Cannonball

by Joseph McElroy

  14 a necessity like water

  Humidity stood and unfolded toward you like the music agitating distantly under the pool itself and you could blink away a cloud transfiguring your upward sight. Though, having on the way downstairs passed in his digs a very ghost of a sometime Administration speechwriter “on the way up,” I was not here to film a ceiling mosaicked blue green crimson with river birds and one great-lobed ear, an esoteric oblong drawn in or on it, anciently listening downward upon this forty-meter-or-so pool, saffron and gray of water, a roped-off, only somewhat deeper section for the diving board where a bald man with a moustache treaded water.

  Plus shower rooms; swimsuited civilian and military mixing nakedly (how did I know one from the other?), soldiers in fatigues; and this sketchy guy somehow, a large face I knew I would act on if I could just recall his job, his deep chin stonier for his short stature, eyebrows so thick and angularly peaked they didn’t need the small, recessed eyes beneath, a man bronzed on neck and forearms contemplating both the busy pool and this big woman guard in camo fatigues one-handing at her side a more or less automatic weapon I wasn’t familiar with with an awkward-looking outside sling swivel; yet also aware, I knew, of me, this stocky, quick civilian I half-remembered, tense, factoring me into the scene his blistered lips saying to the woman what I must hear while wondering all at once why he was here and why would our people consign the Scrolls to underground waterways, why not fax them home?

  Why would the enemy target them, was it envy of this newly documented Jesus reportedly confirming in actual interview the Enterprise Conference’s bold person-to-person Win-Win interaction two thousand years later? I try to honor my own ignorance—about people and what they mean. One forthright Syriac phrase in the transcript of the apparently prevailingly Aramaic-language interview with some Edessian dialectal colorings reportedly literally translated “succeed succeed,” a seed of EC’s “there are only winners if the market plan is followed”; another Syriac term, literally “bird market peace” reportedly meaning “seller’s niche” supposedly echoes our own venerable “flight plan” or “Christian game plan” which was a surprise to me in my ignorance if I believed my old hunch—or my struggling teacher’s, really, the assistant swimming coach at the high school—that Jesus must have been pretty left-wing. Where were the Scrolls coming from, some Holy Land? An oasis where David I have heard escaped Saul? Further north where winter rains once clothed the Mesopotamian plain in verdure? Or where Euphrates attains its height in the mountains? And if this new, not secondhand profile of the Master chief executor of the miracles—saved virtually live in talk by an early first-century Roman with a genius for history, makes the Vatican like a man suddenly bald or worse feel challenged, will the new Pope still judge weapons of mass subtraction the lesser evil to cloning’s multiplier?

  Old Milt’s kind of question, irked at The Inventor’s envelopes, and at my “rage” to see—See?—the war which through my other so young Asian friend turned from seeing almost to another sense, as I subsequently tried to show at the Hearings though less for a theme of Competition synonymous among our people with freedom (to buy, for example, a fragrant candle called His Essence that smells like Jesus, his robes, in Psalm 45) than toward another of our senses I will call Understanding first sketched in samples of my sister’s way of speaking or relation to me though nothing I could do justice to at the Hearings from which I become less connected while realizing that, not bluff or dynamic enough, I no longer knew if I was an emerging professional in the field of sports psychology, or had fallen into Errorism, a humorous but not all that humorous term in the field, which is a branch of sports medicine, and meaning an overprecise differing with somebody (and if they won’t pass you the ball and you’re the open man, it may affect your shooting eventually). And then my sister’s voice so clear inside me it might have been messaging asking how “old Milt” had called me on the carpet about my enlistment for it had never been principally a birthday party for The Inventor. Only trying to make a contribution to just about every panel of the Hearings on Competition when it came to it eventually and say what I saw to show myself months later what I saved even to describe for others what went down when my friend, as I have already said, all but miraculously appeared.

  Sports psychology out on a limb beyond its parent trunk sports medicine if I am in the right field even, led on and on from friend and foe by the equivalent of what you get along the upper wall of castles in old Damascus and Mesopotamia, those projecting galleries supported by arches with holes in the floor which came in handy for pouring boiling oil, water, or blood upon competitors below if you can make the time it came to me to say, finding at last the one person around—in the doorway of the next-to-last panel room of the Hearings—who understood thoughts of that kind probably because it was her kind of thinking, my sister.

  Thoughts in an “up” moment at poolside leaving me exposed so to Storm’s associate (yes) this deep-chinned KPMG accountant UK transplant to California I once saw through my swim goggles at East Hill checking their investment—though now as time, broken-down or not, ran out (shudderingly, I believe) through the palace building, witnessing an event that was and was not my job, I heard again the stupidly familiar words “Come in handy” this man before me now said to the plain vanilla Specialist he may in fact have fancied, meaning surely her old automatic rifle (of course of course—his words like memory itself) a Chinese SKS way-out-of-date post-World-War-II and trade-prohibited under U.S. law I’d caught a much better equipped contract-civilian on film ridiculing—the words felt in my chest an interruption of my heart waking the old surface scar bringing back my father’s prediction Come in handy of my friend Umo, and that they’d bring back the Draft, it was only fair, hearing like never before my name called from above, near where an almost invisible trap-hinged section of the ceiling’s mosaicked giant ear had snapped shut again too quick for me:

  for there was Umo, compelled to be there, I could tell, arrived on that diving board notorious for penalties suffered by divers who fell short of excellence, yet in all his foreign flesh free—and “going,” as we say in our public pools back home or ask of somebody who stands up there on the high board too long (You goin’?): (but a dive multiplying all your damned questions into some moving, unanswerable statement, yet Umo here for me somehow)

  and not here, I felt, for the same job as me:

  yet for a job, solo probably—for where’s his crew, where’s the deserter?—for something has happened: and on the board still a boy, overflowing yet not surplus, still bound somewhere, diving it came to me for me at the same time as Get outa his way, a life weapon in himself. My throat would not sing out his name to him—he might have been Montezuma—I heard some familiar Rock ‘n Roll distantly below the pool yet somewhere central like a comfort level or taped home; mental yet sustaining like a wheel and on message, and as Umo (to these folk what, by these waters?—a not sufficiently developed or identifiable alien presence in the camouflage shorts, a local who doesn’t belong here—did my job give me these words?—troublemaker rising up—how’d he get in, through the ceiling?)—hailing this sweating, dumbfounded Army cameraman in boots on the wet tiles—“Zach!”—who aims his handy beat-up company-issue camcorder quickly from the hip and too low for Godsake unthinking reaching his other hand into his pocket:

  registering behind me the double cluck of a different chamber readying (because it wasn’t the big blonde but the woman, small and dark, whose smell of jasmine soap, so bizarrely distinct from the gun oil and the gleaming slide and interlock of her newly rerustproofed M4 there and a hint of burn, I knew from the bedroom across the hall from mine at home) so I seriously doubted that this was my Operation Scroll Down job, handy as I might be:

  for I suspected under these waters beside which I found myself, under the great tray or vessel of the pool itself, another level down or two, ran what I had been sent for to shoot—to witness, that is—where a branch of the vast desert well system passed by for the
palace-builder’s onetime use and now for ours that we might deliver safely cradled the truly New capsule testimony to our Man and faith in what we were doing here and “next door” with benefits for all, or down there just some sewerside den.

  I would not shout out I thought to Umo, he had made his stately approach and had given his trust to a strange diving board and I wouldn’t have my friend—targeted?—distracted as I had once been, yet found fixed in my throat dread or a power thrust into it of plural cry or covenant the silent question from my eyes and mouth Why’re you here?—virtual Hey Momma somewhere recalled song that my sister or (that was it!) Umo would have understood, hearing in this split delay or vocal two-note chord already, before Umo had launched his upward, arms-flungoutward trip like a vanishing crane white above its black flight feathers from some depleted tundra bog in the far north, the stab of the accountant’s voice at me, “Hey you’re bleeding.” Words come just in time to be part of what I couldn’t say quite, or only hear, the come in handy my father had summed up Umo in—and knew what had stung my arm arriving at the palace and reaching to touch the pillar’s fluting, and presently what I had seen on Storm’s pants and felt of impossibly even myself in his sticky palm.

  And hearing in my head, arm, throat, fingers of my left hand that had drawn the tiny camera from my shirt pocket so that I was double-taking after first bringing my left hand to my chest then out again, Umo’s participation in a moment I didn’t grasp (except as I guessed they had promised him some corner of citizenship) and never taking my eyes off Umo calling to him only in my mind, my mind, to slow down, pause, in midair so we could talk, I stepped back flinging my other arm that was holding the clunky Army-issue videocam back around behind me half-knowing what I would strike and hearing as if I had detonated it the explosion from the M4 fired by the small dark Specialist its aim deflected because it’s a free country and you can always try—and in the corner of my eye aware only afterward of the accountant falling shot; for the dive I had never seen Umo or anyone try—from its surge and peak and sudden all but yanked and independent half twist and the surprises that followed it called up from the depths the gross counterpart of its own folding and unfolding and fall to be all but met by a concussion from below the diving well, bursting, bulging like a huge toilet flush or great bubble of oil from the diving well, bombed definitely from below as Umo was to have entered the water feetfirst, his joined legs, feet, and pointed toes all one, and a flying splinter of shrapnel like a shuttering split second tore a piece of his shoulder, expansion beneath and all around us as he would have made his entry into the vanishing water, yet the diving well section of the pool gave way, not inward at first—a gulp of force drawing up a gush under pressure, a bulbous blossoming water sucked where it came from yet at its ashen, pinkish rim for a split second not moving until following the first souvenirs of tile, cement, chrome, and human material, a leg and foot (the bald man who’d been floating in the well perhaps), and my friend’s vanishing form, the pool water largely draining out into the disaster area where Heavy Metal music resumed, never having ceased, spinning, coming up like what my friend and his team had come here to tape GIs listening to most of them and talking about this badly served-up war the wages of which were regularly paid out of experience to guys and women in sums of money quite modest because experience is almost beyond price, being a necessity like water, though what the terrorists had been after I had to figure was not swimmers or palace but the arriving Scrolls, and had a second explosion boosted the first or aftershocked it or was it still the first?

  And the poolside faces and their bodies all so contingent, looking like bearing weapons’s the job in itself, turn this way and that shepherding nowhere in particular the rest, who might just be the voices all around in the still watery areas of alarm thickened by risk falling at you and away like speeds through some darkness of the noise, new to me in a threatened building. Denizens crowded about the near side of the pit left by the blast, my wrist was wrenched and the camcorder that I had put another notch in when I struck the rifle behind me like a backstroker in a busy lane was gone from my hand. I turned and went after the guard behind me but the big woman standing in the accountant’s watering blood steered me with her rifle another way, I was not to follow the small woman in oversize combats who at the swinging doors turned, rifle stock braced against her ribs her finger ready, my Army cam in her other hand, startled understanding across her cheeks: “Nobody on the high board after 1300 hours,” she said, she was backing, half not believing what she was doing, through the doors into the stairwell where a crush just visible not coming in or out nor loitering ascended from below—she said something else about the diving board.

  Where I overshot is where I still am, he and I. Thought where is he now? A dive divided. Yet they could have their plan and that company camera I guess set to auto-iris whatever they figured was in it. My job blown but not by me, still mine even my own I hoped to do if I could find my way. The gray pool a current with a sideways wash evacuating toward the pit opened by the blast, I am addressed by a swimmer standing up to his shins as if the associate of Nosworthy up here curled on the tiles undone by his own blood didn’t exist, asking me what I had thought of the dive—“was it not two or three combined?”

  “Always,” I think I said.

  “Quite the diver.”

  “A brave diver,” I said, so stunned.

  “He want you to veedeotape.”

  “No, he wanted citizenship.”

  “Citizen!” The man vaulted onto the tiles, built like a wrestler with lethal eyes and looked like some Russian soldiers I had photographed at an airfield in the south in Wasit playing soccer and dolls with little kids; physical, broad-faced, he had the blond brush cut, small ears close to the head, and the blunt blue eyes. “Dey will take you for enemy combatant if you hang out with wrong people. Hang out with a target…” his shoulders shrugged forward, you know what I’m saying was what he meant.

  “What?” I said forgetting even to turn away from him. What had the guard making off with my videocam called back to me: something “diving board” and “nothing happened.”

  The man bobbed his jaw at the smoking pit, what had been the diving well. Human sound loomed up from somewhere below. “I think he had no choice,” said the man. “Think what you like,” I said.

  “He was competitor to the end,” said the man. “He’s my friend,” I said. “He’s a great diver.”

  “Nothing break his concentration. Unless his own death.” The man laughed. “He was your friend.”

  “Is.”

  He looked past me with his lingering hair-trigger alertness, this civilian adviser or reconstruction hustler, as I took him to be, on the margins. “Go see what’s left of him,” the man said, then thought better of it: “That dive,” he said.

  Three point something, high degree of difficulty, I was saying from somewhere in myself, a wish to be accurate, self-important——

  “A simple dive but den a tweest…and den—”

  “—but tuck then layout then pike before entry—he’s known for his entry.”

  “You know this stuff,” the man shifted tactics. “So tell me, under this kinda deal could you…?”

  “I damn near killed my—”

  “This kinda pressure—”

  “—killed myself once,” I said.

  The man squinted. “Yourself?”

  “Oh I let it happen.”

  “Ah well…”

  I heard the killer contempt, yet I was on my way, I was stricken and needed to get to my job but speak words.

  “Somebody…,” I began.

  “Een meedair,” said the Russian softly with a Russian clairvoyance quite poisonous.

  “Yeah. Somebody shouted.”

  “Een meedair,” the Russian said.

  “That’s right.”

  “A dive, a diver. My sympaty.”

  I dropped the mini into my shirt pocket and freed my hands, supposing that the soldier who had b
een pointing her rifle at me and had used it as a prod that had originally brought me to the edge of the pool, was behind me and my best way was through the pool, yet free of the videocam the woman in oversize combats had taken with film inside but had said what about the diving board?