Though I would have to say that’s where we were going, the Hearings, and I would have to make my sister come and find out what Storm Nosworthy had in mind; he had his value over time.
But if Storm’s people harmed her, her name, her faith in herself, a hair of her, the Scrolls would be exposed by me in at least their circumstances and called into question, minor as maybe they’ll prove—and for Storm they were a special project he’d organized, his claim on whatever, for he got even the Intelligence people tracking for him and had found out about us even more than was worth finding out. Why? We’d know how to give him a good time. What if we had a Biblical child? she had murmured. I know what night. A Biblical what? I said—no, I meant what kind of…? We were well along. It was intelligent, like the tent night when E and I held hands, fingers really, across our father’s feet but tonight I had a hand on M’s belly, recently now she was in writing “M,” which, said, was “Em” (between us). Would that be a lucky child? I said. Depends which Bible you keep. Keep? I never threw one away, she said but not only the self-proclaimed holy kind. I wondered what I had done.
And so did the man who was waiting at the end of the hall on the bathroom threshold with only the darkness of the medicine cabinet mirror behind him, it was war as I left her door faintly ajar—yes, her door was open—and crossed to my room and when I locked the door I was free or had a breather from it, but two hours later I woke up in my room thinking and alive and I had to piss and I pissed into a collie dog coffee mug and two old tumblers that I found in my room rather than walk the hall. And lived with my sister’s intelligence when I said, This kid wouldn’t be like the one in the Bible that his father took him out and sacrificed him. No, she said, another night, at the last minute his father didn’t after all. It was a story. Last minute. What good is that? What can you expect? The Old Testament is old? Old news. Out of date, Christians like to think. Pretty primitive, black-and-white, low-budget. It was slanted, her joking, from way back. It could be anxious a little (like asking if something had happened today as if that would explain tonight). (I said “primitive” was a good word for her.) Whereas the New Testament would never sacrifice anyone like that… Are you kidding? I said. Now look, she whispered, having me in her grasp.
Wheels out of line, chassis swaying, The Inventor overtaking, we let him, God. We pulled over and he to the opposite curb, the street broadening as we did so. We were late. Posters way up ahead—FINISH THE JOB—IF YOU GOT A JOB GIVE IT TO A BUSY MAN—JESUS ALL THE WAY—JESUS KNOWS THEY’RE RUNNING ON EMPTY—JESUS AND CO INVEST IN REALITY—FROM BURNING BUSH TO FREE ELECTIONS—two corners further south, the blue-and-white helmets of the California Highway Patrol here at the edge of downtown and parked motorcycles leaning next to squad cars. The posters meant really finish the finishing, end the ending—well, I hoped it was still going when I got back to the Middle East if only to finish my business not making any sacrifices for anybody. Pretend Arabic script I was able to make out, perhaps as a veteran, said, “Train them to take care of their shit so we can generate some wind to farm.” Though it was then, recalling I had hoped those wretched waters might jolt my friend to life, whose name I still didn’t know—and at the Lunch Buffet a wheelchair sergeant who had suffered some spinal nerve dissolution only many months after he had worked with a team that, up to their neck in the Euphrates, had cut the detonation wires in April 2003 to save a major bridge from blowing — that I heard Em’s cell, after her V for Victory deaf Beethoven man’s ringtone, announcing on Speaker the speaker I’d been expecting.
While our Inventor hastening across the road brought us the “bad luck” Coaches Directory he’d wrested from Cheeky’s bosom, whom he didn’t like to leave alone, warning us as he came stumbling toward us that the calls we had missed meant trouble (and two whirring bicycles nearly sideswiped him before, behind—man, woman, hybrids going possibly nowhere so in some endlessly final slowness of delay Time itself it almost came to me, the great interrupter, gathered all the motion it marked), while with his strange ear our dedicated Inventor by turns quick and occasionally deaf to what was uncool told us the new seeds promised if we recollected in the Scrolls that could “grow on fucking rock” and send “ears to heaven” (it was said) might all be “Fascist listening devices” of which the repellent voice on his home phone seeking us was a purrfect instance. Realizing as he came across to us that that very voice addressed us now on Em’s speakerphone, The Inventor was especially irked when by now Em had shouted back across me that we had our own copy she’d already told Cheeky—though No, he said, she doesn’t need it she—Cheeky of all of us should (I said), God, man, it’s Umo, Vera Cruz—!
“No, I will tell to you it is right heerre the page he marked—”
No no please, Em said, as Inventor reached our side safely, we knew the place. Which was strictly true only of her, my little sister who once upon a day, knowing I, the angry one (I thought), had no need to touch the Directory much less read the entry on that southern California swimming coach, had with one slip, a stumble, summed up for me: so the brief résumé that named East Hill (its local swim club area Imperial in the western zone of USA Swimming) and his background and the gist of his methods, let slip the reference to the son who it was hoped could…(it gave Em pause)…“could double as diver slash swimmer”—her pause, like so much in her reading and speech for the brother always infinitely worth attending to like her other body or a thought poised to spring, an omission not so much right then in the entry but a few words on so that, as she would do when she was sight-reading at the piano, she was reading a little ahead as well, “Page one fifty-three,” she said to The Inventor, a special number for me, she said (and then I thought he muttered—like an achievement till now kept to himself—Indeed I once translated that number into Chinese).
Blackly outraged is The Inventor now by the phone voice its Speaker message that they’re glad we’re almost there they’re waiting patiently for what will keynote the Scrolls as ongoing war strategy but more a calculus of the aftermath; where today we “add what only one person, Zach, can give to amplify our sense of where these Scrolls are coming from, Zach, as if in the broad view historically we ‘outsourced’ for bottom line your veteran contribyoosh—”
Mine now? was I over-hearing, alerted, bummed, shocked, awed only at some toxic effrontery to be explained—my contribution? Says who?
—“so pivotal” to this project of “…pandemic democracy”—confided without a whiff of irony by the onetime Sacramento speechwriter, as, overheard now, The Inventor pounded the roof of our Honda lamenting the loss of those “forrteen shoeboxes” of envelopes yet now to my ear alarmingly even heart-sinkingly regretting just moments ago an “indiscretion by Cheeky surrendarred to that warped and viperous voice” when it phoned seeking us, her parting question Then who was the one who was dead but thought to be living?—
—my true job nonetheless gathering with Cheeky’s true charity and hope, against sirens heard converging on us, their hood emblems pointed unknowing toward the future and what Storm Nosworthy and his team foregrounding the Seals captain and the agency “CEO” who had phoned Em would do to safeguard the Scrolls for the War’s sake where my job might be to safeguard the threat TO all this of a dead witness’s potential afterlife, my Chaplain—best friend you never had, my Em had called him.
“Why did we buy your envelopes without seeing what was inside?”
“You were good fellows. You knew.”
“Well, Milt got mad at them.”
“Ah yes, I tould him to get in touch with his—”
“—‘close to the loins of the Administration’ is all Milt let me see, and a name—where did you get that?” I asked The Inventor—“Em you remember Sacramento?”
“It is ulluways researrch of an eclectic—”
“—No no, no, Milt grabbed it back. But it was what I didn’t get to see, so who was this eclectic source?” “Ah, it may have been Umo?” “You mean it was?”
It was like the stones that when you took them to throw at someone they reversed to igneous and burst into fire in your hand according to Milt’s father, but the envelope had said, Make your sibling the apple of your eye and Milt didn’t have a sibling, furthermore it spoke against fathers, he said.
“And you did not only buy,” said The Inventor, preoccupied perhaps by the indiscretion he had admitted on behalf of Cheeky and forgetful of the Coaches Directory he held like a catalogue at his side, and looking in back as if he might ask for a lift, “I gave you two envelopes for your diving wound: the Goldthread to crush into a poultice—”
“You had a hole in your heart,” my sister said. “You were looking right through it,” I said.
“I knew what you were thinking, I heard the words through the hole—” “Yes you have the gift when you are together,” The Inventor began. “—you were thinking you couldn’t breathe.” “—and the other envelope I gave with the worrds—” “But you sold him two others,” said Em, she was my fortune, my beauty coldly knowing more than me, and she tapped the heel of her pedal foot on the floor, the sirens two blocks away; but had The Inventor ever seen us together before today? “It is good to get worrds from out of nowhere, a tradeoff,” said The Inventor, the cell phone streamed its Fifth Symphony tune into his mood and made him laugh—“The number Beethoven put aside most frequently and took up ah-gain of all his—!”
“Out of nowhere? Words from someone don’t come out of nowhere,” said my sister. (That envelope, it was the one I’d given Dad, the day, the night, of two enlistment parties, sight unseen.) “Your Leader it is said never opens envelopes except when it’s a memorial awarrd,” said The Inventor, “our trip has more than one cause, and I traveled to find the oceanographer’s handmade aeroplane but also to replenish the Goldthread which I foresaw we would need.”
I flipped my wrist to show him the time. “The Hearings,” I tapped his fine fingers. “They were cut-rate,” said The Inventor, and let go of the window edge, “hey, a steal at ten dollars for the last you bought and more personalized than you…” He lifted the Directory as if to heave it past me into the backseat. “I tould that scoundrel on the phone only that yes I was competent in the Eddessian Syriac you had just given me to render.” Em’s foot on the pedal left The Inventor standing alone in this street of two-story homes, me with the translation and what it meant. Squad cars passed us in a line. (Maybe ten dollars, maybe twenty, I thought.)
I looked back and five cops were gathered about the Bel Air, which was a spectacle in itself, and from the driver’s side, even at this distance of three long blocks it was the Coaches Directory being unloaded (but who to?—for in it what might you track to what happened before all this?). You don’t go around with an expired tag in a car like that if you don’t want to be just another immigrant.
It got thick with downtown traffic now. Something had happened. Was it this morning’s revisiting of the explosion now thought to be ours?
“The green ink and his fine hand,” said my sister, chauffeuring me, but on the move I could tell. That would be the Veins envelope—I knew what she was thinking, though we were not speaking, for the moment. You, I heard her think, but now she said, “You never went to the hospital. He wouldn’t take you there; then you wouldn’t go. I tried to bathe your chest. I thought it was broken. You couldn’t breathe, that’s all. You spent the night in my bed. Mom came in. She felt it but couldn’t speak, except. ‘For cryin’ out…’ she said, ‘Where does it hurt?’ she said. Your hand was on me.”
A cadre of reverse-collared clergy stood waiting near the Center, and a crowd, or majority, waited massed near them, steadfast and American.
“You were talking, it woke me up, you had your hand on me. That was OK. Four in the morning it was plenty dark. I see you then. You weren’t talking in your sleep. You told me the half gainer again, so free, that forward back dive, looking upward and back like a backstroker but impaled by trust—which way are you going?—dive within a dive—and Dad shouting to you, Closer, closer or worse. So the next time you answered with a twist, and came too close, which is not close but…the body is bombarded from without and within, that book said.”
We came into the intersection where Stud the butcher had picked me up. My sister and I, however, were recalling a child who came within a hair of being sacrificed. “Milt said Dad shouted at you when you went up for the full twist too.” “Well it was an interruption,” I said, “whatever he said.”
“I know pretty much what.”
A state trooper laid his glove on the hood. I’d seen him one day walking up a sidewalk on Golden Hill I’d swear. Em braked and laid her hand on me, I’d been thrown forward in my cross-chest harness. It was not the moment to kill or even sideswipe a cop, and out of nowhere there was someone else outside like, of all the traffic surrounding us, a shadow that she would face more or less face to face, us plus this third person. “What became of him?” she said, for though we were both thinking of Dad and between us she could mean that too, she meant my Chaplain- photographer who I prayed had had an easy burial. My palace driver, who delivered me before and collected me after, divides her loyalties—that’s all she knows—and she’ll get another car out of Cap. I’m there again. But on another job. I feel it like a river moving.
A wicked undercurrent dragged athwart the well rush a track not mine, and he was gone. One ripped-away sleeve of my friend’s wet suit I was left with.
“You could have told me.” (Em swam well enough but without that undisplaced delight in the water; it was in a couple of poems she read me, but.)
“What would you have done?—I lost someone’s body.”
“Well,” she said (so close), “you were friends, because…but you were friends—”
:because—the word so close to another word Em was about to say and maybe no more than “just because”—(friends with the Chaplain only because I would do something for him?—yet Em continuing) “—because you told him what our job is, the real job found inside the coercion—” (had I told Em, emailed her, the job found within the job you were forced to do and had even been set up to play an ugly part in?) the cause, the before like the after, becoming “just because,” collapsed to an instant as suspended as a dive above its remembering, or my despairing trip in reverse back up that dive’s tunnel to the top, where the twist has already begun, bearing words fired from an observer enraged who stops you because you stopped him, and yet an instant suspended for an hour at a time (and she would read to me when I came back from the palace war and I’d drift forward on a line to another car I imagined on its way to Kut with a fan of mine to finish what a photograph had started, win back something, answer more than her original question (driving me to the palace) what had just happened before the picture? so that (seeing her not as before in reverse, 7,6,5,4,3,2,1) I glimpsed her in future in a fairly late-model car-replacement finagled by our captain (now a major—so relieved to be not just an Army captain any more); when after, yes, a two-hundred-and-thirtymile trip north to the border where the possible division of the country was visibly an issue, we would now return south, Livia her name though called Livy by the captain and by me, and go to Kut I had virtually known in advance, she and I, approaching a roadblock and forced to pick up an armed passenger…)—
—when the lock behind Em clucked because she had touched the back door release and, the door open, into the warm day of her car (which she had once wanted me to think of as ours) came a face she’d heard in the old days on our home phone more than once, and for a moment she was quivering and chill, seeing in the rearview like a tiltable screen the man whose presence, function, use that we must face I knew now not just for all else he was and likely the murderer of my friend Umo even though Umo I knew lived (to jump one afternoon cannonball, then dive; then, like a Third way of gathered understanding, that wartime palace dive which as a double somersault also like a jump went in feetfirst), but a Storm voice that praised me for “ideas” or “other” of mine mysterious for he’d received them prompted some way that I hadn’t grasped because even bad people have second sight and hear things:
I have a driver with orders from above and we are entering Kut where I have unfinished business that will show itself to me only when I get there. The Chaplain’s voice is waiting but not the Chaplain. I see powerlifting equipment; brand new squat benches, but see no more, though am seen.
And joining now our very track close in in traffic convening for the afternoon session like he’d been listening in or had bonded (giving us however not more stability as Wick once explained chem but less—and a scent—but of the three of us, now?—some mustard-sweet gum from the incense tree, less myrrh than frankincense it might have been named), Storm it was who settled down on hangersful of colored shirts and rested an elbow on a plump laundry bag (pronounced it a nice little car), though Umo was in my thought and not Storm’s real aim, the car rolling now I’d swear sliding half-sideways on a surface influenced by our slippery and pointing-out passenger. And with a word or two from him how to get where we needed to get and pointing out for some reason suggestively the trolley station—though as “your fans, Zach and others upstairs,” didn’t know, “your friend Umo has been reported near Acapulco, a false sighting we think—for why would someone want us to think him alive, Zach, after we’ve agreed on posthumous citizenship in principle? Another great idea from Zach! (Are these your things, E-m?)”—the letters pronounced separately like an in-the-know interviewer.
“Posthumous—?” she slipped through a red light, attending only to cars. “Your dear brother’s—” “What if he isn’t—?” “—darling idea still.”
“Guaranteed?” I said.
“Dead or alive.” Storm getting into it exactly but always overdoing it, it would get him killed (I saw, I saw it, was he in an Iraq mess hall?—lauding the Scrolls?—or was that me, another tour of duty up ahead?). “In return for what?” I said, my sister murmuring agreement.
“He had borderline high blood pressure. Heartmobile told us; though where exactly he did die matters less and less…even if not known to you the friend he followed halfway round the world—now, your dad—”
“You have nothing to do with my father.”
“He trusted me. Did he you? But we—” My sister squeezed my hand, then needed hers to steer. “He thinks the world of you, Zach, but he does not put his best foot forward, but—” “He has a birthday coming up,” Em said, I felt in my legs and actually in hers that she wanted me to take the bait, ask what the deal had been, she had her elbow up on the edge of the window, which she never did, and she heard what maybe I didn’t in this man’s words.
“—we will see,” Storm said ominously, again the sweet odor, surer than sight or sound; “the world being at stake, the bleeding needing to be stopped, I’m sure you on my case and I on yours can find common ground for tradeoffs to safeguard for the time being…your sister…her job…college applications, what not—am I sitting on your underwear back here, Em?—and, to be frank, Zach, Dad’s future. You two, you, you,” the man seemed to stammer, “who find each other and a matrix ready-made, the clouds burst, the stream flows, it is them, it is original, and then comes the matrix ready-made which turns them into…”
A basement garage Em had driven us down into must prove to be connected with the Conference Center. Why does he call you Zach all the time? she muttered under her breath, and You’re quite generous (I know why). She pulled the ignition key. “What could you do?” she said over her shoulder, getting out of the car. What I had learned I would have to use. I felt that Wick was close now and someone else up there I would need.
“If we can agree about the explosion…,” Storm walking across the subbasement concrete floor rising on the balls of his feet, led the way into a brushed stainless steel elevator big enough to lift a car. “That it happened?” I said. He turned to the buttons, wheeling about, now, so the evidence of his recreated and horrendous face of slants seemed to belong to him no more than a parallel field. “That we don’t know who did it.” “Not the actual ones.” “Though we’ll find them—”
“If we haven’t already,” I said.
“—be they after the Scrolls or their leader himself who there was a story going around of the palace detainment unit housing him when in fact we’ve had him locked up safe and sound elsewhere for months. As we will find the Chaplain-photographer,” said the face Em read, its talk, the finger on the Up button.
I said they might.
“You don’t seem to know his name though you met at Fort Meade.” “Lucky for me.” “We fucking arranged it,” Storm Nosworthy said. The confiding (and cursing) of a fool, a killer. Em near me at once all but inside me but in the new way, her “you” voice had ceased in my head for the moment, for steps approached along the echoing floor of the great garage—with luck there would be another break coming—and Storm got the door to close. “We don’t know how he swung this, for all I know you may have described it to your sister-love whom I would have known from her pictures”—Storm’s smile thick, warped, richly working—“the dove’s eyes, no, too blue, a Celtic queen sold to a King of the Nile, what says the Song? ‘my sister, my spouse,’ and where I was sitting in her backseat the smell of her laundry was as the smell of Lebanon.”
I was the killer now.
The elevator lifted almost at a slant and slowly and like a cabin of secure space that stalled when its computer received calls from a higher and lower floor simultaneously sometimes, Storm warned. The smile again, now quick spasm of a public asshole’s fitful show, punctuating the tradeoff to be agreed to: “The palace explosion I trust we can call a mystery? In return for… Not that I’d expect you two chums would need much cajoling…(?).”
The huge elevator cut off and my sister leaned on me. Storm Nosworthy clear across the elevator floor from us jabbed the buttons—Is it us? she breathed—brother-sister…?
What could he know?
The break-in. Your place.
The bed…the bathroom?
What could anyone know?
Think.
“West Coast contractors,” Storm said, hitting the whole button panel. “You saw the acoustic ceiling above the buffet, the recessed lighting?” “Over the farmed blue marlin,” I said, seeing that coastline-stained, that darkening map. Water damage, worse than water, Storm, I thought. “Care about two adolescents?” my sister whispered, meaning What was there to know and nobody did anyway. “One person,” I murmured. Em snapped her fingers and the elevator was on its way. “Would he?” she said.
“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.