One night near a city known now for danger, I pointed out a campfire a mile off the road. Did she have any brothers and sisters? Three bros. They were not serving. The campfire? she persisted. Oh just I recalled a campfire that we had approached along the lip of a canyon once in California near the Arizona border and I spoke of it since it was her I happened to be with.
We? said my driver. Me?
“When you were driving me to the palace, you would say that was all you knew, yet it wasn’t and you kept adding things and you still would say, That’s all I know.”
We had time to laugh about it now, she touched me. She checked the oil. The car had been acquired secondhand, thirdhand.
How I evacuated the palace my way. That’s life. I didn’t even know her name.
How outside the gate she said, This’s far as I go. What she had said to me through the window when I left her sandblasted half-camouflaged Suburban to go into the palace. It looked like “chose,” her lips meant you chose to be here.
That’s right, that’s right, Livy said.
Her names. Livia to her mother, Olivia to Grampa, Liv to one brother, Olive to the humorous one, Livy to another, O to her father who later calls her Livy, who tells others, She’s never wrong. As a compliment.
“You enlisted,” I said.
Well, trust her on dogs. Where she comes from, hunting, but. (And dog love.) But? Well, here it’s son of a dog, ibn il kalb. Thought to be filthy, should you touch them you shed your clothes.
Man’s best friend.
She gave me a look. She’s smug, a little. They should talk to a friend of mine who grew up eating dog. That’s right, that’s right, she… I had asked her once (?), she said (I’m a little astounded) — on the way to the palace (?) about an Asian kid unnamed working with (?)… Film crew, mmhmm—
South, she replies.
The splendid dive, though, the lost diver, the palace trashed (a bank now?)—
That explosion, she said, people who vanished.
Stuff of legend now, Livy, the selling of the Scrolls.
What a mess when she enlisted, she said (knows I’m interested). Never wrong? I suggest. When Dad’s old Saab started making a godawful noise I told him it was the diaphragm on the servo system operating the automatic clutch. No one else got it right.
The captain now. The job she is doing for — the major, excuse me—Is it for him? This trip, this tour for (we don’t quite talk about) the photographer. “That campfire,” she shifts gears. It’s night. Somehow, as I try to tell her in a blaring, acrid café full of soldiers my job within the job she comprehends, she pouts with insight, desire, she’s compact, hair unfurled, she knows that there is a job within the other job often. I have not called it the Third Way, but she is not unfamiliar with it. The winter wheat, and in the lower corner of my shot from the river a couple looking opposite directions, together. The Bedouin born without eyes. A bald child’s shaved-head hairline. Narrow escapes she knows of, amazing reappearances. Life. Her brothers, father, uncle hunting in the snow out of season — for her it’s walking in the woods, that’s all, she goes along. Farmers’ early warning systems at best, the dogs.
The café noisy, the crowd of men aware of us.
My move. What’s next? Time can be itself tonight, shifted into new places, reassembling, like power between people.
Though selugi, she continues: hunting dog (?), after one of the successors to Alexander’s empire, Seleucus in the South. And south is where she is inclined to head, how about it? She had several good harmonicas in the back of the car, all different keys in their red and white Marine Band boxes and protected in a backpack with her things. The major, now, I said. His irritation at her assignment to keep the photographer monitored I know that came down like major’s promotion from higher up — and something more. He got her her car replacement, I said, she was lucky.
Me? she touched my wrist. (I hadn’t thought what I was saying.) You know about all that. She taps my knuckle as I finish my drink and go to get up (we’re going).
No, I… — how’m I going to explain what I’d pictured, driving with Em from The Inventor’s into the Center, the car bomb with Livy’s name on it, boys, windowpane shivering, odor of cigarettes on the man’s fingers. “I must have heard,” I said, holding the door for her.
“No, I don’t believe so.” She smiles up at me in the dark, the outtake of breath from her nostrils, walking to our billet. Sometimes two people were better than one, she said. That campfire you approached (?), she said.
The person had vanished, I said. (We’ve double-checked the car, and taken the backpack with the harmonicas and her things.)
You have a sister, I recall.
I had never mentioned any sister. So Livy’s been briefed. (Who by? Does this come under briefing? Trickle-down intelligence.) I had hopes for her, and clear as many running feet in a ruined schoolyard a block away sounded distinct from the Metal Rock massing objective at a distance and distinct from, close by, the indigenous instrumental we had been told was about a murdered Palestinian child — it came to me that they were after maybe the Chaplain (Storm Nosworthy’s baby still at large) yet even Storm didn’t matter now at a distance except as someone associated with my father, and I asked Livy why she’d enlisted and she said she would dredge that up for me sometime, she was no prize package and—
Dredge? I’d brace myself. Perhaps so, she said.
Interested in her, but not without doubt, I told her something of a story inspired as the Russian in Chula V, the teller, had himself been inspired when, before shipping out again, I had come by the sound studio one day (bearing gifts in case).
A story the Russian for all his affable suspicion could not know had filled in my own: that the “water” archaeologist, the specialist, on the Scrolls team — who, that day of the palace, getting a brainstorm, was the one whose steps with a guard I had heard descending as I was making my getaway — and a third person trying to keep up — heard just as I dropped into the well current, like a casual death by elimination, Why I Enlisted opening unexpected reasons then as I sank and swam, some dredged-up remains of which from the virtual sky Livy herself had boat-hooked further down — this specialist, said the Russian on his own track, had got himself killed: what you get for a Mexico vacation but almost certainly had been investigating fallout from Scrolls explosion, the Russian had it on good authority (“eef you recall our conversation”—as if that had been what we’d talked about on the intensely inescapable tiles of a pool!). An archaeologist of water itself, said the Russian, holding forth a bit for present company but with a savor of intelligence — for who knows what “vahter” brings with it from where it was to where it will go, “he tell me heemself”—and where eez division between what-has-been and whatweel-be? — “a shout in the meedle of the air, eh,” the Russian adds (not lost on me): and water archaeologist had been drawn to the foundations of this palace as a sinkhole for the net of horizontal wells “like secret map across land before even Scrolls were found.”