It was Storm Nosworthy, the bright shadow spreading here. The past past, where was my videocam? It was the Army’s. Nosworthy frowned and smirked to all and sundry, conscious but of what. With Bea near, I would at last ask what circuit besides mere monitors he had had at his fingertips in contact with not only pool but detonation site, counting down; yet, bursting in me in the life and death of it — stirred by the support of this hot older woman nearby — was that brother, brother voice the “Get-out-of-the-way” woman? — and the virtual presence of my most absent or despised father, the interrogation account I had put together from the Chaplain’s words for my sister one night, sounds, breath, the fume of urine and broken bowel on seared steel and gathered fairly truly of the Seal woman’s agony how long ago, not long, with California sprinklers trained along hot water ducts to throw up steam to shroud the hapless subject of the interrogation, the low-overhead communicating rooms located somewhere in California under a Crater-Lakedeep indoor pool all what my dying man recalled and it coming to a head for him and now for me recalling the containment inside the capsule of the apparently uncooperative Seal woman, just a glimpse coming out of me like justice and anger—“Ask him about water,” I had to answer my attacker at my elbow almost again who’s quoting Dylan for crying out tears; ask the Seal woman, I thought, who couldn’t come up with the goods what it was like to be sealed inside a glass tube sworn to secrecy regarding Jesus revelations she knew nothing of — in question certain Scroll Down leaks they were investigating.
And I — why had I leaked even a word or two, a picture almost, of the interrogation story, some of it, in anger at this person whose kerchief you might like to tear off and in character even to the astringent soap smell of her perspiration. It would be of interest to the captain and the, it came to me the Chaplain had called the black man, CEO. A loaded gun, maybe, that poor, ill-fated Seal trained in EOD.
Why had the Chaplain told me?
And why had I spoken this morning to the angry woman at the Hearings as I had? Was my part to be provoked by these people? By history in the making embracing how belief in competition, as someone in a Goals workshop yesterday had said (and found it cool to have said), can eclipse competition itself in the name of faith in your own business or the promotion of these Scrolls that might put paid, as the British said, to our war (though it was said to be over) or eclipse it in importance?
19 like a Third way
Still, my leg, the scrap of Scroll Ziploc’d in my pocket against it, knew what was important. Attempting to leave, pressing this damp half-hand of a celebrity, I knew, like the mutual and distance-embracing future I and my self-reliant sister at curious moments shared, that Nosworthy on message addressing the afternoon session might find himself amended. Not that my real job would come to me in time, but had already. At war — in Kut, I thought, and in other unfinished business, and half-drowning with, in the custody of my hand, the body of the man with whom like a Third Way this very thing had been broached, Your job—grasped, too, in the words of the kerchiefed woman against an almost twenty-one-year-old profiteering sports psychologist, sometime contractor’s assistant, photographer, like a rightness inside her grosser or even pained and personal attempt at meaning; wondering now more than grasping, and calculating in baffling yet infinitely encompassing increments a distance from my father so unthinkably out of touch and his own up-or-down plan for himself in which I had been dragooned to function under fire, wait a minute, maybe it was true! (the Law Dean bearing down on me, her calculated scent only to be brushed past now by me for the business at hand like the initially by her announced “smorgasbord of topics the Hearings would offer” which was proving to be a broad umbrella for Operation Scroll Down, or what Storm Nosworthy for the Administration had planned to air, introduce, expound, and take possession of and validate the existence of, it came to me like the end of the war growing a new crop of enterprise) was it not possibly true, as a recent TV-interview citing from the Scrolls came to me like a familiar and sister-associated teasing memory of my own, that this first-century “Jesu” could really have envisioned as a practical enterprise to feed the hungry a natural fish hatchery with water captured from Lake Galilee?
“Umo,” I said, “the diver,” Storm reaching for my hand again, “There’s another, Zach—” “Why did you have him shot — with his gifts?” “The guard had her orders. Poor timing, Zach.” Still, Storm liked that I could ascribe that kind of act to him, whatever he said. “It was perfect timing,” I said, finding something in my words. “Not for him, Zach.” “With his gifts, what could have come to him, so young…” “Posthumous,” the hand on my elbow, I think. “Posthumous?” I said. “Posthumous citizenship?” I said. “Great idea, Zach.” (A person passed through me, or so it seemed; a gathering — my sister, Umo, the Chaplain, some lost father let him stay lost, all or none of these, gift and burden.) “Another?” you said. Another what?” “You were hit, Zach; we gotta do somethin’ about that too. Too bad what happened to my number cruncher — no purple heart for him.” “Well, you know why I was there for him,” I said. “To document whatever happened.” “Lucky I had more than that camera.” “Sister thought we were after the diver. Sister—” “Kind of a lost cause, you know.” (Did I mean Umo or Em? It was worth that moment, speaking with the ring of instinct.) “She’ll think twice about who we’re after,” Storm fired a grin at you.
“She doesn’t.”
“We know who she thinks about.”
“Wait for me,” I said.
“And nice work if you can get it.” Storm fingered his nose like a deaf signal, traced his lopsided mouth, pinched and long, his low, face-mask-wide brow, the center part in his scalp hair, this man I was trying to turn from. “We know all about her talents…,” the face said then.
“Who’s we?” I had the Canon out of my jacket. “Wait, Storm”—flashing it with equal depth of field by chance to read both his face like a fucking keyhole and way back in the room as if I had known all the time that she was working for them the woman in the kerchief with a plate of lunch pass the two men in camo fatigues; and as she blatantly ignored it, caught the captain’s polite smile expressly acknowledging this supposedly eccentric lady and obviously hiding his appreciation of what she had gotten out of me, under a ceiling of new acoustic panels stained by an intricate coastline of leaks.
“She’s in our sights, that job back East (?),” Storm let me know, “that application (?)…”—Storm was on the case, taking even care of us, yet in himself a field of experience full of the smell and plot of the real canal encircling delivery of waste and memory to be lived with not squashed like a locust or further eviscerated and maimed like a Kilimanjaro lion or a medicinal Mongolian rat—“yeah, that application — we can get in her way, bro, whatever.”
“Wait for me,” I said, thinking there should be laws for this, would genius and legislation just be at odds? What could that face tell me I didn’t know, but what had I just said, or heard? East Coast in my sister’s mind a while now, college, a marginal research slot — but news of her from that man turned it weird as if he would harm her, she hadn’t seen that face, but he thought he knew about us. It could only have been from one person but Dad would never in so many words have told Storm of a closeness Dad didn’t grasp himself as the heroic intimacy it was unless Storm, in his inexperience, had put unknowns together out of my father’s mouth and, fingering them, had finessed into insight some sexual case. I’m gone, hearing behind me the soft finger snap recalled from that palace lair alerting someone to keep an eye on me on the way down yet someone else following unbidden but not quick enough; the finger snap recalled the pale kilim newly signed with spots of healthy blood, recalled a job still to do beyond this errand that made the scrap of untranslated scroll heat like an aura its faithful Ziploc in my pants pocket.