The Scrolls damaged, had the home team saved what they needed? What did they need? But they had been the only team, I thought. Why did I doubt the other side’s hand here, they were the terrorists. Causes of the war. Christian soldiers right flank harch.
I must know—or would need to someday soon. I crouched by the half-destroyed Chaplain, and my knees were sore, bleeding inside my pants legs, and my arm half-dead, my fingers cut by steel, my back sending and receiving. Damp steel, killings rankly near and palace stone I had to keep blinder than I myself and leave here with what I had which was not pictures. A need to live, not kill. The Chaplain had recognized the name called from the clamor above.
And I—that person—saw for the first time in the gloaming his hand, thumb and two fingers pinching a paper.
And felt my mini in my shirt pocket and could just see the blood that tried to brim past his lip. “I hear you,” he said, hearing the steps now slowly descending off to my right, their exact concussions received at the base of my spine in fact through the raw sore or agony there telling me of my body and my comrade’s, for would I go without him and was he already gone?
For what would his absence, dead or alive, tell those slowly making their way down the stairs at the far end of this floor? At stake, as I guessed, the Scrolls, or an attack on them, and on Why We Were Here.
Some of this I would not say, months later in a crowded Panel room remembering faint, dark, kindest words You’ll know what to do, which, when I quoted them in the dark to my sister not long after I had been ferried—“spirited,” she called it—home, she hugged me, wanting nonetheless more from me; and at Day 2 of the Hearings on Competition I was careful not to recall what had come next from this man who had known names, mine and another he could not quite get it out or—it cost him too much life to—what this “other one” had “meant,” that wasn’t what the Scroll people “needed,” for who or what this “other one” was I wouldn’t have wished to say in public in my home city.
And two guys were standing at the back of the Panel room (as these people will), a white and a black, whom I didn’t at first recognize in combat fatigues. And in my account as an involved photographer of the explosion (my palace pool fiasco perhaps, I’d say to the room) and water running out, I found myself seeing my listeners for myself and recalling a man below the palace pool who was dying of voicelessness, but on the point of learning what exposing myself might in turn expose I kept the scrap of withered paper rescued from between his index and thumb scrupulously to myself.
A flashbulb went off in the Hearings room next to another camera person training a videocam as if the Chaplain-photographer’s story were not his but mine though only my witness to his words seeming to mean that oddly only one team, our own, had been anywhere near the explosion the film of which at least at pool level had been shown at the end of Day 1 with Umo’s dive interrupted by the blow at the guard’s rifle and resumed in one swing for some reason to seize priority, get ahead of the competition, a first for me though I did not add that I had been relieved of it and its videocam on the spot. A scholar had been cut off asking for documentation from the Aramaic of the Scrolls’ condensing Lazarus “back into one man not miraculously resurrected but—”
Tapped for an early second-day Panel I am introduced to seventy fellow citizens (you assume) some with copies of the Scrolls now published and we say packaged in English. But although it is not about them I am to speak, I am introduced as the Army photographer who bore witness to the attempt upon the Scrolls. At not quite twenty-one barely in the workforce studying sports psychology, I am asked here to speak of swimming or diving, and the knack or business of winning, and I find myself in free-fall reverie about backstroke: To not hear other voices or any voices; the body tempo of looking over your shoulder; relief at barely seeing where you were going (laughter) so you trust whatever it is, water, length of the pool (You, murmurs a neighbor), the ceiling, I tell them, let me tell you about the ceiling—(laughter), hearing myself and remembering what Umo heard sometimes in how I might easily speak or curiously or was it helplessly strike a note.
The literature says to set performance rather than outcome goals, I told my people. You know that where an athlete using a larger outcome goal fails to achieve it for reasons outside his control, this can generate enthusiasm-loss, failure feelings, be dispiriting—even for a full twist I had nailed a hundred times, it only took once ignoring the immediate unknown to fail; therefore always they say (and I think of a photographer’s backlight headaches so you set your exposure for the subject), set performance goals within that…that… I was about to say Unknown but found myself saying Known, and saw frowns among the listeners but not only. My shoulders and back as a backstroker I didn’t have the words for it once but even now shadowed by shoulder blade and rotator cuff muscles that arise from it, a bond between shoulder and back—and hands—and your lap flip…how you do it, forgetting something or other, the finish, the time, because… I’d had a friend who was good at this concentration, and he was going off a high board and I had called out to him, couldn’t help it though was it only in my mind?—because he’d called out to me from up there—
“Why did he?” someone suddenly asked—Oh in this packed room of necessary unasked and necessarily unformed questions asked, thanks for this one at least—the voice familiar from our city, the face (not noticed by me till then, as I tried to continue) Wick, who of course would be here, old assistant father-coach and calculus messenger.
“—his concentration—” I said confused, yet was I?
“So you—” a woman cut in, softly, hard to hear—
“unreal…ancient,” why did I add, “I wasn’t in the air or anything”—it was to Wick not the woman, who was on me now persisting, “…after that footage of the diver like they were bombing him that we were shown yesterday, you add this hearsay of some maimed underwater Chaplain witnessing the explosion all by himself, to insinuate that no insurgents were even there when the blast nearly erased these—denied us these these priceless—” the woman all but inaudible, and boring, yet kind of electrifying—a question about her—her powerful hands—and next to her a face I’d known for years under the Padres blue baseball cap worn pulled down over her abundant pinned-up hair and her brow and her large Mediterranean or India Indian eyes, until I cut in to remind not only the patriot who had been simmering I realized but also this great roomful of accredited participants (one soon to be challenged), that I had been stressing where I’d been ordered to take up position myself—at pool level where not the detonation below but the impact for crying out tears—
“Why did he call out to you?” my old mentor Wick asked again—called out, in fact.
“—these unique Scrolls—”
“Unique, ma’am!” I challenged her, ignoring Wick—“they bear out what we’ve been told for a hundred years, for crying out tears” (I was guessing) “so it’s a relief to find the prophet in his own words, one on one—”
“More than a prophet, thank you,” one hand reaching straight up above her shoulder like an athlete but in what sport I could tell no more than the scale of the hand if a scale can be gauged not by size but by strength, or was she recalling my backstroke words?
“—A pro,” I said, “a pro, blessed with initiative, not opposed to win-win—hey, the vineyards and fruits sold off by the servants while the master was away wasn’t just a story in Mark, it really happened. Again, an economist this Jesus almost creative, sensible—American!” I said, “and if you have to shoot those people—the lesson is you don’t leave your land to be worked by just anybody—walking on water is something else.”
Faces nodding here and there. I got a leader’s rush, what that would be like. My heart sank. What did I mean? The two men standing at the back, the white and the black, had their eye on me. They stepped out for a moment. They had come here looking. They could do what they liked as they saw it or within their thinking. “You don’t have to wonder why Matthew, what, forty, forty-five years later, didn’t have room for this stuff they found in the Scrolls—‘Blessed are they who come to market for they take the trouble to know who they’re dealing with’”—I held out my palm, oppressed also by the Chaplain’s interrogation story, fragments kept to myself brimming with ire now this swimming pool unmentioned here thus far underneath it his half-destroyed story gathering in me again as with my sister one night when I told her most of it but not all, my instinct warned me not to voice—and what did I sound like? an attitude… I yielded to the Moderator, who was in a state. The two men were back.
And my emerging job found itself in some use value I put them to as if I were not in the middle of something else.
Yet I sat down, faithful to this question, Why did he? Forthright participant I’m faithful to the evidence I gave this second morning. My voice now known, we listened to a very foreign man in dark glasses who spoke of fifteen languages heard in this city now and (he smiled) refugees from the war so changing demographics that (another smile) some neighborhoods are like an electrocardiogram of international conflict—a smile, a sweep of the hand, this expert who went on now to laud digital imaging used to tease out this ancient text, its often crushed fragments of characters not seen for nearly 2000 years, thus its fine touch “beggars description.” We learned how the wider use of this process had spurred investment in that war-torn country (and our own); how the technology had enhanced medical diagnosis and fine-tuned miraculously our satellite pictures. And what a super-(light-)sensitive digital camera could restore for the archaeological team, the ink itself reflecting light at one point in the spectrum while the blackened background reflects with a wavelength only a millionth of a meter different. Meanwhile, the room—“What a friend we have in Jesus,” does it think?
But I was coming to that question Why did he call out to you? It had come to me because I could not stop for it.
Just like that asked about a friend by one.
Dead or alive, comes back, me take you with—my friend just scarcely known pieces of himself—you’ll know—what to do: with such words a thread of blood drawn down from the mouth like a seam in the chin which barely moved: “Last words I am—without, my friend—they will gainsay…”—which drew a bubble of pale puddingy and purple and iron-rusty mucous out of him to relieve him like the words and let him go. Was he gone? Unsaid is he in me, like not absence but overload, and why the Scrolls were classified he’d promised to tell, and maybe could still—a laugh when you counted the leaks to the press—a furtive friendship dashed—was it Take me with you, dead or alive, he’d said? I balled the curiously durable papyrus from his thumb and index finger and ripped the duct tape from his belly and tearing a narrow strip of it taped the paper into my ear.
The blast and what seemed like its after-companion in overkilling must have done for Umo or the pieces of him which my videocam they’d confiscated shooting from the hip I had imagined would show us. Unlike the Scrolls, I thought, bereft.
What in the end had I to do with them or the war? The Scrolls! Compact and to the point, they have issues, American, they are questioned in the open market, welcomed, unstuffy. A seamless whole even from what I find uneasily familiar in the clips flooding my sleep. Their seeming completeness a drug for this inspector of paper trails if not a recorder of deeds—a phone ringing and ceasing in the night someone could help me to answer (and it is my brother I would speak of—and they would have me speak—though in closed session, in private—and not of those last days, the music project, deserter, dive, explosion, fiasco; and not of these businesslike thoughts scrolled-down to your hopelessly interrupted level, but whatever might call them into question).
That this “Interview” as the Scrolls are called (though another equivalent from the Syriac is thought more apt) should so seamlessly all but blot out that palace day, the bombing of our American Scrolls not quite shredded as they arrived by well and met almost their match and the deaths assembling in my thought faces wrought there. CPA curled in his own blood, that hairy back palely humbled by its bronzed and wasted neck to let you forget he had done business with my father at East Hill. What business? Would it matter? Chaplain, crushed by his steel coverlet, like a cruel plane compressing him, real, remembered, living to the end, his fists clamped in the rigor of his character so the scrap of scroll got torn in two, lucky to make it out—of whom my sister, who knew a little about paper, said when, one day, or rather night, I gave my dank, cordite-reeking account, “Best friend you never had”—so much of her in those words. To be what she means. Where sound goes less to her than what music leaves—a chill corroborating what? His people I would contact. Somehow I waited, picturing falsely to myself the Chaplain given last rites and left where he was, yet gently asking who was the Other one I had mentioned the Chaplain mentioning weakly at the end—“they” had got what they wanted, which wasn’t what “the Other” had “meant”…what did that mean? She was always mine and she knew the Chaplain through me and may have known even then, the night I in my way told her, that he was not deserted by me. The sewer told its tale, it waited for us.
He was in that plane that I hope I didn’t pretend with him, though building secretly and in the account I gave my sister leaving out (and always the father I never thought of!) for secrecy’s sake and for mine where the Chaplain might be. To my Two ways out, up or down, he had replied, Try again. A third exit? I’d take the Down. The stairs now putting unfriendly feet through their paces sounded an overlapping pitch of two people coming down, two at least. I did not hear the steps. The steps resumed, slow. I snapped a string of shots with my remaining camera if it was working, though mini which is somehow good. My bad arm dead but strong, the peeled-down wet suit caught on a corner of steel and stretching till the body of my friend jumped as the rubber came loose, I had hold of him through it and I let myself down through the ruptured floor and was hanging from a ledge above the well and its foul surge that recalled where these waters had been. I let go, spreading one arm out to break my fall, and broke the dark surface, and he came down on top of me, and I could see beneath its rush of displaced bubbles for a second, as I and the Chaplain were borne away in possibly Umo’s traceless wake if he’d ever trust me again (though why should he in the first place?). The thought, so immersed in the wicked stench as to be part of it and hardly noticeable to itself, had dumped me some not even wilderness place or beach of delay, I had done my time, it was said, but I didn’t believe. I thought for myself if I could find words that had found me, it was at first to be an adviser or the water itself had been what I’d sought by enlisting. For above the tunnel’s subtle roar like a calling or added intelligence or an angry sleep like toxin in the water searing my bad arm for me it was my long-nosed father I envisioned—never to be listened to again I would trust. Though what would I have to show for this? I had slipped the camera into my shirt pocket now immersed like some deed in an awful dream to drown in.
Seamless someone called them when they came out and I didn’t read them. Was the California season, the Spring, too long? What was I waiting for? So soon after I came home alone, my father by turns in Colorado Springs to do with Olympics I was told, and DC, in a desk job treated by my mother like a sacrifice made in time of war that I would rather not know about yet not as I don’t know about the Scrolls.