Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  I could just see the Empire State very close from an angle of Sub’s bedroom window. But what if they did find out about the print and break into Dagger’s again and take it?

  But I’d forgotten the negative! There was that.

  Dagger hadn’t said where it was. His friend in the Soho lab was unknown to me. But someone could get to the negative there too.

  My card to Cosmo, in quivering 3-D, had the Empire State in color like tin syrup.

  There was something going on near the top, two figures at the base of a boom, then one straddling it, inching backward, the hundreds of tiny red window frames caressed my eyeballs.

  Sub’s bed looked like a stage set of rough terrain. I should leave the apartment as if the call from Monty Graf would take care of itself, whip down to the Stock Exchange to pick up the things for Will though it had already occurred to me he could have written. Stop off for a strong Szechwan lunch on the way back, be here again by two.

  The ring now came, but when I went to the kitchen the stupid oversight I suddenly saw in my house-bound meditations nearly distracted me from the mild voice speaking.

  So as soon as Messrs. Graf and Cartwright had taken tonal soundings and he’d said he was in the film business from time to time, and said he’d like to know more about the footage we still had, I told him that some of what had been destroyed had been on negative film but this rush we still had that had been developed was reversal film.

  For this, you see, was what I’d remembered on the way to the phone.

  I didn’t add that, rather than workprint the original, Dagger had saved the money for the time being and so the reversal print he had was our only print. The earlier bonfire scene had been on negative film, and the day after we got back to London Dagger and I had a little dispute about it. I said let’s try projecting the negative itself, and he said the faces would come out masked, and I said so what, the snowy look would be haunting, and he said well anyway he wasn’t going to get it processed yet. But Cosmo arrived and I said We’ll talk about it later.

  Monty Graf seemed uninterested to hear that what was left was a single reversal workprint. He called the conversation to a halt and said 8 P.M., gave me an address, and as a sort of afterthought asked where we had shot this particular footage. I skipped the question and thanked him for the address. But, he said, what did I think he was calling for.

  I dialed last night’s number on the pad. A man answered. I couldn’t think and hung up. But I couldn’t think because the man’s voice had for an instant completed some circuit which could not tolerate further contact and so while my inability to think seemed to save me from something, the successful impulse to hang up broke the new circuit and shunted away its idea. Unfortunately, to be between does not necessitate being constantly connected with what one is between.

  By the time the hot tap was running even lukewarm, the water was rising around the pans and plates and dishes and mugs. I inserted my hand under a leaning stack passing two fingertips along a submerged blade and opened the drain to let out the cold.

  The oatmeal saucepan should have had cold water in it soaking the pasty remains. I hadn’t got out of my living room day bed till Sub and the children had left. The supper dishes should have been at least rinsed.

  Under two plain bone-china dinner plates was the black rim of Tris’s white but smaller though thicker plate. The water had reached the rim just as I twisted the drain. Under and around these three plates were assorted silver, and on its side lay Tris’s milk glass from last night.

  Against the stack leaned like a big-hubbed wheel a blue-and-white cereal dish on which in turn leaned a child-size plate I knew had a faded pink and brown view of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. Sub said Ruby was too old for it. She wasn’t.

  The water came steaming hot now and some of the pink gook I squeezed in gathered in a chipped cavity in the lip of a cheap old mug whose mineral and dilute pale-green took me along secondary blacktops in southern Maine and back streets of Bridgeport and Flat-bush and brought me from a drippy spigot at the base of a steel coffee urn that bitter worn liquid whose black-brown surface on a cool roadside night floats fine-sheened splotches of grease reminding you you are in a greasy spoon. This mug, framed by glistening space and multiplied by time, at once overflowed into the cereal dish it sat in which then overflowed suds around the base of the center stack. This was the mug I had poured water into for Myrna. Three others were in the sink, the large willow-pattern mug Sub used, Ruby’s red-green-and-blue alphabet mug which had been a baby present, and Tris’s gray, gravelly textured mug which Rose had made in a pottery class the last winter she lived with Sub and which Tris had had hot chocolate in last night. A fourth mug was in the living room on a large blotter next to the diary pages I’d been looking at on Sub’s desk a few feet from the open day bed.

  Whoever left the number would phone again. But what would happen when I found out who it was and where, and then said Sorry, I was mistaken about the diary, I didn’t leave it at Claire’s after all.

  In the sink there was steam but little water. I’d left the loose old drain open, and the detergent water had mostly found it. I reached to close the drain and burnt my knuckles on a plate. I turned on hot and cold taps and squirted soap.

  I should have told Dagger to shoot a sinkful of dishes. But film could not have seen what I saw. We could have used Lorna’s unidentified hands reaching for a white plastic bottle of supranational Lux though her brand is Fairy Magic—her skin over each pair of delicately raised wrist bones so fine there seem no creases from pore to pore. The blue sponge I pushed across the top plate swept off the dried catsup that marked it as Sub’s and but barely eroded some sandy particles of bone and gristle tracked in congealed chop-fat leading into saffron crust which a green fleck revealed as broccoli butter.

  Sub’s plate I stood up in the water against the stack it had been part of and lifted out Ruby’s with its three-fold fable licked clean last night but speckled now with greaselets launched by sink-water. Sub said Rose made fun of Ruby’s bone-phobia; Sub, when he took the chops out of the oven and Ruby said she was having no bones on her plate, told Tris to put away his comic and get the bread and butter out of the icebox. Sub cut pieces of dry pork off Ruby’s bone, arranged them on her plate, and kept her bone to chew on himself. I asked if I could dish out the broccoli.

  But today where was that copper-bottomed broccoli pot? Not in the sink with the rest of last night’s dishes or on the stove or on the windowsill by the ashtray with the filter-stub of my own cigarette yesterday. When I picked Tris’s overturned milk glass out of the new submerged chop pan, my fingers found a slippery strip of fat the detergent hadn’t had a chance to cut but couldn’t have cut anyway without spreading the grease around the sinkwater. I lifted the pork pan out emptying the water. I found a spatula and shoveled up paths of fat which with my hand under to catch water drips I bore one by one to the garbage. Then I squirted detergent into the pan and ran water into it and placed it carefully again on the sink counter.

  Yes I phoned the number.

  The same man said he didn’t know where Claire was but I should come now to an address downtown. When I asked if he worked for Aut he said Who’s Aut? Then he said, quite finally, OK.

  I said Sorry, I was mistaken, I didn’t leave my diary at Claire’s.

  The man said as if it were a complete assertion, If you don’t want these two pages.

  And hung up.

  I was feeling I hadn’t learned much by this ruse of yesterday. When he rang off, the idea that had been shunted away when I’d hung up before circuited now in a neat eight-by-ten-inch rectangle the very size of that pile of my diary Claire had neatened on her table when she’d gotten up to answer her phone—and I’d come from her lavatory and had seen the pages had been neatened, and felt my hints had been heeded.

  Now I rushed out of the kitchen through the hall to the living room. I clipped my shin on the steel corner of the day bed frame. I tore through t
he sheets on Sub’s desk and at once found, yes, two pages missing that I knew I’d had at Claire’s and that were not with others in my suitcase atop my wife’s compact packing.

  I took a bus downtown undecided.

  If I chose not to go to the peremptory man who’d hung up on me, I could go all the way to Wall and get the brochures for my son. The bus was almost empty.

  The pages must have been copied by now so I’d have no difficulty obtaining them. They might make Aut want to see the rest. Claire might not have had the chance to tell him she’d picked these two virtually at random having to run to answer the phone and knowing I’d be coming out of the bathroom. But if Aut thought these two pages were the best I had to offer, he might not care about others. But for him—if he was even involved—what in these pages mattered?

  It was a rough bus ride. We started and stopped and I slid left and right on the seat’s molded plastic. A pale-faced black-haired woman with blood-red lipstick dropped her fare into the machine and spoke to the black driver. I didn’t see him speak, and as she spoke again the bus broke forward as if something had rammed it and the woman lost her hold on the fare machine and was inertially thrust toward the rear of the bus, but she lifted her knees in such a lucky slow-motion she didn’t fall until, halfway down the length of the bus, I reached out.

  I caught her so that she seemed about to learn to swim. She regained her slim long-calved legs and so involved herself in a magic smile to me and the immediate issue of whether to remove herself from me by sitting across from me or on my side and thus out of my normal line of sight, that she forgot the driver’s behavior. She settled on my side toward the rear, slung one leg over the other, and looked straight ahead. The driver was answering a radio call, giving his position.

  But what did Aut want with the diary pages? That is, what there in my words might equal what had been thought to be in the film? Almost the first words were Dagger’s.

  We were two miles east of Stonehenge among the great green and sand-pale grasses of Salisbury Plain, and Dagger slowing down nodded at the brown car on the shoulder ahead and said, Speak of the Devil, here’s our volunteer for the final scene, let’s change his tire.

  But in fact we hadn’t been discussing this Druid whose flat tire we now changed.

  We’d been reviewing the raw stock we’d used in the Beaulieu up to now. A motley lot, I grant—but Dagger of all people should have recalled that the camera was lighter without the magazine one very bright morning the second day in Corsica, for we’d used a roll of black and white that was only a 100-footer. I said it had been between the petrol station and the fortress, around the corner from Place Napoléon, and the glare and shade decided Dagger to use instead the less inherently contrasty black and white. He’d had a hundred feet of Anscochrome in the camera when we came into Ajaccio on the Marseilles car-ferry the day before and he’d let it all go on the white, pink, yellow, and sky-blue crowd watching from the pier; but at once he’d said he should have waited, the contrasts would have been clearer in black and white, though he added I hadn’t yet sold him on mixing color with black and white. In London I’d given him £12 to pay for six hundred feet of Anscochrome. He’d said Claire’s boss would foot that expense and gas to and from Corsica. But it was black and white he was using when the two men and a girl came up the street that crossed the end of ours. The fortress wall left almost no pavement to walk on—sidewalk is the word in America, not that pavement is exactly the word in Corsica, where the language is French.

  They were coming slowly up from the port in single file like tourists who’ve had their café crême. The girl pointed at us, her midriff blouse stark white. The blond man stepped off the pavement toward us but was recalled by the other young man, bony brown and bald. The three continued quite quickly along the fortress wall, the bald man now with his hand on the girl’s back where it was bare. We were less than fifty yards from the end of our street where theirs crossed coming up from the port, and Dagger who had been feeling into his pocket for a pack of Turns gave up and went down to the end of our street to look up after them. He wasn’t shooting. They turned into Place Napoléon out of sight. The blond man ambled behind. It was this incident we were disagreeing about on the road from Stonehenge a month later. Dagger insisted now on confusing that black-and-white footage with some Anscochrome we’d used the following day. We’d shot a naval encounter off the beach just three blocks from the École Normale where our American academic friend was putting us up. Aquamarine sea, three Corsicans in bikinis in one yellow inflated landing raft, three Americans in cut-off jeans and bright headbands in the other. And on the road from Stonehenge Dagger seemed to have forgotten the black and white he’d used to shoot the two men and the girl at the fortress in Ajaccio. I’d pointed out that the b & w he shot there was almost the last of the single-perforation b & w he’d bought cheap by mail order from Freestyle Sales in L.A. I described in detail the faces and clothes of the threesome, and how he had complained about his stomach and the École coffee and I’d said he obviously needed to change his diet. I reminded him they’d not wanted to be filmed and tried to get away fast, but when we went diving next day the same blond man was sitting with another girl in a port café and as soon as we were in the gray rubber raft that looked like French Navy surplus, I and the girl and the man who was taking us out, with our suits on and the air tanks yellow alongside our fins and masks and under the thwarts weighted belts like a sound-man’s power pack, and Dagger and the boy who worked for the boss got in and the boss got the outboard going, the blond man got up from the table and walked across the cobbles and stepped inside the trailer with something-Plonger painted on it, presumably to engage the boss’s wife in conversation about Dagger and me. The b & w in question was negative film, which is less adaptable to poor light than reversal film because if you’re using a lab that will push it, negative unlike reversal usually can’t be pushed in the developing to a higher emulsion speed as graded by the American Standards Association (ASA), whose system dating from 1943 was, I’m glad to say, adopted by the British in 1947, though the British use a logarithmic scale by degrees. In any case the last lot of b & w Dagger had had shipped from L.A. was ASA 200 but not with the magnetic stripe. The base price was $11.25 for four one-hundred-foot rolls, a saving of less than fifteen cents a roll at the single-roll price but much more if compared to prices elsewhere. Dagger and I, as we sighted the Druid and pulled over to help with the the, had been disagreeing not about Freestyle, or perforation, or magnetic stripe, or price, but about whether we’d used black and white for those three people Dagger didn’t recall having seen. So when he said, Speak of the Devil, I guessed that during our discussion he’d been thinking not of Ajaccio but of our dealings at Stonehenge minutes before with the very Druid we were now slowing down to help.

  The woman with blood-red lipstick recrossed her legs. I looked over my shoulder at lower Broadway to see where I was. A door in a brown commercial building was shutting, but like a circuit for an instant open a hall was visible and a second doorway full of white, and a truth reached me: what I’d been recalling was more than the gist of the two pages Claire must have lifted; it was so closely aligned with those words as to be virtually verbatim.

  In truth I had these pages by heart.

  So what did it matter if the man on the phone gave them back or had something else in mind?

  I had them in my head.

  And so I reached over my head for the cord and bent a magical smile toward the dark and leggy woman who without really catching my eye smiled back less magically.

  I took a step toward the exit and was staggered by the driver braking for my stop.

  I was in Soho going east on Spring. I reached Crosby and knew I was wrong. I turned back west along Spring. A small Chemical Bank branch was out of place among the loft buildings and drab commerce muted despite the trucks cramming the southbound street ahead. At Mercer I turned right and there were not only the trucks moving down the center but parked trucks
tilted solid either side up onto the sidewalk and taking over the sidewalks with thigh-level roller-tracks running to basement loading windows or platforms-wool stock, nightgowns, leather. There were green pillars and posts on the east side, a lingerie firm was by a sheet-metal machinery firm and almost next to that I found my address halfway up the block toward Prince.

  But the verbatim alignment between diary and memory had come not only without my trying; I wondered as I pressed the top button beside a nameless slot if I’d have been even capable of other words when I recalled the Corsica we’d discussed on the road from Stonehenge.

  The latch clicked in answer and I pushed through.

  Somewhere above as I started up the stairs, “Let the Sun Shine In” sang forth like an old chorale.

  No one came as I passed the dark landings. The music which had been building leveled off, and then dropped away just as a door at the fourth or fifth landing swung open, but the song seemed to be from somewhere else.

  Cartwright.

  Over the man’s shoulder to one side of the metal rim of his large round spectacles, two television sets in the room behind him faced each other a yard apart. Beyond them, across what must be the width of a loft, a workbench was against the wall with two green-glass pool-table lamps hung coolly above some tools, a generator, the uncovered tubes of a tuner, two or three small, cheap printed-circuit boards, a red box with a greasy-toothed gear leaning on it, and a tangle of looped wires arching up from a panel that lay flat.

  What are the pages worth to you? the man said.

  You’ve got the question turned around, I said.

  The man backed into the loft and I stepped over the threshold and saw how long the loft was.

  He snickered and said, No, man. Would I make you pay for your words?

  I asked if I’d had any phone calls, I’d left word at the place I was staying that I could be reached here. The man snickered again and said, No phone calls, not even any mail.