Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

“The dive, eet began like swan. He tweested halfway to face board and then doble somersault. Layout and tuck was amazing thing.” Russian had missed Umo’s last pike.

The warped slope of tile shivered sideways, and the woman who had fallen again and I were pulled back. They had caught on to me, that I was not Security. I slipped, I fell.

“He was your friend, he was my friend,” I heard the Russian say, the link itself alert with lurking shifts, motive, plausible profit. “Changsta, they call him.” I crawled, lunged with a bloody palm now down to the lip of the pit that was peeled, burned like shit, jagged and the drained peach color of fat tissue exposed by cutting. “He bothered you,” I got out.

But then where I kneeled came to life, it got me to my feet like aftershocks homegrown, bad arm out for balance. It was the Russian calling: “What they shouted?” he had to know; and then “You have a seester” and then, “Was hees idea—” said on a surge of the same old music from below—“to film here.” I had it: La Jolla, Chula Vista — the truth like a friend’s staggering indiscretion or the jump when something comes to you — for that was who this was: Umo’s boss ! the sound engineer — no, an assistant sound engineer, this Russian who had dared mention my sister, recalling her radiance recalling so vividly my Umo at La Jolla leaning on the fender of a truck watching paragliding as if the sun itself was buoyant: but if like Umo the Russian is traveling with that third member of the documentary recording team a deserter who would be viewed as an enemy combatant caught out after curfew, why hang here?

“He was not my bloody friend — hey what deed it meant,” demanded the voice, “what they shouted at you?”

My grandfather, whom I’d met only once came to mind (why was that?) like grass growing under my feet. I was stressed, the Ukrainian said he was from somewhere, it sounded like “Chernobyl” but not “Chernobyl” with its meaty knell, coal mines, Kiev train line worker, Chevron nearly, Chervonoarmiyska!

And now down there below pool level, the voice stricken, oh, stricken, squalling, “Lift it,” I tipped, for I will do my job, into also Umo’s blabbing and am gone— someone headed somewhere else gone into the water forever —my sister’s thought remembering all by itself my chest-treasured heart, and California, and Umo’s two-and-a-half entry tuck-accelerated that time when the lights went (though back on in a second) one summer night — though, falling now toward the flickering sewer below and an extreme voice I was quite certain known to me, I jumped.

And no time to check my plunge or midair a gap someone else forms into named unknowns:

for Time — so little between fall and water — all but ignored me, slow-on-the-uptake, a pale panel came up to skim me and raw studs wrenched askew and steel I-beam end and four- by-eight ply split torqued velocity at you between instants of a life you could call failed yet met — by me, my jump, my fall, my shadow of uncanniness, its reeling plane, sparks pouring upward through me, my bond waiting someplace, my job after all , which you may still stumble on in this other that they stick you with, on the take, I will tell the Hearings later:

already months before explained at low ebb to a military new I hoped friend listener that only by some stretch or perverse aim had I joined up, or from my father’s example or his thinking impulse self-serving first, or, by some torqued reasoning, my fam ily (?)—

But, No , unh-unh, my listener disagreed, your job —yet then (“No no”) I disagreed with my self , interrupting with what I maybe knew he was going to say — a man of God as it happened and for a moment leaving his voice in my thought and prevailing, “No, unh-unh, negative negative, it was just where you felt…—”

“—forced—” I began, “coerced”—

“Drafted!” the Chaplain had croaked—

Well yeah but—

—’zackly—

— my own way—

—’zackly—

— choose for my—

—’zackly — like these (he caught his breath, recalled by me mortally, exactly, months later as I fell, knowing vacantly in a vacant fate of my own the voice down in the pit) — these damned Scrolls that he’d been assigned to (?) just when he put in for…underwater training for crying out tears which was why he was here at Meade if you want the plain—

— my self , I finished, adding some dumb thought about camera being an eye but a…a…a fucking shield, no, casement window — no excuse for not speaking — word.

We were two exercisers then, like another pair we passed when he remarked, puffing, that only this morning he’d been told never to exercise outside on the avenues here at Fort Meade except with a coworker, like a spotter in the weight room. And here we slowed to a walk down a Base avenue, still at a great rate all elbows and hips, and my companion looking around stopped and we looked at each other and reacted, almost laughing, the Chaplain thick as a bear in the torso with the long, lonely legs headed (he told me) for a monster simulation tank and I, much younger, who’d fallen into step with him when we converged and we had struck up a conversation about lab facilities at Meade and photography the old box and about seeing all that was really crowded into, well, things and how one guy has a certain take and they appropriate it and use it and it’s not what the guy had in mind at all, he said. Chaplain was no genius, he said, but he’d seen a few things and told his trainers what they didn’t like to hear. Meade had chilled one then, looking ahead, the Chaplain had said, if I heard right as if it was more than him.

And his take on my enlistment threw me (but my companion for these few minutes is a Chaplain after all which deserves respect even from an outranked know-nothing), while I defended my act and running or speed-walking all the time I would not recall all I said about what you had to do and what you discovered — he listened, he reminded me of my sister. But did he talk: and he had seen some terrible things, yet en route now at the end of it to the desert for crying out tears where they were shipping him to do battle-stress counseling. He believed he was some contingency plan of theirs (Underwater photography, I said, making sense of what he said)—“A swimmer,” he said of me nodding. He was holding it together, he was looking away from me at a building we had come near. “You got no idea what’s holding me together,” he said, hearing my thought — and, yeah, he could tell I was a swimmer, he said — needing the water , or (he laughed) it needing you. More on that, he said. His voice was together, his eyelids, cheekbones, mouth were, too, and yet he did not preach and was not the type and he was taking me somewhere, it occurred to me.

— people come back from…he looked at me… The dead? I said, exhilarated maybe on Base oxygen — can you do that? He touched me, we were jogging again — Or abuse, he said, winded, it improves your character — or not come back, if you want to know.

No?

I put him in mind of a problem with (he lowered his voice) with Jesus (?). “To my mind Jesus didn’t have one particular pal, though my candidate was” (my running partner lowered his voice) “Lazarus,” he’d become convinced of it, and the women at Bethany, never mind, and Martha’s sister Mary gave Jesus a head-rub with special oil we should get the name of again, and the miracle wasn’t raising anybody from (the Chaplain’s voice barely audible, where was he headed?) the grave, but was the friendship y’see between Jesus and Lazarus. But they doubled Lazarus for more exposure, the two Gospels split it into two guys, beggar with the sores and the rich man named something, and the second one the friend he brought to life, and put the second a week before the Jerusalem wind-down and added a dipperful of magic and, groaning as he approached the tomb, Jesus’s I mean dark (make no mistake) discomfort about bringing Lazarus back — resurrecting him, I mean — and thanking God for granting the miracle of this guy four days dead staggering out of the cave in his stinking sheet, a painting shows someone holding his or her nose, Jesus already knowing what would happen next week in Jerusalem. So they doubled Lazarus and wrote him into a miracle in John but it was nothing like that — which is decades after the…(“Oh well,” I said) And now, “What’s the rush?” he said, for we had clocked some personal mileage it turned out, and you had come back from the dead but in actual fact had just gotten healthy with a little help from your friends.