And hearing in my head, arm, throat, fingers of my left hand that had drawn the tiny camera from my shirt pocket so that I was double-taking after first bringing my left hand to my chest then out again, Umo’s participation in a moment I didn’t grasp (except as I guessed they had promised him some corner of citizenship) and never taking my eyes off Umo calling to him only in my mind, my mind, to slow down, pause, in midair so we could talk, I stepped back flinging my other arm that was holding the clunky Army-issue videocam back around behind me half-knowing what I would strike and hearing as if I had detonated it the explosion from the M4 fired by the small dark Specialist its aim deflected because it’s a free country and you can always try — and in the corner of my eye aware only afterward of the accountant falling shot; for the dive I had never seen Umo or anyone try — from its surge and peak and sudden all but yanked and independent half twist and the surprises that followed it called up from the depths the gross counterpart of its own folding and unfolding and fall to be all but met by a concussion from below the diving well, bursting, bulging like a huge toilet flush or great bubble of oil from the diving well, bombed definitely from below as Umo was to have entered the water feetfirst, his joined legs, feet, and pointed toes all one, and a flying splinter of shrapnel like a shuttering split second tore a piece of his shoulder, expansion beneath and all around us as he would have made his entry into the vanishing water, yet the diving well section of the pool gave way, not inward at first — a gulp of force drawing up a gush under pressure, a bulbous blossoming water sucked where it came from yet at its ashen, pinkish rim for a split second not moving until following the first souvenirs of tile, cement, chrome, and human material, a leg and foot (the bald man who’d been floating in the well perhaps), and my friend’s vanishing form, the pool water largely draining out into the disaster area where Heavy Metal music resumed, never having ceased, spinning, coming up like what my friend and his team had come here to tape GIs listening to most of them and talking about this badly served-up war the wages of which were regularly paid out of experience to guys and women in sums of money quite modest because experience is almost beyond price, being a necessity like water, though what the terrorists had been after I had to figure was not swimmers or palace but the arriving Scrolls, and had a second explosion boosted the first or aftershocked it or was it still the first?
And the poolside faces and their bodies all so contingent, looking like bearing weapons’s the job in itself, turn this way and that shepherding nowhere in particular the rest, who might just be the voices all around in the still watery areas of alarm thickened by risk falling at you and away like speeds through some darkness of the noise, new to me in a threatened building. Denizens crowded about the near side of the pit left by the blast, my wrist was wrenched and the camcorder that I had put another notch in when I struck the rifle behind me like a backstroker in a busy lane was gone from my hand. I turned and went after the guard behind me but the big woman standing in the accountant’s watering blood steered me with her rifle another way, I was not to follow the small woman in oversize combats who at the swinging doors turned, rifle stock braced against her ribs her finger ready, my Army cam in her other hand, startled understanding across her cheeks: “Nobody on the high board after 1300 hours,” she said, she was backing, half not believing what she was doing, through the doors into the stairwell where a crush just visible not coming in or out nor loitering ascended from below — she said something else about the diving board.
Where I overshot is where I still am, he and I. Thought where is he now? A dive divided. Yet they could have their plan and that company camera I guess set to auto-iris whatever they figured was in it. My job blown but not by me, still mine even my own I hoped to do if I could find my way. The gray pool a current with a sideways wash evacuating toward the pit opened by the blast, I am addressed by a swimmer standing up to his shins as if the associate of Nosworthy up here curled on the tiles undone by his own blood didn’t exist, asking me what I had thought of the dive—“was it not two or three combined?”
“Always,” I think I said.
“Quite the diver.”
“A brave diver,” I said, so stunned.
“He want you to veedeotape.”
“No, he wanted citizenship.”
“Citizen!” The man vaulted onto the tiles, built like a wrestler with lethal eyes and looked like some Russian soldiers I had photographed at an airfield in the south in Wasit playing soccer and dolls with little kids; physical, broad-faced, he had the blond brush cut, small ears close to the head, and the blunt blue eyes. “Dey will take you for enemy combatant if you hang out with wrong people. Hang out with a target…” his shoulders shrugged forward, you know what I’m saying was what he meant.
“What?” I said forgetting even to turn away from him. What had the guard making off with my videocam called back to me: something “diving board” and “nothing happened.”
The man bobbed his jaw at the smoking pit, what had been the diving well. Human sound loomed up from somewhere below. “I think he had no choice,” said the man. “Think what you like,” I said.
“He was competitor to the end,” said the man. “He’s my friend,” I said. “He’s a great diver.”
“Nothing break his concentration. Unless his own death.” The man laughed. “He was your friend.”
“Is.”
He looked past me with his lingering hair-trigger alertness, this civilian adviser or reconstruction hustler, as I took him to be, on the margins. “Go see what’s left of him,” the man said, then thought better of it: “That dive,” he said.
Three point something, high degree of difficulty, I was saying from somewhere in myself, a wish to be accurate, self-important—
“A simple dive but den a tweest…and den—”
“—but tuck then layout then pike before entry — he’s known for his entry.”
“You know this stuff,” the man shifted tactics. “So tell me, under this kinda deal could you…?”
“I damn near killed my—”
“This kinda pressure—”
“—killed myself once,” I said.
The man squinted. “Yourself?”
“Oh I let it happen.”
“Ah well…”
I heard the killer contempt, yet I was on my way, I was stricken and needed to get to my job but speak words.
“Somebody…,” I began.
“Een meedair,” said the Russian softly with a Russian clairvoyance quite poisonous.
“Yeah. Somebody shouted.”
“Een meedair,” the Russian said.
“That’s right.”
“A dive, a diver. My sympaty.”
I dropped the mini into my shirt pocket and freed my hands, supposing that the soldier who had been pointing her rifle at me and had used it as a prod that had originally brought me to the edge of the pool, was behind me and my best way was through the pool, yet free of the videocam the woman in oversize combats had taken with film inside but had said what about the diving board?
“Like lights going out,” said the Russian, almost a memory, but Russian. “You are upset now, what you have seen, you are crazy, I think you are involved.” Nearer my age than he had appeared, “He was my friend too; it can drive you nuts,” he said dramatically. “And then?” I said.
“You should have that seen to,” he said; “you came in here with that.” He laughed, it was the dark wet stain where my arm stuck to my upper sleeve. He thought I had put two and two together about him, something he had done.