“You forget, Zach you forget—” a connection coming with Storm Nosworthy, who would see no way for himself but through me.
I hailed Wick, and for a moment hadn’t recognized the blond-streaked hair of the woman whose kerchief not now in evidence had formerly seemed a token of some American religion even Muslim though I’d assumed she was working with Cap’n and “CEO,” but now Storm’s voice gathered so in me the scent of virginsbreath and of my blood on his hand and some gross praise given in his cedared atrium in advance of my video-to-come, flights of stairs below, documenting my friend Umo’s scheduled shooting, that, turning, I registered Storm’s rage or madness only in its synched succession of grins that twitched some screaming code way inside the man somehow presiding in the words that reasoned firm as a priest’s invoking habeas corpus, or villain’s, tight as a lawyer’s or parent’s, glad as a politician’s, modest as an athlete’s, sanguine as generals’ used to be, mysterious as a friend’s or a false friend’s, a doomed dominance and resource — these out-loud words pretty fast for Em and me but no, now out of nowhere breathtakingly like coup, like collapse, betraying here—
— like a blow to the chest—
— Stom’s secret weapon! — “You forget your part in this—”—my sister trying to hear, to hear some complicity alleged with this ugly person—“the family that thought he was crazy and wanted to get hold of him mobbed in the street get him outa there, whom he disowned to go his own way — this leading Man from Nazareth ‘a more hands-on Jesus,’ (?) don’t you of all people recall? Not without friends, yet said, Be a passerby minding your business, but a virtual CEO, Zach? Your word, we have it on good authority, Zach—” “Zach?” Em says, an artist it comes to me who can put things together—“and that family, embarrassed, prudent, of Jesu’s”—
— of course of course but…kill his own chances, to trap me? Storm?—
— when I had by now a way if not a job, my own and no one else’s.
My roads not that remote, a couple of roads, a war apart at the same time sitting in two vehicles beside two future drivers I hear Storm still, meant for me his words: Civilians run this man’s war.
And Jesus seeing profit ahead, your guy and mine, Zach, medicinal saliva and wind (the future of, respectively) you remember your own…memory, was that it for godsake? linked ovens, this Jesus one-on-one live — fighter and economist, private entrepreneurials, food-fasting and possibly fast-fooding, sensible take on capital punishment when appropriate, a very early, matching-grant Jesus where if you’re not willing to work forget about it, sloth violates brotherly love, an American Jesus — what you said or are said to have said on the connecting ovens from you to your sister to your father, who was persuaded your fancy thoughts were redeemed by this Jesus’s view that you don’t beg if you can turn to, and against giving alms, he meant business, Zach, he had capitalized on what he had going for him, Christ had a job to do.
Em keeps watch but over what? — me at that slant of hers, getting it all in one short thought possibly, half-heard, the Scrolls ascribed to her brother, was that it? (Even to her through our father if she heard?) when the rest, or all I knew, she knew: 1) the arrival deep in the palace covered above by 2) a friend’s dive, 3) disaster, 4) a cockeyed photographic record, while below 5) a questionable explosion to cover 6) a questionable project (to please an officially Christian government?) followed by 7) a deathly well current and now 8) back home uneasy phone calls and at least two break-ins:
but what can Em be processing now? We’re equals (all but) and our father beyond his Reserve against mine cannot be much more of a father for her now than some use of me unknown to her but drifting in upon me — and almost not to be believed, his help, his confounded desire bringing him near some imaginary influence through this speechwriter from Sacramento Storm Nosworthy. But the root of the wind is water, I hear (from my sister, reading aloud). I was driving somewhere in two cars, true American, here in Calif, and back at the war, it was quite real.
The Law Dean touched Em’s wrist smiling toothily but grew impatient; alerted, startled (even she), to hear the volume almost in rhyme of voices arriving from the lobby, she turned gracefully to direct the crowd debouching from the elevators down the broad, decisive hall at the end a plenary roomful of folding chairs, those who wait, those in profile who talk to their neighbor, something just to be here, surveying the wreckage of lunch.
Forget I had, / the things I’d said — home from the war, my sleep flooded by some of them. Undeniably said. How meant? Husky himself had asked this morning if and how I’d meant what I’d said, and once long ago Umo too; for Em and I had our joint angle of saying — and now my things had passed into Storm’s listening system through my father, and not only — for in the elevator the Seal thug captain and my bothersome but this morning friendly critic Husky jazzing the real not dead-andalive Lazarus getting a strange reaction in Storm’s eyes, brought back a friend jogging, gasping, crediting me with reminding him of what I must now think he had passed on in anger to the men waiting to train and perhaps question him that day.
Storm’s voice and by contagion mine had reached a terrible hush like silence or unavoidable corruption or like the thought they rested on, and Wick, who had heard no more of what was happening than the others, approached now from the windows and near him the woman from this morning who looked so like my palace driver, and from the direction of the elevators and the hallway, the Law Dean, angry as she could be, who would draw us toward the plenary session where the afternoon Hearings, if not Storm Nosworthy’s welcome fresh from Washington, promised to go deep.
I a source for the Scrolls.
I said, “If it’s all from me suppose I go in there and say so.”
“There exist reasons not to. Your friend the diver’s citizenship. Your sister,” said the man grasping my arm as he had the day I was shot. “To say nothing of your father — your name as a photographer. And quite apart from their not being, as you put it, all from you, many think the Scrolls in their own way are true. Isn’t it what we’re about?”
I had heard right. And here was Wick, and behind him the troubled person who hated me beyond even her call of duty as a coworker with white captain, black CEO, and whose brother — unless I was way off — served in an MP brigade. My sister hadn’t moved from where the Law Dean had left her, her hand in her bag, while Storm was saying we go on faith in everything else…(?) “And the favor we ask of you, it would put a seal on all of this, Zach, a Presidential Seal of course but my seal my friend — the photographer of the Scrolls’ arrival, and my word! what a twist your survival that day — your enlistment bumped into the Reserve as you know, and—” (“What’s the deal,” I said bending confidentially close to his shoulder but Storm now like a show-off sharing some personal phone call or his half anyway for anyone within range) “—look, activating you we cut you a second tour, short form, go where you like, you got fans over there who you know will liaison a…a deal? — like—” Storm pointed to the hall—“the twist! People in there who can’t wait to hear you.” Speak, he meant, of that dive at the Hearings today — Storm tapped me on the chest, my scar, the wound (if only my deluded father, working somewhere, probably in Colorado Springs, for USA Swimming, could be here!), “if I’d only been in time downstairs to see your entry into the well that palace day!”—the deeffayronce between me and Storm — and “liaison”? What meant liaison? — for like the future when it was only the past it came to me why he, as his eyes, their weather of prescience now dilated, wanted me back at the war, and he might not, like Em, have known that it had already been in my plans almost for its own sake.