21 where he takes the plunge
Though I would have to say that’s where we were going, the Hearings, and I would have to make my sister come and find out what Storm Nosworthy had in mind; he had his value over time.
But if Storm’s people harmed her, her name, her faith in herself, a hair of her, the Scrolls would be exposed by me in at least their circumstances and called into question, minor as maybe they’ll prove — and for Storm they were a special project he’d organized, his claim on whatever, for he got even the Intelligence people tracking for him and had found out about us even more than was worth finding out. Why? We’d know how to give him a good time. What if we had a Biblical child? she had murmured. I know what night. A Biblical what? I said — no, I meant what kind of…? We were well along. It was intelligent, like the tent night when E and I held hands, fingers really, across our father’s feet but tonight I had a hand on M’s belly, recently now she was in writing “M,” which, said, was “Em” (between us). Would that be a lucky child? I said. Depends which Bible you keep. Keep? I never threw one away, she said but not only the self-proclaimed holy kind. I wondered what I had done.
And so did the man who was waiting at the end of the hall on the bathroom threshold with only the darkness of the medicine cabinet mirror behind him, it was war as I left her door faintly ajar — yes, her door was open — and crossed to my room and when I locked the door I was free or had a breather from it, but two hours later I woke up in my room thinking and alive and I had to piss and I pissed into a collie dog coffee mug and two old tumblers that I found in my room rather than walk the hall. And lived with my sister’s intelligence when I said, This kid wouldn’t be like the one in the Bible that his father took him out and sacrificed him. No, she said, another night, at the last minute his father didn’t after all. It was a story. Last minute. What good is that? What can you expect? The Old Testament is old? Old news. Out of date, Christians like to think. Pretty primitive, black-and-white, low-budget. It was slanted, her joking, from way back. It could be anxious a little (like asking if something had happened today as if that would explain tonight). (I said “primitive” was a good word for her.) Whereas the New Testament would never sacrifice anyone like that… Are you kidding? I said. Now look, she whispered, having me in her grasp.
Wheels out of line, chassis swaying, The Inventor overtaking, we let him, God. We pulled over and he to the opposite curb, the street broadening as we did so. We were late. Posters way up ahead — FINISH THE JOB — IF YOU GOT A JOB GIVE IT TO A BUSY MAN — JESUS ALL THE WAY — JESUS KNOWS THEY’RE RUNNING ON EMPTY — JESUS AND CO INVEST IN REALITY — FROM BURNING BUSH TO FREE ELECTIONS — two corners further south, the blue-and-white helmets of the California Highway Patrol here at the edge of downtown and parked motorcycles leaning next to squad cars. The posters meant really finish the finishing, end the ending—well, I hoped it was still going when I got back to the Middle East if only to finish my business not making any sacrifices for anybody. Pretend Arabic script I was able to make out, perhaps as a veteran, said, “Train them to take care of their shit so we can generate some wind to farm.” Though it was then, recalling I had hoped those wretched waters might jolt my friend to life, whose name I still didn’t know — and at the Lunch Buffet a wheelchair sergeant who had suffered some spinal nerve dissolution only many months after he had worked with a team that, up to their neck in the Euphrates, had cut the detonation wires in April 2003 to save a major bridge from blowing — that I heard Em’s cell, after her V for Victory deaf Beethoven man’s ringtone, announcing on Speaker the speaker I’d been expecting.
While our Inventor hastening across the road brought us the “bad luck” Coaches Directory he’d wrested from Cheeky’s bosom, whom he didn’t like to leave alone, warning us as he came stumbling toward us that the calls we had missed meant trouble (and two whirring bicycles nearly sideswiped him before, behind — man, woman, hybrids going possibly nowhere so in some endlessly final slowness of delay Time itself it almost came to me, the great interrupter, gathered all the motion it marked), while with his strange ear our dedicated Inventor by turns quick and occasionally deaf to what was uncool told us the new seeds promised if we recollected in the Scrolls that could “grow on fucking rock” and send “ears to heaven” (it was said) might all be “Fascist listening devices” of which the repellent voice on his home phone seeking us was a purrfect instance. Realizing as he came across to us that that very voice addressed us now on Em’s speakerphone, The Inventor was especially irked when by now Em had shouted back across me that we had our own copy she’d already told Cheeky — though No, he said, she doesn’t need it she — Cheeky of all of us should (I said), God, man, it’s Umo, Vera Cruz—!
“No, I will tell to you it is right heerre the page he marked—”
No no please, Em said, as Inventor reached our side safely, we knew the place. Which was strictly true only of her, my little sister who once upon a day, knowing I, the angry one (I thought), had no need to touch the Directory much less read the entry on that southern California swimming coach, had with one slip, a stumble, summed up for me: so the brief résumé that named East Hill (its local swim club area Imperial in the western zone of USA Swimming) and his background and the gist of his methods, let slip the reference to the son who it was hoped could…(it gave Em pause)…“could double as diver slash swimmer”—her pause, like so much in her reading and speech for the brother always infinitely worth attending to like her other body or a thought poised to spring, an omission not so much right then in the entry but a few words on so that, as she would do when she was sight-reading at the piano, she was reading a little ahead as well, “Page one fifty-three,” she said to The Inventor, a special number for me, she said (and then I thought he muttered — like an achievement till now kept to himself — Indeed I once translated that number into Chinese).
Blackly outraged is The Inventor now by the phone voice its Speaker message that they’re glad we’re almost there they’re waiting patiently for what will keynote the Scrolls as ongoing war strategy but more a calculus of the aftermath; where today we “add what only one person, Zach, can give to amplify our sense of where these Scrolls are coming from, Zach, as if in the broad view historically we ‘outsourced’ for bottom line your veteran contribyoosh—”
Mine now? was I over-hearing, alerted, bummed, shocked, awed only at some toxic effrontery to be explained—my contribution? Says who?
—“so pivotal” to this project of “…pandemic democracy”—confided without a whiff of irony by the onetime Sacramento speechwriter, as, overheard now, The Inventor pounded the roof of our Honda lamenting the loss of those “forrteen shoeboxes” of envelopes yet now to my ear alarmingly even heart-sinkingly regretting just moments ago an “indiscretion by Cheeky surrendarred to that warped and viperous voice” when it phoned seeking us, her parting question Then who was the one who was dead but thought to be living?—