Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  My words—the groaning afternoon on the Mercer Street side of John’s window shades had passed into an early evening of such dingy delicacy under the lush sky that the air looked crystal clear.

  In Mike’s London cab the questions are nearing an end two days earlier.

  OK, I answer, say I give filmmaking a rest and leave you and Len and Sherman and Reid and Nash’s nosebleeds alone, what sanctuary have I? Any number of Xeroxes won’t safeguard me from Len Incremona or for all I know—

  Don’t pretend you don’t know, said Mike, then whipped his head away toward his right-hand window having said the reverse of what he’d wanted.

  —or for all I know I could be hit by Nash or you or Bob—

  —No, Bob’s not with us any more, he got sentimental—

  —or Sherman, I guess Sherman’s in the States with Reid by now, and Krish may find it harder to intimidate Nash than before.

  Mike wants to know what I hoped to add to my leverage by shooting Len and himself and Marie (the fortress girl) in the setting of Ajaccio; they were there and even the action originally planned was not going to take place in Corsica—nothing happens there.

  I answer that I was concerned with the ecology seminar the Americans were running at the école, for in my own view it could emerge in our film as a revolutionary though tenuous theme of displacement; however, his Edinburgh friend Mary had been an unexpected dividend.

  The automatic stirred up off the seat back. The ammunition was in my head, film or no film. The gun had a moment of weight on the end of my bent arm like our damned camera hand-held or not hand-held threatening to drag down all it framed: down would go 2D slides of Hyde Park and the English country, and down also the screens of dusty fort and Mediterranean crag; down would go gaps in the Stonehenge circle filled for a moment with new Druids or a lurking American voice or Nash angry with Bob the dark-haired late co-star of our Unplaced Room who bickered with him outside the Sarsen ring: so that the literal weight of that Beaulieu dragged down out of sight even the hand of my wife touching me and the borrowed breath of Tessa in my mouth turning to words and out of words until (as you who have me may say) through manipulation, not real courage, I saved that New England drive-in movie screen by the waters of the Atlantic by placing at the base of that land-slipped clay cliff (cartridged long ago for later thought) Tessa’s uncle who was struck in middream thus not by a cruel-faceted quartz paperweight a German cat pawed off a high night-time ledge but by the very screen 60 by 100 that I couldn’t sell the merchant-investor near Liverpool. Hit but not killed, for in his early old age Tessa’s Uncle Karl became, for all his blindness, a Zionist settler dictating to his wife and her long, comforting fingers epistles from a Tel Aviv suburb to Tessa’s half-envious father in Golders Green which expatiated greatly and with Talmudic pomp upon the age-old zone of mystic In-Between carved like a moat of insulation (in Uncle Karl’s prose) to guard a Jewish self prior to actual territory, yes the inner and spiritual claim to separation from others and claim to a place that was a claim that created that place (that beautiful place) by fiat of communal will. Tessa’s father would tell his neighbors in their well-watered gardens about Karl’s commitment as if he and Karl were collaborating, and about Karl’s theory that despite a permanent eclipse of his main sight, he had intimations he was recovering of all things peripheral vision.

  Now Jan might disdain “mere completions,” but I with my parka-full of others’ weapons and my Druid’s counsel on how to make my body breathe had never laid claim to any kind of completion. I had more than once in recent days found myself poised weightlessly mighty like a god, held in a field of my own generation or finding, in a space between impingements of other fields like the short moment between forces when I snatched the autographed ball flung up by Ned Noble (who when he would jauntily take leave of us would say, I shall return). Yet now from either of two random parallels—the minicab in London Sunday night, the loft in New York Tuesday, each ending with offspring, the ominous mention of Jenny by Mike, the queer allusions to Jerry by Jan—I was now being situated in an independent power way past even what I had pretended.

  Perhaps it was true, the god bit.

  Yet no: my hero the Franco-English engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (in whom my own beloved and neglected Will may not have been so intrigued as I hoped) was much struck by the collapse of a bridge near Manchester in the late 1820’s: the steady tread of troops across it one day set up a harmony so deep it shook loose a pin in one of the suspension chains and the bridge at one end let go. Fields impinge. You must build yourself into the life around you. Which sounds so like good advice I must find another way to pass it on to Will.

  Paul was misconstrued, you see. His views these last months had grown apparently more abstract, not less. But Mike, Chad, John, Nell, Incremona, Sherman, even Gene at first (until then likewise suspect) saw Paul defecting because of the target. This target, which no doubt I knew the logistics of even better than she, touched the Flint family enterprises, and she did not want to know more than that. And John, with his English sense of sinister unity within great families, insisted Paul himself had proposed the target. But Chad and Len believed Paul planned to join Jack in the business at last; Mike and Gene believed Paul had found a new strange reverence for the father who had founded the firm, but Mike thought Paul wished only to safeguard the firm while Gene believed Paul had learned to love his brother Jack. Sherman and Len believed Paul would blow the whistle, and so did Reid, who did not otherwise agree.

  Jan said Paul had gone to Wales in May to see the Prescelly Mountains whence the Stonehenge bluestones had come heroically by land and sea and hand, and Paul had been thinking in a new way about Stonehenge from a new distance.

  And Callanish?

  Jan did not know the name, she said, and I neither challenged her there with my superior evidence from the dilettante geologist in the red mini that in fact she had been at Callanish nor let her know other dates I believed she did not know: that Paul was in the Hebrides sometime before May 24 when we shot the Unplaced Room and heard the deserter’s half-squelched words of praise for Paul, and in South Wales with Elspeth the Bonfire night of May 28 by which time, to judge from Jan who saw him in Edinburgh in June, he’d made up his mind to break with the group.

  Mike said, for we had arrived, Who lives here?

  Near here, I said.

  At the next crossing stood a policeman. Lorna had mentioned Geoff’s party over my Glasgow phone when, on the verge of my lookout dream, I had found myself between her and some northwest passage which on my cartogramic variant of Gerardus Mercator’s flat map curved an unheard-of new great arc remarkably between two seemingly contiguous virtually congruent parallels through Callanish to fields of people compassed by their secrets from each other. I would chance Lorna’s being at Geoff’s party. I had no key to the new lock at home.

  What if we aimed for that cop? said Mike. This cab’s got pickup.

  That would be the end of one callow revolutionary, I said.

  But you’d be stuck in England for years, said Mike.

  I’ll call in a good lawyer; at least I’m within the law.

  The lawyer Mary’s been talking to?

  Why not?

  The New York State Bar doesn’t cover London. What was his business with Allott?

  Maya business, I said (and did not add “undoubtedly,” for I knew on some cooperative current of instinct that this was the lawyer Dudley had consulted on international divorce, having been in touch with him first about Catherwood’s New York holocaust).

  I needn’t shoot you, I said, you don’t have working papers unless Len got you some, and I think we’d find something at the dispatching end of your two-way radio, which by the way may be on, that would be at least as interesting in its connection to Paul Flint as you are yourself, maybe Bob, maybe Nash if he’s back from Savvy’s party.

  Well Mike came around in his seat so suddenly I almost shot. Then, too calmly, he asked if I knew where he co
uld find Bob.

  I haven’t seen him since Stonehenge, I said.

  I was on the pavement, my hand on the roof.

  Why was Mary a dividend?

  Her brother sent us a touring archaeologist from Alabama.

  At Stonehenge, said Mike.

  For comic relief when more important things were happening.

  Like a film, Mike murmured.

  People threatening to appear, I said, or rumored missing. The Alabama academic replying with coy caution, I’d rather not say, really—as if he’d been asked if Mary Napier had actually got her hands on the Montrose heart.

  Mary’s crazy, said Mike.

  On the contrary.

  On the contrary, eh?

  You didn’t hear when Mary described Montrose’s dismemberment the night Marie’s blond costarletto of our fortress footage was mad at her for being with the dark-haired local in the guitar bar. Mary’s brother put the Alabama archaeologist on to us. A good courier.

  The policeman was looking.

  I knew I would have to fly to New York. Mike slid suddenly along his seat to the left-hand window, but then did not say anything, then said, You’re wrong about Sherman; he’s not in New York. I would know.

  I shrugged, I deeply did not care, I turned away—and beyond the street lamp that lighted the policeman who now moved off I nearly saw Ned Noble (on a Brooklyn stoop) from whom I also turned away on the singular occasion of his last departure—as also I turned away from the crystal set he’d promised and broken—toward something I could not see in front that I swore would replace it.

  Mike’s cab came alongside like a perpendicular coordinate to his violent sideways slide along his seat when I linked Mary’s brother to our Stonehenge. And I held Chad’s gun at arm’s length toward the window, a headless pedestrian. What else have you in your jacket? said Mike’s voice, and I told him I had good reason to know they would kill to keep the lid on.

  In that case (said the voice from the far side) think about Reid because you’re right he’s in New York; and even if you’re planning something yourself and you know like day by day where Paul Flint’s been since Stonehenge-night-at-the-film-festival, it doesn’t matter, Reid’s in New York, you know who’s with him; you know what she tried to do, and you know that as of right now she doesn’t have to have done anything, she’s Cartwright’s daughter.

  A loch to look at, a cross to bear, a memory to bring back. Now she was in America, I in England. Nonetheless, by some oscilant continuity I was still on the American trip with its many centers, the second tenor bidding my Highgate wife goodbye, the three against the fortress wall, the stabbing, the escalator plunge, the sullen death of Ned Noble in Brooklyn Hospital in ’45, the portals of Stonehenge with their emulsified night, the cruder stones of Calanish where Jenny hid my words and whose widow’s face has Indian) ones (or as the insular English with their lurid distinctions say, red Indian).

  And the Kansas City Indian last seen at Stonehenge I had first seen the night Paul scampered from the grove in Wales.

  Which Jan seemed to comprehend now not by receiving but only by in response demanding if I’d done violence to her jaguar—bored a hole maybe.

  To house a bomb? To bomb a house—a structure, say, like an inveterate dream-plan where a dark watchman tries to wake and I a lookout on double watch (the squad within, the threat without) may have to cosh him so he stays coshed. Certainly I have not inserted anything in her jaguar, I’ve barely touched it since I took it two nights ago and, traveling under true colors shortly after leaving Alba put less confusion than evidence into Mike, to wit (which then seemed true as I said it) that I’d taken the red jaguar because it made me think of Nash’s nosebleeds.

  But there is someone whom I make see red, I learn from Jan.

  Oh who is that?

  But Jan’s answering that it is not Paul (for Paul has found in stones and stars a calm beyond revolutionary purpose, beyond even peace and contemplation, that she wishes he could pass on) turns my words back to me to the hearsay tale Sunday night told by the splendid woman who left as soon as I came: the nod she gave me: her face like Lorna’s, her name something like Lana: her tale diffused in her absence into a terminal colloquium on violence guess where: but her tale: the man cartridged backwards of so many long pages: a committee of one to undermine a network of violent exiles by sowing confusion among them: is that man me?

  If all this is in fact my lookout dream at last and has been since Glasgow (where in that case I am still and where a hotel bed once holding a map now holds me), then I find myself not simply defending the squad inside the target building nor yet excluded from the squad of approaching pursuers: but am instead some crystal semiconductor whose designed impurity draws the two together.

  The two? The more than two. As one who once entering Paul’s hut in his absence assumed Paul’s one-time alias, Paul Wheeler, to deal with brothers Jack and Gene who were in the presence of my daughter’s present from me containing a copy of my words that are parallel to the film that was Jan’s idea, I at once now three days later reminded Jan that Paul had indeed been able to pass on to others something of the genius she felt in him.

  Witness the deserter Jim and what he found. He came down from Norway and the Faeroes to the Western Isles, the outer and northern parts, and he could have stayed, he said; the low, leaning peatland where a dilettante geologist who owns a small red car put Jim ashore is like the endless Sundays of the crofters’ faith, the dense tablets of fuel dug and handled slow as that Calvinist gravity they were dried to warm; and Jim, next heard of south at Paul’s hut on the slopes of prickly damp Clisham, could just have stayed there: for Paul’s power seemed to Jim to draw an imaginary space where before there had been none so there was now no need to pass on along the line of ostracism from one center of exile altogether by finding an elsewhere in between—

  Oh I see, I see what you mean, said Jan.

  Which was why Bob his mentor-to-be tried to make Jim’s potentially incendiary words mean something else, for Paul who on our sound track of the Unplaced Room was never named was powerful enough to seem to Jim to change Jim’s life, which is what Jan seemed to hope could be done for someone she was thinking of before—as indeed Paul changed Claire’s life—

  Claire! said Jan, blinking twice automatically.

  Drew Claire into an idea for amending a world, but she need merely arrange a few introductions, not actually grind an idea into a camera.

  You can’t mean Phil Aut’s Claire.

  What did Paul say to Jim? Stay on in the hut? No, Paul would not say that to anyone then, not even Claire. Did he tell Jim not to get in touch with Gene, whose name had been given Jim by the dilettante geologist who’d ferried him from Norway to the Hebrides but knew only Paul’s first name and not that Gene and Paul were brothers (only that Gene was the brother of Jack, the dilettante geologist’s periodically profitable connection)? No, Paul was already breaking with the London group but he wished not to have any influence on anyone; he remembered what he had done to Chad at a time when Chad was contemplating a peaceful academic career. At the time Jim left Paul, hiking to Tarbert, buying postcards in the little Harris tweed shop and thinking again that if he could not be a fisherman or a weaver he might just go on walking, Paul was about to leave too: to see first-hand the bluestone quarries in Wales and visit rose-cheeked serious Elspeth and her Hindus and their grove near the two rivers.

  Are you sure?

  I was there. Near the two rivers the Usk and the Wye along which Dudley Allott on a map as if it were all real could point to where in Wales stone castles had stood long before those rivers were conveyed to Dagger—

  The rivers came to Dagger?

  —and this influence on Claire rousing a glamorous amateur to cloistered action occurred even before her rendez-vous at Callanish when Claire sought Paul’s hut by figuring alignments but also bringing to bear an interest unconnected with any mere use of Callanish, say to get someplace else. Which is worth remarkin
g, for what did she find after taking her compass readings (which she could have avoided with a map)? She found the man himself in the flesh come all the way up from the south to Callanish to meet her.

  Not Phil Aut’s Claire?

  It is a refrain Jan can’t help inserting into her alternating protection of Paul with Jerry, and Jerry with Paul (though never the two protected at once). Like my Transatlantic Saving Time that holds in one liquid crystal a Tuesday loft, a London Monday.

  After four hours’ sleep I’d woken in the middle of a dream about Lana, and Geoff surprisingly got up when I did—I might have been a condemned man.

  I phoned my charter associate.

  Geoff and I could not decide between us exactly where Lana had picked up her tale last night of undermining the ring of violent exiles by sowing confusion among them. We discussed the tale but not its link to me. My feet were sore, my daughter now quite near. We decided after all not to drink last night’s coffee. Did the Corsicans drink coffee at the time Boswell visited the revolutionary Republican Paoli? Paoli took him at first for a spy, while the people took him for a British envoy, while Boswell himself (warned on arrival that seducing Corsican women would mean “instant death”) spoke grandly of an alliance between Great Britain and Corsica. I put away half a narrow loaf of last night’s French crust with preserve whose slippery thickness of real apricot I could not bite through as neatly as the small rounds of rewarmed bread. I had to phone Lorna.