Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

“Posthumous—?” she slipped through a red light, attending only to cars. “Your dear brother’s—” “What if he isn’t—?” “—darling idea still.”

“Guaranteed?” I said.

“Dead or alive.” Storm getting into it exactly but always overdoing it, it would get him killed (I saw, I saw it, was he in an Iraq mess hall? — lauding the Scrolls? — or was that me, another tour of duty up ahead?). “In return for what?” I said, my sister murmuring agreement.

“He had borderline high blood pressure. Heartmobile told us; though where exactly he did die matters less and less…even if not known to you the friend he followed halfway round the world — now, your dad—”

“You have nothing to do with my father.”

“He trusted me. Did he you? But we—” My sister squeezed my hand, then needed hers to steer. “He thinks the world of you, Zach, but he does not put his best foot forward, but—” “He has a birthday coming up,” Em said, I felt in my legs and actually in hers that she wanted me to take the bait, ask what the deal had been, she had her elbow up on the edge of the window, which she never did, and she heard what maybe I didn’t in this man’s words.

“—we will see,” Storm said ominously, again the sweet odor, surer than sight or sound; “the world being at stake, the bleeding needing to be stopped, I’m sure you on my case and I on yours can find common ground for tradeoffs to safeguard for the time being…your sister…her job…college applications, what not — am I sitting on your underwear back here, Em? — and, to be frank, Zach, Dad’s future. You two, you, you,” the man seemed to stammer, “who find each other and a matrix ready-made, the clouds burst, the stream flows, it is them, it is original, and then comes the matrix ready-made which turns them into…”

A basement garage Em had driven us down into must prove to be connected with the Conference Center. Why does he call you Zach all the time? she muttered under her breath, and You’re quite generous (I know why). She pulled the ignition key. “What could you do ?” she said over her shoulder, getting out of the car. What I had learned I would have to use. I felt that Wick was close now and someone else up there I would need.

“If we can agree about the explosion…,” Storm walking across the subbasement concrete floor rising on the balls of his feet, led the way into a brushed stainless steel elevator big enough to lift a car. “That it happened?” I said. He turned to the buttons, wheeling about, now, so the evidence of his recreated and horrendous face of slants seemed to belong to him no more than a parallel field. “That we don’t know who did it.” “Not the actual ones.” “Though we’ll find them—”

“If we haven’t already,” I said.

“—be they after the Scrolls or their leader himself who there was a story going around of the palace detainment unit housing him when in fact we’ve had him locked up safe and sound elsewhere for months. As we will find the Chaplain-pho tog rapher,” said the face Em read, its talk, the finger on the Up button.

I said they might.

“You don’t seem to know his name though you met at Fort Meade.” “Lucky for me.” “We fucking arranged it,” Storm Nosworthy said. The confiding (and cursing) of a fool, a killer. Em near me at once all but inside me but in the new way, her “you” voice had ceased in my head for the moment, for steps approached along the echoing floor of the great garage — with luck there would be another break coming — and Storm got the door to close. “We don’t know how he swung this, for all I know you may have described it to your sister-love whom I would have known from her pictures”—Storm’s smile thick, warped, richly working—“the dove’s eyes, no, too blue, a Celtic queen sold to a King of the Nile, what says the Song? ‘my sister, my spouse,’ and where I was sitting in her backseat the smell of her laundry was as the smell of Lebanon.”

I was the killer now.

The elevator lifted almost at a slant and slowly and like a cabin of secure space that stalled when its computer received calls from a higher and lower floor simultaneously sometimes, Storm warned. The smile again, now quick spasm of a public asshole’s fitful show, punctuating the tradeoff to be agreed to: “The palace explosion I trust we can call a mystery? In return for… Not that I’d expect you two chums would need much cajoling…(?).”

The huge elevator cut off and my sister leaned on me. Storm Nosworthy clear across the elevator floor from us jabbed the buttons — Is it us? she breathed — brother-sister…?

What could he know ?

The break-in. Your place.

The bed…the bathroom?

What could anyone know?

Think.

“West Coast contractors,” Storm said, hitting the whole button panel. “You saw the acoustic ceiling above the buffet, the recessed lighting?” “Over the farmed blue marlin,” I said, seeing that coastline-stained, that darkening map. Water damage, worse than water, Storm, I thought. “Care about two ado lesc ents?” my sister whispered, meaning What was there to know and nobody did anyway. “One person,” I murmured. Em snapped her fingers and the elevator was on its way. “Would he?” she said.

“We outsourced the blue marlin farm,” Storm said remembering. A brown business envelope in his jacket pocket, he had it out now. “We know we know…that he crawled some fifteen feet or was dragged because…because…because we tracked DNA from the main urine deposit and and through skin scrapings, waste products, fabric. To where he takes the plunge.” (“A friend,” Em muttered.) “What was that?” “A devoted friend,” I said. “Yet a three-hundred-pound steel plate was found to have his traces on its underside—” (“For friendship’s sake?”) “—and how he could have got out from under it — crushed when it fell on him…” (“Not his face, though,” Em whispered.)

“Two’na half maybe. Three, never,” I said. Storm hasn’t missed my meaning. “Your devoted friend?” “His.” “Ah, his.” Storm alive as not before. “You would…” “Do anything to bring him back.” “Somewhere, along that metropolitan well network that we’re setting to rights, he exists (as we need to address spills right here of untreated sewage, Storm purred), and how he got away from the blast site we can guess, Zach, until we know more—” Em slid her arm through mine again — along a leg of that sewer named after the President I recalled — a sewer I’d described to Em, water part of what contained it inspiring me when she would kindle her incense, turn out the lights, ask what came “just before that” as if not what comes now.

But now, “His nose ,” she whispers, “the blue spots ,” she whispers, “it means ‘ Im pris onment,’” she read the face across the elevator car, my arm knew each finger that gripped it, we heard now a hubbub coming our way. And the other wide door at right angles to the door we’d come in slid back leaving us face to face with a mob in the lobby going to the same place as us and struck silent as we came into view. First, though, or almost first, the Seals captain and his ramrod teammate “CEO” in combats waving back a hundred others who could wait or take the other elevator, but clearly a two-man escort for the sixth passenger making this trip to the Conference level.

Was it my frog-in-the-throat questioner? It was.

In the long white spiritual garment and no badge showing. And Em greeted him (“ Hus ky,” she said), the very one who before they’d cautioned him this morning had told me I didn’t “mean” what I said, but we had been uneasy and close and I’d cut him off; and my “profit-stricken country” and more than that “one great war-torn body” meant also the globe I suppose, glib with parallels ungrasped and the facts we collect on the job from the voices we hear, yet left me taxed for what I might have said. To Umo, my sister, my father, Milt, the accredited conferees, Marine recruiters on a no-kid’s-butt-left-behind watch, War Child snapping his wrist by the hotel turned stock exchange.