His, flooded by the clang that came down upon us now repeatedly final of the building evacuation alarm that caused people to look around them, inconvenient as an air raid rounding more responsibly with each strike of the clapper, a blame for its own sake — Storm’s plans were overtaken utterly awash judging from his eyes, larger suddenly and you might have thought less unready for the great hands of the woman otherwise slight-looking crying, “Deal!” reaching over her head then down upon him not me, fists that being all about themselves and their fighting, tuck-position fingers riveted you wielding a hell of an iron bar it seemed but holding nothing. Well apart at the top; at impact together. Yet it was more the consuming clangor of the alarm set off near the brain that for Storm did away with the moment. This was only apparently so remote from any school fire drill alarm for Wick to line his “people” up (most not unhappy to be interrupted) and walk them to the third-floor stairs (when the alarm had gone off the day after my accident just as Wick had begun an account of calculus cure, though hardly thrown off his stride as Storm, his weather eye out for a tornado, surely seemed to have been).
For this present charge, this bell of sound was like the chaos or comfort it saved you from and it was this in those eyes of a man who’d indirectly murdered or meant to two friends of mine hardly countenancing the woman’s blow I and somebody else and Wick tried partly in vain to deflect, that told you Storm’s mind, if he ever in fact had read a page of the volume of stories on his onyx table in the palace, was too quick to hold a thought. And the thighs and belly too slow, the damage control shallow, sweeping; his a body that had sought always maybe a face to go with it, unfold from it, yet one afternoon a modest blunder touting Jesu’s idea for a gray mullet and dogtooth grouper hatchery in a great pond drawn off from the Galilean Lake had got himself slugged by a Christian lender from McLean, Virginia, Storm sustaining the damage you saw, the face he had gained (appropriately in the lobby of the Willard Hotel in DC).
If not the bewildered eye barely flicked at the furious woman but penetrating the bell timeless for all its sequence, term, and alarm where it came from who knew, and what it meant, as we at once began to learn from the black officer I had been calling “CEO” absent some minutes but back to break his news first to my sister; since it was her car cordoned off.
Storm’s eyes shocked in their irises by plans put off or worse — no more than that, no less. And by interruption, not fear. And not at all by blame which bewilderment at a thing shouted had once caused in me lifting off a springboard. My sister did not turn to me or the wide eyes of Husky at large looking for a friend, soon that afternoon to be found in my voice in the Hearings room, yet I found a look in her mouth and cheeks and hair cruelly alert as if she’d had her pocket picked by the man who had threatened her over the phone, all thrown into the days following. And I looked back at Storm — he at me, as he could, his bloody temple, the ripped fold at the corner of his mouth; but his eyes, the meat of his eyes — but really the moment in them waiting for a bandage, even as the emerging multitude facing another delay would stir, do something, get out of that plenary space or exit the building by emergency stair. Up and down and back again captain and CEO in their combats boarded the major elevator bound for the lobby to screen would-be attendees, reduce them to manageable numbers, just a job, less for Hearings’ sake than to remind us who was in charge; and there was the garage.
23 like nobody in world
A Heartland, if memory serves, almost unidentifiable but spotted by me thousands of miles away as a make of trailer seen in Chula V, the exterior door blown out, though, and the toasted styrofoam like bread, like tissue sandwiched between the weather-side thin steel plate and the inner-side vinyl. A raw hole in the steel where the dead bolt had been once lockable if useless against an intruder. A blown-out window aperture where just the framed head of a bald child of nine or ten had quit grinning as I shot, later to be framed out by the Intelligence processor as not germane to prove this mobile home a bio-facility.
My driver recalls what she knew of me, listens for what she’s been told to listen for, watch for, this second time around. (Not “get you there” this time, but.) Expecting we’d first go south — to Kut! — but here we are, just over forty miles north of Camp Warhorse where they weld steel sides onto small and medium trucks that can support them, and memory serves to oblong a space of weeds and empty ground where the trailer once sat. It trusts my smart Specialist from Wisconsin to see the boy’s face I describe in words, just where the hairline began scarcely fourteen months ago, hear him ask in English are you coming into his house, and hear as a joke, one is pretty sure, his Don’t get too close. His village abandoned by its residents who were hardly that, having been forcibly moved in under the old regime.
No pictures so far? No pictures by the Photographer of the Scrolls? If only of their arrival by water, it is said. Like me, leaving and arriving, after and before merging like a war victim’s real life, accepting her boat hook, her dumbfoundingly being there (for let your tool do the work according to our father’s handy nostrum out in the garage), and a dry shirt and pants. Speechless that late afternoon and untrusting but not dead; speaking, if memory serves, only of Umo’s feetfirst dive, of home, the two bloated books in my bag, and the color of winter wheat; and water, what it could do: she might have learned nothing of the jobs I did deep down in the palace though she remembered me.
Memory trusts her knowledge of anthrax, wells, hoopoe nests of olive-colored eggs, she knows also how they improvised claymore mines, knows the road, has a toolbox in back; memory trusts also her interest in, two day’s drive at our pace north from here past checkpoints, a bridge by a river from which we could see a field of green winter wheat I had once photographed, she recalled. Because I had told her on the way to the airfield for my flight home the night of the palace bomb, I beginning to smell, drying out, alive and smelling not only of that, the fresh shirt she had given me reeking of cigarettes I had not smoked. Her who had boat-hooked me out of that rank well rush. Needing a wash dreadfully — and the boots and decomposing socks she remembers and actually told people. That I stank? No that there was a nice feeling, almost a confiding, without any. What people? Don’t recall, she lies. (For what she told got back maybe clear to the top.) You were tired. Something about a third way — another route? But you didn’t know where we were going.
But memory trusts her impression of the northern Mesopotamian plain. U.S. contractor skipping status reports blowing millions on a pipeline intersection under the Tigris without doing the geology first. The division possible of the country up here as a result of this war, at the highest levels in DC thought a great idea. The depth of the water by our little bridge here, her eye a lead line, the current surprising, close. And a body passing, she thought (or the back of a T-shirt inhabited by it; or only a T-shirt? asks her companion) about which we argued as if about something between us, she hadn’t seen the head. Two people alone contain so much. And how was it, being home? she said, and was I not taking pictures this tour? What I had to say about an experimental bridge back home, 450-foot footbridge made of composite carbon-and-glass materials so far twenty times dearer than steel and concrete construction but a tenth the weight — her interest sort of in these things for their own sake, as is her right as a citizen. Or in me. Can you be interested in a bridge as an end in itself? A person yes, though maybe not. And one punctual star we saw above the desert near the bridge and the asphalt plant, and two cars that had pulled in near us.