Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

Jenny picked up our purchases. I couldn’t answer. My mouth was nowhere. I just nodded.

  We gave Tessa and Dudley our tickets to Uncle Vanya.

  Saturday we went to Dagger DiGorro’s for the first time.

  A very bright and sexy Pole taunted Alba. He said Ho Chi Minh’s father, a mandarin scholar whose knowledge of Chinese was said to be at least as good as that of anyone else in Vietnam, had lost his job because he refused to corrupt his language by learning French.

  That’s something he and I have in common, said Dagger appearing magically and sweeping Alba against him so that I wondered what had happened since the computer man’s Tuesday night hotel room and Alba’s spaghetti.

  Alba could only beam at Dagger and say—in answer to some unasked but implicit question—Yes.

  That weekend receded. Alba emerged from the baby’s room. She had told me not to think Jan was helping Paul escape from his two brothers but she had said Paul was dropping everyone now and she had almost echoed me in her reference to this cut-throat thing of the two films, and she had brought Nash and Chad and a deserter together, and I believed my daydream on the plane was largely true and this was why Kate or someone she had spoken to had got on the blower to Savvy Van Ghent’s party (which in turn reminded me that Lorna might now be at Geoff’s).

  The bell rang. The downstairs bell. The minicab. Alba opened the door for me. I had my pack in one hand.

  She said, You weren’t really asleep. The lights went out just as my cab rolled up.

  Tell me who Bobby is.

  The one who talked to the deserter in your film.

  Alba wanted to close the door.

  I was half in, half out. Tell me, I said, why the hair in the comb on your bathroom floor is red.

  Alba tried to close the door on me.

  Failing, she spoke: Dagger was afraid Phil Aut would find out about the portrait of his son. It shows up in your scene of the Unplaced Room.

  I remembered the palette-knife-thickened face with the lustrous hair, to my right against the wall. And on my left Dagger turning the Beaulieu briefly on me, panning downward as if to show the equipment or study my feet.

  I said: You would never leave a comb lying on the floor. It’s Jan’s hair in the comb. She was here this evening.

  My words weakened me, like the stomach-turning sight of all that equipment in the camera shop in New York just after the stabbing accident.

  Do you blame her for fearing you? said Alba; Dagger has feared you since the day you proposed filming in that Underground tunnel. And this time Alba did shut the door.

  But as I passed out of the house and into the very same cab with the stripe down the bonnet that had let me off here at 10:20, Alba’s words made me powerful again.

  A power of destruction?

  Her words seemed to say Dagger had seen a print of the Unplaced Room.

  17

  Once upon a time I dismissed our film, but told no one, for I am a secret noncollaborator.

  I could not see what Phil Aut would want with it. But I went ahead and it began to make sense.

  My life reflecting a larger life. Not your usual formula documentary.

  Dagger talked of editing it this way and that way, but it was still only an exposed emulsion. He talked about control over the final product.

  Why did I begin a diary? Did I foresee the film’s ruin?

  I learned to look more closely in order to see what Dagger was seeing through the viewfinder. But later to recall what ought to go into the diary. But perhaps always to take for myself a depth that was in our film if not on it.

  For instance, a leader and reputed beautiful person preceded out of his grove into the light of our camera by a sacred beast.

  Or a thick apricot bob above a green blouse, in turn above my son’s just visible chestnut hair—the whole preceded by a forty-eight-state flag-tattoo blown up in my chosen words.

  Or, say, a Church of England vicar among his rainy roses and photos of Marilyn.

  The depth I refer to was also harsh Corsican hills praised by Boswell, touched with scrub pine whose contours might have looked at dusk like children’s mountains or the evergreen armies in my grandfather’s New England but in fact were sparse and crabbed and were seen hazy from a warm sea where I lay buoyed by the nearby wave-rocked words of Mike to Mary: Your brother is a bad influence on Paul.

  The film, or some pause it gave my life, made me sit at Sub’s window in New York and contemplate a high window-washer for his own sake.

  Only hear Sub mention the Bronx or Staten Island and you still sense that in Manhattan you don’t think of yourself living in the whole city. (Not even in the now capsuled forties when the Heights was barely within Ned Noble’s Brooklyn and for Sub and me the Broadway theater district under the river and twenty minutes away from Brooklyn by Interboro Rapid Transit was in the true New York which we could contemplate like its harbor from our residential stoops like early Dutchmen.) But in London even with its villages you do live in the whole city. Never mind Geoff Millan’s velvet-legged friend Jasper languidly claiming not to know what lay “south of the river,” or, in that evening circle at Geoff’s (which you who have me must recall cartridged in relation to our present position not so far back or forward that you’d have to stretch to put your finger on it like the other icepick point of a draftsman’s compass) the bearded intellect with puffy eyes who said that he ventured south of the river once a year.

  My cab with the stripe down the hood rolled toward a fictitious address. But when we paused at a Belisha Beacon for a car to cross I realized we were going the wrong way. I leaned forward and in the amber which outside was the foggy glow softening the dark terraced houses to an aura of privacy but inside the cab gave things a lurid point, I knew my driver’s profile. I said to him that we were going the wrong way. I got no response. And if you who have me are way ahead here and know already that my driver was Mike, the quarterback of my imagination who at a table under the stars of Corsica and under a string of festal lights in Place Foch had asked me if I could kill, you will be glad I now move under my true colors, and shoot and twist among layers of distance as if they were mere liquid films or gelatin, and not forth and back but out and in at all angles sanctioned by my sphere. But as soon as I’ve said that, and see the sphere opened flat on a bed bounded by east and west like cliffs at each edge of the world—and recall the stopped escalator, and recall my legs and feet that would survive apart from me if need be and hence slowed their motion to fit my plunge—I find my position resists the formula I’ve sought; for my position belongs also to that shove in the back whose force dies near the foot of the escalator yet turns then into my own heart rebounding up those grooved stairs after the shover who recedes into an elastic field not mine yet not wholly his since he was moved to push me by a great love including him in its reach like a larger plan. And if John’s white-nosed automatic did not let me very far into Mike’s life as I now lifted it from my parka pocket, changed hands, and laid it along the leather of the driver’s seat near Mike’s head with the magazine-grip away from me and asked Mike if he recalled his question to me in the restaurant in Place Foch—and another car came up behind us and beeped as Mike looked along his shoulder at the white barrel and asked if I was really a lefty—there was no gloved window between me and him.

  The cab advanced but Mike and I hesitated.

  I said, Ask away. He said, What? (as if surprised that he was to do the asking when I was the one with the gun). Why wasn’t I looking out for my daughter, he said, she was looking out for me.

  Was she looking out for me by letting my diary go? I said.

  Listen, said Mike, we know what Jack told you. But suppose he burned one copy for Gene to see but kept the other?

  Mike had turned back toward the fictitious address which if we ever got there was a ten-minute walk from Geoff’s.

  They were all acknowledging my power. Could I solicit information they thought I already had? And did Mike know what the Highgate burgla
r had taken?

  Furthermore, Jan in New York two days later told me Paul’s story not only as if her openness might deter me from further aggression, but as if its meaning was beyond secrecy. On the other hand, Dagger’s new sense about me the morning we filmed the Hawaiian Hippie had made him not more frank but more secret.

  But now—in the cab with Mike, or forty hours later in New York alone in John’s loft with Jan—I had to question what the full tale could be worth if it came to me as easily as the bedtime freedoms I once took with “Puss in Boots” or “Beauty and the Beast” when Jenny and Will were small. For Mike (who voluntarily identified the pistol at his neck as Chad’s) assumed I knew that Jack felt the vagrant astronomer who’d come out of the island murk into Paul’s hut was an equal. And Jan forty hours later seemed to assume I knew that Jack the eldest of the three Flint brothers was cobacker with her husband of her film plan. And both Mike and Jan—as if joined in some mind of mine that had never left the Glasgow hotel room—asked humbly, yes humbly, if there was another Xerox of my film diary in the case I’d checked when I left Glasgow for Stornoway.

  Mike asked why I’d wanted to get Incremona all stirred up with hints of a link between Phil Aut and John, for after all John only knew Phil through Gene: why had I had to go and do that? first thing we knew the whole thing would blow up—didn’t I know?—I must know—how crazy Len was? ate deep-fried shark for breakfast stuffed with Roman sausage—I must have known his temper, otherwise I wouldn’t have been so careful not to flush him out of Jan’s studio when I was talking to Kate tonight, which must mean I knew John was giving two lectures in the New York area—

  To all of which there was no need to reply that the John I’d meant was the other John in New York (who I now saw must have acquired this pistol from Chad some time before my last visit to John’s or Jerry’s Mercer Street loft). I merely said that Incremona was so stirred up that my contribution hardly mattered. And Mike, as we neared my fictitious terminus, asked in vain if Gene had known that John was involved with Phil Aut, and I could not ask the key question: what thing would “blow up”?

  I could have asked Mike and Jan who they thought I was.

  She said she had known I would come. I did not tell her (what she might well know) that there was a chance I’d been set up. I had phoned June from Monty’s house saying I was at Sub’s and she’d said that’s where she’d thought I was, and when I asked at once if she knew Jan, she told me Jan would be at John’s loft in the afternoon. The shades were drawn as before. I wondered if she would mention the space of hair colored in—an open message like a signed blank check.

  A heart-shaped face, thick pale eyebrows, eyes dark, red hair not long but in denseness of growth and hue not to be equaled even by Jenny’s magic marker.

  This was the first time I’d seen her in a skirt—it was white and hung barely above her sturdy knees. A well-made not tall figure of a woman perhaps just out of her thirties who stood composed upon her feet, the workbench behind her, as I pushed the door further ajar and entering and seeing her green blouse felt the jaguar’s red weight in the pocket of the parka I had left at Monty’s.

  I let her talk. I did not break in to say (what would have been a lie) that I knew all this. I sat in John’s straight chair and stroked my beard and hoped to seem patient hearing what she would think I largely knew.

  So (she said) I wanted to stop whatever was happening, right?—but in the process I had stopped her plan too and whatever had been good about it. Hear her out, please, even if this was old stuff. Oh we do not know enough!—That was what a friend had said months ago and it had crystallized her idea and then her husband Phil my associate (she said) had strangely not turned it down. His interest was a pretext financial or other, but the end sustained itself and could even transform her husband’s motive.

  What was the end?

  I did not ask.

  I had left the door open a crack to listen for steps on the stairs. John and others might wish to stop me.

  But from doing what?

  Mike seemed to fear not my stopping something but starting it. (Over again?)

  Jan said her idea for the film was no secret but I mustn’t assume I understood Paul who to her was even more a hero now he’d opted out of the plans she knew I’d set out to stop. Paul was someone she would like her own son to emulate.

  It seemed to me best she think me thoroughly acquainted with her film idea.

  She even seemed to try to shock me with her knowledge of what she assumed I largely knew. Paul had opted out, she said, but not because of the big projects discussed—a symbolic war on children waged against school buses; or slowly, through many collaborators, assembling the parts of two bazookas in a Washington rooming house with a roof and shelling the President during a scheduled lawn function; or simply bombing the White House in order to precipitate martial law and with it consequences leading to change. No, on the contrary, Paul had made a mystic parallel between public political action and the family firm now so complex in its indirect holdings that possibly not even Jack had it all in his head. And since effective political action no longer seemed feasible, Paul had conceived a small community in New England which would be neither as remote as he had felt himself to be in that Hebridean hut nor as socially involved as he had really been both through his power in a movement and through his location so useful to certain American exiles.

  Mike in the cab two nights before is likewise concerned with Paul. Not Paul some magical youngest brother in a tale of fortunes bequeathed and abandoned—but a man dangerous in his purity, and in danger like a Weatherman who doesn’t know enough but sets out to make an impact-bomb by turning TNT back into nitroglycerine. If you go a degree too hot, forget it.

  Why did you take the red jaguar tonight? said Mike.

  It made me think of Nash’s nosebleeds.

  Did you expect to find Paul at the painter-woman’s?

  These minicab drivers don’t know London half so well as regular cabbies, I said.

  But Mike was getting close to the fictitious address I’d given him.

  Could he think I was reviving the film?

  Jan forty hours later said that on hearing I was interested in filming Stonehenge she’d thought that after all maybe she and I were not so far apart.

  But why had she ever thought we were far apart? I said; was it some suspicion roused after Dagger and I accidentally found the Hawaiian hippie and his girl from Hempstead in that Underground tunnel?

  The only accident, said Jan, was Dagger assuming his businessman friend Cartwright was just along for the ride. Well, I might see Paul from more clever angles than anyone else, she said, yet miss his core of personal vision, deeper than an island, than color on canvas, than violence, deeper than dynamite—(deeper than her words or mine?)—deeper than restructuring custom by blowing up cops.

  Downstairs in the Mercer Street loft building a Bach chorale opened fire in mid-cry and at once stopped.

  I said there were businesses and businesses, and before dismissing me, even if I lacked a core of personal vision, she should learn about liquid crystals which are organic chemicals having the uniform molecular patterns of crystal systems, yet in the way they flow to conform to their containers they seem not solids but liquids. Now when an electric field is played across an area of liquid crystal the molecules are upset and light is scattered which in technological application can be controlled so as, for instance, to create displays of numbers or letters.

  Jan thought her husband and Jack Flint were producing a science film for children. Science was impersonal. There were no right angles in nature.

  You see, I said, they bond together two glass plates but keep between the two a space one-third as thick as a human hair and fill it with liquid crystal.

  She wasn’t interested in micro-spaces and mere completions. She had passed on lots of ideas. Many from Dagger, who tossed out too many ideas, some jokey. No, what was needed was life, growth. Afeni Shakur who was said to have plan
ned to blow up the New York Botanical Gardens desired life and growth. Ahmed Evans whom Jan had met found energy in systems of the occult. She would like to meet Erika Huggins, and ask her one question.

  The Bach blew on, was turned lower, but still would cover any but the nearest and heaviest of steps.

  In earlier scenes Jan Graf Aut had receded over and over again vivid and possible. The friend of Krish and Dagger; sister of Monty, wife of Phil; mother doubtless of Jerry; intimate of Reid, rival of Jenny; intimate of Paul. Now she leaned back against the workbench as if against the one source of light in the dusky studio; for her head came between me and the green-glass pool-table shade hanging in front of the poster displaying formulaic sequences.

  Gene the middle brother had been swayed (she said) by Paul to have nothing to do with the family business; then of course Gene had married money so he was free though Nell was giving him trouble; she had been to Wellesley and believed power most corruptible when it lay unused.

  Gene, however, had grown. Phil had approached him no doubt at the urging of Jack, but Gene had turned down the substantial offer to come in with Phil and consented only to cooperate on a scene or two for Jan’s pan-human film. Gene disliked business because of the people, and film because it tended fatally toward entertainment (as Paul had often said) and so could not be used to convey a rigorous theme like Jan’s, i.e., in one ninety-minute peace-montage to bring together clashes of practice, doctrine, color, and geography among (and here, as I knew, for she assumed I knew, was the point) certain revolutionary groups: interviews, glimpses, faces sometimes only half-seen which Jan believed would say implicitly not just that their human aspirations were more kin than foe to each other, but more (and this to the ordinary audiences who would see the film if only on their television sets) that such groups were full of passionate love which might lean toward violence but only in answer to what there was no point in her spelling out. It was to be the deed of her life, plain black and white, Aristotle had said Man was a political being and a being endowed with speech—so a film of silent faces would not do—she left the execution to Phil and John and (though she had not pressured him herself) her son. A greater deed than a painting, or being a parent, or abandoning your family. It was this deed that I had stalled, from motives she said that even with her limited information she could guess had something to do with large amounts of cash rumor said Jack was handling lately—I had contaminated her vision and in spite of what I might think of the scene filmed in her studio, I had actually increased the chance of violence knowing full well that on camera Jim would speak of Paul and be hushed up and thus pushed even further by Bob, and she would like to have only pity for me but confessed to fear as well.