— when the lock behind Em clucked because she had touched the back door release and, the door open, into the warm day of her car (which she had once wanted me to think of as ours) came a face she’d heard in the old days on our home phone more than once, and for a moment she was quivering and chill, seeing in the rearview like a tiltable screen the man whose presence, function, use that we must face I knew now not just for all else he was and likely the murderer of my friend Umo even though Umo I knew lived (to jump one afternoon cannonball, then dive; then, like a Third way of gathered understanding, that wartime palace dive which as a double somersault also like a jump went in feetfirst), but a Storm voice that praised me for “ideas” or “other” of mine mysterious for he’d received them prompted some way that I hadn’t grasped because even bad people have second sight and hear things:
I have a driver with orders from above and we are entering Kut where I have unfinished business that will show itself to me only when I get there. The Chaplain’s voice is waiting but not the Chaplain. I see powerlifting equipment; brand new squat benches, but see no more, though am seen.
And joining now our very track close in in traffic convening for the afternoon session like he’d been listening in or had bonded (giving us however not more stability as Wick once explained chem but less — and a scent — but of the three of us, now? — some mustard-sweet gum from the incense tree, less myrrh than frankincense it might have been named), Storm it was who settled down on hangersful of colored shirts and rested an elbow on a plump laundry bag (pronounced it a nice little car), though Umo was in my thought and not Storm’s real aim, the car rolling now I’d swear sliding half-sideways on a surface influenced by our slippery and pointing-out passenger. And with a word or two from him how to get where we needed to get and pointing out for some reason suggestively the trolley station — though as “your fans, Zach and others upstairs,” didn’t know, “your friend Umo has been reported near Acapulco, a false sighting we think — for why would someone want us to think him alive, Zach, after we’ve agreed on posthumous citizenship in principle? Another great idea from Zach! (Are these your things, E-m?)”—the letters pronounced separately like an in-the-know interviewer.
“Posthumous—?” she slipped through a red light, attending only to cars. “Your dear brother’s—” “What if he isn’t—?” “—darling idea still.”
“Guaranteed?” I said.
“Dead or alive.” Storm getting into it exactly but always overdoing it, it would get him killed (I saw, I saw it, was he in an Iraq mess hall? — lauding the Scrolls? — or was that me, another tour of duty up ahead?). “In return for what?” I said, my sister murmuring agreement.
“He had borderline high blood pressure. Heartmobile told us; though where exactly he did die matters less and less…even if not known to you the friend he followed halfway round the world — now, your dad—”
“You have nothing to do with my father.”
“He trusted me. Did he you? But we—” My sister squeezed my hand, then needed hers to steer. “He thinks the world of you, Zach, but he does not put his best foot forward, but—” “He has a birthday coming up,” Em said, I felt in my legs and actually in hers that she wanted me to take the bait, ask what the deal had been, she had her elbow up on the edge of the window, which she never did, and she heard what maybe I didn’t in this man’s words.
“—we will see,” Storm said ominously, again the sweet odor, surer than sight or sound; “the world being at stake, the bleeding needing to be stopped, I’m sure you on my case and I on yours can find common ground for tradeoffs to safeguard for the time being…your sister…her job…college applications, what not — am I sitting on your underwear back here, Em? — and, to be frank, Zach, Dad’s future. You two, you, you,” the man seemed to stammer, “who find each other and a matrix ready-made, the clouds burst, the stream flows, it is them, it is original, and then comes the matrix ready-made which turns them into…”
A basement garage Em had driven us down into must prove to be connected with the Conference Center. Why does he call you Zach all the time? she muttered under her breath, and You’re quite generous (I know why). She pulled the ignition key. “What could you do?” she said over her shoulder, getting out of the car. What I had learned I would have to use. I felt that Wick was close now and someone else up there I would need.
“If we can agree about the explosion…,” Storm walking across the subbasement concrete floor rising on the balls of his feet, led the way into a brushed stainless steel elevator big enough to lift a car. “That it happened?” I said. He turned to the buttons, wheeling about, now, so the evidence of his recreated and horrendous face of slants seemed to belong to him no more than a parallel field. “That we don’t know who did it.” “Not the actual ones.” “Though we’ll find them—”
“If we haven’t already,” I said.
“—be they after the Scrolls or their leader himself who there was a story going around of the palace detainment unit housing him when in fact we’ve had him locked up safe and sound elsewhere for months. As we will find the Chaplain-photographer,” said the face Em read, its talk, the finger on the Up button.
I said they might.
“You don’t seem to know his name though you met at Fort Meade.” “Lucky for me.” “We fucking arranged it,” Storm Nosworthy said. The confiding (and cursing) of a fool, a killer. Em near me at once all but inside me but in the new way, her “you” voice had ceased in my head for the moment, for steps approached along the echoing floor of the great garage — with luck there would be another break coming — and Storm got the door to close. “We don’t know how he swung this, for all I know you may have described it to your sister-love whom I would have known from her pictures”—Storm’s smile thick, warped, richly working—“the dove’s eyes, no, too blue, a Celtic queen sold to a King of the Nile, what says the Song? ‘my sister, my spouse,’ and where I was sitting in her backseat the smell of her laundry was as the smell of Lebanon.”