Cannonball (18 page)

“The war effort! Your father, and that whole good family I've heard like the good background noise over the phone, siblings real close—you have a
sis
ter,” came then the words all by themselves topped, then, by “nice work if you can get it” (so I could have soiled my palm swiping that broken nose back into line in that somehow familiar face, eyelids thick folds, eyes small or remote). “Where'd you get
that
?” I murmured, chilled by a risk of memories above a springboard, Dad's shouts, the law of pool tiles, the laws of slowing down very nearly grasped by Wick who, doctoring your thought, tried to pass them on for me to apply. “We've done our best,
out
done ourselves, to shoot Operation Scroll Down, get someone whose photographs…” Storm shook his head, agog, mouth open, drool-ready, twisted (expressive but of what? a change of subject?). “Done our best to
get
the best.” (
I
wasn't in competition with—I hear you, he said, hey I'd given him an idea.) (He me.) “And kept it in the family. Your dad's ideas, well I confess I wondered if they could all be his, they were so…as if we didn't know.”

Storm Nosworthy, smiling once twice three times, a dark, burnt-looking rim inside his lower lip. He did something to his pants, which now showed faint smudges. (What were they? Had he been gardening?) “Great springboard for the Operation—maybe it
is
the Operation, Zach. And keeping it to yourself. You won't be forgotten.” (Operation Scroll Down, I thought he meant.) “As your father asked you to”—(
to be forgotten?
) “Nobody even in the loop knows
ev
erything—but he will get what
he
wants, the Committee will see to that, what a competitive…hey competitive with his son, why not? And the diving?
That
whole story, you've gone deeper than diving, how does that grab you? Leave the board to someone—…you know what I'm saying. Another better way. You have to look ahead. You have a sister. You have a former…teacher you—(?)”

Storm came close up, a breath of mildew, and between dread and some partnership I recalled Dad had spoken of Umo as someone who would be of use to “us,” and I should keep it “under my cap” even from Umo, he knew what friends we were. (
If
we were, Dad'd added in that way of his, probing, remote.) Of use as a swimmer? I thought, a diver? whatever, was he a team person?—all I wanted now with Storm in my face was to get where I was going to do the job I'd been sent to do, yet no—was this the real job, to be valued by a person like this somehow? Turning, thirsty, I felt that sting again maybe like the nip of a snake where Storm had thumbed my arm, clasped me, his fingers pinching underneath, though this adder had a chemical on his breath, and I started to mention that odd remark of my father's after his trip, stopped myself, started again, “There was that trip to Baja,” I said, “when he had a meeting—with you, I believe…” For on his return Dad had called Umo “competent” and I had missed something he'd said that would come to me and now seemed sinister if I could recall it. What they learned of Umo in Mexico—little more, I'd bet, than his immigration status.

Storm had my hand again, my name in his mouth implicates me, “You're right, Zach, faith in the system—even over friendship, other priorities, risk by association, you know what I'm saying—silence is golden. You're up to this, it's already part yours, we wanted to be able to get you outa here in a hurry if we had to, so the captain probably mentioned your enlistment got switched to Reserve—finish the job I always say.” Up to
what
, did Storm Nosworthy mean? Videotape, but stills too? Some historical thing arriving—getting unearthed, or plucked in a rush from these waters somewhere below me. Storm had nerve. A vast horizontal well system? Ancient. To impact the war (though it was said to be sort of over).

No contingency plan—this is it
: Storm's words a spinning, flip-sided guarantee of reward and/or punishment (in the frowning smile of a faith-based relative, a punitive
reward
comes back; but a
Reserve
enlistment?)—I experience Storm's hand moist and distinctly sticky, local candies maybe, until I can bow and, processing these words of his
hang out with a target
, you're
one
, and
proceed down to the pool and wait there for your
…—turn away then behind me, distantly, a soft snap of the fingers I thought as I saw a figure appear ahead of me and something else from Storm almost to himself (
what's this
…?)…the indoor garden there behind Storm, the dwarf olive, my thirst, several violet and orange and, I think, indigo, pink, and bulbous plants, in a gold pot a dwarf tree too small for Jonah to have retired under—“You need a drink, Zach” (Storm toasted me with an empty hand)—a silent tortoise, a bird's shadow near the skylight in this land that seemed to Storm though not exactly
our
land a new frontier to build having been torn down, a small volume of Kipling with a half-empty, sordid drink on it he hands me, a family crest on the glass—“
What's this on the…
?” (on the what?—I hear fingers snap as distinctly as the neck of a hanged culprit—“our family Virginia 18
^th
century and before that Cornwall, Devon”—)—stairs rejoining me down past ceramic alcoves, a mouth-watering recipe of pots on the stove and ovens roasting as a door opens somewhere for a second, as my palace escort appeared once more in the shadows on this flight of stairs taking me past a rose-colored room and the elbows, butts, a momentarily one-legged foot of a man and another of a woman or two stepping into or out of something I thought, another door flings open below upon the warp of voices and pool waters, closing again. Till I am there, and a steel door with deadbolts and a lever-handle I jiggle must yield more stairs, but I'm guided away from it to the two swinging portals into the pool area that I push following perhaps my guide who I have the feeling now is not ahead but behind me and more gone from me than even he knows, for I would not tell him what I enlisted for.

Humidity stood and unfolded toward you like the music agitating distantly under the pool itself and you could blink away a cloud transfiguring your upward sight. Though, having on the way downstairs passed in his digs a very ghost of a sometime Administration speechwriter “on the way up,” I was not here to film a ceiling mosaicked blue green crimson with river birds and one great-lobed ear, an esoteric oblong drawn in or on it, anciently listening downward upon this forty-meter-or-so pool, saffron and gray of water, a roped-off, only somewhat deeper section for the diving board where a bald man with a moustache treaded water.

Plus shower rooms; swimsuited civilian and military mixing nakedly (how did I know one from the other?), soldiers in fatigues; and this sketchy guy somehow, a large face I knew I would act on if I could just recall his job, his deep chin stonier for his short stature, eyebrows so thick and angularly peaked they didn't need the small, recessed eyes beneath, a man bronzed on neck and forearms contemplating both the busy pool and this big woman guard in camo fatigues one-handing at her side a more or less automatic weapon I wasn't familiar with with an awkward-looking outside sling swivel; yet also aware, I knew, of me, this stocky, quick civilian I half-remembered, tense, factoring me into the scene his blistered lips saying to the woman what I must hear while wondering all at once why he was here and why would our people consign the Scrolls to underground waterways, why not fax them home?

Why would the enemy target them, was it envy of this newly documented Jesus reportedly confirming in actual interview the Enterprise Conference's bold person-to-person Win-Win interaction two thousand years later? I try to honor my own ignorance—about people and what they mean. One forthright Syriac phrase in the transcript of the apparently prevailingly Aramaic-language interview with some Edessian dialectal colorings reportedly literally translated “succeed succeed,” a seed of EC's “there are only winners if the market plan is followed”; another Syriac term, literally “bird market peace” reportedly meaning “seller's niche” supposedly echoes our own venerable “flight plan” or “Christian game plan” which was a surprise to me in my ignorance if I believed my old hunch—or my struggling teacher's, really, the assistant swimming coach at the high school—that Jesus must have been pretty left-wing. Where
were
the Scrolls coming from, some Holy Land? An oasis where David I have heard escaped Saul? Further north where winter rains once clothed the Mesopotamian plain in verdure? Or where Euphrates attains its height in the mountains? And if this new, not secondhand profile of the Master chief executor of the miracles—saved virtually live in talk by an early first-century Roman with a genius for history, makes the Vatican like a man suddenly bald or worse feel challenged, will the new Pope still judge weapons of mass subtraction the lesser evil to cloning's multiplier?

Old Milt's kind of question, irked at The Inventor's envelopes, and at my “rage” to see—
See?
—the war which through my other so young Asian friend turned from seeing almost to another sense, as I subsequently tried to show at the Hearings though less for a theme of Competition synonymous among our people with freedom (to buy, for example, a fragrant candle called His Essence that smells like Jesus, his robes, in Psalm 45) than toward another of our senses I will call Understanding first sketched in samples of my sister's way of speaking or relation to me though nothing I could do justice to at the Hearings from which I become less connected while realizing that, not bluff or dynamic enough, I no longer knew if I was an emerging professional in the field of sports psychology, or had fallen into Errorism, a humorous but not all that humorous term in the field, which is a branch of sports medicine, and meaning an overprecise differing with somebody (and if they won't pass you the ball and you're the open man, it may affect your shooting eventually). And then my sister's voice so clear inside me it might have been messaging asking how “old Milt” had called me on the carpet about my enlistment for it had never been principally a birthday party for The Inventor. Only trying to make a contribution to just about every panel of the Hearings on Competition when it came to it eventually and say what I saw to show myself months later what I saved even to describe for others what went down when my friend, as I have already said, all but miraculously appeared.

Sports psychology out on a limb beyond its parent trunk sports medicine if I am in the right field even, led on and on from friend
and
foe by the equivalent of what you get along the upper wall of castles in old Damascus and Mesopotamia, those projecting galleries supported by arches with holes in the floor which came in handy for pouring boiling oil, water, or blood upon competitors below if you can make the time it came to me to say, finding at last the one person around—in the doorway of the next-to-last panel room of the Hearings—who understood thoughts of that kind probably because it was her kind of thinking, my sister.

Thoughts in an “up” moment at poolside leaving me exposed so to Storm's associate (yes) this deep-chinned KPMG accountant UK transplant to California I once saw through my swim goggles at East Hill checking their investment—though now as time, broken-down or not, ran out (shudderingly, I believe) through the palace building, witnessing an event that was and was not my job, I heard again the stupidly familiar words “
Come in handy
” this man before me now said to the plain vanilla Specialist he may in fact have fancied, meaning surely her old automatic rifle (of course of course—his words like memory itself) a Chinese SKS way-out-of-date post-World-War-II and trade-prohibited under U.S. law I'd caught a much better equipped contract-civilian on film ridiculing—the words felt in my chest an interruption of my heart waking the old surface scar bringing back my father's prediction
Come in handy
of my friend Umo, and that they'd bring back the Draft, it was only fair, hearing like never before my name called from above, near where an almost invisible trap-hinged section of the ceiling's mosaicked giant ear had snapped shut again too quick for me:

for there was Umo, compelled to be there, I could tell, arrived on that diving board notorious for penalties suffered by divers who fell short of excellence, yet in all his foreign flesh free—and “going,” as we say in our public pools back home or ask of somebody who stands up there on the high board too long (
You goin
'?): (but a dive multiplying all your damned questions into some moving, unanswerable statement, yet Umo here for me somehow)

and not here, I felt, for the same job as me:

yet for a job, solo probably—for where's his crew, where's the deserter?—for something has happened: and on the board still a boy, overflowing yet not surplus, still bound somewhere, diving it came to me for me at the same time as Get outa his way, a life weapon in himself. My throat would not sing out his name to him—he might have been Montezuma—I heard some familiar Rock ‘n Roll distantly below the pool yet somewhere central like a comfort level or taped home; mental yet sustaining like a wheel and on message, and as Umo (to these folk
what
, by these waters?—a not sufficiently developed or identifiable alien presence in the camouflage shorts, a local who doesn't belong here—did my job give me these words?—troublemaker rising up—how'd he get in, through the ceiling?)—hailing this sweating, dumbfounded Army cameraman in boots on the wet tiles—“Zach!”—who aims his handy beat-up company-issue camcorder quickly from the hip and too low for Godsake unthinking reaching his other hand into his pocket:

registering behind me the double cluck of a different chamber readying (because it wasn't the big blonde but the woman, small and dark, whose smell of jasmine soap, so bizarrely distinct from the gun oil and the gleaming slide and interlock of her newly rerustproofed M4 there and a hint of burn, I knew from the bedroom across the hall from mine at home) so I seriously doubted that this was my Operation Scroll Down job, handy as I might be: