Inspired by suspicion to tempt me to betray he didn’t quite know what — by delusions of tactics perhaps, the Russian had himself betrayed more than he knew: for the archaeology team-member whose steps coming down I’d heard along with those of guard and third party, was none other than the ill-fated specialist written up in the magazine I had underlined who’d been independently tracing someone not to be identified to Livy I knew, a friend (I thought now two friends, Umo and the Chaplain)—
nor, for safety’s sake, even the person with whom I stood my ground listening to the foreign sound engineer play the authority, interrupting himself to go and dive into his earphones, adjust a dial, keep us waiting, and come back — and something else that all but came to me, about the archaeologist getting a brainstorm at that moment after the explosion and after a soldier the Russian had talked with had just jumped down into the void.
But the Russian, a dark and gravitational or sinkhole or routine imagination but without real character, could never quite put real things together — my reluctance to learn he was not Russian but Ukraine; my vanishing down the bomb rupture in the palace diving well after the water; and the object of that archaeologist’s search then and later, what he might have said publicly and to Storm who might not want an actual Lazarus on his hands; then, home again in California weeks later, from his path one morning when he had some typically Russian or Ukrainian business I figured at the University looking up to see me observing him from the famous footbridge high above; our host only now in his place of work in Chula V recognizing the dark-haired girl close up who had been with me at the rail, her legs, her look, and recalling the “meedair shout,” yet that the archaeologist, with that profound specialty had been seeking not me but an underwater photographer (and Navy Chaplain) had entered the Russian’s brain no further than I had permitted it into my midnight story to Livy inspired by suddenly guessing her particular mission assigned by some headless HQ, though the Russian was much taken with my sister who had come with me to Chula V, for each to each a goodbye errand. What was hers? “Lucky your little war is done with,” he said.
He had lifted the earphones off and stared at a computer screen. So we had just stopped by? he went on, secretly alert. “Our Umo doesn’t work here any more,” he said, and laughed at his joke. Found something better, I said. Long tables, mixers, swivel chairs, screwdrivers, window into another room. I had something for Umo, I said. Em at the far end, the Russian let the phone ring, cagey, his back very straight, physically strong. Everyone has an instinct. “He’s prob’ly dying somewhere, I mean diving,” said the Russian, making a joke. “Nothing throws heem off.”
My gift would not be posthumous I felt sure. My sister had a good look around; returning to our end she might have been thinking of renting the place. She picked up a screwdriver, a big one with a black rubber handle, looked at it, a Phillips-head; looked at me, pouted. Russian measured the distance to Em’s humor, her eyes, her breasts, her hips, in a dress today, so it was in self-defense that he plotted the positions of everything here, equipment, speakers, job clipboards hanging, the sound of the phone. “He deed what I told him. Good working relationship.” And? “He told me things.”
“Yeah?” said Em. The Russian thought something was up, I thought of the deserter, the way Umo had been used, even of my father for an instant, whom I did not think of.
“Why he came here in first place. His trucking: where he went. He kept that wreck running. Music. The cops. Why he came here.”
“Why did he come here?” said my sister. Russian found this amusing. “Some trrash he read in a book. He gotta get some papers. That’s where you came in, right?” the Russian grinned at me narrowly. “He lied about age, no?” “What book?” my sister said.
“A nine-thousand-mile job with you guys and he doesn’t have papers?” I said.
In the eyes contempt beaming for an illegal trying to survive. “Papers we deescussed.”
“And the deserter?” I signaled Em, we were going. She picked up an invoice off a stack of cartons.
“Discussed many things. Mexico, drugs, music, Chula Vista, you and your vahter,” the Russian seemed to ignore my question. “Lied about his age?” “Both ways, up, down,” was the reply. “Well,” the Russian said then, sagely…“talked about you,” he said, “and you,” flicking his eyes at Em. “And your vahter when he shouted meedair.”
My sister frowned at me and my life. “Milt,” I said — with a gesture, we were going—Milt had told Umo, why would either friend speak to others of it? “It was the half gainer,” said the Russian as if he knew. “So what you bring?” he asked me.
Em flapped the invoice. “Whadda ya got there?” said the man.
Why had Em come along? It was my next-to-last week, I was going back, a brief tour. Yet what my dearest only sister thought she owed me for — and astonished by my intervening at the previous afternoon’s Hearings when CEO and captain thought they were hustling Husky away at the end of the day and discovered they were not going to do that and stood publicly warned in front of a hundred willing Americans — for who was this brother of hers? — it was, I believed, no more than that I knew where somebody was that especially Storm wanted to catch up with. And Em came along today guessing it wouldn’t be Umo but the Russian I would run into, and said later when she’d looked down from the bridge at him looking up that he had the unafraid forehead of a killer—“a life you could miss without a misery.” Also she came along to Chula V because her car liked the road and she liked to drive; and she believed something was going to get said.
The person I loved, but more. “My tools took human faces,” her poet had said in my sister’s voice reading to me the night of the accident having sought to protect, bathe, soothe, heal, use a bloody abrasion wound dividing my heart nearly, and painfully imperceptibly kissing the raging tissues and opening her book — had she a headache building in her temples? — which became my homework for a Wick quiz I wouldn’t miss the next unbreathable morning then miraculously foregone by him for this new calculus he would glimpse for us of narrowing down from your position to some instant speed if it ever could exist while also narrowing down even more magically and for me that hour from speed to speed to where you are, for the assistant coach knew where I was. Between what has been and what will be, that horrendous crash dive to be rethought — though paused as gravity rushing through you isn’t?
“Multeeple half gainers!” the Russian pounded a table. “Coach yelling, ‘Too far out, meedle of the air, too far out!’” “Umo wasn’t there,” said Em, letting the invoice fall sailing onto barely a corner of the long table. (“Milt,” I said.) “Somebody tawled him, that’s all. And so you quit half gainer and went up for tweest,” said the Russian dryly.
“And then?” I said, wondering if Umo had grasped what Milt could not.