Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

“Team got out.” “The team?” I said. “Got out.” “Our team,” I said. “Got out.” “But not you?” Above us my name was shouted, shouted twice. “The only team,” said the man trapped before me. I got hold of a corner of the steel and was able to lift it an inch, this steel ceiling shield, if that. It wasn’t going anywhere. I tried again. “The only team here,” I said. “‘Zackly,” came the reply with breath alone. “Just add water.” Was he losing me? Mentioning his old yellow camera. Fenton , I think he said — he’d never fake a picture. The cannonballs were there and then they weren’t. Great photo… I could hardly hear him. “But the expl o sions,” I said with my whole body, and I slid the steel shield away from his neck.

“Teamwork,” said my mole as if he were smiling, the voice scarcely there; “like the…” “The Scrolls…” I began. “Zackly.” “Operation…” “Zackly.” “Scroll Down.” “Zackly,” the word’s breath only exhaled in the darkness, a will working across crippled membranes of stillness, yet against the imperiling sounds from above. “Bomb went off, guy came down like a shot.” That was the teamwork the voice, this partner of mine, had meant. And I realized with the surge of memorial sewer below us, the one we later learned had recently been named after our leader, that you may live beyond yourself in what may be heard still. “That was a diver,” I said.

“Feet first.” “Where did he hit?” “Hit me,” were the words. “Him?” I tried to follow.

“It.”

Was that it for the explosions? Was my man dying on me? I was smart, I see. Where Umo should have hit, had moved and hit this man instead. And Umo passed right through. “You know him,” he said. “I do.” “They’ll get him. It’s not your job.” Unthinking arms flung out, brought in — Umo, that series of instants I had hoped to grasp, was each one lessening but not truly interrupting the distance to entry, calculus of friend to friend? — who and what had I tried to postpone, my borderline-high-blood-pressure brother at age fifteen gone below into a mysterious pattern of horizontal wells or into a branch of a capital sewer composting anything at all, meaning or revenge, into the waste of Zach’s state.

Two ways out of here, I said: up, or down. But his words knew me.

Try again , I heard from my Chaplain witness photographer partner, fellow soldier. So I put my back and shoulder into it, my hands, my heart. But I couldn’t bypass my bad arm, which had grown a weight, a tight implant thing not pendulous but like a muscle uselessly on its own. How I slid the unthinkable steel sheet away — I had help from the floor or ground tilting under me and thought the palace was coming down, the job further mangled by the second explosion — what job? were they after the infidel Scrolls alone? — if a second explosion was what it’d been. You don’t need to compromise your own palace where bunkers, soundproof practice range, interrogation chambers, a major pool, multiple sound systems, a private mosque, and a rumored internal boating moat speak for themselves. I had to lower the steel plate again but couldn’t and, pivoting the damn thing like a plane to shift away from, stepped on the man’s ankle and was dizzy when space tilted I recall, my job or a new demanding plane finding me or some tide along the sewer, and I could see the rest of him now, he’d emerged from that stinking sandwich of a cave in the wet half-light subtle like him, and I think I heaved the steel all more-than-two-hundred-pounds of it against a stanchion-pillar beyond him bearing its fair share of the building’s structure now in question. He was almost a friend. I could hear him thinking, Seals…‘nterrogation , and then Like this … only opp- osite?

Truth, you knew. And if it could be known curious enough to be someone’s loss or gain. From the clamor above I heard my name.

“That’s you?” asked the man watching me who was the man I had met at Fort Meade and liked, now revealed bare above the waist where his wet-suit torso had been peeled down, his black short leggings and some closed-heel fins that had been bent over by the awful weight, bloody at the knees, his ankles crushed, his chest changed, heaving on one side, a strip of duct tape along a rib as if to hold something in, one ankle already waterlogged-looking. The jabbering voices from the ruptured overhead must be getting ready to act, no need to ask where they had come up with my name, someone always knows you. I yelled for a medical evac.

This man not yet disposed of — what he had said of Umo.

Dislodged cement around me and light from below: “You ,” I said.

“Got what they needed.”

“With a bomb?”

“…Scrolls.” Was it his long legs that replied whisperingly unmuscled, free of the upper body, and it might have been reflected or that I had counseled him : “What they needed,” he said. “Who?” “Not what was meant.” “Meant,” I said, his breathless sounds like someone, like The Inventor, and losing me. “By the other one,” I’m sure he said and sure he meant me to hear or to know.

In the stillness which now counted waters still further below I gave a shout, I yelled, yelled for help, my voice broke. Had the pool been cleared? The palace? For where had the noise above us gone to? Where does noise? No archaeology crew down here in the pit; but they’d been here. Now I thought of the crush outside the pool doors coming not from the pool but up from below. Great as this floor, I felt it a Between forgotten between decks of a ship, storage space, steerage. This man telling of an interrogation — not here. A story tired. I didn’t like the silence. “One of the invited,” he said. Between us a submerged tranquility, and he had given me pieces of a story…of suspects, of persons, back home a woman questioned and more than questioned, a Sister, he called her, but I knew what he meant, a piece of her. Pieces of time, time itself desperate. A story, I guess. I was approaching what I had apparently wanted. “And who was the other one?”

The Chaplain laughed in pain. “Bladder,” he groaned, and then, “Take one Jesus, add two…” He tried to twist, to turn to me, the left leg didn’t come with him. “The Seal captain knew,” he said. Seals again. “Hates me, ignorant.” The Navy Seals! Was that it? He twisted up toward me hearing my thought, I would swear. “Heard of you.” “Me?” I said. The leg looked detached, and now free of the steel lid weighing on him he was worn out. “You’ll know what to do.” “Who’s ‘the other one’?” “You you’ll…you know.”

I saw myself speaking, and to my sister (who often knew how things came about but needed more and wanted to know what happened “just before ”; whereas Umo, it struck me, what happened “ after that”) and The Inventor and that loose survival family and how they talked and, that first time years ago, Inventor mentioning the new City pool, and then that I had seen Umo dive. “Who is this other one?” I said.

“…One who had the ideas,” the man on his back half-blind said into the rankness of this wrecked day and curiously abandoned double floor. “For the Scrolls?” I murmured. I was hearing steps above and over at one end.

“Zackly. Not them , not the ones who will… I see …use it, who don’t see any other way to use it.”

“It?” I asked him, my body hurting though tightly fastened to my twisting hopes.

You , I thought he said, or Use; for I hung on his words exposed to what there was of them — and I could swear I’d heard “no other way” before, also in a subtle voice. Thee alone to … I must have heard now from my friend — or to thee alone . Pieces of a story he had coughed up, people interrogating a person. A woman. In California. A Navy Seal herself. Nearly naked. But presently he was out under the desert waiting at an intersection of the well system like a hungry ironsnout, it came to me, that Wisconsin water wolf the northern pike — the yellow marine camera his long before Fort Meade — an MMII he’d bought with his own money, bayonet mount, weights that kept him under, bearing on his back forty minutes (minus) of compressed air, and the capsule swimming into view like a silver spinner, and the dark thing reaching from above, arm, hand caught on film as it snatched the Scrolls capsule from fingers that might understand them but after that where come to rest, except that days later he was in the awful waters that crossed below the bed of the Tigris very near here, and it was last night?