Here’s a good spot, right?
The difference between fear and excitement must be only a few neurons wide. Just then, one of the NASA engineers from the morning session came down the path. I waved to the man and said, “Let’s do this, Robbie!” We’d be finished in a minute or two, and at least one of us would have a victory to take back home.
While Robbie retrieved the banner, the engineer and I exchanged a guarded postmortem of the day’s hearing. “It’s just theater,” he said. “Of course they’ll fund us. They’re not cavemen.”
I asked if he’d mind taking a picture or two of me and my son. Robin and I unfurled his masterpiece. A slight breeze wanted to take the banner from our hands. Dad! Careful! We tugged, and the banner stretched to full length. It billowed like the jib of a space probe filled with solar wind. In the full afternoon light, I saw details in his creatures that I’d failed to see in the hotel room.
The engineer was all enthusiasm and crooked teeth. “Hey! You made that? That’s just great. If I’d been able to draw like that, I’d never have started with the ham radio.”
I gave him my cell phone, and he took several shots from different angles and distances in the changing light. A boy, his father, the dying birds and beasts, the insect apocalypse along the banner’s bottom, the background mosaic of sandstone, limestone, and marble dedicated to freedom and built by slaves: the engineer wanted to get it exactly right. Another pair of astronomers from the day’s meeting saw us from a distance. They came over to admire the banner and instruct the engineer on how to take a photo. The engineer flipped my phone over to show Robbie the lenses. “We came up with digital cameras at NASA. I helped build the billion-dollar camera that we lost in orbit around Mars.”
One of the astronomers held his head. “We’re the ones who forced you NASA goons to put a camera on that thing in the first place!”
Ordinary civilians and civics tourists stopped, attracted by Robbie’s scroll and the three old men happily shouting at each other. A woman my mother’s age fussed over Robbie. “You made this? You did all this all by yourself?”
Nobody does anything by themselves. Something Aly used to tell him, back when Robin was little. I don’t know how he remembered it.
We spun the banner around. The onlookers cheered the other side. They hemmed in to see the lush details. The aerospace engineer buzzed around, backing people off so he could take a fresh round of pictures. A shout came from a few yards down the pavement. “I knew it!” Somewhere in the billion revolving worlds of social media, a girl in her late teens must have seen posts of a weird little boy chirping his odd little birdsong. Now the teen milled about in this ad-hoc camp meeting, thumbing her phone through a trail of bread crumb bits back to the Ova Nova videocast. “That’s Jay! That’s the boy they wired up to his dead mom!”
Robin didn’t hear. He was busy talking to two middle-aged women about how we could re-inhabit planet Earth. He was joking and telling stories. The girl who recognized him must have started a text chain, because minutes later other teens drifted in from the east end of the Mall. Somebody pulled a ukulele out of his backpack. They sang “Big Yellow Taxi.” They sang “What a Wonderful World.” People were snapping and posting things with their phones. They shared snacks and improvised a picnic. Robin was in heaven. He and I stood holding the banner, occasionally handing it off to four teens who wanted a turn. It was like something his mother might have tried to organize. It may have been the happiest moment of his life.
I was so caught up in the festivities that I didn’t notice two officers of the U.S. Capitol Police pull up on First Street Northwest and get out of their squad car. The teens began to heckle them. We’re just enjoying ourselves. Go arrest the real criminals!
Robin and I lowered the banner to the pavement so I could talk to the officers. Two teens picked it up and began swirling it around like they were kite surfing. That didn’t lower the temperature of the situation. Robin threaded the gap, trying to make peace between his supporters and the officers. His chest came up to their gun belts.
The senior officer’s nameplate read SERGEANT JUFFERS. His badge number was a palindromic prime. “You don’t have a permit for this,” he said.
I shrugged. I probably shouldn’t have. “We’re not demonstrating. We just wanted to take a picture of ourselves in front of the Capitol, with the banner my son made.”
Sergeant Juffers looked at Robin. His eyes narrowed at the complication to law and order. No doubt it had been as long a day for him as it had for me. Things weren’t good in Washington; I should have remembered that. Bullying was trickling down. “It’s unlawful to crowd, obstruct, or incommode the entrance of any public building.”