We rub it with a cloth, and peer back again. The smog remains.

         Now we begin to ruminate on the cost of this attack. Whatever sick brilliance has executed this attack has truly outdone himself. He has wandered the streets, observing the American people. A people entirely dependent on technology. He sees people of all ages out and about with each other, talking to each other but their eyes glued to their mobile phones, distracted from reality. He sees the automobiles running on electricity. He sees the mothers with their babies on the hip, the former jabbering away with her cell phone pressed against her ear, far too loudly for her neighbor’s convenience, while she tries to pick out which brand of waffles she wants to buy. He sees a man transfer money from his savings account to his checking account online, without stepping foot in a physical bank. He sees a young couple using google maps to navigate through Manhattan and becoming entirely lost when their signal fades. He sees ibuprofen bottles stocked by the billions on grocery store shelves. He sees that pain is something Americans do not tolerate very well. He sees opioid overdoses, he sees empty alcohol bottles by the millions. He sees that in the kitchen, there is a little electronic device that controls the lighting, the temperature, the oven, the microwave. He sees the political schisms in ideology, the lack of a national identity. He sees racial divide. He sees ignorance, he sees anger. He sees laziness, he sees workaholics. He sees a nation simultaneously addicted somehow to both ease and money. He thinks, is this the same country of brave souls that fled from political, religious, and economic persecution to establish their own civil liberties and rights?

         He continues to observe.

         He sees an American narcissism, a fascination with self, in social media. He sees imperfect people attempting to portray themselves online as perfect. He sees that social media has crept into the psychological makeup of all ages, genders, and races across the country. They have lost touch with reality, with why clouds form, with why plants grow, with civics, with history, with their own families, with community, with spirituality, as they creep more and more into an isolated state. They search to fill their natural need for love on the social media platforms, drawing their affirmation from false sources,