I didn’t ask, finding myself confronted one afternoon where I had expected ancient Nature by several small depictions of murder grouped around a colorful Mesopotamian picture of men in headgear, a Muslim embassy kneeling before the throne of an Abyssinian “king of kings” seeking the extradition of certain Islam converts I learned (but could never have guessed — nor the Chinese part of it), and this plus the scene of a beloved’s funeral flanked by mourning leopards and antelopes and delicate, bending trees Liz would not have cared to know about, no more than the full range of The Inventor’s wares. A “Book of Brothers” he took from my hand with a shake of his head, objects for sale that were not for sale, a tiny white China dog like no mutt I’d ever seen in my neighborhood, long snout pointed like a turnip, short legs I imagined to be powerful for fast running, I took it up in both hands all two inches of it, and turned it to see if it had a dick and found its eyes to be minute dots of shiny black, and became aware of The Inventor shaking his head but in some prophetic apology I later surmised — Not for Sale — Don’t Touch. But if it was for sale how much would it go for? I thought, letting it go from my fingers only. Not of interest to Liz, I felt sure, but definitely to my sister, also the pained (sometimes) cast of his face, unable to speak at length of something when speaking at length was what he was good at. Except that if I had ever brought Liz here her niceness or whatever it was and casual intuitions which she herself would have forgotten a day later would have interested our host.
The things there. Why were they so important? Maybe they weren’t. A small painting of two women blind you could tell from how they were led by a blind, hooded person. A well-thumbed 1939-40 World’s Fair catalogue with a well-built guy leaning forward on his toes about to go off the high platform of the Aquacade interested The Inventor, too. “It makes you think,” he said. We thought about that. “He played Tarzan in the movies, you know,” said The Inventor. “You used to be a diver,” he said. “No more,” I said. “You can’t do everything. You are a thinker or a healer perhaps.” (I the healer?) He’d known me since I was ten. “Go regularly to the library,” said The Inventor. “Ten dollars?” I held up the catalogue. Too much, I felt. Yes, the catalogue cost ten dollars. No discount offered, none asked for. (For some reason my uncle was a source occasionally of extra cash.) “Where is your friend Milt today?” Milt was angry because of a claim The Inventor had made for the saliva of an old man he knew the chemical composition of which could help you see better if not cure blindness itself though produced pretty weird sight where people walked up to you like low-flying aircraft and L.A. palm trees which was better than blindness probably. Yet Milt was a guardian of manners. He knew of the China dog. When one day I asked why wasn’t it for sale, Milt muttered, “Whatsa matter with you?” But The Inventor confessed he’d acquired it in exchange once for — he paused. “In…China,” I said, not quite knowing and in that instant, an instinct, a picture that receded like a small wave on the beach or a shadow in the corner of your eye, a great thing, though — that you would do, but you can’t bring it back. What passed between The Inventor and Umo? In reply to one question I could ask The Inventor, many people nowadays, without legal ID, knew how to come and go across national borders. “Even as young as Umo,” I said. “He knows his way around,” said The Inventor.
Umo came and went at East Hills. He listened to my father “take inventory” on terrorism and health at the end of practice before we changed. The Olympic trials came up, and then, if it was not another evening though Umo was certainly there, a future war my father somehow didn’t name but it was not the same as the War on Terror. Everyone had his job to do. He might have been receiving bulletins over and above reading the newspaper as he assigned us, he would do his part somehow.
I hoped for Umo’s success. What would that be? Citizenship? To grow up. He was more than grown up probably. What is it we want for others? I said. He said others had to watch his weight. It was a joke. Secret weapon—a phrase of his. Later I decided everyone had a secret weapon, and did Umo really mean that? “Your father’s secret weapon,” he’d said when he’d heard this end of the cell phone conversation at poolside that first day.
Did Umo dive at the Club? Yes, in the separate diving well. Did Dad keep track of him? In his own way, yes. No water partings or geysers for the moment. Someone asked when I would dive again. My father saw it all — who really owned East Hill and by the same token who they were. Or were owned by, I learned to think. Our secret weapon — but how and when would Umo be used, if ever? — and a distraction always though from what to what?. Not ever choosing to be the victim like the rest of us of my father’s evil temper (that’s all it was), Umo was shouted at in the air the first time, though indirectly: “Get that fat idiot off the board—” Umo already in the air—“in a hurry!”—a zero-difficulty front dive that silenced all sound but a wash of watery echo and the voice of the board stressed and then vibrating, which was time not at all simple for all of us in or out of the water to be alerted to this motion that could if it chose continue.
This talent. The arch high and natural, the legs part of it — not yanked.
Dolphin (!) as I also see him and see him slowed down during the moments of a dive even now with the tortoise side of my brain slice by infinitely small slice, beyond competing. The water lurks always, it is what water does. Cleaned in our city, with eye-burning chlorine (a fair price to pay for our southern California public pools and private) — luminous with its own light given back as a home or density not odorless like some other routine poisons but faintly giving off its promise for Umo leaving our three-meter East Hills board for a laborless entry we almost could not credit, for it seemed so beyond team use, and I was watching both my father and it, for I knew he had had an idea from the beginning of Umo’s visits.
My father pointing accusingly at Umo surfacing in the diving pool after that mysterious entry, that pure “front”: “How did you do that, boy? It’s what I always said before you were born, and you’re doing it, it’s what I always said before you were born.” Umo ducked under. What did the man mean? “Downright distracting,” my father said but to himself of course. Why had the astonishing inwash of that entry in the adjacent diving pool all but flattened our waters out here? — stilled them, surprised them? At once, then, to be engulfed by Umo’s happy hand-assisted launch up out of the water to stand like a waterfall, then into the lap pool, where he gave us a length of butterfly, which as Umo’s go-between at least proved me right in the eyes of the man who had nagged me half-jokingly (which is worse) for months, Man, you don’t know how to compete…but I’d brought him a great talent from Asia to be invested in our — or my father’s — Olympic future, not buried in the everyday wars of our life. “What do you know today, mister?” he asked. And I told him there was a spit that could cure blindness maybe if you knew how to build it up and I had told my sister who believed me and often one better.