Cannonball (25 page)

Only now did I realize that the woman who looked like my driver, early that palace day and astonishingly that night where I came out along the canal, who on Day 2 of these much publicized Hearings had belittled my sports psychology training while noting my well-regarded photos of the war only to call the “fascinating” handheld dive footage “accidental,” had put her finger on what might well be guessed from my witness of the injured photographer. That however common the insurgents' theft of their own antiquities and the enemy's desire to appropriate a find on its own home ground like the Scrolls, a weapon additionally in the war of ideas against the green and ancient life of an Islam fundamentally uncompetitive and without a future in the region, there had
been
no insurgents that day below the pool, no team but our own archaeologist and his Occupation specialists; so the explosion might have been set off by us.

One scrap of its damage I kept Ziploc'd. I took it to bed with me, showed it only to my sister, mapping its meaning and privately some small gap in our national, published text that it would fill—when one morning she asked me what had happened to the man who'd given me the scrap besides that he'd died and I said he hadn't really given it to me I'd ripped it out of his hand (assuming she would only ask what had happened before that and not after)—against a day when, expected to speak about competitive swimming at the Hearings, my chest scar from the dive accident, like a poisoned lash or (I knowing little more than English) a translation key like the Ziploc warming in my pocket, my leg, my suspect heart, all signaled what I must do.

That onetime dive timed like the blast from below that Storm Nosworthy you knew had monitored upstairs—my friend competing (though for what?), coming to the rescue somehow (though in the film now to be devoured the dive multiplied to fragments might have
caused
the explosion)—would sometimes at night divorce itself from the diver. To talk to someone. Even my mother. Ah, a mistake to single out one, though in our family it had been for me my sister. And still—and more and more—my sister read my body and my mind, as she had lately on her own I learned been developing a practice (apparently now approaching vocational status) of no less than, and (as she would say to me) no more than, reading faces, which she had always done, like picking up heat and chill from people. To talk to a former teacher about the dive's four-dimensional volume, it came to me, in-air shifts like layers, the entry feetfirst like all even-numbered flips, to gather the parts. While Umo's body, with all its sleek surplus simplified and beyond the exploding pool, carried away, as the Chaplain, whom there wasn't time to talk to about it (about my friend, or if this
was
friendship), had inadvertently imagined for me not blown to bits. Yet for viewers at the Hearings, how to put Umo back together, this casualty of mine faceless and on my confiscated film torn apart by motion?

I was burning oil the day I tried to track down the Russian in Chula and had to leave the car at a Chevron station when Dean Moriarty would just take somebody's and drive it to Denver and bring back a better one. And I remembered “the Other,” who the Chaplain had said had “meant” something “they” had misused. And then the Chaplain's mingled words,
They'll get him. It's not your job
. My job, I recall his interest in it with time running away on his life which yet ran into mine—his last kindness, split-second view of Umo plummeting by feetfirst to vanish in style, my friend, forgotten, irrelevant his entry splashless or at the last an unseen cannonball impacting whatever—a well, many wells, steel, and then flushed down a sewer.

In the privacy of what I came to think could be my Chaplain's Third Way Out—some of this up on my elbow looking down at her, some confided in the dark to my sister—I had put together my footage, the pool debacle it recalled, and my exit from the region that afternoon and night by swift water, foot, car, sky, sometimes an escort but with barely a trace it seemed—with, escorted or not, no fingerprint check or ID asked for by earphoned perimeter guards plugged in to their music, to say nothing of the imperiled camera in my breast pocket or the strip of duct tape across my ear that I'd forgotten, or at the outset my right hand that ruddered me along the well canal hearing a shout, meaningless, a call, a violent sluice, my eyes stung inward swimming. And still in stunned exit mode back at a night post exchange more like a 7/11 where I bought toothbrush, toothpaste, something to put them in, with money I'd forgotten, laundered in the well, and was looked at strangely though it was California where for that matter I was to be notified of “Active/Inactive Reserve” status, modest per diem a surprise and college tuition as needed, no questions asked, and one bleak dawn (though she had said I was better) leaving my obscure apartment my sister on my arm and catching like a snapshot eyes in a parked VW down the block, I realized that my late Chaplain had described the interrogation of the Navy Seal woman because it was his job to pass it on. What outsiders know of you is much and shallow or little and profound. The Russian knew about the shout in midair. From Umo it must have been. Why would Umo tell that? Anyone will say things. Nothing else to say. Silence within their words potential. But the word “sister” struck me in the mouth of the Russian and of Storm.

Not quite as American folk will talk at an open-ended Lunch Buffet if given half a chance about vacation condo time shares, the hours your liver transplant took, or neither (1)
hiding
your talents nor (2) showing them
off
, or about growing a small consulting business unfazed by practices and especially drawbacks, unpleasant surprises, possible draw-downs in your region and field, to say nothing of replacement knees, or even No pain, no gain on the way to market—the secret cradle of democracy as Middle East was cradle of so much else, which might be a gathering risk for me exposed at Lunch that second day. Yet in the jaundiced eye I cast on the Scrolls I was hearing something else: some of it made sense, as when this Jesus, now occasionally called the American Jesus, takes it way further than Saint Mark's a half century I'd recently learned after the time of the real Jesus, who is reported there as telling his men, Peter and the others, to check out what they've gained leaving father, mother, wife, kids, brothers, sisters behind and becoming disciples, but in the earlier
in
terview urging in person that we virtually disown our family, to put them behind us if we were to be successful (talking to the Roman of course interviewer since identified as an out-of-favor nephew of Herod the Great). Whereas in Umo's case (and it had become one, for he was wanted), leaving had been forced on him—not just here but on another continent a mysterious journey away from the sea, as I had plotted those orphan points like an interminable delay, then toward the sea, confirming him in his self-reliance and in family, mine possibly, at a time when I really must leave, and among reasons given us to do things—somebody's words, a job, going to war, duty, the character of a friend, even uncorking a pretty great dive off a springboard (or a cliff, I'd had rumors of a month ago )—I find that different reason I understood the Chinese authorities who were a factor in this shifting equation had basically dismissed, to do the thing for its own sake almost, and this might not come to you under the yoke of family.

I thought I would go ask The Inventor if this could be so, bounce it off him. Was it to return something? I had phoned once since his break-in, I'd been home and he had abruptly had someone on the other line and never called me back. I had kept an eye out for Umo's truck. Once I tried to look up the Russian. What was done was done.

Why would I visit The Inventor now? Word passed along the Lunch Buffet that we were plenary this afternoon and a surprise guest would welcome us.

My teacher and coach spoke up at my elbow: “He called out to you because you would know what he was doing up there, is that it?”

“Wick,” I said, turning to find him not at my elbow but a distance unclear and here were others circling nearer with their plates, one in combats I now recognized from months ago wearing then mufti (that unlikely word The Inventor taught me, speaking of empire); “Wick”—I reached with my free hand clutching napkin and fork—“And did you?” Wick said. “Wick.” For he had skipped the warm greeting you expect after so many months and I lowered my voice. “What?” I said. The GI music-listening project, people Umo had been with, both of us set up, but the real job inside it that you stumble on. “A deserter?” said my friend as if my voice were a form of subdued dishonesty; “someone they were looking for?” “Wick”—he had picked up some fool need in me the last thing you show if you're…“he had no choice—” “You think?” “They knew who he was with and he had something to lose even though they must have told him he was showing up for a photo op, his friend Zach filming at a pool in a palace basement.”

Who I saw gathering near gave me pause, but better, I could tell Wick knew pool, palace, the days, the vectors, rates of change, more assured than I'd seen him, and kept his distance with attention I would not fault: it was his respect for a marked person who would speak, I'd missed him, his obscure life.

“He was always competitive,” I said. “You never met, you never saw this—”

“Not quite true, I saw you guys on the corner, he saw me looking out the window, I'd swear he did—” “—and there was something else,” I said.

Not quite true
, Wick's words—Umo bobbing his head, cocky—a window of memory open and shut—Wick speaking above the smaller voice behind me (like a meaning), the woman in the kerchief from which at the back fell a blond and dark-streaked braid like my driver's the day of the palace: “You said,” she said in such a low almost inaudible angry voice, “‘this profit-stricken country'—well you made fun of that poor GI who wanted to know—” “The captain?” I pointed out the steel-haired observer in fatigues. “—about timing and concentration, he was only asking—”

“Stating,” I said, recalling the nights of my life, my driver appearing again, my driver's offer of first aid, her boat hook, the piece of black rubber wet suit clutched in my hand that was not mine.

“Needing to know.”

“That's his job,” I said. “To put it nicely. Like Navy Seals, sunning themselves, barking, slipping into the water to swim so magically.” (I was about to make a mistake.) “He gets paid for extracting information.” (I was guessing and I had guessed right.)

“And you're a six-month graduate of the war well what's so bad about profit you're cashing in on with a camera they taught you how to use—” “He is?” “That's what she said,” I said. “Oh but of course but he was in the service,” said a man with a briefcase on a shoulder strap who enjoyed revelations. “Still is…” said a knowledgeable older woman. “He's what?” I heard Wick and Bea say. “The shots of the…,” a familiar hoarse voice tried to say, “of the headless kids sitting bolt upright.” A woman in a maroon blazer took him by the arm and spoke to him, pointing to his badge and more than pointing and somehow he did not retort. He had a frog in his throat; while a woman in surgical scrubs asked if anyone had seen the color photo they'd turned into a poster of GIs at night driving green and orange golf balls off the back porch of the Visitors Bureau hotel into a lake. “Doused in chemicals,” I heard Wick say, and the nurse in scrubs, “Lake full of good-eating carp.” “Fed on American garbage,” I said, “dozens in there, huge, rabid,” the photographer telling you what you were looking at but wasn't in the pic.

The two men in camos inched up, a shadow passed across the long lunchtime buffet, was it the freshly renovated acoustic ceiling already discolored here and there? “Still cannon fodder, the war's not done,” I said to Wick, who, though I turned away, knew I wanted to stay, “A/I they classified me if anybody wants to know exactly,” I said to my teacher, my father's indispensable assistant, my friend I believed like the shadow that had come down and was within.

I had seen Storm Nosworthy. First time in eight months, the face as I read it told me I needed to get the scrap of scroll Ziploc'd in my pocket into English. I banked away along the “Spaghetti Springtime,” the blue marlin it said on a photo ID flagged into one once airborne chunk, a substantial brusselssprout-type tree stuck over, instead, with jumbo olives and it said live anchovies, and over there shrimp spring-rolled with orange sections, and further along raw cauliflorets embedded in vegetable ice.

Behind me following me, “The new world is messy, someone's got to clean it up,” I'd heard it before, this woman's anger overdone: What would she have of me?—her intelligent eyes, lips, hands but who was I?—people listening for anything interesting—surely she quoted someone. Her seatmate Bea close at hand, something in Bea's attention to the woman. While at the far end of the thirty-foot buffet hovering prophetically, the oval exaggeration of a face not quite containing its parts like deeds that won't go away and shorn of its goatee now but moustached heavily like a Turk, the rezoned nose at such a slant it might have been in motion and independently was, with that swerve or parallel if I could track it, discuss it, with Wick—one eye arrowing the windows, another the dwarf palm layout and veteran wheelchair contingent I had spoken with (to try to tell one guy in particular where I was coming from), surveying the spread, the field of conferees, my first sighting of Storm since the palace day who had probably arranged for Umo to be blown to pieces, and attending Storm the sweet-breathed Law Dean long-skirted, menuing the food for him when she saw me, my work here gathering in and expanding determined to ignore the Seals captain and his African-American
superior
I thought (within earshot a moment ago as they had not been at Meade dressed for that occasion, respectively, in uniform with four gold stripes on the jacket cuff and a lethally tailored suit like exact plans for my Chaplain's coming participation in Operation Scroll Down), two thugs you look for again only to find seeing you.