I was the killer now.
The elevator lifted almost at a slant and slowly and like a cabin of secure space that stalled when its computer received calls from a higher and lower floor simultaneously sometimes, Storm warned. The smile again, now quick spasm of a public asshole’s fitful show, punctuating the tradeoff to be agreed to: “The palace explosion I trust we can call a mystery? In return for… Not that I’d expect you two chums would need much cajoling…(?).”
The huge elevator cut off and my sister leaned on me. Storm Nosworthy clear across the elevator floor from us jabbed the buttons — Is it us? she breathed — brother-sister…?
What could he know?
The break-in. Your place.
The bed…the bathroom?
What could anyone know?
Think.
“West Coast contractors,” Storm said, hitting the whole button panel. “You saw the acoustic ceiling above the buffet, the recessed lighting?” “Over the farmed blue marlin,” I said, seeing that coastline-stained, that darkening map. Water damage, worse than water, Storm, I thought. “Care about two adolescents?” my sister whispered, meaning What was there to know and nobody did anyway. “One person,” I murmured. Em snapped her fingers and the elevator was on its way. “Would he?” she said.
“We outsourced the blue marlin farm,” Storm said remembering. A brown business envelope in his jacket pocket, he had it out now. “We know we know…that he crawled some fifteen feet or was dragged because…because…because we tracked DNA from the main urine deposit and and through skin scrapings, waste products, fabric. To where he takes the plunge.” (“A friend,” Em muttered.) “What was that?” “A devoted friend,” I said. “Yet a three-hundred-pound steel plate was found to have his traces on its underside—” (“For friendship’s sake?”) “—and how he could have got out from under it — crushed when it fell on him…” (“Not his face, though,” Em whispered.)
“Two’na half maybe. Three, never,” I said. Storm hasn’t missed my meaning. “Your devoted friend?” “His.” “Ah, his.” Storm alive as not before. “You would…” “Do anything to bring him back.” “Somewhere, along that metropolitan well network that we’re setting to rights, he exists (as we need to address spills right here of untreated sewage, Storm purred), and how he got away from the blast site we can guess, Zach, until we know more—” Em slid her arm through mine again — along a leg of that sewer named after the President I recalled — a sewer I’d described to Em, water part of what contained it inspiring me when she would kindle her incense, turn out the lights, ask what came “just before that” as if not what comes now.
22 the already strange distance
But now, “His nose,” she whispers, “the blue spots,” she whispers, “it means ‘Imprisonment,’” she read the face across the elevator car, my arm knew each finger that gripped it, we heard now a hubbub coming our way. And the other wide door at right angles to the door we’d come in slid back leaving us face to face with a mob in the lobby going to the same place as us and struck silent as we came into view. First, though, or almost first, the Seals captain and his ramrod teammate “CEO” in combats waving back a hundred others who could wait or take the other elevator, but clearly a two-man escort for the sixth passenger making this trip to the Conference level.
Was it my frog-in-the-throat questioner? It was.
In the long white spiritual garment and no badge showing. And Em greeted him (“Husky,” she said), the very one who before they’d cautioned him this morning had told me I didn’t “mean” what I said, but we had been uneasy and close and I’d cut him off; and my “profit-stricken country” and more than that “one great war-torn body” meant also the globe I suppose, glib with parallels ungrasped and the facts we collect on the job from the voices we hear, yet left me taxed for what I might have said. To Umo, my sister, my father, Milt, the accredited conferees, Marine recruiters on a no-kid’s-butt-left-behind watch, War Child snapping his wrist by the hotel turned stock exchange.
And now against this crowd balked by the spaces of the multiuse elevator closing on their faces, accreditation badges somehow not to be seen on their lapels, pullovers, shirt pockets, breasts, ID lockets, though there in their free faces Entitled (but to what?)—“Get ‘em outa the building,” captain said (“Done,” said CEO, his idea practically…“This Hearing!”) — it was jealousy in me not envy of Husky, and even as my sister unsure of what she had entered into gripped my arm, and captain and “CEO,” his cell phone out so quick it might have been up his sleeve, took up formation along the wall opposite us with this peaceable, curiously significant person in front, I must gather what was going on even in an elevator and against this operator Storm to be undone I believed but dangerous to Em, who had met a friend of hers who seemed to be in custody and hardly acknowledged me though he had something remarkable in him to say and would say it.
“Your people,” I said. “My people?” “Come on, that woman working with captain and the black guy acting the wacko?”
Though now Storm points at my chest.
Tradeoff time, he means. A brown business envelope in hand, Storm Nosworthy will cross this room that rose toward our Hearings floor, target what he will use, and, doomed, it came to me, can’t know how my father’s birthday envelope divides me between what random hurt Em hints it held and what really I’d paid twenty dollars for (or was it ten?), Earth Veins you make your own running universally through each of us, rift and river, a hole in the head, a half-completed dive to heal, yet quite parentless (if you could prove it, Em once said); how Umo pronounced him—“Stom’s secret weapon you better get to know.” The humoring muscle of distrust an orphan doubt no less trusting me, asking what meant “brother,” describing grandfather’s plan to come to Mexico, work the mineral mines, sign up with Plutarco Calles, live right; the secret weapon, though, Umo, how do you figure that? The brown envelope, always about to be drawn out for me, delayed, I can feel it, that voice to nail down our understanding quid pro quo as, on the other cheek, Storm’s face shouts our very History et habeas corpus silentem—beside us (for I was right, he has come across to us) he speaks in confidence from his own, base Faith — Umo dead, Chaplain alive (yet Umo come thousands of miles to hook up with me—do I understand that trip, those Umo miles? — while the other guy lives again in a scrolled-down monitoring of those dark and memorial waters) the Scrolls Storm’s baby (!), for holistic proof rests beneath ineetiative, ineetiative beneath democracy, and what shall it profit us near term if we lose the Near and Middle East? — this giant lift inching up retarded by what’s left in return for what was always there; Wick’s morning-after calculus healing more wounds than my dive, more pitfalls than an elevator’s division between waiting silence and, with two adjacent doors, a need to speak before time runs out.
To me a friend and mere miracle, the Chaplain on the other hand matters so much to Storm he’ll flush him even from extinction along old sewerways. Just one of many you’ll silence who might explain the explosion uncharitably for the Administration, for us. He had the Vice President’s ear.