Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  Give Jack credit for madness, my God.

  Almost! he laughed, and never spilled a drop of that old Scotch and pulled out the desk drawer and produced four green, white, and black stacks of hundreds.

  He asked if I knew what Incremona was capable of if I didn’t come across, and if I knew that Krish had not been found. I said I knew whose weapon Len had used on Claire and who Jack was framing which I didn’t like at all, and this was the rest of the deal I’d meant by Almost.

  I’ve got an almost too, he said, but don’t tell me you know Wheeler (and for a moment Jack thought back but couldn’t reach it, and was interrupted by me to hear the name of a New England college, one of the Little Three)—don’t you worry about Wheeler, he said. What the police know and what they can do are two different things, but that depends on you.

  Why don’t you frame me for Claire, I said.

  I like your style, he said.

  Where’s Wheeler—South America?

  Jack gave a stiff smile in my general direction and then and there could have killed me if I could have vanished. Then he laughed. Then he laughed again.

  Mexico of course, he said. You could have figured that out for yourself. Hunting jaguars bare-handed. Maybe he’ll disappear.

  Your almost?

  The one remaining copy of the diary—arriving by mail from Callanish yesterday, tomorrow, immediately.

  Jack did not know quite enough. And I leave it to you who have me to conclude that this one of the aforementioned five moments has its dreamlike features.

  Like the strange collaborations early in the summer arising out of the London subway.

  Like the liquid crystal warehouse elsewhere in this other city.

  A warehouse not exactly central to the Flint enterprises but associated by multiple systems under the normal levels of commerce and product research which are coded not to make Manhattan bulge. What is that bulge seen from a hired chopper? Black kids move weightlessly from subway car to car. So do black men.

  Although Incremona was given cause to think John-of-Coventry a private opportunist when Red Whitehead told him John had made inquiries, improbably Incremona won’t act on these suspicions.

  And whereas the diary is less and less likely to stay secret at Callanish since the dilettante geologist (joined or not by Jack Flint a week ago) will probably spot it while seeking Krish, improbably this doesn’t appear to happen.

  The chopper pilot looks back at a middle-aged businessman and shrugs. We have circled, but I recall this only later, staring at a smashed pumpkin, seedy and moist upon Sub’s sidewalk.

  Wait for me, I said at eight thirty Saturday night to Gilda.

  Not funny, she said, as if answering something insulated in my words.

  After midnight Jack says It’s who you know.

  I’m to wait for a call tomorrow, I give Sub’s number, no address; Jack has a car, a man gave him a left-over Opel unexpectedly yesterday, someone will pick up the carton tomorrow (wait for a call); a gift car? I say; oh that, says Jack—the warehouse janitor deserves it and will get it.

  But twilight comes Sunday and still no call from Jack, yet no less risk to Ruby, Tris, and Sub whose new solid-state color TV with an unprecedented minimum of horizontal linearity I’m on the point of extracting four bills to reimburse the cost of, when the plug is yanked and the set is being lugged across the room and Tris is protesting and Ruby’s Daddy! sounds a crystal clear reproof.

  But Sunday morning at either empty end of the warehouse street in lower west Manhattan on the edge of a market area, there is no one, and no one in the empty lot opposite. But I turn, feeling a presence, and at the double door to the warehouse I check all axes: up the street, down; up to lenslike windows adjacent and diagonally across; up to a sky where a plane heads slowly into Kennedy; across to the cement lot and its alley invisible from here—then sense a change. It was probably behind the windshield of a parked car up the block. I put my hand on the knob of the warehouse door, the left one of the double doors, and then my case twitches and almost tugs and simultaneously there’s a shot like a dry back-fire. And above me inside this warehouse a familiar man’s voice uninterrupted by that shot that hit my case is telling children’s voices something too broken up to be a story: they’re working for him, it sounds like.

  But at one on Sunday afternoon 900 feet up I seem to see out my window the pounding of a new tempo: it’s as if my optic nerves through the new vacancy made by the absorption of my former heart into the co-laboring of all my other body parts are now tuned to that tiniest muscle that operates the stirrup bone in the middle ear’s drum—itself a slot in the temporal bone guarding the inner ear’s semicircular circuits that compute my balance—and so Lower Manhattan bulges, or bulges in some inflationary sign to me that weightlessness may make those canals come unplugged and Terminus the god of boundaries and property may be subject to Mercurial delusions because of insecurity arising from the fact that his post was created to take some of the work-load and even responsibility off Jupiter’s back but the liquid stir of that city aggregate there below may be my post-Terminal sense that I’m at the center but overcommitted and underconnected. A plane makes its way above our new tempo and can it be we cannot go forth and back now?

  But it was June not I who changed the time from Sunday morning to Saturday evening—whoever ordered her to, after that first explosion into my answering service’s willing ear. June did not guess who Gilda was, and the forces at June’s end did not see that I’d gladly settle for two times in place of one knowing that surviving the first, an ambush, I might be better covered to control the second, though surviving that first visit to the warehouse Saturday night I might risk seeming not to have come at all and so to be an even more vulnerably probable visitor on Sunday morning, the time June had originally divulged to Claire’s supposed answering service.

  What’s happening to the helicopter? What would Philip do?

  But the night before, I’m just in time to spot from my doorway two blocks north within range of music and talk emanating from a hole-in-the-wall theater where it’s intermission time at a multimedia dance recital, two figures coming from the south who suddenly disappear.

  When I get there it’s not the Flint warehouse but one abutting it on my north side. I am early. A helicopter blinks by quite low, I can’t see its skis (if it has them) or its silver side—only a red light—so Incremona would see it before it saw him.

  The door is locked. This is not the door that was my destination. The Flint is the next one down. A car races in behind me from the direction of the theater and parks at the Flint doorway and the man who bursts out of the back seat is Chad, and a man with Gene’s voice steps out looking over the car roof across the street. Both disappear into the Flint doorway but I hear only a murmur inside my own door and the car moves off, makes a U-turn, and parks across the street and fifty yards to the south and I can’t see who the two in the front seat are but though they drop down now, I think they could have seen the movement of my hat sharp gray in the extreme north corner of the wide old doorway—the dark is shadowed on the sidewalk and street by light only from the theater just round the corner two blocks north and from the south one of the experimental anti-mugging street lamps that with their dayglow have forced or persuaded certain trees in residential areas to drop their leaves in July or betray no signs even of color-turn by mid-October. My voices are now nearer but no louder, but Chad says, Nothing, so he and Gene have not gone inside the Flint warehouse and I wonder if Gene would have a key. My hair is tight, but I take off Sub’s hat and hold it behind me. My voices are even nearer but not louder and the south half of the great steel double-door creaks inward and the voice of Jack Flint says, Just between you and me it’s going to be an interesting bit of work in its own right, money’s secondary of course. The other, a high foreign maybe Scandinavian voice says, You’ve had experience, have you, Mr. Flint? and Jack says Oh enough to manage one of those things, and listen: Thanks. And the other voice say
s OK Mr. Flint, any time. And suddenly Jack’s broad back is to me, the peajacket and glimmering white construction worker’s hard-hat, and as he turns he seems to have on goggles. He crosses into the lot and is gone. There is more talk in the next doorway. Nothing to do with us, Chad says, but Gene’s reply is lost, except the word newspaper, but Chad says, Who was he going to pass it to? and Gene says Jan and some other words, and Chad says I guarantee it’s your brother. And presently steps from inside bear down on my door and a man with a flashlight that is turned off as he emerges walks south right past the Flint doorway. I extend a foot but my door has already closed. I wish I knew what to do. Time of some kind passes.

  And then a long way away I feel the uneven grain of familiar steps, closing fast yet slow; there is no one in the street, the steps are inside and my door is about to open and the steps are those of the person who pushed me down the escalator but I already know, and what matters is that I not be seen and that I catch the door. In the middle of the street far down, the Scandinavian cups his hands to his face. My door is opening bit by bit and if I’m not seen it’s a miracle. But the car starts up and without lights pulls on up past me. It makes a U-turn and comes on back and keeps going, and when it turns out of the street at the south corner where the Scandinavian janitor is turning, my door opens.

  And in the lookout dream that I once thought I must, by design, dream I am in motion across Ned Noble’s sunny sick room and its threshold, his mother behind me fixed in a chair, his father before me with a sitting alcove and a window behind him and on either side of him the corridor opening like oversized arms toward either end of the floor, and he’s waiting for me to tell him something about his son he doesn’t know—that Ned will live, for instance—and I am about to ask again about the time machine and crystal set but know tonight as I enter the warehouse next door to the Flint and hear the door crank closed that that bequest of nothing from Ned Noble (a terminal miser as if those mere possibilities, which is all they were, were chance transistors that might by some unknown system shunt the cancer messages out of him like waste) was really what I wanted—yes wanted—looking down either end of the hospital hall to recall where the elevators were but knowing I must speak to Mr. Noble, and even asking if he’d been to the beach (he looked so tan), upon which he said he was just buying a place on the Jersey shore at a very good price—but Manhattan’s bulge lets go a flash of light as if in some coordinate ignition with the new broken beat of the chopper blades which shakes us as if the cabin hangs on the tip end of a blade, and elsewhere on the circuit of revolution a peajacket is slung over the TV though the other item of Jack’s costume, the white hard-hat, is not in evidence for Jack would probably not wear it into this hotel, and elsewhere in this flat map of times is the hole in my case, a bullet hole not big enough to leak paper money I’m safeguarding against a search of Sub’s while I’m gone and still elsewhere is Sub’s fury bearing the new TV across the room and as it reaches the sill my hands get under it, Tris grabs the rotating base of the aerial, Sub, Tris, and I collaborate, and Jerry (whom the last figments of flexibitity in the helicopter enable me to say I am to see twice more—Sunday morning at the warehouse and Sunday noon watching me lift off the helipad) darts forth now Saturday night turning south toward the street lamp where the car he heard has just turned, and before I quite know it I’ve moved to block the door from latching shut.

  But what does Gilda want?

  And what will she want at dawn Sunday passing me the phone with Monty on it who with a strange dead mechanical energy says he wants to arrange the helicopter I’m asking about out of my sleep, for though I don’t say so to him I hardly know why I’ll need it later in the day.

  But if he thinks I made probable Claire’s death in this system that so many think I engineer, did he arrange to have our swash-plate loosened?

  We can go only down and forward, it feels, but not fast-forward any more, and can a god evolve?

  Lorna speaks her Zen koan out of earshot, Tessa calls me heartless but that is in the future and all the open ends I might use to escape some other sequence come so near telling me something I seem once to have known that I gladly take that sequence down to earth.

  Though not below all there is.

  Not below Gilda’s digital manipulation: of my hair, my ear, my fingers.

  Nor what followed the crank of the door (whose lock Jerry had picked) and his familiar slow-fast heterodyne tread dissolving as he now from what I could hear sprinted for the corner, but nothing followed him but Chad saying That wasn’t him.

  The steps that had proved to be Jack and his Scandinavian employee had been descending, so I would take the stairs, yet I felt here on the first floor a great space.

  There was no watchman. That was him, the Scandinavian. More a janitor. The car had turned that corner just as he did. I was the reason the car was here, perhaps why Jack too, therefore probably the janitor.

  Who had what to watch? A great area of floorboards.

  Would Chad and Gene have heard the last creak of the door and thought it came not soon enough after Jerry’s exit? What if they thought I hadn’t come? What had happened in the red-and-blue room came back gradually but not a bit of what was in my head while unconscious. Chad had said it would be strange if I was both with Jack and in the original plan.

  I heard nothing. The south wall was bare brick. I tripped over a stool and then another.

  The car came back and stopped and I went to the window. I could see no one in the car. Chad and Gene had been in front of that other door to the Flint warehouse designated as the place.

  I moved my ear slowly along the south wall toward the rear or west and then there was a hole just below eye level. A square. There was no sound in it. I put my hand in, and I kicked over what felt like a chair.

  I picked up a tripod. I put my hand in the hole again. There was a square metal housing inside with a square cap. I raised the latch and the cap opened out and there was an oblong tunnel maybe eighteen inches long I couldn’t get my hand through. I felt the top of the tripod. It was a big one.

  On my hands and knees I felt around and along the wall and there was a case maybe a foot and a half by two feet which I snapped open.

  I lit a match and wanted a cigarette.

  An oblong camera lay packed with some accessories, in compartments. It was a videotape camera. My head contracted on the left side where the blood had been. If I was still lying in a Glasgow hotel preparing my lookout dream, where was a skeletal building in process of going up? Instead, this turn-of-the-century warehouse complete, and across the way the lot, empty.

  What did I look like from that other Flint warehouse through this hole? What would I be doing there?

  Through a third-floor window I saw a pale movement under the car windshield. I went over to the south wall and moved my ear along the cool rock.

  Halfway west there was a square hole again and the square housing and the cap and a stool and a tripod I didn’t kick over this time, but no case.

  The car started and I went back to the east wall to see it move up toward the theater. The case was under the next window.

  On the fourth floor I found what I foresaw.

  On the second, third, and top floors, then, Jack had the means of shooting what went on in the next building, or for that matter in the street. In Paul’s hut in the Hebrides, Jack had mentioned one warehouse.

  I couldn’t see the roof. At each window on my way down I checked the street. I waited at the second floor, and the car came by twice from south to north, and a third time parked, then moved off.

  It was eleven thirty. The car had gone north. I’d have to go that way probably, for if I went south I’d pass Chad and Gene in the doorway. I saw Jenny’s abdomen spread-eagled spinning on Reid’s dome with someone else at the controls.

  At the ground floor with my hand on the door knob I let go as if by instinct; I called out over different distances: Take the roof! Claire! Jack! (I opened the door a crack.) She was kill
ed by more than Incremona. What Len doesn’t know can hurt us. (I let the door close.) Incremona! Cops! No no no. (I opened the door.) Jack can’t frame me: he needs me. Get finished fast and leave by the roof, ten to one they’ll send a squad car. No!—(I closed the door. Then I opened it.) OK. Good luck tomorrow. You’re on your own. See you in London.