Except it did not matter any more than whether my dad had really gone fishing on the Baja trip or met on business the speechwriter Nosworthy and his 60s Porsche with cocoa-matting on the floor, for the speed of light, my poor teacher tried to persuade us and himself, is constant no matter which way you’re going or how fast. And Vera Cruz was up there on the pool ceiling left behind like someone’s unknown war as I left that night in a hurry, my face, chest, withered fingers unrinsed of chlorine; the payphone at Adams near the Interchange in my hand to call Liz and her car, yet before she can pick it up, back on the hook because I had won something in my laps of wandering — an absence — my course unfolding secure inside me — Umo or no Umo — though that night my father might wonder for a time what had happened. Though not that I would become smarter or readier for others in my trek. And what he thought of me remained clear, though what? When I was far away my sister — her voice, exact (to me), eccentric — e-mailed the void.
A phone call comes back from the season of my enlistment as if I control the world, two weeks before, in fact; though mustn’t it have been earlier? I had been speaking with my uncle about college and the war. He had never risked his life that he knew of. A private person, childless, a weirdly satisfying conversation with a family member considering his looks, round face ladder-like body as if an extension might come into use released, and he had asked if I would go with him to an old black-and-white film about World War II bombers over Europe, and I had said, “Low budget?” half joking but had no intention of going to the movies with him much less in the afternoon. By coincidence we were comparing notes about picture-taking when I took a call though it was about his because he did a lot of family videocam and I didn’t even own a digital. I had a little Canon automatic actually in my hand as I took the call and it was a practiced voice on the end of the line said they were an Army agency and was I Zachary? The Army? I said. They understood I was a pretty fair photographer and (my uncle raised his eyebrows and kept them raised) were offering a Specialist assignment should I enlist. I said I was nowhere close to being a pro and had been told so by a member of my family who should know; but it didn’t sound like how the recruiters promise you Tahiti — it was praise over the phone and the phone is powerful, and, hanging up, I shook my head as if mystified by my distinction, and my uncle and I went on about college but he was dying of curiosity and I let him be.
Except to say it had been the Army calling. And after my uncle had said I was quite a decent guy (as if that had been in question), I asked him a personal question that all but stopped him: Had he ever been in a fistfight? He had the habit of frowning and smiling at the same time and I thought I had found Christian people doing it a lot, maybe it was me — why, a wedding photographer friend of my mother’s who had fulfilled a lifelong dream by going into the firearm business, had a nose like Dad’s, high, bony, a pointed tip, look out but…(Imagined himself a gun, my sister said, I remember her mystifying words, “Vulcan begat me, / Minerva me taught”—a reader at three in the morning? she read me poems as if to my extended body — that one a riddle for some kind of gun.)
10 likes your approach
And so until a critical conversation with a captain about certain shots months later I gave little thought to that phone call (except that it was odd if not improper, mysterious as the clearness of my prior will to enlist, the offer a Specialist benefit I’m prequalified for if I signed a Reserve enlistment package, which at first and because of my uncle’s presence I felt no desire to do). I thought of sending my dad a shot from the outskirts of Kut, or of music — that’s how I thought of it — an Afro-American GI, scar down his cheek, earphones in hand, listening with his friend to “Let There Be Rock” just after he said it would make his last day worth it and Ghostface Killah rapping about having to pay the rent; I sent photo to Cheeky for Umo case she knew where he was, along with my long-traveled digital shot a gray whale’s fluke subsiding into the sea (his license plate). I recalled the Mexico trip with my father when I was ten, the dumb shots I just shuttered one after the other and the humbling cut I took from him without a peep, though the snaps were not much but something else, it had come to me, sort of true how you can let yourself get distracted in the middle of…and came back years later during a dive…because…it was about waiting and patience with him and to my mind the hidden instant you couldn’t ever pose that didn’t really exist except in a snapshot was it (?) and even then you couldn’t count the time even in memory which was all I thought I had when he took the camera away from me. So there was a positive side.
The week he went to Baja and came back not himself and talked to me, it was of water (yes, yes, what chemical event could move it briefly uphill) and of underground delivery systems they were brainstorming, tricky stuff frankly “if not quite over your head” (but wasn’t it me he came to), a thing on the move I felt in there somewhere. Like a weapon, were his words. Yet as if I should speak, when what did I know, and he was the one. And though it was said to have surfaced in the newspapers like some 4th dimension of information peculiar to half-hidden forces about the time I resolved privately to enlist (despite what my sister had passed on to me though this was from Bea, the Italian wife of the Mexican motel man, Corona, one of my father’s Reserve connections), I never came across word of it; not that I read the papers, each day’s revelations superseded by the next.
A “weapon” it had been called in government circles you heard in the beginning — why tell me? — and later in an improvised Administration news conference said to be in motion hooked up to a conference call.
A miracle that wound up where it was heading, my dad actually said to a son known for saying blunt stupid things or embracing untenable positions or posing questions.
Mysterious, I accept him, managing somehow to excuse himself outlandishly from the Reserve without ever undermining our morale by letting us in on it though how I got my job is also an interesting question I asked myself at his birthday dinner before I left. Though felt one chance already gone replaced by another coming.
How to find the right person even more than question to ask proved my training no less than hearing for myself and knowing a few people before they vanished, a chaplain at Fort Meade, a sergeant behind the wheel of a car in foreign streets. An office, a captain.
An ochre city not at peace or war outside the window, a parking lot it was well to keep an eye on from time to time, this captain paging gingerly through dozens of prints of what I did best, careful not to touch more than a corner lest some damp contagion reach the thumb and fingertips of his left hand. A captain who traded words with you as if he had some hunch. That the work — the photos, the work now strewn across a desk — claimed some privilege quite other than a camera’s light. That my sister once after some months when I had scarcely heard for all her attention to me had wanted to know what had been said just before a certain shot was taken — something said in words — wound my slack tighter too.
My father would have liked three white-pyjama’d suspects framed by the open back of a dedicated personnel carrier so they seemed to be on a tilted TV screen. Two Yamaha wheelies spinning off a ramp, I could just hear them, one biker blindfolded. “Jump pay,” I said. Two headless kids caught squatting still upright beside an irrigation ditch at Tal Afar. (Non-renewable resources, I muttered.) A one-legged Indirect Fire Specialist with big tits going in for a lay-up hopping as she bounces the basketball, which is also caught in the air (“Woman MOS,” I said; captain, “No such thing.”) Two left severed ears on the shelf of a bookcase. A Dang Freres ice cream Humvee unloading the day after their Defense contract got canceled when they were discovered to be a French Catholic firm. Seen from the window of an armored vehicle returning for the fourth time I was told to the same village, indigenous trainees fieldhockeying a ball around with their Kalashnikovs on a leveled playing field. An old man in a green beret watching fire skating across a river.