“I would haf killed him,” said the Russian, creature of eerie attention and arrested imagination, his accent distinctly correct this time. “Your father?” I said. We turned back at the door.
“Never had one. Let us say first cousin,” our man grinned, “what does it matter, it’s done.” “What’s done?” “But could it have been meedair, to cause such an accident? No, I think it was as you hopped and landed on board before leaving it that he shouded.” What the Russian saw in my face — a standoff between us. “Umo had sympaty — whatever happen with his vahter — those border Chinese working all over the place. Eemigrant mentality.” The Russian said father like he said water.
Was he on a green card? I asked — I’m half out the door holding it for Em, who weighs a step, because he is not done with us, he thinks: “You did not follow his coaching. He was testing you.” “Your cousin,” Em said, “was it a him?” “But so what,” the Russian said, “some asshole shouts, ‘Go fuck yourself,’ so what if you crash? You see I remember the words ‘Go fuck yourself all night, be your own fucking vahter.’”
Em is about to shift into Drive, he’s out here rapping at my window and I run it down. “He sayed you understand half gainer like nobody in world.” “Who?” “Inertial, I forget — it doesn’t matter. Tweest also, but.” I had brought something (?), the Russian asked…for Umo?
News, I said. His citizenship. It had come through.
Bending to the window, stunned, “Maybe I see him,” the Ukraine sound engineer said rather slowly. I thought he would reach in or go grab a tire iron. He shouted at us as we turned into the road north, “Feegurehead woman” the words my father’s on my half gainer virtually. Someone just like Cheeky came out of the 7/11 with a newspaper and a pink bottle of Snapple with a straw sticking out of it. “Cheeky,” I said, pointing. Em understood and didn’t look.
“So was that all?” She was shaken and lit a cigarette. Or I lit it for her. I knew what it was, and it was not Umo or the Russian. I remember talking for a couple of miles. It was stupider the truer it was, because she was thinking about her father, what to do about him. I talked about him maybe setting myself up with such fluent indifference. Yet then, “What was the trashy book that was why Umo came here?” I thought she knew but was thinking of us, our father, our family.
24 your real job
Maybe the only way you get to do your real job is when you’re set up by outsiders who use you but they don’t know what they’re doing, I know I said, finding it as easy to talk as if I and Em on a sunny day in California had been marketers around an oval table, and simple for me in words to be indifferent or unforgiving, wherever he was, in Washington at some desk liaison job that would get him what he wanted in swimming, or in Colorado Springs, or back here for a short weekend with our mother, who said, We’re a good people — which he would say of an individual and without the a—of the CPA with the long jaw, “He’s good people,” as if he came with a group; or of Wick, who covered for Dad. So the Russian and the other one used Umo, and Storm used them in order to use me after Dad thought he was using Storm who used Dad to use me and even Em—“even you”—through me… I caught the smell of aloes and jasmine from her knees apparently — But the music video project, she said, watching the road, her cell in her lap, where did that begin? — “And look at them all, where it all got them,” I said.
A Well of Lebanon spa closed I remember, a fountain elsewhere for the moment, for none of this smart, gathered indictment and story was of interest to the person next to me. It was as if we were not getting anywhere, because the opposite was true, which later I grasped as the real job, receding into itself as we overtook it. Static on the radio, so many littler and littler things, her bike seat stolen from the trunk in the parking garage before she could get down there, anger in her eye when I noticed sweat on her upper lip, a bubble at the top of the windshield where a grain of gravel had been spun up by a passing truck — did she want some fruit we drove by (?) and her mouth pouting in concentration upon less and less, erasing a dimple, meant she might have to pull over and have a laugh, which didn’t mean we would never get back for we were not hopeless about all the tiny things adding up. (“Did he think Storm would get me into Yale?” I joked but it was no more true to what it came to me was “the real job” than my little string of people using people.) And somewhere in all of this she asked like a fact what we had done to drive him away — We were always wrong, I said — No we were always right, Em said, angry with herself almost indifferent to me. And I was able to say that we had made use of him to his surprise.
How? I in a silence I occupied could feel her ask; and at me from the north-bright windshield came the unjust Why do you persecute me? war he would wage on us now and again, but my answer to her: “to have our life.”
What had happened to precipitate Dad’s diving-accident words Em had never asked, nor why they threw me off, an experienced performer. You can’t know, for one thing, no more than why people have the voices they do. Em not one of those women’s voices, squeezed, pinched, all-business, and/or going on about nothing, soliciting (but it’s their job) on the phone, talking in line in a public place to another woman, a store, finding a friend to exchange emergency insights with at the same pace and with same vocal cord and nasal quick talk. European women and even African didn’t sound like this, not Polish, not even Mexican. My sister, though, was almost a singer in speech or a natural actress, sly or guttural too when I think of what she could say, and with a stagy range she kept for me.
So I remember summing up, in the car-quiet, a danger-corrupted year or two, leaving out the Scrolls mostly, but what was to be done about our father, too.
While swelling in my own voice I felt Em’s in my chest that always seemed to have returned from a droll surprise and disappointment to become her own surprise and overdrive—“‘I have a Navy in the West,’” (!) quoted from our poet in an e-mail intercepted I believe by Intelligence and Storm — and subtlety riding alongside my voice now with gift, anger, mouth, riding north also in her car in which, since it had not blown up, though someone had Remoted her trunk open in the parking garage the other day of my reeling, remarkable, but perhaps irrelevant analysis of the full twist in the afternoon to the plenary Competition Hearings (and taken her bike seat), she was on the move away from home and by some route not yet valued away from her brother who would be also far away and with other wheels.
All of which, not just the sound guy’s quote from Dad, was turning over in Em’s mind when she said, “Was that all?” and I said I was going back for a second tour.
My driver driving me sometimes to distraction thank God complained at our slow progress south. For we would stop often, in mixed towns around the capital. But look, it was she who’d made al Kut our southeast destination if not beyond, where I had said I had unfinished business which she I knew took to mean someone they thought I would lead them to. Hey, from here a hundred fifty miles dead south along the watercourse you would see its vandalized gates and dilapidated, dam-like barriers, she told me, called barrages to level the flow, and one of the embattled if not poorer oil fields near where she had seen twenty of our own oil tanker trucks lined up single-file — near Nassiriya, a few flat-roofed yellow-mud houses left here somewhere once the silver worker we kept an eye on who followed a religion of John the Baptist and Shem and the Mandaean Enos but one day died of burns inflicted by Sunni visitors with his own instruments — though all this made less and less difference to me. I was happy to have her to talk to, be with, she was good — we were both happy about that, we talked fast and it was warm and sexy, her beret in her lap. She said No it was I who had said Kut, I had unfinished business, yet had never, she added, told her on the way to the palace or since—