“Citizenship for Silence,” Storm speaks what is in his pocket—“more than a fair trade, kids, and clear as anything”—then (smile grim as a clock face): “Posthumous Citizenship now, your idea, Zach, deeded whether ‘deceased or living,’ I think we can certainly put in writing, with a No Rescind rider guaranteed by some pretty amazing signatures faxed from DC an hour ago.” (The smile weird as words.) “In return for…” the hand gesture suggestive. “Not much to ask from someone and you really are someone, you two.”
“Em,” said her friend Husky in the white kurta (and in custody to all appearances), “Em?” “What could you do to us anyway?” my sister said, in the ceremonial advance of the elevator. “What did we do but be a family of two somewhere?” my sister said, Storm staring at the shared and to-be-revered floor as if he saw it moving. Then to me, “Silence—” he began (my sister by my cheek muttering, “Dead or living ‘posthumous’?”)
“This soldier, Em (?)” said her friend—“said, ‘You can call me Captain.’ ’n’I’m OK with it. It’s my first commandment right to honor my own ignorance.” “Husky,” Em said. They seemed to laugh. (I was on my own and could tell Husky kind of respected me.) “Tryin’a recruit me, Em.” Elevator moaned. “For what, Husky?” softly. “Cap’n said, ‘Djou read the Scrolls?’ Not rilly.” (The Seals captain in camo combats gripped the hungry shoulder of the man in spiritual dress, breathless too.) “‘Well, it’s not two Lazarus but one,’ did I know that? ‘And he ditn’ need to come back, right? — ‘cause he never died in the first place — and Jesus was best friends with him,’ and did I read the Scrolls? and I said, ‘Not rilly; did you?’”
“Silence agreed on here and now,” Storm commenced, his eyes narrowing the floor — but it was also the exchange with Husky. “‘n y’know what Cap’n said?” said Husky.
The captain spun Husky around to face him, muttering, “Squeeze you out like a sponge.”
“Said, ‘Ditn’ have to read it! Had it from the horse’s mouth,’” Husky said over his shoulder to Em, to me too I was certain, a friendly exchange once jogging with an even then fugitive friend fellow photographer and Chaplain all but resurrected in me now, Lazarus, yes, between me and the Chaplain! The envelope drawn forth for my hand, I have it still, a document, next week when we’ll be on a last junket to locate Umo, Em and I before I leave, tell him the good news — while Storm rapid-fired terms of the deal in intimate undertone now: Explosion unquestioned, it is what it is; authenticity of Scrolls unquestioned; and by same token no leak to media describing a relationship between major principal Zachary and sister (since “certain Family Values sat not well with the national community that had gotten behind the war, the Scrolls, this Christian President”). The elevator door strained — perhaps against its newness, for the unit was undeniably masking-tape new — and gave way at last upon more light than people where I’d been at noon, and now Storm thought he would charm the Dean tilting his head, finishing with me, he thought — the brown envelope mine now — or sort of addressing both of us: “For backup we got a fantastic film record of the bombing the Scrolls heinously survived, if fragmentarily, to be distributed for spiritual export crediting a cameraman of genius (which brings us to another quick trip for you, Zach, if it’s OK)”—the good news I felt in my blood.
Heinously surviving (?)…to recall, I half recalled, and less than half understood, this same man’s forgotten! (that palace day): You won’t be forgotten …as your father asked you to. I slipped the envelope into my jacket pocket, and drew out by its torn feel one of two small sheets already there, hearing between us faintly the best of Storm last — unreally weird, yet…yes, Zach, family values, yes, that Storm could just eat up if it was only him himself (“though unlike you I never had so to speak a sibling”). A small sound of…was it pain from my sister, ecstasy? and for my ear only, This citizenship, you know, she hissed while I to her, “That ‘carpenter’ one about the ‘unpretending time’ being our ‘plane,’” I said from the book she had given me the first time around, chagrined to recall so little of it and almost like Lincoln’s someone else’s words at that for some new farewell.
Interrupted now by her friend Husky, a perverse call for help, “Guy’s so ugly you gotta wonder, but in this country that’s still a person,” Lazarus and the horse’s mouth rose up in me like foresight and memory and in return for what I’m half losing, was that it?
“You had that badge?” I said. CEO followed us.
I waved The Inventor’s notepaper as Storm made to go for the Dean, shaking his head at his wristwatch, like We’re here, we’re here — the two limbs of the little notebook of her cell phone open, a look on her face, What a workhorse! Storm’s body language complimenting her, but—
“Check out the hand, Storm, half an hour old,” I waved the paper, the entrance to the great abandoned buffet lounge before me, a smell of seven-grain and spiced turkey or was it liver; mayo and melon slices in the sun, the yolky paprika’d statement of rank leftover deviled eggs and cold fish — and over by the windows stood Wick unmoving. “Check out the words here, Storm, at the beginning, right? — ’n’here at the end (?)”—Scroll words Storm would know, wouldn’t he? — they came from parchment saved from the blast and in safekeeping eight months ago in my ear and subsequently in pocket, bed, glove compartment, love, but as I hardly had to tell him, so precisely between us, though we were drawing a small audience, “because you already had it — the whole thing — this wasn’t needed, this scrap from the bomb,” the text like all the other revelations to see the light of day in English had already been in hand somewhere else, “your explosion that day pure show, your palace—” I peered at Storm. A smell from his face now of stale cardamom seeds, leaf extract, dead tortoise, and a couple of on-the-run lunchtime shots of Jim Beam I realized I’d smelt in the car told me he knew what I had here in my hand but had never seen it.
But, the car! I thought.
I turned, my sister was with me and I told her and her hand dived into her bag and held it up, the remote-entry fob — the car left unlocked — her things, her plans (CEO was instantly on his cell) — our distance new, gathering prophetic and unknown upon me — losing one Em, gaining what? CEO watching, behind me, the Law Dean’s futile call, I sensed a scattering of the accredited not yet adjourned to the Conference room though the afternoon had more than come, CEO gone, and—“This citizenship Umo’s getting, living or dead”…my dearest sister entering from our already strange distance tells me what I had already realized, “‘Posthumous’ even if citizen’s alive? Isn’t that what it means?” she asks beautifully; and “In return for what, Zach? — you don’t owe him.”
The acoustic ceilings, a clarity or known future that turned their stains to coastlines intricate with nested corruption, the bay and the sea sky out the windows, and a familiar but now unfurled figure, the woman who had attacked me to make me give something away I thought, closing on Wick, who’s looking out the window absently, for a moment a ghost.
And remembering him so long ago seen by Umo — of course! — from a distance leaning out the classroom window and I must not ask but tell Wick — the dive I have slowed down as if I could divide it endlessly from its end — my job now nearer somewhere between my sister’s “before” and Umo’s “after” and another trip vouchsafed only to her for its own sake — and knew better than my own my sister’s breath close behind, and my name in Storm’s diseased throat: