Truth, you knew. And if it could be known curious enough to be someone’s loss or gain. From the clamor above I heard my name.
“That’s you?” asked the man watching me who was the man I had met at Fort Meade and liked, now revealed bare above the waist where his wet-suit torso had been peeled down, his black short leggings and some closed-heel fins that had been bent over by the awful weight, bloody at the knees, his ankles crushed, his chest changed, heaving on one side, a strip of duct tape along a rib as if to hold something in, one ankle already waterlogged-looking. The jabbering voices from the ruptured overhead must be getting ready to act, no need to ask where they had come up with my name, someone always knows you. I yelled for a medical evac.
This man not yet disposed of — what he had said of Umo.
Dislodged cement around me and light from below: “You,” I said.
“Got what they needed.”
“With a bomb?”
“…Scrolls.” Was it his long legs that replied whisperingly unmuscled, free of the upper body, and it might have been reflected or that I had counseled him: “What they needed,” he said. “Who?” “Not what was meant.” “Meant,” I said, his breathless sounds like someone, like The Inventor, and losing me. “By the other one,” I’m sure he said and sure he meant me to hear or to know.
In the stillness which now counted waters still further below I gave a shout, I yelled, yelled for help, my voice broke. Had the pool been cleared? The palace? For where had the noise above us gone to? Where does noise? No archaeology crew down here in the pit; but they’d been here. Now I thought of the crush outside the pool doors coming not from the pool but up from below. Great as this floor, I felt it a Between forgotten between decks of a ship, storage space, steerage. This man telling of an interrogation — not here. A story tired. I didn’t like the silence. “One of the invited,” he said. Between us a submerged tranquility, and he had given me pieces of a story…of suspects, of persons, back home a woman questioned and more than questioned, a Sister, he called her, but I knew what he meant, a piece of her. Pieces of time, time itself desperate. A story, I guess. I was approaching what I had apparently wanted. “And who was the other one?”
The Chaplain laughed in pain. “Bladder,” he groaned, and then, “Take one Jesus, add two…” He tried to twist, to turn to me, the left leg didn’t come with him. “The Seal captain knew,” he said. Seals again. “Hates me, ignorant.” The Navy Seals! Was that it? He twisted up toward me hearing my thought, I would swear. “Heard of you.” “Me?” I said. The leg looked detached, and now free of the steel lid weighing on him he was worn out. “You’ll know what to do.” “Who’s ‘the other one’?” “You you’ll…you know.”
I saw myself speaking, and to my sister (who often knew how things came about but needed more and wanted to know what happened “just before”; whereas Umo, it struck me, what happened “after that”) and The Inventor and that loose survival family and how they talked and, that first time years ago, Inventor mentioning the new City pool, and then that I had seen Umo dive. “Who is this other one?” I said.
“…One who had the ideas,” the man on his back half-blind said into the rankness of this wrecked day and curiously abandoned double floor. “For the Scrolls?” I murmured. I was hearing steps above and over at one end.
“Zackly. Not them, not the ones who will… I see…use it, who don’t see any other way to use it.”
“It?” I asked him, my body hurting though tightly fastened to my twisting hopes.
You, I thought he said, or Use; for I hung on his words exposed to what there was of them — and I could swear I’d heard “no other way” before, also in a subtle voice. Thee alone to… I must have heard now from my friend — or to thee alone. Pieces of a story he had coughed up, people interrogating a person. A woman. In California. A Navy Seal herself. Nearly naked. But presently he was out under the desert waiting at an intersection of the well system like a hungry ironsnout, it came to me, that Wisconsin water wolf the northern pike — the yellow marine camera his long before Fort Meade — an MMII he’d bought with his own money, bayonet mount, weights that kept him under, bearing on his back forty minutes (minus) of compressed air, and the capsule swimming into view like a silver spinner, and the dark thing reaching from above, arm, hand caught on film as it snatched the Scrolls capsule from fingers that might understand them but after that where come to rest, except that days later he was in the awful waters that crossed below the bed of the Tigris very near here, and it was last night?
Below?
Yes, the well bed, though entered through sewers. Take me with you. The capsule like a map case had swung toward him, and he had caught it, this photo-witness but of what? “Show you,” he said. Take me with you, seemed to follow, aloud or in me already I should be able to say.
But next thing he was down here below the pool, assigned below as I had been assigned above.
And the blast? An afterblast seemingly too. Where was everybody? he said and answered himself: Gone upstairs with his old yalla camera commandeered by — (“Yours, too?” I said. “Ah,” he breathed and understood. It came as a reassurance to him that they had taken mine as well. But an imperative to resist. “As above,” I thought he said, “so below,” the words seemed to help him to say them, I hadn’t heard those words before, it breathed hope, it couldn’t be true.) “Where was…?” He turned to catch, I imagine to see almost the steps coming down the stairs, to be where he was, alone as a spar on a beach. (Heard of you, he’d said. Heard of me?) “See, they forgot something,” the breathed words are life. Neither of us could wait. “Got my eyes put out,” I distinctly heard — this man who’d been my fellow photographer once—“hates me but…likes my Lazarus.” “Can you tell me who?” “Take me with you,” the Chaplain said. I heard the memorial sewer like a canal or moving well below us getting used perhaps to me.
16 Best friend you never had
The Scrolls damaged, had the home team saved what they needed? What did they need? But they had been the only team, I thought. Why did I doubt the other side’s hand here, they were the terrorists. Causes of the war. Christian soldiers right flank harch.
I must know — or would need to someday soon. I crouched by the half-destroyed Chaplain, and my knees were sore, bleeding inside my pants legs, and my arm half-dead, my fingers cut by steel, my back sending and receiving. Damp steel, killings rankly near and palace stone I had to keep blinder than I myself and leave here with what I had which was not pictures. A need to live, not kill. The Chaplain had recognized the name called from the clamor above.