Lookout Cartridge (69 page)

Jan and I getting together to talk about our kids. Her son the locksmith. My daughter the photographer. Jerry and Jenny. Each child defending its parent. Oh the joy of Jenny discovering American comics. Not in America but in the funnies my mother wrapped the children’s presents in. The inner wrapping waits while Jenny who used to be too polite about presents stops to read the outer.

I’ve really talked to you, I said: and Jan nodded vigorously and showed a small but pleasant gap between her broad front teeth; and so saying, I understood: not what Mike said I was wrongly igniting or what Jan said I had stopped: but through telling Jan what Lorna had told me of the Nielsens, its meaning: Mike had said Bob was not with them any more and did I know where he could be found, and Jan had said the Unplaced Room increased the chance of violence through Jim’s being squelched on the topic of Paul: now Bob referring the Nielsens to us and then like ancient history Elizabeth at Stonehenge running up to report the boy with the blond beard missing: well, the meaning was this: that Jim, having taken steps to end his war and having (from place to place, mainland to island to studio to Stonehenge) thought his war was over, had now had it ended for him: Jim had been removed, and probably by Nash.

That was my reading.

But if Jim had been killed, was it for protecting Paul or advertising him?

Tessa had said she had walked over some bodies.

Jan had never had much interest in comics. Slick drawing. Cheap color. The English have a wonderful sense of humor. Sly. Droll.

I said they felt it was a national asset.

Jan had narrowed her nostrils. She is about the age of Gilda the florist, and of Renée whose hot copper hair had come all the way from the kiss-proof rouge of a Brooklyn Heights tease through the romance of the Golden Gate.

I am out of my chair. I had forgotten the chorale downstairs which now ends.

If, now that my diary is thought defunct, I myself am the hit, will they bother to find out what is in my head—whether, say, I’m trying to stop something or pull it off? Jan is telling me how I have too much power; her vagueness is convincing because she is trying not to weep, and I point out that I am under surveillance—witness Wheeler, who might have stabbed me instead.

But he knew you—that’s why he was hired.

I tell her to tell me where Paul is, but I am deeply and privately wondering whoever said Wheeler knew me, for Wheeler never knew me except as someone in a poli-sci class or playing tennis two courts down.

Tell me where Reid is, she says.

Reid for Paul, I thought.

A god has no morale, needs none. What if they got hold of me and hooked an amplifying system to my heartbeat? What might come out? How could I be a god? An emptiness or semi-conductor at the heart of their system.

Reid is with Paul, I said. Jan cocked her head. Not with Sherman? she said.

If I am a god, it is precisely because I am not independent.

There came steps on the stairs below the chorale, but their seeming familiarity may have been the music they rose to. Jan urged me to the loft’s far end.

There were quantities of time as the steps came on. I was behind the curtain where John’s slit-scan track ended, and Jan may have told me more now when she touched the empty pocket of my new raincoat touching at last upon the most intimate and least rational connection between us: “He” would not forgive what had been done to her picture—stay out of sight.

But wait: did Jan think Kate had been in the main room when the blank hair had been colored? Did anyone imagine Kate knew what hung in Aut’s gallery well enough to walk out into the main room and see at once the white space absent in the flat orange freshly laid on? Oh no indeed. And indeed even if I paid the bills, I could not be held responsible for my daughter’s magic marker.

A look from Jan’s dark eyes brightened her heart-shaped face and she said in a whisper,
Jenny
then!—the Suitcase snapshot!—and receded swiftly toward the center of the room rented for John by the growing boy who I heard now bash open the door and exclaim, I knew you’d be here! Guess where we’re going?

Tell me on the way, said Jan his mother, and at once took him off downstairs.

I wanted to take home a tale to my family they could understand. But it might be too late. They were dispersed.

Who had recruited Wheeler, a mere acquaintance at college years ago?

I wanted time to myself.

I wanted to know for sure the film was destroyed.

Cooking came up to my mind from the direction of the Bach chorale—oil, tomato, even cheese, even the pale slick filling steam of pasta, a bland blend doughy and delicate: I could see a pan of lasagna being layered. And I tried to recall which of Paul’s two brothers back in that northern hut had said Sherman was the only one of the lot that Incremona trusted.

CARTRIDGE

Cut to an idea: initial system highly improbable moves toward increasingly probable states: the bog will seep into Krish and thus equalize pressures either side of his thin skin: with Krish gone, the next Nash nosebleed will have fewer probable causes: Phil Aut (legal spouse of Jan, the film’s apparent source) and John (whose loft is rented for him by their son Jerry) will prove to be still closer: pairs of namesakes crop up: two Jims—the newly bearded lately departed deserter, and the lunchtime stabber of the man in the target T-shirt; beautiful
Mary
who told her tale of a dismembered heart to my secret cassette, and pretty
Marie
, who crossed our Corsican field first at the fort and then at the
Son des Guitares
café;
John
, the Coventry munitions expert, transatlantic technologue, bumptious debunker of our film, and owner of a house near Portland, Maine, and the other
John
whose glasses I’d knocked off, whose friend June had helped me, and whose loft conveyed an authenticity beyond the sum of its video-synthesizer, slit-scan gear, and formulaic poster with the computer code-word
NAND
in a lower part: further probabilities are that Len Incremona, who disliked the English John enough to blow a bullet through a dartboard, will if given cause to think John a private opportunist act upon it, though Len would not fly to New York just for that: and probabilities are that the package of pages typed by Jenny Cartwright and left by her under an ancient megalith in Callanish where the great stones are like petrified tree-shards is less and less likely to stay a secret, for the dilettante geologist now possibly joined there by Jack may spot it while seeking Krish, or I could phone the crofter widow to retrieve it (which forty years ago you could film with that trick of the diagonal wipe bundling two distant talkers into one magic frame), or I get Dagger to drop everything and go collect the package—or Jenny is made to talk, in which case anyone (if anyone truly operative is left on that side of the watery world) could zip up to Glasgow, Stornoway, and Callanish and grab what may now be the single copy of a diary whose interest seems increasingly to be in what it yields about its manufacturer and his life and less and less in what it hints of certain schemes.

Does Jenny grow more like Claire or less? Claire lacks that fine detour like a wave or illusion in the bridge of the nose where Jenny’s new camera came up to hit her after Will backpedaled into her, teasing a friendly neighbor’s hound that had in turn been excited by a turtle, and she fell, both hands clutching the camera. Jenny and Claire will approach each other, probably.

Yet on the other hand how
im
probable the procession now to come.

But this idea is cut from me, or I from it: not to a timeless scheme of parted window shade, doors ajar on two floors, dark stairs tapped into cadence; nor to a course laid out as on a map projection where curves and zig-zag turn into one bearing, straight from the slit-scan track to a blue air letter typed in red on the workbench beside the video-synthesizer thence to a dark corner three flights down where I Frederick Dudley Jack Paul Monty Mercator held my breath till two unlikely fellows and one voice tiptoed past on the way up: instead cut from that glimpse of conversely increasing improbability to what I merely did.

In the loft I opened the shade to the city and outcroppings of sky. Mother and son came into Mercer Street below. The fine billowing brown hair and the shorter, coarse red lost some of their color in the aisle of shade northward. The air letter was from Dagger DiGorro postmarked London, and it was addressed to me in New York but not at John’s loft. There was grit on the stairs. On the floor below, the spitüng of oil in a pan covered my steps. The letter in my pocket was another weapon, this time mine though already used by others though not therefore useless to me.

At the last instant before I would have emerged into the street and been seen, the ground-floor door opening made me find, in the luck of its deepening shadow, a corner to stand in, but just in time to find only a mass of trouble which seemed to have no bearing on American society or international commitment, on the poster in Dag’s living room of Trotsky and his American aide Bob Harte in Mexico or in the Sorbonne courtyard in May ’68:
TAKE YOUR DESIRES FOR REALITIES
. But the mass of trouble bore not merely on the cross-hatched plots and the faces heart- or cartridge-shaped and sounds (dry wet soft hard) excised from tracks, and parallel beards and that strong swimmer Mary’s two missing finger joints, my wife’s underwear, my son’s Chartres, the characters of Dudley and his daughter Jane, and endlessly inescapable informations beneath if not a god maybe a man, such as Jenny saying she and Reid had been in the pedestrian passage leading under the museum to South Ken tube station, which moved me to urge that site on Dagger who it turned out was planning to find the Hawaiian boy and Hempstead girl precisely there that morning, which is where they had been the day Jenny passed through with Reid. No, the mass and waves of trouble I found in this dark dusky ground-floor corner of a New York Manhattan loft building bore not just on all this but (I swore) toward a formula for how such power could be ascribed to me at the very moment my own field seemed less definite than ever.

The one voice spoke: Believe me, somehow that bastard knows we’re coming, he’s got Chad’s gun, remember.

And when I saw the speaker’s long concave profile and short coiled body of prowling legs and shoulders and arms and on his hand, for it was Nash, those three colors that in the glance of late light from the street flashed like sound being heard somewhere else, I found not the formula but the red that Jan said I’d made a certain someone see. I felt it in Sub’s address red-inked under my name on the typewriter of the much-connected man my friend, collaborator, and protective deceiver Dag in whose Hampstead flat I’d met the other of these two the evening of the day we filmed the air base.

Yes, the man with Nash was the big Frenchman with a shock of prematurely white hair. He and the other two waiting in Alba’s chairs had been glum or contemptuous when they heard my brainstorm. I said two new minutes of them now slow-motion would beautifully top what Dag and I had just filmed at the air base thinking it would be the end—namely, men sending trained hawks to kill starlings so the starlings from the fifties deployed like the regular trees along avenues administered with street signs and speed limits like those in U.S. bases and towns anywhere—then (and here had been our finale) the bombers themselves in quick repeat (like the Hawaiian hippie approach shots) again and again stiffly lifting off into the sunset which to an audience wouldn’t be necessarily northern or August—on the way back to the stationwagon the U. Maryland part-timer we’d run into at Stonehenge asked if I knew John, and when Dag said, No, he doesn’t know John, I at once said, Sure I know John, was it John I was going to be introduced to? and the U. Maryland part-timer who was our host because he taught here though Dagger had done one term a few years ago, said No, unfortunately he changed his plans at the last minute. Dagger was not amused.

But now beyond this, my new idea: three men lifting their hands in parlor talk so slowly that the audience (if Phil Aut would distribute us to one) would feel the endless distance from those real and rising bombs just as Alba’s reappearing wrist and long American cigarette and solo activity would flute the edges of the room with nerves—a woman’s service, her unease, the seeming ceremonies of men. Add sound at too few revs per second slow-motioning small talk into garbled agony, and Lorna if her blue eyes ever saw the film would see the struggle of our years, the reach from somewhere less real to something more, which might be less likely the cadres and secret councils of terrible change—
CONSUMER SOCIETY MUST DIE A VIOLENT DEATH
—and more the unchecked wages of Sub’s days at home and at work, unchecked actuality of a small-claims suit and his lack of a divorce, a historic Bach sweatshirt on a heap of spin-dried sheets, hamburger the color of crushed strawberries on a table near an old blue cut-glass tumbler that holds the water Sub washes his deep-yellow-urine-producing Stress Supplement vitamins down with while on the sink beside the steaming kettle his red-white-and-blue Japanese mug stands ready with its teabag damp from the film of water left in the bottom (for Sub washes last night’s late teacup first thing in the morning) while Tris is drinking orange Tang seeing in the middle distance floating astronauts squeezing their breakfast into their mouths as he and Ruby spread their white toast with grape jelly that comes in a jar with a picture on the side which Ruby will use to drink her skim milk from when the jelly is gone—and Ruby anticipating opposition announces over the radio news that Sub some time in the past ruled that tonight she may stay up late for a TV program because today is Monday (which she turns to Tris to confirm), and then the news on this good-music station ends with the weather and a calm commercial for stereo systems and Sub tells Ruby also calmly that he would like to drop the TV set out the window (the new smaller portable I haven’t reimbursed him for), but at that instant his Japanese radio slips off its band onto another with those hermaphrodite voices singing
“You
Are Every
thing
, and Every
thing
Is
You
.”