Lookout Cartridge (67 page)

Jan thought her husband and Jack Flint were producing a science film for children. Science was impersonal. There were no right angles in nature.

You see, I said, they bond together two glass plates but keep between the two a space one-third as thick as a human hair and fill it with liquid crystal.

She wasn’t interested in micro-spaces and mere completions. She had passed on lots of ideas. Many from Dagger, who tossed out too many ideas, some jokey. No, what was needed was life, growth. Afeni Shakur who was said to have planned to blow up the New York Botanical Gardens desired life and growth. Ahmed Evans whom Jan had met found energy in systems of the occult. She would like to meet Erika Huggins, and ask her one question.

The Bach blew on, was turned lower, but still would cover any but the nearest and heaviest of steps.

In earlier scenes Jan Graf Aut had receded over and over again vivid and possible. The friend of Krish and Dagger; sister of Monty, wife of Phil; mother doubtless of Jerry; intimate of Reid, rival of Jenny; intimate of Paul. Now she leaned back against the workbench as if against the one source of light in the dusky studio; for her head came between me and the green-glass pool-table shade hanging in front of the poster displaying formulaic sequences.

Gene the middle brother had been swayed (she said) by Paul to have nothing to do with the family business; then of course Gene had married money so he was free though Nell was giving him trouble; she had been to Wellesley and believed power most corruptible when it lay unused.

Gene, however, had grown. Phil had approached him no doubt at the urging of Jack, but Gene had turned down the substantial offer to come in with Phil and consented only to cooperate on a scene or two for Jan’s pan-human film. Gene disliked business because of the people, and film because it tended fatally toward entertainment (as Paul had often said) and so could not be used to convey a rigorous theme like Jan’s, i.e., in one ninety-minute peace-montage to bring together clashes of practice, doctrine, color, and geography among (and here, as I knew, for she assumed I knew, was the point) certain revolutionary groups: interviews, glimpses, faces sometimes only half-seen which Jan believed would say implicitly not just that their human aspirations were more kin than foe to each other, but more (and this to the ordinary audiences who would see the film if only on their television sets) that such groups were full of passionate love which might lean toward violence but only in answer to what there was no point in her spelling out. It was to be the deed of her life, plain black and white, Aristotle had said Man was a political being and a being endowed with speech—so a film of silent faces would not do—she left the execution to Phil and John and (though she had not pressured him herself) her son. A greater deed than a painting, or being a parent, or abandoning your family. It was this deed that I had stalled, from motives she said that even with her limited information she could guess had something to do with large amounts of cash rumor said Jack was handling lately—I had contaminated her vision and in spite of what I might think of the scene filmed in her studio, I had actually increased the chance of violence knowing full well that on camera Jim would speak of Paul and be hushed up and thus pushed even further by Bob, and she would like to have only pity for me but confessed to fear as well.

My words—the groaning afternoon on the Mercer Street side of John’s window shades had passed into an early evening of such dingy delicacy under the lush sky that the air looked crystal clear.

In Mike’s London cab the questions are nearing an end two days earlier.

OK, I answer, say I give filmmaking a rest and leave you and Len and Sherman and Reid and Nash’s nosebleeds alone, what sanctuary have I? Any number of Xeroxes won’t safeguard me from Len Incremona or for all I know—

Don’t pretend you
don’t
know, said Mike, then whipped his head away toward his right-hand window having said the reverse of what he’d wanted.

—or for all I know I could be hit by Nash or you or Bob—

—No, Bob’s not with us any more, he got sentimental—

—or Sherman, I guess Sherman’s in the States with Reid by now, and Krish may find it harder to intimidate Nash than before.

Mike wants to know what I hoped to add to my leverage by shooting Len and himself and Marie (the fortress girl) in the setting of Ajaccio; they were there and even the action originally planned was not going to take place in Corsica—nothing happens there.

I answer that I was concerned with the ecology seminar the Americans were running at the école, for in my own view it could emerge in our film as a revolutionary though tenuous theme of displacement; however, his Edinburgh friend Mary had been an unexpected dividend.

The automatic stirred up off the seat back. The ammunition was in my head, film or no film. The gun had a moment of weight on the end of my bent arm like our damned camera hand-held or not hand-held threatening to drag down all it framed: down would go 2D slides of Hyde Park and the English country, and down also the screens of dusty fort and Mediterranean crag; down would go gaps in the Stonehenge circle filled for a moment with new Druids or a lurking American voice or Nash angry with Bob the dark-haired late co-star of our Unplaced Room who bickered with him outside the Sarsen ring: so that the literal weight of that Beaulieu dragged down out of sight even the hand of my wife touching me and the borrowed breath of Tessa in my mouth turning to words and out of words until (as you who have me may say) through manipulation, not real courage, I saved that New England drive-in movie screen by the waters of the Atlantic by placing at the base of that land-slipped clay cliff (cartridged long ago for later thought) Tessa’s uncle who was struck in middream thus not by a cruel-faceted quartz paperweight a German cat pawed off a high night-time ledge but by the very screen 60 by 100 that I couldn’t sell the merchant-investor near Liverpool. Hit but not killed, for in his early old age Tessa’s Uncle Karl became, for all his blindness, a Zionist settler dictating to his wife and her long, comforting fingers epistles from a Tel Aviv suburb to Tessa’s half-envious father in Golders Green which expatiated greatly and with Talmudic pomp upon the age-old zone of mystic In-Between carved like a moat of insulation (in Uncle Karl’s prose) to guard a Jewish self prior to actual territory, yes the inner and spiritual claim to separation from others and claim to a place that was a claim that created that place (that beautiful place) by fiat of communal will. Tessa’s father would tell his neighbors in their well-watered gardens about Karl’s commitment as if he and Karl were collaborating, and about Karl’s theory that despite a permanent eclipse of his main sight, he had intimations he was recovering of all things
peripheral
vision.

Now Jan might disdain “mere completions,” but I with my parka-full of others’ weapons and my Druid’s counsel on how to make my body breathe had never laid claim to any kind of completion. I had more than once in recent days found myself poised weightlessly mighty like a god, held in a field of my own generation or finding, in a space between impingements of other fields like the short moment between forces when I snatched the autographed ball flung up by Ned Noble (who when he would jauntily take leave of us would say, I shall return). Yet now from either of two random parallels—the minicab in London Sunday night, the loft in New York Tuesday, each ending with offspring, the ominous mention of Jenny by Mike, the queer allusions to Jerry by Jan—I was now being situated in an independent power way past even what I had pretended.

Perhaps it was true, the god bit.

Yet no: my hero the Franco-English engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (in whom my own beloved and neglected Will may not have been so intrigued as I hoped) was much struck by the collapse of a bridge near Manchester in the late 1820’s: the steady tread of troops across it one day set up a harmony so deep it shook loose a pin in one of the suspension chains and the bridge at one end let go. Fields impinge. You must build yourself into the life around you. Which sounds so like good advice I must find another way to pass it on to Will.

Paul was misconstrued, you see. His views these last months had grown apparently more abstract, not less. But Mike, Chad, John, Nell, Incremona, Sherman, even Gene at first (until then likewise suspect) saw Paul defecting because of the target. This target, which no doubt I knew the logistics of even better than she, touched the Flint family enterprises, and she did not want to know more than that. And John, with his English sense of sinister unity within great families, insisted Paul himself had proposed the target. But Chad and Len believed Paul planned to join Jack in the business at last; Mike and Gene believed Paul had found a new strange reverence for the father who had founded the firm, but Mike thought Paul wished only to safeguard the firm while Gene believed Paul had learned to love his brother Jack. Sherman and Len believed Paul would blow the whistle, and so did Reid, who did not otherwise agree.

Jan said Paul had gone to Wales in May to see the Prescelly Mountains whence the Stonehenge bluestones had come heroically by land and sea and hand, and Paul had been thinking in a new way about Stonehenge from a new distance.

And Callanish?

Jan did not know the name, she said, and I neither challenged her there with my superior evidence from the dilettante geologist in the red mini that in fact she had been at Callanish nor let her know other dates I believed she did
not
know: that Paul was in the Hebrides sometime before May 24 when we shot the Unplaced Room and heard the deserter’s half-squelched words of praise for Paul, and in South Wales with Elspeth the Bonfire night of May 28 by which time, to judge from Jan who saw him in Edinburgh in June, he’d made up his mind to break with the group.

Mike said, for we had arrived, Who lives here?

Near here, I said.

At the next crossing stood a policeman. Lorna had mentioned Geoff’s party over my Glasgow phone when, on the verge of my lookout dream, I had found myself between her and some northwest passage which on my cartogramic variant of Gerardus Mercator’s flat map curved an unheard-of new great arc remarkably between two seemingly contiguous virtually congruent parallels through Callanish to fields of people compassed by their secrets from each other. I would chance Lorna’s being at Geoff’s party. I had no key to the new lock at home.

What if we aimed for that cop? said Mike. This cab’s got pickup.

That would be the end of one callow revolutionary, I said.

But you’d be stuck in England for years, said Mike.

I’ll call in a good lawyer; at least
I’m
within the law.

The lawyer Mary’s been talking to?

Why not?

The New York State Bar doesn’t cover London. What was his business with Allott?

Maya business, I said (and did not add “undoubtedly,” for I knew on some cooperative current of instinct that this was the lawyer Dudley had consulted on international divorce, having been in touch with him first about Catherwood’s New York holocaust).

I needn’t shoot you, I said, you don’t have working papers unless Len got you some, and I think we’d find something at the dispatching end of your two-way radio, which by the way may be on, that would be at least as interesting in its connection to Paul Flint as you are yourself, maybe Bob, maybe Nash if he’s back from Savvy’s party.

Well Mike came around in his seat so suddenly I almost shot. Then, too calmly, he asked if I knew where he could
find
Bob.

I haven’t seen him since Stonehenge, I said.

I was on the pavement, my hand on the roof.

Why was Mary a dividend?

Her brother sent us a touring archaeologist from Alabama.

At Stonehenge, said Mike.

For comic relief when more important things were happening.

Like a film, Mike murmured.

People threatening to appear, I said, or rumored missing. The Alabama academic replying with coy caution, I’d rather not say, really—as if he’d been asked if Mary Napier had actually got her hands on the Montrose heart.

Mary’s crazy, said Mike.

On the contrary.

On the contrary, eh?

You didn’t hear when Mary described Montrose’s dismemberment the night Marie’s blond costarletto of our fortress footage was mad at her for being with the dark-haired local in the guitar bar. Mary’s brother put the Alabama archaeologist on to us. A good courier.

The policeman was looking.

I knew I would have to fly to New York. Mike slid suddenly along his seat to the left-hand window, but then did not say anything, then said, You’re wrong about Sherman; he’s not in New York. I would know.

I shrugged, I deeply did not care, I turned away—and beyond the street lamp that lighted the policeman who now moved off I nearly saw Ned Noble (on a Brooklyn stoop) from whom I also turned away on the singular occasion of his last departure—as also I turned away from the crystal set he’d promised and broken—toward something I could not see in front that I swore would replace it.

Mike’s cab came alongside like a perpendicular coordinate to his violent sideways slide along his seat when I linked Mary’s brother to our Stonehenge. And I held Chad’s gun at arm’s length toward the window, a headless pedestrian. What else have you in your jacket? said Mike’s voice, and I told him I had good reason to know they would kill to keep the lid on.

In that case (said the voice from the far side) think about Reid because you’re right he’s in New York; and even if you’re planning something yourself and you know like day by day where Paul Flint’s been since Stonehenge-night-at-the-film-festival, it doesn’t matter, Reid’s in New York, you know who’s with him; you know what she tried to do, and you know that as of right now she doesn’t have to have done anything, she’s Cartwright’s daughter.

A loch to look at, a cross to bear, a memory to bring back
. Now she was in America, I in England. Nonetheless, by some oscilant continuity I was still on the American trip with its many centers, the second tenor bidding my Highgate wife goodbye, the three against the fortress wall, the stabbing, the escalator plunge, the sullen death of Ned Noble in Brooklyn Hospital in ’45, the portals of Stonehenge with their emulsified night, the cruder stones of Calanish where Jenny hid my words and whose widow’s face has Indian) ones (or as the insular English with their lurid distinctions say,
red
Indian).