A woman’s laugh was off to my right somewhere near a florist’s doorway flanked by pussywillows in a black can and soft dark and bright pansies in tiers of flats.
The driver came round the rear of his car, his hands in front of him at hip level.
Jim stuck the length of aerial straight out.
The man in the T-shirt rushed onto it.
It went into his shirt well below the brown decal, which I now saw was a target of numbered rings.
The two words “License revoked” suddenly survived above the engines whose din swirled like a virtually immeasurable air conditioner killing itself yet letting off staggered signal horns to mark its decaying sequences.
The victim’s mouth was open.
From the rise and fall of the woman’s laugh I couldn’t tell if she had seen the stabbing.
The driver had got his aerial back in one piece. The other man let go.
A few inches showed in front.
When the victim turned, as to avoid the aerial already in him, the rod could be seen to have gone clear through and pierced his back. But instead of puncturing his T-shirt again it tented it out as if he had a rolled tabloid in his back pocket sticking up under his shirt.
The stabber, Jim, stepped back onto the curb. He set out east finding his way into the clusters of early lunchtime strollers.
The driver, with the severed aerial through him, stood against his black fender not doing anything. The gathering mass of traffic pressed north. There was blood at the corner of the driver’s mouth. His eyelids were pinched shut.
I was at the curb now. There was more than enough of the broken silver rod to get hold of.
Jim walking east was already half a block away if that was his beige suit.
A voice like the laughing woman’s said, Call a cop.
The noise volume guarded by high buildings rose into a homogeneity like quiet; like a patient Om.
Back down the swarming block I saw Claire; it had to be Claire because she still looked much like my Jenny, who is only seventeen.
At once she turned back and went into a corner camera shop. Even if she simply didn’t want to meet me an hour before the time we’d agreed on as well as in a place other than her apartment, had she in any case seen the stricken man through the crowd?
At this point, then, the driver is several feet in front of me, Claire is in a shop a block south, Jim is now half a block east. The aerial is fixed in the driver’s front and gleaming so cleanly the T-shirt is like a new polishing rag.
He went to his knees and the aerial sticking out his back scraped a line on the fender.
The pressure then must have increased his pain inside, but his eyes were shut and he was apparently silent among the vehicle horns and the revvings of diesel trucks pushing dark fumes out of side-stacks.
The kneeling man dropped his large hands from his stomach to the street, and one mashed a length of ocher turd, the other a dark circle of spit. So he was on his hands and knees, and his T-shirt had ridden above the two inches of aerial that came straight up out of his back red-sleeved.
Two Puerto Ricans pushing coats and dresses along left their four-wheeled racks at the curb and looked into the black car.
One of the driver’s hands was missing part of the middle finger.
A siren that seemed in its low register as close as a speaking voicerose and swooped to rise again, a cop car in traffic a block and a half south.
There was clearly nothing to do for the man in the T-shirt till the ambulance came, certainly not disengage the aerial.
I felt I had been inserted into a situation.
I went back to the camera shop a block south but, being on the corner, it happened to have another door around on the cross-town street.
I entered and someone called behind me, I saw it.
I passed along the glass counter thinking to catch Claire in the cross-town street. The man said, What happened?
Jenny my daughter was in the market for a Leica IIIG box for a hundred dollars top, and if I could find one an Elmar f3.5 too.
I said over my shoulder, A man was stabbed.
Claire was out of sight.
Back through the door, the camera man said, Oi.
Could I get Jenny a reliable second-hand 200-millimeter automatic as cheap here in the camera capital as on the other side through Dagger?
It had been Claire, but she looked even more like my own seventeen-year-old Jenny now the difference in age was less.
My eyes stung as if blinking through chlorine. Eastward the way I thought Claire had gone, a Salvation Army hatband showed dull soft red moving toward me.
Did Jenny even want something from America this time? Why did I have the idea she was saying to me, Don’t bother, I’ll get it myself when the time comes.
In 1957 she was three and didn’t yet object to Ginny; I said I’ll bring you a present when I come back from America. She knew present but not America. A list of all I’ve brought her since would make a history.
If I told the camera man my problem too simply, he’d say, Look, all your camera prices are much higher in England, they got a very serious problem with their economy.
But when he got my point about the American PX or the continental duty-free shops Dagger had connections with, he’d turn right off; he’d say, Well we don’t compete with those foreign prices—maybe you need some film? you take slides, try this Fuji color.
During this absence from my house in London that has almost no mortgage left on the freehold, I could be holed up in another part of London for a fortnight and not even be in America. Bringing a present from the PX in Ruislip on the outskirts of London or the Navy place near the Embassy was like bringing a present from the States. But Jenny wanted something else.
I cut back through the camera shop, I would meet Claire as arranged. The man was outside the other door looking up the block, but behind the counter now was evidently the proprietor, a white-haired broad swarthy man in very dark glasses.
A man in a stained apron came in behind me and put a lidless shallow cardboard box on the counter. The clerk came back in the other door. The ambulance is stuck in traffic, he said.
What’s the ambulance? said the deli man.
On his forearm across a vein and barely visible in the hair were five blue numerals.
Claire’s disappearance wouldn’t have mattered if she hadn’t first appeared. You see Jim Wheeler you haven’t seen in years, or been aware of not seeing. You see him impale somebody without exactly meaning to and walk away down a lunch-hour street. You see behind you a young woman you’re going to talk to in half an hour. She cuts back through a camera shop and you lose her.
My children aren’t children any more. Not like the Kodacolor display ad propped high on this glass counter—a regular neighborhood snap enlarged and backed—five kids aged say six to ten: if I could draw them out from behind their u-v filter, slide away the health spectrum, leave them black and white, they’d hear the tale of my trip to America and dismiss it in none of the adult ways your own family can.
The weekend had been confusing. Jenny had picked an argument Friday night but dropped it until Monday night and then Lorna seemed deliberately to have stayed upstairs packing my bag when I knew she’d normally get into the act.
I hadn’t told Lorna and Jenny and Will the trip was more than business, though Lorna unlike Dagger knew I had an appointment with Claire, and Lorna must have thought I wanted support for a second try on the film and wasn’t just having a friendly lunch with Dagger’s beautiful niece. And Lorna knew nothing of the Indian I thought might have slipped into Dagger and Alba’s flat during the three hours when someone had broken in and ruined most of our film.
My son Will would not dismiss the trip’s true purpose if he could understand it. But he’d think big, he’d imagine international manipulations.
Feed facts to wife, son, daughter: before you’re through you’re retrieving responses.
You take these little Americans in
the Kodacolor blow-up who would be just as multiracial in black and white: whip them out of their crush of color-corrected health, polarize them into Tri-X prints, and they’d ask good questions.
About Dagger’s film. They’d ask why and how. Maybe not when.
And who ruined the movie? And why did they?
Were the cops there—? The pigs, you mean, says the oldest, a ten-year-old black girl, her full lips moving in this still enlargement and my mind moving with her lips—let’s say she had fish-fingers for lunch at her school on Ninth Avenue this noon—fish-fingers! What’s fish-fingers? calls a nine-year-old oriental boy whose mother does not permit him to take advantage of the new hot breakfast how many New Yorkers in the highest-taxed city in America know is given at that same public school on Ninth Avenue—It’s fish-sticks! And the rest giggle, and two little ones add their motion to this blow-up ad for Kodacolor and start wrestling saying Fish-fingers! Fish-fingers!—and I’d tell them that in London fish-sticks are called fish-fingers (hot, fish-fingers old, which little piggie stays home with a cold), and I’d remind them it was in London that the film was destroyed.
Yeah? Anybody get killed in it? What’s it about?
I could be mysterious and the kids would take it. But if after I said, What would you rather do, see the film or hear me tell about it? and they said, See it, and I said, But it’s ruined, wrecked, exposed, burnt up by the light of day, then they’d squint in the New York sun, shrug and maybe nod and say, Yeah you could tell about it.
Last year when Will was fourteen he asked for a book on analog computers. (Or did I suggest it?) This trip it was brochures from the Stock Exchange. He is thinking of opening a numbered account in a Swiss bank with a hundred pounds.
At my end of the display case under the glass were some used items. Cameras mostly Japanese, then four lensless boxes with lens cap covering the hole; then some lenses on their own, at waist level black barrels ribbed with white-numbered distance scale, depth of field, f numbers, cylinders so rich you could just reach through the display case’s plate glass (avoiding the smudges) and lift out the heavy zoom and adjusting it to your eye and the subject snap without a box directly into your head like an act of thought. A 12–120 zoom with a crank and a little steel bar either of which turns the barrel. On sale also an Olympus-Pen just like Dagger’s; the half-frame means on a thirty-six-exposure roll you get seventy-two shot s, said Dag, and it was one of my bad days and I said to him, What if they’re lousy?
At the avenue door through which I’d first entered, I was weighed back by a thing in my eyes and chest like the damned sickness in my wrist when I fell off a ladder in Highgate and Lorna couldn’t stop laughing and Jenny ran to me and cried. (My Maine grandfather died not in his boat casting for lake bass but in a hotel.)
A new breeze blew steam to the doorway of the camera shop, sewer steam was what I smelled looking out. A smell not of London.
When I had asked what she wanted this time, Jenny said Bring me back a memory. But maybe because Dagger had just been on the phone to me I didn’t decide what she’d said and filed it away in my head as a request for a Memorex, which for a start was unlikely because you can buy them in London.
Outside I couldn’t see through the crowd up at the accident. Two cops were backing them off, but you’d think the trick would be clearing a way for the ambulance.
Crosstown vehicles were now locked into the uptown traffic. The black car hadn’t been moved. One cop was very tall and had a moustache.
In reply to my letter Claire couldn’t see what there was to discuss: her Uncle Dagger’s film as she saw the situation did not now exist even if it had been shot with a 16 that blows very well to 35, and Phil Aut doesn’t exactly promote nonexistent films. Furthermore, Claire went on, Mr. Aut had only said originally that he’d look at it, you never know what you can sell to TV, it wasn’t necessarily going to be a commercial proposition; he liked Claire, she said, and so he’d said he’d look at it when it was finished. What was there to discuss now?
If I’d wanted her just to hear my voice I could have sent her a cassette explaining myself.
How often had I seen her? What did I know?
She was in New York.
I was coming to New York anyway. I didn’t write her that.
Did the appointment stand?
Forty-eight hours before my flight from London, there was a cable. WEDNESDAY NOON INSTEAD MY PLACE CLAIRE.
PRINTED CIRCUIT CUT-IN FLASH-FORWARD
England is not safe for me. Is that it? The tempered voices in Geoffrey Millan’s living room above me as I pad up his stairs are past and future. I trail him into the long room that has at the street end some of his curious work and at the garden end some people. The round healthy face of the pediatrician and across the circle his sleek wife who has illustrated a children’s book. A bearded grim intellect whom I don’t know, with eyes either puffy or with an eastern fold at the corners. A splendid dark-haired woman not my wife who rises for some purpose. A girl named Nuala who once looked up my friend Sub in New York. A white-haired lady in a tweed suit who is a maths don and a vigorous violist and asks where my wife Lorna is tonight. A tall, long-haired boy of twenty named Jasper stretched in brown velvet trousers on his side on the rug between the chairs of Nuala and the woman who has risen, so he forms the one explicit arc of the circle.
The subject is not dropped on my entrance. It is a person—something he has done. The splendid woman is leaving. I’ve arrived even later than I knew. The pediatrician’s wife is insisting to her husband that violence on the contrary can make one more authentic. Geoff embraces the woman who is leaving; she gives me a nod, disappears, and I acquire her chair. There comes a time, says Nuala, when one has to act. Nonsense, adds Jasper, and giggles.
I can’t tell if everyone knows the person or no one.
The pediatrician is arguing that this man they’re talking about would do better to consult the authorities, a man who has appointed himself a committee of one to attack and undermine an organization of potentially violent exiles by sowing confusion here and there among them. The mathematician argues that violence nullifies itself and that hewing to a line of moderation while less attractive particularly to people of certain temperaments and even more of certain ages is more delicate, difficult, and complexly responsive to the really human.
Around me are the years in London, years of evenings in which people listen and talk and do not drink too much, get a ride home after the Underground closes down or phone a cab that comes in seven minutes. The bearded man has been expatiating on American allegiances; what after all can one expect of Americans, they never reflected seriously upon their own revolution, they cared only to put it behind them. The mathematician interjects that Charles the First’s last word before they chopped off his head was Remember.
The bearded man seems not to hear her. He says that indeed Americans confused the natural resources of their continent with their own ability to exploit those resources, even mingled those minerals and plants with the illusion of philosophical ideas, and now in the interest of holding violence down, whom does America back?
I am about to intervene, as I have on some other evenings with a glass in my hand on the side of ideas I do not hold defending, for instance, American internal security systems (for after all we do have something to be secret about!); challenging the standard of living here which for ten years the English middle classes have comfortably not let themselves inquire into; and gently (though later at home Lorna often says I was terrible) attacking…what was it?…the Truman Doctrine? Churchill, self-fulfilling Cold War prophecies?…the ease of friendly intercourse has buffered my memory-but I don’t intervene now, for the bearded man is saying he’s not sure what violence is and he can sympathize with the man in question. And Geoff Millan returns us to the man in question himself, an American resident here from whom now for lack of information the talk finds its exit into sex, and I have the odd sense that no one in the room in fact knows this mythical
committee of one, and it turns out that Geoff doesn’t know the name of the man.
I stay and stay.
When the other guests are gone, Geoff does not betray surprise when I ask if I can stay over. It’s very late, a new stage of talk.
Who is Claire?
Claire is in New York.
Cartwright’s contact.
For the film.
Yankee dollar.
You measure the pound by it.
You rely on the American connections.
My boats on the south coast were bought with money I made here in England. So were the French stoves, you have one yourself.
You bought into those young married boutiques, you started an antique bottle shop.
Was it money I wanted?
It was cordless electric carvers from the States at the time of the assassination. And who ever heard of exporting brass beds from here to Manhattan?
My margin was surprising.
And quilts from Maine and Appalachia, some old, some new, and antique stoves from France that aren’t really antique. And then that University of Maryland education racket at your Air Force bases here.
I’m hardly involved.
And this film.
Which film?
Cartwright, international businessman.
Sounds like the title.
What did you hope for?
More than what we have.
Is it all a waste?
What can you do with several pounds of ruined film?
You’re the American.
The English take photographs too.
Not so many.
Maybe they don’t see so much.
They’re not so busy snapping pictures.
They would know better than an American what to do with a load of ruined film.
You said some burnt. Well then, blow up the negative, silkscreen it, rephotograph the print, hang it over that flak hole in your study—
It’s a crack—
Or just hang the blown-up negative.
Find me the negatives and we’ll go into business. There are no negatives. Or just one.
Lookout Cartridge Page 2