— my true job nonetheless gathering with Cheeky’s true charity and hope, against sirens heard converging on us, their hood emblems pointed unknowing toward the future and what Storm Nosworthy and his team foregrounding the Seals captain and the agency “CEO” who had phoned Em would do to safeguard the Scrolls for the War’s sake where my job might be to safeguard the threat TO all this of a dead witness’s potential afterlife, my Chaplain—best friend you never had, my Em had called him.
“Why did we buy your envelopes without seeing what was inside?”
“You were good fellows. You knew.”
“Well, Milt got mad at them.”
“Ah yes, I tould him to get in touch with his—”
“—‘close to the loins of the Administration’ is all Milt let me see, and a name — where did you get that?” I asked The Inventor—“Em you remember Sacramento?”
“It is ulluways researrch of an eclectic—”
“—No no, no, Milt grabbed it back. But it was what I didn’t get to see, so who was this eclectic source?” “Ah, it may have been Umo?” “You mean it was?”
It was like the stones that when you took them to throw at someone they reversed to igneous and burst into fire in your hand according to Milt’s father, but the envelope had said, Make your sibling the apple of your eye and Milt didn’t have a sibling, furthermore it spoke against fathers, he said.
“And you did not only buy,” said The Inventor, preoccupied perhaps by the indiscretion he had admitted on behalf of Cheeky and forgetful of the Coaches Directory he held like a catalogue at his side, and looking in back as if he might ask for a lift, “I gave you two envelopes for your diving wound: the Goldthread to crush into a poultice—”
“You had a hole in your heart,” my sister said. “You were looking right through it,” I said.
“I knew what you were thinking, I heard the words through the hole—” “Yes you have the gift when you are together,” The Inventor began. “—you were thinking you couldn’t breathe.” “—and the other envelope I gave with the worrds—” “But you sold him two others,” said Em, she was my fortune, my beauty coldly knowing more than me, and she tapped the heel of her pedal foot on the floor, the sirens two blocks away; but had The Inventor ever seen us together before today? “It is good to get worrds from out of nowhere, a tradeoff,” said The Inventor, the cell phone streamed its Fifth Symphony tune into his mood and made him laugh—“The number Beethoven put aside most frequently and took up ah-gain of all his—!”
“Out of nowhere? Words from someone don’t come out of nowhere,” said my sister. (That envelope, it was the one I’d given Dad, the day, the night, of two enlistment parties, sight unseen.) “Your Leader it is said never opens envelopes except when it’s a memorial awarrd,” said The Inventor, “our trip has more than one cause, and I traveled to find the oceanographer’s handmade aeroplane but also to replenish the Goldthread which I foresaw we would need.”
I flipped my wrist to show him the time. “The Hearings,” I tapped his fine fingers. “They were cut-rate,” said The Inventor, and let go of the window edge, “hey, a steal at ten dollars for the last you bought and more personalized than you…” He lifted the Directory as if to heave it past me into the backseat. “I tould that scoundrel on the phone only that yes I was competent in the Eddessian Syriac you had just given me to render.” Em’s foot on the pedal left The Inventor standing alone in this street of two-story homes, me with the translation and what it meant. Squad cars passed us in a line. (Maybe ten dollars, maybe twenty, I thought.)
I looked back and five cops were gathered about the Bel Air, which was a spectacle in itself, and from the driver’s side, even at this distance of three long blocks it was the Coaches Directory being unloaded (but who to? — for in it what might you track to what happened before all this?). You don’t go around with an expired tag in a car like that if you don’t want to be just another immigrant.
It got thick with downtown traffic now. Something had happened. Was it this morning’s revisiting of the explosion now thought to be ours?
“The green ink and his fine hand,” said my sister, chauffeuring me, but on the move I could tell. That would be the Veins envelope — I knew what she was thinking, though we were not speaking, for the moment. You, I heard her think, but now she said, “You never went to the hospital. He wouldn’t take you there; then you wouldn’t go. I tried to bathe your chest. I thought it was broken. You couldn’t breathe, that’s all. You spent the night in my bed. Mom came in. She felt it but couldn’t speak, except. ‘For cryin’ out…’ she said, ‘Where does it hurt?’ she said. Your hand was on me.”
A cadre of reverse-collared clergy stood waiting near the Center, and a crowd, or majority, waited massed near them, steadfast and American.
“You were talking, it woke me up, you had your hand on me. That was OK. Four in the morning it was plenty dark. I see you then. You weren’t talking in your sleep. You told me the half gainer again, so free, that forward back dive, looking upward and back like a backstroker but impaled by trust — which way are you going? — dive within a dive — and Dad shouting to you, Closer, closer or worse. So the next time you answered with a twist, and came too close, which is not close but…the body is bombarded from without and within, that book said.”
We came into the intersection where Stud the butcher had picked me up. My sister and I, however, were recalling a child who came within a hair of being sacrificed. “Milt said Dad shouted at you when you went up for the full twist too.” “Well it was an interruption,” I said, “whatever he said.”
“I know pretty much what.”
A state trooper laid his glove on the hood. I’d seen him one day walking up a sidewalk on Golden Hill I’d swear. Em braked and laid her hand on me, I’d been thrown forward in my cross-chest harness. It was not the moment to kill or even sideswipe a cop, and out of nowhere there was someone else outside like, of all the traffic surrounding us, a shadow that she would face more or less face to face, us plus this third person. “What became of him?” she said, for though we were both thinking of Dad and between us she could mean that too, she meant my Chaplain- photographer who I prayed had had an easy burial. My palace driver, who delivered me before and collected me after, divides her loyalties—that’s all she knows—and she’ll get another car out of Cap. I’m there again. But on another job. I feel it like a river moving.
A wicked undercurrent dragged athwart the well rush a track not mine, and he was gone. One ripped-away sleeve of my friend’s wet suit I was left with.
“You could have told me.” (Em swam well enough but without that undisplaced delight in the water; it was in a couple of poems she read me, but.)
“What would you have done? — I lost someone’s body.”
“Well,” she said (so close), “you were friends, because…but you were friends—”
:because—the word so close to another word Em was about to say and maybe no more than “just because”—(friends with the Chaplain only because I would do something for him? — yet Em continuing) “—because you told him what our job is, the real job found inside the coercion—” (had I told Em, emailed her, the job found within the job you were forced to do and had even been set up to play an ugly part in?) the cause, the before like the after, becoming “just because,” collapsed to an instant as suspended as a dive above its remembering, or my despairing trip in reverse back up that dive’s tunnel to the top, where the twist has already begun, bearing words fired from an observer enraged who stops you because you stopped him, and yet an instant suspended for an hour at a time (and she would read to me when I came back from the palace war and I’d drift forward on a line to another car I imagined on its way to Kut with a fan of mine to finish what a photograph had started, win back something, answer more than her original question (driving me to the palace) what had just happened before the picture? so that (seeing her not as before in reverse, 7,6,5,4,3,2,1) I glimpsed her in future in a fairly late-model car-replacement finagled by our captain (now a major — so relieved to be not just an Army captain any more); when after, yes, a two-hundred-and-thirtymile trip north to the border where the possible division of the country was visibly an issue, we would now return south, Livia her name though called Livy by the captain and by me, and go to Kut I had virtually known in advance, she and I, approaching a roadblock and forced to pick up an armed passenger…)—