A Chaplain I recalled who, about to complete underwater photography training preparatory to being sent to use it in this very desert, had said that I had given him “a lift”—I—and even now at death’s distracted door if not slammed by it offering terminal help more even than asking it, “Your old mole,” which meant God knows what, the creature working in the dark though his eyes were there above the neck-high steel sheet (or slab) wide open—and unseeing, I thought, though hearing why you should rush here like this, like a laugh somewhere between us.
Distant but breathing, soughing in his gullet like night tide at Chula Vista, telling me something, he was alive.
Of use, it came to me. Like me. Of use, as your employers like to think, even beyond being alive, and his face had not fallen apart.
“Team got out.” “The team?” I said. “Got out.” “Our team,” I said. “Got out.” “But not you?” Above us my name was shouted, shouted twice. “The only team,” said the man trapped before me. I got hold of a corner of the steel and was able to lift it an inch, this steel ceiling shield, if that. It wasn’t going anywhere. I tried again. “The only team here,” I said. “‘Zackly,” came the reply with breath alone. “Just add water.” Was he losing me? Mentioning his old yellow camera. Fenton, I think he said—he’d never fake a picture. The cannonballs were there and then they weren’t. Great photo… I could hardly hear him. “But the explosions,” I said with my whole body, and I slid the steel shield away from his neck.
“Teamwork,” said my mole as if he were smiling, the voice scarcely there; “like the…” “The Scrolls…” I began. “Zackly.” “Operation…” “Zackly.” “Scroll Down.” “Zackly,” the word’s breath only exhaled in the darkness, a will working across crippled membranes of stillness, yet against the imperiling sounds from above. “Bomb went off, guy came down like a shot.” That was the teamwork the voice, this partner of mine, had meant. And I realized with the surge of memorial sewer below us, the one we later learned had recently been named after our leader, that you may live beyond yourself in what may be heard still. “That was a diver,” I said.
“Feet first.” “Where did he hit?” “Hit me,” were the words. “Him?” I tried to follow.
“It.”
Was that it for the explosions? Was my man dying on me? I was smart, I see. Where Umo should have hit, had moved and hit this man instead. And Umo passed right through. “You know him,” he said. “I do.” “They’ll get him. It’s not your job.” Unthinking arms flung out, brought in—Umo, that series of instants I had hoped to grasp, was each one lessening but not truly interrupting the distance to entry, calculus of friend to friend?—who and what had I tried to postpone, my borderline-high-blood-pressure brother at age fifteen gone below into a mysterious pattern of horizontal wells or into a branch of a capital sewer composting anything at all, meaning or revenge, into the waste of Zach’s state.
Two ways out of here, I said: up, or down. But his words knew me.
Try again, I heard from my Chaplain witness photographer partner, fellow soldier. So I put my back and shoulder into it, my hands, my heart. But I couldn’t bypass my bad arm, which had grown a weight, a tight implant thing not pendulous but like a muscle uselessly on its own. How I slid the unthinkable steel sheet away—I had help from the floor or ground tilting under me and thought the palace was coming down, the job further mangled by the second explosion—what job? were they after the infidel Scrolls alone?—if a second explosion was what it’d been. You don’t need to compromise your own palace where bunkers, soundproof practice range, interrogation chambers, a major pool, multiple sound systems, a private mosque, and a rumored internal boating moat speak for themselves. I had to lower the steel plate again but couldn’t and, pivoting the damn thing like a plane to shift away from, stepped on the man’s ankle and was dizzy when space tilted I recall, my job or a new demanding plane finding me or some tide along the sewer, and I could see the rest of him now, he’d emerged from that stinking sandwich of a cave in the wet half-light subtle like him, and I think I heaved the steel all more-than-two-hundred-pounds of it against a stanchion-pillar beyond him bearing its fair share of the building’s structure now in question. He was almost a friend. I could hear him thinking, Seals…‘nterrogation, and then Like this…only opp-osite?
Truth, you knew. And if it could be known curious enough to be someone’s loss or gain. From the clamor above I heard my name.
“That’s you?” asked the man watching me who was the man I had met at Fort Meade and liked, now revealed bare above the waist where his wet-suit torso had been peeled down, his black short leggings and some closed-heel fins that had been bent over by the awful weight, bloody at the knees, his ankles crushed, his chest changed, heaving on one side, a strip of duct tape along a rib as if to hold something in, one ankle already waterlogged-looking. The jabbering voices from the ruptured overhead must be getting ready to act, no need to ask where they had come up with my name, someone always knows you. I yelled for a medical evac.
This man not yet disposed of—what he had said of Umo.
Dislodged cement around me and light from below: “You,” I said.
“Got what they needed.”
“With a bomb?”
“…Scrolls.” Was it his long legs that replied whisperingly unmuscled, free of the upper body, and it might have been reflected or that I had counseled him: “What they needed,” he said. “Who?” “Not what was meant.” “Meant,” I said, his breathless sounds like someone, like The Inventor, and losing me. “By the other one,” I’m sure he said and sure he meant me to hear or to know.
In the stillness which now counted waters still further below I gave a shout, I yelled, yelled for help, my voice broke. Had the pool been cleared? The palace? For where had the noise above us gone to? Where does noise? No archaeology crew down here in the pit; but they’d been here. Now I thought of the crush outside the pool doors coming not from the pool but up from below. Great as this floor, I felt it a Between forgotten between decks of a ship, storage space, steerage. This man telling of an interrogation—not here. A story tired. I didn’t like the silence. “One of the invited,” he said. Between us a submerged tranquility, and he had given me pieces of a story…of suspects, of persons, back home a woman questioned and more than questioned, a Sister, he called her, but I knew what he meant, a piece of her. Pieces of time, time itself desperate. A story, I guess. I was approaching what I had apparently wanted. “And who was the other one?”
The Chaplain laughed in pain. “Bladder,” he groaned, and then, “Take one Jesus, add two…” He tried to twist, to turn to me, the left leg didn’t come with him. “The Seal captain knew,” he said. Seals again. “Hates me, ignorant.” The Navy Seals! Was that it? He twisted up toward me hearing my thought, I would swear. “Heard of you.” “Me?” I said. The leg looked detached, and now free of the steel lid weighing on him he was worn out. “You’ll know what to do.” “Who’s ‘the other one’?” “You you’ll…you know.”
I saw myself speaking, and to my sister (who often knew how things came about but needed more and wanted to know what happened “just before”; whereas Umo, it struck me, what happened “after that”) and The Inventor and that loose survival family and how they talked and, that first time years ago, Inventor mentioning the new City pool, and then that I had seen Umo dive. “Who is this other one?” I said.
“…One who had the ideas,” the man on his back half-blind said into the rankness of this wrecked day and curiously abandoned double floor. “For the Scrolls?” I murmured. I was hearing steps above and over at one end.
“Zackly. Not them, not the ones who will… I see…use it, who don’t see any other way to use it.”
“It?” I asked him, my body hurting though tightly fastened to my twisting hopes.
You, I thought he said, or Use; for I hung on his words exposed to what there was of them—and I could swear I’d heard “no other way” before, also in a subtle voice. Thee alone to
… I must have heard now from my friend—or to thee alone. Pieces of a story he had coughed up, people interrogating a person. A woman. In California. A Navy Seal herself. Nearly naked. But presently he was out under the desert waiting at an intersection of the well system like a hungry ironsnout, it came to me, that Wisconsin water wolf the northern pike—the yellow marine camera his long before Fort Meade—an MMII he’d bought with his own money, bayonet mount, weights that kept him under, bearing on his back forty minutes (minus) of compressed air, and the capsule swimming into view like a silver spinner, and the dark thing reaching from above, arm, hand caught on film as it snatched the Scrolls capsule from fingers that might understand them but after that where come to rest, except that days later he was in the awful waters that crossed below the bed of the Tigris very near here, and it was last night?
Below?
Yes, the well bed, though entered through sewers. Take me with you. The capsule like a map case had swung toward him, and he had caught it, this photo-witness but of what? “Show you,” he said. Take me with you, seemed to follow, aloud or in me already I should be able to say.
But next thing he was down here below the pool, assigned below as I had been assigned above.
And the blast? An afterblast seemingly too. Where was everybody? he said and answered himself: Gone upstairs with his old yalla camera commandeered by—(“Yours, too?” I said. “Ah,” he breathed and understood. It came as a reassurance to him that they had taken mine as well. But an imperative to resist. “As above,” I thought he said, “so below,” the words seemed to help him to say them, I hadn’t heard those words before, it breathed hope, it couldn’t be true.) “Where was…?” He turned to catch, I imagine to see almost the steps coming down the stairs, to be where he was, alone as a spar on a beach. (Heard of you, he’d said. Heard of me? ) “See, they forgot something,” the breathed words are life. Neither of us could wait. “Got my eyes put out,” I distinctly heard—this man who’d been my fellow photographer once—“hates me but…likes my Lazarus.” “Can you tell me who?” “Take me with you,” the Chaplain said. I heard the memorial sewer like a canal or moving well below us getting used perhaps to me.
16 Best friend you never had
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 footag
e 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—
Cannonball Page 16
