22 the already strange distance

But now, “His nose,” she whispers, “the blue spots,” she whispers, “it means Imprisonment,’” she read the face across the elevator car, my arm knew each finger that gripped it, we heard now a hubbub coming our way. And the other wide door at right angles to the door we’d come in slid back leaving us face to face with a mob in the lobby going to the same place as us and struck silent as we came into view. First, though, or almost first, the Seals captain and his ramrod teammate “CEO” in combats waving back a hundred others who could wait or take the other elevator, but clearly a two-man escort for the sixth passenger making this trip to the Conference level.

Was it my frog-in-the-throat questioner? It was.

In the long white spiritual garment and no badge showing. And Em greeted him (“Husky,” she said), the very one who before they’d cautioned him this morning had told me I didn’t “mean” what I said, but we had been uneasy and close and I’d cut him off; and my “profit-stricken country” and more than that “one great war-torn body” meant also the globe I suppose, glib with parallels ungrasped and the facts we collect on the job from the voices we hear, yet left me taxed for what I might have said. To Umo, my sister, my father, Milt, the accredited conferees, Marine recruiters on a no-kid’s-butt-left-behind watch, War Child snapping his wrist by the hotel turned stock exchange.

And now against this crowd balked by the spaces of the multiuse elevator closing on their faces, accreditation badges somehow not to be seen on their lapels, pullovers, shirt pockets, breasts, ID lockets, though there in their free faces Entitled (but to what?)—“Get ‘em outa the building,” captain said (“Done,” said CEO, his idea practically…“This Hearing!”) — it was jealousy in me not envy of Husky, and even as my sister unsure of what she had entered into gripped my arm, and captain and “CEO,” his cell phone out so quick it might have been up his sleeve, took up formation along the wall opposite us with this peaceable, curiously significant person in front, I must gather what was going on even in an elevator and against this operator Storm to be undone I believed but dangerous to Em, who had met a friend of hers who seemed to be in custody and hardly acknowledged me though he had something remarkable in him to say and would say it.

“Your people,” I said. “My people?” “Come on, that woman working with captain and the black guy acting the wacko?”

Though now Storm points at my chest.

Tradeoff time, he means. A brown business envelope in hand, Storm Nosworthy will cross this room that rose toward our Hearings floor, target what he will use, and, doomed, it came to me, can’t know how my father’s birthday envelope divides me between what random hurt Em hints it held and what really I’d paid twenty dollars for (or was it ten?), Earth Veins you make your own running universally through each of us, rift and river, a hole in the head, a half-completed dive to heal, yet quite parentless (if you could prove it, Em once said); how Umo pronounced him—“Stom’s secret weapon you better get to know.” The humoring muscle of distrust an orphan doubt no less trusting me, asking what meant “brother,” describing grandfather’s plan to come to Mexico, work the mineral mines, sign up with Plutarco Calles, live right; the secret weapon, though, Umo, how do you figure that? The brown envelope, always about to be drawn out for me, delayed, I can feel it, that voice to nail down our understanding quid pro quo as, on the other cheek, Storm’s face shouts our very History et habeas corpus silentem—beside us (for I was right, he has come across to us) he speaks in confidence from his own, base Faith — Umo dead, Chaplain alive (yet Umo come thousands of miles to hook up with me—do I understand that trip, those Umo miles? — while the other guy lives again in a scrolled-down monitoring of those dark and memorial waters) the Scrolls Storm’s baby (!), for holistic proof rests beneath ineetiative, ineetiative beneath democracy, and what shall it profit us near term if we lose the Near and Middle East? — this giant lift inching up retarded by what’s left in return for what was always there; Wick’s morning-after calculus healing more wounds than my dive, more pitfalls than an elevator’s division between waiting silence and, with two adjacent doors, a need to speak before time runs out.

To me a friend and mere miracle, the Chaplain on the other hand matters so much to Storm he’ll flush him even from extinction along old sewerways. Just one of many you’ll silence who might explain the explosion uncharitably for the Administration, for us. He had the Vice President’s ear.

“Citizenship for Silence,” Storm speaks what is in his pocket—“more than a fair trade, kids, and clear as anything”—then (smile grim as a clock face): “Posthumous Citizenship now, your idea, Zach, deeded whether ‘deceased or living,’ I think we can certainly put in writing, with a No Rescind rider guaranteed by some pretty amazing signatures faxed from DC an hour ago.” (The smile weird as words.) “In return for…” the hand gesture suggestive. “Not much to ask from someone and you really are someone, you two.”

“Em,” said her friend Husky in the white kurta (and in custody to all appearances), “Em?” “What could you do to us anyway?” my sister said, in the ceremonial advance of the elevator. “What did we do but be a family of two somewhere?” my sister said, Storm staring at the shared and to-be-revered floor as if he saw it moving. Then to me, “Silence—” he began (my sister by my cheek muttering, “Dead or living ‘posthumous’?”)

“This soldier, Em (?)” said her friend—“said, ‘You can call me Captain.’ ’n’I’m OK with it. It’s my first commandment right to honor my own ignorance.” “Husky,” Em said. They seemed to laugh. (I was on my own and could tell Husky kind of respected me.) “Tryin’a recruit me, Em.” Elevator moaned. “For what, Husky?” softly. “Cap’n said, ‘Djou read the Scrolls?’ Not rilly.” (The Seals captain in camo combats gripped the hungry shoulder of the man in spiritual dress, breathless too.) “‘Well, it’s not two Lazarus but one,’ did I know that? ‘And he ditn’ need to come back, right? — ‘cause he never died in the first place — and Jesus was best friends with him,’ and did I read the Scrolls? and I said, ‘Not rilly; did you?’”

“Silence agreed on here and now,” Storm commenced, his eyes narrowing the floor — but it was also the exchange with Husky. “‘n y’know what Cap’n said?” said Husky.

The captain spun Husky around to face him, muttering, “Squeeze you out like a sponge.”

“Said, ‘Ditn’ have to read it! Had it from the horse’s mouth,” Husky said over his shoulder to Em, to me too I was certain, a friendly exchange once jogging with an even then fugitive friend fellow photographer and Chaplain all but resurrected in me now, Lazarus, yes, between me and the Chaplain! The envelope drawn forth for my hand, I have it still, a document, next week when we’ll be on a last junket to locate Umo, Em and I before I leave, tell him the good news — while Storm rapid-fired terms of the deal in intimate undertone now: Explosion unquestioned, it is what it is; authenticity of Scrolls unquestioned; and by same token no leak to media describing a relationship between major principal Zachary and sister (since “certain Family Values sat not well with the national community that had gotten behind the war, the Scrolls, this Christian President”). The elevator door strained — perhaps against its newness, for the unit was undeniably masking-tape new — and gave way at last upon more light than people where I’d been at noon, and now Storm thought he would charm the Dean tilting his head, finishing with me, he thought — the brown envelope mine now — or sort of addressing both of us: “For backup we got a fantastic film record of the bombing the Scrolls heinously survived, if fragmentarily, to be distributed for spiritual export crediting a cameraman of genius (which brings us to another quick trip for you, Zach, if it’s OK)”—the good news I felt in my blood.

Heinously surviving (?)…to recall, I half recalled, and less than half understood, this same man’s forgotten! (that palace day): You won’t be forgotten …as your father asked you to. I slipped the envelope into my jacket pocket, and drew out by its torn feel one of two small sheets already there, hearing between us faintly the best of Storm last — unreally weird, yet…yes, Zach, family values, yes, that Storm could just eat up if it was only him himself (“though unlike you I never had so to speak a sibling”). A small sound of…was it pain from my sister, ecstasy? and for my ear only, This citizenship, you know, she hissed while I to her, “That ‘carpenter’ one about the ‘unpretending time’ being our ‘plane,’” I said from the book she had given me the first time around, chagrined to recall so little of it and almost like Lincoln’s someone else’s words at that for some new farewell.

Interrupted now by her friend Husky, a perverse call for help, “Guy’s so ugly you gotta wonder, but in this country that’s still a person,” Lazarus and the horse’s mouth rose up in me like foresight and memory and in return for what I’m half losing, was that it?

“You had that badge?” I said. CEO followed us.

I waved The Inventor’s notepaper as Storm made to go for the Dean, shaking his head at his wristwatch, like We’re here, we’re here — the two limbs of the little notebook of her cell phone open, a look on her face, What a workhorse! Storm’s body language complimenting her, but—

“Check out the hand, Storm, half an hour old,” I waved the paper, the entrance to the great abandoned buffet lounge before me, a smell of seven-grain and spiced turkey or was it liver; mayo and melon slices in the sun, the yolky paprika’d statement of rank leftover deviled eggs and cold fish — and over by the windows stood Wick unmoving. “Check out the words here, Storm, at the beginning, right? — ’n’here at the end (?)”—Scroll words Storm would know, wouldn’t he? — they came from parchment saved from the blast and in safekeeping eight months ago in my ear and subsequently in pocket, bed, glove compartment, love, but as I hardly had to tell him, so precisely between us, though we were drawing a small audience, “because you already had it — the whole thing — this wasn’t needed, this scrap from the bomb,” the text like all the other revelations to see the light of day in English had already been in hand somewhere else, “your explosion that day pure show, your palace—” I peered at Storm. A smell from his face now of stale cardamom seeds, leaf extract, dead tortoise, and a couple of on-the-run lunchtime shots of Jim Beam I realized I’d smelt in the car told me he knew what I had here in my hand but had never seen it.

But, the car! I thought.

I turned, my sister was with me and I told her and her hand dived into her bag and held it up, the remote-entry fob — the car left unlocked — her things, her plans (CEO was instantly on his cell) — our distance new, gathering prophetic and unknown upon me — losing one Em, gaining what? CEO watching, behind me, the Law Dean’s futile call, I sensed a scattering of the accredited not yet adjourned to the Conference room though the afternoon had more than come, CEO gone, and—“This citizenship Umo’s getting, living or dead”…my dearest sister entering from our already strange distance tells me what I had already realized, “‘Posthumous’ even if citizen’s alive? Isn’t that what it means?” she asks beautifully; and “In return for what, Zach? — you don’t owe him.”

The acoustic ceilings, a clarity or known future that turned their stains to coastlines intricate with nested corruption, the bay and the sea sky out the windows, and a familiar but now unfurled figure, the woman who had attacked me to make me give something away I thought, closing on Wick, who’s looking out the window absently, for a moment a ghost.

And remembering him so long ago seen by Umo — of course! — from a distance leaning out the classroom window and I must not ask but tell Wick — the dive I have slowed down as if I could divide it endlessly from its end — my job now nearer somewhere between my sister’s “before” and Umo’s “after” and another trip vouchsafed only to her for its own sake — and knew better than my own my sister’s breath close behind, and my name in Storm’s diseased throat:

“You forget, Zach you forget—” a connection coming with Storm Nosworthy, who would see no way for himself but through me.

I hailed Wick, and for a moment hadn’t recognized the blond-streaked hair of the woman whose kerchief not now in evidence had formerly seemed a token of some American religion even Muslim though I’d assumed she was working with Cap’n and “CEO,” but now Storm’s voice gathered so in me the scent of virginsbreath and of my blood on his hand and some gross praise given in his cedared atrium in advance of my video-to-come, flights of stairs below, documenting my friend Umo’s scheduled shooting, that, turning, I registered Storm’s rage or madness only in its synched succession of grins that twitched some screaming code way inside the man somehow presiding in the words that reasoned firm as a priest’s invoking habeas corpus, or villain’s, tight as a lawyer’s or parent’s, glad as a politician’s, modest as an athlete’s, sanguine as generals’ used to be, mysterious as a friend’s or a false friend’s, a doomed dominance and resource — these out-loud words pretty fast for Em and me but no, now out of nowhere breathtakingly like coup, like collapse, betraying here—

— like a blow to the chest—

Stom’s secret weapon! — “You forget your part in this—”—my sister trying to hear, to hear some complicity alleged with this ugly person—“the family that thought he was crazy and wanted to get hold of him mobbed in the street get him outa there, whom he disowned to go his own way — this leading Man from Nazareth ‘a more hands-on Jesus,’ (?) don’t you of all people recall? Not without friends, yet said, Be a passerby minding your business, but a virtual CEO, Zach? Your word, we have it on good authority, Zach—” “Zach?” Em says, an artist it comes to me who can put things together—“and that family, embarrassed, prudent, of Jesu’s”—

— of course of course but…kill his own chances, to trap me? Storm?—

— when I had by now a way if not a job, my own and no one else’s.

My roads not that remote, a couple of roads, a war apart at the same time sitting in two vehicles beside two future drivers I hear Storm still, meant for me his words: Civilians run this man’s war.

And Jesus seeing profit ahead, your guy and mine, Zach, medicinal saliva and wind (the future of, respectively) you remember your own…memory, was that it for godsake? linked ovens, this Jesus one-on-one live — fighter and economist, private entrepreneurials, food-fasting and possibly fast-fooding, sensible take on capital punishment when appropriate, a very early, matching-grant Jesus where if you’re not willing to work forget about it, sloth violates brotherly love, an American Jesus — what you said or are said to have said on the connecting ovens from you to your sister to your father, who was persuaded your fancy thoughts were redeemed by this Jesus’s view that you don’t beg if you can turn to, and against giving alms, he meant business, Zach, he had capitalized on what he had going for him, Christ had a job to do.

Em keeps watch but over what? — me at that slant of hers, getting it all in one short thought possibly, half-heard, the Scrolls ascribed to her brother, was that it? (Even to her through our father if she heard?) when the rest, or all I knew, she knew: 1) the arrival deep in the palace covered above by 2) a friend’s dive, 3) disaster, 4) a cockeyed photographic record, while below 5) a questionable explosion to cover 6) a questionable project (to please an officially Christian government?) followed by 7) a deathly well current and now 8) back home uneasy phone calls and at least two break-ins:

but what can Em be processing now? We’re equals (all but) and our father beyond his Reserve against mine cannot be much more of a father for her now than some use of me unknown to her but drifting in upon me — and almost not to be believed, his help, his confounded desire bringing him near some imaginary influence through this speechwriter from Sacramento Storm Nosworthy. But the root of the wind is water, I hear (from my sister, reading aloud). I was driving somewhere in two cars, true American, here in Calif, and back at the war, it was quite real.

The Law Dean touched Em’s wrist smiling toothily but grew impatient; alerted, startled (even she), to hear the volume almost in rhyme of voices arriving from the lobby, she turned gracefully to direct the crowd debouching from the elevators down the broad, decisive hall at the end a plenary roomful of folding chairs, those who wait, those in profile who talk to their neighbor, something just to be here, surveying the wreckage of lunch.

Forget I had, / the things I’d said — home from the war, my sleep flooded by some of them. Undeniably said. How meant? Husky himself had asked this morning if and how I’d meant what I’d said, and once long ago Umo too; for Em and I had our joint angle of saying — and now my things had passed into Storm’s listening system through my father, and not only — for in the elevator the Seal thug captain and my bothersome but this morning friendly critic Husky jazzing the real not dead-andalive Lazarus getting a strange reaction in Storm’s eyes, brought back a friend jogging, gasping, crediting me with reminding him of what I must now think he had passed on in anger to the men waiting to train and perhaps question him that day.

Storm’s voice and by contagion mine had reached a terrible hush like silence or unavoidable corruption or like the thought they rested on, and Wick, who had heard no more of what was happening than the others, approached now from the windows and near him the woman from this morning who looked so like my palace driver, and from the direction of the elevators and the hallway, the Law Dean, angry as she could be, who would draw us toward the plenary session where the afternoon Hearings, if not Storm Nosworthy’s welcome fresh from Washington, promised to go deep.

I a source for the Scrolls.

I said, “If it’s all from me suppose I go in there and say so.”

“There exist reasons not to. Your friend the diver’s citizenship. Your sister,” said the man grasping my arm as he had the day I was shot. “To say nothing of your father — your name as a photographer. And quite apart from their not being, as you put it, all from you, many think the Scrolls in their own way are true. Isn’t it what we’re about?”

I had heard right. And here was Wick, and behind him the troubled person who hated me beyond even her call of duty as a coworker with white captain, black CEO, and whose brother — unless I was way off — served in an MP brigade. My sister hadn’t moved from where the Law Dean had left her, her hand in her bag, while Storm was saying we go on faith in everything else…(?) “And the favor we ask of you, it would put a seal on all of this, Zach, a Presidential Seal of course but my seal my friend — the photographer of the Scrolls’ arrival, and my word! what a twist your survival that day — your enlistment bumped into the Reserve as you know, and—” (“What’s the deal,” I said bending confidentially close to his shoulder but Storm now like a show-off sharing some personal phone call or his half anyway for anyone within range) “—look, activating you we cut you a second tour, short form, go where you like, you got fans over there who you know will liaison a…a deal? — like—” Storm pointed to the hall—“the twist! People in there who can’t wait to hear you.” Speak, he meant, of that dive at the Hearings today — Storm tapped me on the chest, my scar, the wound (if only my deluded father, working somewhere, probably in Colorado Springs, for USA Swimming, could be here!), “if I’d only been in time downstairs to see your entry into the well that palace day!”—the deeffayronce between me and Storm — and “liaison”? What meant liaison? — for like the future when it was only the past it came to me why he, as his eyes, their weather of prescience now dilated, wanted me back at the war, and he might not, like Em, have known that it had already been in my plans almost for its own sake.

His, flooded by the clang that came down upon us now repeatedly final of the building evacuation alarm that caused people to look around them, inconvenient as an air raid rounding more responsibly with each strike of the clapper, a blame for its own sake — Storm’s plans were overtaken utterly awash judging from his eyes, larger suddenly and you might have thought less unready for the great hands of the woman otherwise slight-looking crying, “Deal!” reaching over her head then down upon him not me, fists that being all about themselves and their fighting, tuck-position fingers riveted you wielding a hell of an iron bar it seemed but holding nothing. Well apart at the top; at impact together. Yet it was more the consuming clangor of the alarm set off near the brain that for Storm did away with the moment. This was only apparently so remote from any school fire drill alarm for Wick to line his “people” up (most not unhappy to be interrupted) and walk them to the third-floor stairs (when the alarm had gone off the day after my accident just as Wick had begun an account of calculus cure, though hardly thrown off his stride as Storm, his weather eye out for a tornado, surely seemed to have been).

For this present charge, this bell of sound was like the chaos or comfort it saved you from and it was this in those eyes of a man who’d indirectly murdered or meant to two friends of mine hardly countenancing the woman’s blow I and somebody else and Wick tried partly in vain to deflect, that told you Storm’s mind, if he ever in fact had read a page of the volume of stories on his onyx table in the palace, was too quick to hold a thought. And the thighs and belly too slow, the damage control shallow, sweeping; his a body that had sought always maybe a face to go with it, unfold from it, yet one afternoon a modest blunder touting Jesu’s idea for a gray mullet and dogtooth grouper hatchery in a great pond drawn off from the Galilean Lake had got himself slugged by a Christian lender from McLean, Virginia, Storm sustaining the damage you saw, the face he had gained (appropriately in the lobby of the Willard Hotel in DC).

If not the bewildered eye barely flicked at the furious woman but penetrating the bell timeless for all its sequence, term, and alarm where it came from who knew, and what it meant, as we at once began to learn from the black officer I had been calling “CEO” absent some minutes but back to break his news first to my sister; since it was her car cordoned off.

Storm’s eyes shocked in their irises by plans put off or worse — no more than that, no less. And by interruption, not fear. And not at all by blame which bewilderment at a thing shouted had once caused in me lifting off a springboard. My sister did not turn to me or the wide eyes of Husky at large looking for a friend, soon that afternoon to be found in my voice in the Hearings room, yet I found a look in her mouth and cheeks and hair cruelly alert as if she’d had her pocket picked by the man who had threatened her over the phone, all thrown into the days following. And I looked back at Storm — he at me, as he could, his bloody temple, the ripped fold at the corner of his mouth; but his eyes, the meat of his eyes — but really the moment in them waiting for a bandage, even as the emerging multitude facing another delay would stir, do something, get out of that plenary space or exit the building by emergency stair. Up and down and back again captain and CEO in their combats boarded the major elevator bound for the lobby to screen would-be attendees, reduce them to manageable numbers, just a job, less for Hearings’ sake than to remind us who was in charge; and there was the garage.

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