Or my promise to myself to find my Scroll scrap’s absence from the text of the little book now making its way worldwide; for if the scrap’s text was there then the book’s full text had been in government hands before the notorious capsules set sail. My gleam might have been Umo’s friendship, his questions recollected—what were Cliff Notes? he had wanted to know, almost surprising to me he didn’t.
Or might have been my sister who had first seen the scrap of Scroll by slipping her hand into my pants pocket and drawing out the Ziploc and knew who I’d got the scrap from but not what I had done for him, and I believe borrowed an early copy of the Book of the Scrolls from the library — it seemed familiar, she didn’t quite know why, she knew her poetry but not the Gospels I now proudly knew meant to most people only the four “synoptic” whereas there were several other Gospels — but wasn’t this Jesus sort of acting out?
“He gave you this?”
“…”
“How did he get it?” she persisted. “After the explosion it must have been.” “Where the bomb went off?” “Below the pool, yes.” “Why did he?” “Why? Because we were friends.” “And why was that?” “We just were.” “On such short acquaintance.” (My sister loved me.) “Well, he credited me with figuring out what our real job is, the one time we had met at Fort Meade months before like I told you, though I thought—” “Yes, there’s always another, isn’t there,” said my sister. “Though I thought he was the one who’d come up with what it — what our real job is, that—” “Is?” “—that you found it within the job you were…” “—forced?” “Yeah.” “To do?… Zach?” It seemed to be my sister and I. “You could say he gave the scrap to me but you could say I took it from him. That was all I could do.” “That was enough,” my sister said. “It was?” It was us and it was also me.
Wick! our science teacher and/or math, true to us, our assistant swim coach, our true coach at school — why hadn’t I visited him these last months back? Just didn’t.
Wick, I thought, sitting back down because the Moderator was in a state wondering what I believed or was about to say, and hearing Moderator’s stomach like a thunderclap homing on lunch break. Wick, I thought, and his question what did Umo call out to me?
So the heck with the Moderator, I stood up and acknowledged Wick: “What we hear, forget all that little stuff about digital imaging we can’t even see without digital. For godsake hear the human voice. What we hear. You ask why that diver…”—the Moderator in a shake of his fist had received a signal and would not object — the answer to Wick, to what?…some complicity of mine in Umo’s appearing and vanishing, and it came to me like a sting in the chest or I was terribly slow, the Chaplain, his disorganized body nowhere in evidence when the steps on the stairs turned into perhaps two members of the archaeology team if not two armed guards, or in a still better universe one guard and one archaeologist. Wick, I thought. High school once inside a time, Wick, young, who cared about us almost too much — fellow seekers — equals, family, if we could pick our way through his downhill parentheses chalked on the board and Log over Log, and these arrows you had to do things with, add, multiply, depending if an event was a succession of steps or several happening independently and at the same time (same time) (same time) — my eyes choked my throat — all his unknowns that left us with these clarities you didn’t quite get but believed in like stunts, just math, came back to me, like a stopwatch he described depending on the color of the light particle which could shrink or turn. Very cool stuff: Was it over our heads? Why was Umo here in this unsettling memory who never went to our school? Wick ringing my father at East Hill, the job that mattered — whereas to Umo one day that we talked it was high school that interested him. Not that it was my father’s real job, though he could show his interest in my classes there in his own way.
“Why?” I gave my old teacher back his question—“Why’d he call out to me?” But looking as we do elsewhere, blinking at the hand back of the room raised at the end of a camouflage uniform sleeve, we need the Moderator a too broad, too blond decently worried hedge manager who’d made a noise while the camo fatigue uniform man I would not forget went ahead anyway in the gathering stillness of the Panel room a killer I would guess, with a question more like an answer: “Timing in sports performance and business profit may affect concentration and vice versa, wouldn’t you say?”
“Say?” I said, for we knew we knew each other from Fort Meade — I’m this raw trainee hustling away down the Base avenue with eyes in the back of his head, and then thousands of miles east the Chaplain marooned at the Scrolls explosion. Camo combats, this was still that Navy Captain — famous classified Seal — his words no less a weapon jump-started me straight through the event like timing it in advance, so I could see back, thing by thing, and time less the matter than the smell of his interrogator’s eye stuck with gluey infection behind its lens and thrown by this need of me (or something I had) — or it was the treacherous breath of water, scent of cement walks at Meade, friendship and shouts and necessarily induced war labor gathered into a formula gone into words and they had never forgotten me (or my sister whom they had phoned and I thought I knew what she was to me if I didn’t think about it, like where did sound go, we once looked into) and what I must know, nor could I forget the Chaplain’s interrogation material I’d so far censored wisely — why had he told it? — and lunch break was coming and after lunch, the Moderator asked us to believe, a distinguished visitor from DCwould be welcoming us — though we were already here — like a Mystery Guest you get to meet if you’re a major donor.
In the communal stir of sitters getting up on signals from their stomachs and hunger primarily for change of almost any sort or lunch, the Moderator thanked me for my contribution to the Panel and to the war effort. But I recognized my original questioner and was heard to say (aside to the audience), “You’re consulted as some kind of expert when probably you’re an expert in something else—” (laughter) “—in this weird profit-stricken country like—” (laughter).
“Like what?” spoke a hoarse, lost voice at the back, “like some ancient nation, man? I hear you but you don’t, you don’t, you don’t you know mean it with all your—”
“—one great war-torn…,” I said to the lost voice, uneasy both of us at its words to me, and where was he coming from? — when closer at hand to my old mentor Wick I said, “Diver called out because I’m his friend, I should know why he’s up on the diving board because…”
“And can you cite a recent example of your friend’s ‘ancient’ concentration?” the Seals captain in combats at the back interrupts, and, short of something else I knew but did not yet retrieve about white captain and black agency partner, I realized they wanted Umo.
But not him to be talked of publicly.
And seeing that moderation in all things made my uncle an extremist, I heard through time a living catalogue, as if I had been coached but had coached myself (and my own catalogue), of Umo and his take on my family…
— odd about my sister (“Your family,” he called her whom he hadn’t met); and about my uncle (“He could be a cop where I come from; they frown, it’s murder”); still stranger, “Stom,” whose phone chat with my father at the far end of the pool Umo had witnessed (“He has a secret weapon you better get to know”); and Zoose, whom Umo did know — whose brotherin-law was not spoken of any more, the guitar player who had deserted—“Zoose thinks twice before he backs anyone for citizen”); and Umo on my own father (lost and found now in a desk job and its decisions) — (“Thinks he gonna make the Olympics”—that sudden Chinese laugh—“a’ least he taught you photography”); or, and why come to think of it now, Umo sort of on science (“Look out window. Zebra fish can grow a new heart, you know”). He described his mother’s singing once upon a time: it was the double-toned throat-singing technique common to her part of the world — thought to interrupt fertility—“I was her only, but she’s gone, you get arrested you’re gone, well maybe.” “You’re gone, Umo”—