Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  Claire was looking at her hands wedged between her thighs.

  The fog partly hid Dagger and me from these people. Claire didn’t yet know I was recalling my diary. Fog stood here and there as far as the edge of the ring. But passing through the ring the fog became something else gassy and jumped and bent through the forms of those people into the inner circle where it passed into the fire but freshened and inflated the colors of their clothes, the woven oranges and denim blues, a brown cloak, some yellow, some olive green.

  A baby’s cheek flashed on a girl’s back. Dagger tracked a little boy in overalls who as he walked stared at the blaze they were all circling. The camera’s drive motor seemed loud, a softer or more musical dentist’s drill, a buzz saw under water. Dagger switched off and focused on one corner of the ring and shot till they’d all gone by once. I whispered wouldn’t it be funny if some were Americans. When he said, Recognize someone from Berkeley? he may not have been kidding, though he often speaks of his old bailiwick and feeding some friend who later became an official in Washington, for Dagger unlike me keeps up with the old Alma Mater. A big woman with a red and yellow blanket over her shoulders burst from her place and surged across the circle to hug and kiss the boy in overalls—and they all shouted something. And she, in a glad tantrum of head-wagging, stood aside till her spot in the circle came by.

  My ankles were wet and tom. Sheep bleated. Dagger flipped the turret to get a closer shot of the fire.

  What were they burning? They stopped circling and clapped. What was burning? I saw two branches sparkling and one gray label with letters that didn’t mean anything.

  Is that all? Claire murmured, staring at her hands.

  They stopped circling and began to clap.

  We didn’t know about the Hindu group, said Claire.

  Who didn’t?

  At the office.

  You mean you did know other things we filmed?

  Dagger I thought had written her a note in April answering the tentative encouargement he said she’d given him.

  Dagger didn’t mention Hindu to you, did he?

  Māyā’s the giveaway, said Claire. I mean, that’s Hindu. Anyhow I think Dagger wrote me.

  I let that pass. I told her that later an American whom Dagger and I know in London hearing me talk about the bonfire got worked up about looping zoom dissolves. He thought Dagger had zoomed in through the ring to the fire; but in May we had no zoom.

  What was his name? said Claire.

  Cosmo. And he had a friend from Delhi he wanted Dagger to meet who he said lives completely in the present. I said we weren’t interested in technical tricks like looping zoom dissolves but he just kept talking at Dagger saying we ought to make a separate cartridge loop. Dag said he thought you could do that with eight but not sixteen, but Cosmo said when we got to projecting just insert the cartridge wherever we wanted and change the whole scene at will. Like, three, four loops, the audience couldn’t tell if it was a repeat or the people in the ring were just being shot all over again round and round. Dagger said, No, you better check that out, that doesn’t sound right…

  Cosmo said to me, What else you got, man?

  Once Cosmo got some high-priced audio equipment through Dagger and turned up one midnight waking Dagger and Alba and meaning to tape their entire record collection. Which is not quite the same thing as a friend dropping over in the middle of the afternoon to hunt up a magazine.

  Did someone say anything to you? said Claire. Did you get close to the ring?

  Here, I said, pulling out of my inside pocket a handful of diary pages.

  Look, said Claire, I didn’t shop for lunch, all I’ve got in is granola and Earl Grey tea bags from England. And honey, Greek honey. Like, how long are you in New York? I could return those pages to your friend’s.

  I said I didn’t have time. I skipped to a passage way past what I’d read her, put all but ten pages back in my inside pocket and said I was skipping a sentimental part full of technical stuff on loading our zoo-foot magazine when we used it.

  She said, Eight doesn’t blow, so it wouldn’t have been any good to us. But that was Alba’s film you said—how many 8 cartridges did you say?

  But I began again.

  Look, said Claire, but she sank back stiff into the pale cushions.

  I said, There’s some here you wouldn’t care about.

  We’re well past the hedge, well past a young American Indian’s challenge to us and Dagger’s raucous I’m-from-Pathé-News I’m-looking-for-the-United-States, wait! hold that! out of the pan into the can, I do my best work when the subject stays still, who’s on guitar I got news for him there’s a chord called the subdominant.

  And well past the guy who when we approached got off into the dark to a small tall grove of trees; well past the Beaujolais I went back to the car for and we couldn’t get this crowd to touch.

  All the way a few minutes later to a tough little apple with hair to her buttocks. Dagger touched her fire-bright face with the back of his hand, he looked twice her size when he bent and gave her a one-arm hug and got shoved. The camera looked heavy then. He said, But it’s you I’ve been looking for ever since I got onto this road. Because you are beautiful.

  He raised the camera, the motor hissed, he started to pan, he said, Try to be loving, what do you get.

  I said I didn’t understand, why not just shoot some footage—and as for panning, it’s overrated.

  The Nagra unit was in the boot; no point intruding it. Too bad because against the snapping of the blaze the damping of the various voices sounded an odd turn of distances.

  When Dagger swung to get the grove where the man had gone, he didn’t switch off the motor. So it was an unintentional swishpan and hand-held at that, so you can imagine how it must have wobbled however strong the Dagger arm. The grove was just a shadow in the dark and thus almost as indefinite as the intervening blurs he swished through. Then the round-cheeked woman grabbed the arm supporting the pistol grip and Dagger switched off and listened to her.

  She said they were finishing and we had no right to force it by entering their field.

  A gaunt fellow said to me, It doesn’t matter, you will come and break bread at the house and we will drink a glass of your wine. I said, Oh you drink.

  But the little woman said they’d been combining a Hymn to Night with the little boy’s initiation and she turned and informed me only three of them drank and the group was unusual in not excluding visitors from meals.

  On the side of the fire toward the grove three men circled the boy chanting what sounded like Rama Rama. Several of the group were drifting away from the light.

  Who’s that in the grove, said Dagger, I think your guru’s taking a breather.

  There is no one in the grove, said the little woman, though she need not have answered, and as if continuing an instruction that had not been interrupted she explained that just as the group included different conditions of rebirth, so it included also different styles of practice, Tantric release, ascetic release.

  Dagger moved away saying, What I want to know is who went into that there grove.

  He was having trouble revolving his turret to find the 50 lens.

  I said to the little bright-cheeked woman, Are there Americans here?

  She said, Why do you ask? and pointed to the American Indian, who was saying to Dagger, I’ve been here four months, I mean in Britain, and I’m not looking back. I’m from Kansas City originally.

  The woman pointed to the small circle chanting Rama and said, Also the boy-his father’s American, his mother’s English, they’re in London.

  Dagger was on the far side of the fire. The big woman in the blanket stopped him and embraced him so he had to drop his camera hand. She said, Anyone who enters as you entered is so lost he risks rebirth as a tortoise. She giggled.

  The little woman called to Dagger across the fire, But I know you, I know you from London. The big woman said with more laughter, Elspeth knows you. The big woman he
ld Dagger and his camera at arm’s length: As the calf knows the mother, she said, you have not known the relation between your samsara and your karma.

  Dagger very friendly said, Out of the karma, and the woman said, Into the camera.

  I joined him near the grove. He was shooting. Sure enough I detected ahead a pale motion, though why he had to get (as he said) the complete picture puzzled me.

  A skinny man in a hooded jacket stood with his arm around the young initiate: Come with us, brothers, he called, and Dagger called back, Just a minute, and the other fellow said, Throwaway your machine, brother, you are filming as if you were pursuing your enemies.

  Dagger called back, Don’t know till I catch up with them.

  But now, instead of the elusive character in the grove, out of it came at us in a brief, accidental charge a cow that cantered off into the fog-sifted night.

  She is going to the river, said a man’s voice behind us, and someone chuckled, and I said, Just some of the local fat stock (for that was no dairy cow), and Dagger said, Near the intersection of the River Usk and the Monmouth-Breconshire border.

  The man in the grove-unnecessarily it seemed to me and almost as if to show us-stood clear of a tree and I saw him quite well in the light of the fire at my back. I saw him, and Dagger got a shot of him veering out of the grove and running after the cow.

  The big woman captured Dagger from behind. As when a lute is played, she said with her cheek against his shoulder, one cannot grasp the eternal sounds but by grasping the lute or the player of the lute the sound is grasped.

  I was talking to the fellow from Kansas City who was explaining how the Indians would not let Sir Walter Raleigh in on the secret of pot that they smoked in the peace pipe but gave him tobacco instead to take back to the white man in Europe.

  The little woman at this distance not so ruddy was close to me talking across me low and rather fiercely to Dagger: This is our place, we rent it, we are here only a small part of the year. We prepare now for the cosmic dance of the Dancing Siva tomorrow evening and no one outside the group is allowed here, I don’t know what you are doing to us.

  And that, I said to Claire, looking up from a page of onion skin, is the dance that celebrates the end of the world, and when I said this to the woman, Dagger said, Well I don’t want to be here when it happens-he asked her name-a baby started crying-I said Elspeth, and he said, Do you go to the National Film Theater? Maybe you saw me there.

  She only said, I do know you, and Dagger said, Dagger DiGorro, and this here is an untrustworthy merchant adventurer named Cartwright, a Common Market lobbyist. Now the cat chasing the sacred cow, is he dancing Siva tomorrow night?

  She turned to go back to the fire. She seemed to sense we weren’t sticking around. Dagger said, Oh hell.

  He didn’t like this after all, and I wasn’t sure why.

  Mind you, I said, getting up and leaving on Claire’s table the onion-skin pages I’d had out, that was more than a cow-catcher, the piece of his face I did see.

  Funny, said Claire.

  In the bathroom Scotch-taped to the wall beside her beige toilet was a two-page glossy-spread of a stately mansion, Luton Hoo. To the viewer’s right of the pillared portico and one of those English lawns so vastly level green they seem artificial (and in a sense are) and under Dr. Samuel Johnson’s This is one of the places I do not regret having come to see, was an inset shot of the celebrated ivory casket whose deep surfaces hold twenty carved scenes from the lives of Virgin and Son.

  Claire called out: Did you write down a description of him?

  I reached for the silver flusher and then did not push it, and said without raising my voice, Somewhere.

  And the phone rang.

  On the inside of the bathroom door was a white felt heart and pinned to it a big button showing Claire in a floppy hat.

  Peace, said Dagger, and we passed the fire heading for the hedge.

  Why did I say to the newly initiated boy, Is it tomorrow you welcome the god?

  The boy said, Every day.

  Without thinking, I said, Every minute, and he said, Right.

  Those few words weren’t in my diary and Dagger didn’t film them. The boy had a narrow face and a cowlick and sandy hair as light as Jenny’s. And real overalls. I bore down with all my weight and gentleness upon the bathroom doorknob.

  In her bedroom Claire was saying, I knew he might be—that’s all.

  My onion-skin pages in the living room were neater now. The enamel cross lay beside them.

  Monty, I didn’t know, said Claire from the bedroom; then not so loud, That’s what I said.

  The receiver rattled but she did not come out.

  I had the diary pages stuffed back into my inside pocket with the others when she appeared in the bedroom doorway.

  I picked up the cross.

  Cloisonné, she said. The Japs imitate cloisonné but they cover up the metal.

  She put her hands in her jacket pockets to cheer herself, and said, I’m afraid I have to make another call.

  (If no, keep looping; if yes, proceed.)

  I said, You still haven’t explained why I saw Jenny behind me today and then she turned into a camera shop and gave me the slip.

  Claire took heart. I strengthened her. She shrugged and said, What do you want? You’re not going to believe this, but I didn’t know what to say to you seeing you there. I mean we had a date for half an hour later.

  I asked what Outer Film was interested in at the moment, and she said a little bit of everything. I said I couldn’t think who would want our film destroyed. Claire said, Maybe a competitor who was making a film on the same subject. I said, Very funny. She said, We’ll go to the theater in London next time I’m there. I said I must go see Cosmo’s Indian, maybe he’d know what happened.

  Oh don’t do that, said Claire ironically.

  I let her feel she was making me go.

  She asked me for Sub’s number and address. She said it was better than staying in a hotel, and I said my grandfather from Maine died in a hotel.

  That fire, she said, and came away from the bedroom as I went to the front door. I put my hand on the knob.

  That was the third part, I said. The first was in Hyde Park two weeks before. Too bad you never got any idea of all this.

  But the fire, she said.

  We’ll never know if Dagger got a good shot of what they were burning, I said.

  I meant when the film got burnt on his table.

  Oh it only got Alba’s Super-8 baby film.

  But your film was destroyed there too, right?

  Not burnt. Except by the light of day. Exposed. No, I meant the fire might have spread.

  I held the front door. Poised concern in the tilt of her head, cigarette in her fingers, some melancholy immobility in the cheeks which next to my Anglo-American Jenny’s seemed bloodless.

  I meant the film they missed that wasn’t on Dag’s table, I said. That’s what I meant.

  How is he? said Claire, keeping me.

  Older, well-covered, very strong, keeps open house, magical, more American than ever, a father now at last as you know. And in that film never mind how clumsy we were, we really saw something.

  So did we, said Claire. I mean, we thought there was something in it.

  I was over her threshold and let the door slip.

  Too bad, said Claire softly. What’s Jenny up to?

  Dying to try America. Has a new boyfriend. Plans to take A-levels in Latin, I hope.

  Now Claire let me wait. What’ll you do with the film they missed?

  Who’s they?

  My chat with Geoff Millan recircuited Fast Forward; I heard nothing new.

  Claire smiled: It’s your life; how would I know who they is? Going to make any more films?

  I’m still working on this one. It’s all written down.

  Who reads any more? said Claire.

  VACUUM INSERT

  Show an American girl London the day before the young bodie
s of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney are missing in Mississippi—which makes it summer solstice years ago. She rang you at home in Highgate, got your wife Lorna who passed the phone instantly to you even though you were twenty feet away.

  Now you hear the girl again when the bearded desk clerk hands you the house phone. She’s running behind schedule, she says, would you like to come up.

  OK, but what’s with her? It’s too early for a drink even if she had a bottle in her room. You don’t know her. Surely she doesn’t want you to listen to her brush her teeth.

  The lift’s ornate ironwork opens each floor as you and the attendant rise past. It’s a lovely machine, ride all day, not a cage. You catch the eye of a chamber maid passing along a hall her arms full of last night’s sheets, then she’s out of sight below you.

  Your college friend Sub’s wife’s former roommate this is: you forget the first name as you take her hand crossing the threshold, it’s a double room. A harpsichord steady and copacetic is coming from a little transistor on a plaid suitcase. Not a stitch of clothing adrift, not a half-slip, not a passport on the bureau’s glass top or a collection of change. Her bed is turned right down and a London A to Z is on the night table by a half full tumbler with bubbles at the bottom and up the side. She takes the tumbler into the lav.

  She’s tall and dainty, her page-boy newly trimmed. She gives you a lifesaver. She stops the transistor, and her name comes back: Connie—Constance. She makes references to her parents and the job she’s just packed up, and a play she got a ticket for at the last minute last night. She puts a hand to her cheek thinking. She puts the transistor on the bed, opens the suitcase and carefully tears out two travelers checks. When you ask how Sub and his wife are, she locks the case, comes very close to you and says, Not good.

  She’s better being solemnly shy in the slow elevator. She thanks the attendant, who thanks her, and doesn’t volunteer additional information when I answer her question about the big orange globes on posts at crossings. Belisha Beacons. Belisha. Someone during the war.

  You cross Oxford Street and in the busy seclusion of Soho Square she turns the talk from your awe-inspiring expatriation to the church on the left which you find you don’t know anything about though you’ve sat on these benches reading The Evening Standard waiting for Lorna. You say it’s Huguenot you believe, let’s look.