Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  It was not ten twenty any more. I went for the balcony room and its cabinet, but passing Cosmo’s carton and my half-full rucksack slumped softly against the wall and between them Alba’s closet with the cartridge boxes that had made me wonder about those apparently unopened cassettes in the glass-fronted cabinet, I turned into the dark bathroom.

  This was an impulse, a godlike move veering and light as if Red Whitehead had given me an expense account. Here baby flesh was overcome by the acid of urine and the foggy perfume of talc. I was getting closer. A red light went on beside the sink. I avoided the mirror. There were chemicals and two pans but no film cans or spools. I got a shtip in my gut—Tessa’s Yiddish for stab—and I wanted a long hot bath. I got away from the smell.

  The film if it existed might be in the bedroom where, as I passed it again, I could tell at a glance the clock didn’t say ten twenty any more. Now the cabinet in the garden room; the shelf with the lenses and blower-brushes: the Kodak 4X movie film: three boxes open in the dark then under Krish’s flame betrayed no images; I opened the rest—for why not hide old film in new cans?—but it was the same story. If Maya as I had said to Kate meant the world was not separate from me, maybe (but I did not believe it) the film I sought had nothing to do with a world of mine.

  If, as you say, you are counting on the diary to advertise the film, maybe I should see a piece of it.

  But a piece of what? Monty had seen a piece of the diary. Did he want more? I was between many people in many directions. The people I was looking out for may have exited through another part of the building site and the other people coming after the people of the first part may never come. And if so, will the site blow? The steps in the hotel pass Glasgow, Portland, Cincinnati—but a modest B & B where Lorna and I had a week just before American Labor Day is relatively hall-less and I had a chance to talk to my boatyard partner about ferro-concrete hulls and to his granddad about exactly what part of a wheel the felloes were and again about why the cleavage had to be so right, and in that B & B mopping up our egg and banger-grease with fresh white bread (for breakfast is what the second B stands for) the news came on the Irish landlady’s wireless on a shelf up among some bric-a-brac and it was Nixon’s devaluation, and Lorna said we could have feathered our nest even better and I said maybe now’s the time to sell the house and transfer the money through Canada and go home, and Lorna drank her tea and looked at me: It’s possible, she said quietly; I said Jenny would like that; Lorna said she wasn’t at all sure because Jenny was English—and now by the cabinet in the dark amid Dagger, Alba, Dagger plus Alba, Alba in Dagger, Dagger in Alba, I had to try the bedroom. But then I wheeled away from the luminous clock-face far and dim, for there was a bathroom closet that might hold more than bath crystals and pumice.

  Yet setting foot again in the darkroom where Dagger developed his black-and-white stills, my shoe hit something, and I bent and put my hand not first on it (a comb) but on the fino tile which Alba had laid and which I knew to be black and white diamonds, but whose cold I could not foresee: it traveled across the heel of my palm and the inside of my wrist close to my blood, straight to my armpit, and turned me blue: not blue with cold: for Tessa’s haiku quoted to me in bed by Lorna emerged briefly along that vein of thermal action—some bare chill I could not recall the words for climaxed by: my dead wife’s comb under my heel: Lorna’s robin’s-egg blue comb, and then I did touch what my shoe had felt, and it was a wide comb—Alba’s?—with a tuft in the teeth—I had a hard-on, the two of them Lorna and Tessa in that smooth untouched bed in the next room—with me—and with the lunar intruder coming in at an extreme angle, a pilot’s five o’clock, and the shttp came again and again like the film paying out in my dream, and amid the mere things of this household beyond which or in which I must find the film or its history, I could have lain in a hot tub as I did on the night of the Marvelous Country House and been fingered by Lorna while defining Māyā for her and seeing the Southeast Asia of my sex enlarge and straighten and some time later swell and vanish like some multiple dream of achievement into the huge faded black towel she surrounded me with blotting out Dagger tooling away toward Hamp-stead with the boys and girls in the VW minus Sherman, and the Marvelous Country House in two cans and the Beaulieu—and no doubt using his talent to stir up a little friction if there wasn’t any or calm things down if there was, though when he retorted to Sherman on the way to the MCH that Yucatan was just as tough as Africa, Sherman seemed to leave that for Dagger to explore—which he did not, for he told that tale of the dwarf which purported to be first-hand from his supposed wanderings in Yucatan but derived from my idea of tying into power possessed of momentum but undeveloped purpose which Monty Graf had pondered while I ate my New York fish, though out of loyalty to myself I would not have told him my sense at the end of June that some almost too adequate purpose of mine was being drawn into Dagger’s new lack of momentum which was not his New Jersey Italian dolce far niente but his willingness to believe what his man the cine-film processor in Soho promised and his determination to use this man rather than someone who’d do the job for us at once, even though driving home from Wales in the early hours of Saturday, May 29, with (at that moving point in time) three scenes in the can (the May 16 Softball Game, the May 24 Unplaced Room, and the May 28 Bonfire) he had said it was possible but not probable we could get the man to do our work as early as Monday.

  However, Stanton the charter man in London got after me to book some tours that were a new extension of our services to American tourists including hotel accommodations and tight time tables for visiting Stately Houses and Civil War castles, the American Museum at Bath and cathedrals up as near the Scottish border as bare towering Durham where the Venerable Bede seems to be interred—which was what saddled me with this chore in the first place, for I’d told Stanton I’d be away the first part of that week seeing a man at Union Carbide’s plant in Durham, and Stanton had made it hard for me to refuse, and it meant money, so I didn’t think about Dagger for a few days during which I was home just often enough to take Lorna to a party at Geoff Millan’s and to have a discussion with Jenny about her social life interfering with her Latin A-levels—her social life being the guerrilla-theater actor—and when she spoke of the trips she and Will (then Billy) and I took to the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum in the old days to push the buttons and clock the dinosaur, it stuck in my head and when I not Dagger suggested the Underground not at Tottenham Court Road or Piccadilly where you might expect to see kids banging guitars but the old long dusky I tunnel under the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum I connecting with the South Ken Underground and Dagger didn’t say anything but looked through his supplies in a shelf of the glass cabinet and brought out two 100-foot-reel cans in their boxes and said absent-mindedly, How much of this are we going to need for sound track, and when I said That’s film, I thought Alba’s coolness might mean they’d had a fight and Dagger was going around in circles for the moment like me more than two months later in face of Lorna’s coolness over breakfast in the seaside B & B getting Nixon’s devaluation on the news but being more conscious of the first B than of egg and sausages.

  Which made me hungry through my heat and through the pain in my stomach (which might well be less Kate’s sandwich than a shtip of guilt which even a minor god can feel) and spinning from ’the bathroom darkroom past the comb of whatever color and in another direction away from the entrapping axis of living room/balcony room into the kitchen I found hanging near a window a salami in its unbreached skin, and to find a knife I switched on a light which set off a ventilator, and then grasping the knife I spun away again into the dark of the hall and the balcony room to the glassed cabinet, for Dagger’s absent-mindedness put me in mind of what I now withdrew from the low shelf where the Sony no recorders were: and indeed three of the little cassette boxes, resealed so that in Krish’s light I made out only a tiny almost imaginary line of slit, contained not cassettes but Nagra spools. These I put in the
tight pockets of my jeans, turning involuntarily to lay my hand on some ordinary thing in that room that would tell me the truth about Dagger.

  The sheets of mica in the indirect light from the kitchen felt very like Red Whitehead’s plastic-encapsulated sample sheets I’d shown Dagger to illustrate the behavior of certain organic chemicals being developed for use in the display-panel numerals of cheap microelectronic calculators which like Mylar insulation for ordinary sleeping bags are yet another spin-off from space research. Dagger uncorked another bottle and said, OK how did I know what our warm fingerprints were really doing to what I had been calling liquid crystals encapsulated in that “there” plastic sheet, but this altercation differed from the one we had toward the end of June when Dagger showed me three spools of reversal film which, when he said these were the Softball Game, called up a cylinder of unspecific cinders, my grandfather in his can which the weekend of his death in a Maine hotel I saw only the outside of—I demanded to know why the Unplaced Room and the Bonfire in Wales were not here as well, and Dagger was visibly unhappy he couldn’t divert me with his idea to shift the Softball Game to between the Hawaiian Hippie and the Suitcase Slowly Packed which we had just shot, so as to leave the Unplaced Room first—a far simpler opening, no? I asked why we had to do business with this lab; Dagger said again this was a fellow who’d give us a break.

  I did not recall losing faith in Dagger, yet I had been quite capable of loosening Claire’s faith in him when on Monday over drinks at Monty’s I’d told her the only film developed had been the Bonfire—knowing that Dagger if he’d told her anything about developed footage would have mentioned the Softball Game but not the Bonfire.

  Why did he never ask about the diary?

  Even when I said Jenny was typing it.

  I would have asked Jenny then and there the night she finished typing Hawaiian Hippie and Suitcase Slowly Packed—June 27—what she thought of my speculations on the snap so quickly shot; but she gave me the pages so glumly all I could do was look into her face and murmur, Is it Reid?

  My words seemed to move Jenny’s feelings into view: she said there was no telling with Reid, they’d been all around London that day and he had said they were going to the cinema, but after they left Jane and Dudley, Reid had decided he had to split—he’d call her—and Jenny said to me that if she was being punished she’d like to know for what. But when I prolonged that question, she kissed me and went up. And on the 4th of July a week before we set sail for Corsica, Dagger said his lab man had gone on holiday to America but it mustn’t hold up, and when Cosmo who I’d never thought had a key to this flat drove me home in that three-wheeler that looks as if it would take off or tip over he asked if Aut had sold the film to TV, and the question (more interesting than I gave it credit for) passed by in my then strangely released exasperation: I said I was beginning to wonder if Dagger was ever going to get our film processed.

  Would Krish have heard my gripe from Cosmo?

  Could Reid have heard it from Jenny?

  I had not found the film in the things of Alba’s household; I had only three tapes and they could be Stonehenge, Unplaced Room, HH, MCH—the minute hand of the bedroom clock had swept from the straight line of ten twenty round into the acute angle of ten fifty-five. I slid back the long door of the clothes cupboard and felt among neat-stacked boxes behind hanging wool and silk. Alba made a smooth bed. I was beginning to think she and Dagger had gone away. Again I tried the bathroom, stepped over the comb, reached behind some plastic bottles lined up in the window-inset—the tub had a puddle near the drain—the small plastic tub leaning against the wall under the sink was dry. That was the baby’s tub. I had forgotten all that. I remembered Lorna standing legs apart on the pebbly strand, Lorna stroking steadily out through the dark damp sea. I saw her from the boatyard where my partner was trying to buy me out. Lorna stroked beyond the children and out past the pale fat breast-stroker with thick dark hair, Lorna’s steady crawl learned in a New England lake thirty years ago was young and beautiful, and even you who have me would not have guessed that the night before at twelve thirty by my wristwatch she was demanding to know what Stonehenge had to do with “draft deserters” (from one sagging B & B single bed to another across a turquoise carpet on the second creaking floor of that B & B) and then demanded why I had not taken Jenny to Stonehenge. And I had to have something repeated by my boatyard partner, who then observed that I was distracted by the girls bathing, and when granddad the old wheelwright came up and remembered me I had to have something else repeated, being between in more ways than Reid’s with Jan and Jenny (to judge from that curious scene along the gallery street in Knightsbridge, the kisses, the bus stop, the Underground): Jan and Jenny might have in common that he was less or otherwise interested in them than they in him. I sat on the tub-edge and looked at the comb so out of character there dropped on the lino and saw in the still gloam from the kitchen down the hall the tuft sprouting in a tiny languorous arc, and wishing to reach for it I felt the slippery porcelain under my new jeans, and Dudley Allott and I, bare thighs on the tiles of Swiss Cottage pool, shared an illusion of April intimacy that I now see was also intimacy’s authentic shiver, at least for me who was between: for it was the closest he’d come since the night of his appendix forked saffron off a Jewish table into my jaws with (at differing gates and distances) Tessa, Lorna, and the pediatrician’s wife who had not then done her children’s book and who now (as I sat on Alba’s clean tub and listened to Dudley naked the last day of April) sat conversing with animation at a small party at Geoffrey Millan’s, and (as you who have me may know if you can now lay your hand on and insert a flash-forward printed-circuit cartridge heartfelt or cryptic) before the night was over I was to put in an appearance at Geoff’s party:

  Catherwood, said Dudley. How odd! I took up Catherwood to interest Tessa. Can you feature that?

  I’d known this as far back as New York in ’64—the first flush of Dudley’s interest. I told him so, and he looked at me. I looked down at his belly flapped over his bathing suit. He spoke at length, and I leave you who have me to imagine my occasional responses and the washing of pale green chlorine waves clearer in their refractions than hard crystal.

  Whatever was between us, said Dudley (meaning himself and Tessa), it came to take solid forms.

  Stones. Violence. Mexico.

  The Maya, their sacrifices, their underground rivers in Yucatan, the noses and the lips, the legends. I made her come with me to the British Museum to see what she’d seen on her own before—the wooden lintel from a temple in Guatemala with the halach uinic, the religious chief, seated holding the round shield and the manikin scepter, one of whose legs ends in a serpent’s head; and I’d read about Tikal, the ancient city the lintel came from, and I said someday let’s go see its pyramid temples which are the highest man-made things in Maya country ranging from 143 feet to 229 measuring from the ground to the roof comb, and in fact she’d seen a painting of Tikal, an enclave of powerful structures shadowed by time and perspective into a forbidding scene held off from the viewer who feels he might lose out if he tried to enter—at which point Tessa says Dudley, do me a favor and stop trying to be a poet; she cared about the method of sacrifice and I was unable from my rudimentary reading to say for sure if the heart-excising ritual was common to Tikal or not and she wandered away to look at Egyptian antiquities. I took her to Switzerland, I know you remember, when she had a bad chest but principally to surprise her with the Maya lintels at Basel which are the finest. You can guess how I made the same bloody mistake over and over. I took her to Holland to see the Leyden Plate which is just a hunk of jade 8½ inches by 3 from Guatemala in a shape like a little chisel implement they call a celt—the Leyden Plate was unearthed in 1864 and of the highest importance though not for the ferocious sleepy profiles of animals or gods—the enormous-nosed, dollop-lipped, retreating-chinned profiles Tessa loved—and the captive under the warrior’s sandal. I read Bishop Landa. I read Stephens’ Incidents of
Travel. I gave it to Tessa. I tried to intercept her—you know her—but then again I know her. And if it was ever physical it had little to do with whether I took regular exercise or studied breast-beating in the Kama Sutra. For a time I virtually gave up European history except to lecture on it. I took up Catherwood (said Dudley) because I wanted a German Jewish refugee who was obsessed with her mother’s disappearance in a death camp.

  Catherwood was between us, the friend of Keats and Shelley, Prescott and Wilkinson, and no one except possibly Wilkie Collins in The Woman in White described him, and there the character Hart-wright goes off to Central America and is a draftsman and the rest of it may not be Catherwood at all—the star-crossed lovers (for he was married)—but the honesty and legality in Hartwright does seem right for the man I find in Stephens’ Incidents and in the drawings; he was a great draftsman and the first to use daguerreotype to record Maya remains, but there is no picture but the self-portrait vaguely self-effacingly at the center of his picture of the Tulum ruins where he’s either paying out or pulling in surveyor’s tape, possibly the same reel they used for the ruins in Jerusalem.

  Tessa would of course interrupt me (said Dudley) in the presence of her father and others when I would speak of my Catherwood inquest. She would say Dudley is counting the fifteen-foot-long rungs of the famous eighty-foot ladder that runs down the well of Bolonchén but the real current is the underground river that feeds the well; Dudley is working out what Catherwood’s camera lucida was and just how he used it between his eye and the paper to bring Egyptian temples and obelisk carvings and Alexander’s grand cock jutting along from wall to wall at Karnak down to the right proportions and perspective—while my Catherwood is finding in a ruined city his friend paid fifty dollars for, a Maya idol he instinctively knows is a blood relative of Egypt.