Joseph McElroy - Cannonball

Interrupted now by her friend Husky, a perverse call for help, “Guy’s so ugly you gotta wonder, but in this country that’s still a person,” Lazarus and the horse’s mouth rose up in me like foresight and memory and in return for what I’m half losing, was that it?

“You had that badge?” I said. CEO followed us.

I waved The Inventor’s notepaper as Storm made to go for the Dean, shaking his head at his wristwatch, like We’re here, we’re here — the two limbs of the little notebook of her cell phone open, a look on her face, What a work horse! Storm’s body language complimenting her, but—

“Check out the hand, Storm, half an hour old,” I waved the paper, the entrance to the great abandoned buffet lounge before me, a smell of seven-grain and spiced turkey or was it liver; mayo and melon slices in the sun, the yolky paprika’d statement of rank leftover deviled eggs and cold fish — and over by the windows stood Wick unmoving. “Check out the words here, Storm, at the beginning, right? — ’n’here at the end (?)”—Scroll words Storm would know, wouldn’t he? — they came from parchment saved from the blast and in safekeeping eight months ago in my ear and subsequently in pocket, bed, glove compartment, love, but as I hardly had to tell him, so precisely between us, though we were drawing a small audience, “because you already had it — the whole thing — this wasn’t needed, this scrap from the bomb,” the text like all the other revelations to see the light of day in English had already been in hand somewhere else, “your explosion that day pure show, your palace—” I peered at Storm. A smell from his face now of stale cardamom seeds, leaf extract, dead tortoise, and a couple of on-the-run lunchtime shots of Jim Beam I realized I’d smelt in the car told me he knew what I had here in my hand but had never seen it.

But, the car! I thought.

I turned, my sister was with me and I told her and her hand dived into her bag and held it up, the remote-entry fob — the car left unlocked — her things, her plans (CEO was instantly on his cell) — our distance new, gathering prophetic and unknown upon me — losing one Em, gaining what? CEO watching, behind me, the Law Dean’s futile call, I sensed a scattering of the accredited not yet adjourned to the Conference room though the afternoon had more than come, CEO gone, and—“This citizenship Umo’s getting, living or dead”…my dearest sister entering from our already strange distance tells me what I had already realized, “‘Posthumous’ even if citizen’s alive ? Isn’t that what it means?” she asks beautifully; and “In return for what, Zach? — you don’t owe him.”

The acoustic ceilings, a clarity or known future that turned their stains to coastlines intricate with nested corruption, the bay and the sea sky out the windows, and a familiar but now unfurled figure, the woman who had attacked me to make me give something away I thought, closing on Wick, who’s looking out the window absently, for a moment a ghost.

And remembering him so long ago seen by Umo — of course! — from a distance leaning out the classroom window and I must not ask but tell Wick — the dive I have slowed down as if I could divide it endlessly from its end — my job now nearer somewhere between my sister’s “before” and Umo’s “after” and another trip vouchsafed only to her for its own sake — and knew better than my own my sister’s breath close behind, and my name in Storm’s diseased throat:

“You for get , Zach you for get— ” a connection coming with Storm Nosworthy, who would see no way for himself but through me.

I hailed Wick, and for a moment hadn’t recognized the blond-streaked hair of the woman whose kerchief not now in evidence had formerly seemed a token of some American religion even Muslim though I’d assumed she was working with Cap’n and “CEO,” but now Storm’s voice gathered so in me the scent of virginsbreath and of my blood on his hand and some gross praise given in his cedared atrium in advance of my video-to-come, flights of stairs below, documenting my friend Umo’s scheduled shooting, that, turning, I registered Storm’s rage or madness only in its synched succession of grins that twitched some screaming code way inside the man somehow presiding in the words that reasoned firm as a priest’s invoking habeas corpus , or villain’s, tight as a lawyer’s or parent’s, glad as a politician’s, modest as an athlete’s, sanguine as generals’ used to be, mysterious as a friend’s or a false friend’s, a doomed dominance and resource — these out-loud words pretty fast for Em and me but no, now out of nowhere breathtakingly like coup, like collapse, betraying here—

— like a blow to the chest—

— Stom’s secret weapon ! — “You forget your part in this—”—my sister trying to hear, to hear some complicity alleged with this ugly person—“the family that thought he was crazy and wanted to get hold of him mobbed in the street get him outa there, whom he disowned to go his own way — this leading Man from Nazareth ‘a more hands-on Jesus,’ (?) don’t you of all people recall? Not without friends, yet said, Be a passerby minding your business, but a virtual CE O , Zach? Your word, we have it on good authority, Zach—” “Zach?” Em says, an artist it comes to me who can put things together—“and that family, embarrassed, prudent, of Jesu’s ”—

— of course of course but…kill his own chances, to trap me ? Storm?—

— when I had by now a way if not a job, my own and no one else’s.

My roads not that remote, a couple of roads, a war apart at the same time sitting in two vehicles beside two future drivers I hear Storm still, meant for me his words: Civilians run this man’s war.

And Jesus seeing profit ahead, your guy and mine, Zach, medicinal saliva and wind (the future of, respectively) you remember your own… mem ory, was that it for godsake? linked ovens, this Jesus one-on-one live — fighter and economist, private entrepreneurials, food-fasting and possibly fast-fooding, sensible take on capital punishment when appropriate , a very early, matching-grant Jesus where if you’re not willing to work forget about it, sloth violates brotherly love, an American Jesus — what you said or are said to have said on the connecting ovens from you to your sister to your father, who was persuaded your fancy thoughts were redeemed by this Jesus’s view that you don’t beg if you can turn to, and against giving alms, he meant business, Zach, he had capitalized on what he had going for him, Christ had a job to do.

Em keeps watch but over what ? — me at that slant of hers, getting it all in one short thought possibly, half-heard, the Scrolls ascribed to her brother, was that it? (Even to her through our father if she heard?) when the rest, or all I knew, she knew: 1) the arrival deep in the palace covered above by 2) a friend’s dive, 3) disaster, 4) a cockeyed photographic record, while below 5) a questionable explosion to cover 6) a questionable project (to please an officially Christian government?) followed by 7) a deathly well current and now 8) back home uneasy phone calls and at least two break-ins:

but what can Em be processing now? We’re equals (all but) and our father beyond his Reserve against mine cannot be much more of a father for her now than some use of me unknown to her but drifting in upon me — and almost not to be believed, his help, his confounded desire bringing him near some imaginary influence through this speechwriter from Sacramento Storm Nosworthy. But the root of the wind is water, I hear (from my sister, reading aloud). I was driving somewhere in two cars, true American, here in Calif, and back at the war, it was quite real.