And my emerging job found itself in some use value I put them to as if I were not in the middle of something else.
Yet I sat down, faithful to this question, Why did he? Forthright participant I’m faithful to the evidence I gave this second morning. My voice now known, we listened to a very foreign man in dark glasses who spoke of fifteen languages heard in this city now and (he smiled) refugees from the war so changing demographics that (another smile) some neighborhoods are like an electrocardiogram of international conflict — a smile, a sweep of the hand, this expert who went on now to laud digital imaging used to tease out this ancient text, its often crushed fragments of characters not seen for nearly 2000 years, thus its fine touch “beggars description.” We learned how the wider use of this process had spurred investment in that war-torn country (and our own); how the technology had enhanced medical diagnosis and fine-tuned miraculously our satellite pictures. And what a super-(light-)sensitive digital camera could restore for the archaeological team, the ink itself reflecting light at one point in the spectrum while the blackened background reflects with a wavelength only a millionth of a meter different. Meanwhile, the room—“What a friend we have in Jesus,” does it think?
But I was coming to that question Why did he call out to you? It had come to me because I could not stop for it.
Just like that asked about a friend by one.
Dead or alive, comes back, me take you with—my friend just scarcely known pieces of himself—you’ll know — what to do: with such words a thread of blood drawn down from the mouth like a seam in the chin which barely moved: “Last words I am — without, my friend — they will gainsay…”—which drew a bubble of pale puddingy and purple and iron-rusty mucous out of him to relieve him like the words and let him go. Was he gone? Unsaid is he in me, like not absence but overload, and why the Scrolls were classified he’d promised to tell, and maybe could still — a laugh when you counted the leaks to the press — a furtive friendship dashed — was it Take me with you, dead or alive, he’d said? I balled the curiously durable papyrus from his thumb and index finger and ripped the duct tape from his belly and tearing a narrow strip of it taped the paper into my ear.
The blast and what seemed like its after-companion in overkilling must have done for Umo or the pieces of him which my videocam they’d confiscated shooting from the hip I had imagined would show us. Unlike the Scrolls, I thought, bereft.
What in the end had I to do with them or the war? The Scrolls! Compact and to the point, they have issues, American, they are questioned in the open market, welcomed, unstuffy. A seamless whole even from what I find uneasily familiar in the clips flooding my sleep. Their seeming completeness a drug for this inspector of paper trails if not a recorder of deeds — a phone ringing and ceasing in the night someone could help me to answer (and it is my brother I would speak of — and they would have me speak — though in closed session, in private — and not of those last days, the music project, deserter, dive, explosion, fiasco; and not of these businesslike thoughts scrolled-down to your hopelessly interrupted level, but whatever might call them into question).
That this “Interview” as the Scrolls are called (though another equivalent from the Syriac is thought more apt) should so seamlessly all but blot out that palace day, the bombing of our American Scrolls not quite shredded as they arrived by well and met almost their match and the deaths assembling in my thought faces wrought there. CPA curled in his own blood, that hairy back palely humbled by its bronzed and wasted neck to let you forget he had done business with my father at East Hill. What business? Would it matter? Chaplain, crushed by his steel coverlet, like a cruel plane compressing him, real, remembered, living to the end, his fists clamped in the rigor of his character so the scrap of scroll got torn in two, lucky to make it out — of whom my sister, who knew a little about paper, said when, one day, or rather night, I gave my dank, cordite-reeking account, “Best friend you never had”—so much of her in those words. To be what she means. Where sound goes less to her than what music leaves — a chill corroborating what? His people I would contact. Somehow I waited, picturing falsely to myself the Chaplain given last rites and left where he was, yet gently asking who was the Other one I had mentioned the Chaplain mentioning weakly at the end—“they” had got what they wanted, which wasn’t what “the Other” had “meant”…what did that mean? She was always mine and she knew the Chaplain through me and may have known even then, the night I in my way told her, that he was not deserted by me. The sewer told its tale, it waited for us.
He was in that plane that I hope I didn’t pretend with him, though building secretly and in the account I gave my sister leaving out (and always the father I never thought of!) for secrecy’s sake and for mine where the Chaplain might be. To my Two ways out, up or down, he had replied, Try again. A third exit? I’d take the Down. The stairs now putting unfriendly feet through their paces sounded an overlapping pitch of two people coming down, two at least. I did not hear the steps. The steps resumed, slow. I snapped a string of shots with my remaining camera if it was working, though mini which is somehow good. My bad arm dead but strong, the peeled-down wet suit caught on a corner of steel and stretching till the body of my friend jumped as the rubber came loose, I had hold of him through it and I let myself down through the ruptured floor and was hanging from a ledge above the well and its foul surge that recalled where these waters had been. I let go, spreading one arm out to break my fall, and broke the dark surface, and he came down on top of me, and I could see beneath its rush of displaced bubbles for a second, as I and the Chaplain were borne away in possibly Umo’s traceless wake if he’d ever trust me again (though why should he in the first place?). The thought, so immersed in the wicked stench as to be part of it and hardly noticeable to itself, had dumped me some not even wilderness place or beach of delay, I had done my time, it was said, but I didn’t believe. I thought for myself if I could find words that had found me, it was at first to be an adviser or the water itself had been what I’d sought by enlisting. For above the tunnel’s subtle roar like a calling or added intelligence or an angry sleep like toxin in the water searing my bad arm for me it was my long-nosed father I envisioned — never to be listened to again I would trust. Though what would I have to show for this? I had slipped the camera into my shirt pocket now immersed like some deed in an awful dream to drown in.
Seamless someone called them when they came out and I didn’t read them. Was the California season, the Spring, too long? What was I waiting for? So soon after I came home alone, my father by turns in Colorado Springs to do with Olympics I was told, and DC, in a desk job treated by my mother like a sacrifice made in time of war that I would rather not know about yet not as I don’t know about the Scrolls.