Oh, said the woman respectfully as if I’d reported a disaster in my family, oh yes. But then she seemed so knowing—that in retrospect I wondered if she didn’t know enough to guess my ruse—she added, Oh, you’ll be Jack from America.
Thinking this was enough work for the moment before the major journey upon which I was bent, I took a fingerful of my beard and smiled and said I had had reason to alter my appearance.
The little woman stepped back into the shadow suddenly fading into the face of someone I was sure I’d seen not long ago. She seemed to expect me to come in and wait, but I raised my hand and asked the address of the Community, I’d go there myself.
The Druid opened his door at the far end of the hall. I had presence of mind to forestall the woman’s introduction by greeting the old man heartily and apologetically. I had just a question or two for him, I’d been experiencing difficulty in New York.
I nodded over my shoulder to the woman, having made my way past her. I told the Druid I regretted inserting myself so crudely into his schedule and not to blame the lady, for I’d been fully as insistent as he knew me capable of being—or do you? I added.
Yet now as I approached the old man through the dusk and the familiar untart scent of tangerines which brought to mind the French vegetable cutter I’d given him, I recalled that if Dagger had wanted in early August to shift Suitcase Slowly Packed because it contained a snapshot of Paul—and if the Marvelous Country House was occupied by Paul’s brother Gene and his family—why had the Softball Game been shifted to between Suitcase Slowly Packed and Hawaiian Hippie? The time had come to phone Dagger.
With the distance between me and the Druid, as well as my growing need to trust fewer people with the weight of my private inquiries, this lookout cartridge narrows from the walls of its slot. But it enlarges too so that that which lies between, crowds that between which it lies.
Your breathing, said my Druid Andsworth, and stepped aside as if to reveal the thing I next saw in his tome-lined den, the phone on the desk.
You’re back from New York. Was it a necessary trip?
I told him that once begun it had become necessary.
There was a fire in the grate. The phone receiver when I touched it was warm. (There was a copy of English Country Life open on the desk.) I took my hand off the phone and straightened up.
But I’d passed beyond Mr. Andsworth, having seen through that strangely familiar little woman in the front doorway that he was somehow involved with Gene and thus part of the network I had thought him authoritatively separate from. And if he could not yet know how I’d identified myself at the door, he knew either from reports or by the way I had walked into his study that I had knowledge which altered him.
I feared for you, he said, remaining at the open study door.
I let him talk—he said he’d sensed in me a need for cures that he could never satisfy, I might as well set off thunderclaps on Guy Fawkes night—he’d had only a handful of principles which might but only might be received in the body of my mind, he said, in such a way as to open currents between cell and cell, recollection and recollection, lungs and shoulders, head and hand, even (to let the fancy play a bit) between on the one hand America and England on a Mercator grid, and on the other America and England on some other representation—oh he’d sensed in me when I’d first come (in March, wasn’t it?) a failure of collaboration with myself which he felt could not be especially helped by his macrobiotic community (which even if I’d been interested would have been inconvenient since I had a family I was devoted to way up in Highgate who incidentally—and he underscored the words—he hoped were well) but—
I interrupted to ask if I might use his phone.
He closed the door and continued.
I must have known, he said, that the film good or bad could hardly make a revolution in my life, and if it became an obsession might interpose itself between the Logos in me and the active instincts that, as Poseidonus tells us, must be organized by Logos. And if he did not hold dogmatically with the old arguments by which this control is articulated—as I myself must know from his efforts to associate the electronic idiom (which he thought closer to my personal interests) with the gods who are aspects of the one total Nature—any more than he necessarily believed with ancient Druids that the world is literally consumed from time to time by fire or water—any more than he disbelieved in the Norse gods—
I had begun to dial, begun amid my host’s words as if only rudeness could roll me through (and I even whispered audibly the third number).
—any more than one would ever now talk seriously about human sacrifices at Midsummer Solstice.
Of my daughter Jenny? I shot out at him.
Or a substitute for her! he shot back, startled into automatic humor.
I dialed only two more numbers, for I’d decided a real Dagger on the other end of the line might Cramp whatever now occurred to me. I held the receiver to my ear. Mr. Andsworth in retort raised his forearm so the sleeve of the dark green jacket of his suit pulled back to reveal his gold-banded Timex which he consulted with pursed lips.
To the phone (which began to crackle and then to whisper with one of those crossed connections one often overhears in the London telephone system) I spoke as if to Dagger.
Admit, friend, I said, you wanted the snapshot of Paul to appear in Suitcase Slowly Packed.
I waited. I said, I don’t care what it would have looked like with the film slowed down. Why didn’t you tell me in the first place? We might have saved our film.
I waited, then said, I don’t care, Claire’s told me what she and Graf have for their own film using our remains.
I paused for a long count, then said, I know all about that. They can pinch a dozen Xeroxes, they still have to find my original.
But pausing yet again—recalling Dagger’s tales of summer stock in St. Louis and a screen test in which he had to talk on the phone, I saw (through this seeming irrelevance) that Dagger might often have been tracking and shooting people whose significance in this story he himself could only guess from what Claire had told him.
No, I said, when I finish here I’m going right back to New York. I’ve got to see Monty about his sister and above all I’ve got to see Claire.
Oh I paused, I paused! And you who have me, whatever is inside me, must imagine what energy I tapped from that almost dead phone. I said, Of course we’re still pals, Dagger, but listen man, we got work to do on the Bonfire in Wales.
Mr. Andsworth was panting in an easy chair by the gilt-tooled encyclopedias and folios and some portfolios that might hold prints and maps. The color had so gone from his gaunt cheeks that last night’s white stubble was now hard to see. I had been almost tired in the cab, but rather than lean too close to one time or the other I had kept my body buoyed in some gimbaled space, I’d passed through one gate, then another. And now through my thoughts about Dagger roused by an imaginary conversation with him, I’d found such energy that I could have rushed on foot eight London miles to take Lorna twice before tea.
Wales, said my Druid.
I know, I said, and taking a chance added, the meaning of the grove, the man in the grove whom you called a guru whom that lovely stern woman with the apple cheeks tried to shield—
I almost said Elspeth! as in my own talk I found the softening fade from present to past to present through the fat red little old woman at the door, some outer or other image of Elspeth herself beyond any difference between color and black and white.
I have to go, I said, hoping for what I now received (and wondering where my suitcase was). I hung up.
Mr. Andsworth looked ill.
Crazy Wednesday, I said.
I, he said, could see no reason why you should not film Stonehenge. It was what you wished. I knew your friend’s acquaintance with certain people. You know my vision of a benign violence I will not live to see. I sincerely wished some new order for you yourself and for your dear wife—even a return to America. I did not know after all what I see I s
hould have divined—that you would become involved in the violence that Paul in May was determined to sequester himself from once and for all. Believe me, I knew little, and know little more perhaps than you—it’s Thursday not Wednesday—and maybe knew more then than now—only that these people are beyond me. I do not want to know what you know, do you see? I was concerned about Paul as I was about others whom I know in their individual contributions to—the continuum—even you, who were at best a marginal case. I was amused; yes, that’s it, I was amused; and that is why I made my little remark about Cape Kennedy.
And about being a tourist? I said.
No. That was more serious.
Do you know Chad’s brothers?
Not Chad’s.
Who were you phoning? Your phone was warm.
Who were you phoning just now?
The Druid’s door came toward me and I opened it. I bade Mr. Andsworth as gentle a goodbye as I could find in me.
But when I reached the front door and had my case in hand, he spoke again. He was at the end of the hall’s twilight—entre chien et loup is the quaint French for twilight—and Andsworth said, Mr. Cartwright, someday the destruction of your film will seem part of a large endless harmony, believe that. Mary told me (and I enter it here like a stabbingly mysterious communication)—
The destruction, I replied, will be only one part.
I did not point out that he was repeating himself as if on a loop. But I was not particularly sorry for him.
Elsewhere in the field of the day I was lightly telling a girl on a train how right Jules Verne was to insert capsule lectures in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea on technical topics such as geology and the submarine isthmus which once joined and (in a literal sense Dudley would appreciate) still joins Europe to Africa.
And I found in what I said, like liquid crystals I sold in another life, an orderly solid, extremely firm yet also mobile or if you will nonrigid, through the normal course of three or four dimensions, reaching out east across the Lake District to the west coast and the declining town of Whitehaven where (as I told my companion) the parish church where George Washington’s grandmother sleeps was gutted by a strange fire last August, east across the valley of the Eden River to the Yorkshire moors and the oil rigs of the North Sea where Dudley’s appendix swam free, south (more or less) to Lorna in Highgate or the Druid in drab Wandsworth, until as I escorted the girl back three or four cars for a drink and the train slowed for one of those hushed operational reasons so the train’s speed north suddenly equaled that of the girl and me stepping toward the buffet carriage, my own words retrieved the Druid’s suddenly peculiar your dear wife.
I knew she knew his name and knew his address, for it was she who’d passed them on to me from some friend. But she had never visited such a man herself. Someone had mentioned his renown as an adviser on diet and psychosoma. He was a wise man who Dagger said had once treated a gigantic California politician by walking upon him. But I would have known if Lorna had gone to see the Druid personally.
Say Andsworth had talked to Lorna; what might he not have heard about the film?
The answer was, nothing; for Lorna would keep calm and friendly, and tell him nothing. But someone else?
At Glasgow I got off and phoned Tessa’s flat in London.
I hadn’t had time in London to pick up the Number 12 Ordnance Survey map I needed, so I decided to break my trip and took my case with me.
In a phone booth I dialed random numbers and let a look of preoccupation veil my survey of the immediate sector for anyone shadowing me. Across it men and women in dark-colored clothes passed, perhaps to places I knew the names of, to outskirts, Paisley, Renfrew, Barrhead—and because they came from my left and my right I could not easily think I was the one moving and they stationary.
A lookout stays in one place. But what of a moving lookout with a stationary trust?
If someone knew my destination—someone who knew what June had said to me in another old station not so many hours ago—why then have me followed? Why not wait for me instead?
If I knew anything about Jack the American (on whom I had grown my beard and into whose shoes I’d let myself be placed if not laced by the Druid’s doorkeeper), then I’d be able to gauge the forces released by my impersonation. For her—at least for the time of my interview in Wandsworth—I was this Jack. For others I might be a moving core of knowledge about Jack the American. Though no superman.
You could shoot half a thousand feet of film here in this station of the British Railways—a girl running, weaving through the mass of people making connections, a grandma waiting on a bench with a green shopping bag, men with folded newspapers wearing rumpled suits and white shirts without ties. And the film would never show or know that you were in Scotland. You could cut in “Loch Lomond.” A real sound track might yield grains of Gaelic or the sinewy joins of Glaswegian phrase to phrase tumbled and quizzical, not so curtly cadenced as other brogues. Or on your film a broad serious old man might pass, as in a fake documentary, in a pleated kilt, bound outward from this poor and difficult and deep city where joking young men who wait for a pub to open let the walking stranger calmly step over (like a fissure in the pavement) a vein of their danger felt in one column of thought—and where middle-aged men wait for ships to build in the yards along the sludgy Clyde back up whose inland reach in the 1840’s the Navigation Trust steam dredgers lifted two million cubic yards of (as they put it) “matter” and dumped it in Loch Long, and along a few miles of whose outward reach from 1812 to 1820 the first steamer to ply regularly on any river in the Old World, the Comet with an engine of three horse, made the run between Glasgow and Greenock which there is no need for holiday-makers and tourists like me to know who contemplate taking a MacBrayne steamer out past Dumbarton Castle on the right then down left to the Firth of Clyde and the North Channel then up past the mouth of the Firth of Lome on up to Mallaig on the west coast and across then to Skye where Boswell and Johnson deliberately walked and later beyond to the Outer Hebrides.
I wondered if no one would be there when I arrived.
In my glass kiosk like a functionary checking passengers, I listened for any loudspeaker that might betray over the phone where I was.
I dialed Tessa and was able before a voice answered to slot a two-shilling piece (which after all my years on the old scheme of sixes and twelves was no longer two bob but twenty new decimal pence).
The voice was not Tessa and it was not Lorna. It was Jane, and unlike my recent Jenny she did not at once abruptly say, Would you like to speak to my father, or, Would you like to speak to my mother—but addressed me directly and with what I can only call love, though it must have been a power already flowing from Jane in the home from which she spoke though the love in that home is not between the parents.
She might have been my own child glad to have me back and bursting to know what I’d brought, wanting my undivided attention, to tell me (as Jane did) that her grandmother was coming next month for Thanksgiving even though there is no Thanksgiving in England. And how were Jenny and her boyfriend? Jane had seen him once passing in the street when she was with Tessa having coffee at Yarner’s in Regent Street and just before he passed behind the big bronze grinding wheel Tessa and the other woman Mrs. Flint who was an American had seen him and he waved and Jane had waved too though she’d never seen him before and then he was gone, a super chap neat and rather small with long hair. Jane wanted to know if we still taped letters to our family in America, she would like to try it. Her grandfather was going to Munich for three weeks and her mother was probably going to Scotland. Everyone was going somewhere, Jane said. Tessa had spoken of my film and Jane hoped I would show it to them. I asked when Tessa had mentioned it, and Jane said only yesterday or the day before. Daddy would love you to come over, said Jane, and then I heard sounds in the room from which she was speaking.
I asked if Lorna was there and Jane said, No, did she say she’d be?
I said, Only last
night, but I thought I might find her there now.
Jane said maybe it was tonight, for Lorna hadn’t come last night, Jane had played Go with Tessa till after midnight when Dudley came in, and there had been no Lorna that Jane could see.
Daddy doesn’t like games, said Jane. Jane laughed off-phone and said off-phone, Oh Daddy.
Jane said wasn’t I in New York though? Would I like to speak to Daddy?
I would, and I could see Dudley hauling himself out of a chair and leaning his bulk toward the phone from the other end of the high-ceilinged room as if the angle of inclination in the field of this powerful day of mine might equal what one experienced as movement on other days, and I wondered if Dudley knew he was in this field where static inclination as of mind might displace physical movement, yet again an energy quite other than any that movement bodes, embodies, or imparts. If so, Dudley’s gravity whose center was, God knew, too low, leaving him topple-heavy, might find who could know what powers in process around him and convert them to his own uses. I had been at a moment of what Sub calls major illumination and felt the risk of even knowing so, for something threatened to recede as Dudley reached his receiver and raised it to one large ear never dreaming his American friend Cartwright was in Glasgow Central Station still fairly weightless in a giant wheeling field where distance and duration decay into fresh equation embracing Tessa’s late blind uncle in Munich (where some of the stained glass in Glasgow Cathedral was made) being jarred awake near dawn in 1936 by the very waking agent that simultaneously stunned him back into dreamland from which his wife then roused him, having heard in her own sleep the concussion, and sensing something wrong with him there in the dark when in fact Tessa’s uncle, delivered by that blow into a new weight of pain and limit, may yet (reroused) have felt shared between dream-space and wake-time yet in a field between, instantly swollen to power that was more than a headache and that absorbed those rules that wall our normal slot.
No, said Dudley, as I raised his saffron appendix on the grid of my fork at Blum’s kosher restaurant in Whitechapel and inserted fork and forkload into my mouth knowing that while I chewed this sweet and sour most unkosher squidlike divination the tall bald festive waiter in the white coat would come to Tessa’s ear (bared that night gracefully below the tight pull of hair combed back into a ponytail) and tell her she was wanted on the phone (where I foreknew she would learn that the lady surgeon had gone in and the offending appendix had come out); no indeed, said Dudley, Lorna hadn’t been at the Allotts’. But Tessa never never tells me anything, said Dudley, she leaves me the odd message; today for instance someone called from New York to consult me about Maya glyphs but if Lorna were corning here for the night (which I’ll stake my honor as a man of fact she didn’t do) I wouldn’t necessarily hear in advance.
Lookout Cartridge Page 37
