Cannonball

by Joseph McElroy

  “Like lights going out,” said the Russian, almost a memory, but Russian. “You are upset now, what you have seen, you are crazy, I think you are involved.” Nearer my age than he had appeared, “He was my friend too; it can drive you nuts,” he said dramatically. “And then?” I said.

  “You should have that seen to,” he said; “you came in here with that.” He laughed, it was the dark wet stain where my arm stuck to my upper sleeve. He thought I had put two and two together about him, something he had done.

  He was quick only.

  He turned away toward the changing rooms. “We better get outa here,” he said.

  I squatted supporting myself on my hand and jumped into the shallows and a tremor seemed to spread from my footfall upon the rust-streaked bottom and was my nerves claiming territory. Over there in what was left of the diving area, they were trying to clear the fools away from the great rupture in the floor that had carried the drain down with it. “You’re done,” the blonde said, meaning my job, I thought, and the muzzle-sight at the end of her rifle barrel came my way from above as if it would target me sideways and the barrel struck the camera in my shirt pocket hardly bigger than a coin, I felt it clear across my chest scar. I kept my hands off her rifle, walked through it, and kept going.

  The Russian said wait a minute, he was the fool who makes a practice of not being one. I had seen him from a car, a truck, yes maybe my one trip in an armored vehicle he was standing in the sun watching, listening somewhere. I stepped over the safety rope of small black-and- white buoys slack in the shallows and into the diving well, remembering him now with headphones. A bathing suit. California. “Hey you’re the Russian.”

  15 Heard of you

  He came after me along the tiles at the edge of the pool. I made my way down the mostly drained warp of what had been the diving well floor, catching traction on split, broken grouting, slipping on the downward break, getting almost the hang of it, a ship, a section of deck, disaster. The Russian followed along at his level: “Hey. I am Ukrainian!” he shouted. He was trotting around the pool to the far side of the demolition area. “Ukrainian, not Russian!—Ukrainian.” “All the same,” I called across, heard a siren above.

  I pulled a bather away from the edge—I might be Security, I waved several bathers back, an elderly Arab couple with small knapsacks, this wasn’t a public pool. Close to the pit I would see for myself. Groans from below, clamor, rooms shifting and things piled and after-concussion and structural undulation abhorrently underfoot. I had thought there had been a second explosion as well. I would more than see what it was, it was what I could do for Umo, if I believed such truths, this rebel bombing, this accident, this the two of us coinciding and far away a steady thump of Rock ‘n Roll going down.

  Someone in a bathing suit got hold of my bad arm, I lost my footing like a skater, now it was this nearly naked fellow who held me up, and then I had a sight that almost drew me far down in the smoke and structure though mysterious of what I seemed to hear—yet a visible glint of waters burning like sewers you just know are sewers and then gone from view as wreckage of darkness or raft of rubble slid across below, and under my feet and down there a yelling, a sieve of words even howled but only a few clear—“…up behind,” a bosun’s order, reached me, and two voices I almost recognized, or one voice in trouble, struggling, so you thought “not with the men” wasn’t the real words.

  The Russian shouting…

  But I would get down to where I should have been all alone.

  “Why they shout at you when you dive?” he demanded to know. In midair, he meant. Why did he know something? Why would Umo tell him? He was directly across the pit from me now, past the diving board ladder and above the destroyed diving pool. “Ukraine,” he shouted. “When?” I said (“Last year! Always!”)—my passing interest involuntary, like future turning these tiles into the bread of his own life and schemes to be pursued as sheep follow the provider, and, papers, green card, everything in hand he won’t forget, for he needed a deal to get here and will deal again. What would he do?—a “Russian,” after all. But he would come no further, his no one-way ride. He was talking at me, stopping for new tremors I took to be a sign damage was ongoing like aftershock. Had the insurgents overshot? Where were they? Oblivion?

  “The dive, eet began like swan. He tweested halfway to face board and then doble somersault. Layout and tuck was amazing thing.” Russian had missed Umo’s last pike.

  The warped slope of tile shivered sideways, and the woman who had fallen again and I were pulled back. They had caught on to me, that I was not Security. I slipped, I fell.

  “He was your friend, he was my friend,” I heard the Russian say, the link itself alert with lurking shifts, motive, plausible profit. “Changsta, they call him.” I crawled, lunged with a bloody palm now down to the lip of the pit that was peeled, burned like shit, jagged and the drained peach color of fat tissue exposed by cutting. “He bothered you,” I got out.

  But then where I kneeled came to life, it got me to my feet like aftershocks homegrown, bad arm out for balance. It was the Russian calling: “What they shouted?” he had to know; and then “You have a seester” and then, “Was hees idea—” said on a surge of the same old music from below—“to film here.” I had it: La Jolla, Chula Vista—the truth like a friend’s staggering indiscretion or the jump when something comes to you—for that was who this was: Umo’s boss! the sound engineer—no, an assistant sound engineer, this Russian who had dared mention my sister, recalling her radiance recalling so vividly my Umo at La Jolla leaning on the fender of a truck watching paragliding as if the sun itself was buoyant: but if like Umo the Russian is traveling with that third member of the documentary recording team a deserter who would be viewed as an enemy combatant caught out after curfew, why hang here?

  “He was not my bloody friend—hey what deed it meant,” demanded the voice, “what they shouted at you?”

  My grandfather, whom I’d met only once came to mind (why was that?) like grass growing under my feet. I was stressed, the Ukrainian said he was from somewhere, it sounded like “Chernobyl” but not “Chernobyl” with its meaty knell, coal mines, Kiev train line worker, Chevron nearly, Chervonoarmiyska!

  And now down there below pool level, the voice stricken, oh, stricken, squalling, “Lift it,” I tipped, for I will do my job, into also Umo’s blabbing and am gone—someone headed somewhere else gone into the water forever—my sister’s thought remembering all by itself my chest-treasured heart, and California, and Umo’s two-and-a-half entry tuck-accelerated that time when the lights went (though back on in a second) one summer night—though, falling now toward the flickering sewer below and an extreme voice I was quite certain known to me, I jumped.

  And no time to check my plunge or midair a gap someone else forms into named unknowns:

  for Time—so little between fall and water—all but ignored me, slow-on-the-uptake, a pale panel came up to skim me and raw studs wrenched askew and steel I-beam end and four- by-eight ply split torqued velocity at you between instants of a life you could call failed yet met—by me, my jump, my fall, my shadow of uncanniness, its reeling plane, sparks pouring upward through me, my bond waiting someplace, my job after all, which you may still stumble on in this other that they stick you with, on the take, I will tell the Hearings later:

  already months before explained at low ebb to a military new I hoped friend listener that only by some stretch or perverse aim had I joined up, or from my father’s example or his thinking impulse self-serving first, or, by some torqued reasoning, my family (?)—

  But, No, unh-unh, my listener disagreed, your job—yet then (“No no”) I disagreed with myself, interrupting with what I maybe knew he was going to say—a man of God as it happened and for a moment leaving his voice in my thought and prevailing, “No, unh-unh, negative negative, it was just where you felt…—”

  “—forced—” I began, “coerced”—

  “Drafted!” the Chaplain had cro
aked—

  Well yeah but—

  —’zackly—

  —my own way—

  —’zackly—

  —choose for my—

  —’zackly—like these (he caught his breath, recalled by me mortally, exactly, months later as I fell, knowing vacantly in a vacant fate of my own the voice down in the pit)—these damned Scrolls that he’d been assigned to (?) just when he put in for…underwater training for crying out tears which was why he was here at Meade if you want the plain—

  —myself, I finished, adding some dumb thought about camera being an eye but a…a…a fucking shield, no, casement window—no excuse for not speaking—word.

  We were two exercisers then, like another pair we passed when he remarked, puffing, that only this morning he’d been told never to exercise outside on the avenues here at Fort Meade except with a coworker, like a spotter in the weight room. And here we slowed to a walk down a Base avenue, still at a great rate all elbows and hips, and my companion looking around stopped and we looked at each other and reacted, almost laughing, the Chaplain thick as a bear in the torso with the long, lonely legs headed (he told me) for a monster simulation tank and I, much younger, who’d fallen into step with him when we converged and we had struck up a conversation about lab facilities at Meade and photography the old box and about seeing all that was really crowded into, well, things and how one guy has a certain take and they appropriate it and use it and it’s not what the guy had in mind at all, he said. Chaplain was no genius, he said, but he’d seen a few things and told his trainers what they didn’t like to hear. Meade had chilled one then, looking ahead, the Chaplain had said, if I heard right as if it was more than him.

  And his take on my enlistment threw me (but my companion for these few minutes is a Chaplain after all which deserves respect even from an outranked know-nothing), while I defended my act and running or speed-walking all the time I would not recall all I said about what you had to do and what you discovered—he listened, he reminded me of my sister. But did he talk: and he had seen some terrible things, yet en route now at the end of it to the desert for crying out tears where they were shipping him to do battle-stress counseling. He believed he was some contingency plan of theirs (Underwater photography, I said, making sense of what he said)—“A swimmer,” he said of me nodding. He was holding it together, he was looking away from me at a building we had come near. “You got no idea what’s holding me together,” he said, hearing my thought—and, yeah, he could tell I was a swimmer, he said—needing the water, or (he laughed) it needing you. More on that, he said. His voice was together, his eyelids, cheekbones, mouth were, too, and yet he did not preach and was not the type and he was taking me somewhere, it occurred to me.

  —people come back from…he looked at me… The dead? I said, exhilarated maybe on Base oxygen—can you do that? He touched me, we were jogging again—Or abuse, he said, winded, it improves your character—or not come back, if you want to know.

  No?

  I put him in mind of a problem with (he lowered his voice) with Jesus (?). “To my mind Jesus didn’t have one particular pal, though my candidate was” (my running partner lowered his voice) “Lazarus,” he’d become convinced of it, and the women at Bethany, never mind, and Martha’s sister Mary gave Jesus a head-rub with special oil we should get the name of again, and the miracle wasn’t raising anybody from (the Chaplain’s voice barely audible, where was he headed?) the grave, but was the friendship y’see between Jesus and Lazarus. But they doubled Lazarus for more exposure, the two Gospels split it into two guys, beggar with the sores and the rich man named something, and the second one the friend he brought to life, and put the second a week before the Jerusalem wind-down and added a dipperful of magic and, groaning as he approached the tomb, Jesus’s I mean dark (make no mistake) discomfort about bringing Lazarus back—resurrecting him, I mean—and thanking God for granting the miracle of this guy four days dead staggering out of the cave in his stinking sheet, a painting shows someone holding his or her nose, Jesus already knowing what would happen next week in Jerusalem. So they doubled Lazarus and wrote him into a miracle in John but it was nothing like that—which is decades after the…(“Oh well,” I said) And now, “What’s the rush?” he said, for we had clocked some personal mileage it turned out, and you had come back from the dead but in actual fact had just gotten healthy with a little help from your friends.

  Nor did he bring up the Scrolls again, a polite soul, until—but did I know of the two Crimean War photos and one of them was said to have been staged and fake? An English photographer name of Fenton clip-clopping along the Valley of the Shadow of Death mid-1850s with his assistant and his traveling darkroom like a Gypsy caravan at the risk of Russian cannon fire, and two photographs the road was clear in one though there were cannonballs in the ditch and in the other, the exact same place, balls were littering the road like shot-put shot.

  Then as we approached a long brick structure that a Navy Captain and a civilian, African-American, in a double-breasted pinstripe suit were vigorously motioning us, I thought, into—but it was him (“Brother against brother’s the message,” he muttered)—“Scrolls,” he said, breathless, “on faith as killer weaponry these guys sight unseen,” and he thanked me for what I’d said about…about coercion and your real job, it was prophetic—

  —for what, Chaplain? I slipped in.

  —you will see, he said—that you found it after all within the job you were forced to do and had even been set up to play a not very creditable part in—

  (had I meant that? said that? guess so)

  —it gave him a lift, he said, in the midst of (nodding toward the two men waiting at the building) all this profit and loss, and your origins and your aim should be two quite different…“well, you know what I’m saying.” Though the “within-the-job” brainstorm had come not from me but from him, I would have sworn, though I gave him the benefit of the doubt, he meant well. Stealing a look at the men waiting for him, he didn’t look like a minister, he said he had not much faith in these classified Scrolls and if he had a minute, if the CEO were not watching his every move and the Navy Seal who was some kind of…—he thought he knew why they were classified.

  Well, I’m not dead yet, were his words under his breath. A disposable life, he said.

  His voice itself held you that would not lay down the law: and that is what I said as he made his way, loose-limbed, disjointedly hip-heavy, to the meaningless building, its exterior, some species of lab, and didn’t look around but shook his head, as the two figures consulted at the door looking perhaps beyond him but he had said he would see me again or would recommend me, yet was he doing so well himself? Long after this my sister read me some lines about Lazarus and I said there were two of them that had been doubled up from the real one, and it rang a bell for her, I think, and I told her out of my ignorance where I’d got it.

  If it doesn’t move throw a coat of primer on it, Bosun First on a Coast Guard weather ship out of San Diego liked to tell his guys, and this was a moment to move. I was gone down the street of that invented town of Fort Meade at near quickstep, yet my own surveillance in the absence of the minicam somehow implanted so in the back of my head that I might have been jogging backwards as my own brother after graduation before he discovered golf had been seen to do on our high school track feeling the cinders fly up against his calf muscles keeping track where he’d been, I guess. In my confusion and fear at seeing some of the truth, I was putting distance between me and the men ushering, I gathered (as if I would never see him again), my Chaplain down to a simulation tank greater (it came to me) in area than the visible extent of the seemingly aboveboard of the brick building so long, so low that its structure pursued me which only now months later, my knees aching from my fall, my left arm sore and throbbing, came back to be understood, yet with a thought of building itself, hearing a voice so weak.

  “Lift it up behind”: the voice so slight and near it might be little more, th
e memory of a throat and chest—voice, but left hanging in the burning damp dripping down and up if I could trust my eyes and skin, a gust came up from the rank current of the active well if you could read it. Thrown onto my hands and knees, sparks flowing outward from a dismal corner like welders who’d left work going. My left arm athrob with whatever was to be done, I reared up reaching for balance as the surface tilted back, a strip of interior shielding, ceiling become floor I realized and more to come down—was it my brain I was in?—posts angled adrift like the destroyed national bank I had been sent to shoot weeks since, yet in the twilight shambles singed, rumbling, stinking still, and tilting adrift on current here as well as below dealing errant blows by some pitch of afterblast from above and below, the voice fainter—“Leave me be”—a constant like a binnacle compass to balance amid the wreckage its own survival if more the words to vouchsafe than the speaker, so they were more my job than he—his “up behind” (my Bosun mentor’s command well remembered from a bad day south of Point Loma but instantly taking up slack for a couple of belaying pins made it better for me) and “team got out” (Chaplain groaned tellingly)—“c’mon, you’re the brawn I’m…,” again familiar from possibly the wreck of my life, where I must have said, “Hang on, I’ll get to you,” running like time between instants a driving force encountering isolated individuals—the snarling security guard who had hauled me back from the edge by my bloody sleeve; before that, the totally tanned, slight woman in almost nothing who gripped my bad arm when I rescued her from the edge; the soldier who struck me in the chest with her rifle; the Russian who would barely admit he’d found talent in Umo, as I had hoped my father would, while the intrepid wham of the music might be his doing lasering now and then down to some shredded rock rush like fit-to-be-tied mandolin; the quick little lance corporal whose rifle I had reached back unerringly to whack from one aim to another; and before that the late accountant telling me I’m bleeding, whose “Come in handy” meant the big blonde’s Chinese gun not at all that use of Umo my father had mysteriously meant so many months ago—what they figured Umo could do for them in a pinch now a photo op for his distracted friend Zach and a now repossessed Army camera; and further back, my powerful though almost imaginary escort down the dark, onyx-figured stairs, and Storm and my driver I could not now stop for, for in this double floor below the pool reeking of fire and toilets, metal welds, and probably skin, the speaker had become a pale face, but from the neck down a sheet or partition of steel or panel or plane, poor person, and he’s calling, Lift it up behind I honestly didn’t know why for honesty penciled into the plans of others was mine too, and the face’s words faint as memory Not dead yet became “Your job now,” for it was the man I had run into (and with) at Fort Meade months before, and “slab” was what he said, though how I would move it I…