— why had I said that? Gone from home and family. It would have been good to talk to Umo about competing, young as he was. Why? It was like living. It was one thing within another thing. Yet at barely fifteen, to claim my sister as his bride, he got a snub from me and then nearly fractured Milt’s skull as a joke who had shared with him the shout (its words, anyway) that killed my dive and nearly me maybe, though Milt merely a messenger of words he still didn’t get. Regrets but not for Umo that night at Cheeky’s before my enlistment, which others but not Umo might think I had been enticed into, whereas it was into knowledge of them, against which (as if it were The Man) they weren’t quite now ready to enlist me among the missing in action.
Know, or tell, just enough. My instinct strong to call the strangely, in-pieces told, interrogation account (if and when I would tell it) his — which it was — but keep him, his fate, his Jesus even, his body, out of my account — while Moderator knew to defer to captain now if he could: but some meaningless force of discussion took a turn and I waited mine, narrowed to the face of the Fort Meade captain in his combats who had just spoken, yet in all this my once and, it came to me, still somehow science teacher Wick’s loose, wide-eyed face whom Umo knew of and of course had something surprising to say about this man he had never met so you would not have guessed how Umo lived.
Was it Umo they wanted, however?
I read Mormons and Puritans, the accounts they say firsthand, their freedom yours for the having would you but live as they lived in their villages. I read histories of farming, of water and war, success and musculature, herbal stimulants, a brochure for caregivers, tools, the tools of tools, cities, even the gig of a Zen city, and what some person in the asylum of a library stack helped me find, not the painting I was looking for by rocky Giotto the Chaplain had told me about but Saint Zeno it turned out arising resurrected I think from a tomb in Verona in a little b-and-w print in a book and three people holding their noses; or out on a dock a guy in a wet suit trying to tell me something in broken English and Spanish and German about the harbor in the old days or, marooned in a Hawaiian bar on Fifth, what a woman told me to read or, fucked-up in a bus stop waiting room, a guy I knew in high school claiming Kerouac had written a book at one fool sitting indivisible it seemed or one sheet of paper.
Emerson’s “American Scholar” beyond me except that action might be subordinate, yet in his “Circles” the lowest prudence being the highest, and (which I admitted I didn’t get — but to whom?) “Self-Reliance”; building materials texts — iron, concrete, steel, wood and their joinings — nests made by birds of the air and caves by the ancient shore, Frederick Douglass and his oxen, Covey’s 7 Habits especially Win-Win — soil, weather — my father’s own seldom named father a Connecticut farmer, or used-to-be, wherever he was or whatever now — I, like a convict, reading up on law terms for self-defense I knew I’d need, a word bobbing slowly past me glommed onto (debauched, sanguine) — no word from my father, a memory or two to forget: Camus, he said, for we were reading Camus senior year, Camus. For Camus swimming was all but sacred, if anything could be, said my father. I said I knew what he meant. He exploded at my lameness I guess: Had I missed the point? An overturned bucket I might seem: science in the face of my father. Old newspapers in the library a year or two ago. Yet there came across at midnight Chaplain’s words as above so below again and I switched them around, having thought he meant pool level and our own; took notes, and one night if a terrible thought hadn’t come to me when my sister was examining the welt-scar, raised high, hard, purple-and-orange on my tricep in no time by the toxic waters that had borne me to safety, nearly told my sister about rescuing his body, because she said, “The underwater photographer, he was dead when you took the piece of Scroll from him, was that it?”
All this reading at midnight somehow drew closer and closer together medicines for sports psychology to which I had come like a migrant seeing the California light, I could always discuss with my mother, and wet behind the ears like a seer to his calling it seemed, one afternoon soon after being automatically mustered out into the Reserve driving a balky old car to meet my sister at her part-time intern job, who should I see but Bea, her friend, at the high school track unwisely all by herself hardly get off the ground hanging on her striped vault pole swinging hopelessly into it, braid hanging down; and I drove around the block to check her out again and she was making her approach like a jouster, her knees driving high, she was leaning back a little and brave and something missing to my eye, only as she brought her pole down for the plant anxious lest she miss her aim at the box (as she glanced over angrily like a confidence between us not quite knowing me) her end caught in the ground and her motion lifted her a good six feet and the carbon catapult gave a little, not enough to whip her upward — there’s no bar — so I almost ran down the bicyclist in the street in front of me bald, very active. Because I could help Bea.
And now, wearing her baseball cap and a Hearings badge that entitled her to the Lunch Buffet, why was she here?
Slow on the uptake, my father would joke. Umo’s new word, too. The “i” word “ironic.”
Zach doesn’t need to be fast, he knows a better way to get there, my sister said. Yet in the dead literally of night leaning so close to me her breast itself listening to what she may have guessed was not just what came before but screened what followed, still something I had attained to get back with a story so awful albeit drawn together by her presence and a story from the Chaplain she measured as if it were all of me coming to meet her: “You mean she was contained inside a capsule until she couldn’t breathe because she wouldn’t—” “Wouldn’t cooperate, give them what they wanted—” “—under questioning, a Seal woman—?” my sister not even persisted, only was patient to get what she could: somewhere in California under a cavernously deep indoor pool all what my dying man recalled and it coming to a head for him and now for me, the nearly naked woman I pictured for my sister in the dark of our bed couldn’t come up with the goods, what it was like to be sealed inside a glass tube until she couldn’t breathe and suffocating get shot upward plungered through a trap opening the full pressure of the pool above down upon the escape valve risking her neck at the top of the tube automatically suddenly uncapped if she bent her head even an inch — I cut short my tale of the concussion of pressure released from above upon that perfect fit of an opening where, smothering, she waited to be shot upward—“…neck snapped — ask your friends if they’d give you a job at that pool, ask my friend another ordinary photographer a witness to all this”—where, in this valve function, the pool pressure above upon the stressed subject equals the pressure back up at you from a water surface to equal which one would have to dive from a height of one hundred eighty-four and a half feet a no-hands “sailor’s dive” and she was a Seal herself (not combat-billeted but Explosives Ordnance Disposal — I spelled it out), nor sworn to secrecy regarding Jesus revelations she knew nothing of — in question certain Scroll Down leaks they were investigating: “When did your Chaplain tell you this?” my sister asked, wondering respectfully and seductively about the rest of the story.