Cannonball (23 page)

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 capsules 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.

Wick
, I thought, sitting back down because the Moderator was in a state wondering what I believed or was about to say, and hearing Moderator's stomach like a thunderclap homing on lunch break.
Wick
, I thought, and his question what did Umo call out to me?

So the heck with the Moderator, I stood up and acknowledged Wick: “What we hear, forget all that little stuff about digital imaging we can't even see without digital. For godsake hear the human voice. What we hear. You ask why that diver…”—the Moderator in a shake of his fist had received a signal and would not object—the answer to Wick, to what?…some complicity of mine in Umo's appearing and vanishing, and it came to me like a sting in the chest or I was terribly slow, the Chaplain, his disorganized body nowhere in evidence when the steps on the stairs turned into perhaps two members of the archaeology team if not two armed guards, or in a still better universe one guard and one archaeologist.
Wick
, I thought. High school once inside a time, Wick, young, who cared about us almost too much—fellow seekers—equals, family, if we could pick our way through his downhill parentheses chalked on the board and Log over Log, and these
arrows
you had to
do
things with, add, multiply, depending if an event was a succession of steps or several happening independently and at the same time (same time) (same time)—my eyes choked my throat—all his unknowns that left us with these clarities you didn't quite get but believed in like stunts, just math, came back to me, like a stopwatch he described depending on the color of the light particle which could shrink or turn. Very cool stuff: Was it over our heads? Why was Umo here in this unsettling memory who never went to our school? Wick ringing my father at East Hill, the job that mattered—whereas to Umo one day that we talked it was high school that interested him. Not that it was my father's real job, though he could show his interest in my classes there in his own way.

“Why?” I gave my old teacher back his question—“Why'd he call out to
me
?” But looking as we do elsewhere, blinking at the hand back of the room raised at the end of a camouflage uniform sleeve, we need the Moderator a too broad, too blond decently worried hedge manager who'd made a noise while the camo fatigue uniform man I would not forget went ahead anyway in the gathering stillness of the Panel room a killer I would guess, with a question more like an answer: “Timing in sports performance and business profit may affect concentration and vice versa, wouldn't you say?”

“Say?” I said, for we knew we knew each other from Fort Meade—I'm this raw trainee hustling away down the Base avenue with eyes in the back of his head, and then thousands of miles east the Chaplain marooned at the Scrolls explosion. Camo combats, this was still that Navy Captain—famous classified Seal—his words no less a weapon jump-started me straight through the event like timing it in advance, so I could see back, thing by thing, and time less the matter than the smell of his interrogator's eye stuck with gluey infection behind its lens and thrown by this need of me (or something I had)—or it was the treacherous breath of water, scent of cement walks at Meade, friendship and shouts and necessarily induced war labor gathered into a formula gone into words and they had never forgotten me (or my sister whom they had phoned and I thought I knew what she was to me if I didn't think about it, like where did sound go, we once looked into) and what I must know, nor could I forget the Chaplain's interrogation material I'd so far censored wisely—why had he told it?—and lunch break was coming and after lunch, the Moderator asked us to believe, a distinguished visitor from DCwould be welcoming us—though we were already here—like a Mystery Guest you get to meet if you're a major donor.

In the communal stir of sitters getting up on signals from their stomachs and hunger primarily for change of almost any sort or lunch, the Moderator thanked me for my contribution to the Panel and to the war effort. But I recognized my original questioner and was heard to say (aside to the audience), “You're consulted as some kind of expert when probably you're an expert in something else—” (
laughter
) “—in this weird profit-stricken country like—” (
laughter
).

“Like
what
?” spoke a hoarse, lost voice at the back, “like some ancient
nation
, man? I hear you but you don't, you don't, you don't you know mean it with all your—”

“—one great war-torn…,” I said to the lost voice, uneasy both of us at its words to me, and where was he coming from?—when closer at hand to my old mentor Wick I said, “Diver called out because I'm his friend, I should know why he's up on the diving board because…”

“And can you cite a recent example of your friend's ‘ancient' concentration?” the Seals captain in combats at the back interrupts, and, short of something else I knew but did not yet retrieve about white captain and black agency partner, I realized they wanted Umo.

But not him to be talked of publicly.

And seeing that moderation in all things made my uncle an extremist, I heard through time a living catalogue, as if I had been coached but had coached myself (and my own catalogue), of Umo and his take on my family…

—odd about my sister (“Your family,” he called her whom he hadn't met); and about my uncle (“He could be a cop where I come from; they frown, it's murder”); still stranger, “Stom,” whose phone chat with my father at the far end of the pool Umo had witnessed (“He has a secret weapon you better get to know”); and Zoose, whom Umo did know—whose brotherin-law was not spoken of any more, the guitar player who had deserted—“Zoose thinks twice before he backs anyone for citizen”); and Umo on my own father (lost and found now in a desk job and its decisions)—(“Thinks he gonna make the Olympics”—that sudden Chinese laugh—“a' least he taught you photography”); or, and why come to think of it now, Umo sort of on science (“Look out window. Zebra fish can grow a new heart, you know”). He described his mother's singing once upon a time: it was the double-toned throat-singing technique common to her part of the world—thought to interrupt fertility—“I was her only, but she's gone, you get arrested you're gone, well maybe.” “
You're
gone, Umo”—

—why had I said that? Gone from home and family. It would have been good to talk to Umo about competing, young as he was. Why? It was like living. It was one thing within another thing. Yet at barely fifteen, to claim my sister as his bride, he got a snub from me and then nearly fractured Milt's skull as a joke who had shared with him the shout (its words, anyway) that killed my dive and nearly me maybe, though Milt merely a messenger of words he still didn't get. Regrets but not for Umo that night at Cheeky's before my enlistment, which others but not Umo might think I had been enticed into, whereas it was into knowledge of them, against which (as if it were The Man) they weren't quite now ready to enlist me among the missing in action.