He was quick only.
He turned away toward the changing rooms. “We better get outa here,” he said.
I squatted supporting myself on my hand and jumped into the shallows and a tremor seemed to spread from my footfall upon the rust-streaked bottom and was my nerves claiming territory. Over there in what was left of the diving area, they were trying to clear the fools away from the great rupture in the floor that had carried the drain down with it. “You’re done,” the blonde said, meaning my job, I thought, and the muzzle-sight at the end of her rifle barrel came my way from above as if it would target me sideways and the barrel struck the camera in my shirt pocket hardly bigger than a coin, I felt it clear across my chest scar. I kept my hands off her rifle, walked through it, and kept going.
The Russian said wait a minute, he was the fool who makes a practice of not being one. I had seen him from a car, a truck, yes maybe my one trip in an armored vehicle he was standing in the sun watching, listening somewhere. I stepped over the safety rope of small black-and- white buoys slack in the shallows and into the diving well, remembering him now with headphones. A bathing suit. California. “Hey you’re the Russian.”
15 Heard of you
He came after me along the tiles at the edge of the pool. I made my way down the mostly drained warp of what had been the diving well floor, catching traction on split, broken grouting, slipping on the downward break, getting almost the hang of it, a ship, a section of deck, disaster. The Russian followed along at his leveclass="underline" “Hey. I am Ukrainian!” he shouted. He was trotting around the pool to the far side of the demolition area. “Ukrainian, not Russian! — Ukrainian.” “All the same,” I called across, heard a siren above.
I pulled a bather away from the edge — I might be Security, I waved several bathers back, an elderly Arab couple with small knapsacks, this wasn’t a public pool. Close to the pit I would see for myself. Groans from below, clamor, rooms shifting and things piled and after-concussion and structural undulation abhorrently underfoot. I had thought there had been a second explosion as well. I would more than see what it was, it was what I could do for Umo, if I believed such truths, this rebel bombing, this accident, this the two of us coinciding and far away a steady thump of Rock ‘n Roll going down.
Someone in a bathing suit got hold of my bad arm, I lost my footing like a skater, now it was this nearly naked fellow who held me up, and then I had a sight that almost drew me far down in the smoke and structure though mysterious of what I seemed to hear — yet a visible glint of waters burning like sewers you just know are sewers and then gone from view as wreckage of darkness or raft of rubble slid across below, and under my feet and down there a yelling, a sieve of words even howled but only a few clear—“…up behind,” a bosun’s order, reached me, and two voices I almost recognized, or one voice in trouble, struggling, so you thought “not with the men” wasn’t the real words.
The Russian shouting…
But I would get down to where I should have been all alone.
“Why they shout at you when you dive?” he demanded to know. In midair, he meant. Why did he know something? Why would Umo tell him? He was directly across the pit from me now, past the diving board ladder and above the destroyed diving pool. “Ukraine,” he shouted. “When?” I said (“Last year! Always!”) — my passing interest involuntary, like future turning these tiles into the bread of his own life and schemes to be pursued as sheep follow the provider, and, papers, green card, everything in hand he won’t forget, for he needed a deal to get here and will deal again. What would he do? — a “Russian,” after all. But he would come no further, his no one-way ride. He was talking at me, stopping for new tremors I took to be a sign damage was ongoing like aftershock. Had the insurgents overshot? Where were they? Oblivion?
“The dive, eet began like swan. He tweested halfway to face board and then doble somersault. Layout and tuck was amazing thing.” Russian had missed Umo’s last pike.
The warped slope of tile shivered sideways, and the woman who had fallen again and I were pulled back. They had caught on to me, that I was not Security. I slipped, I fell.
“He was your friend, he was my friend,” I heard the Russian say, the link itself alert with lurking shifts, motive, plausible profit. “Changsta, they call him.” I crawled, lunged with a bloody palm now down to the lip of the pit that was peeled, burned like shit, jagged and the drained peach color of fat tissue exposed by cutting. “He bothered you,” I got out.
But then where I kneeled came to life, it got me to my feet like aftershocks homegrown, bad arm out for balance. It was the Russian calling: “What they shouted?” he had to know; and then “You have a seester” and then, “Was hees idea—” said on a surge of the same old music from below—“to film here.” I had it: La Jolla, Chula Vista — the truth like a friend’s staggering indiscretion or the jump when something comes to you — for that was who this was: Umo’s boss! the sound engineer — no, an assistant sound engineer, this Russian who had dared mention my sister, recalling her radiance recalling so vividly my Umo at La Jolla leaning on the fender of a truck watching paragliding as if the sun itself was buoyant: but if like Umo the Russian is traveling with that third member of the documentary recording team a deserter who would be viewed as an enemy combatant caught out after curfew, why hang here?
“He was not my bloody friend — hey what deed it meant,” demanded the voice, “what they shouted at you?”
My grandfather, whom I’d met only once came to mind (why was that?) like grass growing under my feet. I was stressed, the Ukrainian said he was from somewhere, it sounded like “Chernobyl” but not “Chernobyl” with its meaty knell, coal mines, Kiev train line worker, Chevron nearly, Chervonoarmiyska!
And now down there below pool level, the voice stricken, oh, stricken, squalling, “Lift it,” I tipped, for I will do my job, into also Umo’s blabbing and am gone—someone headed somewhere else gone into the water forever—my sister’s thought remembering all by itself my chest-treasured heart, and California, and Umo’s two-and-a-half entry tuck-accelerated that time when the lights went (though back on in a second) one summer night — though, falling now toward the flickering sewer below and an extreme voice I was quite certain known to me, I jumped.
And no time to check my plunge or midair a gap someone else forms into named unknowns:
for Time — so little between fall and water — all but ignored me, slow-on-the-uptake, a pale panel came up to skim me and raw studs wrenched askew and steel I-beam end and four- by-eight ply split torqued velocity at you between instants of a life you could call failed yet met — by me, my jump, my fall, my shadow of uncanniness, its reeling plane, sparks pouring upward through me, my bond waiting someplace, my job after all, which you may still stumble on in this other that they stick you with, on the take, I will tell the Hearings later:
already months before explained at low ebb to a military new I hoped friend listener that only by some stretch or perverse aim had I joined up, or from my father’s example or his thinking impulse self-serving first, or, by some torqued reasoning, my family (?)—
But, No, unh-unh, my listener disagreed, your job—yet then (“No no”) I disagreed with myself, interrupting with what I maybe knew he was going to say — a man of God as it happened and for a moment leaving his voice in my thought and prevailing, “No, unh-unh, negative negative, it was just where you felt…—”