I was on the verge of a formulation. Ned Noble’s terminal breaths lay ahead but near, and Andsworth’s Integrated Breathing beckoned me on past my concern for a shrunken heart and my concern about why he did not urge me to attend macrobiotic meals at the Community though I would have declined. He kept his activities in compartments, as Geoff Millan did his friends, and as once in those long drizzly safe winters in London I had thought Dagger did not.
Speak of the devil!
I said it aloud.
We were bumping to a stop at the red light and John’s cab ran on ahead.
It was what Dagger had said coming away from our preliminary visit to Stonehenge.
Slowing down to help the Druid, Dag had said Speak of the devil, as if recalling negotiations through Andsworth and not our present dispute about what film we’d used for the threesome against the fortress wall in Ajaccio. But Dagger had been stubbornly attentive; and now I understood.
But I had no time; two of that threesome were Marie and Incremona, and John-of-Coventry said she had been after Len to go on a macrobiotic diet, and Dagger’s stomach had been kicking up after breakfast at the école and I’d told him to change his diet, and he’d been reaching with his free hand for a Turns when the three appeared, and whether or not it was at Andsworth’s in South London that Incremona had beaten up Nash after the South Ken fiasco, it was clearly Andsworth’s Community that drew the Druid into the fortress scene in Dagger’s mind as we sighted the old Ford on Salisbury Plain and slowed down to help him fix his flat.
But I had no time, because that was precisely what Paul’s cab had—a flat.
No time to figure Andsworth’s collaborations with friends, enemies, and neutrals; nor for the unlikely prospect that my train of thought had caused this flat.
Guiding Ruby and Tris across the islanded double road of Park Avenue South at 7 A.M. for breakfast at a coffee shop, I saw Incremona and a blond man half turned away at a postbox on the southwest corner, I could have raised my voice in song and no one would have heard, for the sound around us was that great; I could have been one of those street singers of yore who materialized out of Atlantic Avenue and wandered the fine enclosed streets of Brooklyn Heights on a Sunday morning and looked up to our windows for a couple of buffalo nickels tight-folded in a chewing-gum-sized scrap of the Sunday Times—and no one here in Manhattan (perhaps even including Incremona who at that moment tracked my physical presence only) would have known much less taken me for a mad yeller attacking the system diagonally from some corner—the sound around us was that great.
But now as I bolted from Paul’s cab and ran after John’s, thinking if nothing else I could ascertain that he was not after all leading me where I thought, Paul shouted into a quiet that can be a city’s powerful charm at night be it London, New York, or somewhere in between—a humming quiet like an afterglow of glare, a field just out of sight voicing a guarantee that something has happened and will again: Paul shouted, I only wanted to help!
In the last word the deep voice out of that narrow tall chest contained still like an obscure unvoiced quiet surrounded by all the windy vacuum of other answers, those words It comes to that, and that alone.
Two hundred and forty miles without the wheel.
But where then was the calm Jan said Paul had found beyond stones and stars, beyond contemplation? But hell, here he’d been driving me into a trap.
To help me?
I could not find John’s cab. It turned west where I expected but did not then turn into the block of Mercer that I’d thought I was being drawn into. I was out of breath. There was no light around the shade in John’s loft.
When I got back to Paul’s cab, it was empty in the middle lane with its lights on and the traffic light ticking from green to red, and John-of-the-loft seemed not to have come back. I ran my hand around the tread of the tire that had gone, and I found what I was looking for.
Rose had Ruby and Tris till Sunday. Sub’s tests would be over then.
Should have kept the cab, said Dagger on Saturday—fixed your flat, hundred percent mobility, drive and park till the city towed you away, could have had it as our first car for weeks.
I was curious, said Gilda on Friday; you’re not responsible for me. She had at last got a call through to me at Sub’s to report that the man who had called himself Cartwright had come again and she had got into the spirit of the thing, couldn’t help it, and had told him a scary bald man had told her Cartwright was meeting Claire—at which this impersonator of me had been strangely shaken.
I walked from Paul’s cab to Monty’s house, which was dark. Later I phoned Claire and got her answering service.
Paul would not knowingly kill me.
I must find out what it was I knew that was so important to these people.
I would have to ask.
The black man who’d said We all part of the system, man, had chuckled when Paul’s cab crunched the glass of a bottle the black man would have hit John with if my steps or the inevitable field of my presence had not made John stop and look back, and the bottle crashed in the gutter instead, there to insert some of itself into the arriving tire of my cab.
Friday I waited in Sub’s apartment.
For Incremona, Nash, the Frenchman, Jenny, Chad, June—I wasn’t sure.
I phoned Claire’s answering service and said I’d be seeing her.
Nothing happened.
I found if I waved at the TV from a distance of four feet I could stop the picture rising.
In the evening Sub phoned from the hospital. Keep the sound down, Ruby had bad dreams. Then Sub remembered the children were with Rose, and I heard him breathing erratically.
At home he watched the news and thrillers, thrillers with the sound off. Educational TV was starting a series of good films, old films, no interruptions.
What are you doing in? said Sub.
At ten the phone rang but the caller did not speak.
At eleven and at twelve the same.
No one tried the door.
Incremona had seen the children with me.
I tried to get you, said Dagger Saturday.
But in fact it had been Claire who’d phoned Saturday morning just as I was leaving for her apartment, and when I told her it was a pure accident my leaving the letter from Dag on Phil Aut’s desk, Claire did not know, she did not know—she had not been told—she had not been to her office.
Why did I believe her? I let her talk. I could not stop her. But something stopped her, after she had told me Monty was not a fool no matter what our meeting at the restaurant might lead me to think. In London he’d told Dagger I’d be staying at the King Street house, I was extraordinary but Monty was afraid of me; but I must not, please, think him a fool.
Her goodbye came so fast then that it seemed cut off; I had not answered his challenge about the letter on Aut’s desk, so Monty must have heard from Jan.
But there was so much he had not asked. Like the sound. The sound tapes he’d asked about like a madman outside my cab the first time we parted so long ago it seemed. Why didn’t he ask this time? Three of those tapes were in a parka under a bed in his house. Where were the others?
But here was my friend Dagger who at length had opened Claire’s door on a beautiful October Saturday in New York and was jollying me along about “our” taxi whose flat I should have fixed, and my secret visits to his wife, and was I trying to put Jenny through a survival course, man, and Dagger had come very close to flying up to the Hebrides looking out for her.
He wore an Army jacket and a Castro cap; he took the dog’s leash off the closet door-handle. I was about to ask where Claire was and why Dagger had wished to put the Softball Game between the Hawaiian-in-the-Underground and the Suitcase Slowly Packed, but I reached down without looking and touched the familiar bulk of an untouched Sunday Times and was glad the film was probably destroyed, maybe I could conquer my weightlessness and sell the destroyed film to Jack Flint who must not wish his brother Gene’s wife and
house on view, nor his agent Krish in the Softball Game, nor his brother Paul the guru in transit at the Bonfire in Wales (near where Brunel’s timber viaduct over the Usk burned and was replaced by him with iron)—nor would Jack want his brother, his youngest his magnetic brother Paul’s voice on a Nagra tape or his face in a stone doorway at the probable scene of Jim Nielsen’s liquidation. For you could never tell how someone would make use of film footage—U.S. Air Force planes acquired for a moment to illustrate power possessed of momentum but insufficient focus like Cosmo’s Sunday fastball; America and England mingling in some dream of action and peace; Brunel’s great Clifton suspension bridge across the Avon gorge failing to convey me, my son, my dreams, my daughter, my wife (so that one might almost agree with Ned Noble’s late conviction that the finished thing, contrary to Kelvin’s belief in demonstration, was inferior to the concept); an American couple making music in a passage I used to walk along with my children; the use of my life as background for something else; the nervous wife fluttering in anti-climactic 8 mill, stronger than she looked.
Strong enough to lift that carton out of sight last Sunday night.
Claire’s big black retriever lay across the living-room threshold while Dagger fumbled for the ring to snap the leash. The dog seemed very calm if it was really about to be walked.
Dagger must have been telling the truth that Claire was not in, for he was taking the dog out. Asking me to wait.
To wait?
Claire’s expecting a delivery man.
I don’t believe you, friend, I said.
That’s your fault, friend.
If Claire’s absence and her unexcited dog did not show I was being once again set up, all other signs pointed inward at me. All the reports.
I placed a call to Highgate. While I waited I reread Dagger’s letter. It had come from London to Monty’s house in King Street, been conveyed to John’s loft probably by Jan, read by Jan or Paul or John or Monty or some or all of these or more; so whatever of me Dagger had sent was there for them as well: H.E.W. (on recommendations from, among others, a behaviorist friend of the English schoolteacher who’d been sacked from his job in the Bahamas) will take Mr. DiGorro on for pilot study to determine if the government wishes to get into sleep-teaching at federal level; and Dagger says in the letter, All bets are off with the film, sorry man you pushed too hard but you surprised me man and I’ll always wonder what you would have done in Corsica without me, right now the heat’s on and this heat confuses me but you know all about it—be good to Claire, we’ll be in touch.
It would work; it was not the piece of that retreating dream he’d had the morning of that little b & w crucifixion on the beach with the Bahama sand in his eyebrows and California sticking to his eyes and he’d been asleep enough to hold the thought that dreams are a species of sleep-teaching with a key difference that Dagger was just awake enough to lose; but now, what the hell—for peat’s sake—plain sleep-teaching would pay the bills—it would work, it would keep millions of kids away from violent schools during peak hours and Alba would work and transfer her closet to a new set of equally clear axes, Dagger did not get bogged down.
I said Cancel the call.
A man’s voice with an English accent said, No reply, sir.
Just as well. She would have asked where Jenny was.
Right, sir.
Well, Tessa had never except literally had her teeth in me, and I thought Lorna knew this by instinct, even if she did not know what she meant when on that July Sabbath that my own Hindu-American shtip had set off she’d said I had friends—married friends—to organize me on my travels.
I ran by others’ times and, cogged to one another, they by mine—which brought me near again to a formula but shunted off again at the memory of being shunted this terminal Thursday of October by Monty’s information and the thought and threat of Dagger’s letter but by being shunted given a gift, namely that on Tuesday night when Sub had already entered Roosevelt Hospital for tests and I fried cheeseburgers and told the kids the story of the Three Brothers and of how Dagger got his name, and watched a thriller in which everyone talked softly and walked loudly, and I waited for Jenny to phone and wondered if the Frenchman and Nash had gotten to her—I had dreamt my lookout dream, and now recalled nothing of it but that fact. But as if sound had been time, no time had passed while for me Monty had been soundless—and when my Sabbath shtip had ended I listened as closely to the dinner in Coventry as I had to the trivial news that had caused my shtip— Dagger’s H.E.W. and a carton of audio gear to fall back on.
A heavy carton? Dagger had surely swung a hop from a U.K. base and skipped the excess-weight charges. Alba loved London. She was excited by Dagger’s absences, but she would not like Washington. But they would find a flat or something larger and there would be room, and they would have another child. And Alba would be careful. And have I lulled you who have me?
Well I was over Claire’s living-room threshold in a second as if the room were a thought and from that clear pale indefinably oriental order I carried in my eye in another second back to the bedroom door the living-room blow-up of Claire’s grainy arm, and as I opened the bedroom door knowing what I wanted in her closet, I feared I would find something awful between it and me. But the king-size low expanse was flat as a motel bed and I whipped open her deep closet and hauled out from under the longer hems of dresses and the shorter limits of pants suits what Alba would never never have made the mistake of lifting Sunday night in London if she had not feared I would find out what was inside.
I clawed at the seam.
Tore my right index nail.
Two amplifiers a snug top layer.
Below were Nagra tapes.
And the rest was 16 mill.
Ours.
Dated and Placed. In my hand.
Developed or not I could not easily tell.
My blood was on the amplifier carton.
I gathered all the tapes.
I put them down on the bed and left blood there too.
I laid the amplifiers back in the carton.
A picture of Claire on the night table reminded me of how Jenny is like my sister.
In the incinerator room shared by the other tenants on this floor I unrolled our black-and-white Stonehenge and it was a developed negative, tiny and lurid.
Near the hundred-foot mark of the second Stonehenge reel I looked for Paul being tugged through a portal by the witch Tessa in her green beret but found Nash instead and remembered that not Dagger but the other man in the plastic mac had probably shot Tessa tugging Paul, and then I gave up unrolling the cork-screw celluloid and took the reels out of their cases and dumped the lot and heard the rattle halfway down fifteen floors to the basement furnace, then read the white letters on the black plastic plaque telling what not to put down the chute, and wondered if in fact film was still made out of celluloid.
Liquid assets you say?
Not liquid enough.
I took last Sunday’s Times from Claire’s hall table. I opened the pages and scrunched them as if to start some kindling and filled the top of Dagger’s carton and found some Scotch tape (called one of America’s signal inventions, by a famous English writer with famous scientific forebears who himself died an American citizen in California taming his terminal throes with LSD).
I sealed the carton, shoved it into the closet, realigned two pairs of slippers in front, and went to answer a buzz that proved to be not the door but the housephone.
Dagger had been told by Claire all right.
Delivery man.
Two: a tall old man in bell-bottoms, a red bandanna under his chin; and a woman my age or older whom I felt I knew from a negative somewhere—platinum shag, a plump pretty face matured by comfort.
O.F. pick-up, the man said.
Had Claire known Dagger would be out?
O.F.? I said.
Outer Film, the woman said.
Your key, the man said, and handed me the key to Claire’s flat.
>
Now where would it be, I said, thinking of Peter Minuit and the Indians.
Bedroom closet, said the woman. Which is the bedroom?
So Claire’s triple game had now been left to simplify itself for safety’s sake.
I thought, There goes a box of newspaper; but the old man in the bandanna asked what the hell was in here, couldn’t be just film.
I pocketed Claire’s key, as her door closed.
I imagine that if you (who have me) cut me open at the right points you’d find Will, Lorna, Jenny, some others, each in motion in some way but you would find them. Yet there is something in what Jan and Tessa said of me later; and I wonder if, in the trap that I presently had to choose, my morale could have been worn down by an amplifier tuned to my heartbeat: the thunder thud: a closed system growing conscious of itself till it thinks itself into pause as if it guessed some lightning ought to have preceded it: and it waits breathless: and sometimes it waits too long.
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