Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  Did you know, Krish, that she was particularly interested in the shadow cast over the sepulcher behind you by the Great Menhir that stands behind me.

  Ah, said Krish almost inaudibly, that was just Paul. I do not need that information. I have no use for it. I erase it herewith. I wish to know how in this crucial encounter you cannot pay the strictest attention.

  For my eyes had lifted past him and around the circle northward. The rain was letting up. The rain god was nearby having a happy delayed-action dream of me thinking pleasantly of him many hours ago when I left my driver. The moon followed the rain into a cloud. I wanted to give thanks to the sun and moon and rolling moors and the mounds and hollows of peat forming and reforming in slow logics of energy down through the ancestors of the widow and her husband who had been a seaman and a crofter and the others here who came to church twice each Sunday, minister or no minister, for he moved from place to time dispersing his face and voice across the simple independences of their creed. I would not have wished to wake these living and dead ancestors from the nature of their past and present. I should have been afraid of this tense ungentle Indian who wore, and lived in, white.

  I could not take him seriously. I reviewed with rapidity that should have astounded me Krish’s known connections. His loop included Reid and Cosmo, the red-haired woman and Aut and Aut’s wife and, hence, her brother Monty Graf (who might have heard from Claire and then told Krish I was headed for the Hebrides), and maybe Jerry who might be Jan Aut’s son, not to mention the Druid Andsworth.

  I recovered myself and murmured that I was rechecking alignments from the afternoon.

  There is nothing here, said Krish.

  An alignment pointing toward Mount Clisham, I said, nodding right.

  There is nothing here, said Krish. A historic dump.

  Except me, I said. And I will give you information if you will reciprocate. First, for whom did you break into DiGorro’s flat and ruin our film? Second, how did you know I was in Glasgow? You didn’t get that from the Druid. Third, why did you wait till we got out here?

  In reverse order, said Krish, I wanted to see what your behavior here was. I knew you were in Glasgow because I phoned the Allott residence and was told you’d phoned from Glasgow, and learning yesterday that your daughter was in the Hebrides, I phoned BEA, said I was you though mumbling the name and asked if I could make it two reservations; they said yes, and checked the name by spelling it out, for which I commended them; so I knew you were on the plane. I asked if I had left my hotel phone number; they obliged by naming the hotel. The Scots are straight. As for your third or first query, I did not break into the DiGorro flat or destroy his film, nor do I need to oblige you by asking who did destroy it.

  How did your source know Jenny was out here—if she is out here?

  I believe my source was informed by Monty Graf. I myself saw him, but not to speak to.

  Where?

  In London of course. I do not believe in leaving London.

  When?

  Yesterday afternoon after I phoned Glasgow BEA.

  Dawn would come late here. My watch said four but what time that was I couldn’t tell.

  I asked what he had in his left pocket and he said I could easily guess.

  Oh here was the gentle Indian from overpopulated India the hope of the moral world I had once begun to think.

  Our talk drops somewhere in the gaps of the Callanish circuit, and yields its sound; gains instead imagination or a dispersion of probabilities. But as soon as I think, looking through Krish to an avenue or an antenna, that a miracle won’t be needed against him, my body gets heavy and uncoordinated the way it did one day near the end when I had a fight with Ned Noble, my muscle against the indifferent play of his mind.

  Krish advised me to tell him at once where the Bonfire had been cached, why I’d come here rather than somewhere else, why I’d given the alias to Andsworth’s housekeeper, and why I’d only pretended to phone Dagger DiGorro from Andsworth’s. When I said oh indeed I had said to Dagger on the Druid’s phone just what I’d wanted to say, Krish replied that after Andsworth had phoned he’d called Dagger himself and had almost missed him for he was leaving for a base where he had some business, but Dagger had said of course Cartwright hadn’t phoned him, Cartwright was in New York.

  I asked if Krish would trust Dagger before he would me; Krish said no, but Andsworth had had a feeling about the connection, how I’d held the phone too tight to my ear and jaw for real connection to be credible and hadn’t looked far enough or vaguely enough away.

  I said the Bonfire sequence was ruined as far as I knew, and when Krish said did I then not know, I said I really didn’t except on Dagger’s say-so, and by the way how did Krish know I wasn’t Gene and Paul’s brother Jack from America with a beard. Krish’s hand stirred in the dangerous pocket and a breeze of rain came so light it seemed to have stopped above our heads and let go inertially the thinnest field of mist. Krish asked why Claire who had been so close to Dagger had said the Bonfire footage was extant—but Don’t answer, said Krish, you know possibly less than anyone in this and are instigating a method by which we will all know less.

  I asked to whom Claire had said the Bonfire had been saved and Krish, with a bored glance a third of the way round the circle of stones which would have scared me if I’d not regained my levity, shrugged and asked after all which of the brothers she could have said it to, and when I said Jack is here, Krish at once said, But as you know he was in New York two days ago but I assure you you will not get to him tomorrow.

  Through these words I now believed that whoever had broken into Dagger’s place twice and whatever was Krish’s relation to Aut or Jan Aut through the Knightsbridge gallery, Krish was in fact working with Jack; and with the luck of his seeming acknowledgment of this, I took a chance: I said I began to see beyond the messages left here at Callanish an explosive—yes, explosive—equation I only half comprehended now but knew to be much more important than Jan Graf Aut’s adopting here with Paul an alias which coupled her husband’s beautiful assistant’s given name with my old college friend Jim’s surname. And the equation paired Callanish and the words of my film diary opposite Stonehenge and the film.

  Krish spoke fast, to stop whatever was happening around him. OK. So Jim Wheeler, so what—our Stonehenge was dead, don’t talk about explosive, likewise the absurd so-called Suitcase Slowly Packed with its photo of Paul (yes, Cartwright?) and the asinine baseball game in the park (which in any case lacked sound—right, Cartwright?) and the folly of spying in Corsica—and now, he said, answer please in one hell of a hurry the questions posed: Where is the Bonfire and why did you call yourself Jack? And where is the original of the diary?

  I said the widow knew where I was and what I was doing right now, and so Krish had better watch it. I said I’d called myself Jack because I foresaw Krish would be working for me soon.

  My mention of the widow may have encouraged him because with his right hand he reached and grabbed my parka and pushed me back to one side of the Great Menhir and past it. Dying seemed less awful than a passive life. The moon came out again and the rain increased. The place was too much for anyone not able to feel it. I had made Krish think I stood between him and something, and maybe it was true; but he had come after me to put himself between me and something, doubtless Jack and the brothers. And I had thought of Krish on one side and an object on the other, and of myself defending one against the other. But now I was not sure I was between.

  Krish’s left hand was in his tightly tailored trenchcoat pocket, his right was clutching my pack in front but not shaking me. I asked who said that in the Suitcase Slowly Packed it was a shot of Paul: and Krish unhesitatingly with the deepest watchful satisfaction said, Your friend Dagger on the phone yesterday.

  But Krish’s pleasure did not relieve him, and when I said, but Cosmo talks more than Dagger, Krish replied like an automaton: Wheeler was incompetent, he does not matter.

  And so though I could no
t ask what talking Krish thought Cosmo had done, I knew I would handle Krish here. I felt at liberty in this wet earth and with these high stones, and I said, What would you know about Stonehenge?—and as for Callanish, I came here with much less information than, thanks to you, I now have, I came here because of a circle on a map and I came here really to find out why I came.

  The Dravidians from South India! he cried or stuttered—they are the ones who built Stonehenge!

  His fury seemed to shrink Krish.

  Or was this my renewed sense of his left pocket as if far below?

  For it transmitted itself through his arm to my chest.

  I knocked his arm away with one hand and with the other pulled the pistol, and this so startled him—he being unable to assimilate any of my power—that he leapt backward, hit his head against the Great Menhir, and caroming on fell eastward half into the sepulcher.

  His head and shoulders were over the edge. He was on his back but his head was turned so blood came down from his nose. But when I hauled him onto the ground blood welled from inside his brown ear. I could not tell if I had his pulse or mine. The head was bad but not bleeding as badly as one would have expected from the scalp area. He’d hit the stone as hard as if he’d been trying to. He might be dead. The eyes were half open, and the nose bleeding brought back the Softball Game when Cosmo had tossed off a remark about blowing up the subway (and, diary aside, Krish would have been glad we had no sound track that Sunday), and the guy standing off first whom Cosmo had said it to had sprung a nosebleed and then with potential ferocity. The name was Nash. That footage could bear another look. But the map came first, and Paul’s hut, and a discreet sleep at the widow’s.

  If Krish were found here at the tumulus in the center of the famous Callanish circle that no one ever visited in the northmost of the Outer Hebrides with a crumb of the Great Menhir in his head, the tabloids would make enough noise to alert the very people I might need.

  I got him to the east fence. He was surprising. It took all I had to get him up and over. The place had drawn his spirit down. I went over after him and hauled him to a boggy ditch where he was safe unless someone came looking. At least he was spared the sordid mess on his white raincoat. The left pocket held a leather-covered cylinder some six inches long, like a long lighter—and at one end it was a lighter. But when I put my thumb on a button to strike a light to see the wallet in my hand, something shot out of the other end by lucky chance parallel with my upturned sleeve rather than into me, for it was a ten-inch antennalike instrument sharp as an icepick; but the lighter had worked too, so I was able to see that what had sprung the blade was a release near the other end that the heel of my palm had depressed. Using the lighter end you’d take care with the rest of your hand; no doubt Krish didn’t smoke. To retract the blade you pressed the release again. I pocketed the cylinder, first going through the wallet and taking the one thing I didn’t understand, which was numbers on a strip of file card, plus Krish’s money in case a false lead was useful. In an inside pocket of his coat I found a No. 12 Ordnance Survey map with, so far as I could tell in the light of the moon and the lighter, no marks. His ear had been bleeding but there was no cut to be seen.

  Back in my room I hung my jeans on a chair and tilted my shoes against the baseboard of the wall. I looked at the numbers on Krish’s file card.

  If Cosmo had been capable of “talking” about “others” watching me, and this kind of information evoked from Krish the name Wheeler, what system of accident had brought Jim Wheeler into this far-flung sequence?

  I had to know what the destroyers had wished to destroy. Had Krish been thrown off by the strange thought that Jack hadn’t been straight with him? Krish acknowledged that Dagger’s flat had been broken into this second time but said he had not done it. So it had been arranged by him for Jack or by Jack directly. Or indirectly.

  The numbers were unspaced: 5758450815½.

  My watch still said four. It was ticking. Had I just started it?

  It was as if I hadn’t been wakened by Krish’s eyes. I was asleep again, awake again—the pale force of the morning sky spaced itself between the magic concussions of a hand on my door, and there came the murmur of the widow’s voice saying it was nine o’clock, and when I opened my mouth to convert into energy the miles of peat between me and those numbers, and said, Latitude, the voice on the other side said, Yes in fifteen minutes, and I heard her creak lightly down the steep carpeted stairs.

  My map open on the bed, the first six digits could be degrees, minutes, and seconds of latitude, a parallel which crossed the northern lowmost slopes of Mount Clisham if I read aright. The other numbers were not longitude, and as I drew my other pair of jeans on I kept looking back at these numbers as if they had a meaning in themselves.

  South of Ardvourlie Castle heading down to Harris, I must turn off the road onto this parallel.

  A ROUTE TO PAUL’S

  What am I hungry for? What if I bought a bog? I might think up a revolutionary way to turn peat into tough elastic to shoe the wheels of a movable railway station. The soundlessness of rubber. Yet the cruel strength of steel like the metal-hard sapodilla wood the Maya whittled into lintel glyphs, not a few of which went up in poor Catherwood’s New York holocaust of 1842.

  What did I want to get my hands on? Some ready cash? Not really. The film? It might be sacrificed. But to what? Dagger and I the afternoon of May 26 paused at the foot of an insanely steep lane to look up after the slowly rising back of an old lady in a blue mac hauling her heart up the railing hand over hand. We were there on the south coast because I had to discuss with the boatyard man whose silent partner I was the possibility of my putting in another £500; he was determined to go beyond storing and repairing and into building, and he had two tentative orders, a 24-foot sloop and a 32-foot gaf-rigged ketch, from summer people who had inquired about bypassing a firm they’d heard of through friends who had taken up sailing, and my partner had encouraged them to have a boat made frame by frame right here in this yard.

  He inclined toward fiberglass for the hull and he humored his grandfather, a small neat ninety-year-old countryman, who insisted that only wood would do, and when Dagger with great gentleness and good humor told of a friend of his family in Monmouth County, New Jersey, who had invented antipecking specs for chickens so they wouldn’t be able to see each other directly enough to kill each other and these he manufactured by the thousands in plastic—tiny red pince-nez blinkers—the grandfather said that was America and what they did there was their own business. When I said the new ferro-cement hulls gave you as much as 12 percent more space because you did away with framing, Granddad said he could remember when tin pails took over from wooden buckets. He’d worked seven years to learn to be a wheelwright, when you made a wagon wheel in those days you didn’t have nothing but your eye and your hands to go by, seven years wouldn’t teach you all you must know, say, about elm and ash and a bone-hard butt of beech eight feet long six inches square for an axle but nothing would do for spokes but oak, for spokes must never be sawn lest you get a cross-grain, and a cross-grained spoke could snap, so you had to have a wood that could be cleft, and the wood was oak—and not just for spokes—you used nothing but heart of oak for the old harrows—a hundred years ago wheelwright shops made harrows and the finished harrow was fitted with a copse; now a copse was a wrought-iron loop let into the wood so you could harness your horse, and the copse was hooked in with a bolt (once made of wood, then of iron) called a whippance. Oh yes, but there was a lot to a wheel, you could cast the felloes out of ash or beech or elm as well as oak. And Grandfather (whose south-country speech despite the rolling father’s was not so different from my late grandfather’s narrow dry Maine accent) bet we didn’t know what part of the wheel the felloes were.

  But he was interrupted by his grandson, and Dagger walked off down to the beach with the old man, while I finished my business with my partner whom I so rarely saw.

  And next day when Dagger and
I were on our way up to Bristol and Wales, Dagger recounted what the old man had told him about the parallel grain of the oak that made it ideal for spokes, and how it had to be cleft in the summer still full of sap so the split would run from end to end. The old man had changed jobs around the turn of the century and had gone to work in a coach-and-foundry shop where he’d done all right. Dagger said the old man had never himself made harrows, for by the time he got into the trade harrows and ploughs were being made of cast iron, though wagon and cart wheels were still made largely of wood.

  At Clifton near Bristol we parked in the gorge far below the marvelous bridge and Dagger consented to take some quick cut-in shots of the high limestone cliffs and the Giant’s Cave and the woods and the river cutting through to Bristol Channel, and above all Brunel’s bridge—with the 15, then rotating to the 25, then to the 50—from crag to crag across the sky famous as a spectacle and known to students of Brunel for his original drawings which are art in their own right. And as if I were sound-tracking what the Beaulieu filmed, I told Dagger how despite numerous flaws in Brunel’s calculations the bridge had beautifully survived, and he murmured getting his viewfinder-focus right how easy it would be to blow it up. I enumerated what in that case would be found under the first foundation stones—a plaque, some coins, a China plate bearing a picture of the bridge, and a copy of the Act of Parliament enabling its construction. The Egyptian towers Brunel had first designed were never built and because his sketches for them were lost we know of his projected tower-base plaque designs (for instance, men carrying one of the links of the chainwork) only through a friend’s memoirs.

  No doubt much is better lost. I should like to make a conveyance. A conveyance may be a deed. I doubt I’ll ever get around to peat wheels. When I referred on May 24 to the Unplaced Room as a title of the footage we’d shot that morning, Dagger said Great, you make up the titles.