Cannonball Page 18

  Wick, I thought, sitting back down because the Moderator was in a state wondering what I believed or was about to say, and hearing Moderator’s stomach like a thunderclap homing on lunch break. Wick, I thought, and his question what did Umo call out to me?

  So the heck with the Moderator, I stood up and acknowledged Wick: “What we hear, forget all that little stuff about digital imaging we can’t even see without digital. For godsake hear the human voice. What we hear. You ask why that diver…”—the Moderator in a shake of his fist had received a signal and would not object—the answer to Wick, to what?…some complicity of mine in Umo’s appearing and vanishing, and it came to me like a sting in the chest or I was terribly slow, the Chaplain, his disorganized body nowhere in evidence when the steps on the stairs turned into perhaps two members of the archaeology team if not two armed guards, or in a still better universe one guard and one archaeologist. Wick, I thought. High school once inside a time, Wick, young, who cared about us almost too much—fellow seekers—equals, family, if we could pick our way through his downhill parentheses chalked on the board and Log over Log, and these arrows you had to do things with, add, multiply, depending if an event was a succession of steps or several happening independently and at the same time (same time) (same time)—my eyes choked my throat—all his unknowns that left us with these clarities you didn’t quite get but believed in like stunts, just math, came back to me, like a stopwatch he described depending on the color of the light particle which could shrink or turn. Very cool stuff: Was it over our heads? Why was Umo here in this unsettling memory who never went to our school? Wick ringing my father at East Hill, the job that mattered—whereas to Umo one day that we talked it was high school that interested him. Not that it was my father’s real job, though he could show his interest in my classes there in his own way.

  “Why?” I gave my old teacher back his question—“Why’d he call out to me?” But looking as we do elsewhere, blinking at the hand back of the room raised at the end of a camouflage uniform sleeve, we need the Moderator a too broad, too blond decently worried hedge manager who’d made a noise while the camo fatigue uniform man I would not forget went ahead anyway in the gathering stillness of the Panel room a killer I would guess, with a question more like an answer: “Timing in sports performance and business profit may affect concentration and vice versa, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Say?” I said, for we knew we knew each other from Fort Meade—I’m this raw trainee hustling away down the Base avenue with eyes in the back of his head, and then thousands of miles east the Chaplain marooned at the Scrolls explosion. Camo combats, this was still that Navy Captain—famous classified Seal—his words no less a weapon jump-started me straight through the event like timing it in advance, so I could see back, thing by thing, and time less the matter than the smell of his interrogator’s eye stuck with gluey infection behind its lens and thrown by this need of me (or something I had)—or it was the treacherous breath of water, scent of cement walks at Meade, friendship and shouts and necessarily induced war labor gathered into a formula gone into words and they had never forgotten me (or my sister whom they had phoned and I thought I knew what she was to me if I didn’t think about it, like where did sound go, we once looked into) and what I must know, nor could I forget the Chaplain’s interrogation material I’d so far censored wisely—why had he told it?—and lunch break was coming and after lunch, the Moderator asked us to believe, a distinguished visitor from DCwould be welcoming us—though we were already here—like a Mystery Guest you get to meet if you’re a major donor.

  In the communal stir of sitters getting up on signals from their stomachs and hunger primarily for change of almost any sort or lunch, the Moderator thanked me for my contribution to the Panel and to the war effort. But I recognized my original questioner and was heard to say (aside to the audience), “You’re consulted as some kind of expert when probably you’re an expert in something else—” (laughter) “—in this weird profit-stricken country like—” (laughter).

  “Like what?” spoke a hoarse, lost voice at the back, “like some ancient nation, man? I hear you but you don’t, you don’t, you don’t you know mean it with all your—”

  “—one great war-torn…,” I said to the lost voice, uneasy both of us at its words to me, and where was he coming from?—when closer at hand to my old mentor Wick I said, “Diver called out because I’m his friend, I should know why he’s up on the diving board because…”

  “And can you cite a recent example of your friend’s ‘ancient’ concentration?” the Seals captain in combats at the back interrupts, and, short of something else I knew but did not yet retrieve about white captain and black agency partner, I realized they wanted Umo.

  But not him to be talked of publicly.

  And seeing that moderation in all things made my uncle an extremist, I heard through time a living catalogue, as if I had been coached but had coached myself (and my own catalogue), of Umo and his take on my family…

  —odd about my sister (“Your family,” he called her whom he hadn’t met); and about my uncle (“He could be a cop where I come from; they frown, it’s murder”); still stranger, “Stom,” whose phone chat with my father at the far end of the pool Umo had witnessed (“He has a secret weapon you better get to know”); and Zoose, whom Umo did know—whose brotherin-law was not spoken of any more, the guitar player who had deserted—“Zoose thinks twice before he backs anyone for citizen”); and Umo on my own father (lost and found now in a desk job and its decisions)—(“Thinks he gonna make the Olympics”—that sudden Chinese laugh—“a’ least he taught you photography”); or, and why come to think of it now, Umo sort of on science (“Look out window. Zebra fish can grow a new heart, you know”). He described his mother’s singing once upon a time: it was the double-toned throat-singing technique common to her part of the world—thought to interrupt fertility—“I was her only, but she’s gone, you get arrested you’re gone, well maybe.” “You’re gone, Umo”—

  —why had I said that? Gone from home and family. It would have been good to talk to Umo about competing, young as he was. Why? It was like living. It was one thing within another thing. Yet at barely fifteen, to claim my sister as his bride, he got a snub from me and then nearly fractured Milt’s skull as a joke who had shared with him the shout (its words, anyway) that killed my dive and nearly me maybe, though Milt merely a messenger of words he still didn’t get. Regrets but not for Umo that night at Cheeky’s before my enlistment, which others but not Umo might think I had been enticed into, whereas it was into knowledge of them, against which (as if it were The Man) they weren’t quite now ready to enlist me among the missing in action.

  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 some
thing 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….”