17 a nation that would one day
Something sad I did not put my finger on as if I were hearing thoughts of my own in someone else, so that the hand I saw scrupulous evidence of in my small living room on my return one evening — an article I’d clipped and underlined in red about an archaeologist found dead in Mexico, my ballpoint, however, not standing in the crusty old mug where I’d left it but lain across the magazine page, and clothes hangers in the bedroom closet now spaced evenly. It might have been my doing but wasn’t. A lower kitchen drawer open containing cardboard boxes of Hefty Easy Flaps, and stiff old sponges and clear plastic wrap and the Ziplocs I had purchased at a midnight 7/11 on the way back from the war. Let them come. Like a joke played on me by Liz and I thought I would ring her but she was married to an older Navy guy and lived in Oceanside. I read Thoreau in bits to get the idea — the watchman fox, the self-appointed inspector of rainstorms, the molasses, the telegraph, the briefness of the Walden time a badge I guess of depth — and thought of myself and my threatening secrets and a few works I was putting off reading for fear everything was in them, a short poem, a long play, and that most people under surveillance wouldn’t come up with much to keep the watchers significantly interested (though we ourselves are of interest, it all over again puzzled me to think, with my cowardice strengthening my thought, rebuilding that palace like a temple of faces). How sincerely had I befriended Umo, lived as a soldier let alone as a son?
What is a bond? A seam, a divide; a suturing a doctor in me closes up the divide with. Some part I myself will take, familiar now (or perhaps only later, or too late) in what of the Scrolls I gathered from the news. This contemporary talker, this real walking-around Jesus, all business, interested in certain new, connecting ovens (something like Shoshone) either recently invented, it seemed, or sketched on First Century tablets. The idea to divide labor and multiply product, and I gather in the Scroll interview cheered on by his own remarks and coworkers to apparently call family itself into question, not surprising when I thought about it remembering now the picture of Shoshone ovens and how E and I were caught planning a trip out there by Dad whatever else we imagined about that way of life (and said in his hearing).
The Korean woman I would see at the high school track told me she did not believe in these Scrolls, she did not know why. (Faith, I said. We warmed to each other for a moment. I’ve seen nobody lately but my sister, I thought.) Yet the Roman interviewer’s Jesus had smart things to say about sight-restoring spit, I’d heard, and it was this coupled with a note in the Union (and then a magazine) about the death of a member of the Scrolls archaeology team while vacationing at a remote coastal point near Acapulco that moved me to read a few pages at the bookstore. This saliva precipitated from mustard, myrrh, oregano, and another unknown herb of the Galilean desert growing near one great geographical bend of the horizontal wells allegedly one might have to swallow and regurgitate but here could be the truth behind the miracle in Saint. Mark, itself written long after Jesus and not from eyewitness, the Korean woman told me — pausing suddenly surprised at herself. For then, resuming stretching, she said Mark was the Gospel written soonest after the Death on the Cross (a generation, more than that), which took my mind off Bea’s not turning up for help with the vault box. One surprise of the interview, which seemed right and even familiar, was that this “chemically special” spit might be grown in each individual’s body and salt-multiplied and one day without dependence on others or, as our own Administration put it, the government doing it for you. Self-reliance was how Ralph Waldo Emerson had put it — a good Christian thought, I learned in the Hearings, it came up the second day I recall, a healing expert from Colorado Springs. “A sound apple produces seed,” he said, and self-reliance made you a sound apple, I think was the point, though self was unclear to me but only when I thought about it. Self-reliant, OK, did that mean don’t count on these other people you grew up with? Who supposedly raised you — from the ground or from the dead? There should be a Complete Idiot’s Guide to it — self-reliance.
Sad still what you heard about the Scrolls. How so? as onetime friend Milt would put it, echoing his father — and those same words a poet politely challenging our own leader in Washington when he had called it an honor to have one leg of the well system named for him. I had spent time alone burdened by my knowledge, the swiftness of my release, waiting to hear from my father if only to ignore him; read so much “ancient history” (as I called it introduced by my sister to her librarian friends) in seven, eight months (happening not to call anybody though one day saw from a pedestrian overpass looking up at me from eighty feet below the Russian at some typical business that brought him to the University), my eyesight erratic or perhaps just deferring to undoubted experience between the lines of my reading, that, asked here to these Hearings by a University big shot friendly with my librarians (and less friendly faces) as if to get me out for a few days, my sister listening to me a lot, I tried to think I might have been overlooked as Scroll-implicated. They had just recently appeared, were they the reason for these Hearings, “postwar” so-called? I had other reading, limitless to do and afterward to have, though I had absorbed some sound of the Scrolls in the paper, on TV, a remark dropped by a stranger. This dialect Syriac for Blessed was valuable, I learned. Thus, “valuable are the peacemakers”—but how could Luke, reporting long afterward Jesus’s Do violence to no man, have overlooked the practical survivor’s “Blessed are they who come to market” creed of the Scrolls’ firsthand Jesus?
The Inventor might have known. He always had an opinion in that black Dravidian attention of his face, and he knew Parsee, Urdu, Syriac, I understood, and knew Kufic script and could read also the Leader’s alleged script in between the Red and the Black of that national flag or he had the dictionaries to back it up.
Had I been party to the fate of Umo? For that matter, to the death of the Scrolls archaeology team member by drowning in Bahia Petacalco? — himself just let go by the agency that had sent him to the Middle East in the first place. It hung in memory supported by all the lack of information about the case, for he had been not only in the forefront of radiocarbon dating in samples drilled in standing trees but an amateur ad-lib tap dancer, and then I thought I could hear him behind us one late night when my sister was with me (and said she saw me better in the dark), his measured, archaeologist’s voice, his knowledge of what had happened, or his steps, for hadn’t he been one pair of steps descending the stairs when I had dropped into the well waters just in time bearing the heavy and welcome and secretly light burden of my late friend but also in my stunned chest and like a signal on my chest scar, it seemed, the great absence of the other friend who’d gone before us like a Third Way I’d missed by taking the Second Down even with a second body half coming apart I’d never told a soul of?
Transmitted like a message swiftly home, I’d been since then almost everywhere in my studies, more than alone, ahead of myself (and thus already seen) and long ago, my life its homeless chips and shavings scattered by a gleam in me which might have been Umo’s whereabouts.