“It was good of you, Zach.”
Beethoven’s Fifth false-alarming again, Who’s that? she murmured, and may have forgotten to ask what became of my cargo, my saved dead man, my attempted cross-chest carry, for she made a zigzag of residential blocks, she enjoyed it, a new route. The car was a mess inside, but she could drive, the tiny white scar on her right wrist came into view. Passed a couple of Craftsman houses. “I won’t miss it; everyone wants to live here.” She might drive East or sell the car. We passed the bus. “You won’t sell your Honda,” I said. What were we talking about? Were we putting off getting downtown or finding the way there? The Hearings, I said. I thought they went well for me but maybe not.
I was thinking out loud, Em too, driving, and together we’re more prophetic it comes to me (and from the future) yet never again quite the couple. A trade-off, and we passed a playground with ceramic figures you entered and looked out of the eyes and mouths of—like Tarot, Em said (specific reference like her poets always with her—someone who’d actually built such things)—and then, “We temples build with human faces,” which made sense; we passed a school and a woman in shirtsleeves was leaning way out a window, and in a residential street a horse, a good sturdy quarter horse, a long cowboy sitting him, they seemed not to move and yet were headed in the other direction from us, the man’s hands resting the reins on a snakehead pommel and I in this weird profit-stricken country like a great war-torn…body, I had said to the lost voice at the back of the Hearings room and what had he said?—that I didn’t quite mean it with all my something or other I didn’t get back to him; we passed a dumpster of rubble and fill and old painted planks and bare-ticking pillows and pure garbage waiting for pickup, and in our conversation maybe Em glad to have the windshield to keep her eyes looking through and the rearview: “The fresh paint ‘n all, Umo’s gotta be somewhere.” “Inventor’s hanging on.” “How does he live?” “Hard to see how they’re plugged in.”
“There he is again,” my sister said as if it were nothing new. I twisted to look back. The rearview did not lie. The Inventor’s old coupé ran a stop sign and just missed a car crossing like clockwork. When she’d said, “Who’s that?” she hadn’t meant the cell phone riff. “Em?” My sister wanted to deposit me and get back to her office, perhaps. “He wants to give us that Directory of Coaches and we have a copy at home,” she said. The Bel Air, though a loose-slung affair, was handling well, there is nothing to say that Hindus drive poorly, but I could see the driver’s fierce eyes. I said we didn’t know what he wanted when we were leaving, that call had come in.
“We have to get you back to the Hearings.” My sister slowed to pass a California Highway Patrol officer sitting on his parked motorcycle waiting. Did I remember the ten-dollar envelope I bought myself for my birthday that time? Em said.
I remembered showing it to her, resealing it, and giving it to Umo at the enlistment party. Did I remember what it said? I remembered a year or two previous citing it to Dad when Mom was calling the United States the Good Samaritan. Be a passerby, the envelope had said—or rather, its contents—the first line, and it only made him mad when he learned it came from a Gospel but not a well-known one, not that I’d read it. The cop had not pulled The Inventor over. His inspection had lapsed. The whole envelope was like that: You can’t think except in conflict with the Other but stopping to help someone isn’t the way and we are being told to feel things we don’t and it might be a relief when a favorite uncle dies suddenly, like existence itself, and visiting the elderly might have nothing to do with one’s real feelings. This had come up in the Scrolls, my sister had said. Between the lines there was another Jesus who conceived of the earned leisure of a successful person as a disquiet blessing the useless and the tiny, which, like the stone in the road, reality passes by. I’m putting into words what’s pretty dumb but I can sort of see it.
“So…” I said, “this translation in my pocket, y’think Jesus ever…—?” “He had a mission statement.” “The ‘house divided’ (?)—sounds familiar like a fucked-up family’s a good thing not a bad thing (?) because it—”
“—gees up your—”
“Unh huh, initiative yeah (and not even very fucked-up), you think Christ ever said anything like that?”
“The first part of your…papyrus?—your piece of paper, your scrap, it’s in the book: I remember it from the library. So they didn’t need—” “They didn’t need it—” “For the book they had their Scrolls down already, their Scrolls,” my sister pushed forward her lips, dwelling on the word.
“And the explosion,” I said, as my sister put her hand on my knee, “it probably didn’t make any difference—”
“—they had what they needed—”
“—wait: ‘they got what they needed,’ the Chaplain said. Does that mean, from the explosion?” Scraps and glimpses to weigh like a fool, my life, not papyrus which would disintegrate but parchment, animal, but my scrap manufactured to look old, it came to me.
“God you remember. But didn’t the Chaplain say also, ‘Not what was meant by the other one’? ’cause honey you told me.” “I must have.” “There’s that ‘other’ again,” said my sister; “well, he said a lot for a guy who was dying.” “I don’t see that.” She took a right turn at a stop sign, both hands on the wheel, was she going to the Hearings?
Honey? Em would never call me Honey. It didn’t sound right. We had slowed and the Bel Air was behind us, the full anatomy of The Inventor’s old Bel Air drummed wild syncopation around the moan of an engine soon to drop its tailpipe, the message radiating at greater speed than our own forward motion. My sister asked if I was going back to the war. How she knew, I had no idea. She like Umo didn’t think of changing my mind, she was cruising an edge of family feeling and calculation and something she wasn’t telling me, well she was in the workforce. Yet could there be anything too much to talk about with her, the strongest person in our growing-up home when she chose. I persist in finding my job. What if she’s way ahead of me? It is gathering my “things” together on my free time. Something awful here, as she swings the wheel and the front wheels turn and turn and then turn back and we’re south-west bound and I’m telling her how Wick seemed at the Hearings, Bea too, and the odd memories in the Scrolls, though I’ve not read the book, forcing on me action yet asking a presentiment, a shadow to cast in order to be in.
Yet like following the path we are making, it is gathering now Em’s things and future and other durable goods like the Scroll scrap. Down a canyon in Little Picacho once where we could still hear the Chocolate Mountain aerial gunnery range, we went the wrong way we thought and passed a tortoise carcass on the way down and photographed a wild horse we thought on the opposite ridge that didn’t turn up on the print. A turning point for us the canyon path we made more than followed, followed only by making, we agreed, a future, an apex for us, knowing we couldn’t live forever in the tent and tossed a burning coal into the stream little more than cool and damp sand like what Indians we once visited plant their beans in. Make time free, it came to me, for we were in reverse at the same time that we were heading into the Hearings feetfirst, and a teacher Wick and Umo as if I owed it to him to find him, and with any luck an inexcusable father or the deserter, Zoose’s guitar-playing brother-in-law whose whereabouts I had little interest in now; or a Scrolls archaeology team member whose steps were among those I’d heard on the stairs coming to check the blast site for signs of life or witness, who had met with foul play while vacationing at a remote coastal point near Acapulco—all gathered together by me in motion beside my sister so as at once to make free time.
21 where he takes the plunge
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 an
d 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 perhap
s 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.)
Cannonball Page 22
