“—forced—” I began, “coerced”—
“Drafted!” the Chaplain had croaked—
Well yeah but—
—’zackly—
— my own way—
—’zackly—
— choose for my—
—’zackly — like these (he caught his breath, recalled by me mortally, exactly, months later as I fell, knowing vacantly in a vacant fate of my own the voice down in the pit) — these damned Scrolls that he’d been assigned to (?) just when he put in for…underwater training for crying out tears which was why he was here at Meade if you want the plain—
— myself, I finished, adding some dumb thought about camera being an eye but a…a…a fucking shield, no, casement window — no excuse for not speaking — word.
We were two exercisers then, like another pair we passed when he remarked, puffing, that only this morning he’d been told never to exercise outside on the avenues here at Fort Meade except with a coworker, like a spotter in the weight room. And here we slowed to a walk down a Base avenue, still at a great rate all elbows and hips, and my companion looking around stopped and we looked at each other and reacted, almost laughing, the Chaplain thick as a bear in the torso with the long, lonely legs headed (he told me) for a monster simulation tank and I, much younger, who’d fallen into step with him when we converged and we had struck up a conversation about lab facilities at Meade and photography the old box and about seeing all that was really crowded into, well, things and how one guy has a certain take and they appropriate it and use it and it’s not what the guy had in mind at all, he said. Chaplain was no genius, he said, but he’d seen a few things and told his trainers what they didn’t like to hear. Meade had chilled one then, looking ahead, the Chaplain had said, if I heard right as if it was more than him.
And his take on my enlistment threw me (but my companion for these few minutes is a Chaplain after all which deserves respect even from an outranked know-nothing), while I defended my act and running or speed-walking all the time I would not recall all I said about what you had to do and what you discovered — he listened, he reminded me of my sister. But did he talk: and he had seen some terrible things, yet en route now at the end of it to the desert for crying out tears where they were shipping him to do battle-stress counseling. He believed he was some contingency plan of theirs (Underwater photography, I said, making sense of what he said)—“A swimmer,” he said of me nodding. He was holding it together, he was looking away from me at a building we had come near. “You got no idea what’s holding me together,” he said, hearing my thought — and, yeah, he could tell I was a swimmer, he said — needing the water, or (he laughed) it needing you. More on that, he said. His voice was together, his eyelids, cheekbones, mouth were, too, and yet he did not preach and was not the type and he was taking me somewhere, it occurred to me.
— people come back from…he looked at me… The dead? I said, exhilarated maybe on Base oxygen — can you do that? He touched me, we were jogging again — Or abuse, he said, winded, it improves your character — or not come back, if you want to know.
No?
I put him in mind of a problem with (he lowered his voice) with Jesus (?). “To my mind Jesus didn’t have one particular pal, though my candidate was” (my running partner lowered his voice) “Lazarus,” he’d become convinced of it, and the women at Bethany, never mind, and Martha’s sister Mary gave Jesus a head-rub with special oil we should get the name of again, and the miracle wasn’t raising anybody from (the Chaplain’s voice barely audible, where was he headed?) the grave, but was the friendship y’see between Jesus and Lazarus. But they doubled Lazarus for more exposure, the two Gospels split it into two guys, beggar with the sores and the rich man named something, and the second one the friend he brought to life, and put the second a week before the Jerusalem wind-down and added a dipperful of magic and, groaning as he approached the tomb, Jesus’s I mean dark (make no mistake) discomfort about bringing Lazarus back — resurrecting him, I mean — and thanking God for granting the miracle of this guy four days dead staggering out of the cave in his stinking sheet, a painting shows someone holding his or her nose, Jesus already knowing what would happen next week in Jerusalem. So they doubled Lazarus and wrote him into a miracle in John but it was nothing like that — which is decades after the…(“Oh well,” I said) And now, “What’s the rush?” he said, for we had clocked some personal mileage it turned out, and you had come back from the dead but in actual fact had just gotten healthy with a little help from your friends.
Nor did he bring up the Scrolls again, a polite soul, until — but did I know of the two Crimean War photos and one of them was said to have been staged and fake? An English photographer name of Fenton clip-clopping along the Valley of the Shadow of Death mid-1850s with his assistant and his traveling darkroom like a Gypsy caravan at the risk of Russian cannon fire, and two photographs the road was clear in one though there were cannonballs in the ditch and in the other, the exact same place, balls were littering the road like shot-put shot.
Then as we approached a long brick structure that a Navy Captain and a civilian, African-American, in a double-breasted pinstripe suit were vigorously motioning us, I thought, into — but it was him (“Brother against brother’s the message,” he muttered)—“Scrolls,” he said, breathless, “on faith as killer weaponry these guys sight unseen,” and he thanked me for what I’d said about…about coercion and your real job, it was prophetic—
— for what, Chaplain? I slipped in.
— you will see, he said — that you found it after all within the job you were forced to do and had even been set up to play a not very creditable part in—
(had I meant that? said that? guess so)
— it gave him a lift, he said, in the midst of (nodding toward the two men waiting at the building) all this profit and loss, and your origins and your aim should be two quite different…“well, you know what I’m saying.” Though the “within-the-job” brainstorm had come not from me but from him, I would have sworn, though I gave him the benefit of the doubt, he meant well. Stealing a look at the men waiting for him, he didn’t look like a minister, he said he had not much faith in these classified Scrolls and if he had a minute, if the CEO were not watching his every move and the Navy Seal who was some kind of… — he thought he knew why they were classified.
Well, I’m not dead yet, were his words under his breath. A disposable life, he said.
His voice itself held you that would not lay down the law: and that is what I said as he made his way, loose-limbed, disjointedly hip-heavy, to the meaningless building, its exterior, some species of lab, and didn’t look around but shook his head, as the two figures consulted at the door looking perhaps beyond him but he had said he would see me again or would recommend me, yet was he doing so well himself? Long after this my sister read me some lines about Lazarus and I said there were two of them that had been doubled up from the real one, and it rang a bell for her, I think, and I told her out of my ignorance where I’d got it.