Storm Nosworthy, smiling once twice three times, a dark, burnt-looking rim inside his lower lip. He did something to his pants, which now showed faint smudges. (What were they? Had he been gardening?) “Great springboard for the Operation — maybe it is the Operation, Zach. And keeping it to yourself. You won’t be forgotten.” (Operation Scroll Down, I thought he meant.) “As your father asked you to”—(to be forgotten?) “Nobody even in the loop knows everything — but he will get what he wants, the Committee will see to that, what a competitive…hey competitive with his son, why not? And the diving? That whole story, you’ve gone deeper than diving, how does that grab you? Leave the board to someone—…you know what I’m saying. Another better way. You have to look ahead. You have a sister. You have a former…teacher you — (?)”
Storm came close up, a breath of mildew, and between dread and some partnership I recalled Dad had spoken of Umo as someone who would be of use to “us,” and I should keep it “under my cap” even from Umo, he knew what friends we were. (If we were, Dad’d added in that way of his, probing, remote.) Of use as a swimmer? I thought, a diver? whatever, was he a team person? — all I wanted now with Storm in my face was to get where I was going to do the job I’d been sent to do, yet no — was this the real job, to be valued by a person like this somehow? Turning, thirsty, I felt that sting again maybe like the nip of a snake where Storm had thumbed my arm, clasped me, his fingers pinching underneath, though this adder had a chemical on his breath, and I started to mention that odd remark of my father’s after his trip, stopped myself, started again, “There was that trip to Baja,” I said, “when he had a meeting — with you, I believe…” For on his return Dad had called Umo “competent” and I had missed something he’d said that would come to me and now seemed sinister if I could recall it. What they learned of Umo in Mexico — little more, I’d bet, than his immigration status.
Storm had my hand again, my name in his mouth implicates me, “You’re right, Zach, faith in the system — even over friendship, other priorities, risk by association, you know what I’m saying — silence is golden. You’re up to this, it’s already part yours, we wanted to be able to get you outa here in a hurry if we had to, so the captain probably mentioned your enlistment got switched to Reserve — finish the job I always say.” Up to what, did Storm Nosworthy mean? Videotape, but stills too? Some historical thing arriving — getting unearthed, or plucked in a rush from these waters somewhere below me. Storm had nerve. A vast horizontal well system? Ancient. To impact the war (though it was said to be sort of over).
No contingency plan — this is it: Storm’s words a spinning, flip-sided guarantee of reward and/or punishment (in the frowning smile of a faith-based relative, a punitive reward comes back; but a Reserve enlistment?) — I experience Storm’s hand moist and distinctly sticky, local candies maybe, until I can bow and, processing these words of his hang out with a target, you’re one, and proceed down to the pool and wait there for your… — turn away then behind me, distantly, a soft snap of the fingers I thought as I saw a figure appear ahead of me and something else from Storm almost to himself (what’s this…?)…the indoor garden there behind Storm, the dwarf olive, my thirst, several violet and orange and, I think, indigo, pink, and bulbous plants, in a gold pot a dwarf tree too small for Jonah to have retired under—“You need a drink, Zach” (Storm toasted me with an empty hand) — a silent tortoise, a bird’s shadow near the skylight in this land that seemed to Storm though not exactly our land a new frontier to build having been torn down, a small volume of Kipling with a half-empty, sordid drink on it he hands me, a family crest on the glass—“What’s this on the…?” (on the what? — I hear fingers snap as distinctly as the neck of a hanged culprit—“our family Virginia 18th century and before that Cornwall, Devon”—) — stairs rejoining me down past ceramic alcoves, a mouth-watering recipe of pots on the stove and ovens roasting as a door opens somewhere for a second, as my palace escort appeared once more in the shadows on this flight of stairs taking me past a rose-colored room and the elbows, butts, a momentarily one-legged foot of a man and another of a woman or two stepping into or out of something I thought, another door flings open below upon the warp of voices and pool waters, closing again. Till I am there, and a steel door with deadbolts and a lever-handle I jiggle must yield more stairs, but I’m guided away from it to the two swinging portals into the pool area that I push following perhaps my guide who I have the feeling now is not ahead but behind me and more gone from me than even he knows, for I would not tell him what I enlisted for.
14 a necessity like water
Humidity stood and unfolded toward you like the music agitating distantly under the pool itself and you could blink away a cloud transfiguring your upward sight. Though, having on the way downstairs passed in his digs a very ghost of a sometime Administration speechwriter “on the way up,” I was not here to film a ceiling mosaicked blue green crimson with river birds and one great-lobed ear, an esoteric oblong drawn in or on it, anciently listening downward upon this forty-meter-or-so pool, saffron and gray of water, a roped-off, only somewhat deeper section for the diving board where a bald man with a moustache treaded water.
Plus shower rooms; swimsuited civilian and military mixing nakedly (how did I know one from the other?), soldiers in fatigues; and this sketchy guy somehow, a large face I knew I would act on if I could just recall his job, his deep chin stonier for his short stature, eyebrows so thick and angularly peaked they didn’t need the small, recessed eyes beneath, a man bronzed on neck and forearms contemplating both the busy pool and this big woman guard in camo fatigues one-handing at her side a more or less automatic weapon I wasn’t familiar with with an awkward-looking outside sling swivel; yet also aware, I knew, of me, this stocky, quick civilian I half-remembered, tense, factoring me into the scene his blistered lips saying to the woman what I must hear while wondering all at once why he was here and why would our people consign the Scrolls to underground waterways, why not fax them home?
Why would the enemy target them, was it envy of this newly documented Jesus reportedly confirming in actual interview the Enterprise Conference’s bold person-to-person Win-Win interaction two thousand years later? I try to honor my own ignorance — about people and what they mean. One forthright Syriac phrase in the transcript of the apparently prevailingly Aramaic-language interview with some Edessian dialectal colorings reportedly literally translated “succeed succeed,” a seed of EC’s “there are only winners if the market plan is followed”; another Syriac term, literally “bird market peace” reportedly meaning “seller’s niche” supposedly echoes our own venerable “flight plan” or “Christian game plan” which was a surprise to me in my ignorance if I believed my old hunch — or my struggling teacher’s, really, the assistant swimming coach at the high school — that Jesus must have been pretty left-wing. Where were the Scrolls coming from, some Holy Land? An oasis where David I have heard escaped Saul? Further north where winter rains once clothed the Mesopotamian plain in verdure? Or where Euphrates attains its height in the mountains? And if this new, not secondhand profile of the Master chief executor of the miracles — saved virtually live in talk by an early first-century Roman with a genius for history, makes the Vatican like a man suddenly bald or worse feel challenged, will the new Pope still judge weapons of mass subtraction the lesser evil to cloning’s multiplier?