“Your work…” he said, he had been smoking too much — my “work” had gone largely unnoticed, I had thought, some not clear enough, the child with his mouth wide open on teeth and the taste buds only, it was for the files, not the international wires—“Tell me about it,” said the captain. “—for Intelligence (?).” “Your work is known,” the captain said then. DC came into my head, the War Memorial with all the names, Lincoln Memorial with his words in stone. Captain eyed his desk, as if I was leaving. My training at a base near DC had proved routine, a Chaplain training there to be a highly specialized photographer had asked me why I’d enlisted, and at once dismissing my thought with his, which I interrupted without hearing, they sparked new thoughts in me but what had he said about everyone doing their job? — he had vanished into a building, his heavy midsection supported by long, gangly legs that seemed out of another life, or he was to be cut in two, this deeply intelligent and humorous and divided man, not so divided after all, leaving me unsure if he meant what he said about the division of—
I thought I was dismissed. The captain took in the window and the music running on. “Better not Forward any more pictures”—to personal correspondents, he meant. He was coughing fit to die. What did either of us have to offer? His voice gave off an animal-enough sound without inflection. It said I would take a couple days off starting at once to be ready for another assignment.
“You will keep it to yourself.”
Plenty of experience in that quarter. Keep…? (A weatherwoman I knew personally and had tried to know better had been told the same thing.)
“Scroll Down. Operation Scroll Down.” He looked into my face as if I might know already, or something like that. A GI, earphones at the ready, sloped past between me and the window. I would be receiving my orders. It was quite an opportunity, captain said, pulling out a desk drawer as if it was one of the things he had. Some paperwork.
Ready? I thought; what would I do? A hotel near the river had become the stock exchange, maybe it could get blown up along with the sewer (though be it noted that sewage privatization in the war zones had been put on hold, in the sense of retention rather than hands-on). “Your billet, you will keep its location to yourself.” My orders would identify me and what I did and announce my appearance in advance. My job, what was it again? Dividing the labor but how? The way you make jobs? The way you halve the distance endlessly?
Could I use the laptop?
“It’s down.” The captain put down his pen and clasped his hands. Looking at his hands, I missed Milt, who had not answered an e-mail I had sent on someone’s laptop down in Khawr. Was it my fault? I would try for a reaction at home when I thought of it.
Opportunity was what I had come here for, I said. Yeah well, said the captain. Opportunity was ineetiative. Try to photograph that, I said. Come on, he said. Had he said too much and knew it and was resigned to something? Well, the assignment…was an “archaeological site,” said the captain, leaning forward in his chair, to at last say perhaps too much. Were there any left? I said. (Which side was I on? captain asked.) Babylon looted, I thought; thirty digs visited by profiteers I’d heard, what they took… A phone rang in the next office — and 8500 treasures, I thought, gone from museums alone kept in some moistly climate-controlled wing of memory like a cropped photo or a fact that would come in handy. The insurgents were living off stolen antiquities, I said. Which side was I on? captain said.
(Had I let Umo go? Those locomotives — the numbers an eight-year-old fat boy wrote down when they passed near where he lived for a while in Shenmu until he was reported.)
The side of the most living and truthful, this history, I think I replied to the captain, so he put his hand on the phone and took it off, searched for a cigarette: “We’re a family here,” he said, “and I’ll see that your thoughts are passed on to those whom they may concern. They’re certainly inspiring.” What they inspired in him I couldn’t tell. Anyway, my assignment…that was all he knew. I said there must be a laptop somewhere if I could borrow it for a quick e-. “Try that one,” said captain of the one that was down. “And stay away from any elevators in this city. You were on a swimming team?” he said. “Diver, did I hear? “Once. Got injured,” I said. “Didn’t keep you out of our clutches.” We thought about it.
Someone arriving at a site — I wondered if they were phasing me out. Dignitary? Scientist? A precarious archaeological operation, I thought, involving…“a weapon” (the captain had reached, I believe to this day through me, a need to speak the word)—“a weapon,” he concluded staring into my face as a whole, and I saluted for some reason, hearing quick steps at the door but the person didn’t come in — a woman, I felt, from the captain’s staring at his coffee mug and eyeing the ceiling.
11 words in the dark
One step back, two steps forward, my sister had said one night in my room, shortly before I’d not volunteered to get up and pull the curtain, the light was bothering her; but No, she said really only a few minutes later, twenty minutes, twenty-five, of picking up my loud old clock and chucking it into the steel-mesh waste basket and leaving it there with its loud, old-fashioned marking-time weight—one step forward two steps back but it’s the two back that give you—it was the doorway of her room late the night of the supposedly aborted sleepover, and it was me in the doorway of her room, a scent of what I’d been told was jasmine that her mother had given her strong in all directions. “Yes,” she said.
A premonition I would hardly have told the captain how Umo the morning I went for my enlistment physical laughed that harsh Chinese laugh to learn that my dad had managed to resign from the Reserve but had kept it to himself. First glad for my father, Umo then coolly enraged they wouldn’t let him go in with me. Finding that my father had finessed the Reserve I saw that it had been precisely at a moment when, from his Club sponsors, all intimations pictured him as a person who knew what was going on. You don’t apologize.
I had two pretty good books with me, the captain saw the angle of one digging at the canvas equipment bag but not camera equipment, and when I was leaving he touched the bag for that reason. Books, I said, one from my sister, one from me to myself. Your sister, he said.
Slightly fire damaged, their contents nearly intact, I read them because “experience,” whatever Dad meant, “isn’t the only best teacher”; or reading is, too, it had come to me and is the best of someone else’s all boiled down though one of these was long. Though one short but seemed long. Read it through only when I got home. Ancient but mentioning desert missiles that pass by the guilty and kill the blameless. Feathers that fall no more slowly than cannonballs, death not to be feared though the author didn’t persuade me. (Was there a photo missing from the captain’s batch of mine?)