Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  In any case it was with this inter-time, like an expansible space inside my knuckles and eyes and the back of my shoulders—an organ time which must be in its sphere like a type of weightlessness—that I phoned home from the airport in London and got Will.

  Loma had spent the night at Tessa’s.

  I was between them all.

  Loma had wanted Will to go to his friend Stephen’s. He couldn’t believe Loma was as disheartened about the break-in as she said. He said, rather importantly, In fact, Dad, I think Mummy misses you. I suspect that’s all there is to it. Will had locked all the windows. In the front hall under an old black spread he had laid a complex field of pots and pans, and had rigged the small cassette recorder that was supposed to receive family letters from America so that if the intruder was for some reason hugging the wall he or she would rip a strong indirectly routed string yanking downward a bolt resting on the PLAY button releasing the National Anthem. Will was concerned only that he not be in a deep or bad dream from which he might wake ignorant and scared or which might itself naturally incorporate the kitchen clatter or “God Save the Queen” so he would not wake up at all. He had had nightmares.

  Surely the humor of the music would have disturbed a burglar most.

  I told Will I had his Wall Street literature, and asked where Jenny was.

  He said off with Reid, she’d taken a bag.

  There was a nearly final moment of silence in which a ghost stood at attention in our hall (and I thought, if you scare a ghost instead of being scared by the ghost, you double the event and pass through into a new field of force).

  Did you ask who collected the copy and the original?

  I asked if it was a man or a woman. They said they didn’t know. Someone who knew the pages were there, I said.

  Will asked if I had any enemies. I felt he was writing in his leather notebook. From train numbers he’d graduated to shares—now maybe detection.

  I asked him why he asked.

  Routine question, he said. Was I going to Mummy’s concert?

  I’d forgotten all about her chorus, but I said yes of course.

  Will was going to Stephen’s tomorrow night. I recalled Loma had insisted he go even the night after the break-in, but Will would not leave her, and now he said she’d gone on about it and he almost felt obliged to spend the night at Stephen’s.

  I said, She just doesn’t want to be a bother to you.

  I said I’d see him when I saw him, and he agreed, and we hung up.

  I was between Will and Lorna invisible. I was between June and Chad. I was between Dagger and Claire.

  Jenny, however, was between me and probable northern danger, and that danger was not to me but to her, though her own damn fault.

  Why had Tessa never really talked to me about the film? I was no longer between her and Dudley, or no more than anyone else was. She would take a drag and look at me and after a count of four or five say with languid finality, Oh everyone’s making a film. But then to Lorna she suddenly said, Oh but can’t you see Dudley in boots and breeches and flowing sleeves and tight cuffs marching around a set giving orders and checking historical details! And she and Lorna would laugh at that. And Dudley of course would not be present.

  She and Dudley—this is not only during the time Dagger and I made the film but for a couple of years at least—didn’t go away together much. A weekend in Wales was about the size of it. Dudley took Jane, or Jane Dudley, to the Bethnal Green dolls’ house museum or a garden pub for Sunday lunch. Tessa took Jane shopping and to the cinema.

  The three of them went to Tessa’s father’s for lunch on Saturday, or rather Tessa went early with a pot of chicken soup she’d cooked with a whole chicken, and spent two hours getting lunch while her father laid the table and talked to her and put out the chala with the white and gold cloth over it; and then Dudley and Jane came and at the end of the meal Jane and Tessa and Tessa’s father sang the end of his grace more or less, and then the four of them went to the park, Jane hand in hand with her grandfather.

  Will it be a cast of thousands? said Tessa in May—and in June, The plot doesn’t have to be original, you know, and in August shortly after the Marvelous Country House, I bet if you looked around you I mean closely you could make a real documentary.

  Tessa was in Scotland for a while in the spring and no one could figure how she’d come back with a tan, and she said a clan chieftain had spirited her off to Italy for two weeks. She was certainly in Scotland in July before she and Dudley flew to America to spend three weeks at Mrs. Allott’s place on Cape Cod, because Jane just after she broke her arm was with her up in Scotland for a long weekend in late June when school still had a month to run. In August Tessa said she never seemed to see Jane any more, Jane was so busy visiting friends. Tessa had not lost interest in Mexico but didn’t talk much now about the gods and their animate calendars and those primeval migrations Dudley could not listen to. According to her she sat around all day reading Wilkie Collins and old issues of Galaxy left by her Belgian subtenants six years ago. This is not quite accurate. She did ask to come along for the Stonehenge shooting and perhaps surprised me with her interest in the most hard and discrete information, some mine, some picked up from Jenny when she and I visited Stonehenge: the main large horseshoe within the circle is, or was, composed of five trilothons—i.e., two free-standing uprights topped by a lintel; trilothon means three stones and is not to be confused with the Sarsen Circle of thirty huge stones also originally capped by lintels but all connected; the western stone #56 of the central trilothon was 29 feet 8 inches, 50 tons, the largest at the Henge. It surprised me that Tessa knew some people who were going, but I must have assumed Lorna had told her. It did not surprise me that she at once said there must be a connection between the great stone’s number, 56, and the number of Aubrey holes that make the far circle, out by the mounds and the ditch.

  And now as I was about to drop a coin into a slot at Heathrow airport to call Tessa’s to speak to Lorna if she was there, some god of true tourists interposed between the current that joined head and thumb some pancreatic pulse that eased breath into my shoulder-wings which had been tense since unknown hands three thousand miles down-range had launched me into a stalled escalator—and instead of the predictable thing I kept my coin and splurged on a big groaning cheerfully private cab.

  Not to Highgate or Tessa’s, but to the Druid’s.

  And not at random.

  No such thing as randomness were five words on our sound track for the burned Marvelous Country House footage. Had Chad said them? No, I. I had wished for a formula to front the high abstract talk of Chad and the bumptious Englishman who looked like Teddy Roosevelt and in a recent unexpected dream of mine was Teddy, a brusque banal god following timetables full of ideas and audiences. He hadn’t even looked at me, but to my no such thing as randomness, he’d said, Your film is random; look: you speak, a woman comes, a hand opens, the rain might be raining or not, your spacemen are taking their driving test—

  My cab’s dark leather cooled my hands, the cabbie asked if I was over for long; blue-gray-beige-medium-high-rises passed on the left, a green football pitch on the right browned at either goalmouth; I said I didn’t know how long I was over for. The Cockney cabbie had a pale thin neck and pale brown hair that started well above his ears—short back and sides. He might be fifty or he might be my age. I was going to the end of the predicament I had not yet formulated.

  Do you believe in God? I said.

  The missus handles that end, he said.

  What’s it the end of? I said.

  The tether, Guv, he said.

  The English, I told myself in the late fifties when Lorna went to pieces, are really not all that reserved.

  If I could take the Beaulieu hardware, reduce its gates and motorized magazine and steel rims and the celluloid it was loaded with to software, to a program or a formula, I would sell it peacefully to myself alone. I would not be looping inside someone else’s plan.r />
  For it was someone else’s plan.

  Never mind how many projects there had been in the mind of Outer Film—Monty said two—never mind Claire and Dagger’s collusion on the Wales footage; I’d find a formula that would be more than such half-knowledges as Chad’s warning to June apparently about me, June’s warning about Jerry, Jerry’s feeling for Jan Aut, Phil’s awareness of Claire, Dagger’s acquaintance with Gene—and pray what has been the result of Mary’s Scottish Nationalist brother’s influence upon the mythical Paul? And why did June speak so of Paul?

  And if you with your kid or canvas or asbestos gloves fixed in that lab wall have me, then you have also the riddles my film idea seems to have sparked.

  I paid the cabbie. I stood on the Druid’s step in the South London privacy of half a mile of brick semidetacheds.

  I blinked, and a tiny red plump old woman stood in the doorway telling me Mr. Andsworth—which he says on as in onward but she pronounced as in bound—was not at home. And at once I saw the idea to film in Wales had not been mine any more than Dagger’s. It had been my Druid’s, for when I’d come to talk to him of what I imagined the film might make of my life and to ask specifically about using Stonehenge, he’d urged me in the most emphatic words to go to Wales first and see the mountain where they quarried the famous Stonehenge bluestones. But then we got on to physiology, breathing, divination from one’s own living entrails no less, and the subject was dropped. I did not have to trust the Druid’s motives for putting Wales in my mind, because I trusted other things in him, and unlike Dudley Allott and Lorna Cartwright I have come to doubt that probity and loyalty of the usual sort are the necessary grounds of personal power. Yet I was sure of one thing: The film idea was mine. No one had said, Do a film.

  I was a cartridge myself. Yet as the slot softened like memories that one keeps separate and I found myself touched at all points and mildly engulfed by some sponge that dissolved as it engrossed me, I found myself also shrinking into independence, and though I could not yet frame a formula for my state, I looked through the little red fat woman (as if she were the NOT in a digital computer’s NAND valve) forward to American futures as dark as the Druid’s hall and the ruined film, but free in a field on which to delineate the hand that reaches at right angles out of a fourth-floor Brooklyn Heights apartment window as if to protect the glass but with an intimation of startled rebirth in having sliced between gravities to grasp a gift sphere with names in sundry scripts all over its white cover which is divided by red-stitched seams seemingly endless that you could only see if you skinned the sphere and laid out its cover. It was the week before Ned Noble first was in hospital and he seemed very well. He had come in to Brooklyn Heights from Flatbush to spend the day with Sub and me, and he had begun by recounting the little jokes by which last night without lifting a finger he had climaxed a day which included completing the construction of his personally designed crystal receiver set by going the limit with his sister’s best friend in a Reformed synagogue’s basement rec room and his sister was scared he’d tell their father. Ned and Sub had left me, for I had a bad cold, and they’d gone out into our street—one of the distinctively brownstone streets of Brooklyn Heights which are nonetheless if you look closely composed of several other materials as frequent—and the scene in that old Dutch street that was still elegant but year by year filled up with parked cars until just as it became virtually impossible to play there we found we had grown up so much that in fact we were playing even on Saturday afternoons on the athletic field elsewhere in Brooklyn of our private and so-called Country Day School—but the scene, this earlier scene, when we were fourteen you could not have conveyed on film and still caught that collusive vibration with which the mind saw the hand grasp. It was a baseball—what we called a hardball, as opposed not here to a softball (for we might play softball in Prospect Park in the shadow of the great triumphal arch in memory of the Civil War dead on a Sunday with a parent though never here on the discreet narrow streets of Brooklyn Heights) but rather to one of the white or dark pink rubber balls we played punchball or stickball with (though we played stickball also with old tennis balls so naplessly light if you hit one hard it would warp off in sharply unpredictable directions). Where did that rubber come from? From the latex-milk of whose trees? An official National League hardball in any case was what this was all about. With autographs. Of Dixie Walker, Carl Furillo. All the Brooklyn Dodgers. A birthday present from Sub and me to Boyd, who this afternoon brought it outside to show and Ned Noble had come down to the Heights for lunch and did not really accept Boyd who didn’t believe Ned had experimented with gunpowder in the synagogue and who went to another school where they did not begin actual Latin grammar in the eighth grade. I was housebound with a cold and so when Sub and Ned went out and ran into Boyd I was not down there in the street with them. But I kept an eye on the four or five kids down there in one of those fairly serious conversations that might or might not lead to a ball game. Sub told me later that Ned was kidding Boyd he was going to put his own signature on Boyd’s autographed ball, and someone who was looking at the ball flipped it on an impulse to Ned and Boyd shrugged keeping an eye on the clean autographed ball until he began to get a little mad and came after Ned, who back-pedaled into the street regardless of cars and when Sub called for Ned to throw it to him—thinking to give it back to Boyd—Boyd cried out, No, it’ll get scuffed, hey it’ll get scuffed.

  And as I ran up my window, Ned on the wings of his own private laughter had reached the curb below my window and said, Let’s scuff it against the brick, and Boyd called out, Hey no! but instead of rubbing the ball against the building with his own hands, Ned turned toward my apartment house and unfurled a monumental throw almost straight up, but the ball never quite reached the bricks of my house, yet came so high it came just up to my level past the silence of the watchers but perhaps three and a half feet out from my window and as it came to rest in a moment of equality that I’ll never forget, I lunged with one strange half of my body, and my mother who had felt a draft and come into my room shrieked behind me, and I took that white sphere out of the air at the instant it stopped rising and stopped spinning so it might have been a knuckleball in space and facing me as I took the ball was the name of Ed Head whose steady no-hitter one day was a mercurial once-in-a-lifetime he never survived.

  Something had been interrupted and as I withdrew into my parents’ well-ordered apartment Boyd said, Goddamn Brooklyn Indian, and Sub said, Oh come on Boyd. But Ned may not have heard, for he seemed speechless.

  For Ned knew he’d thrown the ball so nearly straight because he had not wholly wanted to scuff it against the bricks; and then at some interior angle of his act he had seen me behind a window and thought to throw to me. Later he said he’d thought of busting my window with all those dumb autographs Sub and I had given Boyd, but Ned said he’d had something else like prevision in his mind and now I feel it was like a prevision that he’d lost in the act but which averted time.

  I felt I knew what it was, but I did not tell him, for Ned was quite possibly a genius.

  When he mentioned the ball at school Monday he then dropped the matter with that electric or fanatic abruptness, and told of an experiment he was doing on his sister and father where he would speak so as to attract them to either side of what he was saying (that, for example, the rabbi might throw him out because he was playing with dynamite in the rec room but there were no synagogues on Brooklyn Heights) which resulted in what was for him a trance of power, like eyes independent of each other, or a balance of pulls—so he became free beyond the clear blackboard explanations of a physics teacher who ridiculed Ned’s sci-fi magazines but gave him A’s. But Ned’s loss of that something else that had been in his head when he threw the autographed hardball out of a divided mind was, I felt sure, displaced by the energy transferred to my act of snatching the ball at its interval between thrust and fall—I mean Ned had acted, and the act had a velocity greater than any memory of its origin.r />
  I’ve just come from America, I told the little fat red woman on the Druid’s threshold, and she said in a polite and gently whining Cockney, Oh you’re American, yes.

  But I was way ahead of myself looking into the dark possibilities of our ruined film and into Dagger’s idea broached to me August 4 or 5 that we better shift the Suitcase Slowly Packed and use it as a cut-in in the Marvelous Country House. The token dropped into a slot and on the chance that Jenny’s mysterious bookmark snapshot was in fact of Gene’s brother the great and notorious Paul, I said, Did he leave a message for me? I’m…

  I paused, and she said, Mr. Andsworth’s at the Community.

  Ah, the Community, I said. It was the macrobiotic community where they breathed together. I could never go that far.

  You’re…?

  I’m Gene’s…perhaps you know…