Lookout Cartridge (30 page)

I want to do something creative, said Claire.

Right, said Monty, also she thinks it’s time for a change.

I asked if Aut was getting to be too much, and Claire had a sip and Monty opened his mouth but Claire said, Lately we haven’t talked much.

Monty came to the point, though if it was the true point my name is Graf, his Cartwright. Well, what I’d said about the aim of the film that I’d made with
Dagger
had stayed deeply imbedded in his
mind
, he said, brows scoring key words which may have been just sounds.

And had this, I asked, aroused our Claire’s creative instincts?

She may not have liked the sound of my words; her only movement was to purse her lips.

Monty said he’d loved the ideas I’d outlined—and I heard something genuine in what he thought he was saying—and, he said, if I could give him a clearer picture, then he and Claire might be prepared to make me a proposal.

I said to tell me the proposal, I’d give him a picture to suit it.

But I felt I had to let go of something. I was tired.

Monty smiled and said all he could say was it had to do with beginning with the
rush
Dagger and I still had and the
sound
, and the 8-millimeter cartridge I’d mentioned we’d shot between air base and Stonehenge—was
it
destroyed? (no reply from me)—and then to build on the original purposes as uncompromisingly as Dagger and I had tried to the first time through.

Claire said, Did we ever pay your gas to Corsica?

I didn’t like her tone. She was still working for Aut.

I said to Monty as far as I could tell we’d stuck to our guns whatever had gone on at this end, and I thought Dagger would agree. When Monty pressed me, I went beyond what Dagger would have been able to accept. I said yes: power poached on or tuned in on when it lacked direction but had momentum. The religious group circling the fire but not united on what they all surely believed and the agitation and energy which the camera called forth was also part of this power poached on. Likewise the Hawaiian with the steady guitar seen as if by a series of travelers who were moving down the corridor toward a ticket booth out of sight, toward stairs, the train platform—the camera passing again and again at different speeds to suggest different persons but going over the same stretch of corridor, bobbing, leaning toward the swelling cheekbones of the large-eyed boy and his girl from Hempstead, Long Island, in her wool sergeant’s jacket over a plaid shirt with the tails out over her bluejeans rocking in the London chill clapping hands, swinging her long tangled wheat-colored hair—their energy spent on those passers-by but protected by Dagger’s saving Beaulieu 16-millimeter camera. To see Claire’s reaction I mentioned the color snap briefly seen in the Suitcase Slowly Packed, a flickering glimpse of a person then instantly packed between a black sweater and something else—well, the power angle was just part. But through all the scenes mingling England and America and deliberately unplacing the scenes, there was a cool theme of America itself—

Monty said Yes, yes. And the 8 between air base and Stonehenge?

—the softball, the space shot ignored on the rainy terrace, a NATO First-Strike Base in the English countryside. But Dagger, I said, didn’t know that all or exactly this was coming into his camera, and it doesn’t matter that he didn’t know.

Claire had risen suddenly. She wanted a cigarette but she had risen because of me: And likewise, she said, there are things in the film that he knew and you don’t. Right?

No doubt, said Monty, reaching her a cigarette like a wand and she fell back into the sofa and murmured, No doubt;
indeed
no doubt.

A new weightlessness was upon me, the circle of Clahe’s light body filming the strong square of mine, erasing without a trace so that attachments to our film or even Outer Film, wife or friend, pearl scar or narrow Jewish shoulders, went like a radar weather-scope, and came again and went. My heart beat hard and a sweat cooling the roots of my moustache brought my empty glass to my mouth and then Monty’s hand to my glass.

Claire said, But is Stonehenge so American?

Somewhere a cartridge grew and melted into its system, and though I did not know where, I was glad. It might have been a unit of protected memory. It might. It might have been Connecticut, Jenny’s Reid’s Connecticut, which on the map seems so much smaller than its space when you hear of all the prosperous people who live there on their own land, though my gravity just now was shaky and my concern for Jenny raised Connecticut to some north-bound Mercatorized acre as great as Greenland; and my words to Claire and hers to me and my thirty-odd-block walk with too few diagonals weakened me, especially as it was toward some new strength I may not have had the equipment for and another longer way lay behind me that I could not quite recall and either that way itself or my unlikely hardship recalling it weakened me too, but in the direction of this new strength like a salmon finding that unlikely electric path upstream generated by the downstream rapid.

I said that long before the first night we seriously talked about doing a film, Dagger had wanted Stonehenge and had said if we couldn’t buy it and ship it to Berkeley we could at least shoot it. But he was full of passing tricks and he forgot about Stonehenge. One July 4th he had got a box of fireworks through an air force friend and had set them off in Hyde Park to the delight of Will and some other children and played as background a cassette of “My Country ’Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty,” which my son of course called “God Save the Queen” just as he called cherry bombs
thunderclaps
. I had first opposed including Stonehenge. I pictured a fed-up American couple having a public argument at the altar stone, I pictured a midwestern small businessman with rimless glasses (and gray suedette loafers and four children in bright shorts and a pretty wife) saying, Excuse me, sir, to a guard he was about to ask the age of the stones—it was the old tourist thing, and both too well known and too immeasurably dubious, what did it mean? And this was even before television commercials were showing Sunset through a Stone Age Doorway, Dawn at the Henge, the Beginning of Time Told Round an Ancient Clock, the Holy Slice of Druid Sacrifice, the Mystery of Life. A void.

But then I’d gone there on my own for the first time, with Jenny, with our cameras, staying the night in Salisbury across the road from the Cathedral Close, driving over to Stonehenge in the morning but not early enough to climb the barbed wire unobserved. I found it then. By myself. Without any but the unavoidable advance word you get over the years about sun worship and remains and calendars and, of late, computers. I let Jenny know more than I. Lorna had complained that I’d been unable to persuade Will to come.

What I found was a ground so old and powerful I could not be lessened by others’ relation to it. In the midst of the partly ruined circle I knelt to draw my hand over a fifteen- or sixteen-foot-long gray-brown stone that must surely once have been standing; it was neither rough nor smooth, and there were glints of something else in it, and I let myself feel at peace touching it where there were no initials to be seen, a fresh touch upon a thing thus real, a feeling like one of those days in the fifties when I sensed that without being in any way exiled Lorna and I were going to stay in England. And when Jenny reappeared stepping inside a circle, her slender back to me, to take a picture outward through one of the linteled arches, and I heard but ignored the imprint upon the earth of steps behind me, I gently clawed this gray-brown rock and felt that Stonehenge had been planted here in my planet turning about the sun so as to use the constant-bearing energy of the earth-turn as if Stonehenge were a mind. And as the light footprint behind me coughed, my daughter wheeled to me radiant and excited and slightly vague of eye and said, It’s a message! and I fancied the earth fading like your green-edged blue fingerprints on a dark sheet of encapsulated liquid crystals when you put it on a cool window—fading to leave, all by itself in space, Stonehenge and its revolutions as together as an orbiting station. But the cough cleared into a voice, a man in a plastic mac who wanted to tell me that they called this stone here that I was touching the Altar Stone, though without any reason in the world, it had probably been standing back there—he pointed to a huge trilothon arch near us on the far side from Jenny—and there were two horseshoes of stones where we were in the middle of the circle and the circle was really two circles though you couldn’t easily tell unless you knew, the Sarsen Circle outside the Bluestone Circle, and the diameter across the Sarsen was ninety-seven feet, and most of the lintels of the Sarsen Circle were gone and only sixteen of the original thirty standing stones in the Sarsen were here now but they were ten feet apart if you measured from the centers and each was thirteen feet six inches high. The man gave us many more measurements, a high narrow face and full lips and a narrow red-veined nose, and before we got away he had altered my consciousness of what was here, and Jenny had giggled because as she later said I was nodding so much and all of that could be found in the guidebook and she wondered if he expected to be paid because of my American accent.

Dagger could see with his own mind. I need not protect Stonehenge.

Who from? said Claire.

Dagger? I said instinctively.

Don’t knock him, she bridled again, he’s sensitive, he’s smart, you talk like it was all your idea.

Monty raised a gentle hand toward Claire.

When I was just his twelve-year-old niece he’d come up from Mexico and bring me a present. He always had a story. He showed us an old wheel-map worth a thousand dollars once when he visited us in Philadelphia. Once he told me the saddest story and when he laughed at the end I was crying, but I didn’t mind. When I think of him now I feel like a child.

What was the story, said Monty.

He’d come in from L.A., he was going to see someone in New York, he said he was giving his friends in California a rest, he said friends can be dangerous, I remember him saying that, but it isn’t the kind of thing a kid takes you up on but that’s what he said and it was about his friends in Berkeley, and this from a man who has more devoted friends than anyone I know who is so frank, maybe that’s why. He was staying in a tenement in L.A. just before he came east, and for several mornings he didn’t do anything but look out a window and on the roof of another building just like half a floor higher than his. There was a black man who would come out on this roof in the sun and move around as if he was blowing his mind, looking down to his feet as if he’d once been a dancer, tossing his head, seeming to stagger, looking here, there, breaking into a run looking over his shoulder. Six or seven floors up with a four- or five-foot barrier. He would talk to himself and Dag wished he had binoculars because he once learned to lip read when he had a deaf girlfriend, I’m not joking, that’s what he said. Well the fourth or fifth day the black man came up and did his thing like practicing for a part and after a while he stopped and was staring over at Dagger but it must have been too far to see Dagger sitting at the window. When suddenly the man dodged to one side there all alone in the middle of the roof and made a dash right at Dagger, I mean from a hundred yards away and all that space in between. And suddenly close to the barrier he stopped and a white dog appeared in the air landing on the narrow ledge that the man had been running toward, and he’d been playing with this dog and the dog couldn’t get its footing, I can hear its nails scratching, couldn’t stop its momentum, and over it went and the man fell down on the roof and must have crawled because Dagger saw his head again and then he was peering over the edge down all those floors to the street where his dog was. And Dagger laughed and laughed, I never saw him laugh so hard, tears came to his eyes. Is that the Dagger you know? I mean it’s quite a performance, true or not, and then I thought the tears had come first.

What friends were those? I said. But Monty wanted to get something accomplished and he at once asked if Stonehenge was the scene we’d got a rush of.

Claire looking at me said, No no no, that was the last scene they shot, they had their rush long before that.

Oh of course, said Monty gently.

His power with Claire did not come from his knowledge of our film, though in some indirect way maybe from his being Phil Aut’s brother-in-law. But this wasn’t the main hold on Claire. She liked Monty, liked the house and the couch. She had smiled at him after her first sip (it was only tonic) and had drawn her bare feet up under her like a daughter or wife.

I was losing Monty and Claire, the attachments here in this picture-lined room asserted their drab gravity, and my stomach complained and I smelled bluefish and lobster and fennel-stewed squid, and cheeseburgers, and I gulped my drink and schemed.

I decided to lie.

You asked about the rush. OK, it was the night scene originally number three, then two when we shifted the Softball Game.

This shifting, said Claire, it’s all pretty much in your mind, right, because you never got a real print to cut.

But she was interested.

The night scene I told you about, the second day I got here. Wales and the fire. We had to see if it had come out. We couldn’t be sure. The light, the dark. Silhouettes. And that grove.

Claire didn’t blink.

So we took it next day to the man in Soho, you know the man.

I don’t think so, said Claire.

Dagger said you knew him.

Monty watched Claire as he drank.

And the man who came out of the grove, we wanted to see if he was just another thing like the flank of a cow or a shape of shrubbery. Dagger probably wrote you about this scene, didn’t he?

I stood up and stretched and yawned.

No, said Claire, he didn’t write.

Then how did you know about all those Mayas?

Māyā’s Hindu.

I told Claire we’d had this conversation last week and she better decide if Dagger had or had not written about the Bonfire in Wales. But, said Monty, that could be a marvelous beginning.