Lookout Cartridge (77 page)

Tuesday, July 6, we rested in the water at the far end of the pool, an elbow lying on the tile, feet idly treading for pleasure, and Dudley told me how he had not liked the doctor’s rough handling of Jane’s cast but when she looked at her arm he had felt something else, a
shtip
—he stopped, he smiled the scholar’s quick mad smile to himself—a
shtip
indeed, a
shtip
—for her reaction hurt him, her arm was a thing the way it is when circulation gets cut off and you have to pick your arm up and hold it while you shift your position in bed, and what hurt her hurt him.

But even more idly than I was treading, I was staring idly at his pale and hairy stomach enlarged in the tile-blue-tinted water, a lens for Corsica—not so much Dag’s call the night before to announce that it was on again he was glad to say, but more what I’d proposed: the women looking ten years older than the men, a woman flogging Napoleon souvenirs, a university student in a café explaining in English to an American the meaning of the ’68 slogan
THE MORE I MAKE LOVE THE MORE I WANT TO MAKE THE REVOLUTION,
American dropouts living in the coastal caves, sharp
CUT
to a construction crew wiring sticks of dynamite apparently (because of the sharp cut) on top of the very cliff that housed the caves, and finally (or as far as I had gone with Dagger on the phone) a Corsican breaking open his fowling piece and cleaning it and laying it back in the boot of his car.

Thus preoccupied, I wondered only later if my reason for not asking Dudley why he talked to me openly the way he did was that I was afraid he would reply in his direct way something that on the contrary would embarrass
me
, or lead if you will beyond the inherent reward of Dudley’s candor on certain accepted subjects.

He is an honorable man.

There in the water he said, Well I couldn’t let her go to the doctor on her own with Queenie, could I?

But he would never have said, That bitch of a wife of mine had to pick yesterday morning to go to the British Museum to try to identify the person on whom the romantic hero of Wilkie Collins’
The Woman in White
is based who also may well have given his name or most of it to the heroine of that book.

But Dudley—as a combination of waters now washed glimmeringly into my view—could embarrass Tessa when he wanted. Yes, that Sabbath
shtip
apart from its inherent reward had its 25 percent of incremental information gossiping through gate after gate like a digital sum to the hot and nice but (because Will had not washed the tub) faintly scummy bath water from which I delivered to Lorna my two-part definition of Hindu Māyā and she for her part told how Dudley had angered Tessa at that party by asking Dag and interrupting to ask again and yet again who was this Nash, eh? who was Nash?

A query I now saw came from Jane’s cast, destroyed to reveal the true limb it had been made to mend—first inspected—inspected rather casually I should have guessed that Sunday, July 3, while Tessa washed the teacups and Jane looked up the movie they would see with us that night.

But Jenny did not go after all. She phoned Reid, and they met, and the
quid pro quo
of their meeting I imagined now in Paul’s cab that had gone strange on us this October Thursday in New York just as accurately as Jenny herself told me when I got it out of her Saturday.

But why did Nash want to call himself to Tessa’s attention?

Mike!
I exclaimed.

Mike indeed. Mike who had heard me answer Mary Napier that the name of my friend who visited in Edinburgh was Tessa Allott.

But Mike had heard this in Ajaccio, whereas on the Sunday Nash autographed Jane’s cast Dagger and I had not even been to Corsica. A valve had opened with a blink like the Mercurial god of film, cutting some prefigured Corsica into a Marvelous Country House as yet unshot, and some coordinate part of me had leaned naturally toward that vacuum blink, but must say No, and in lieu of an answer ask the question Why did Dagger change his mind and say on Monday night, July 5, that we were going to Corsica after all?

I knew only what others knew.

As you who have me know, I did not seek top secrets from the bottom of my heart. But that is where they seemed to fall, and I had no hard-hat to leave above the grating’s grid. I become all these data shredded into their oscillations. A Zen voice from Lorna’s crisis of the late fifties comes home with her: it is late at night: she stands over me still in her coat, I look up at the smell of her soap and the damp rain on her shoulders: I love her: she smiles a brave matinée smile that asks for an understanding no man can give, no real man, or maybe just not me: she quotes her koan: Open yourself as wide as the sky: she laughs silently.

Open myself as wide as the sky?

But that was not Brunel’s way. Consider the astronaut. Unlike those wartime shipyard workers who now know that the asbestos they breathed a generation ago may yield a fiery carcinoma, the astronaut cannot know what lesions of the eye or breakdowns of the head may hit him in his earthly autumn from those flicker-flashes radiating by night through his helmet and out the other side into the unresisting space of his late youth. Meanwhile we do what we can. We look at the unmediated glare of the sun in space and devise a visor and rethink certain properties of imperviousness in gold. We look at the fact of heart shrinkage in the weightlessness of space where it works less; and it is possible to do something; we measure stress in the elevated levels of activity of a nerve-transmitter called catecholamine related to hormones. And Brunel with his banged head sunk in an overflow that has collected—Brunel breathing air and water and fire—will think not of the devoted waiting wife, or his centrifugal solution to the threat of suffocation by a coin caught in his throat in the bosom of his family, or his dawn horseback ride to Bath thence to survey the valley of the Avon and the soft hill clay along a canal, but thinks rather at once about what caused the fire on the
Great Western
—and the clear answer in his new
Great Britain
is David Napier’s new feed-water heater, not to stop the excess heat around the funnel but to use it. I do not wish for a technology of wedlock. Still there are times—a problem could have been stated, a pain received as a message. Dagger got Alba’s phone call at the école in Ajaccio and at once saw that even if her false labor did not last, she had to know he was on his way back to London—though in Paul’s October cab I wondered if Dagger had used the false labor (which must have been nerves because Alba took methodical care not to overtax her body) to get us out of Corsica before I poked into something that was not our business. Now Brunel’s
Great Britain
had another problem on her maiden voyage to New York. She lost her way and ran aground on the coast of Ireland, and at daybreak the skipper looked for the Isle of Man and saw the Mountain of Mourn, but this was because there were errors in a new chart that had not existed in the old. More important, this was a mishap that Brunel’s unprecedented longitudinal iron girders (like his earlier timber viaduct that survived the head-on collision of two trains) could withstand but not forestall. And so in the transfer from the old chart to the new the
Great Britain
(51 feet broad, 289 feet long between perpendiculars) survived, and so did Brunel’s name, which was enhanced.

I was on the verge of a formulation. Ned Noble’s terminal breaths lay ahead but near, and Andsworth’s Integrated Breathing beckoned me on past my concern for a shrunken heart and my concern about why he did not urge me to attend macrobiotic meals at the Community though I would have declined. He kept his activities in compartments, as Geoff Millan did his friends, and as once in those long drizzly safe winters in London I had thought Dagger did not.

Speak of the devil!

I said it aloud.

We were bumping to a stop at the red light and John’s cab ran on ahead.

It was what Dagger had said coming away from our preliminary visit to Stonehenge.

Slowing down to help the Druid, Dag had said Speak of the devil, as if recalling negotiations through Andsworth and not our present dispute about what film we’d used for the threesome against the fortress wall in Ajaccio. But Dagger had been stubbornly attentive; and now I understood.

But I had no time; two of that threesome were Marie and Incremona, and John-of-Coventry said she had been after Len to go on a macrobiotic diet, and Dagger’s stomach had been kicking up after breakfast at the école and I’d told him to change his diet, and he’d been reaching with his free hand for a Turns when the three appeared, and whether or not it was at Andsworth’s in South London that Incremona had beaten up Nash after the South Ken fiasco, it was clearly Andsworth’s Community that drew the Druid into the fortress scene in Dagger’s mind as we sighted the old Ford on Salisbury Plain and slowed down to help him fix his flat.

But I had no time, because that was precisely what Paul’s cab had—a flat.

No time to figure Andsworth’s collaborations with friends, enemies, and neutrals; nor for the unlikely prospect that my train of thought had caused this flat.

Guiding Ruby and Tris across the islanded double road of Park Avenue South at 7
A.M
. for breakfast at a coffee shop, I saw Incremona and a blond man half turned away at a postbox on the southwest corner, I could have raised my voice in song and no one would have heard, for the sound around us was that great; I could have been one of those street singers of yore who materialized out of Atlantic Avenue and wandered the fine enclosed streets of Brooklyn Heights on a Sunday morning and looked up to our windows for a couple of buffalo nickels tight-folded in a chewing-gum-sized scrap of the Sunday
Times
—and no one here in Manhattan (perhaps even including Incremona who at that moment tracked my physical presence only) would have known much less taken me for a mad yeller attacking the system diagonally from some corner—the sound around us was that great.

But now as I bolted from Paul’s cab and ran after John’s, thinking if nothing else I could ascertain that he was not after all leading me where I thought, Paul shouted into a quiet that can be a city’s powerful charm at night be it London, New York, or somewhere in between—a humming quiet like an afterglow of glare, a field just out of sight voicing a guarantee that something has happened and will again: Paul shouted, I only wanted to help!

In the last word the deep voice out of that narrow tall chest contained still like an obscure unvoiced quiet surrounded by all the windy vacuum of other answers, those words It comes to that, and that alone.

Two hundred and forty miles without the wheel.

But where then was the calm Jan said Paul had found beyond stones and stars, beyond contemplation? But hell, here he’d been driving me into a trap.

To help me?

I could not find John’s cab. It turned west where I expected but did not then turn into the block of Mercer that I’d thought I was being drawn into. I was out of breath. There was no light around the shade in John’s loft.

When I got back to Paul’s cab, it was empty in the middle lane with its lights on and the traffic light ticking from green to red, and John-of-the-loft seemed not to have come back. I ran my hand around the tread of the tire that had gone, and I found what I was looking for.

Rose had Ruby and Tris till Sunday. Sub’s tests would be over then.

Should have kept the cab, said Dagger on Saturday—fixed your flat, hundred percent mobility, drive and park till the city towed you away, could have had it as our first car for weeks.

I was curious, said Gilda on Friday; you’re not responsible for me. She had at last got a call through to me at Sub’s to report that the man who had called himself Cartwright had come again and she had got into the spirit of the thing, couldn’t help it, and had told him a scary bald man had told her Cartwright was meeting Claire—at which this impersonator of me had been strangely shaken.

I walked from Paul’s cab to Monty’s house, which was dark. Later I phoned Claire and got her answering service.

Paul would not knowingly kill me.

I must find out what it was I knew that was so important to these people.

I would have to ask.

The black man who’d said We all part of the system, man, had chuckled when Paul’s cab crunched the glass of a bottle the black man would have hit John with if my steps or the inevitable field of my presence had not made John stop and look back, and the bottle crashed in the gutter instead, there to insert some of itself into the arriving tire of my cab.

Friday I waited in Sub’s apartment.

For Incremona, Nash, the Frenchman, Jenny, Chad, June—I wasn’t sure.

I phoned Claire’s answering service and said I’d be seeing her.

Nothing happened.

I found if I waved at the TV from a distance of four feet I could stop the picture rising.

In the evening Sub phoned from the hospital. Keep the sound down, Ruby had bad dreams. Then Sub remembered the children were with Rose, and I heard him breathing erratically.

At home he watched the news and thrillers, thrillers with the sound off. Educational TV was starting a series of good films, old films, no interruptions.

What are you doing in? said Sub.

At ten the phone rang but the caller did not speak.

At eleven and at twelve the same.

No one tried the door.

Incremona had seen the children with me.

I tried to get you, said Dagger Saturday.

But in fact it had been Claire who’d phoned Saturday morning just as I was leaving for her apartment, and when I told her it was a pure accident my leaving the letter from Dag on Phil Aut’s desk, Claire did not know, she did not know—she had not been told—she had not been to her office.

Why did I believe her? I let her talk. I could not stop her. But something stopped her, after she had told me Monty was not a fool no matter what our meeting at the restaurant might lead me to think. In London he’d told Dagger I’d be staying at the King Street house, I was extraordinary but Monty was afraid of me; but I must not, please, think him a fool.