Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  I said even more quietly that I didn’t know what Aut’s thing with Graf was, but getting into Gene Autry drag to impersonate Graf must have got him a bonus and if he thought I believed one guy went there Thursday and another guy Sunday he must be as dumb as he must have been mean to shake the pennies out of a recycled coffee tin’s slot when you could just take off the plastic top.

  He finished his tea in a gulp, put his cup down by the ring, approached me and said he thought he knew what had happened—

  I said there’d been a window cracked too.

  Who’s Gene Autry? he said.

  I had my eye on him. His patience seemed gratuitous. I felt again a solid value in this place of his work. It was as if his patience for which in flickering spasms of insight he could see utterly no reason nonetheless protected that work. Instead of two tellies facing, there was just one up on the bench beside a compact console which to judge from its wiring may have been a video synthesizer.

  But now so quick it was like the glory of that black girl’s voice coming out of the woodwork, I had his pearl-buttoned denim shirt in one fist and had whacked the side of his head with the other hand which was open but hard so it was more like an unfeathered chop than a slap which it was not, and his glasses were on the deck and he was blinking deeply from his cheeks up. He hit me in the chest with the heel of his hand and I found I hadn’t let go of his shirt so he stuck to me when I staggered back. My raincoat was killing me. The best I could do was bring my free hand up in a fist and as he brought his arm on that side out for a hook my fist cut into his armpit and he gave a high-pitched grunt and his punch didn’t come fast and I blocked it with the elbow of the arm I’d uppercut him with and let go his shirt as he dropped to a knee. It was a fight I now sensed I had almost had in Corsica with Dagger. The armpit, as my Druid adviser must have said some time, is one of those openings dangerously near the real circuits of the body. And as my host dropped and my fist dropped, he couldn’t have said more persuasively than in half-nauseated pain he did say the word pennies—so it occurred to me that he had not been the Sunday one. He crawled away and reached for his glasses across a line of sunlight that had escaped through one corner of a window where the shade that had probably been drawn for something he had been doing with June hadn’t quite blocked it.

  I told him to pass that information (which must have meant what I’d done to him) on to Aut.

  Still on the floor he said the word information the way he’d said pennies.

  What are you really into?

  He reached for his glasses. You wouldn’t believe me, he said. The line of sunlight rolled along a sleeve that I saw was of purple, a light so brightly violet the hand going for the glasses seemed feeling for something in murky dishwater. Feeling for my Wednesday night promise that I would color with Ruby Thursday night. But then Thursday I’d been here and with Graf and not home till past her bedtime. On the other hand kids forget.

  What wouldn’t I believe? I said.

  The man on the floor began panting.

  He said, I’m blind without glasses.

  He panted and stopped as if he might die. He said, Go?

  I thought I had done something to him.

  I asked what Aut had expected to find Thursday, but my host said all he knew was what I knew he knew and he was an artist and all this up here had nothing to do with—Aut—at last he had said the word the way I’d wanted. I did not approach him because the issue of my friend Sub and his kids’ toys was over, and a new fight would be my host now in the right defending his real work. Whatever he knew about the Corsican Montage or the Unplaced Room, he wasn’t about to tell me if his slit-scan contraption had anything to do with Outer Film, so I didn’t try anything like, say, asking if he used a selsyn drive to shift panels of painted glass behind the screen slit—he must have been playing about with something behind the slit for the oncoming camera to take. I had again this strong sense that the slit-scan wasn’t Aut’s business.

  What wouldn’t I believe? I said.

  There were steps rising and the man in glasses got himself to his feet.

  Answer me, I said.

  He stared at my chest so idly the continuing steps seemed to stop rising: Expanded real-time projection, he said, directly mind through console.

  But indicating the door he said, Don’t tell him about this, he’s crazy.

  A selsyn is a sort of analog computer in that it transfers angular rotation from one power source to another.

  About what? I said.

  Oh he’s crazy, the man in glasses said.

  Well he’s not a god, I said.

  It occurred to me I hadn’t been in a fight since before I grew my beard. Now three years later as the big metal door scraped and for a second wouldn’t open, I had less feeling than I should have had about Sub’s being inconvenienced or Tris and Ruby’s things being upset. And this touch of new weightlessness I’d experienced climbing the stairs was not opposite to but in collaboration with the straightening effect my elegant raincoat had connecting my shoulders and biceps and chest.

  But crazy how? I said. Hell, you might be crazy too—you go around impersonating a guy named Graf.

  The door came open and Jerry the fifteen-year-old-looking child with the lush shimmering hair raised his hand to me Hi, and went to the electric ring. He turned as if thinking again, and stared at his friend, and said, You might save a tea bag.

  I might.

  I do pay the rent.

  Lucky I let you, said the man in glasses.

  Jerry contemplated me.

  Graf I heard?

  He poured water on his friend’s tea bag.

  I said, You know a Graf?

  Jerry stabbed color from the bag. The question, he said, is do you know a Graf?

  I smiled parentally. I tried something; I said, Yes, a painter Jan Graf.

  Jerry turned to me and stood straight on two feet, shoulders back, teacup held like a host. What had I seen and where?

  I said I was quite, well, familiar with her, her current work at a London gallery; her abstracts were very interesting especially of faces; I said I couldn’t think of anything else really to say, I didn’t know how to talk about painting but I saw some and I liked Jan Graf what I’d seen of her.

  Jan Graf herself? he asked.

  I smiled I think and said I’d come in contact only with her work.

  Jerry was like a boy I knew in school, less head and more hair. A private school in Brooklyn, what is called in England a public school. You never knew what thing you said would drive him mad with an insanity. And what happened then was quite exciting though sometimes tiresome. He would seem with his attention to whip in close to you and like a word in some elaborate memory system the numerical address so to speak of what you’d said was lighting up a new mile of gates and circuits, functions and paths, loops and levels, though in those days during the war when we didn’t know about computers, I must have thought this reaction in him was more like the pneumatic message-capsules that flew through the tubes at some New York department store my mother had a charge at. Yet no—for to think of these, I’d have had to think of computers first.

  I asked if Jerry knew this painter. He smiled at the man in glasses, and without once looking at me said, I know her work, she’s a beautiful artist, the real thing not some prostitute hack.

  He was excited drinking his tea.

  I said I was interested in buying one of her pictures, and Jerry was so quick to say which one, that I said, A sort of abstract woman with white hair.

  Jerry turned suddenly to the man in glasses and said, Where’s June?

  I said, Your friend can pick ’em.

  His trick, said Jerry, is he doesn’t make it with them and so they keep coming back for more nothing.

  Just that one time, said John as if pretending to care.

  Jerry asked when I’d seen that portrait with the hair.

  I said I had to go, and he said he had me mixed up with someone else, and as I was p
ulling the door to behind me I thought I heard the man in glasses say, No you don’t, and Jerry say, Watch it, John.

  I was sorry to have had a fight with John, the man in glasses, because I knew Jerry knew Jan Graf. But after the fight—which I’d asked John to pass on to Aut—I believed I would now hear from Aut.

  I was in New York, wasn’t I?

  In London I could have phoned Jan Graf Aut and gone to see her. She might well be estranged from her husband if she lived there. Wasn’t not going directly to her like not going directly to Aut’s office, or was it like not telling Lorna what the film was about last night London time?

  Jerry felt something about June. What? She was taller. He’d named her in that precipitate way he had that reminded me of my classmate Ned Noble. I didn’t want to go back, only ahead.

  I had almost lost that sensation on the stairs before of happening into a new stage.

  I went to the bank, I took the subway to Wall and walked up that deep aisle named for the wall built by their governor for the Dutch against the Indians but soon taken down plank by plank to house and heat themselves. Straight old Trinity Church rises at the head if you go that far where Broadway ends Wall, but just past the legendary bank where in 1920 the bombers missed their target J. P. Morgan and exploded instead thirty-eight lunchtime strollers who happened to be near the crucial cart. I turned left down Broad and visited the Stock Exchange where I picked up some disappointing literature for Will and stood in the visitors’ gallery watching shirt-sleeved men on the floor drop ashes into their telephones.

  I came down around along Broad past Fraunces Tavern where our American history teacher, a Son of the Revolution, met some of us for lunch the spring he retired and told us its first owner, Black Sam Francis, a French West Indian Negro, became Washington’s steward in the first presidential mansion in New York, and was going on about Black Sam’s daughter Phoebe who saved the Father of his Country from a bodyguard’s poison, when Ned Noble who’d been brought here for lunch more than once by his father who was a broker interrupted to say that Washington had left his hat here, and we all laughed and later found it was true.

  I had Will’s literature in a big envelope and I wanted to put it somewhere. I was cutting back on Water Street to Wall and the subway.

  Sight unseen, Will wrote a school essay about James Hamlet, whom I’d never heard of, who in 1850 worked for a Water Street firm right by the East River near the junction with Old Slip, and that autumn he was kidnapped to Baltimore under the Fugitive Slave Act and it stood up before the Commissioner who perhaps because of the federal fee of ten dollars was willing to believe that black James Hamlet belonged to Mary Brown. I asked Will to tell all this to Dudley Allott, who was a historian, and Will did.

  I saw a Leica IIIG box but for $130, and after all, this was the same trip and I’d already brought Jenny something and she wasn’t in my good books anyhow.

  If my suitcase hadn’t been stolen from Sub’s, and there was little reason to think it had been, I’d put Will’s stock exchange literature in it for safekeeping.

  That had been a good half hour with Will yesterday on the floor of his room. I’d lost the weightless feeling now. The sun had spun a rainbow cartwheel in a flawed pane of Jenny’s window.

  The slave-catcher’s last name was Clare.

  I let myself into Sub’s and saw my suitcase standing in the hall; and the penny dropped.

  I sidestepped a shopping basket full of laundry at the entrance to the kitchen and put in a call to London. I got Will and told him the Xerox address in Junction Road and asked if he’d use his money and not let Lorna know, and tell her I’d called to say everything was all right and to give my love. Will said nothing had happened, no one had broken in, Jenny had not come home, Lorna would be home soon.

  I hung up and the coordinate truck engines and fire sirens in the sound grid of Manhattan weighed silently on the miles between me and Highgate till that distance dropped like some scope trace.

  Where had Dagger stashed the sound tapes? And what about the reluctant 8-millimeter cartridge we’d shot the night we came back from shooting at the air base. I could simply ask. But on the other hand, by asking I might lose what I sought.

  You may have to forget anything even on the brink of remembering everything.

  Lorna my beloved in her bad period prior to Tessa forgot even me, perhaps me first.

  Dudley Allott himself, the cool scholar backing across the Atlantic in one direction and then the other from period to period, said for his Catherwood work he sometimes felt that contrary to the laws of preparation and intellectual maturity, he had to forget ten thousand modern European histories for some unknown duration in order to find his object and its central American space: for he it was, with an Indian-head patch he’d sewn himself on the seat of his jeans, who lumbered around right field that softball Sunday and had his place in Dagger’s camera on a good sluggish bunt that he was too slow to beat out.

  That game had been the first scene we shot, though Dagger (as I’ve explained) was for putting the Softball Game back between the Hawaiian-in-the-Underground and the Suitcase Slowly Packed, which if the film had survived would have left the Unplaced Room first with its second-hand Marx and third-hand combat experience.

  Oh if the deserter’s lift from Trondheim fjord to the Faeroe Islands was a dilettante geologist looking out more for trout than rocks and caring still more for boats, what the devil was I with my smattering of music from plainsong to Charles Ives’s variations on “Washed in the Blood of the Lamb” picked up from Lorna, my guidebook Chartres from Will, Stonehenge from newspapers, even science from outside and inside, the outside often seeming to be little more than that hobby firm that up to now had paid me a few hundred pounds a year for little more than bearing messages.

  I did a sinkful of dishes.

  I strode abruptly to the living room threshold dripping detergent water. The pages left on Sub’s desk were gone.

  On the other hand, Will had picked up a lot from me about computers, space, England, trains, Vietnam, and about women I dare say, not that he lacked instincts, but I could point out to him that Lorna found it hard to ask for help so we must offer it before she got upset and you could sometimes tell she was on the edge when she hummed a Brandenburg—or that Jenny often lost a good picture because once again she had to get out her lens brush and squeeze the blower bulb to get rid of that last foreign speck.

  She asked for an electric pencil sharpener one year and I got her one through Dag.

  I packed Will’s stock exchange literature and set the suitcase on the day bed.

  I hadn’t thought to pick up some duty-free whiskey last night but it was less than a week between trips and I suddenly didn’t know the law. My charter associates on either side of the ocean seemed farther and farther away.

  I went out and purchased for Tris and Ruby and Sub two small packs of magic markers and a bottle of Scotch.

  There was a fresh TV in the living room, a small Sony portable.

  I left a note in case Phil Aut called and for good measure my address and phone but not Monty Graf’s name.

  I thought of an answer if Monty asked about the sound track.

  However, if I’d known for sure about the sound, then I’d have been between Monty and Dagger. But right now I felt between. Like a lookout, my eye peeled for a sign from my people or a sound from the enemy.

  Instinct this morning had been right. Bar the outside chance Graf was in with Aut, either Monty was in my way in my effort to get to Outer Film, or I was in his.

  I set out again, couldn’t find a bus; I didn’t want to pay for a cab, though I didn’t really think I’d have to buy Lorna’s Blue all over again. I envisioned the map of Lower Manhattan, my destination a grid come adrift in slipped parallels sieving into some one of the drags funneling noise toward the tunnels and bridges, and against that map in my head I ticked off like a tourist my list of things that at this stage were not inevitable.

  It was n
ot inevitable I would run into the asbestos-watcher again to whom I’d given a dollar outside the record shop, or the touchy blind man, or Jim the stabber; it was not inevitable that Aut would phone, nor that my collaboration with the painter Jan Graf would get a rise; not inevitable that it meant anything my seeing my name on the panel truck just before the aerial stabbing; not inevitable Dagger would mention the sound track on his own without prompting, nor that I’d ever meet the schoolteacher who had lost his job in the Bahamas possibly through associating with Dagger and now lived in London or Paris, I forgot which. And not inevitable that Gilda would phone, nor that Jenny would come to the States, nor that Claire, newly bathed and happy, would be waiting with Monty Graf when I arrived, nor that Sub would be angry seeing the suitcase, or for that matter even care if I came or went. Not inevitable that the weightlessness I now felt again seeing my head in the window of an uptown Express bus would recur or have meaning.

  But the Druid my sometime source says that in the current between lungs and shoulders, head and hand, breathing and pancreas—or one’s own breathing and that of others—the gate which a pulse finds open may then flip a whole future of gates; for the gods, to whom are proper certain provinces of possibility in the field of forces, know each other and know that Yes sometimes equals Yes and sometimes No, and my Druid agrees all this lore looks and is parallel to computer talk because in every age arise partial tongues that may do violence to some truth but that you learn to use to find the gods who themselves have given the tongues. Think but of the difference between the true (if flattened) globe we live in (says the Druid) and Gerardus Mercator’s plane grid on which regardless of the deformation of sphere into flat map Raleigh unlike Columbus could plot a straight-line course to the New and virgin World and know he had a line of constant compass-bearing.

  Which, as my Druid may not have known, is a rhumb line— really not straight at all, a gentle loop from one point of the great circle you were following to another, but in practice a plottable and constant bearing the wheel-watch could hold till you ordered a change. Look at Mercator’s Greenland (said the Druid), it dwarfs your United States because the price of transformation is that as you move away from the Equator your scales change, latitude parallels widen, Greenland grows into a new space that both does and does not exist.