Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  And she was asleep but at once began to talk of visitors she had not asked in, she felt guilty now—the parents of a young American. God, she’d never known I was mixed up with deserters, the name is Nielsen, the boy is Jim Nielsen. The father seemed to apologize for his son’s staying in Sweden on some American farm not facing the music, and Lorna asked why Jim should face it, and then a strange and sad thing happened (and Lorna still seemed as if my phone call had plugged into her sleep, and I knew she’d been at Savvy Van Ghent’s and probably out late and Will gets his own breakfast and I wanted to crawl down through that line to her and so almost wasn’t paying attention when she told what the thing was) as she and Mr. Nielsen in his lightweight beige waterproof windbreaker stood at the top of the steps Saturday: a woman tall as he and thin and round-shouldered wearing the same new windbreaker came along up the street as if flat-hunting, and it was Mrs. Nielsen and she came along up the steps to stand beside Mr. as if through indigestion she’d fallen behind in the tour but had caught up and was going to get as much out of the guide lecture as she could; she looked down at each step as she came up and didn’t look at Lorna till she got to the top.

  But what was the sad thing?

  They had come for Jim. Lorna said God what if he doesn’t want to go, or isn’t here? The father said that was really why they’d come. In case he wasn’t here. That is, because he ought to be here. They knew that much. And Lorna said why did they think Jim might not be in London; she said she couldn’t stop smiling. At the end Lorna went back inside, having not asked the Nielsens in, and she could have cried on Will’s shoulder if he had been there, not for her rudeness that had been genuine enough, nor for their tour of inquiries perhaps subtly budgeted; but for their matching wind-breakers. My husband is not at home, Lorna had said—it was just an accident I was, she said to me. The Maya, I replied, say there are no accidents. Lorna laughed and said, You and Tessa.

  Mr. Nielsen looked toward the line of great trees shrouding the houses along what’s called The Grove, where Menuhin lives, and Nielsen had no camera nor the stomach to take a picture. He asked how high Highgate was, and Lorna said the highest spot in London.

  Maybe, said Lorna, the son didn’t believe in the war. Mrs. Nielsen put a patient hand on Lorna’s wrist: Jim used to believe in God and in his heart of hearts he still does. He was in our Youth Fellowship his junior year. The Army shouldn’t have had such a bad influence on him. He liked Germany. We told him he would.

  I asked Will’s whereabouts.

  Away for the weekend.

  I said I was sorry to ring so early. She said she was wide awake. How could she be so sentimental first thing in the morning, I said, and about windbreakers?

  She thought I had gone right back to America from Glasgow.

  Why the hell should she assume that? I said too fast.

  Geoff was slowly counting spoons of fresh-ground coffee.

  You going back?

  Why?

  Geoff dragged a black terry-cloth sleeve over some pale Danish butter to get to the small Aladdin’s Lamp dripping fresh-ground Milano that would be too harsh for me at this hour.

  Just so I can tell Jenny and Will.

  Will’s away, you said.

  At Stephen’s.

  And Jenny’s in New York. So enjoy yourself.

  I did not wish to discomfit Lorna.

  New York!

  That’s also why I have to be there. How did the Nielsens get my name?

  Someone named Bob said you might help.

  How?

  Find Jim.

  Why were you in, by the way.

  Waiting for a phone call.

  Jan after hearing this a day and a half later nonetheless said: Claire? Did you mean Claire?

  Claire Wheeler, I said. The astronomer-painter. Not the girl at Outer Film.

  Jan walked away, as the movie heroine does when in turmoil. She now recalled her Callanish alias. If, as she now said, there was something too much in my knowledge, she herself was adding to it. Well, she said, she was through protecting Paul; she would leave that to Elspeth and Mr. Andsworth; even that poor idiot Jim, who could not begin to know the size of Paul’s abdication, had gotten into the risky bit of protecting Paul and what with my own involvement with Jim perhaps I was in the business of protecting Paul too, but what could I know of Paul—mere information—business—and she would not hold that against Paul. He did what he could with his gifts…and yet he didn’t.

  I suggested Jan introduce Jerry to Paul, Jerry could use help.

  Which here Ned Noble, even on his death bed up to the very time he told me I was not getting either his crystal set or the plan for his time machine, would have called a pedestrian trick to learn more of Paul. Yet Jan coming back close to me turned now to the son and not the hero, maybe because it struck her she knew where Paul was and I did not.

  If only Jerry would come and live in London. I have so many good friends; an Indian—but you know I’m sure. Jerry is so gifted, so resentful. John has been good to him, Jerry has been good to John. Phil hates me probably. He did the film to lure Jerry, though Jerry says it was to get me. If Phil was corrupting John, as Jerry said, how could Jerry reconcile that with my film itself when John was more than glad to shoot some scenes? Jerry wouldn’t come over when John and June shot the air base. Not even and stay with me. He would do anything to help me. He hates his father owning my gallery. Phil imagines it will keep me in London, but it isn’t the gallery. And here I am: I’m not even in London. Phil doesn’t know I’m here unless you told him. But Jerry knows.

  My suitcase was at Monty’s, the case that in the minds of Mike and Jan might still be checked in Glasgow, and of whoever had spread word that in Jan’s Mexican jaguar was hidden after all not Mary Napier’s Montrose heart (conveyed to me, it was said, Stonehenge night by the Alabama archaeologist) but a bomb no less. Which, when I learned this shortly after leaving Jan, might have explained why, when I put my hand in my raincoat pocket, I said in answer to her question (What is left if all copies of your diary are gone?), Rub a whiff of nitroglycerine on a table-top, drop a book there and Bang.

  Highgate, I might have told Mr. Nielsen, is at its highest 423 feet above sea level. Decomposition sets in more slowly than at peat level.

  Jan would like to go shopping with Jerry, she said. Silly of her. She was too bohemian to miss that side of marriage, wasn’t she?

  Bohemian? I said.

  Get him new boots, or get the ones he was wearing resoled. You never knew what he’d show up in. He had beautiful hair. Why wasn’t it red? His was fine, hers tough.

  Where had she gone when she left Alba’s? I asked. I got up; but I couldn’t go, as if she were painting me into her picture.

  Jerry wants to do things for himself. He installed two new locks in his loft. He started resoling one boot but that was as far as it went. You’re not as bad as Jack. I didn’t mean to imply that. Just that without you the film could have come off. Paul said there should be some right-wing revolutionaries in the film too. We do not know enough; from that to a series of quiet interviews, and some close-face, calm exposures of some people telling what they want and why; it might have spread a spirit of relenting. But everyone not knowing enough wasn’t the only point; another was just not tricking up some neat script-story but taking power in process, other people’s ongoing energies and tying into them, that’s the way I express it but I got the idea from someone else and that’s appropriate too. I think Jerry understood. But for him as you know Phil is an exploiter.

  Jan and I getting together to talk about our kids. Her son the locksmith. My daughter the photographer. Jerry and Jenny. Each child defending its parent. Oh the joy of Jenny discovering American comics. Not in America but in the funnies my mother wrapped the children’s presents in. The inner wrapping waits while Jenny who used to be too polite about presents stops to read the outer.

  I’ve really talked to you, I said: and Jan nodded vigorously and showed a small but pleasant
gap between her broad front teeth; and so saying, I understood: not what Mike said I was wrongly igniting or what Jan said I had stopped: but through telling Jan what Lorna had told me of the Nielsens, its meaning: Mike had said Bob was not with them any more and did I know where he could be found, and Jan had said the Unplaced Room increased the chance of violence through Jim’s being squelched on the topic of Paul: now Bob referring the Nielsens to us and then like ancient history Elizabeth at Stonehenge running up to report the boy with the blond beard missing: well, the meaning was this: that Jim, having taken steps to end his war and having (from place to place, mainland to island to studio to Stonehenge) thought his war was over, had now had it ended for him: Jim had been removed, and probably by Nash.

  That was my reading.

  But if Jim had been killed, was it for protecting Paul or advertising him?

  Tessa had said she had walked over some bodies.

  Jan had never had much interest in comics. Slick drawing. Cheap color. The English have a wonderful sense of humor. Sly. Droll.

  I said they felt it was a national asset.

  Jan had narrowed her nostrils. She is about the age of Gilda the florist, and of Renée whose hot copper hair had come all the way from the kiss-proof rouge of a Brooklyn Heights tease through the romance of the Golden Gate.

  I am out of my chair. I had forgotten the chorale downstairs which now ends.

  If, now that my diary is thought defunct, I myself am the hit, will they bother to find out what is in my head—whether, say, I’m trying to stop something or pull it off? Jan is telling me how I have too much power; her vagueness is convincing because she is trying not to weep, and I point out that I am under surveillance—witness Wheeler, who might have stabbed me instead.

  But he knew you—that’s why he was hired.

  I tell her to tell me where Paul is, but I am deeply and privately wondering whoever said Wheeler knew me, for Wheeler never knew me except as someone in a poli-sci class or playing tennis two courts down.

  Tell me where Reid is, she says.

  Reid for Paul, I thought.

  A god has no morale, needs none. What if they got hold of me and hooked an amplifying system to my heartbeat? What might come out? How could I be a god? An emptiness or semi-conductor at the heart of their system.

  Reid is with Paul, I said. Jan cocked her head. Not with Sherman? she said.

  If I am a god, it is precisely because I am not independent.

  There came steps on the stairs below the chorale, but their seeming familiarity may have been the music they rose to. Jan urged me to the loft’s far end.

  There were quantities of time as the steps came on. I was behind the curtain where John’s slit-scan track ended, and Jan may have told me more now when she touched the empty pocket of my new raincoat touching at last upon the most intimate and least rational connection between us: “He” would not forgive what had been done to her picture—stay out of sight.

  But wait: did Jan think Kate had been in the main room when the blank hair had been colored? Did anyone imagine Kate knew what hung in Aut’s gallery well enough to walk out into the main room and see at once the white space absent in the flat orange freshly laid on? Oh no indeed. And indeed even if I paid the bills, I could not be held responsible for my daughter’s magic marker.

  A look from Jan’s dark eyes brightened her heart-shaped face and she said in a whisper, Jenny then!—the Suitcase snapshot!—and receded swiftly toward the center of the room rented for John by the growing boy who I heard now bash open the door and exclaim, I knew you’d be here! Guess where we’re going?

  Tell me on the way, said Jan his mother, and at once took him off downstairs.

  I wanted to take home a tale to my family they could understand. But it might be too late. They were dispersed.

  Who had recruited Wheeler, a mere acquaintance at college years ago?

  I wanted time to myself.

  I wanted to know for sure the film was destroyed.

  Cooking came up to my mind from the direction of the Bach chorale—oil, tomato, even cheese, even the pale slick filling steam of pasta, a bland blend doughy and delicate: I could see a pan of lasagna being layered. And I tried to recall which of Paul’s two brothers back in that northern hut had said Sherman was the only one of the lot that Incremona trusted.

  CARTRIDGE

  Cut to an idea: initial system highly improbable moves toward increasingly probable states: the bog will seep into Krish and thus equalize pressures either side of his thin skin: with Krish gone, the next Nash nosebleed will have fewer probable causes: Phil Aut (legal spouse of Jan, the film’s apparent source) and John (whose loft is rented for him by their son Jerry) will prove to be still closer: pairs of namesakes crop up: two Jims—the newly bearded lately departed deserter, and the lunchtime stabber of the man in the target T-shirt; beautiful Mary who told her tale of a dismembered heart to my secret cassette, and pretty Marie, who crossed our Corsican field first at the fort and then at the Son des Guitares café; John, the Coventry munitions expert, transatlantic technologue, bumptious debunker of our film, and owner of a house near Portland, Maine, and the other John whose glasses I’d knocked off, whose friend June had helped me, and whose loft conveyed an authenticity beyond the sum of its video-synthesizer, slit-scan gear, and formulaic poster with the computer code-word NAND in a lower part: further probabilities are that Len Incremona, who disliked the English John enough to blow a bullet through a dartboard, will if given cause to think John a private opportunist act upon it, though Len would not fly to New York just for that: and probabilities are that the package of pages typed by Jenny Cartwright and left by her under an ancient megalith in Callanish where the great stones are like petrified tree-shards is less and less likely to stay a secret, for the dilettante geologist now possibly joined there by Jack may spot it while seeking Krish, or I could phone the crofter widow to retrieve it (which forty years ago you could film with that trick of the diagonal wipe bundling two distant talkers into one magic frame), or I get Dagger to drop everything and go collect the package—or Jenny is made to talk, in which case anyone (if anyone truly operative is left on that side of the watery world) could zip up to Glasgow, Stornoway, and Callanish and grab what may now be the single copy of a diary whose interest seems increasingly to be in what it yields about its manufacturer and his life and less and less in what it hints of certain schemes.

  Does Jenny grow more like Claire or less? Claire lacks that fine detour like a wave or illusion in the bridge of the nose where Jenny’s new camera came up to hit her after Will backpedaled into her, teasing a friendly neighbor’s hound that had in turn been excited by a turtle, and she fell, both hands clutching the camera. Jenny and Claire will approach each other, probably.

  Yet on the other hand how improbable the procession now to come.

  But this idea is cut from me, or I from it: not to a timeless scheme of parted window shade, doors ajar on two floors, dark stairs tapped into cadence; nor to a course laid out as on a map projection where curves and zig-zag turn into one bearing, straight from the slit-scan track to a blue air letter typed in red on the workbench beside the video-synthesizer thence to a dark corner three flights down where I Frederick Dudley Jack Paul Monty Mercator held my breath till two unlikely fellows and one voice tiptoed past on the way up: instead cut from that glimpse of conversely increasing improbability to what I merely did.

  In the loft I opened the shade to the city and outcroppings of sky. Mother and son came into Mercer Street below. The fine billowing brown hair and the shorter, coarse red lost some of their color in the aisle of shade northward. The air letter was from Dagger DiGorro postmarked London, and it was addressed to me in New York but not at John’s loft. There was grit on the stairs. On the floor below, the spitüng of oil in a pan covered my steps. The letter in my pocket was another weapon, this time mine though already used by others though not therefore useless to me.

  At the last instant before I would
have emerged into the street and been seen, the ground-floor door opening made me find, in the luck of its deepening shadow, a corner to stand in, but just in time to find only a mass of trouble which seemed to have no bearing on American society or international commitment, on the poster in Dag’s living room of Trotsky and his American aide Bob Harte in Mexico or in the Sorbonne courtyard in May ’68: TAKE YOUR DESIRES FOR REALITIES. But the mass of trouble bore not merely on the cross-hatched plots and the faces heart- or cartridge-shaped and sounds (dry wet soft hard) excised from tracks, and parallel beards and that strong swimmer Mary’s two missing finger joints, my wife’s underwear, my son’s Chartres, the characters of Dudley and his daughter Jane, and endlessly inescapable informations beneath if not a god maybe a man, such as Jenny saying she and Reid had been in the pedestrian passage leading under the museum to South Ken tube station, which moved me to urge that site on Dagger who it turned out was planning to find the Hawaiian boy and Hempstead girl precisely there that morning, which is where they had been the day Jenny passed through with Reid. No, the mass and waves of trouble I found in this dark dusky ground-floor corner of a New York Manhattan loft building bore not just on all this but (I swore) toward a formula for how such power could be ascribed to me at the very moment my own field seemed less definite than ever.

  The one voice spoke: Believe me, somehow that bastard knows we’re coming, he’s got Chad’s gun, remember.

  And when I saw the speaker’s long concave profile and short coiled body of prowling legs and shoulders and arms and on his hand, for it was Nash, those three colors that in the glance of late light from the street flashed like sound being heard somewhere else, I found not the formula but the red that Jan said I’d made a certain someone see. I felt it in Sub’s address red-inked under my name on the typewriter of the much-connected man my friend, collaborator, and protective deceiver Dag in whose Hampstead flat I’d met the other of these two the evening of the day we filmed the air base.