Cannonball (31 page)

“We outsourced the blue marlin farm,” Storm said remembering. A brown business envelope in his jacket pocket, he had it out now. “We know we know…that he crawled some fifteen feet or was dragged because…because…because we tracked DNA from the main urine deposit and and through skin scrapings, waste products, fabric. To where he takes the plunge.” (“A friend,” Em muttered.) “What was that?” “A devoted friend,” I said. “Yet a three-hundred-pound steel plate was found to have his traces on its underside—” (“For friendship's sake?”) “—and how he could have got out from under it—crushed when it fell on him…” (“Not his face, though,” Em whispered.)

“Two'na half maybe. Three, never,” I said. Storm hasn't missed my meaning. “Your devoted friend?” “His.” “Ah, his.” Storm alive as not before. “You would…” “Do anything to bring him back.” “Somewhere, along that metropolitan well network that we're setting to rights, he exists (as we need to address spills right here of untreated sewage, Storm purred), and how he got away from the blast site we can guess, Zach, until we know more—” Em slid her arm through mine again—along a leg of that sewer named after the President I recalled—a sewer I'd described to Em, water part of what contained it inspiring me when she would kindle her incense, turn out the lights, ask what came “just
before
that” as if not what comes now.

But now, “His
nose
,” she whispers, “the blue
spots
,” she whispers, “it means
‘
Im
pris
onment,'” she read the face across the elevator car, my arm knew each finger that gripped it, we heard now a hubbub coming our way. And the other wide door at right angles to the door we'd come in slid back leaving us face to face with a mob in the lobby going to the same place as us and struck silent as we came into view. First, though, or almost first, the Seals captain and his ramrod teammate “CEO” in combats waving back a hundred others who could wait or take the other elevator, but clearly a two-man escort for the sixth passenger making this trip to the Conference level.

Was it my frog-in-the-throat questioner? It was.

In the long white spiritual garment and no badge showing. And Em greeted him (“
Hus
ky,” she said), the very one who before they'd cautioned him this morning had told me I didn't “mean” what I said, but we had been uneasy and close and I'd cut him off; and my “profit-stricken country” and more than that “one great war-torn body” meant also the globe I suppose, glib with parallels ungrasped and the facts we collect on the job from the voices we hear, yet left me taxed for what I might have said. To Umo, my sister, my father, Milt, the accredited conferees, Marine recruiters on a no-kid's-butt-left-behind watch, War Child snapping his wrist by the hotel turned stock exchange.

And now against this crowd balked by the spaces of the multiuse elevator closing on their faces, accreditation badges somehow not to be seen on their lapels, pullovers, shirt pockets, breasts, ID lockets, though there in their free faces
Entitled
(but to what?)—“Get ‘em outa the building,” captain said (“Done,” said CEO, his idea practically…“This Hearing!”)—it was jealousy in me not envy of Husky, and even as my sister unsure of what she had entered into gripped my arm, and captain and “CEO,” his cell phone out so quick it might have been up his sleeve, took up formation along the wall opposite us with this peaceable, curiously significant person in front, I must gather what was going on even in an elevator and against this operator Storm to be undone I believed but dangerous to Em, who had met a friend of hers who seemed to be in custody and hardly acknowledged me though he had something remarkable in him to say and would say it.

“Your people,” I said. “My people?” “Come on, that woman working with captain and the black guy acting the wacko?”

Though now Storm points at my chest.

Tradeoff time
, he means. A brown business envelope in hand, Storm Nosworthy will cross this room that rose toward our Hearings floor, target what he will use, and, doomed, it came to me, can't know how my father's birthday envelope divides me between what random hurt Em hints it held and what really I'd paid twenty dollars for (or
was
it ten?), Earth Veins you make your own running universally through each of us, rift and river, a hole in the head, a half-completed dive to heal, yet quite parentless (if you could prove it, Em once said); how Umo pronounced him—“Stom's secret weapon you better get to know.” The humoring muscle of distrust an orphan doubt no less trusting me, asking what meant “brother,” describing grandfather's plan to come to Mexico, work the mineral mines, sign up with Plutarco Calles, live right; the secret weapon, though, Umo, how do you figure that? The brown envelope, always about to be drawn out for me, delayed, I can feel it, that voice to nail down our understanding
quid pro quo
as, on the other cheek, Storm's face shouts our very History
et habeas corpus silentem
—beside us (for I was right, he
has
come across to us) he speaks in confidence from his own, base Faith—Umo dead, Chaplain alive (yet Umo come thousands of miles to hook up with
me
—do I understand that trip, those Umo miles?—while the other guy lives again in a scrolled-down monitoring of those dark and memorial waters) the Scrolls Storm's
baby
(!), for holistic proof rests beneath ineetiative, ineetiative beneath democracy, and what shall it profit us near term if we lose the Near and Middle East?—this giant lift inching up retarded by what's left in return for what was always there; Wick's morning-after calculus healing more wounds than my dive, more pitfalls than an elevator's division between waiting silence and, with two adjacent doors, a need to speak before time runs out.

To me a friend and mere miracle, the Chaplain on the other hand matters so much to Storm he'll flush him even from extinction along old sewerways. Just one of many you'll silence who might explain the explosion uncharitably for the Administration, for us. He had the Vice President's ear.

“Citizenship for Silence,” Storm speaks what is in his pocket—“more than a fair trade, kids, and clear as anything”—then (smile grim as a clock face): “
Post
humous Citizenship
now
, your idea, Zach, deeded whether ‘deceased
or
living,' I think we can certainly put in writing, with a No Rescind rider guaranteed by some pretty amazing signatures faxed from DC an hour ago.” (The smile weird as words.) “In return
for…”
the hand gesture suggestive. “Not much to ask from someone and you really are someone, you
two
.”

“Em,” said her friend Husky in the white kurta (and in custody to all appearances), “Em?” “What could you do to us anyway?” my sister said, in the ceremonial advance of the elevator. “What did
we
do but be a family of two somewhere?” my sister said, Storm staring at the shared and to-be-revered floor as if he saw it moving. Then to me, “Silence—” he began (my sister by my cheek muttering, “Dead or
living
‘posthumous'?”)

“This soldier, Em (?)” said her friend—“said, ‘You can call me Captain.' 'n'
I'm
OK with it. It's my first commandment right to honor my own ignorance.” “Husky,” Em said. They seemed to laugh. (I was on my own and could tell Husky kind of respected me.) “Tryin'a recruit me, Em.” Elevator moaned. “For what, Husky?” softly. “Cap'n said, ‘Djou read the Scrolls?' Not rilly.” (The Seals captain in camo combats gripped the hungry shoulder of the man in spiritual dress, breathless too.) “‘Well, it's not two Lazarus but one,' did I know that? ‘And
he
ditn'
need
to come back, right?—‘cause
he
never died in the
first
place—and Jesus was best
friends
with him,' and did I read the Scrolls? and I said, ‘Not rilly; did you?'”

“Silence agreed on here and now,” Storm commenced, his eyes narrowing the floor—but it was also the exchange with Husky. “‘n y'know what
Cap'n
said?” said Husky.

The captain spun Husky around to face him, muttering, “Squeeze you out like a sponge.”

“Said, ‘Ditn'
have
to read it! Had it from the horse's mouth,
'
” Husky said over his shoulder to Em, to me too I was certain, a friendly exchange once jogging with an even then fugitive friend fellow photographer and Chaplain all but resurrected in me now, Lazarus, yes, between me and the Chaplain! The envelope drawn forth for my hand, I have it still, a document, next week when we'll be on a last junket to locate Umo, Em and I before I leave, tell him the good news—while Storm rapid-fired terms of the deal in intimate undertone now: Explosion unquestioned, it is what it is; authenticity of Scrolls unquestioned; and by same token no leak to media describing a relationship between major principal Zachary and sister (since “
certain
Family Values sat not well with the national community that had gotten behind the war, the Scrolls, this Christian President”). The elevator door strained—perhaps against its newness, for the unit was undeniably masking-tape new—and gave way at last upon more light than people where I'd been at noon, and now Storm thought he would charm the Dean tilting his head, finishing with me, he thought—the brown envelope mine now—or sort of addressing both of us: “For backup we got a fantastic film record of the bombing the Scrolls heinously survived, if fragmentarily, to be distributed for spiritual export crediting a cameraman of genius (which brings us to another quick trip for you, Zach, if it's OK)”—the good news I felt in my blood.

Heinously surviving (?)…to recall, I half recalled, and less than half understood, this same man's
forgotten
! (that palace day):
You won't be
forgotten
…as your father asked you to
. I slipped the envelope into my jacket pocket, and drew out by its torn feel one of two small sheets already there, hearing between us faintly the best of Storm last—unreally weird, yet…yes, Zach, family values, yes, that Storm could just eat up if it was only him himself (“though unlike you I never had so to speak a sibling”). A small sound of…was it pain from my sister, ecstasy? and for my ear only,
This citizenship, you know
, she hissed while I to her, “That ‘carpenter' one about the ‘unpretending time' being our ‘plane,'” I said from the book she had given me the first time around, chagrined to recall so little of it and almost like Lincoln's someone else's words at that for some new farewell.

Interrupted now by her friend Husky, a perverse call for help, “Guy's so ugly you gotta wonder, but in this country that's still a person,” Lazarus and the horse's mouth rose up in me like foresight
and
memory and in return for what I'm half losing, was that it?

“You had that badge?” I said. CEO followed us.

I waved The Inventor's notepaper as Storm made to go for the Dean, shaking his head at his wristwatch, like We're here, we're here—the two limbs of the little notebook of her cell phone open, a look on her face, What a
work
horse! Storm's body language complimenting her, but—

“Check out the hand, Storm, half an hour old,” I waved the paper, the entrance to the great abandoned buffet lounge before me, a smell of seven-grain and spiced turkey or was it liver; mayo and melon slices in the sun, the yolky paprika'd statement of rank leftover deviled eggs and cold fish—and over by the windows stood Wick unmoving. “Check out the words here, Storm, at the beginning, right?—'n'here at the end (?)”—Scroll words Storm would know, wouldn't he?—they came from parchment saved from the blast and in safekeeping eight months ago in my ear and subsequently in pocket, bed, glove compartment, love, but as I hardly had to tell him, so precisely between us, though we were drawing a small audience, “because you already had it—the whole thing—this wasn't needed, this scrap from the bomb,” the text like all the other revelations to see the light of day in English had already been in hand somewhere else, “your explosion that day pure show, your palace—” I peered at Storm. A smell from his face now of stale cardamom seeds, leaf extract, dead tortoise, and a couple of on-the-run lunchtime shots of Jim Beam I realized I'd smelt in the car told me he knew what I had here in my hand but had never seen it.

But, the car! I thought.

I turned, my sister was with me and I told her and her hand dived into her bag and held it up, the remote-entry fob—the car left unlocked—her things, her plans (CEO was instantly on his cell)—our distance new, gathering prophetic and unknown upon me—losing one Em, gaining what? CEO watching, behind me, the Law Dean's futile call, I sensed a scattering of the accredited not yet adjourned to the Conference room though the afternoon had more than come, CEO gone, and—“This citizenship Umo's getting, living
or
dead”…my dearest sister entering from our already strange distance tells me what I had already realized, “‘Posthumous' even if citizen's
alive
? Isn't that what it means?” she asks beautifully; and “In return for what, Zach?—you don't owe him.”

The acoustic ceilings, a clarity or known future that turned their stains to coastlines intricate with nested corruption, the bay and the sea sky out the windows, and a familiar but now unfurled figure, the woman who had attacked me to make me give something away I thought, closing on Wick, who's looking out the window absently, for a moment a ghost.

And remembering him so long ago seen by Umo—of course!—from a distance leaning out the classroom window and I must not ask but tell Wick—the dive I have slowed down as if I could divide it endlessly from its end—my job now nearer somewhere between my sister's “before” and Umo's “after” and another trip vouchsafed only to her for its own sake—and knew better than my own my sister's breath close behind, and my name in Storm's diseased throat: