I know, says John. You know too.
But inside a headache that seemed like an old vacant idea, I knew too!
For they were talking about my product.
For these were liquid crystals, and to get motion what you do is lay on your conductive coatings in a collective mosaic like colors in successive silk screenings to produce one multicolor print and as you go along you electrically charge the tin coating and so the liquid crystal molecules are disrupted in just the patterns out of hundreds of thousands of picture elements that you want, and your preset mosaic is affected precisely as you want with your scanning signal.
Crazy turn-on, the other has said, but John says, Well, no.
The other: A visual, right?
It’s past words, says John.
It’s something else! says the other (and I could hardly hear).
No, says John. I don’t think that’s it. The liquid crystal—it’s going to be…
Exponential, the other says quietly.
Let’s not talk about it.
Like a new circuit? But not real-time projection, John—don’t give me that.
Steps, receding steps, supplant the voices.
My hand tries the knob, a button snaps into my palm. The lock works from inside too.
I see the room clearly. It’s dark. There’s a red light on a console. There’s a light somewhere else. I close my closet behind me.
My headache is the price of my power.
The footsteps slide along the light that widens as I reach another corner and two doors. I open one, I draw it closed behind me, I’ve picked wrong, I’m in another closet, and it has things in it, I fall back but sit down on metal that rises to my upper thigh.
A chance I’m still dreaming.
Because I recall no dream.
Just young John’s voice calling John-of-Coventry to the phone offstage long ago.
A new voice, an older voice, says something was terrible and someone won’t die of old age and this someone wouldn’t talk but is crazy and can be traced everywhere, England, here, France, the Flints, that crazy diary; but Jack is pinning it on someone else if that someone else stays lost.
You’d need a dozen x-ray helicopters to trace Incremona, says John. What about Mercer Street? What’s the matter with you?
It was terrible. He had trouble with her. She looked all chewed up. I don’t know what I saw, John. She looked wall-eyed. Think of it. When he got through with her.
Was she before?
And her hands were crossed on her chest and one knee was still raised. The house was OK but a windbreaker was on the floor in the basement. There’s a bedroom there. Right after she called out, the door banged and someone in the next house heard steps on the stoop, so Incremona must have gone through the house first. It was terrible.
Can I still use Mercer Street?
They thought it was an aerial. Then they found a stiletto. It springs out of a lighter. Oh God her neck, John, her front. She had the beginning of a black eye. Her hair was pulled out, John.
Who did she call for?
She just called. They said it wasn’t a scream. The steps on the stoop couldn’t have been more than one person.
I never met her.
That hair. Not exactly blond, John. They thought rape but it wasn’t after all. I never had a daughter. It was the color of wheat.
You never saw a wheat field in your life.
We’d be better off with rape. No motive problem. Why did he go after her? They didn’t close her eyes, John. Brown eyes with that light hair. They didn’t close them.
Just like a movie.
I never saw a dead girl, John. I felt responsible just looking at her. You know you can get a black eye after an extraction. You know she closed her mouth tight, can you imagine that? You know you always think of them with their mouth open.
I don’t.
Just a kid.
This spring-loaded lighter…
Can’t be traced to Incremona.
Will anyone come here?
And that picture on the wall. My God! This mess makes me see her in a whole new way.
A cartridge flies like a wingless bus into the future. I must get away from these words. Three overhead rotor blades sweep their segments of air, they do the work; but perpendicular to their plane there is at the tail like a light wheel feathering its own gleam a smaller vertical prop that checks the main rotor’s tendency to rotate the fuselage.
Static gravels the voice on the police frequency. We slide left like a diagonal vector-product. Under the two sets of blades perpendicular to each other, what am I, as I look below me, looking for? Under that grid lie bones and for that matter flesh of New Nether-land, sixty guilders or twenty-four dollars worth of 1626 goods.
We are rising, but (down by the Battery where the grid turns into a fingerprint if you could just see the streets) I can’t find the tavern founded by the black man whose daughter Phoebe saved Washington from a bodyguard’s poison. The story was told to us at a lunch there by our retiring American history teacher Mr. Johnson, John Paul Johnson, who having told us that we will presently go up to the third floor to the museum now stands above our empty ice cream dishes as if we were Rotarians or utilities analysts; and Mr. Johnson as he does when he’s caught up in what he’s saying brings his hands together under his pink, dimpled chin and round, rimless glasses as if he’s praying or giving a Zen goodbye—he’s saying farewell like Washington in this very tavern to his troops who when he suddenly says, How many Presidents came from Virginia? answer (as one) Eight! and who laugh when Ned Noble who’s been here before with his father drawls irreverently from a far corner of our oblong circle, George left his hat here.
Not up to Ned’s usual standard—for he’d told me during the main course. Also I’d seen it coming in the doodle on the tablecloth.
And Lafayette his pistols, Noble, which I’m sure you also know, said old John Paul, who completed his remarks and was applauded and made his way round to Ned just in time to offer him (improbable as it seemed) a light—because Ned had produced from under the sleeveless sweater he wore under his camel’s hair jacket a pack of Raleighs with a book of matches inside the outer cellophane and had tapped out a cigarette and put it between his teeth, the only time I saw him smoke.
As we climb higher, Ned Noble is not at the controls.
Nor am I.
New York approaches the condition of a map. Nothing comes through.
The pilot in a turtle-neck looks over his shoulder and shrugs.
I’m responsible for our being here.
Want to keep your friend out of trouble, meet me: Nash deftly delivered this on June 27 not knowing Tessa was in Scotland. Dudley was not expected to see the note.
Dudley felt responsible. He knew that passage under the museum. The Maya hated empty space.
Problems may have solutions.
The pilot slides off toward the 40 Wall Street tower—pauses. Our swash-plate leans and straightens.
The things way high in Chartres Cathedral meant only for God may perhaps be reached by diagrams. I didn’t tell Dag I meant to pay a visit to Chartres. When I said on the way up from Marseilles and the carferry that he could drop me in Paris, he merely named a hotel I should stay at, he didn’t register surprise. In Paris he offered to wait until my affairs were completed, but I reminded him of Alba’s false labor. He left me at a small hotel near the Odéon Métro. He went on to Dieppe. French roads in that area are to Paris what a system’s electrical power is to a main “bus” or distribution terminal. I took an early train.
Dagger would be waking up in London.
I walked from the station.
I stood under a windowbox in my sturdy, shoe-backed English sandals and looked up at the western front.
Knowing the heights of the two so different spires, I reckoned as something under thirty meters the average distance between the taller sixteenth-century north (fine, decorated, obvious) and the twelfth-century south (a steeple strangely ste
ep, a wizard’s hat, also isosceles), though as I went closer and away from two women with knapsacks chattering about Americans who say châtre (castrate)—this great flat-sided tower became octagonal.
Entering, I can’t see for a moment. I peer to the left where they’re selling pictures, and my eyes adjust.
Where are the things up high meant only for God toward which Will would hoist himself by means of his mother’s behind bent at the open fridge? I’ll get back my feeling for the Corsica footage. I have bought a guidebook and it is in my hand open to a title-page photo of a twelfth-century sculpture of Pythagoras writing. God knows what is on that Corsica footage. Mike having a long silent chat with the student who lent me the cassette recorder who I’m told (by the woman who identified the date palms) has a great deal of money in his own right. I will think about it when I get to London. Daylight stands beyond the crystal green hills and the still waters and the crudely outlined sometimes leaded heads of cartoon martyrs. I’m sure there’s bearded Noah, and some craftsmen at the bottom and a wheel and much higher a rainbow and some man, and below the rainbow maybe Noah and his wife. I go east and south. Light slides past noon. I am between two groups and two languages. Is it a cloud passing, that for a moment invests with motion all the compartmented colors of a window like a sound wave made visible? I am in Chartres. Time is light. My son was here. A tear films my vision. There is a huddle of some kind to the west, and as I pass, an English guide grabs me. I am to give my hands, arms, shoulders—he’s explaining Gothic vaulting—my arms are crossed, hands gripping other hands, I lean, I look away and over on the north side several yards away almost in shadow I catch the eye of a man with a moustache who looks like Dagger, and I grin but he turns away toward the photo and postcard place no doubt thinking this demonstration mad; I am part of the vault of our Lady the Virgin’s mystic city, it is a surprise.
We should all breathe together, I say, and suddenly I want a cigarette.
And the guide, a good English schoolteacher type, parental, clear, brisk, interrupts himself to say to me, Good, good, yes indeed, that’s the idea, one body co-laboring for the Lord.
This isn’t London Bridge he’s playing now. He’s inside.
Now knees up he is hanging from the vault to show us how miraculously strong its structure is.
The man with the moustache looks out from behind one of the piers of the north tower as if he can’t believe what we’re doing, and in my semiconductive cartridge slung forward above New York on Sunday, October 31, that instant of cool cathedral twilight in July borne by some rhumb and random constancy in me from Corsica to England via Chartres yields almost those words said on Waterloo Bridge in Dagger’s car receding from the National Film Theatre in March but instead not quite, for they are the words right after, which are (from Dagger) We’ll use Claire, (from me) and Jenny too, (and then from Dag with a casualness that made his next words seem merely part of some larger harmony) They look alike (which I hadn’t myself seen on meeting Claire the preceding fall, but saw now).
The vault broke up, pack it and send it air freight to Arizona, I found a cigarette, I saw the moustached man and called Hey and moved toward him to ask for a light, but he was out the door into the sun and as I reached for my matches and put my cigarette between my lips and caught sight above me again of the West Rose, an affable English voice said, Mustn’t smoke in here, and I turned suddenly but the wrong way and saw not a red double-decker which could not have squeezed down the nave aisle between the flanks of folding chairs, but at the east end an intricate shine of color overpowering my ignorance of the tales told in all the compartments.
You see even now I can’t be in that closet simply, but must flash-forward into some known future, for what do you think about when you’re eavesdropping on someone’s revelation of your daughter’s body? I kept my cigarette in my mouth, sauntered to the north side to the cathedral shop to look at pictures. In Seward’s day you could leave your daughter a little town house on Madison Park but there is no refuge in history; John Stephens may have given for the Maya city Copan, whose plunder Catherwood was to preserve in his drawings, twice what the Dutch paid for Manhattan, but twenty-four dollars was a lot of money and look at what the Dutch got fot it—real estate inflation—always depressing—and I look down over an area near City Hall Park and some warp of air or temperature from the overhead rotor makes the grid nine hundred feet below bulge slightly, the pilot is looking where I am looking, and I have more than one picture of the man who looked like Dagger in Chartres.
What picture? says John, and my hands are colder than the steel I sit on in the closet I chose by mistake. I have missed nothing. But am I Tessa’s Maya god Kokulcan who was exiled yet at once relanded and never really went away? Not quite.
My wife’s, says the voice. I see her in a whole new way. The gallery was a mistake. I was measuring her with something she couldn’t resist. I should have let her go. But instead I gave her presents.
Why did Incremona do this?
You don’t want to know.
Why did she have nothing on?
She lives there half the time.
Why did the cops call you?
They found a letter from my secretary telling her to come in and clean out her desk. I got nothing against her. It’s my brother-in-law.
John says, Can I use Mercer Street?
Incremona hangs out in that area.
But can I use Mercer Street?
Aut says he has to go.
John asks if Flint is doing anything on the real-time project, and did Aut contact U.K.?
Aut says he’ll see John tomorrow.
A famous hotel is mentioned.
The last I hear as they recede is Aut: so what’s the matter with your eyes? You didn’t know Claire; you wear glasses, don’t you?
Data from Chad and Nash tumbled into the absence of my lookout dream, and with them two contact lenses dropping in search of a soft slot and shimmering now between two Sarsen stones, for John in contacts had been the strange photographer, Aut’s man at Stonehenge. Now if Jack planned to frame me for Claire’s death and to do so not just with the lighter-stiletto but by means of my absence, how had I got away? I went from one closet to another closet of that detached room, I clipped my knuckles on a steel corner somewhere, I plunged down the service stairs.
In a cab up Tenth Avenue I was thrown forward and braced my hand against the back of the front seat next to the pivoting V-shaped fare-receptacle marked PLEASE PUSH and PAY HERE. The meter clucked, I found blood around the nail I’d ripped at Claire’s and blood on my knuckles, and as if at some consequence I made a quick stop at a corner booth to phone the florist, and told Gilda I’d nearly been killed and in fact my head was kilting me—she’d heard nothing more of Incremona. Then it was crosstown from red light to red light and to a news dealer with a gray fedora who could not see what his hat made me feel in my shoulders, that I’d left my expensive trenchcoat behind—and who sold me a paper that had no news of the war.
I went through Sub’s unmanned lobby and up to his empty apartment which had something to tell me but not in answer to what I wished to know of my daughter whom I might have been responsible for killing if she had been where I had thought she was, and now, assuming Claire had been improbably killed by Incremona who had set out to kill Jenny, what I wished to know was this: when the Frenchman had said, The Cartwright girl, and then Incremona had said, We got her—who was we and why hadn’t Incremona known where to go?
And there was an emptiness here in Sub’s place I could not put my finger on. It was an absence I might have believed was watching me (to see, say, if I picked up Sub’s phone before it stopped ringing). I was looking through it, and I left the living room and lifted the receiver and said Yes, and I felt an emptiness grin, except if I was looking through the emptiness the smile might be my own.
Can a god have a religious experience?
Can a god be isolated?
It was Jenny and she said thank god I was
all right. She’d been told I would probably be killed if she didn’t tell who else had installments of my diary. Sherman had found Incremona’s copy at Mike’s apartment and had thought the best thing was to liquidate it. Incremona had found out.
Crescendos of highway cars behind her were between us. I’m in Connecticut, she said.
I could not speak.
You who have me may put some construction other than clinical on my inability this Saturday, October 30, 1971, to speak to my daughter who was alive. I must warn her Incremona had missed once and wouldn’t miss again. But that is what she now said to me. And because I could not bring out those or other or any words, she said nothing more, except to ask who this was.
The first thing Sub’s wife Rose did when she moved out was get an answering service.
It had been more than probable that Incremona would go after Jenny. However, Claire, who looked like Jenny though wouldn’t be taken for her by anyone who knew them both and had not been taken for her by Incremona because of looks, had improbably been hit as Jenny.
In part because of me.
But did I know why Incremona had gone after Jenny?
Incremona (who had stared at me as through a gap beyond which was his object) couldn’t know that through the scene of Claire’s killing, Aut had seen Jan in a whole new way. And as for Phil, she didn’t know (what Jan just might) that that moment of insight had required me.
Was there a dream looking into my head while I was out cold in the closet? All I recall is emptiness but also way out across it like punctures in a dartboard words said in the red-and-purple room with the headlines on the carpet: You know when; we know that from Sawy—It was Chad’s idea, man, but it came out of the group, man.
On the phone one may lose some sense of where places are. But I’d never even had June’s address to lose, though it would have been as easy to find out as it was hard to stop her from saying as she did again and again that whatever the idea was and no matter what Nash said, it wasn’t Chad’s idea, it was Paul’s, it must have been Paul’s.
Hard to stop her—for this was said not quite direct to me but to Claire’s answering service since it was Claire’s number I automatically gave June when upon feeling the special pressure I applied she said she couldn’t talk and I said call back at eight—I didn’t want June to know I was at Sub’s.
Lookout Cartridge Page 64
