Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  You know her. Why do I tell you all this? In ’64 Catherwood instead of being a means to a juncture became a subtle passion. To me. Tessa begged off the Brooklyn Museum and the Natural History Museum. She reminded me that because of her in the Natural History in London I’d said I’d never set foot there again with or without her. On a mad detour en route to Yucatan she could fly around southern California looking out her window for the 167-foot man, but she wouldn’t come uptown in Manhattan to see the vaults of the Museum of the American Indian, though on the other hand she always made me feel I’d done well when I took her to a restau rant as I did that night, there was a Mexican place in the Village, but you must recall it—and even as early as ’64 I knew it was hopeless and at this time Catherwood got larger in my thinking, a mystery man, exile engineer, impromptu physician to the Indians—how much of Collins’ Hartwright is Catherwood?

  And Catherwood stayed between Dudley and Tessa but for Dudley as a memory of his need for her and an mkling of discovery. And when a lawyer was interested in Cabot and the rotunda burning of Catherwood’s Maya drawings and the Jerusalem panorama, Dudley consulted him about a divorce.

  Her disparagements ceased to touch him, he said. The Leyden Plate tells us how early the Maya calendar systems and the associated hieroglyphics and astronomy were developing in Yucatan: but Tessa turns away to tell tales of dwarves looking out of windows, and widows underground selling river water in exchange for babies in order to feed pet snakes—did Dagger really go to Yucatan?—not to mention the feathered serpent god, the exile Kokulcan, who seemed to go away but who landed further down the coast—or she confuses Kokulcan Quetzlcoatl with the extended snake-head foot of the manikin scepter somewhat as she confuses fourth-century Maya calendrics with animal cycles in Tibet.

  I, Cartwright, sitting on an edge of the Swiss Cottage pool, had been following the stroke of a girl lap after lap. Dudley’s unprecedented talk moved steadily ahead through a hotel in Merida, North Yucatan: Tessa suddenly got nice when they talked of going southwest to find the hundred-foot-high terrace where two giant cottonwood trees originally from India spread their great roots thirty yards outward to bind down the ruined stone structures—and Dudley didn’t touch the water or the beans and still got cramps.

  The swimming girl passed close, twisting her head to breathe automatically as if in a sleep, and Dudley passed through a Welsh farmhouse with two long-haired cats that filled his allergic lungs and itching chest and a gentleman farmer friend of a Scottish friend of Tessa’s took her off on long walks and got drunk and amused Tessa with the jumbled tale of how Lord Cardigan of the Light Brigade had been responsible for the r-w defect politely imitated by his officers and bequeathed now to certain members of the upper middle class, and Dudley asked where in Wales Cardigan was and the gentleman farmer asked Dudley questions he’d asked a half hour before about what kind of sanitation they had in the stone castles along the Wye and the Usk and whether there were any castles in America, where the Allotts were about to return, and Tessa and their host were still up when Dudley was in bed asleep.

  But on the round edge of Alba’s bathtub I’d seen or heard through outward curves like someone else’s fingerprint of my life Dudley fibbing to Jane: This man Dudley in the probities of resolved habit would not go to that museum in London any more; I’d heard him say so. It hadn’t been the museum he wanted to stop at after they left the nearby air terminal. The museum was a pretext.

  Reid had been in the pedestrian tunnel then with Jenny, had been recognized by Jane, and had suddenly changed his mind.

  Jenny had wended her way home and typed two parts of my film diary, the Hawaiian Hippie and the Suitcase Slowly Packed.

  In the hall I lifted the carton Cosmo had left; it didn’t feel like wine, not heavy enough nor, in its lines of stability, vertical. Nor did it clink.

  Cars passed. I switched off the kitchen light. Pushed in the drawer I’d left out. Switched on the light to see if I’d left a knife out. Then switched off.

  The worldly goods of Alba and Dagger had conveyed themselves to me in my rounded fingertips and rising memory. Man and woman, let them together cleave. They might come back. The place had cloven itself first from garden to street:

  at thigh level: mica sheet to film table

  steel stove to fruit bowl

  at knee level: a letter blown onto a chair seat,

  a stereo turntable in a bookcase

  at toe level: unhoused tuner, fallen comb.

  But was the comb along that axis between garden and street? No. It was in the bathroom: and it turned me: or I was turned to it by the leveled contents of Alba’s closet which itself was off or barely on that axis that now rotated. Round and round I turned looking out to these dark things that were also all (especially in Dagger’s “exciting” absences) Alba’s. Well, Dagger had dropped into my house one day when I wasn’t there and taken some magazines—Lorna didn’t know which. At eye-level across from the forged Mercator, the fresh face of Bob Harte murdered in May 1940 (in part because he lent away the key to Trotsky’s gate) thickened to the lips of Mick Jagger peeling down off Jenny’s wall, blinding in turn into my own merchant mouth nosing Lorna’s calf toward twelve thirty to confuse anger if not only to please the object of my desire, but having lost that axis to a turn and having turned less clearly yet more smoothly borne past faces two, three, four, six times familiar, not just a father and a daughter approaching a daughter and an actor, but (cleaving watery distances) others, round through origin after origin, still the building site my people were wiring to blow up while I stood guard is alone with me, and the absence of them (for they have gone) and of the others whose approach I was to intercept but who now may not come softens the fore-and-aft axis where I stand between, to a conglomerate of foreign fields surrounding me on all sides belonging to other after other after other, hence seeming to decrease probabilities, hence seeming static, yes parts of a wheel I have not wholly made myself, in turn a conveyance I’ve also partly made, like the Nagra spools I’ve added to the weapons in my pockets, like ideas for a film whose idea was also Jan’s, like my dream on the Glasgow plane which a preclassic Maya shrink deglyphs as a rueful record of Tessa who acted out for me the old Maya price of cuckolding a noble—the belly opened, the intestine coaxed forth into the temperate air loop by loop, a trout’s dream of fish heaven, but here too the cuckold-executioner with his hand on the real inner thing which yet escapes him for under its belly-flesh it has so often turned over when stroked lightly by the adultress his wife. But what did Tessa ever say about Lorna? Nothing!

  Not, Why do you fuck your wife’s friend?

  Not, What would she feel if she knew? or feel if she did not know?

  Between rucksack and carton in Dagger’s hall I felt the slow thump of steps. Not many. As many as the steps behind me Wednesday in New York (though they were odd) and as I went to the living-room couch and curled up in a self-defense Napoleonic or godlike in the casual will to really sleep for plausibility’s sake, I was still deeper into the wheel which was a new, less violent between.

  So that I was an axled part not just of objects where I’d hoped to find the film, not just among objects which, in proper light, film they say can best reveal, nor of a wheel merely solid; for the things in this flat swelled my head like a lung or the ripples round a disturbance, out through what the objects meant in the DiGorros’ life, beyond to Catherwoods and Cartwrights that abandoned such darkly solid household effects as these to pass so far out in this cycle as to reach then an inner not an outer vacancy to be filled with words which (let me finish) may yet turn up bodily parts like the Maya limbs hired machetes unearthed while John Lloyd Stephens “leaned over [them] with breathless anxiety” not knowing what he’d got hold of—in fact a city he would presently buy for a record fifty dollars still not knowing what he had.

  Red Whitehead watched a fourth-quarter screen-pass unfold on his TV and reached blindly for the pack of filters on the table between a beer can and a
hand-painted plate of crumbs. I must abandon my subservience to minor moneys, and make my fortune in America. My mind was a live liquid. A Xerox lay under a wet stone at Callanish. OK, let it advertise the film. Phone the Indian-boned Calvinist widow and ask her to retrieve it. Let Jack and Aut, Reid and the boy named Sherman who had helped roof Reid’s dome in Ridge-field with Reid’s parents’ phonograph discs, let Incremona and Gene and others fear the film through the words of mine that lay between them and it.

  A piece of flesh in Lorna’s firm fingers.

  Pachisi, the backgammon Hindus play with cowry shells—which is like Mexican Patolli.

  From Prescelly, Pentelicon, Aswan, the Copan quarries, the great stones (how, one does not know) sometimes without the wheel, moved through the four ages of the world, Maya, Hindu, other.

  So that the world comes to be believed in, between us and the truth.

  An illusion the Hindus call Māyā.

  Felt even more in the partly separated blocks that never quite made it out of the mountain-top quarry and that Stephens and Catherwood scratched their names in.

  Catherwood with his hand moved column-idols thirteen feet high all over the world. Stephens arranged the digs, studied the finds. Catherwood went on sketching.

  Māyā is the world this side of the truth.

  Dudley did not make it up to the Museum of the American Indian that Monday to look at the Catherwood drawings in the vault. The place was closed. On that Monday, Catherwood grew between Dudley and Tessa. In the evening he took her to a Mexican restaurant and they ate baby cactus, and it is quite likely that Tessa did not think of what she had had that afternoon. Dudley knew.

  I am Catherwood.

  I am Māyā.

  Why not use the film to push the diary.

  As if still in Glasgow, but now with more weapons, I had nearly willed myself to sleep and knew the comb on the bathroom floor did not belong; for Alba was too careful.

  Hands pinioned in the new raincoat now packed in a suitcase checked at the West London Air Terminal, I heard through that static escalator field down which I had plunged, two men angrily arguing, their voices receding.

  Between this and what happened next, I knew myself to be adequate.

  16

  Dag, she called, and a light came on and she got no answer. I was half there.

  I contemplated my absence. Nothing happened.

  More light thinned my lids, and a rustling preceded a second silence unlike the first. Then above me very near, the baby moaned.

  You who have me may see on the far side of my shut, untrembling lids, the tight-bunned contour of Alba’s hair silvery in this light.

  She went away.

  The baby squawled.

  Would Alba change her in the bathroom?

  Alba, I called, as if I had just woken.

  Alba didn’t speak.

  After a while she was nearer.

  The baby at first crying as she was at last put down was not sung to but told some nonsense tale that she could not understand at two months but that in some sound of the words stilled the cycles of her energy.

  Alba was in the living room, the light behind her.

  I told you to take care of Dag, she said. And what have you done?

  A woman with a baby, a woman with a closet full of tools, a woman with a husband she had introduced me to ten minutes after she had met him herself and five after she’d met me, in November of ’63 in the hotel room of an American acting as adviser to engineers who were about to introduce a computer into the London traffic mess, and this American Lorenzo kept hugging Dagger and calling him an untrustworthy bastard and when Dagger invited among others me and my “wife” over on Saturday and I accepted, Lorna came up behind me, said we had tickets to Uncle Vanya Saturday, and introduced herself to Dagger and Dagger said her dark hair and blue eyes were sensational and demanded to know when our show let out Saturday. Six of us that Tuesday night (for Lorna had a sitter) went off to Alba’s for spaghetti, and it was clear that she and Dagger clicked. She kept her aphorisms demurely few but sharply apropos.

  Here cut in ten seconds of Dagger’s applause record, a particular favorite with Cosmo, who taped it for his own collection.

  Add: Dagair, Dagair, I will geeve you da Croix de Guerre, crooned by Alba’s Paris pal, the model, kissing him once on each lip.

  Or if maps came with sound, think of Bourguignon d’Anville the eighteenth-century cartographer clearing away the false lakes of Africa and shrinking the Antarctic continent he refused to believe covered half the southern hemisphere.

  If you have filmed Alba with sound, but failed to change the aperture when shifting up to slow motion, you who knew her and had seen her would have the efficient voice still more sequential. With it you could call up the turn of one shoulder toward you with the dip of the neck as she introduced between (a) your curious question (Did you recently refinish the table by the window?) and (b) a simple reply (which would have been No) the counter-query to you, Why did you have to keep a diary in the first place?

  Anyhow facing you she was so gently still that slow motion would have singled out only her lips: unlike the night Dag and I came back from the final shooting at the air base and I insisted on our filming with Alba’s 8 their flat and the three people we found there, and suddenly I knew how to do it—in slow motion with the sound later slowed also—a fitting end for our film and for me a private recollection of a dream I’d had a week after Lorna and I fought our one and only first and last physical fight, and after trying to dream my lookout dream I was stuck instead with our fisticuffs and wrestling falls and crabbed fingers slow motion as if we were running down, or approaching the state of stills or being analyzed in someone else’s purview plan we’d no say in, and the dream turned words and grunts into some unheard-of madness or underlying real structure that in my dream I was merely impatient with though I’d heard in these disintegrated sounds evidence that Lorna was Jewish—and Alba the night we came back from the base was so restless, up and down, smoking, cocking her wrist, jumping to change a record-band, that she would have constituted a struggling current in the ultimate footage: but Dagger yakking on about Cartwright’s unique plan for a moving terminal had not changed the aperture, and though he said he’d send the film in, there was no hope—as it turned out—at that speed apparently you need much more light. And since I was going away mad, Dag decided to be funny describing Phil Aut, a tense abstemious man, who had told Claire a rule of thumb for 16-millimeter production was a thousand dollars a minute, but the three fellows in Alba’s Swedish chairs either were tired or didn’t find our film venture droll, and neither did I till I was in the minicab Alba called for me and was away from her living room watching white-framed windows flicker down a quiet sturdy street and then saw we were wrong and told the driver to turn, and then was sorry, as if a univac’s fingerprint of micro-rectangles had switched us to a more logical route at the end of which was the chance I had always foreseen that the film would come to nothing, and a gate swung open upon the nuclear family if in fact you got past omens along the way and reached the gate and inside the gate slept wife and hilly seaside village a week hence—son and maybe daughter—who were not coming to the seaside village—and the memory of two helium balloons Dagger gave them the first Christmas we knew him, 1963.

  Tell me, Alba, why did we even go there? I asked her now in October in answer to her challenge that you who have me will recognize echoed her light parting plea to me in July to take care of Dag during the Corsican trip. But I added that I had not needed to go to Ajaccio to know that Mary-the-Scot’s brother had helped to influence Paul to disentangle himself.

  I got my feet onto the floor. Would the lady like me to go? I asked.

  What did it matter? she said.

  Very tired I was, I said.

  Had I been locked out then? she said. Surely Will was at home?

  Dagger’s plan to put the Softball Game between HH and SSP would bring into linkage or collision with the my
stery snapshot and the tunnel I’d more than once traversed with Jenny and Will as children, the top of Will’s head: for the camera as I’d thought (and Dagger confirmed) had scalped Will—for Dagger panning behind home stopped to get a long shot of Krish, Jan, and the other Indian sitting on the grass, and Will was under the Beaulieu’s path and we got his hair. But what could it matter, editing a film that was possibly as Claire had said nonexistent—said so bleakly I’d wondered that first noon in her flat if after all she did indeed care; no, it was Monty who cared, and in part because of his sister Jan whom I assumed Alba knew, though I asked not about her but (yawning) whether Monty had got back from Coventry, I’d meant to phone the number there, did Alba have it?—which drew from her then, You mean John? and I at once though casually said yes that bumptious florid chatterbox ego and she said well he was very intelligent and was always going off to America but she hardly knew him and had I involved Dag with him? he was in munitions. Monty, I said, was responsible for that, and if Dagger was going to have secrets from me with Claire I could not very well be held responsible for his involvements.

  I rose—still profound with my brief half-sleep—and followed Alba into the kitchen. My rucksack seemed even more in evidence as if Alba had lifted it and let it slump back lower against the wall.

  She filled a kettle and did not look at me. She said she should imagine Lorna was home by now if I wanted to phone.

  To ask, Is the film destroyed, and to hear, Dag told you so, why ask me?—was like going back to September yet like drifting into November—Guy Fawkes pennies dropping boom boom—Thanksgiving harvest—Christmas cassettes from the U.S. But Alba was less tired than she claimed, for when I said I’d never really had the film so I could not really discard or lose it, she cited the Sufi sage who retorted to a man lamenting his penniless state, My son, perhaps you paid but little for your poverty.