Cannonball

by Joseph McElroy

  “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.

  17 a nation that would one day

  Something sad I did not put my finger on as if I were hearing thoughts of my own in someone else, so that the hand I saw scrupulous evidence of in my small living room on my return one evening—an article I’d clipped and underlined in red about an archaeologist found dead in Mexico, my ballpoint, however, not standing in the crusty old mug where I’d left it but lain across the magazine page, and clothes hangers in the bedroom closet now spaced evenly. It might have been my doing but wasn’t. A lower kitchen drawer open containing cardboard boxes of Hefty Easy Flaps, and stiff old sponges and clear plastic wrap and the Ziplocs I had purchased at a midnight 7/11 on the way back from the war. Let them come. Like a joke played on me by Liz and I thought I would ring her but she was married to an older Navy guy and lived in Oceanside. I read Thoreau in bits to get the idea—the watchman fox, the self-appointed inspector of rainstorms, the molasses, the telegraph, the briefness of the Walden time a badge I guess of depth—and thought of myself and my threatening secrets and a few works I was putting off reading for fear everything was in them, a short poem, a long play, and that most people under surveillance wouldn’t come up with much to keep the watchers significantly interested (though we ourselves are of interest, it all over again puzzled me to think, with my cowardice strengthening my thought, rebuilding that palace like a temple of faces). How sincerely had I befriended Umo, lived as a soldier let alone as a son?

  What is a bond? A seam, a divide; a suturing a doctor in me closes up the divide with. Some part I myself will take, familiar now (or perhaps only later, or too late) in what of the Scrolls I gathered from the news. This contemporary talker, this real walking-around Jesus, all business, interested in certain new, connecting ovens (something like Shoshone) either recently invented, it seemed, or sketched on First Century tablets. The idea to divide labor and multiply product, and I gather in the Scroll interview cheered on by his own remarks and coworkers to apparently call family itself into question, not surprising when I thought about it remembering now the picture of Shoshone ovens and how E and I were caught planning a trip out there by Dad whatever else we imagined about that way of life (and said in his hearing).

  The Korean woman I would see at the high school track told me she did not believe in these Scrolls, she did not know why. (Faith, I said. We warmed to each other for a moment. I’ve seen nobody lately but my sister, I thought.) Yet the Roman interviewer’s Jesus had smart things to say about sight-restoring spit, I’d heard, and it was this coupled with a note in the Union (and then a magazine) about the death of a member of the Scrolls archaeology team while vacationing at a remote coastal point near Acapulco that moved me to read a few pages at the bookstore. This saliva precipitated from mustard, myrrh, oregano, and another unknown herb of the Galilean desert growing near one great geographical bend of the horizontal wells allegedly one might have to swallow and regurgitate but here could be the truth behind the miracle in Saint. Mark, itself written long after Jesus and not from eyewitness, the Korean woman told me—pausing suddenly surprised at herself. For then, resuming stretching, she said Mark was the Gospel written soonest after the Death on the Cross (a generation, more than that), which took my mind off Bea’s not turning up for help with the vault box. One surprise of the interview, which seemed right and even familiar, was that this “chemically special” spit might be grown in each individual’s body and salt-multiplied and one day without dependence on others or, as our own Administration put it, the government doing it for you. Self-reliance was how Ralph Waldo Emerson had put it—a good Christian thought, I learned in the Hearings, it came up the second day I recall, a healing expert from Colorado Springs. “A sound apple produces seed,” he said, and self-reliance made you a sound apple, I think was the point, though self was unclear to me but only when I thought about it. Self-reliant, OK, did that mean don’t count on these other people you grew up with? Who supposedly raised you—from the ground or from the dead? There should be a Complete Idiot’s Guide to it—self-reliance.

  Sad still what you heard about the Scrolls. How so? as onetime friend Milt would put it, echoing his father—and those same words a poet politely challenging our own leader in Washington when he had called it an honor to have one leg of the well system named for him. I had spent time alone burdened by my knowledge, the swiftness of my release, waiting to hear from my father if only to ignore him; read so much “ancient history” (as I called it introduced by my sister to her librarian friends) in seven, eight months (happening not to call anybody though one day saw from a pedestrian overpass looking up at me from eighty feet below the Russian at some typical business that brought him to the University), my eyesight erratic or perhaps just deferring to undoubted experience between the lines of my reading, that, asked here to these Hearings by a University big shot friendly with my librarians (and less friendly faces) as if to get me out for a few days, my sister listening to me a lot, I tried to think I might have been overlooked as Scroll-implicated. They had just recently appeared, were they the reason for these Hearings, “postwar” so-called? I had other reading, limitless to do and afterward to have, though I had absorbed some sound of the Scrolls in the paper, on TV, a remark dropped by a stranger. This dialect Syriac for Blessed was valuable, I learned. Thus, “valuable are the peacemakers”—but how could Luke, reporting long afterward Jesus’s Do violence to no man, have overlooked the practical survivor’s “Blessed are they who come to market” creed of the Scrolls’ firsthand Jesus?

  The Inventor might have known. He always had an opinion in that black Dravidian attention of his face, and he knew Parsee, Urdu, Syriac, I understood, and knew Kufic script and could read also the Leader’s alleged script in between the Red and the Black of that national flag or he had the dictionaries to back it up.

  Had I been party to the fate of Umo? For that matter, to the death of the Scrolls archaeology team member by drowning in Bahia Petacalco?—himself just let go by the agency that had sent him to the Middle East in the first place. It hung in memory supported by all the lack of information about the case, for he had been not only in the forefront of radiocarbon dating in samples drilled in standing trees but an amateur ad-lib tap dancer, and then I thought I could hear him behind us one late night when my sister was with me (and said she saw me better in the dark), his measured, archaeologist’s voice, his knowledge of what had happened, or his steps, for hadn’t he been one pair of steps descending the stairs when I had dropped into the well waters just in time bearing the heavy and welcome and secretly light burden of my late friend but also in my stunned chest and like a signal on my chest scar, it seemed, the great absence of the other friend who’d gone before us like a Third Way I’d missed by taking the Second Down even with a second body half coming apart I’d never told a soul of?

  Transmitted like a message swiftly home, I’d been since then almost everywhere in my studies, more than alone, ahead of myself (and thus already seen) and long ago, my life its homeless chips and shavings scattered by a gleam in me which might have been Umo’s whereabouts.

  Or my promise to myself to find my Scroll scrap’s absence from the text of the little book now making its way worldwide; for if the scrap’s text was there then the book’s full text had been in government hands before the notorious caps
ules set sail. My gleam might have been Umo’s friendship, his questions recollected—what were Cliff Notes? he had wanted to know, almost surprising to me he didn’t.

  Or might have been my sister who had first seen the scrap of Scroll by slipping her hand into my pants pocket and drawing out the Ziploc and knew who I’d got the scrap from but not what I had done for him, and I believe borrowed an early copy of the Book of the Scrolls from the library—it seemed familiar, she didn’t quite know why, she knew her poetry but not the Gospels I now proudly knew meant to most people only the four “synoptic” whereas there were several other Gospels—but wasn’t this Jesus sort of acting out?

  “He gave you this?”

  “…”

  “How did he get it?” she persisted. “After the explosion it must have been.” “Where the bomb went off?” “Below the pool, yes.” “Why did he?” “Why? Because we were friends.” “And why was that?” “We just were.” “On such short acquaintance.” (My sister loved me.) “Well, he credited me with figuring out what our real job is, the one time we had met at Fort Meade months before like I told you, though I thought—” “Yes, there’s always another, isn’t there,” said my sister. “Though I thought he was the one who’d come up with what it—what our real job is, that—” “Is?” “—that you found it within the job you were…” “—forced?” “Yeah.” “To do?… Zach?” It seemed to be my sister and I. “You could say he gave the scrap to me but you could say I took it from him. That was all I could do.” “That was enough,” my sister said. “It was?” It was us and it was also me.

  Wick! our science teacher and/or math, true to us, our assistant swim coach, our true coach at school—why hadn’t I visited him these last months back? Just didn’t.