Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  Seeing—yes seeing seeing seeing but what was seeing—smoke flow from the flash that had now vanished (though was the emptiness in Sub’s flat yesterday before Jenny’s call merely the pumpkin grinning or was my cockeyed idea right that it was an emptiness that belonged to me like a grin I might grin through that emptiness appropriating it)—I weighed what Nash had said: they had feared I would go ahead with what had been called off; and Nash and the Frenchman had learned from the janitor last night that Jack Flint had cameras going right through the walls of the north warehouse to make a scientific film of what went on in the south warehouse.

  And to get what I thought I otherwise couldn’t get I’d asked a question of this dependent and erratic Nash which was of zero value to me (for I knew the answer), namely had Len left a time bomb in there? but which stirred one small pulse in Nash who began to splutter breathlessly that he’d finally gotten a phone call through to Len at five this morning to tell him there were cameras in the other warehouse and a Norwegian watchman and Cartwright and Jack Flint, so Len knew but he had said merely have you seen the newspaper, and hung up.

  The change in rotor rhythm had sounded like a flat. The pilot was edging us left or uptown toward the nearer of two East River helipiers. He had called in the explosion.

  As Nash had receded and begun to run I had called out, What did you tell Len?

  Meaning just now at the warehouse.

  I was a second-story witness.

  The way does not belong to things seen, nor to things unseen, or so says Lorna’s koan. It does not belong to things known or to things unknown. Do not seek it, study it, or have it. To find yourself in it, open yourself as wide as the sky.

  Was that why she’d had a plug-in phone installed upstairs?

  I did not expect to see my address book again.

  The clouds were rising and we were wobbling down and Manhattan did not look like a surface now.

  That initial system highly improbable would indeed have yielded increasing probabilities, things coming together, the bog seeping into Krish to equalize pressures either side of his thin skin, the dilettante geologist finding the diary—but only if that system had been to begin with one system and not many systems which I had to forget in the living, and whose multiple impingements I had easily imagined operating through me in the chance of my life but operating through this impure semiconductor like many parts of me or as through one terminal albeit moving. But that was not the case. For look at the life of Jenny—so far from me I could be a collaborative cause of someone else’s accidentally dying for Jenny; look at Dagger and his health, his education, his canny welfare, and the jaguar and the idea he gave to Jan Aut; look at Jan the rival of Jenny twice her age, look at Dudley all by himself entering to safeguard Tessa—or was it pure systematic curiosity?—and look at Claire and at Krish whose unfound body still eventually yielded the name of the lighter-stiletto’s owner who thus came to share Claire’s half-solved murder with J. K. Flint in whose hotel room was found a cross of delicately compartmented enamel in a technique Monty Graf identified for the police as cloisonné.

  But that was then some future or past beyond what we had to go on. And what we had to go on was a certain forward capability like a plane’s and enough lift to get us down before we hit the veterans hospital or that main peripheral artery FDR (or East River) Drive, where traffic was light to medium on this autumn Sunday and moving at a good clip. But then as if our advance was merely added to and overweighed by the vector force of that traffic north and south, we were not moving forward now, we were hovering, and I went forward to see why, for the rotor system maintained its slowed and laboring cadence and we were in trouble. The pilot verified my guess about the swash-plate but said there was more to it, he was testing our turning action, that was why we had momentarily stopped going forward, and he said go back and sit down it could be worse we could get flipped by a cross-current and come down in the river upside down and as I turned away he asked what I made of that explosion and he said he never worked on Sunday, and was this something special?

  At the East River pier I gave him a hundred dollars which was on top of what I’d paid on the Hudson side.

  A cab let me off near City Hall Park.

  I could ascertain from two Sunday strollers only that a police tow truck had been badly damaged by an explosion that had destroyed a car the instant the tow truck started to tow it away.

  I phoned Jack Flint’s hotel, and was asked who I was. I said we had an appointment tomorrow but I had to be in L.A. and wondered if I could see him today. My name? James Wheeler.

  Mr. Flint died this morning.

  That is incredible, I said.

  I phoned Sub’s hospital. Incremona knew Ruby and Tris by sight, and I was concerned. Sub’s doctor couldn’t see him till late afternoon and Sub wouldn’t come home till suppertime, which was when Rose his gifted wife was bringing Tris and Ruby.

  I went to Mercer Street.

  I pressed the top button beside the nameless slot and got no answer and pressed the next one down and was admitted. I passed the door behind which the music was playing and from where I was sure I had been buzzed in and went on to the top, where over the door of all places was a key and I opened the massive metal door and walked between the two TV sets, once more facing each other, to the work bench where I left a note which read Real-time projection is still financially possible and wrote my last name.

  The music volume rose and there were steps but going down.

  I phoned Lorna and she was home. And she was cool enough for me to sense anger, which was all to the good probably. I asked her to find out if one could open an “external” account at a bank for someone without the nerson’s signed annroval or at least without the person being there. I said I would try to catch a plane by tomorrow or Tuesday, I had two pieces of unfinished business. You don’t say, she said sounding like my father, and added that a package had arrived from the Hebrides.

  I stared at the word NAND in the corner of John’s formulaic poster, and Lorna asked again, and the twitch or pulse or whatever it was in my shoulder went away into the mystery of my body and I said under no circumstances even touch it and that goes for Will too, and Lorna said she already had touched it and Will was at Stephen’s but due home any minute, and what about Jenny, and I said Jenny was OK.

  I locked up and left the key.

  I did not walk into King Street. I found a phone booth a block north—the one Jenny and Jerry and Jan and Reid had all passed—and I got the deep gong you still got for a quarter and dialed Red Whitehead.

  No, he said, the bald man who’d asked about me had identified himself as an Immigration agent and had nothing to do with any higher-up at Red’s end because there was no big holding company controlling “our” operation, how did I ever get that idea; it was independent. I said I was leaving and did Red have anything for me.

  Leaving? You hardly got here.

  He had his stuff at the office and he was busy right now. He would be in touch.

  I went looking for John in Chelsea in the building where I might have been killed or dreamed my lookout dream. There was a pane missing in the street-floor hall door. I plodded all the way up. The service door was not locked, but the inner room with the display console was, and I didn’t have a loid.

  In the red-and-blue room there along the wall was my trenchcoat.

  I tore off a bit of newspaper and wrote John another note and stuck it in the door to the computer room. I packed Sub’s coat and hat in on top of the money, put on my trenchcoat and left.

  The last piece of the sun was visible down an aisle of high buildings. There wasn’t a car in sight. I was in the shadow of Sub’s apartment house and I went in carefully.

  I did not answer the phone.

  I phoned Mercer Street but John was not there.

  I raised the window all the way, it was a beautiful late afternoon despite the clouds.

  I leaned out over the pumpkin and there was nothing to see excep
t a cab passing and a cab parked twenty feet past Sub’s entrance. No Opel.

  The package was from the crofter widow of course. That was what Jenny had meant when she said, You know the woman.

  I could see Jenny get off Reid’s motorbike and plod up to the widow’s door with the pack on her back. I could see her as far as the door and hear her ask for a glass of water and see her step inside and the door close. But I could not see or hear her produce three or four or five quid and ask the crofter widow to wrap all these typewritten pages and mail them to Highgate, it was an emergency.

  Again the phone rang and I looked out at the twilight, and the cab was still downstairs. I could hardly describe to John my experience of digital trivia, my sense even now that even if mine had been a gloved hand at last programming its way through a deep transparent wall to handle dangerously contaminated substances much less administer justice, bring peace, or transform my own oscillations into something more fixed (that would nonetheless then demand motion in the observer to be understood), I would still feel short of that direct current I had envisioned if not dreamed of.

  And again the phone rang, and digital mosaics leafed over one after the other, and I saw John with the money I would provide thinking directly through a machine to something visible and new which might be no nearer Andsworth’s prophesied telepathy than my own shtip-like sense of other people’s pain but might be revolutionary, profound, and (who knew?) even profitable.

  I answered. It was Gilda. Had I read the news?

  It was probably in a cab somewhere.

  The girl Claire who had been killed and whose answering service Gilda had been honored to impersonate had been murdered for a reason that had not been guessed till new information received just before press time, and this new information was that she should have had twenty thousand dollars there in cash in payment for a film deal she’d been mixed up in and it was missing: Twenty grand! said Gilda, where did she get twenty grand? The police had other leads.

  The door came open and it was Sub with a suitcase and a huge, loaded brown paper bag of a kind almost unheard of in England, though one can buy a sturdy shopping bag with a handle if one has not brought one’s string bag or other bag with one to the shops.

  His energy had risen. He stood as if waiting for me to disappear. He looked toward his bedroom. He said he was ready for a vacation.

  He had gone way out of his way to find corn candies and a “revolting” Halloween cake, and I said, Look man, we bought bread and milk and a lot of other stuff—and Gilda was saying the same thing in my other ear as Sub took a deep breath through his genuinely wise gray beard and smiled bravely and said, You should know by now I am programmed to act in a certain way and I hope at some point in the future to be able to look back and say I have come through.

  He put on some water, he carried his suitcase into the bedroom and put it on the unmade bed, he went into the living room and I heard him talking to his plants, he bumped me coming back into the kitchen, he laid out plates and forks and spoons and knives for three and put a cake on a plate and the candies in two orange-and-black dishes, and put a transparent package of hot dogs into the unde-frosted icebox, poured water onto his tea bag, took the hot dogs out of the icebox, dipped his teabag several times, turned and added a fourth place to the table, and I said I’ll be in touch, I’ve got the florist shop number, and hung up.

  I went into the living room and looked out over the pumpkin and the cab was still there twenty feet beyond Sub’s entrance.

  But where should I go?

  My case lay on the day bed.

  Sub said the icebox was the story of his life, it would take two days to defrost it.

  I asked when Myrna was coming.

  He said at least no one had broken in again—had I finished my business?

  I said I would be out of his hair by tomorrow or Tuesday. I opened my case and the gray hat was squashed to one side of the money, but Sub in the kitchen was saying No and again No, and then he said No, that wasn’t it, and he sounded odd and I felt I had put too much strain on the friendship but also that I was out of place yet also not even wholly here, and I wondered if the strains of convalescence had made Sub a little crazy.

  I heard the elevator and then steps and voices and I was going to offer to defrost the fridge tomorrow but the buzzer went three times fast and I wondered if Sub (who now strode from the kitchen) still wore that gray hat—but the children burst in before Sub quite got to the door. They were alone and excited. Ruby said Oh Daddy, Mommy made us turn off the TV, and Sub said where is she and Ruby said Connie brought us home, and Tris put down a small suitcase, said Hi Dad, how are you, and followed Ruby to the TV which being a solid state started making noise instantly and the picture was two or three seconds coming. I think my going now to the window where the pumpkin was and looking out infuriated my friend as much as his children ignoring him on the Halloween of his homecoming from the hospital and Ruby saying Fix the picture, but it was his laying hands on the TV that made Ruby scream and made me turn from my dreamlike vision of the sidewalk ten floors down and two yellow cabs and the brief gleam of a bald head bending beside the first cab; and as Sub with a hand on the top handle which enables the maker to call the set portable and a hand underneath bore an unreimbursed telly toward me past a day bed and a suitcase and his gray hat and dark Navy raincoat and a lot of money, I knew that right to the last moment Jack Flint had figured the south warehouse was going to be blown up by his hated brother’s people, and knowing this I wanted to protect with my own life these children and my friend who had just said the box was going out the window and seemed to mean it.

  I met him halfway but seemed only to help him or to support the set which was small but heavy. Tris had his hands on the rotating base of the aerial, as if in response to Ruby’s request he were going to pull out the rabbit ear, I staggered back and recovered my balance and staggered again jamming my back on the windowsill and Ruby screamed and I seemed only to have helped Sub get the TV set to the sill and now I held it also back but Ruby screamed and I looked away toward the door and because of what I thought but did not see I relaxed my grip and Sub’s suddenly unrestrained force sent the TV set over the edge, yet—since my belief in the multiple and collaborative impingement of many systems beyond my own had suffered a new relapse sensing like a shtip that I and no one else had been the one to tell Dagger about Maya jaguars and to speak in his car the idea he gave to Jan, namely, that none of us knew enough, and to mention long ago to Jenny that the Hebridean crofters were utterly dependable and generous—I thought, Is it insured for this kind of thing? and in some final force as if one outer or inner system comprising all our mysteries blinked open for a micro-instant in me an instinct of collaboration—I think I gave the set an extra push.

  I was higher for a second seeing the black-and-brown object pass strangely like a space capsule through an alien medium turning with slow force, but then I dropped five or six inches it seemed, as the set hit the hood of the first taxi and headlights speeding north through this most treacherous time of day could not have seen the figure in the hooded parka jump automatically to the cab’s front bumper as if released by the concussion of the TV set and spring past into the path of those headlights and flashing grille that sent him twenty feet through the air so narrowly missing the fender of the second parked cab that one might have seen some diagrammed triangulation of impulses Incremona had no control over.

  The pumpkin was smashed on the carpet under my foot.

  The driver of the taxi that had almost been hit by Incremona had him under the shoulders and was getting him into the back.

  Incremona was dead, I knew it as surely as I knew that even if the police acquired the three filmless tapes the words would be an impenetrable if interesting surface, and it was as unlikely that the authorities would get the tapes from whichever part of the group now had Incremona as that they would get the random letters I’d taken from Dagger and Alba’s and stuffed in my parka pocket.r />
  A high street lamp had come on. There was something in the street that looked red.

  The woman who got out of the first cab looked up, and it was Constance. Her driver stood by his door on the street side. The driver of the car had stopped half a block up and was coming back; Incremona’s cabdriver closed the rear door, got in, and drove off past the man in the street who was yelling and gesturing. Incremona had seemed to become motionless as soon as the car hit him and he had passed through the air as if fixed between times.

  Everyone was looking up at me and Sub, and I was not sure what I had seen but I knew what we had done.

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