Cannonball

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It is my brother I would speak of — I will call him that — though I begin with the Scrolls. How they made it through by water, as our people, a sect of them, said they would who reportedly at their peril had slid them like rolled-up maps into a capsule and sent them on their way underground secured from those who would have misused them. A great find, it was said, a weapon in the war — for in a way they were “maps” (though all Legend). Yet the Scrolls floating hundreds of miles under the deserts from En Gedi, even Gaza, eastward along a web of roughly horizontal wells, like missives arriving then with such long-range accuracy of time and place, proved less stunning on that day I record than the apparition on a diving board himself all too solid and familiar as the pool was notorious and strange. Suddenly here was my friend, my find — my borderline Chinese so far from our home — in the depths of a Middle Eastern palace standing immense and unlikely above waters put there once for a tyrant to swim, dive into, own, withhold, and worse.

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