Old Milt’s kind of question, irked at The Inventor’s envelopes, and at my “rage” to see—See? — the war which through my other so young Asian friend turned from seeing almost to another sense, as I subsequently tried to show at the Hearings though less for a theme of Competition synonymous among our people with freedom (to buy, for example, a fragrant candle called His Essence that smells like Jesus, his robes, in Psalm 45) than toward another of our senses I will call Understanding first sketched in samples of my sister’s way of speaking or relation to me though nothing I could do justice to at the Hearings from which I become less connected while realizing that, not bluff or dynamic enough, I no longer knew if I was an emerging professional in the field of sports psychology, or had fallen into Errorism, a humorous but not all that humorous term in the field, which is a branch of sports medicine, and meaning an overprecise differing with somebody (and if they won’t pass you the ball and you’re the open man, it may affect your shooting eventually). And then my sister’s voice so clear inside me it might have been messaging asking how “old Milt” had called me on the carpet about my enlistment for it had never been principally a birthday party for The Inventor. Only trying to make a contribution to just about every panel of the Hearings on Competition when it came to it eventually and say what I saw to show myself months later what I saved even to describe for others what went down when my friend, as I have already said, all but miraculously appeared.
Sports psychology out on a limb beyond its parent trunk sports medicine if I am in the right field even, led on and on from friend and foe by the equivalent of what you get along the upper wall of castles in old Damascus and Mesopotamia, those projecting galleries supported by arches with holes in the floor which came in handy for pouring boiling oil, water, or blood upon competitors below if you can make the time it came to me to say, finding at last the one person around — in the doorway of the next-to-last panel room of the Hearings — who understood thoughts of that kind probably because it was her kind of thinking, my sister.
Thoughts in an “up” moment at poolside leaving me exposed so to Storm’s associate (yes) this deep-chinned KPMG accountant UK transplant to California I once saw through my swim goggles at East Hill checking their investment — though now as time, broken-down or not, ran out (shudderingly, I believe) through the palace building, witnessing an event that was and was not my job, I heard again the stupidly familiar words “Come in handy” this man before me now said to the plain vanilla Specialist he may in fact have fancied, meaning surely her old automatic rifle (of course of course — his words like memory itself) a Chinese SKS way-out-of-date post-World-War-II and trade-prohibited under U.S. law I’d caught a much better equipped contract-civilian on film ridiculing — the words felt in my chest an interruption of my heart waking the old surface scar bringing back my father’s prediction Come in handy of my friend Umo, and that they’d bring back the Draft, it was only fair, hearing like never before my name called from above, near where an almost invisible trap-hinged section of the ceiling’s mosaicked giant ear had snapped shut again too quick for me:
for there was Umo, compelled to be there, I could tell, arrived on that diving board notorious for penalties suffered by divers who fell short of excellence, yet in all his foreign flesh free — and “going,” as we say in our public pools back home or ask of somebody who stands up there on the high board too long (You goin’?): (but a dive multiplying all your damned questions into some moving, unanswerable statement, yet Umo here for me somehow)
and not here, I felt, for the same job as me:
yet for a job, solo probably — for where’s his crew, where’s the deserter? — for something has happened: and on the board still a boy, overflowing yet not surplus, still bound somewhere, diving it came to me for me at the same time as Get outa his way, a life weapon in himself. My throat would not sing out his name to him — he might have been Montezuma — I heard some familiar Rock ‘n Roll distantly below the pool yet somewhere central like a comfort level or taped home; mental yet sustaining like a wheel and on message, and as Umo (to these folk what, by these waters? — a not sufficiently developed or identifiable alien presence in the camouflage shorts, a local who doesn’t belong here — did my job give me these words? — troublemaker rising up — how’d he get in, through the ceiling?) — hailing this sweating, dumbfounded Army cameraman in boots on the wet tiles—“Zach!”—who aims his handy beat-up company-issue camcorder quickly from the hip and too low for Godsake unthinking reaching his other hand into his pocket:
registering behind me the double cluck of a different chamber readying (because it wasn’t the big blonde but the woman, small and dark, whose smell of jasmine soap, so bizarrely distinct from the gun oil and the gleaming slide and interlock of her newly rerustproofed M4 there and a hint of burn, I knew from the bedroom across the hall from mine at home) so I seriously doubted that this was my Operation Scroll Down job, handy as I might be:
for I suspected under these waters beside which I found myself, under the great tray or vessel of the pool itself, another level down or two, ran what I had been sent for to shoot — to witness, that is — where a branch of the vast desert well system passed by for the palace-builder’s onetime use and now for ours that we might deliver safely cradled the truly New capsule testimony to our Man and faith in what we were doing here and “next door” with benefits for all, or down there just some sewerside den.
I would not shout out I thought to Umo, he had made his stately approach and had given his trust to a strange diving board and I wouldn’t have my friend — targeted? — distracted as I had once been, yet found fixed in my throat dread or a power thrust into it of plural cry or covenant the silent question from my eyes and mouth Why’re you here? — virtual Hey Momma somewhere recalled song that my sister or (that was it!) Umo would have understood, hearing in this split delay or vocal two-note chord already, before Umo had launched his upward, arms-flungoutward trip like a vanishing crane white above its black flight feathers from some depleted tundra bog in the far north, the stab of the accountant’s voice at me, “Hey you’re bleeding.” Words come just in time to be part of what I couldn’t say quite, or only hear, the come in handy my father had summed up Umo in — and knew what had stung my arm arriving at the palace and reaching to touch the pillar’s fluting, and presently what I had seen on Storm’s pants and felt of impossibly even myself in his sticky palm.