Cannonball (24 page)

Know, or tell, just enough. My instinct strong to call the strangely, in-pieces told, interrogation account (if and when I would tell it) his—which it was—but keep him, his fate, his Jesus even, his body, out of my account—while Moderator knew to defer to captain now if he could: but some meaningless force of discussion took a turn and I waited mine, narrowed to the face of the Fort Meade captain in his combats who had just spoken, yet in all this my once and, it came to me, still somehow science teacher Wick's loose, wide-eyed face whom Umo knew of and of course had something surprising to say about this man he had never met so you would not have guessed how Umo lived.

Was it Umo they wanted, however?

I read Mormons and Puritans, the accounts they say firsthand, their freedom yours for the having would you but live as they lived in their villages. I read histories of farming, of water and war, success and musculature, herbal stimulants, a brochure for caregivers, tools, the tools of tools, cities, even the gig of a Zen city, and what some person in the asylum of a library stack helped me find, not the painting I was looking for by rocky Giotto the Chaplain had told me about but Saint Zeno it turned out arising resurrected I think from a tomb in Verona in a little b-and-w print in a book and three people holding their noses; or out on a dock a guy in a wet suit trying to tell me something in broken English and Spanish and German about the harbor in the old days or, marooned in a Hawaiian bar on Fifth, what a woman told me to read or, fucked-up in a bus stop waiting room, a guy I knew in high school claiming Kerouac had written a book at one fool sitting indivisible it seemed or one sheet of paper.

Emerson's “American Scholar” beyond me except that action might be subordinate, yet in his “Circles” the lowest prudence being the highest, and (which I admitted I didn't get—but to whom?) “Self-Reliance”; building materials texts—iron, concrete, steel, wood and their joinings—nests made by birds of the air and caves by the ancient shore, Frederick Douglass and his oxen, Covey's
7 Habits
especially Win-Win—soil, weather—my father's own seldom named father a Connecticut farmer, or used-to-be, wherever he was or whatever now—I, like a convict, reading up on law terms for self-defense I knew I'd need, a word bobbing slowly past me glommed onto (
debauched
,
sanguine
)—no word from my father, a memory or two to forget: Camus, he said, for we were reading Camus senior year, Camus. For Camus swimming was all but sacred, if anything could be, said my father. I said I knew what he meant. He exploded at my lameness I guess: Had I missed the point? An overturned bucket I might seem: science in the face of my father. Old newspapers in the library a year or two ago. Yet there came across at midnight Chaplain's words
as above so below
again and I switched them around, having thought he meant pool level and our own; took notes, and one night if a terrible thought hadn't come to me when my sister was examining the welt-scar, raised high, hard, purple-and-orange on my tricep in no time by the toxic waters that had borne me to safety, nearly told my sister about rescuing his body, because she said, “The underwater photographer, he was dead when you took the piece of Scroll from him, was that it?”

All this reading at midnight somehow drew closer and closer together medicines for sports psychology to which I had come like a migrant seeing the California light, I could always discuss with my mother, and wet behind the ears like a seer to his calling it seemed, one afternoon soon after being automatically mustered out into the Reserve driving a balky old car to meet my sister at her part-time intern job, who should I see but Bea, her friend, at the high school track unwisely all by herself hardly get off the ground hanging on her striped vault pole swinging hopelessly into it, braid hanging down; and I drove around the block to check her out again and she was making her approach like a jouster, her knees driving high, she was leaning back a little and brave and something missing to my eye, only as she brought her pole down for the plant anxious lest she miss her aim at the box (as she glanced over angrily like a confidence between us not quite knowing me) her end caught in the ground and her motion lifted her a good six feet and the carbon catapult gave a little, not enough to whip her upward—there's no bar—so I almost ran down the bicyclist in the street in front of me bald, very active. Because I could help Bea.

And now, wearing her baseball cap and a Hearings badge that entitled her to the Lunch Buffet, why was she here?

Slow on the uptake, my father would joke. Umo's new word, too. The “i” word “ironic.”

Zach doesn't need to be fast, he knows a better way to get there, my sister said. Yet in the dead literally of night leaning so close to me her breast itself listening to what she may have guessed was not just what came before but screened what followed, still something I had attained to get back with a story so awful albeit drawn together by her presence and a story from the Chaplain she measured as if it were all of
me
coming to meet
her
: “You mean she was contained inside a capsule until she couldn't breathe because she wouldn't—” “Wouldn't cooperate, give them what they wanted—” “—under questioning, a Seal woman—?” my sister not even persisted, only was patient to get what she could: somewhere in California under a cavernously deep indoor pool all what my dying man recalled and it coming to a head for him and now for me, the nearly naked woman I pictured for my sister in the dark of our bed couldn't come up with the goods, what it was like to be sealed inside a glass tube until she couldn't breathe and suffocating get shot upward plungered through a trap opening the full pressure of the pool above down upon the escape valve risking her neck at the top of the tube automatically suddenly uncapped if she bent her head even an inch—I cut short my tale of the concussion of pressure released from above upon that perfect fit of an opening where, smothering, she waited to be shot upward—“…neck snapped—ask your friends if they'd give you a job at that pool, ask my friend another ordinary photographer a witness to all this”—where, in this valve function, the pool pressure above upon the stressed subject equals the pressure back up at you from a water surface to equal which one would have to dive from a height of one hundred eighty-four and a half feet a no-hands “sailor's dive” and she was a Seal herself (not combat-billeted but Explosives Ordnance Disposal—I spelled it out), nor sworn to secrecy regarding Jesus revelations she knew nothing of—in question certain Scroll Down leaks they were investigating: “When did your Chaplain tell you this?” my sister asked, wondering respectfully and seductively about the rest of the story.

What I missed.

Though not the promotion, my talent to fit into all but the buoyant war commercials the almost not even evil reconnoiterings contaminant as they were airborne of the supposed person Storm Nosworthy, government employed but exactly where?—my fit even into the faith long untimid embracing our real business of everyday dollars and cents, nickels and dimes, what it took to build whatever. And friendly/unfriendly fire you or your government would take for your initiative extending even to a good old Crusade, cost benefit decently absorbed but don't take us for granted. Specialist at large for the Army thousands of miles from here in desert places hot as Utah, and, lately, flattened as Texas, and across our vast intelligence grid ancient cities, streets of wheels, inclined planes and stones, earphones, shouts, city eyes and noses, near-revelation if I wanted while I was there, in danger and reserves of danger I could hardly think of except in that bared and unknown place the job I didn't deserve; yet, then, did like some inherited Reserve obligation: to just miss the actual arrival of the Scrolls but be part of it or the scenario Storm Nosworthy had figured. Yet why me? Who was I? Acquainted with the diver.

And who was he, gone without a trace? Wholly Umo, I knew. The Russian knew. Nosworthy with his closed circuits and face must know. The question lurked here and there in the run-up to the Hearings, once nameless in a mention of the explosion in the Sunday
Union
Arts section noted by my sister whom I told in confidence, after she'd replied to a phone call about (she thought) Umo that—she had thought quickly and said, No, he'd “gone back.
”
Her way of not giving in to the voice, deeply politely in charge in her ear, her very mouth—her aching back, she reported to me, black, like the actor who does the commercials Biblical, an agency presence supreme and felt by her to be a threat like all isolated voices. Though to what? her brother? his reputation? we laughed). Gone
back
! I could love her for that, the impulse (and not to hang up)—back to China? Mexico? The family alley in lower Mongolia (though Umo without any folks to speak of)? The Middle East without me? (I feared for her car.)

Then,
Dead
, she had thought and nearly said but didn't, she told me (and asked if I would come by and see Mom—See Dad? I said—He won't be there)—but thought the black man's rich, searching voice had uncannily believed the unsaid thought (thus can smarts outsmart the smart if he is a killer for the mad can read minds). “Anyone see him passing through?” “He's probably where he belongs.” “Underwater photographer (?), doubling as?” said the caller like he's reading off an alphabetized—
Doubling
? I said to my sister. Yes, that was his word. (The Chaplain's word.) “No, that's another friend,” Em had said.

“Passing through?” “By water?” she had answered question with question. “Over
there
, then.” For the voice, clearly the executive civilian from the Fort Meade run, was not without intelligence in his intimacy, his phone style we agreed, his phony-phone-phone, Em called it. “Here or there,” she countered. He:“You're giving me double talk, honey…not smart, nobody raised Lazarus from the dead he just had an influential friend improved his health,” said the voice. Had she said too much? Why Lazarus? The black man had rung off. “Did I…?” “You're you,” I said. “I got the idea it wasn't Umo he was after.” “You were right.” It came to me that she wasn't scared so much as—“Am I promiscuous?” “Discriminating,” I said, pulling back on the thought that she would after all go East to work as she'd said she would, yet she was writing some things down, no matter where she was, “something high-handed,” she called it, and I could feel when she gave me a hard, uncanny neck rub pausing over some tendon nerve at either side like roots of a tree or a vein of all of me or resistance in me to not the war so much as Dad's silence or, running back up her own long arms, a between-times or between-people grief in her. Loaded for him at last and Sierras would answer she said, though these government people might get onto friends of hers that had nothing to do with her brother.

I had not told her how I had swum the sewer.

I would not speak for anybody but ran into Mom on purpose at the Farmer's Market, her full face peering into mine over her shopping which I helped her carry.
We have to strike out on our own
, she said in the kitchen. Afraid to ask about me, vague when I said I was reading, bizarrely showing me the house if there was anything I wanted, her and my father's bedroom with the framed picture of her looking like me under the lamp on my father's side of the bed. She pulled out drawers of handkerchiefs and socks and showed me The Inventor's envelope its wrinkles much flattened. I ran a finger over it, and felt my mother's hand on my shoulder.
I saved it. It had some food for thought
.

I safeguarded the Scroll scrap, would hardly tell my self where.

In these later months, our economy booming, or bombing, people showing signs of getting behind these historic Scrolls, I had thought what to do (for others would always want to tell me first). Bea would never make it as a vaulter, she thought. She would phone me. Blamed no one. Knew I'd “been there,” she said. Had become vault-box-shy lowering her pole. I told her what the optimal performance literature said; had my own view, we could talk some time…she an older woman practically, very experienced from how she appreciated something about me, my “nerve,” she said, she could listen, she paused—tops on her list, she said off phone a moment, “you with E-m, amazing, like….”

It was sad that The Inventor had been threatened with the termination of his green card though he was not a Muslim, and two windows had been broken and an almost invisible break-in, Milt had told my sister, had cost The Inventor nothing of value, though I heard his syncopated voice in this information and knew there was more to it—perhaps just time. I tried every way to reach Nosworthy, I had the captain's name but no reply, I would not ask my father but he was out of the country, I heard. I wanted to know who had ordered Umo shot coming up off the palace diving board.

Still wondering, in these beige Panel rooms, Why the delivery by water? Why the secrecy of Operation Scroll Down—and if my own damaged scrap was real, why had not the full text (in a species of Syriac) been photocopied before being launched along the well system? (Not easy in the field? What would The Inventor think? I didn't call.) Before I had left for Fort Meade news of Scrolls had been leaked to the press I now learned, if slantingly or randomly, never verbatim. If you picked up on this news slotted to an inside page, found interviewed in his own voice (called “Jesu” at least once in the TV news clip) this contemporary living legend rougher, more go-ahead than the Gospel Jesus (Mark or Luke, I would have said for had I ever much read them, hearing them quoted? Though more like the controlling scene-stealer in the woman-at-the-well story in the John Gospel. Though in John, I learned, he sometimes goes off the point or doesn't answer the question—like an exec at a shareholders meeting—“Thanks for the interview,” Em said inimitably.); down to the translated words of the Scrolls at first not much challenged that at one point foretold implicitly a
nation
that one day would spread the news of popular rule, profit both in spirit and talent ledger, and what amounted uncannily to R & D we now say, knowing much is expected of us. Apart from all this I persisted in believing that of me some other “much” was asked.