My sister didn’t censor much: Your soldier there e-mailed asking Was I married?—I said Not that I know of, but thought again and added, Talk not to me.
She would like to hold me and whisper me a joke that what I start in others need no more be mine than streams far as forever from their source. A faithful e-mailer even later when I got out of the service (I thought) and was seeing almost no one and she told me how they had visited a papermaking studio with the big Mixmasters and the felt blankets and cloudy water everywhere and that was the way she did things, from the ground up. Her exact geography in these e-mails of hers, plotting my whereabouts but exactly where is she, in her words? Another retrieved on a poor happy corporal’s laptop who couldn’t get his earphones or almost his ears to work so rachetting forth was the jam around him (and me) though Stones and Zeppelin-wise.
Again from my sister, this time “some numbers” she promised, and signing herself “Arabiyoun ana Maisoon.” What’s your sister’s name? the soldier wanted to know, though he had only to hit Reply to contact her. She changes it all the time, I said. I thought, Is he going to start up something with her?—and she was e-mailing me abroad that our mother had said Dad had told her one night before I left, and in fact did leave before he had a chance to drive me home, that I had come close to equaling the Club record for the 200 backstroke but he didn’t get a chance to tell me, I had seemed in a real zone looking up into the sky almost…reaching like… She forgot, my sister said…my mother had forgotten what I’d been reaching like. And Umo… Javascript or garbage followed yet at the end, haven’t seen Dad over there, have you? and it wasn’t until I got home to California that I learned the other number she had bulleted for me for Umo. Why my father had not taken the opportunity to tell me my 200 time next morning no more needed to be explained (to me at any rate) than his decision (and permission) to quit the Reserve at this time. Because he knew someone—or had something to offer in exchange, it came to me. Yet my days were clear as memory, my parents, the speed of light in its actual presence (and therefore slowness), and the fact that I’ve never had its constancy (going away or toward) satisfactorily explained to me. A swelled head Dad and Mom would call it. Another e-mail retrieved at Kut asked what had happened just before the photo of the “two headless ones” I’d sent in a wretched mood; a second e-mail, what had happened before that? She could always help me. As she had just before I left.
Dad’s forty-third birthday evening I was fresh from a friendship-ending debate with Milt. And faced with a scheduling conflict. Almost exactly the same age, we had known each other too long and so could swap words of our fathers’—“let your tool do its work,” Milt quoted my dad, and now throughout the forty-five-minute exchange on the way home from The Inventor’s during which I laid out vastly more fact than Milt to establish the error of a war that I was joining up for, we found ourselves paused upon a narrow meridian—its gravelly ground advertised for Adoption—a fault line between opposing three-lane streams of rush-hour vehicles that all but drowned my friend out. So I observed him from head to toe with more clarity than regret somehow pairing the seventeen tons of ordnance dropped during the run-up by the President in a no-fly zone, with Milt’s higher-pitched Lincoln voice; the President’s unwillingness (like a silhouette heavily backlit) to share intelligence among our allies, with Milt’s index finger shaking at me (thumb over the other three), still irritated that I had alleged Jesus had spat into someone’s eye; that the ten-foot-high concrete blast walls in the capital separating protected visitors from exposed natives had been acquired from Kurdistan not poured in plentiful local cement, with Milt’s huge feet encased in gray Converse; and the Middle East vet once trained as a Ranger in Fort Lewis up in Washington, then trained as a forward observer, now an RPG amputee and devoted hunter in Oregon, who had not liked me and had told us personally that his absolute certainty that there is a Jesus got him through—with Milt’s unusually thin, marine neck with its elderly bobbing Adam’s apple. So I felt like a swimmer whose shoulders and legs belong to the water on a very good day, with that coast and skim and play of power quite apart from how far you are going as if you had kid fins on, laying down on the dining room table for my sister to wrap it one of The Inventor’s envelopes that had cost me twenty dollars I think and added its stake to whatever had made Milt mad—a difference with The Inventor often. Once about sex (which Milt said was just the release of tension, a biological function). Today more likely the news, edited in fact slightly by me as if it had been solo, that I had taken my physical at the ungodly hour of seven that morning. And now The Inventor had summoned us to a party that evening, at an address not his that I imagined I knew. But in the kitchen with my mother and the turkey molé conquistadores I asked that the evening be not about me but Dad, which she thought considerate though considerate of what? (Did I know what the envelope contained? my sister asked. Not really.)
The evening was not well attended. We were missing the assistant coach at the high school Wick and his wife, and my brother and Liz and Milt. Sinatra singing “Five Minutes More,” my mother handed me a platter to carry in from the kitchen. My aunt and uncle came for the fresh local shrimp and turkey molé and spoke cordially of this friend of mine they had yet to meet because a young Mongolian (of all things) Sumo had taken Osaka by storm (they laughed frowning at this), broken taboo by taking prize money with his left hand, being left-handed, but in Japan you don’t throw your opponent by yanking him forward by the hair and he’d had to go back to Mongolia until things cooled down. Umo himself, I pointed out, had told me how this Asashōryū glared, but Umo was a diver, he was not into Sumo, in fact I didn’t know where he was (I felt my sister smiling on me—the way I had said it).
I hadn’t seen him in weeks.
Had I done something? We gather what we can together, and that’s it.
My sister made an impromptu speech, wordy for her, in honor of the breadwinner who brings home his loaded gun unfired, and in a moment slightly embarrassing but we didn’t quite know why, she remembered wrestling in the living room with brother Zach over a joke and Dad’s not breaking it up—
He came upon us wrestling—
Angry on the rug.
Father to us both, he thought
Fight—or sport—or hug.
They dive into their home work—
Espousing not to shirk.
His kids—for all they lack—
Making the path they track.
—and that on the camping trip we had taken with Dad I had seen an indigo bunting on the Bradshaw Trail that wasn’t supposed to be there and Dad had said, But it is, and with his prompting we had taken another camping trip on our own and learned to make the path you follow even while hearing almost on top of us the aerial gunnery at Chocolate Mountain though we had wound up with all this food tonight, look only at the birthday dude and think of all the different people there in that chair, and someone had said this of James Thurber when he came to dinner.
My father and I didn’t bother telling each other what we each knew anyhow—his somehow quitting the Reserve, my more than impending enlistment. His shortness with me, and transferring the beribboned envelope, its own wrapping, unopened from the table to the top of my older brother’s straw sombrero he wore on the twenty-nine-dollar-a-weekday golf course on the floor—I felt it in the flush on my face a message in both directions telling me Dad was angry at having, in some original way, used me.
If he had, the phone call a month ago might be paying me off. How was not clear, an assignment the Army might not make good on or I could decline or not enlist.
Yet I was acting for myself. No matter what had been done to get me in. Less enlisting in the Army than enlisting the war in a plan of my own no dumber than other stuff I’d done. Family? East Hill? Math? Love? Getting in my own way, my mother just said when I ran into her in front of the Heartmobile having her picture taken by the butcher, a friend. I had asked my father when he got back from his strangely timed trip if he had ch
ecked into Umo’s activities on the east coast of Baja. Yes, he said, yes.
Yes? I said.
The kid was quite competent. “Competent!” A reliable shipper and contact person, my father understood, he would come in handy. “And for your information it’s a lot to say about anyone, that they’re competent.” I had missed something and it would come to me. The phone rang. “The envelope,” I said.
It was Milt’s surprised voice reminding me of The Inventor’s party, the scheduling conflict I regretted for my mother and sister’s sakes, respectively, the cook and, I sensed then and confirmed late that night in her room, the secret genius of the moment with whom I left the issue of the envelope. Though I picked it up—Happy Returns my sister had written on it—and carried it into the hallway.
“Thank you,” my father said, his napkin in hand, appearing and taking the envelope from me. I didn’t much want to see what was inside right then and neither did he. A wide and brilliant smile in a narrow face—stranger than truth—there was a joke on someone. I said I was enlisting in the Army and had taken a physical this—“It’s your decision,” my father broke in. “That’s what I’m saying, Dad.” “If you were in the Reserve you’d be out sooner,” he said. “Feet first,” I pulled open the somehow heavy front door into the night. I said I thought the President would let me go in good time. “And good luck with your…” I looked him in the face and didn’t flinch at the unknown, a touchy man, enterprising, but why this outlandish hook-up or patron, Storm and with a last name Nosworthy at that?
I heard his interrupting as I ran for a bus that waited. A physical this morning?
You cannot fly but your body will sometimes feel spread out, there is so much of it, hand to mouth we say, hand, arm, shoulder, belly, and in the whole body with a little help from our friends there is not only a future but a gift to see it. I couldn’t have taken my sister, who seemed all the family I had sometimes when I would lie beside her talking, speaking.
I had signed up knowing that my father weeks since had quit the Reserve somehow. He himself was surprised, he said, in moments of humor as soon as I was out the door, I learned; but at what? At himself that he’d resigned? That his son had enlisted? The two. “Happy birthday,” my sister said all over again across the table at him upon this last, she told me very late that night when I came home to tell her about Milt and Umo and the state cop Zoose and his sister dancing alone because her husband was in the Army, and the others. Was he surprised that I didn’t break with him? (He’d resigned, because he’d been given leave to. In return for what?)
My sister and I that night and always in touch, and presently as fleeting e-mails would remind, tracking me not really. Yet, in my hopes of some secret employment, this person mine—her quaint hand on my heart, words on her lips, her words on my skin now and again, words in the dark touching my words, even as we heard the footfall outside her door at three in the morning pause and pass on. Upon which she regretted doing what she’d done when she had read me my father’s entry in the Coaches Directory so long ago—omitting words, omitting words, her hand on my chest, perhaps waiting for me to ask, until I didn’t but I had already read them, they didn’t matter: you’re diving into the wreck of this war she said that night of my enlistment when I came home to her, it didn’t sound quite like her.
Others think they have plans for you but you keep a memory of your future free. The dive, its execution some say an infinite series of instants each bringing you somewhere as if you were stopped. No borrowed laptop at hand to tell my sister my orders came where I was billeted and apparently I would have company two mornings later. Meanwhile I waited in my own way. One afternoon I saw into a doorless home, not a rag of a curtain between me and that nearly impenetrable dusk and I was seen by faces, or in their alertness they were willing that I enter, perhaps it was to help the woman lying on a mat dead or sleeping even by spying. With what? A camera? A bow. In a hovel with a rifle bipod lying on a sandal in a corner, a talisman hanging on the wall, other people came in off the street, a gathering just to hear what might be said. Then I had to go. She was dead but her eyelids glued shut, willed, soldered, and I asked to use their e-mail, odd though the welcome seemed, and I asked as I typed myself in what “Arabiyoun ana Maisoon” meant and was told “I am an Arab,” and my sister wanted me to know that my 200 time that night of the ceiling had been a personal record.
Another day a boy asked me to come with him, he had American night vision goggles of the type for which replacement parts had run out. Along Haifa Street cavalry were now on foot patrol. One morning two armed men in shorts and t-shirts came running toward me but passed on either side. I photographed an old curved balcony, exposed a whole roll, and a man came out onto the balcony then. He showed his wrists, he was shouting to me, explaining. I thought it was about flex-cuffs so tight he developed gangrene in one hand. A picture of all that? Where was I going during the three-day wait for where I was going? Already there almost, impatient as a bad photographer (recalling, too, the photo of the burned-out trailer missing from what the captain had of mine) I heard of a sound crew taping/ recording GIs, I was just missing them.
Rather, a crew filming GIs and their music, word of three guys crossing the desert (a $900 cab ride from Syria!) to capture on videotape the listening habits of our soldiers. Headphones handed to me as friends at school used to, to hear “Raining Blood,” and aboard a parked truck where nothing was happening “Little Red Corvette,” and “Purple Haze” Jimi walking underwater, and in another set of headphones with this time talk by the numbers. “It’s Too Late Now, We Ready,” Pastor Troy told it, and I had to ask someone three times if they had seen a big Asian kid in the sound crew till I got the attention of this plugged-in Specialist who said Plenty of Asians, tapping the headphone, grinning, “Weapon of mass instruction,” taking it in my stride, shaking his finger like a speaker, when a skinny little guy with rimless glasses said Yes he had “reconized” one of them; he turned away to his laptop. Recognized? I said; which one? I thought—but there was action down the avenue and in a warren of alleys, and I was on the run in mid-thought past a shut-down masquf restaurant, Wednesday I remembered the lucky day to eat fired carp guts, or hearing Nineveh Street I thought behind me, also someone’s question behind me but up ahead Marines, spray-painting “Long live the muj killers” over a rebel sign in Arabic at the entrance to I didn’t know what, dived for cover when a shooter moving from window to window opened up again from above. And I thought what “GIs” meant, and how headphones gave you out of mind out of sight. Yet Umo is here, I thought.
And the night before this odd or as I expected then routine assignment—an “archaeological arrival,” the captain had said in confidence—why did I feel I had no business here listening as though my life depended on it to the mumbled words of a swarthy redhead from a northern California military police brigade on a table, with a head wound, a bloody bandage all across his eyes, poor guy?—blood under the table.
My sister’s lips upon one eyelid, then the other, then the first, dizzying (the touch itself another’s touch to call me back beyond the dizziness), my eyes sore from party smoke, I recounted the droll farewell night in a whisper, if anyone here were still awake after The Inventor’s ‘57 Bel Air (never guilty of the sloth on which its owner disagreed with some mysterious “Apostle” who had said sloth violated brotherly love) had picked the worst moment, delivering me at my door, to detonate two blats of backfire in our street.
Though no lights had gone on. Though my sister’s face in an upstairs window welcomed me like a wife who’d been sleeping.
12 the stillness between the beginning breakers of his breathing
Who was there? she asked, sixteen and a half years old lying beside me, my shirt half-unbuttoned, a scent blurred and slept-on.
Well, everybody. Three little runaways Cheeky lets stay there; one smokes right along with her. Weed? Course not. Cheeky? It was her place not The Inventor’s, out in North Wash. Up the street from him,
a bungalow with a blue door, everybody was there.
Everybody? Well, Milt. Of course, he picked the right party to go to. No, he was mad at me. And me. You? He thinks we might go out. Milt argued with The Inventor—he was there. Well, the party was for him except—Right, it was an enlistment party it turned out. And The Inventor’s two nieces and his plumber and the plumber’s teacher of some kind, and a Mexican girl, very tall, lives in Chula Vista, husband they let him outa jail to enlist, a music guy worked for a Russian, got into some stuff; and Umo, who you haven’t—Yes that night on the Interchange—You only saw him—Yeah—And I not since seven—This morning—Yeah—Who you haven’t set eyes on, my sister began—Since seven this morning, I said. Your physical. I don’t know how he knew what time it was, he lined up, they wouldn’t let him in. The Mexican girl was a basketball player, she laughed and laughed (such a smile), a friend of Umo’s. He thought he was going to enlist this morning. They wouldn’t let him in. ‘Course they wouldn’t, you’re a team, said my sister. Did Milt know? He said why would he think they’d let him in, he didn’t even have papers, better clean up his act, Milt said. Umo pulled out an old photo ID from Republic of China, Milt snapped it out of his fingers. He never recognized Umo, E said beside me. No, he did, I said. Oh he’s a free—Yeah—A mountain in your way. Shoulda gone all the way down to Mexico with him, my sister said. You saw him, I said—Mmhmm, getting up into that—Hey, who was driving—? On the Interchange—Yeah you saw him climbing into a truck in the middle of traffic. Who was driving?
My baby clucked. She threw the bedclothes back and rolled over on me: Nobody, she said, nobody was driving. Her voice touched my ear, the mouth spread, a finger on my shoulder hours between night and dawn deepened like hope against hope And I told how Umo said, Give my best to…and grinned. Umo did? That’s right. Umo will go where you go, my sister said into my ear, that’s the agreement. He’s going to marry my sister, he said. Marry your sister? (she coughed against me, laughing) “Milt didn’t like it,” I said. “You didn’t.” Umo, I murmured. He’s luck of some kind, said my sister. Mm hmm, and a friend, but he competes. He’ll go where you go. He will? Yeah, a secret weapon. He’ll follow you and—
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