Lookout Cartridge (72 page)

I
, said Monty Graf, did not interrogate
John: John
of his own free will told
me
, and I’ve known him much longer than you.

But Sub disagreed. He said that what Ned had done was not terrible, that my question to Ned’s already grieving father Hy was not heartless, and that Ned’s mother following me out into the hospital hall still holding the book Ned did not want her to read to him and hearing my question to Ned’s father and then her rebuke to me, was reacting as helplessly to the messages coming in as Ned was himself in that high bed she smoothed every hour, or as I was myself, coming out of Ned’s private room to ask a question that meant I did not want this undependable friend (whom Sub never liked) to die, but in words as clear as the messages in my head were scrambled.

Look, said Monty, if you want to know exactly what John—

But the waiter asked if we were ready to eat.

Ned had promised me his crystal receiver. He had done so on the day I reached far out my window in Brooklyn Heights to grab between its upward and downward course (like two gravities) his vertical throw. But when I visited him in Brooklyn Hospital the autumn of ’45, he said he’d destroyed the crystal set precisely because he’d promised it to me, and having committed the plans for the other thing to memory (I called it a time machine but Ned never labeled it) he’d soaked the page in rubbing alcohol blurring the ink and when it had dried and what was flammable had (so he said) evaporated, he had burnt the page, though not the logo he had designed for the formulas. And since the night I came home to Highgate from Liverpool having failed to sell the drive-in movie project (and all the way to Euston toyed with the vision of mobile terminals for trains or new conveyances) and arriving home heard the climax of Tessa Allott’s tale of Uncle Karl who was blinded by the same blow that woke him up, which in turn was to Tessa first of all an intimation of some other (or after-) life rooted in her vision that a thought properly held just before and during death carried into timeless survival with it the person whose brain (no doubt, as I suggested to her, tuned and integrated to the whole bodily life) had for its part helped to crystallize the idea and then had flickered out hundred-cell-parcel by hundred-cell-parcel (heca-cell by heca-cell if you think of Welsh cows offered up as unsacrificed accidents to a would-be god), I have seen Ned’s act as another kind of gift and as a model for futures even further than Andsworth’s vague next stage, which may be really like what I felt after Mrs. Noble came to the door of Ned’s private room (now awful again, its colorless door ajar at my back) and heard me ask Mr. Noble if Ned was kidding about the crystal set and the time machine—she said, You are heartless.

But Hy Noble said no he was afraid his son wasn’t kidding, and then he stuck out his hand to shake mine. He said, You understand.

I said, Yes.

He said, I think you’ve helped. You’ve helped me.

How? said Monty.

Monty was afraid but cool. A camera could not show what I state: If I wouldn’t tell about those right-angles Tuesday and operations he assumed I was at least mentally in command of, then he would think of Ned and try to compute digital trivia.

The hand of Ned’s father held mine for several counts as if the hand-to-hand connection was still on the way. Time held. I looked behind still holding Ned’s father’s brown hand; the door was shut.

Always after that, I felt between them.

And I never saw them again, though Christmas of my freshman year in college Mrs. Noble phoned my mother to say they had an extra ticket for
Streetcar
and later on I heard Ned’s sister had graduated from Chicago and gone to Germany. Ned read my mind; but during these years in England perhaps he’s read it even more truly.

Wait—said Monty; he’s alive?

He died a routine drugged death in the fall of ’45. Hy founded a scholarship at our school. There’s no telling what Ned might have achieved. My father heard in Wall Street that Hy had talked to his partner about changing his name back to what it was in 1920 when his father had changed it to Noble, but Hy’s wife was against this. Hy was an expert doubles player. His feet, he said (though I never saw for myself), were almost perfectly flat, but there had been something else as well that had kept him out of the war. Why do I call him by his given name Hy?

How close are you and Dagger really?

Close enough to have read his letter to his niece about the project she contemplated behind Aut’s back. Close enough to have in a pocket of mine hidden at this instant in the King Street house a note Dagger had from you, Monty, in which you say that if he is counting on my diary to advertise his film, maybe you should see a piece. A piece of the action, Monty, your thing.

The waiter is thinking mainly that we haven’t ordered, and to judge from his permanently raised gray-tufted eyebrows and creased forehead and his skeptical eyes, he is not interested in what at first glance he or a camera would see in Monty’s now suddenly quite undivided face, a fixed look that could be dislike, could be rage, a hot antipasto that wasn’t sitting well (but the waiter knew we hadn’t eaten), or a coldly intelligent fear much more clearly coherent than its nearest cause, which was what I (in my hypothetical field of multiple impingements) was doing to him and to myself. I did not have to have the sharpness of a god to know that he did not wholly mean to let go his next words: Who put that letter on my brother-in-law’s desk.

I answered, A sequence of footsteps, phone rings, bucket clanks, lights, darks—words which reminded me that, godlike or not, my strength was in knowing what these others mistook: that all I had was my place in a multiple system. So I was not wholly responsible for now saying to Monty (what I knew would worry if not scare him) that Jack Flint wouldn’t like that letter, he wouldn’t like it one bit, and neither would the man who had almost shot John in my presence—did Monty happen to know Incremona?

Monty, whom a cine camera of any water would have shown to break his pose as soon as the waiter limped off, and a sound track would have voiced in cadences heavily ironic, now softly pounded out such words as Power already in process, right? like someone else’s crystal prototype? someone else’s formula? like some other boy’s baseball you happened to catch? someone else’s film idea you steal without understanding? isn’t that what it’s all about, Cartwright? like someone’s lighter which those who have not handled it before had better not reach for in your pocket?

There was no beer in the stein I tipped back to my mouth-tipped more calmly than a camera could see. Monty had heard about Krish, so Krish had been discovered. And Monty had heard I was suspected. I saw him through the stein like an old forgotten hypothesis, then set it down and looked for the waiter and waved, while Monty said how he cared about that girl and nothing must happen to her even if I was the one as he now began to think who was at the heart of the whole thing—and even if I already had the information he was about to give me, I was not going to have the chance to sneak it, he was going to give it to me free and then he was going to get up from this table and he hoped I understood where he stood.

Over your head, I said.

He said that taking me into account Dagger DiGorro was wise to distribute his chances so now he had H.E.W. and a carton of audio gear to fall back on.

Which gave me, as Tessa’s father would say, a
shtip:
Dagger then was really serious about that vita sent to his old friend in Washington, and he was busy too with a carton of audio gear like an extra suitcase or a box of softball bases and bats and balls or of Nikon lenses (the Nikon
system
you’re urged to commit yourself to) bought through the U.S. Air Force or Navy or from the woman in Amsterdam or the man in Antwerp with pounds sterling acquired in bulk the week after the Marvelous Country House when (as I learned from Jenny) he’d had advance word of devaluation by that revolutionary Republican Nixon and unloaded all the dollars he could get his hands on. But I had no time to trace that
shtip
from side to back to stomach to calf, chest, and shoulder, a node of warm mercury lurching like some bulk of liquid around my body when I smoked Geoff’s friend Jasper’s hash.

For, extending the waiter’s course, my eye reached the bar and there just leaving was John the man in glasses—friend of Jerry who paid his loft-rent, friend of June whose voice I’d last heard at the moment Tuesday that I discovered the two right angles Monty now seemed to have foregone—and there, too, were the steel-rimmed specs I’d knocked off, which was nothing to what Incremona, that lithe, otterlike personal and impatient revolutionary might do to the other John if John was in cahoots with this John’s boss Phil Aut (though I could not then on Thursday have said exactly why). And yet, whatever Hy’s wife might think of me to this day when she is beyond the first shocks of that twelve months during which her son Ned died of a lung cancer as swift in its race to self-destruct as it seemed mysteriously untraceable, and during which she had news of her mother’s cousins and her husband’s Nachbush cousins spirited into an ultimate statistic whose increasingly rhetorical melody rhymes with
ill, will, kill
, and
pill (pillion
indeed) as readily as it calls up my bedtime variant of the witch shoved into the oven or echoing chatter in the soap-strewn steamy concrete showers after swimming practice the winters of ’45 and ’46, and may even twist the unable mind to dollar dreams (but what’s six million worth today?), say some law-making appropriation so those who find technology cold and soulless might suddenly think (if they could) of that early European computer made of one hundred human beings—this
shtip
or stab seemed a thought crystallized as at the fork of a nerve cell, yet in my whole body too, whose heart was hard to find because pointless to seek since now so open to the lines of others in this petty system I had had a hypothesis about but forgotten.

Having lived something like the story of his life, Dagger had moved on to fatherhood; he had a daughter. It was not clear if the English schoolmaster had lost his job in the Bahamas because he had sat by Dagger’s driftwood fire watching a cube of pink meat with certain wartime associations drip and spit on the toasting prongs that belonged to the lady who had the guest house; but the island’s Church of England vicar to his deep joy and satisfaction (though not his wife’s, in her pink, broad-brimmed, locally woven hat bending over a large lush garden having issued two of her three servants their day’s easy instructions) was transferred back to England not long after he had told a commissioner that the schoolmaster drank borrowed hotel rum with an American beachcomber who had been a comfortable spectator one Sunday while native boys offered mild violence to a small tourist from Toronto, a white female child. And (if you wished to be suddenly very clear) Dagger was almost Monty’s age; and even with various kinds of American money (even after the Nixon devaluation) and at London prices (even with inflation), and even with the pleasure which a French wife named Alba took in wheeling a pram just a few blocks to the Heath (which reminded Lorna Cartwright not at all of Central Park and its dream-fence of high-rise stone to the east, west, and south, but of real country far! from smoke, lunchtime mobs, and the press of motors, not to mention amenities like the Indian physician who was Alba’s devoted friend and so gave that extra attention to her minor ailments, to the baby’s skin, and to Dagger’s gastric pangs, that compensated for the shortcomings of the English Health Service)—there were measurable respects in which between life in London and life in America the, differences had begun to deteriorate. So how did you figure the big money at this stage? A way had opened for Dagger and it was through Claire, who would do almost anything for him, and through Phil Aut, who would do almost anything for his son Jerry (who in turn would do anything for his mother Jan, whose dreams of world rapprochement included her dark-haired preoccupied husband only as a block of flats includes a plumbing system or a democracy includes other people). And Dagger’s way—through Claire and Aut and Jan—had lain from London through New York to London, to Hyde Park and its Sunday bases and to wild Wales through an Unplaced Room that by identifying son and mother could suddenly change Aut’s estimate of all that came before or after—and Dagger confessed to me the Saturday morning after the Thursday evening of my interview with Monty that shooting Jan’s wild portrait of Jerry had been designed to ensure a little last-minute leverage if only to sustain Phil Aut’s concern with a film which to his strangely inhibited but intense protectiveness might thus seem to implicate in left-wing activities the two human beings he told Jack Flint in a rare moment of frankness he would make any sacrifice for. And I with my diary and my daughter had intervened in Dagger’s simple sequence of acts and maybe thrown a monkey wrench into his chance of the big money.

For me the film was just one speculation. I had some irons in; the fire and I expected to be solvent no matter what happened. But it seemed on Saturday with Dag, on Thursday with Monty, and on Tuesday listening to June while watching Reid, Jenny, and the Frenchman—that my film could not have developed parallel to Dagger’s without disturbing it.

His had been one open and neat part of Aut’s exploitation of Jan’s plan. Like getting rare maps from one part of the world to another. The serial route of some man-made automaton. Background footage for insertion, a piece here a piece there, in something else.

I, however, had deliberately used this thing as a point through which attention might be distributed. But whatever the film now meant to me, I must succeed in selling it, I must get us both a decent return on our parallel inputs.

I thought, That’s it! My
shtip
is simply that by not letting Dag’s film alone, I’ve cost him some money.

But at once that line of thought lapsed like blips on a weather scope into new blips as the radar pulse sweeps full circle but never quite full because never through quite the same weather, though from sweep to sweep the blips may seem as stable as a map or a fleet at anchor. No, my
shtip
had no neat equation in cash or rueful credit. You would not exactly measure it as a Hyde Park home run stretched for years of Dagger’s extra bases to a right-angle two-phone desk at H.E.W. in Washington, where he had been recommended by the English schoolmaster whose Bahama contract had not been renewed. Nor would you exactly measure my
shtip
in the two U.S. Coast Guard weather balloons Dagger picked up through an Embassy attaché inflated now almost eight years later not by the local or imported American helium inside the sheer white elastic that Will and Jenny got their hands on and bombarded briefly the day they got those gifts from their father’s jolly new friend, but rather by regret—inflated so to constantly enlarge their equally lessening size loose over Hamp-stead Heath—adrift yet not moving, not moving, and yet the Heath itself was retreating.