Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  The loft seemed to go clear through from Mercer to the next street west. At that far end was an extensive rig with a long track connecting a camera and some kind of focusing-plate gear. Areas around this imposing rig seemed in shadow because of the light on it from ceiling spots hung from two parallel socket-tracts.

  I felt a third person but I didn’t look around. I didn’t have to see the man with the steel-rimmed glasses who’d greeted me with the voice I’d heard on the phone. The loft, the lights—the equipment I saw at once and the equipment I made out when I looked away from the lights—plus something genuine which seemed at odds with my teasing reception—all absorbed our words to spread their quotable sound into meanings I find now but found even then I could describe but not quote. But you who read this have me even though here I admit there are things I have heard that I didn’t have in my head exactly. Do not withdraw your hand from the glove port, you haven’t yet found what you imagine you’re not looking for.

  I asked if Claire was here and when the young man in the glasses asked who Claire was, the third voice said to him, You never met her.

  The voice seemed so young I turned toward it and saw a child, virtually a child.

  Or at most a fifteen-year-old, a boy with shoulder-length hair combed to a billowing sheen—and I checked the ceiling along which I realized I’d sensed transverse waves eight or ten inches deep flowing the length of the loft. God knows why they built those cement-and-plaster waves fifty years ago, but it was as strong and right as all the powder-smooth New York walls laid on by a generation of Italian immigrant plasterers.

  I asked where my pages were. I asked again and sounded just anxious enough. Above a workbench was a poster showing formulaic sequences. Someone had written in the lower right the word NAND, which in computer logic means NOT AND—or, input signal zero, output one (which sounds like you get something for nothing).

  The man in the glasses said my diary was…

  I asked what kind of films he made and the boy said Original, original.

  I said, Joined the filmmaking revolution, have you?

  To you it’s a revolution maybe, he said.

  I said my diary wouldn’t interest them if they were pros. The man said I seemed very into it, like the description of those two dudes and the chick in Ajaccio. I said there wasn’t any description of them in the two pages I’d left at Claire’s, there was merely reference to my having described in intimate detail to Dagger, right? The boy cut in that it was good to keep a diary, he wished he’d started when he was young, he’d lost so much. I asked if either of them knew someone named Cosmo, and they said no.

  The man in glasses mentioned a cup of tea. I said thanks. I looked at the far end of the loft and said, What’s with the screen?

  The man said it was going to be a slit scan when they got it finished, but it wasn’t really what he was into.

  The boy asked what we thought we were trying to do making that film. Get something together, I said. Christ, said the man from over by a table where he’d switched on a hot plate, how much diary had I written about it? I said maybe thirty thousand words. The boy said, Those two pages make the diary sound better than the film—I thought he was high—and the man said how much did I bring to New York, and I said thirty pages about, I thought, and he said did that mean twenty-eight back where I was staying—but tried to interrupt himself with a semblance of enthusiasm saying were they about Corsica too. I said I wasn’t sure if it was twenty-eight or more, I sometimes got confused after they were typed up. The man dropped tea bags into two mugs and said why did I bring the pages to New York. I said I wanted to tell Phil Aut what had been in our film, so I wanted to be able to check my facts. The boy hummed.

  The man said over his shoulder as he was pouring water that he’d show me the slit scan, he didn’t have the camera yet, he needed a sixty-five mill for a job but he had some good interesting panels behind the screen slit. I wasn’t in a hurry? This kind of film wasn’t really what he was into, he said.

  The big metal door closed behind me. I took out my wallet and I murmured, Let’s see, how do I get to Graf’s from here. I returned my wallet to my inside pocket which wasn’t bulging as it bulged when I visited Claire. The big door scraped again and closed. There was the sweet smell of pot. I said what about the two pages I came for. The boy now surprisingly close behind me said, The great Phil Aut doesn’t know shit about film, he’ll quote you a price and tell you you’re not commercial, that’s Phil.

  The man lifting two cups turned and said, Shut up, Jerry, and sloshed tea onto the floor. He grinned. I said, Jerry you’ve got principles.

  Jerry said to our host, I’ve seen you put in your pretty contacts and go off to work as happy as…

  I asked Jerry if he could get me an appointment with Aut.

  I never go near him. I don’t even know where his office is.

  The door wasn’t bolted.

  If someone was busting into Sub’s looking for more diary pages, at least they wouldn’t find Sub or Ruby or Tris.

  I got the door open. The boy took a drag on his joint. A bit close, I said. The boy said what did I mean I got confused when they were typed up, and the man said Hey your tea.

  I said my daughter in London made a carbon usually, if she was doing the typing, so I sometimes thought of all those pages doubled.

  The man with the metal-rimmed glasses had stopped but now moved my way again. He said, Your pages. Just take your cup, I’ll get them.

  I said no thanks, I knew them.

  What did I come down here for, then? the man was saying as he bent over to put the cups on the floor.

  I was going to be detained. I couldn’t tell how clear the boy was.

  I said, I don’t know much yet that’s going on here but I know we haven’t been disagreeing about Freestyle, or perforation, or magnetic stripe, or price, and I know that—to quote myself again—I have no wish to engage the boss’s wife in conversation about Dagger and me, but you tell your boss Mr. Phil Aut that whether or not he foots our gas from London to Ajaccio and back, it will be of interest to deal directly with me.

  I was taking the stairs two at a time and steps came after but then stopped, then started, but far off.

  I called up, I want you to explain your camera track to me.

  He’d said it was not really what he was into. There had been something genuine up there, but nothing to do with my diary pages, which were also genuine. That music from Hair that Lorna used to play and play had stopped.

  I was back on the street. Warehouse space, light industry, and in the area more and more artists, filling space, displacing industry.

  Did the man in glasses know the name Monty Graf? If so he probably didn’t know that I had six hours till that appointment.

  A girl in jeans with a knapsack came along looking up at the buildings as if for something in one of those loft windows. She was smiling, like a blind person or as if she knew something good. My neck itched but I wouldn’t find a chemist’s this far south of the Village and north of Canal. Lorna’s packing had been flawless, of course, but the Wilkinson dispenser was empty of new blades and the one in my razor was ready to be retired. When I visited the Wilkinson lab in Newcastle I asked a young engineer in a long white coat if the profit motive might not lead Wilkinson to relent and make a blade that didn’t last so incredibly long. He said this was not a prime concern.

  Wilkinson want their American people resident.

  My only mistake had been to mention Cosmo just now. That was giving too much away. I didn’t know if the Indian had mentioned my visit to the Knightsbridge gallery.

  And the mistake seemed then doubled by my having sent that Empire State 3-D yesterday to Cosmo, who knew we weren’t friends.

  Well where had I seen the Indian before?

  And why should Claire care if I’d put in writing what the man looked like who came running out of the grove in Wales?

  What I wanted was not a trip to Wall Street but a cheeseburger and a
malted and the early afternoon edition of the Post.

  SLOT INSERT

  Witness a different cartridge: not a thing solidly instated in a slot, rather a slot inserted in a thing.

  What happens? Shift a something to make room for an emptiness.

  This slot, then—has it identity unfilled? Maybe only so. I.e., if as appears to be true this slot is, say, the place where (not to be too specific) motives for making the DiGorro-Cartwright film can be found, isn’t it true that when these appear in the slot thus filling it or causing it to cease to be empty, it thus ceases to be itself?

  What appear to be such motives? Each one, as it fills the inserted slot, is also transparent. Through the motive may be seen the lack it is aimed to fill, as if the motive were a picture thrown not upon a screen but upon a volume, the motive thus even in its nagging transparency quite whole and plastic. A slot if like this one insertable is not only a place for a cartridge, and where inserted this slot is a cartridge of the future, of unknowns, or the unknown.

  Are these statements themselves slots obscuring what’s in them?

  Forget the slot and give it content. One motive for doing the film was that an American named Constance had been told in so many words that the film was in fact projected. Another motive was that the partners both and each thought it high time to get something together. A third was to mingle England and America. A fourth was to permit accident, say a couple of pompous hippies swapping recipes for gelatin dynamite, but no joke, as Will did not quite see when he suggested a New York tycoon blowing up his own building to collect the insurance.

  For years it was possible to bring back to Lorna, Will, and Jenny American gifts. These can be recalled like a roll of events reminding one that three-dimensional Scrabble predated lie-dye jean jackets, and Peter, Paul, and Mary came after the new ultra-thin polyester sandwich bags sticky with static electricity. Bring back a memory Jenny snidely said, but it was often a future. If America was to popularize the universe she must be given a chance.

  There was indeed one motive unvoiced to pragmatical Dagger. This was that the film under the guise of documentary daydream (and early associated with the chance that Chaplin might appear in an interview) would express some way two decades of America. The Bonfire in Wales threw into contour this possibility—here, for instance, the trend toward eastern modes, organic community, dislodging from city. The Unplaced Room, which of course had not been Dagger’s contribution, could show the American’s increasing disjunction in his environment and the need and arresting capacity to assert an existence and a self in a departicularized setting; it would be helpful to insert into such a setting Americans; and Dagger, even had he intended to, could not have made an apter contribution to this Unplaced Room than the unknown deserter who came with his friend and talked for several minutes. The Hawaiian-in-the-Under-ground playing his guitar would help to include race, national integrity, and the signal sweep of new folk musics and all they have been able, even unable, to express, Dylan and Mitchell and Newman and Stills. Hints here and there that the film was originating somehow outside America served to cool the focus.

  Motives that did not get voiced to Dagger included, for instance, the power of spoken words to make even more magical the merest objects of daily life—seen, say, in the scene designated Suitcase Slowly Packed: the laying of a black Marks and Spencer sweater upon a white-and-green plastic bottle of medicated shampoo, the insertion and removal of hands, the documentary account of each thing given in one voice as Dagger wished against his partner’s alternative but impracticable plan that each thing going into the one gray case go with a new voice to live distinct and separate, though Dagger, as he assured his partner and his partner’s son one day in the park, would not automatically say no to any idea.

  One summer there was one gift for the whole family from America—the one and only lost Cartwright family flick found in a large Whitman sampler—for God’s sake take it, my mother had said, the kids might enjoy it.

  That was a past all right but barely a remembrance even for those who shot it, certainly not for the stars. These were the two Cartwright children, a curly blond three-year-old boy named Me in light-colored jersey shorts that came out stony gray, and a five-year-old girl my sister in nothing but a rubber life-ring, the frames in those days so few per second that the pretty little girl in the film’s grainy snow hops into and out of a shallow canvas lawn-pool like a swallow dipping its beak and wings in a birdbath. The little boy jerks down his elastic-waisted shorts, he pushes them to his ankles, stands free and bends menacingly at the camera, then erect turns profile and with a dynamic faraway look like a lookout but looking merely at his pretty sister, he forgets his hobble and starting off falls flat on his elbows.

  The film (released from New York now) seemed a waste. Lorna said, A manly boy. Will said, There’s no sound. Dagger, stationed at his projector, said, A remarkable film for its period. Alba said, You were enchanting, I recognized you right away. Jenny said, It’s raised a lot of new questions, I must say.

  Everybody laughed when Jenny said that. But her pleasantly insignificant quip with the film still running set some new deadline the meaning of which must come clear before the reel ended, and then it raced on and the leader whipped off and flapped clear leaving on Dagger’s screen a glare without clear scale, and like a deadline set just on principle the thought came, with the end of these images of the thirties that weren’t after all so distinctively of the thirties, that this film should not have been taken away from the creaky, spider-inhabited American attic, for someone would have to pay for its removal. The canvas pool is an ancestor of today’s collapsible vinyl-lined Doughboy pools that have their indispensable counterparts in England and can even be heated from the point at which the pool’s filter cartridge is located.

  Unlike the three-year-old Virginia who said Daddy bring back a present, the seventeen-year-old Jenny said something else killingly sophisticated to her international businessman father: Bring back a memory.

  Motives? Others would come after the film was done, even later—even now—leaving or holding out possibility like a lunar depression or one of a series of superimposed transparencies, even that ultimate form, the shape of that slot-space visible through various contents.

  5

  Let me convey Monty Graf’s face, confirm his rather still voice. A mixed face and a dark mild voice that doesn’t so much confide as pass on to you some prior confidence reached with someone else. Between nostril and upper lip an area very ample, sensitive, and ambiguous. Absolutely black eyebrows, thick and trimmed. And a vocabulary.

  When he spoke to me his zinc-gray eyes widened sharply on certain words—Stratford, Soho, Handel, Coventry, brain-drain.

  To see what it was like I widened my eyes the same way on two of mine—Knightsbridge and Stonehenge.

  The narrow healthy nose and the eyebrows and eyes so vitally differed from the rest of his face they seemed a section jammed down to fit the rest as if that were a receptacle—pocked sallow cheeks, a pudgy, brief though not recessive chin jabbed by a mole at the fork of a center cleft, which was less an event than a surplus fold.

  Dagger’s camera could glibly sum up this face: a wary, half-sensual indeterminately beat-up forty-six soon to be much older.

  Three deep lines cross Monty Graf’s forehead no matter what happens lower down. The second stops midway across, but your eye goes on as if drawn between the upper and lower wrinkles to the far temple and its softly combed swell of gray and black hair, and my eye went still further to the ash blonde with her back to me in the next booth and to the right of her hair and above the back of the booth the eyes of the man she was with.

  Monty Graf went through Coventry during the war and still knew someone in munitions there; the new modern cathedral was a great experience I should be sure not to miss—bitter experience, Coventry, but of course the English were pretty reserved—but I must know all about that, having lived there.

  You said it, I said, they’r
e so reserved there’s a postman none of his coworkers have spoken to in three years.

  Monty Graf picked that right up, said not he thought in Coventry but someplace else, it was due to a strike the postman hadn’t joined, and did I know where that phrase sending to Coventry came from.

  I did not know.

  Coventry jail, Civil War, he said, the citizens of Birmingham sent a passel of Royalists away to Coventry; I’m an Anglophile, he said. He asked me what I’d drink. I was thinking it wasn’t quite true that the English were reserved. How can you live so long there and not know if they’re reserved or not? Think of the stranger, the bank clerk who came up behind you at Stonehenge and gave you a little talk unsolicited complete with weights and measures.

  I said by the way I had indeed seen the new Coventry Cathedral, but speaking of Anglophilia he wasn’t the one who phoned yesterday afternoon, was he?

  He didn’t seem to make the connection of Anglophilia with the phone call, but he did shake his head.

  I asked if he was with Outer Film; he said No though he’d heard of them. Our film didn’t include Coven try, did it—or had I said I knew someone in Coventry.

  An engineer, but I don’t think I mentioned him to you.

  Automobiles?

  I nodded.

  Monty Graf sipped through a short straw a New Orleans gin drink made with milk and fresh-cracked ice, sugar, and white of egg.

  He’d come in from London this morning, he said.

  I said I’d guessed that.

  He took another sip and said he’d learned—in London—that a film I’d made was very interesting and that I hadn’t sold it yet.

  I said we’d lost most of it so there was virtually nothing to sell.

  He said according to his information we still had some significant footage.

  I said what could you do with a few minutes of 16 mill?

  Monty Graf drew gently on his gin and milk and looked beyond me phrasing the next move.