Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  Does anyone know you’ve got that carbon up in your cupboard?

  How would anyone?

  At the door Jenny gave a bad imitation of an afterthought: What brought you back so soon?

  I’m not really back. I’d prefer you not to tell anyone. Not even Reid.

  Would he care?

  Are you staying with him these days?

  Not really.

  Lorna was behind Jenny and instead of asking Jenny if she’d met a red-haired woman this morning, I said, Does Reid know an Indian?

  I wish you’d leave my private life alone. Jenny got past Lorna into the hall and went upstairs.

  Lorna said, You know Reid’s dome that he built on his parents’ property in Connecticut? He’s shingling it with old LP’s.

  Lorna held her hands out to me. She dropped her hands. I saw something so obvious I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before, as obvious as the sloppy paint splotches along the edge of white traffic lines in New York streets—you assume the line, so you don’t see the splotches, till suddenly you look.

  What I saw now when I looked at my wife Lorna was that the Indian, Cosmo’s Indian, the Knightsbridge gallery Indian, had been one of the two men with dark hair and white shirts sitting on the grass with the red-haired woman when we filmed the softball game. Yet having expressed this I was now not sure.

  I turned away from Lorna, and on the table with Tessa’s hunk of rock salt was a bowl of apples, not Orange Pippins but Sturmers that are like small ordinary rough orchard apples you see by the bushel in the fall in New England.

  Lorna said, There must be an awful lot on the film only you could know.

  UNPLACED ROOM

  Both ask anonymity. Anscochrome color will make the drab hues here threatening, like a strangely rich black and white. Windows in our Unplaced Room symmetrically on either side of and behind the table are not quite on camera; they give a light other than our overhead globe. Dagger thinks the effect may be expansive. Globe? says the deserter. Bulb to you, says his costar.

  The deserter’s hair is fair and long, down over his slanting neck as he stares at his hands on the table. In front of the table a blue-red-and-umber floor cushion. His friend’s dark hair is longer than its clutching kinkiness indicates. Dagger has a tripod this morning; I didn’t know he had one. He says he’ll be ready to move laterally but wants, as we agreed, to keep it if possible still and at most play with focus, like on the near hands (deserter’s left, friend’s right) which are in a plane closer than the heads whose plane is not so delicate really because Dagger’s distance gives a depth of field that easily includes in focus ear and nose.

  My headset on, the mike hidden on the table, the Nagra spool spinning, I hear the first exchanges and see no significant movement.

  I don’t mind, says the deserter apparently in reply to something his friend asked just as I got the phones on before switching in the voices.

  The friend, who must have said, Where were we? now says to the deserter Shoot.

  I can hear the Beaulieu all too clearly.

  The deserter tells a considerable opening tale; much of it I recall.

  This boy—he is twenty-one tomorrow—moved out with his company from Fort Dix when he had just been best man in a wedding at the beautiful modern chapel, and they were all relieved to be going to Germany.

  Why’d you let yourself get drafted? snapped his friend.

  Everybody gets drafted, it’s what you do with it that makes the difference.

  You’re just beginning to know your own power. You have to be shown. For example, you got drafted; I didn’t.

  You cut your finger off.

  My face.

  The deserter says No wonder—but the dark-haired one waves his hand as if to say get on with it.

  The deserter says with a bit of lonely drama in his voice that all this is like months and years ago, another time, and the dark-haired one says evenly, It’s the same only more so.

  The deserter tells how the belly-aching black soldiers at the base bugged him with their challenges about nothing, so the news from Nam got on his nerves and letters came from his mother about chapel attendance and from his sister who he is hung up on and she was splitting from her husband and had a good job as a computer programmer, and a guy in quartermaster said the bombing in Southeast Asia would go on till 1980 till we were just touching up our own craters and it looked like the moon, and our deserter heard of an underground antiwar paper being put out by two GI’s in England but it wasn’t pushing counter-action like Roger Priest’s Om, and he didn’t at the time know why he did it but a black first lieutenant who’d never been channeled into vocational school like him gave him an address up north in Kiel—clean-cut liberal black (both laugh at this), ROTC, scholarships, did card tricks and read palms, the whole bit but now getting out—and before our costar knew it he’d extended a furlough, slipped the Danish Coast Guard, landed on the east Swedish coast south of Kalmar (which is not much of a secret any more), and was hitching toward a lake three hundred miles north where there was a community—

  OK. OK—

  A land-reform lab in beautiful Sweden and when he got there he saw this TV broadcast he said, and he knew he’d done the right thing. No words for it. It was of a South Vietnamese officer hustling this wiry bare little VC along by the arm like some farmer who got drunk and disorderly on market day, and yelling at him and getting worked up, then in the middle of the street headed for the lockup or interrogation pulling a pistol and bombing that little VC just like that at right angles, bumping him off literally, a sideways bump in the head, the VC tipped over.

  I’d been building this fence all day with—you know them—

  Of course.

  The girl. The guy. The other girl.

  Right, right.

  You know their names.

  They don’t matter.

  But it was them, you see.

  The black-haired one whispers something with the word forget. And Dagger for a moment has cut around to me I don’t know why, the second unit on my shoulder strap, mike held out, dumbly alert I guess I look.

  But, says the deserter, it was a good afternoon. We built that fence together and it was for us and the girl Joan—

  Cool it. It was Joanne, wasn’t it? It doesn’t matter.

  You kidding?

  The deserter mouthed something, then said OK. To me it matters. We knew each other from the start and we came back after work and went down and swam in the cold lake, and we got off, and we had supper and then we saw the news on TV, and I knew I’d made the right move because I’d been more scared than I knew, worse than Vietnam, scared of white armbands in the night—but the TV news made me see.

  In Sweden.

  In my head, which is anywhere!

  OK, baby.

  That TV news changed my head.

  The deserter is playing with his fingers. He looks at the camera and back at his friend, and says, What are we doing here?

  They exchange formulas for gelatin dynamite, kidding. Big issue: do you use woodmeal with gun cotton or gun cotton alone? Let’s ask Mr. Johnson in Senior Chem.

  The black-haired one says, Where were we?

  Here.

  They laugh.

  The black-haired one very composed in the midst of his laughter as his friend also laughing is not, says, A friend of a friend is making an experimental film.

  More laughter.

  The black-haired one says, Therefore talk. How come you left a good set-up? Affluent Sweden.

  It was a visit only to a girlfriend of the deserter’s sister who was in Norway. Trondheim. Some institute. Walked north and overland to cross into Norway south of the railway line that runs from Östersund in Sweden right over to Trondheim, but had to stay north enough to miss the higher mountains so they were in some uplands between the railway and the bad mountains. And well in Trondheim, you know what happened then. Joan decided to go back to the States and the deserter got in with an American like nobody he’d ev
er seen who said he was a geologist but he was a water freak working on his sixth or seventh boat, it was a broad-beamed converted trawler fitted up with the works, he had the bread.

  The black-haired one says, This is all meaningless, you know.

  We’re off to the Faeroe Islands then, where the skipper wants to look at some curious rock formations, and in the Faeroes I started not being able to remember what happened to me, just knew I had to keep going on, and I got in with a fishing crew from the Hebrides who’d lost a man who’d gone off to the Orkneys to haul seaweed—like those northern islands are something else, no words for it.

  The Hebrides are called the western isles.

  So I came down to the Outer Hebrides and lived in a hut north of Mount Clisham, bleak and Puritan. I could have stayed there. Just stayed. You know the rest.

  You found us.

  But listen, I almost stayed up there. I mean you know how he is.

  The deserter’s voice has dropped on these last words and just as suddenly his friend says, These rich sailors they’re all the same.

  But the deserter says, I didn’t mean—and his friend cuts in No, I do know how it is.

  Why?

  In a military situation you learn what to say and what to leave out.

  More I think of it, it’s a meaningless war. But where does that leave me? (The deserter wants to give with some on-camera dialogue, and coming up with some comes up with a genuine thought:) I mean, I made it mean something in my life.

  You weren’t in it, man, says the black-haired one. You were in Heidelberg. You were signed up for a course with University of Maryland at the base. I knew it long before you knew I knew and long before you knew me. And don’t forget, the Visiting Forces Act says the English police can pick you up.

  The deserter shrugs his shoulders in embarrassment, seems stumped: You saying I’m Visiting Forces?

  You got away, man, what do you know?

  I’m a Vietnam vet, man.

  Why you don’t know a thing about the war.

  I know what you know.

  Less, much less.

  What do you know?

  The correlation between this war and the nature of unearned income.

  What about Billy Smith at Bien Hoa? This is a race war. Vietnam is the cheap Chink cunt.

  Who’s Billy Smith?

  He’s black. They charged him with fragging an officer’s barracks.

  What’s fragging, soldier?

  Fragmentation bombing. They say he tossed a grenade that killed two lieutenants.

  That’s fireworks, not ideology, says the older one, then raises a hand. I’m bugging you, I don’t mean to bug you, not here.

  There’s a contradiction in what you said. (The clear simplicity of force in the words seems to have been drawn from the deserter by our scene.)

  There is no contradiction.

  Anyway, Smith may get off.

  It’s irrelevant.

  Right—and all contradictions will be resolved, right? including the struggle of the individual, right? that’s what your boss said.

  Others have said it.

  I glance at Dagger; the distance between us is secret; I might learn something seeing these blokes as he sees them.

  Mao for one, says the deserter.

  The dialogue has a strangely official spontaneity.

  Got enough? asks the black-haired costar.

  Dagger has switched off now; my sync unit is off.

  You fellows are so good I’ve never in my career had less directing to do.

  They laugh.

  I’m going to let you have another minute, how’s that?

  They relax again, having been ready to get up. There is a bridge during which nothing happens but the sound of the Beaulieu and the phone ringing once. Dagger turns the camera on me: its sound almost visualized in my headset and preoccupations, the camera goes lower to my hands, my feet.

  The deserter says, Well there it is.

  The black-haired man bursts into a spiel, surprisingly exasperated, something has gotten to him. The war, he says, is ultimately a good thing because it significantly accelerates the decline of the democracies. The British filled the vacuum after the Japanese left, and this let something happen that would have delayed this process of decline for generations. What it did was keep Ho Chi Minh from moving in, and instead the French took over; and when the Americans filled the vacuum later when the French got out it was the same thing. So Ho didn’t become what it would have been in the interests of the western capitalist democracies to have him be, namely a Southeast Asian Tito. The war had been a good thing, yes.

  Hey, said the deserter, war’s not that good. Think of all the things the POW’s missed. And think of those kids with their backs skinned. But nothing’s going to come out of this war.

  No, something. (Dagger must have caught the contempt in the black-haired face.)

  At that moment the room, unplaced in word or light or sign, resumes a power it first had had in the bare tableau like a still. So place is felt to be not always or at least visibly the one of national coordinates or crystallized history. The pictures we removed from view lean against a wall, off camera.

  The black-haired one has to make a phone call. Dagger tells him where it is.

  Not on camera perhaps is at the end a sense that the principals depart less friends than they arrived. But even as I make these words, the truth loses contour, though it will have more authority in Jenny’s type.

  8

  I entered the Knightsbridge gallery Monday afternoon. The girl with the posh lisp that made r into w (really into weally) was at the desk and didn’t seem to know me. She had a deep tan this time and her loose orange-and-magenta blouse put the pictures to shame.

  When I asked for Mr. Aut, she said I’d just missed him, he was on a plane to New York. When I asked who had painted the pictures on the wall to my right, the girl said it was Jan Graf.

  But then I looked, and there were two new ones up. One was very likely of the red-haired woman, though the hair had been left unpainted. What you had was face and shoulders, neck and breast, predominating pale peach and silver-mauve, with the hair left the plain underpainted white that had been laid on the canvas. I felt that this was an abstract, a kind of wildly energetic abstract—I think I really don’t know about these things; I hear a bit from Geoff Millan, but he prefers to talk to me about liquid crystals or West End plays I haven’t seen. The peculiar thing here was I was simply seeing the face, no problem, as if the displacements and the riding, shedding planes of the work that made the flesh look like it was undressing didn’t exist. Now this was a switch, at least for the likes of me. Also, I wanted to sit down on the girl’s desk and tell her.

  Instead I asked if in real life that woman had red hair.

  The girl shrugged: In weal life? I mean, it’s a work of art.

  I said it might be a good likeness.

  I was wondering if anyone was in the back room where through a door I saw bigger canvases leaning up against white walls.

  I said I guessed leaving the hair unpainted made the picture art.

  The girl smiled.

  I asked Jan Graf’s address and phone, the girl wouldn’t give it out. She said if I was interested in buying, she would take my name. The artist would be in Wednesday.

  I asked when the girl herself came to work. It wasn’t as if I’d invited her to breakfast, but she didn’t like my asking and said, When we open. I felt I was losing something and could get something else better only if I took advantage of being in New York and London at the same time or if I started asking the girl some wonderful questions: like, Is there an insurance group prepared to write a policy to cover the theft even of the carbon copy of my film diary that’s hidden in Jenny’s cupboard? What are the dimensions of such a carbon copy and would those dimensions fit into a lookout cartridge? But these questions are like the dreams I envision when waking but then don’t have sleeping. On the 271 from Highgate Village to Holloway Road tube
station after lunch with Lorna—some very hot and good leftover curry—I had imagined having such a dream some night soon, imagined perhaps in order to forestall. For the familiarity of that route had obviated my looking at it except the marquee of the ABC cinema and instead I envisioned having a nightmare in which I challenged Outer Film to a public audit. Phil Aut in an Aquascutum Super Burberry with silk labels streaming out of the tailored pockets lay on an exercise couch waterbed that was just water and dreamily asked the audit to proceed and the audit was of my film record and then many carbons, and with each new carbon the price rose until I couldn’t pay and Phil Aut said we still had not found who was responsible for destroying the film but we might try another carbon.

  Instead of wonderful questions like forestalled dreams, I asked the gallery girl if she knew Jenny Cartwright.

  When she said this wasn’t American Express, I said would she pass on a message from Jenny to Reid.

  There was an alertness in the way she said Reid?

  You know Reid, I said.

  She had work to do now.

  She got up.

  I said, Will you take a message from someone you don’t know to someone you do? From Jenny to Reid, it’s this: there’s a carbon of the film diary in her cupboard.

  She backed away, got out from behind her desk, side-stepped toward the door to the back room.

  Might I use her phone?

  She said no. Then she said in a different measured tone that if I saw Reid, someone had been trying to phone him here and would he stop giving this number.

  I said I was not in touch with Reid; sorry.

  I preferred that Lorna not hear my call, so before returning home I found a kiosk. Cosmo wouldn’t be in my address book, but my address book was back at Sub’s. Now the third of the four London phone directories was missing that in the alphabetical sequence contained Cosmo’s name. I was close to the Knightsbridge bed-and-breakfast hotel where Lorna didn’t know I’d spent last night—long after she’d perhaps prepared that curry for the second tenor. The hotel would have all four phone books. But as I pushed open the glass door of my kiosk I recalled Cosmo’s number—pure accident.