Lookout Cartridge (78 page)

Her goodbye came so fast then that it seemed cut off; I had not answered his challenge about the letter on Aut’s desk, so Monty must have heard from Jan.

But there was so much he had not asked. Like the sound. The sound tapes he’d asked about like a madman outside my cab the first time we parted so long ago it seemed. Why didn’t he ask this time? Three of those tapes were in a parka under a bed in his house. Where were the others?

But here was my friend Dagger who at length had opened Claire’s door on a beautiful October Saturday in New York and was jollying me along about “our” taxi whose flat I should have fixed, and my secret visits to his wife, and was I trying to put Jenny through a survival course, man, and Dagger had come very close to flying up to the Hebrides looking out for her.

He wore an Army jacket and a Castro cap; he took the dog’s leash off the closet door-handle. I was about to ask where Claire was and why Dagger had wished to put the Softball Game between the Hawaiian-in-the-Underground and the Suitcase Slowly Packed, but I reached down without looking and touched the familiar bulk of an untouched Sunday
Times
and was glad the film was probably destroyed, maybe I could conquer my weightlessness and sell the destroyed film to Jack Flint who must not wish his brother Gene’s wife and house on view, nor his agent Krish in the Softball Game, nor his brother Paul the guru in transit at the Bonfire in Wales (near where Brunel’s timber viaduct over the Usk burned and was replaced by him with iron)—nor would Jack want his brother, his youngest his magnetic brother Paul’s voice on a Nagra tape or his face in a stone doorway at the probable scene of Jim Nielsen’s liquidation. For you could never tell how someone would make use of film footage—U.S. Air Force planes acquired for a moment to illustrate power possessed of momentum but insufficient focus like Cosmo’s Sunday fastball; America and England mingling in some dream of action and peace; Brunel’s great Clifton suspension bridge across the Avon gorge failing to convey me, my son, my dreams, my daughter, my wife (so that one might almost agree with Ned Noble’s late conviction that the finished thing, contrary to Kelvin’s belief in demonstration, was inferior to the concept); an American couple making music in a passage I used to walk along with my children; the use of my life as background for something else; the nervous wife fluttering in anti-climactic 8 mill, stronger than she looked.

Strong enough to lift that carton out of sight last Sunday night.

Claire’s big black retriever lay across the living-room threshold while Dagger fumbled for the ring to snap the leash. The dog seemed very calm if it was really about to be walked.

Dagger must have been telling the truth that Claire was not in, for he was taking the dog out. Asking me to wait.

To wait?

Claire’s expecting a delivery man.

I don’t believe you, friend, I said.

That’s your fault, friend.

If Claire’s absence and her unexcited dog did not show I was being once again set up, all other signs pointed inward at me. All the reports.

I placed a call to Highgate. While I waited I reread Dagger’s letter. It had come from London to Monty’s house in King Street, been conveyed to John’s loft probably by Jan, read by Jan or Paul or John or Monty or some or all of these or more; so whatever of me Dagger had sent was there for them as well: H.E.W. (on recommendations from, among others, a behaviorist friend of the English schoolteacher who’d been sacked from his job in the Bahamas) will take Mr. DiGorro on for pilot study to determine if the government wishes to get into sleep-teaching at federal level; and Dagger says in the letter, All bets are off with the film, sorry man you pushed too hard but you surprised me man and I’ll always wonder what you would have done in Corsica without me, right now the heat’s on and this heat confuses me but you know all about it—be good to Claire, we’ll be in touch.

It would work; it was not the piece of that retreating dream he’d had the morning of that little b & w crucifixion on the beach with the Bahama sand in his eyebrows and California sticking to his eyes and he’d been asleep enough to hold the thought that dreams are a species of sleep-teaching with a key difference that Dagger was just awake enough to lose; but now, what the hell—for peat’s sake—plain sleep-teaching would pay the bills—it would work, it would keep millions of kids away from violent schools during peak hours and Alba would work and transfer her closet to a new set of equally clear axes, Dagger did not get bogged down.

I said Cancel the call.

A man’s voice with an English accent said, No reply, sir.

Just as well. She would have asked where Jenny was.

Right, sir.

Well, Tessa had never except literally had her teeth in me, and I thought Lorna knew this by instinct, even if she did not know what she meant when on that July Sabbath that my own Hindu-American
shtip
had set off she’d said I had friends—married friends—to organize me on my travels.

I ran by others’ times and, cogged to one another, they by mine—which brought me near again to a formula but shunted off again at the memory of being shunted this terminal Thursday of October by Monty’s information and the thought and threat of Dagger’s letter but by being shunted given a gift, namely that on Tuesday night when Sub had already entered Roosevelt Hospital for tests and I fried cheeseburgers and told the kids the story of the Three Brothers and of how Dagger got his name, and watched a thriller in which everyone talked softly and walked loudly, and I waited for Jenny to phone and wondered if the Frenchman and Nash had gotten to her—I had dreamt my lookout dream, and now recalled nothing of it but that fact. But as if sound had been time, no time had passed while for me Monty had been soundless—and when my Sabbath
shtip
had ended I listened as closely to the dinner in Coventry as I had to the trivial news that had caused my
shtip—
Dagger’s H.E.W. and a carton of audio gear to fall back on.

A
heavy
carton? Dagger had surely swung a hop from a U.K. base and skipped the excess-weight charges. Alba loved London. She was excited by Dagger’s absences, but she would not like Washington. But they would find a flat or something larger and there would be room, and they would have another child. And Alba would be careful. And have I lulled you who have me?

Well I was over Claire’s living-room threshold in a second as if the room were a thought and from that clear pale indefinably oriental order I carried in my eye in another second back to the bedroom door the living-room blow-up of Claire’s grainy arm, and as I opened the bedroom door knowing what I wanted in her closet, I feared I would find something awful between it and me. But the king-size low expanse was flat as a motel bed and I whipped open her deep closet and hauled out from under the longer hems of dresses and the shorter limits of pants suits what Alba would never never have made the mistake of lifting Sunday night in London if she had not feared I would find out what was inside.

I clawed at the seam.

Tore my right index nail.

Two amplifiers a snug top layer.

Below were Nagra tapes.

And the rest was 16 mill.

Ours.

Dated and Placed. In my hand.

Developed or not I could not easily tell.

My blood was on the amplifier carton.

I gathered all the tapes.

I put them down on the bed and left blood there too.

I laid the amplifiers back in the carton.

A picture of Claire on the night table reminded me of how Jenny is like my sister.

In the incinerator room shared by the other tenants on this floor I unrolled our black-and-white Stonehenge and it was a developed negative, tiny and lurid.

Near the hundred-foot mark of the second Stonehenge reel I looked for Paul being tugged through a portal by the witch Tessa in her green beret but found Nash instead and remembered that not Dagger but the other man in the plastic mac had probably shot Tessa tugging Paul, and then I gave up unrolling the cork-screw celluloid and took the reels out of their cases and dumped the lot and heard the rattle halfway down fifteen floors to the basement furnace, then read the white letters on the black plastic plaque telling what not to put down the chute, and wondered if in fact film was still made out of celluloid.

Liquid assets you say?

Not liquid enough.

I took last Sunday’s
Times
from Claire’s hall table. I opened the pages and scrunched them as if to start some kindling and filled the top of Dagger’s carton and found some Scotch tape (called one of America’s signal inventions, by a famous English writer with famous scientific forebears who himself died an American citizen in California taming his terminal throes with LSD).

I sealed the carton, shoved it into the closet, realigned two pairs of slippers in front, and went to answer a buzz that proved to be not the door but the housephone.

Dagger had been told by Claire all right.

Delivery man.

Two: a tall old man in bell-bottoms, a red bandanna under his chin; and a woman my age or older whom I felt I knew from a negative somewhere—platinum shag, a plump pretty face matured by comfort.

O.F. pick-up, the man said.

Had Claire known Dagger would be out?

O.F.? I said.

Outer Film, the woman said.

Your key, the man said, and handed me the key to Claire’s flat.

Now where would it be, I said, thinking of Peter Minuit and the Indians.

Bedroom closet, said the woman. Which is the bedroom?

So Claire’s triple game had now been left to simplify itself for safety’s sake.

I thought, There goes a box of newspaper; but the old man in the bandanna asked what the hell was in here, couldn’t be just film.

I pocketed Claire’s key, as her door closed.

I imagine that if you (who have me) cut me open at the right points you’d find Will, Lorna, Jenny, some others, each in motion in some way but you would find them. Yet there is something in what Jan and Tessa said of me later; and I wonder if, in the trap that I presently had to choose, my morale could have been worn down by an amplifier tuned to my heartbeat: the thunder thud: a closed system growing conscious of itself till it thinks itself into pause as if it guessed some lightning ought to have preceded it: and it waits breathless: and sometimes it waits too long.

Dagger didn’t come back.

I answered the phone.

I had to go.

The scene shifts and I with it.

Heartless they both called me—Jan, angry, then fearful; Tessa weirdly tremulous then angry at herself: heartless it was of Cartwright to gamble Jenny’s life.

Ah Tessa, there’s more than one way to gauge hormone levels (mine, Dudley’s, or a kilted chieftain’s in orbit). The two wheels cogged to each other turn their calendars toward one special day in the mesh of Maya teeth, the sacred cardiectomy proceeds upon a sunny pyramid, no sutures needed but the stress is real, four priests spread the victim on the stone, the fifth so marvelously brings down the knife and up the beating heart in his free hand that watching from below you know the heart came up to meet the hand; but not today, for here, my dear Tessa, the victim has no heart—that’s right—the breast is parted, blood goes on, there is no heart; the priest must improvise—but dares, since only the four can really see him stick the beautiful knife here and there hunting the heart the people want, who if they get to see the frantic hack-marks may go after the surgeon.

Kill him, he can disappear, said Incremona who’d been looking beyond me, and so saying he looked away from me to the doorway of a larger room that had been dark when they’d whisked me through.

For you see, Jan had said Cartwright could make people appear; and Incremona listened when she said she felt in her bones that I had made Reid appear Tuesday for I had said he was with Paul and yet when Reid entered Monty’s house Jan could see Reid was stunned to see Paul.

Skip the magic, said Chad, who was the last person I’d looked at as I was struck in the chest downstairs (if in fact where I now was was upstairs and not the basement). In the dark room that we’d come through to reach this red-and-blue room there were two great square metal housings, a TV screen, a typewriter-like keyboard, a light-pen attached to a console by a telephone-type cord—other hard edges. There were voices there now, and Chad shut the door. I knew where the building was but not where in it I was.

I was there they thought because of Jenny. I had not really expected to see her and I was not disappointed in my expectation. The blow sent my breath away and the word Stupid occurred but whether said by someone else or me or merely thought, I didn’t know, and when I could see again and think what I was seeing I was being helped through a hall to that dark room by Chad and Mike and it had not been Chad who’d hit me in the dilapidated marble vestibule, for I had turned toward him where he stood against the wall, and the blow, the fist, the arm into my chest had come from someplace else.

In the empty red-and-blue room there were newspaper headlines on the carpet.

I did not ask where Jenny was. When Chad sat down on the floor, that is where they all were—Gene, Mike, Jan on a bright cushion, Nash in a half-lotus kneading his lips with a knuckle, beside him the white-haired Frenchman leaning back on his hands shifting his legs, Incremona kneeling back on his heels at the far end by the other door, Chad’s tribal cuts seeming both more raw and more leathery in my state of altered alertness after the blow to my chest—all of them on the floor except John-of-Coventry leaning against the wall and he later went out through Incremona’s door to find a chair.

I moved above them, moved about the room. No one stopped me. I passed between Len and John, Jan and Mike, and therefore Chad and Mike, between Chad and Nash and therefore Chad and John.

I had brought them together. The headlines were medium big. I didn’t let John go further with Len than the curtest rebuke before I broke in. After all, I said, Len had never liked the film except as a cover, and after we caught him in Corsica with the girl Marie who could be traced to the Druid’s macrobiotic community in South London, the area where on a certain summer Sunday Len had given a pal of his a beating without visible injury in particular that tell-tale bloody nose, Len had liked me less and less; so John-of-Coventry should not stop Len from saying what he felt, any more than John should stop knocking our film which was for us, if I might speak in a pedestrian way for myself (and here my words threw up an improbable idea) an ongoing form of communication whether with Beaulieu 16, later Kodak Super 8, or now in New York (and here was the idea) slides, slides shot with an Olympus-Pen brought in from the other side by Dagger DiGorro—so, from first-strike U.S. bombers taking off, to our burly French operative in Dagger’s flat in August betraying as much with his uncomfortable face as with his taped voice (but betraying exactly what?), to a blank momentum of white screen, the plunge now to slides would be like a movie’s ultimate still—like Morse code for Beethoven, eh Lorna (dot dot dot daaa) better yet 3 (dot dot dot daaa daaa)—or a heart, Gene, which having raced like a bomb beats easier transplanted to a fresh system; listen, Jan, in this growing work of ours this jump from movie through blank screen to slides feels like a jump between two rates of Maya time that bypasses the cogged tangent where the sacred and the solar calendars, great circle, small circle, move each other meshed; so this communication grows, Nash, from Stonehenge, where you thought one rite concealed another wrong (which Jim Nielsen’s folks would have paid to hear from you in their new windbreakers if you had stood at my door in Highgate a week ago today), on up to Callanish, Chad, where by a miracle your gun helped kill the Indian agent Krish who after all was not hired to break in and destroy the film, though was indeed employed by Jack Flint with whom I’ve on occasion been inseparable as Elspeth’s mother will attest. So all in all, John, it isn’t surprising Incremona wants to liquidate me, for he’s quite right—I and this film that never says die and is worth quite a lot of cash are no good as a cover, for the cover doesn’t cover, it reveals.