Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  I saw myself now having to find Jan Aut. She had nothing to do with the break-in here, but she was interested in Reid whom Jenny was chasing, and there were the Indians too.

  You’re a good citizen, I said to Sub.

  What’s the use? he said.

  Did you win? I said.

  It was over that TV that I had to get fixed every weekend. But now I can’t blame a smashed screen on defective merchandise.

  I’ll write you a check for the Sony, I said, and as I then shuttled my slot in Sub’s life outward to a margin, another coin dropped through my mossy tubes, a foreign object saucering in like the rear prop of a helicopter on the blade of which slow but mercurially revolving craft like great figures approaching by nonvehicular hydrofoil were the red-haired woman and Dagger.

  Let’s split it, said Sub.

  It’s my doing, I said, and got up as if to leave. Which made Sub rise, as though he thought I were going.

  I asked if he trusted me, and he said, To do what?

  But I was now thinking what Aut would make of Dagger’s letter on his desk as an evidence that Dagger was between Jan and Claire. For Dagger had mentioned the three figures on the grass in Hyde Park and had said the one he hadn’t known was the other Indian. So he did know the red-haired woman, and as if pressed by Monty Graf’s will to close some deal with me and by my prematurely gray-bearded friend Sub’s pollution-watch cards on certain window-sills (for on Manhattan nights you’ll see like linear pressures the secret smokes from unupgraded incinerators of colorful old residence hotels or textile firms where, say, in a cutting room on one high floor past six windows one long unrolled bolt flashes its pigment) I kept catching myself assuming the red-haired woman was Jan Aut.

  At nine forty-five the next morning I descended the subway steps. It was turning cold. Again, I had not dreamt of the lookout, though for a moment in the night I’d seen Lorna smudged by black powder and pierced above the knee leaning negligently bare against our Highgate doorway watching for me I thought.

  I did not know what day it was.

  Escalators are common in the London Underground, less so in the New York subway. Subway in London means pedestrian underpass.

  Hard to imagine now the adventure of building New York’s subway. They had the Elevated, but when they went underground the El in Manhattan was doomed. And yet its scrapping much later might not seem to have cleared the skies to those who, like Tessa, come from London’s low profile to live here in some towering closet where you can’t decide if there’s a lot of sky or none—for in New York Tessa did not like looking up, though one Friday and one Monday she did look up to me.

  My father stands, two or three years after 1900, at Sixty-fourth and Broadway. For support they use a great extension girder at right angles to the Elevated where it crosses above the excavation trench. The first fifty-one-foot subway cars are to be four feet longer than the existing Elevated cars. Mahogany for the car doors, galvanized corrugated sheet iron for the bed on which is laid the fireproof flooring called “monolith.”

  Ah what happened to the wheels! So shining in 1903, steel-tired with cast-steel-spoke centers, now their gray gleam has turned to screaming space. I envision a constructive nightmare in which please find the formula for a new asbestos-veined synthetic tire, balance perfected as if in space, soft as rubber, softer-sounding than the London Underground, diamond-hard.

  What Brunel would do with space! Run a vacuum bridge to Jupiter’s lakes. Will, my son, asks about Skylab; I mention sun-sensors which from earth-orbit may learn how the sun turns hydrogen to energy, thus teach us a thing or two to solve pollution. Will tells his friends at school. They mention my accent, a sound I hear but not so loud as they.

  I had a purpose. It was to see June in order to pass information to the Jerry-John cluster, thus to Outer Film. The London system tying Reid to the red-haired woman to the gallery and thus to the Indian and even to acts of a subversive sort aimed at removing our film from the DiGorros’ flat lay parallel and (for today) secondary. The New York sequence had seemed to rule the field whose forces formed it, singled it out like a crescent or some other line, but as I came to the change booth (an oak original from 1903) the field seemed to equal the noise from the walls which in turn equaled the power whatever it was of our film destroyed unedited; and the noise came from the sidewalk concrete where I was born and then from deep under the tunnel the presumed bedrock above which, buried during construction, how many bodies will rise again when New York falls; and the noise was all those machines blowing past on the street above yet also on a dozen superimposed semipriceless maps of the Thames estuary Dagger juggled through customs, and on the tracks below (for a train was pulling out); and maybe the noise was some escalator ahead whose noise was also the breath of shyness in Rose’s college friend Connie when I helped her ride the elevator; and the noise was rock from the change booth where a black girl stared at her newspaper through blue-smoked cartwheel glasses as big as Jenny’s the once I saw her riding behind Reid in daylight with her knees out and she stuck out her arms as if Reid spinning past on his black motorbike built for two would turn two ways at once; and the retreating noise of the train that might have been mine was like ten tomcats and the noise above and below was not something you’d turn tail from because for one thing I thought that besides the black girl pushing tokens, there was no one but an old fellow in a herringbone with the hems drooping toward his ankles who preceded me through the turnstile and made for the stairs maybe because he didn’t like escalators, which I see now made no sense, for the old do like escalators down or up.

  But you’ve been here before and you’re looking back and forward, so you know the escalator wasn’t running. All those grooved steps dropping away in front in a noise like motion weren’t moving, but the new steps behind me were, and their nature would have made me turn (for the clicks were at once close and slow, fast closing yet dream-slow like two rates simply merged), but I could look only ahead: for as you know I got a shove bang like a silent noise in my sacrificial shoulder-wings which when I told this before seemed coincident with my hands fast-stuck in the tight slash-pockets of my raincoat but now seems to have trapped my hands, and the rest you know as well as I, down to almost the foot of the fast-dragging grade all stopped as only an escalator can be stopped. I’d found a beat, so I kept myself from plunging head under hem, arms pinioned by hands socketed; and if I had fallen thus, no telling what I might have done to myself, my dry-mouthed momentum crashing into this moveless sequence of stairs. Yet when I began this story did I think this momentum mine? I think I did. But it was my pusher’s first, then mine, which I see now is like what I, if not (no surely not) Dagger, saw us doing in the film, taking other energy in process and using it for our own peaceful ends. But was not the end there that of my pusher?

  Plunging then up the dead escalator as if I had taken its energy, I reached the top again and would have run on up to the street but thought of June and stopped and asked the change-booth woman what she’d seen, but she mustered a moist smile with a new mild dreamy song for background on her transistor and she said how busy she was and in her glasses like a wide-angle fish-eye out of some bad movie about nerves and death I saw that the pusher had pushed me because I must have in some way pushed him; but I saw that I might not have in my head why my film got destroyed, I’d have to do more than just recall things. And I had better not go back. It may be a bad rule of detection, but the right way now had been don’t go back. And as soon as I had thought this, I saw that the way to survive the pusher’s push was to use its force to move on.

  The pusher would not be at June’s stop. I caught the old man’s train just.

  A pale brown woman next to me on the subway seat yawned, and I smelled on her breath a doughnut with coffee in the hole. Live in New York and you might have subway dreams. Of white men sitting and black men roaming. White men reading newspapers and engrossed in some inner page so they don’t seem to notice the black men loping through the car a
s if it has no movement, the black riding between cars, returning to the head of your own car, batting his eyes for action, tramping through again patrolling his space station, not catching your glance which is like a blink, then passing into another car, leaving your door open sliding to and fro with the car’s rushing lurch. A white woman with fat hands does her crossword with a white, company ballpoint. The black women do not look either.

  June was where she’d said she’d be but was looking toward the other end of the train that I got off. Between a flight of steps and a post with a chewing gum machine she waited with her back to me, the highsprung ancient crown of hair independent as if turned also away. Two people moving toward either side of the platform crossed between us and at the point of my view where they crossed, June had turned and for that second hadn’t seen me and then had, and I was like some expected surprise at the end of an avenue.

  She was in color today, brown and gray and melancholy mauve, mid-thigh soft boots, a hot-pants suit.

  She had hold of my arms, she leaned back smiling as if it had been a long time when in truth it had, for Corsica had come between us in the pica lines of Dagger’s note to Claire which I’d left on Aut’s desk, the space of that dubious isle emptying into our Beaulieu lens and the hours and days we’d exposed and lost.

  June and I were arm in arm on a platform bench. She crossed her legs. The top rim of one mauve boot stuck up away from the dark thigh so one saw down in. Like a banner signing an interesting entrance, a label hung from inside the rim half unsewn. I’d seen it before.

  She wasn’t the same person as twenty-four hours ago, yet now seemed not to need the words really really like you, in order to show with the lean of her chic gray shoulder pad against me and the attentiveness of her whole eyes that moved all over my face as she spoke, that she really did need to act.

  The matte softness of her skin could gather all her fear and brightness as if it were her person, at rest and accessible enough and still not different from the coasting flirting model who makes a white male feel unnecessarily good, but a firmer appearance of that person from yesterday. I could not help touching her lips with my own and she was friendly, no more, but eased from firm edges of curve to curve of the breathing space between us so the kiss did not seem unnecessary.

  She said what she had to say with dispatch and grace and until I was safely on the plane to London I didn’t stop to think she’d said it all without a single uptown or downtown local or express intervening.

  I was in danger, she said. From Jerry. From his father. From some others. And from still others she didn’t know. Did you always dream about being famous, baby? she asked.

  Who are the others you don’t know, I said.

  Maybe I’ll get to them, she said.

  It seemed Jerry had been even madder to find that the person he’d wanted to get hold of had been standing right in John’s studio that he, Jerry, paid rent on (with his dad’s money, June added) and hadn’t even known that this was that person; and he’d been mad too that this Cartwright had been in secret conversation with John, and (she thought) worst of all this Cartwright had been in the studio when she had been there with John—like if anyone’s going to see John and her together Jerry wants it to be him because from the top of his Clairol scalp down to the taps of his shoe-shoes he is jealous as hell.

  When I asked which hole Jerry had come out of, June said she’d thought that I of course knew that Jerry was Phil Aut’s son and knew about the hassle with Phil who wants Jerry in the business and Jerry’s never been near the office and what Jerry wants is to make far-out films with John who does jobs for Phil and who Jerry thinks has been tainted by Phil and some silent partner, though John couldn’t be corrupted by anyone, he’s too crazy about his thing which was what her brother had said about John long before she’d met him.

  June said, when I asked where she was in all this, that she was friendly with John and with a girl in Phil Aut’s office, and a guy with an ocean-going-and-coming yacht who is interested in Phil Aut’s wife, and with some others I wouldn’t know.

  I asked what else besides Jerry; and June talked straight through till we parted. One of her brothers coming through New York had read her palm and warned her a white man with a light brown beard might come from England asking questions and that she must absolutely say nothing, the white man would be taken care of, but answer none of his questions. She knew from John that I had come from England, but John didn’t know her palm had been read with this warning any more than he or Jerry knew her brothers. Jerry was a brat; her brothers could be violent; she’d liked the feel of my arm when she gripped it in John’s studio yesterday and felt an up-current trying to get through, and she’d liked how my smile was part of my face, and she was mad because her brother Chad used to be fun reading her palm and doing card tricks before he went away, but this time he took her hand and was very nice and suddenly started giving orders, but he had other long-range plans. There was a project, like five hundred people, organized by Berkeley and this university in England, a commune in Chile if the government approved, and it would be ecological and it would start in two to three years from now.

  She had my hand, as if against the trundling waves of an approaching train. She got up and my hand followed and I.

  How many brothers do you have? I said.

  Many, many, she said, and leaned to me and kissed me. She turned then as if never to see me again, then turned back. Who is Allott? she said. He’s in your address book, right? And they have your book—you know that?

  Allott, I said, is a friend of mine. Do you know Gene and Paul?

  Those words from Corsica released in the letter in Claire’s desk that I’d left on Aut’s had come automatically with a feeling that I had to use the space left before the train came in like a cartridge filling its place.

  They are brothers, said June. She stepped back and a little girl bumped through between us. June was no genie out of a flask, she had a warm mouth openly fluent to belly and brain.

  Wait, I said, I don’t want to be the person your brother Chad warned you against, I mean asking questions. But where can I find this Paul? The platform was filling and June looked around her. Two people passed idly between us not seeing our conversation. June came close and said, I have heard that Paul is the most dangerous of all, he was supposed to be on an island off the coast of Scotland but they talk about him in New York and in London now like he was everywhere. He’s not old. Two kids I met were just setting out to go see him. I didn’t ask what it was about. One of these kids was a starry-eyed chick. I don’t know if they had a message for him. I don’t want to know.

  Off the coast of Scotland? I said.

  The Hebrides, she said. No one should go there, you understand me? No one.

  The train was upon us and I couldn’t see why she cared about my going to the Hebrides, maybe now she’d turned strange and wasn’t thinking specifically about me. We had to talk loudly.

  How did Aut get my address book?

  He never had it.

  She was gone in the crowd. I thought I heard men’s voices angrily retreating as if beyond her but they may have been inside the train’s noise.

  Had June been in London? The white label with a gray oval inside a flat red triangle inside the rim of her boot was a London shop where Jenny had bought an expensive leather coat. I cared less what kind of brother Chad was than that he was the one I’d played ball with and the one at the Marvelous Country House where Gene and his wife and those kids in their olive and red and yellow slickers lived.

  If Aut never had my book, then Jerry after breaking into Sub’s had either kept it or given it to someone else. But would vandalism like that go with pinching the address book? The name Allott linked the book with Monty to whom the name had meant something as I left his house. I had never trusted Monty but had enjoyed not trusting him.

  For a second as she went swiftly up the stairs, June was visible down an aisle that parted through the crowd of people.
r />   The Hebrides was where Jenny was going.

  Back at Sub’s I put in a call to Highgate. Will answered, I asked what time it was there, he said five. What day? Wednesday.

  I had a stitch in my heart, the time was getting away from me as if I were some tourist who’d spent a thousand dollars to arrive in Moscow or Osaka but hadn’t planned what to do then.

  Will said I must have been mistaken, the Xerox shop said the job had already been picked up and when he’d shown the receipt they’d said they really didn’t know. I could imagine them saying they were sorry.

  I’d been in New York thirty hours and I was going back to London.

  Will read my mind: Dad, could we go camping in the Outer Hebrides?

  During Easter hols, I said.

  But I did not think to ask until I’d hung up what I then knew I need not ask and had I asked would have stated: You don’t use pencil do you.

  No question. My son’s reply was in my head more intimately soon than if he had still been at the other end of our New York-London line, and the answer was a clean No.

  I saw standing up on Jenny’s windowsill in a jar with a Victorian black-and-white flower design the pencils she kept sharpened with the silly machine I’d got her cheap through Dagger.

  You see, I’d also seen a penciled ring drawn I knew by her and her alone, and while I was willing to bet the map had gone with her, I knew that on a duplicate of that Ordnance Survey map I would find the site of those standing stones whose designation in archaic letters she had circled.