I thought I would go ask The Inventor if this could be so, bounce it off him. Was it to return something? I had phoned once since his break-in, I’d been home and he had abruptly had someone on the other line and never called me back. I had kept an eye out for Umo’s truck. Once I tried to look up the Russian. What was done was done.
Why would I visit The Inventor now? Word passed along the Lunch Buffet that we were plenary this afternoon and a surprise guest would welcome us.
My teacher and coach spoke up at my elbow: “He called out to you because you would know what he was doing up there, is that it?”
“Wick,” I said, turning to find him not at my elbow but a distance unclear and here were others circling nearer with their plates, one in combats I now recognized from months ago wearing then mufti (that unlikely word The Inventor taught me, speaking of empire); “Wick”—I reached with my free hand clutching napkin and fork—“And did you?” Wick said. “Wick.” For he had skipped the warm greeting you expect after so many months and I lowered my voice. “What?” I said. The GI music-listening project, people Umo had been with, both of us set up, but the real job inside it that you stumble on. “A deserter?” said my friend as if my voice were a form of subdued dishonesty; “someone they were looking for?” “Wick”—he had picked up some fool need in me the last thing you show if you’re…“he had no choice—” “You think?” “They knew who he was with and he had something to lose even though they must have told him he was showing up for a photo op, his friend Zach filming at a pool in a palace basement.”
Who I saw gathering near gave me pause, but better, I could tell Wick knew pool, palace, the days, the vectors, rates of change, more assured than I’d seen him, and kept his distance with attention I would not fault: it was his respect for a marked person who would speak, I’d missed him, his obscure life.
“He was always competitive,” I said. “You never met, you never saw this—”
“Not quite true, I saw you guys on the corner, he saw me looking out the window, I’d swear he did—” “—and there was something else,” I said.
Not quite true, Wick’s words — Umo bobbing his head, cocky — a window of memory open and shut — Wick speaking above the smaller voice behind me (like a meaning), the woman in the kerchief from which at the back fell a blond and dark-streaked braid like my driver’s the day of the palace: “You said,” she said in such a low almost inaudible angry voice, “‘this profit-stricken country’—well you made fun of that poor GI who wanted to know—” “The captain?” I pointed out the steel-haired observer in fatigues. “—about timing and concentration, he was only asking—”
“Stating,” I said, recalling the nights of my life, my driver appearing again, my driver’s offer of first aid, her boat hook, the piece of black rubber wet suit clutched in my hand that was not mine.
“Needing to know.”
“That’s his job,” I said. “To put it nicely. Like Navy Seals, sunning themselves, barking, slipping into the water to swim so magically.” (I was about to make a mistake.) “He gets paid for extracting information.” (I was guessing and I had guessed right.)
“And you’re a six-month graduate of the war well what’s so bad about profit you’re cashing in on with a camera they taught you how to use—” “He is?” “That’s what she said,” I said. “Oh but of course but he was in the service,” said a man with a briefcase on a shoulder strap who enjoyed revelations. “Still is…” said a knowledgeable older woman. “He’s what?” I heard Wick and Bea say. “The shots of the…,” a familiar hoarse voice tried to say, “of the headless kids sitting bolt upright.” A woman in a maroon blazer took him by the arm and spoke to him, pointing to his badge and more than pointing and somehow he did not retort. He had a frog in his throat; while a woman in surgical scrubs asked if anyone had seen the color photo they’d turned into a poster of GIs at night driving green and orange golf balls off the back porch of the Visitors Bureau hotel into a lake. “Doused in chemicals,” I heard Wick say, and the nurse in scrubs, “Lake full of good-eating carp.” “Fed on American garbage,” I said, “dozens in there, huge, rabid,” the photographer telling you what you were looking at but wasn’t in the pic.
The two men in camos inched up, a shadow passed across the long lunchtime buffet, was it the freshly renovated acoustic ceiling already discolored here and there? “Still cannon fodder, the war’s not done,” I said to Wick, who, though I turned away, knew I wanted to stay, “A/I they classified me if anybody wants to know exactly,” I said to my teacher, my father’s indispensable assistant, my friend I believed like the shadow that had come down and was within.
I had seen Storm Nosworthy. First time in eight months, the face as I read it told me I needed to get the scrap of scroll Ziploc’d in my pocket into English. I banked away along the “Spaghetti Springtime,” the blue marlin it said on a photo ID flagged into one once airborne chunk, a substantial brusselssprout-type tree stuck over, instead, with jumbo olives and it said live anchovies, and over there shrimp spring-rolled with orange sections, and further along raw cauliflorets embedded in vegetable ice.
Behind me following me, “The new world is messy, someone’s got to clean it up,” I’d heard it before, this woman’s anger overdone: What would she have of me? — her intelligent eyes, lips, hands but who was I? — people listening for anything interesting — surely she quoted someone. Her seatmate Bea close at hand, something in Bea’s attention to the woman. While at the far end of the thirty-foot buffet hovering prophetically, the oval exaggeration of a face not quite containing its parts like deeds that won’t go away and shorn of its goatee now but moustached heavily like a Turk, the rezoned nose at such a slant it might have been in motion and independently was, with that swerve or parallel if I could track it, discuss it, with Wick — one eye arrowing the windows, another the dwarf palm layout and veteran wheelchair contingent I had spoken with (to try to tell one guy in particular where I was coming from), surveying the spread, the field of conferees, my first sighting of Storm since the palace day who had probably arranged for Umo to be blown to pieces, and attending Storm the sweet-breathed Law Dean long-skirted, menuing the food for him when she saw me, my work here gathering in and expanding determined to ignore the Seals captain and his African-American superior I thought (within earshot a moment ago as they had not been at Meade dressed for that occasion, respectively, in uniform with four gold stripes on the jacket cuff and a lethally tailored suit like exact plans for my Chaplain’s coming participation in Operation Scroll Down), two thugs you look for again only to find seeing you.
The woman might have forgotten these men or have drifted in from a contiguous building: “Get out of the way if you can’t lend a hand — God you and your swimming pool pictures,” her voice rose — her brother in a military police brigade, she went on, and “at least that shot of the mobile lab.”
“What war did you go to, girl? I thought I knew you, who you working for, honey?”—it was the body and voice of Bea, bicyclist, pole-vaulter; admirer of my reputation, my sister, my stupid nerve, my learning, my driving—“who you?” “Thanks, Bea”—“How do you parse these—?”—“Fact is, I’m on my way to a translator.” “Wow! You’re not here this affie?” from this admirer also of my small apartment she had only heard of — I said I’d be right back — Bea even, I felt, in a suspicion of lust, admiring a narrow escape I had never broached with her yet hearing in Bea’s eyes though in fact from the troubled woman near us My brother, my brother, that’s who, in a voice hurt, hooded, overdone — she had mentioned a mobile bio-lab shot by, it seemed, me? My brother, I thought, what had my example done for Umo?