Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

Below?

Yes, the well bed, though entered through sewers. Take me with you . The capsule like a map case had swung toward him, and he had caught it, this photo-witness but of what? “Show you,” he said. Take me with you , seemed to follow, aloud or in me already I should be able to say.

But next thing he was down here below the pool, assigned below as I had been assigned above.

And the blast? An afterblast seemingly too. Where was everybody? he said and answered himself: Gone upstairs with his old yalla camera commandeered by — (“Yours, too?” I said. “Ah,” he breathed and understood. It came as a reassurance to him that they had taken mine as well. But an imperative to resist. “As above,” I thought he said, “so below,” the words seemed to help him to say them, I hadn’t heard those words before, it breathed hope, it couldn’t be true.) “Where was…?” He turned to catch, I imagine to see almost the steps coming down the stairs, to be where he was, alone as a spar on a beach. ( Heard of you , he’d said. Heard of me ?) “See, they forgot something,” the breathed words are life. Neither of us could wait. “Got my eyes put out,” I distinctly heard — this man who’d been my fellow photographer once—“hates me but…likes my Lazarus.” “Can you tell me who?” “Take me with you,” the Chaplain said. I heard the memorial sewer like a canal or moving well below us getting used perhaps to me.

The Scrolls damaged, had the home team saved what they needed? What did they need? But they had been the only team, I thought. Why did I doubt the other side’s hand here, they were the terrorists. Causes of the war. Christian soldiers right flank harch.

I must know — or would need to someday soon. I crouched by the half-destroyed Chaplain, and my knees were sore, bleeding inside my pants legs, and my arm half-dead, my fingers cut by steel, my back sending and receiving. Damp steel, killings rankly near and palace stone I had to keep blinder than I myself and leave here with what I had which was not pictures. A need to live, not kill. The Chaplain had recognized the name called from the clamor above.

And I — that person — saw for the first time in the gloaming his hand, thumb and two fingers pinching a paper.

And felt my mini in my shirt pocket and could just see the blood that tried to brim past his lip. “I hear you,” he said, hearing the steps now slowly descending off to my right, their exact concussions received at the base of my spine in fact through the raw sore or agony there telling me of my body and my comrade’s, for would I go without him and was he already gone?

For what would his absence, dead or alive, tell those slowly making their way down the stairs at the far end of this floor? At stake, as I guessed, the Scrolls, or an attack on them, and on Why We Were Here.

Some of this I would not say, months later in a crowded Panel room remembering faint, dark, kindest words You’ll know what to do , which, when I quoted them in the dark to my sister not long after I had been ferried—“spirited,” she called it — home, she hugged me, wanting nonetheless more from me; and at Day 2 of the Hearings on Competition I was careful not to recall what had come next from this man who had known names, mine and another he could not quite get it out or — it cost him too much life to — what this “other one” had “meant,” that wasn’t what the Scroll people “needed,” for who or what this “other one” was I wouldn’t have wished to say in public in my home city.

And two guys were standing at the back of the Panel room (as these people will), a white and a black, whom I didn’t at first recognize in combat fatigues. And in my account as an involved photographer of the explosion (my palace pool fiasco perhaps, I’d say to the room) and water running out, I found myself seeing my listeners for myself and recalling a man below the palace pool who was dying of voicelessness, but on the point of learning what exposing myself might in turn expose I kept the scrap of withered paper rescued from between his index and thumb scrupulously to myself.

A flashbulb went off in the Hearings room next to another camera person training a videocam as if the Chaplain-photographer’s story were not his but mine though only my witness to his words seeming to mean that oddly only one team, our own, had been anywhere near the explosion the film of which at least at pool level had been shown at the end of Day 1 with Umo’s dive interrupted by the blow at the guard’s rifle and resumed in one swing for some reason to seize priority, get ahead of the competition, a first for me though I did not add that I had been relieved of it and its videocam on the spot. A scholar had been cut off asking for documentation from the Aramaic of the Scrolls’ condensing Lazarus “back into one man not miraculously resurrected but—”

Tapped for an early second-day Panel I am introduced to seventy fellow citizens (you assume) some with copies of the Scrolls now published and we say packaged in English. But although it is not about them I am to speak, I am introduced as the Army photographer who bore witness to the attempt upon the Scrolls. At not quite twenty-one barely in the workforce studying sports psychology, I am asked here to speak of swimming or diving, and the knack or business of winning, and I find myself in free-fall reverie about backstroke: To not hear other voices or any voices; the body tempo of looking over your shoulder; relief at barely seeing where you were going ( laughter ) so you trust whatever it is, water, length of the pool ( You , murmurs a neighbor), the ceiling, I tell them, let me tell you about the ceiling — ( laughter ), hearing myself and remembering what Umo heard sometimes in how I might easily speak or curiously or was it helplessly strike a note.

The literature says to set performance rather than outcome goals, I told my people. You know that where an athlete using a larger outcome goal fails to achieve it for reasons outside his control, this can generate enthusiasm-loss, failure feelings, be dispiriting — even for a full twist I had nailed a hundred times, it only took once ignoring the immediate unknown to fail; therefore always they say (and I think of a photographer’s backlight headaches so you set your exposure for the subject), set performance goals within that…that… I was about to say Unknown but found myself saying Known, and saw frowns among the listeners but not only. My shoulders and back as a backstroker I didn’t have the words for it once but even now shadowed by shoulder blade and rotator cuff muscles that arise from it, a bond between shoulder and back — and hands — and your lap flip…how you do it, forgetting something or other, the finish, the time, because… I’d had a friend who was good at this concentration, and he was going off a high board and I had called out to him, couldn’t help it though was it only in my mind? — because he’d called out to me from up there—

“ Why did he?” someone suddenly asked — Oh in this packed room of necessary unasked and necessarily unformed questions asked, thanks for this one at least — the voice familiar from our city, the face (not noticed by me till then, as I tried to continue) Wick, who of course would be here, old assistant father-coach and calculus messenger.

“—his concentration—” I said confused, yet was I?

“So you—” a woman cut in, softly, hard to hear—

“unreal…ancient,” why did I add, “ I wasn’t in the air or anything”—it was to Wick not the woman, who was on me now persisting, “…after that footage of the diver like they were bombing him that we were shown yesterday, you add this hearsay of some maimed underwater Chaplain witnessing the explosion all by himself, to insinuate that no insurgents were even there when the blast nearly erased these — denied us these these priceless—” the woman all but inaudible, and boring, yet kind of electrifying — a question about her — her powerful hands — and next to her a face I’d known for years under the Padres blue baseball cap worn pulled down over her abundant pinned-up hair and her brow and her large Mediterranean or India Indian eyes, until I cut in to remind not only the patriot who had been simmering I realized but also this great roomful of accredited participants (one soon to be challenged), that I had been stressing where I’d been ordered to take up position my self —at pool level where not the detonation below but the impact for crying out tears—