Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  She played hide and seek in a bombed house, got a first kiss, hid one day all but the side-part in her hair and the pale brown eyes the only moving thing as her father’s voice rose to a pitch she had not heard before which did not make her show herself but made her stay, a narrow face between textures of wrecked stone and as hard to see as I am on my lookout site keeping watch for those who have gone into the building’s shadowy forms and are to be warned by me if the other forces come from the street outside, so I’m important but I’m struck stationary between the two motions of those inside and those outside but I do not know enough about the two sides, can’t look at both at once; need power: to cope with (a) a wife who on the morning of my trip to Corsica called our film half-baked, and (b) my partner-friend whose view of our film was so haphazard that we had two films, my montage, his footage: yet a friend who, as with the 8-millimeter cartridge I somehow haven’t inquired into, so with his changed plans first to put the Softball Game between the Hawaiian Hippie and the Suitcase Slowly Packed, and then August 4 or 5 instead to cut the SSP into the Marvelous Country House, seemed to know something I didn’t, yet even now that I’ve found his collusive letter to Claire, Dagger seems not to know too much to be my friend. He must have wished to say something by means of that snapshot Jenny packed between the black sweater and the green-and-white plastic bottle of medicated shampoo in the filmed suitcase that I now see recalls uncannily Lorna’s suitcase in a third scene in our bedroom, a suitcase that, like a poignant still picture invulnerable to the motions around it, remained half-packed on a chair for three days in 1958 when Lorna was leaving and not leaving, dreaming me with crystal clarity dead, not hearing what I said to her, wishing herself asleep for good: until on the third night (which was a week before she met Tessa) I lay on our bed preparing to dream the lookout dream and wondering what to do to the building-site watchman who is recovering consciousness after the blow on his head—and found that Lorna was now unpacking the case she’d half-packed three days before back into our less orderly life together.

  But now in Glasgow wondering where Cosmo’s Indian was spending the night, and whether the Druid through his connections had put Dagger in danger, and thinking what from my suitcase should I pack in my new rucksack, I knew that I would keep going and that if Cosmo’s Indian who’d awed Cosmo by saying he lived only in the present turned up at this old hotel door in Scotland I would collar him and find a way back through his recent acts to my most practical course in the Hebrides tomorrow.

  But I thought he’d wait. I jammed a chair under the door knob, killed the light, lay down, heard approaching my building site the quiet voices in the street of those who were opposed to the small squad at work inside for whom I was standing watch; and heroism seemed not so much unlikely as encumbered with tasks and timetables, names and address books: the injured watchman stirs beside a long I-beam: Dudley corrects Tessa at a Mexican restaurant (Kokulcan did not simply arise in Yucatan as a Mayan god reborn from the Aztec Quetzlcoatl—Kokulcan arose quite probably through rumor collaborating round the figure of a bearded priest-ruler who took the name of Quetzlcoatl and as a result priests of a rival god Tetzcatlipoca expelled the impostor and he may have made his way to the sea and disappeared to the east on a raft, or—and we note a decisiveness in Dudley’s very lack of certainty—this bearded Toltec exile may have detoured on the mainland instead, for about this time Kokulcan who has some but not all of Quetzlcoatl’s characteristics first shows himself among the Maya of Yucatan).

  I did not feel much like a god on my Glasgow bed. I found myself swelling to fill the spaces between me and the two forces, yet contracting too as to make some space between me and the rest. The squad inside were committing a subtle robbery and wiring a thunderclap invented unknown to them by me, and they were taking too long about it. The watchman we’d coshed was reaching groggily to hold his forehead or rub his eyes, and for the first time in my mind he was a recently discharged veteran from a big Italian family in Brooklyn. Tessa’s bombed houses were the third of those moments that placed her in my film diary if not in the Marvelous Country House where Dagger had found something to make him wish to cut into it the Suitcase Slowly Packed which would in my own vision of the film be as unplaced as the MCH or for that matter the Unplaced Room, or the pad of paper on which I’d written Claire the false lead “Gulf of Honduras” then circled it.

  I was near sleep and near the end of my preparation to dream my lookout dream, and the bombers led by a man in a beard and a black sweater inside the shadowed geometries of the great unfinished building were in fact a revolutionary group. But, like an Indian rapping on my hotel door, the dim snapshot that had fallen from Reid’s book and that Jenny had quickly packed turned into a picture hung in two places, and that picture was the oil of Jan Aut’s that I’d noticed in Monty’s living room because of the black-and-white photo next to it whose framed glass reflected my face and I’d disparaged the oil hoping to lure her brother into telling me something—and the other place I’d seen it was May 24 in a rough neighborhood of London in the Unplaced Room that Dagger and I had depictured and whose address I now saw congruent with an address I had written on our hall table in Highgate and now here on a scrap of paper in Glasgow, and it was the address of Jan: whom Dagger therefore knew.

  But I placed my hand over my eyes and found a new detail of the lookout dream I was preparing to dream: the wakening watchman whom I might have to dispose of was one of three brothers, yes that was it: but as sleep reached to lock on my frequency for the night, Tessa’s hand was on my body pulling hairs, stretching latitude parallels up a thigh with her middle three fingers so pinkie and thumb stuck out like my Jenny signaling left and right from Reid’s motorbike (as if to say take a picture of anything but me) and Tessa was telling me the tale of the Moon and her three sons, and she sighed Kokulcan and I felt the wind and said if I am Gene’s brother Jack, then I am also Paul’s brother Jack.

  And so as sleep did at last lock on and a breeze from Scotland crossed the sill onto my exposed feet, I had to end my preparing for the lookout dream as the unknown third brother Jack: and then I saw without preparation that I was going to be forced to kill the watchman.

  But I was ready enough and felt in my relaxing shins and my collar of bone that if I didn’t dream my lookout dream now I never would.

  12

  I left my case at the hotel desk and paid my bill early when the lobby was empty. After breakfast I told the desk I was expecting a call from London at noon and could be found in the lobby. I paid a boy to check my rucksack at the bus terminal. I could not recall what pages if any were in my case.

  I consulted the classified. At 9:30 when I strolled out in jeans and parka I found a booth and phoned a gunsmith’s and got the information I needed. I had the locker key and my compass in my pocket and nothing in my hands. I browsed at a news agent’s. A vacant cab turned into the block and when I saw the light green ahead, I jumped in and we went toward George Square. I asked the driver how many fares he could expect during the working day. We weren’t being followed so I asked for the bus terminal.

  But an hour later when I appeared at the upper level of the airport terminal having left my pack at the weigh-in counter, the Indian was ahead of me standing at a news agent’s cash register reading a magazine. I didn’t glance at him again, and when I boarded the plane I took a forward seat.

  In the far north you feel close to the great cycles. You are close to the earth’s flattened poles. A sunset especially if you see it from a mountain can show you the curve of the earth.

  But west of Stornoway when I took the road with Krish the Indian somewhere in eyeshot behind me, I had for vantage points ahead only the earth-colored moors losing their heather purple as October waned and the dark cold lochs that seemed to have been purified of life by the withdrawal of the trees.

  To a tourist, a dire land with a beauty of exile.

  To a motion intent as mine, a place maybe potentially as static as the eastern Steppe
s.

  According to my map Mount Clisham lay hazed way to the south; but to find my point on it I must go west to the stones Jenny had penciled at Callanish. Was there haze, then, on my map? I breathed breaths deep as a compressed dream. She could not have meant to give a false lead. But it might still be a lead. She had picked up that English interest in archaeology whose cachet is like that of anthropology in the States. Surrounded by the noise of a small city, English coeds ready to work like Trojans sign up for a summer of dusty sifting at the site hard by Exeter Cathedral, the way adolescent girls at genteel schools fall in love with horses.

  Callanish was where I trusted to find the way on to Paul. I was alone and alert. I breathed out and in.

  I knew nothing.

  The pack focused my shoulders. I would walk all the way. I turned as a skier turning leans downhill, and looked back stiffly as if for a car, but really to see what I saw—which was the Indian.

  He was at a quai-side fence looking at a boat basin. A long white trenchcoat tailored like my tan one now packed in my case in Glasgow. Nothing in his hands or on his back. He lived in the present, Cosmo said.

  I was on the edge of Stornoway, the colorless sky low and long.

  A drunk swung by and disappeared.

  A car beeped. The driver of a bright red mini beckoned. The Indian was watching the empty boats.

  I could still feel my pack after I’d dumped it in back.

  My driver switched off the music.

  We drove around the next corner and Stornoway lapsed. The man said I was from America. I thought him about my age; he looked younger; he had Irish in his voice; I’d seen nothing but black hair and blue eyes in Stornoway, but this man had brown hair and brown eyes. He said I was going to see the stones, and I said yes. He wasn’t going all the way, he was turning off. I asked if this was dark for three o’clock in October. He said no, but this wasn’t too bad a time to come.

  A wind pushed a flicker of rain over the road and it was dry again. I asked about December, what was it like here. My companion laughed and said nothing.

  I drew upon Stonehenge five hundred-odd flying miles somewhere to my left: I said the stones at Callanish might be worth visiting December 22, the winter solstice.

  He didn’t know.

  He and some friends assembled for sunrise at summer solstice, drank a few pints, but did not dress up in robes or speak spells. I said he knew about the solstice… He said, the longest and shortest days. I said another way of seeing it was that the sun at those times appeared to stand still between northward and southward motion. He doubted if Stone Age man could have observed that.

  I did not know what I would say next. It was a fact that once in Honduras Catherwood’s American companion John Lloyd Stephens had dropped his dagger into the mountain mud and then had fallen off his mule almost onto the dagger which had stuck blade up. He passed a fork and he said that was where he’d been going to turn. I thanked him and asked if there had been Americans at Callanish. Americans were always writing books, he said.

  He didn’t come into this area, he lived several miles from here. Lewis was better than the mainland. In his view the stones were interesting, but no one would ever know what they really meant. It was lucky I wasn’t up here on a Sunday because “the locals” he said might object to my doing the stones on the Sabbath. Stornoway was shut up and there were no buses or cars on the road, so be sure not to travel on Sunday. Many emigrated from the Hebrides to America.

  I did not say, I am looking for my daughter.

  Anyway, was I?

  He asked where I was staying. I said I didn’t know—I had an address—a number with Callanish after it. A crofter’s cottage. Maybe they would take me in.

  He didn’t comment.

  I asked if the peat would ever give out.

  No, he said, not unless the population drain were reversed, but maybe not even then.

  Figures were cited.

  Rain blew across the road more than once.

  I wanted to say to this man that the film did not matter.

  He did not speak of America. He spoke of peat.

  America and Canada have forty million acres of it. It has to have special conditions, so you’d think it would yield something special. Now south of here—

  Down by Clisham? I said.

  Oh no. Down three islands to South Uist—there’s a seaweed factory on the beach. They dry and pulverize seaweed and send it out to England. Process it for fertilizers, nylon, and some binding agent used in false teeth. A very special seaweed of huge plants like cables, and it comes by steamer from the Orkneys and takes two days to unload out of two holds. But what’s peat good for? Burn it of course. The men make a party and go off digging on a Saturday. They spade up sods and stack them. The drying takes six weeks unless it’s as wet as it was this summer (and you probably know, it’s precisely wet weather coupled with poor drainage that encourages the formation of peat). Well elsewhere they may use excavators and heating chambers but in the Hebrides it is by hand, big square sods out there and you can see what the work is like right where you see the strip-trenches.

  There’s going to be an international commune in Chile, I said, ecologically based, self-supporting, recycling, all that, five hundred people.

  They might make it, said the man.

  Can you walk out there? I asked, say directly overland to Mount Clisham so as to cut the roundabout distance by road.

  There are only three reasons to go out on the moor, said my driver: to find your sheep, to take a short walk for it’s handsome country, and to cut peat. No good trekking; you run into high heather, and lochs, and bogs of moss that you’ll go right down into.

  My driver might have been an engineer or a schoolteacher. I wanted to ask if he had an independent income. I reviewed the air and steamer connections available to him (for instance the four-hour crossing from Stornoway to Kyle of Lochalsh). He could not easily or cheaply commute to the mainland; I had heard somewhere of a process of boiling peat in a weak solution of sulphuric acid, then neutralizing with lime, whereby a ton of peat could yield twenty-five gallons of alcohol for motor fuel. A Highgate neighbor had once, but only once, urged me over his fence to try peat on the stubborn rhododendron in one far corner of our garden.

  My driver nodded ahead across three or four miles of road and field and moor. The stones, he said.

  And as he continued his information on peat, I saw on a rise and blanched by the brightening but now later light a gathering of what must be quite high stones, some pointed like weapons with contours like heads, but more than in any of their single shapes they seemed from here more intelligible as a gathering. There was in the midst one greater than others.

  They can make it into coke briquettes, said my driver. Pulp it, mill it, homogenize it, bake it, press it so it’s like lignite—and the end product’s a fuel as hot almost as coal with less sulphur. They can also convert the nitrogen in peat into ammonia.

  I looked at the stones as they moved off to my left as if toward Clisham. You’ve studied chemistry, I said. And geology, he said. What about peat for caulking, I said.

  But here, said my companion, they cut it; and when the dug peat dries, they burn it.

  We stopped at a house on a rise: A red-faced heavy-set woman in a thick pink cardigan said hers was not the number I wanted and told me where to go, pointed across a valelike depression containing a loch, to a rise on the other side where a few cottages of wood frame or stone were scattered along a couple of miles of road from a church on the right or north to the neolithic site fenced off on the higher headland to the left above a considerable body of water.

  I reflected upon further information received from my driver.

  I went back and got in beside him, said I knew where I was going and would walk it from here; I thought I would like to arrive on foot; I thanked him for going out of his way. He did not ask what would happen if they couldn’t take me in over there. He said it was a pleasure to talk to an American an
d asked what line I was in. I said business, a bit of this, a bit of that. Random enterprises. He said it sounded like I was quite free. I said that in fact I had a great untapped capacity for work. University of Lancaster had I said? The Chilean commune? Yes, I said, University of Lancaster. He said an American firm had got into fish-processing in Stornoway, but he doubted it would keep people here. Did I know there was a factory in Michigan that used to turn peat into paper?

  A breeze brought the rain racing across the loch and from the far cottages and over along the road and over the car, but the late sun on the headland lit the Callanish stones.

  I decided there was nothing in his having picked me up. He made this run from Stornoway often on a weekday afternoon an hour or so after the Glasgow plane.

  Peat fires, the man said, were an acquired smell; it was one reason he’d always planned to come back to Lewis, the smell was different in India.

  But, I said, they use ox and camel dung there.

  Yes, mainly, he said—but there is an Indian peat that forms from decaying rice plant material, it hasn’t that brackish acrid odor of peat in the Western Isles.

  You’ve traveled, I said.

  He looked at me closely as I reached back for my pack and I was about to ask if he knew of an American in these parts named Paul (and it hit me I’d never asked Dagger Gene’s surname), but the man (now looking through me as if out beyond the Callanish stones to the great loch from the sea, a meaning, a Norse source, an old sequence inspiring him) said the word sphagnum and said it again; yes, it was where some of this came from—amazing stuff, a moss that thrives on acid conditions, and grows at the top while it decays at the bottom so the heather is maintained above and the decayed matter sinks and settles in deposits that eventually form peat which if it were put under great subterranean pressures would in fact become coal. Ancient forests at different levels, he said.