Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [102]
Before them stood three men, two in workers’ coveralls, one in a Metro uniform.
The one in the uniform held a clipboard. “Y’all okay?” he said to them.
“Yeah” “We’re fine” they said together.
Everyone stood there for a second.
“Must have been hot in there,” the uniformed one remarked.
The three black men stared at them curiously.
“It was,” Frank said.
“But not much different than out here,” his companion quickly added, and they all laughed. It was true, getting out had not made any marked change. It was like stepping from one sauna to another. Their rescuers were also sweating profusely. Yes—the open air of a Washington, D.C., evening was indistinguishable from the inside of an elevator stuck deep underground. This was their world: and so they laughed.
They were on the sidewalk flanking Wisconsin Avenue, next to the elevator box and the old post office. Passersby glanced at them. The foreman gave the woman his clipboard. “If you’d fill out and sign the report, please. Thanks. Looks like it was about half an hour from your call to when we pulled you.”
“Pretty fast,” the woman said, reading the text on her form before filling in some blanks and signing. “It didn’t even seem that long.” She looked at her watch. “All right, well—thanks very much.” She faced Frank, extended a hand. “It was nice to meet you.”
“Yes, it was,” Frank said, shaking her hand, struggling for words, struggling to think. In front of these witnesses nothing came to him, and she turned and walked south on Wisconsin. Frank felt constrained by the gazes of the three men; all would be revealed if he were to run after her and ask for her name, her phone number, and besides now the foreman was holding the clipboard out to him, and it occurred to him that he could read what she had written down there.
But it was a fresh form, and he looked up to see that down the street she was turning right, onto one of the smaller streets west of Wisconsin.
The foreman watched him impassively while the technicians went back to the elevator.
Frank gestured at the clipboard. “Can I get that woman’s name, please?”
The man frowned, surprised, and shook his head. “Not allowed to,” he said. “It’s a law.”
Frank felt his stomach sink. There had to be a physiological basis for that feeling, some loosening of the gut as fear or shock prepared the body for fight-or-flight. Flight in this case. “But I need to get in touch with her again,” he said.
The man stared at him, stone-faced. He had to have worked on that look in a mirror, it was like something out of the movies. Samuel L. Jackson perhaps.
“Should have thought of that when you was stuck with her,” he said, sensibly enough. He gestured in the direction she had gone. “You could probably still catch her.”
Released by these words Frank took off, first walking fast, then, after he turned right on the street she had taken, running. He looked forward down the street for her black skirt, white blouse, short brown hair; there was no sign of her. He began sweating hard again, a kind of panic response. How far could she have gotten? What had she said she was late for? He couldn’t remember—horribly, his mind seemed to have blurred on much that she had said before they started kissing. He needed to know all that now! It was like some memory experiment foisted on undergraduates, how much could you remember of the incidents right before a shock? Not much! The experiment had worked like a charm.
But then he found the memory, and realized that it was not blurred at all, that on the contrary it was intensely detailed, at least up until the point when their legs had touched, at which point he could still remember perfectly, but only the feel on the outside of his knee, not their words. He went back before that, rehearsed it, relived it—cyclist, triathlon, one mile twenty mile ten k. Good for the legs, oh my God was it. He had to find her!
There was no sign of her at all. By now he was on Woodson, running left and right, looking down all the little side streets and into shop windows, feeling more