Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

  I breathe away the pain, the room is in my blood, breathing. Gene squints as if in pain, he doesn’t dream it’s the Montrose heart Mary’s here in New York for. Nash bites on a ring staring at Len’s empty door.

  I say to Nash: It was Nell—it was through Nell that Tessa’s daughter knew Reid.

  Nash to Gene: Tessa knew Nell!

  Gene to me: Savvy knew the husband Dudley.

  Nash to me: You were balling Tessa. Nell told Savvy.

  Gene to no one: Tessa got him into Mexican stuff, she said.

  I’m queasy. The uninterrupted expanse of pale carpet looks new. Headlines say 2500 to 5000 are dead and there’s a follow-up on what seems now recent news I’ve missed—Britain has opted for the Common Market.

  There’s talking outside this room from beyond each door, but then also around—like an axis turning into motion.

  What Mexican stuff? says Jan.

  I believe Dagger the source of Jan’s film no more readily than myself the source of the Marvelous Country House described by me to Dagger then really found by him—nor the source Tessa either, who in March described to me that very house known I see now through Nell Flint, but Tessa did not meet the DiGorros till mid-July.

  System probably moves toward increasingly improbable states: Cartwright’s Law?

  My shtip Thursday with Graf is now far off as the point of its twinge, to wit Other Life at some harmonious remove from me—which is my power that I’m on the point of formulating in front of Monty when I remember having had my lookout dream; but power about to burst in through Chad’s closed door and Incremona’s open door plunges me again, in mid-formula, beyond its knowledge, and the body that Andsworth’s ideas have given me is mine but not mine: pulses swash more ways at once, there’s a chopper coming apart in my future, the Dagger-loop blinks through evenings of discussion and through the Beaulieu’s advertised featherweight six and a half pounds but greater far through a growing diary now marked by a megalith near where Krish’s body if unfound by Jack may have risen with the aid of a dilettante geologist in a red mini whom Jan must know—Dagger-loop parallels other pulses, loops or not loops: red jaguar darting (Mexico, Jack, Dag, Jan, me): plot against Flint that Jack seems himself part of; and (near, yet tracked apart from, John-of-the-loft’s authentic care for his real work surrounded but not touched by Aut’s cash) the Druid’s holy sobriety leads near but past a cache of organic exile hash, near but past a quiet downstairs bedroom where Nash was sorely beaten, near but past more of Andsworth’s survival economics—a Napoleonic fake of the French cartographer Nicholas Sanson’s 1658 map of the British Isles with two delicate scroll cartouches and thickish yet delicate outlines that make the land look singed out of the sea, survival economics—near but clear of the undevalued strait gate of the one flat map thence through the strait-jacket of the body’s network to Ned’s sixteen-year-old face not to be saved by any bell the despised Lord Kelvin rings from his demonstration models yet not marked by a cancer frantically circuiting within to carry the message out, petulant sixteen-year-old futures leaving a go-Dutch-yourself blank for a Brooklyn Heights Gentile hand of pedestrian invention to fill in with its own magic shtip reaching between gravities but not in time for an autographed sphere along a flat shelf that exists only in that hand’s instinct.

  I’m hungry. Sub’s children are with Rose for the weekend.

  Nash eyeing me laughs and speaks; but it has no more to do with his real thoughts about Nielsen and Stonehenge and me, than on the day of Boyd’s autographed ball my stabbing reach was conscious of a meaning in it that Ned and I later tacitly shared without benefit of demonstration. Nash is telling me of all people that Incremona’s been in a rage ever since the cops towed his taxi off day before yesterday, and I ask if he’s planning to blow up a few police tow trucks, and when Jan (behind me as if behind my eyes) asks if Len had the necessary cash to bail the cab out, Nash and I laugh in such a way that I know the cab was stolen whether or not they knew Paul had it—and now the Frenchman lets go with a great laugh like the ground rushing up to meet you, and I am sure the twenty thousand is some deal Len has with Jack.

  Gene says, You don’t know what you’re doing. Mike says, He knows all right, but there’ll be no doing.

  Between the two truths a space occurs, a new volume there was not room for.

  I get out my pen and search my pockets and say, Oh Jerry’s got the address book. And I reach down and tear a corner of newspaper just above the headline. I put it in my palm and draw spontaneously a logo for Ned’s lost time-machine.

  There is a space I’m trying to use, having seen it come into being. Mike is questioning Jan.

  Chad is saying that I gave parts of the diary away.

  To my wife, for instance.

  That doesn’t count, says Nash (and then irrelevantly but with relish), she was holding hands Sunday night.

  At Savvy’s of course—whom I told to look up Dudley Allott in the North Library when Savvy had to use the British Museum one week long ago.

  But the space that I have reached into existence fills with the memory of a stabbing pain due to past or future hard to tell—(a) a train ride up from the south coast, a boatyard mentioned to a Frenchman who kept saying, Correct, and would not discuss the May événements (“CONSUMER SOCIETY MUST DIE A VIOLENT DEATH”—“TAKE YOUR DESIRES FOR REALITIES”) or (b) the prospect of a drink with Lorna, Dudley, Tessa, and Tessa’s father—or some jellied eels in between that may have been as pivotal as the depressing old man in the bog (English for john) who kept my hands wet and bent my ear about his dream of a wheel-shaped radially compartmented pub to please everyone—yes after him my stab dissolved and I went back upstairs to have a drink and hear about German Jews wandering the wartime Heath.

  Why not, says Nash—you took his wife to Mexico.

  And the space I have reached into being fills on the eve of the Allotts’ sailing for New York with Tessa’s suitcase and with the stone she gives me, then, hearing Dudley and Jane, takes away to give Lorna.

  I’ve never been to Mexico, I say to Nash. I’ve been to Stonehenge.

  And before I can do the job myself, the space fills up with something other than Tessa’s third moment: it is survival politics, stop-gap, and crass, a curtain of flesh and failure, both the Māyā Lorna had her hand on firming it up so it didn’t look like Southeast Asia any more, and the purpose Dag and I in an old Volkswagen receding from the National Film Theatre settled at last, a film-to-be, settled in words.

  But there is still space, and for Uncle Karl who finds in his wife’s fine-fingered hand space for a postscript to Tessa’s father who phones me when “the children” are in Massachusetts to ask what is the matter with Dudley and to share with me Karl’s P.S. (you know he’s blind? yes, I know): that the early nomad Hebrews living “between the desert and the sown, between the most fertile of lands and the total negation of life, which in this remarkable corner of the earth lie cheek by jowl” may have developed a “tension…between a desire and a contempt for what is desired”: interesting, I agree, and the Dudley question fades, very interesting indeed; and is Uncle Karl still enjoying his dream house? Oh no, they moved to a flat in Tel Aviv. Still sleeps till ten in the morning? It’s possible, the voice turns uncertain. And have they a cat? Always a cat. A new cat? An Israeli cat.

  By luck Karl is prepared; he dreams of a house he has often designed, bombs turn to rain showers and garden flowers spring up faster than mushrooms or the house itself; there is not even pain, or so he can’t recall—he has a bump later, and of course he is blind, but the dream house swung back and disappeared like a shooting-gallery target but then swings back up and Uncle Karl is awake: the German tabby dislodging an old heavy wedding present was four feet above him, so not even his cat’s paw did he feel, much less claws at a throbbing eyeball like body meat ripped out from under a river turtle’s shell by a jaguar unlike either the red jaguar throne at Chichen Itza near an ancient Maya observatory, the Caracol, with its square wall-
holes giving sunset and moonset lines-of-sight which Dudley himself checked on March 21, 1965, nor the jaguar’s Maya name balam, hidden thing, which in Tessa’s troubled passion was just right for the camouflaged violence that reached its thirsty teeth down from the dark, and Dagger told me he wished he’d known all this before venturing into the heart of the jungle in search of his friend because he could have used a cultural rest-stop even a detour from time to time—he looked up the Mayas later in New Orleans.

  I did not in so many words offer Lorna the Marvelous Country House. Was it Tessa I was offering?

  You say my face betway? Betway what?

  Oh at last the Frenchman’s come out of his visiting bulk.

  Betray? I laugh to Gene. Well if this thing began as a loyalty test Len laid on you, it might end out of all your hands, so don’t sweat the loyalty angle, Geney.

  Geney! says Nash. Geney!

  In my mouth Jack’s big-brother name for Gene surprises me, it comes from the east and the north, from invented compass bearings scribbled with a wet hand on borrowed paper in a Hebridean hut a week ago tonight, and Gene grabs for the scrap in my palm and misses, and the Frenchman demands my answer and Gene in some collaboration that is out of my hands says low to me, Do you think Incremona would ever have settled for a Flint warehouse, do you think that? you know damn well the idea wasn’t Incremona’s just as Jack knew damn well your name wasn’t Wheeler with that fake accent coming in out of the rain—he knows Wheeler—but Incremona! forget it! the idea for a Flint warehouse—

  Fingers jerking my arm are French and the question comes again, Betway? betway? betway what?

  I shake my head with a pitying grin for Chad who has darted over behind Gene and grips Gene’s arm, but Gene thinks the grin is for him.

  Nothing like sharing information, I say, you’ve told me where, why don’t you tell me when?

  You know when, says Nash—we know that from Van Ghent.

  I say (and laugh), Oh you guys are incredible, aw Chad boy you should never have visited Paul in the Hebrides, June told me all about it.

  Nash moves close, he wants to hit me with those rings, he’s raised his voice to a pitch of purposeless energy: OK so it was Chad’s idea, man, but it came out of the group, man, and did you know you’re through, man?

  Yet none seems to see me.

  Chad has swiped Nash to the floor.

  Gene eyes the other door. I know what Incremona will say. He is through Chad’s door and I am saying, Don’t worry about me, Nash, it’s Nielsen’s friend Bob Coronelli you better look out for, but the Frenchman yanks me around, and now Incremona is calling across the room as if across a considerable distance: how did Gene know about Jack and that jaguar? was Gene in touch with Jack? and whose friend was DiGorro anyway?

  Not mine, says Gene—

  Because (calls Incremona slowly) I don’t know the answer to that one—because “your” friend DiGorro pulled a fast one, right?

  I was on the carpet, the Frenchman had shoved me down; but I’ve spun up to face Incremona, who stares through me as through a gap and says, not across the room but close, You were right there’s no film; you knew he wasn’t going to come across.

  I was up; but hands from behind held me. So Dagger planned to sell the film. But who to?

  Voices evoked by me pass through me:

  Jack didn’t know him at Paul’s last Saturday so they’ve worked fast.

  Paul’s behind this!

  Paul’s gone to Chile.

  What do you mean Chile?—that’s where I’m going with Jerry.

  Cut it out. So what if there’s no film?

  Don’t give me Bob—Bob knew Nielsen had to go.

  Twisting to be free of the arms, I want to know whose. The other door where Incremona left to take his call now shuts. Incremona’s right behind me, and he has himself shut the door he reentered by—Chad’s door. Ned Noble is dying in a movie theater, the children’s section smells of peanuts and warm chocolate, there’s a rustling arithmetic of nickels and dimes dropped in the dark of the St. George Playhouse on Pineapple Street on Brooklyn Heights—and in the darkness the starched white matron leans over my sister and me to tell Ned to stop groaning; I can’t quite see the movie, can’t quite hear whose words in Dagger’s VW receding from the National Film Theatre, key words—but all that opens is Sub’s ripe fridge, a snowdrift round the freezing compartment, semisoft Birds Eye cardboard thus insulated from subfreezing temperatures; and Ned, dying, can say only that Kelvin was a jerk; and while I want to dream of peat wheels and hand-hewn oak subway carriages and the Brunel-Cartwright memorial moving terminal founded on that original Maya system using twenty and the breathtakingly original concept of zero, and a hand claws a scrap out of my palm, I feel but cannot understand a law that lies beyond increasing improbability and the more I feel it the less I can claim it as let us say Cartwright’s Law; but not quite hearing the words in Dagger’s car I am ready to be at home with the unexpected which is a concussion that inserts itself like the Om of an overhot stereo in a space in my body not previously there, an emptiness eased in with dry oil of whispers:

  The gell.

  Tourists have accidents.

  What are you doing? What’s that?

  Lighter fluid.

  Where are you going?

  Back to Taos, New Mexico. How about that?

  He’s going to blow up a few police tow trucks.

  The Bay of Bengal tidal wave blobs like a fingerprint that didn’t hold still, the dead align along mud terraces that I see now too late were the isobars of my fingerprint, reaching for the strings of two helium balloons my wife has just yanked from the ceiling and punched out the garden door. Through a crystal clarity equating a kind of silence, a hand in glove reaches to you—you are dangerous, worth study, valuable, and what seems at first to be Tessa’s word twenty disperses itself into Tessa saying, So what, twenty”? so what, zero? the Maya got that from China—that’s not what matters about the Maya!—but no, the word twenty cut off so it turned into an absolute or an idea was my word, my last word.

  I do not know what went on inside me while unconscious if I was unconscious. I know what happened outside.

  But my head filled the dark closet where I was slumped. The voices outside plus the thought that I was at last ready to be launched into the dream so as at last to control it led me to see myself still in that room with the newspaper, but the vivid faces that belonged to the voices I now heard did not belong to Len, Nash, Chad, Jan, Gene, Mike, or the big Frenchman, but to John-of-the-loft and someone else, and their faces were vividly visible because I was blind.

  I reached for a Beaulieu sync button thus though unfilmable to record on the attached Nagra my remarks which I rehearsed in my body as if these remarks were to be my lookout dream. But as fast as I could evaporate the irrelevances with which this rehearsal filled the closet up to and beyond liquid level, more came.

  But I needed the practice—my head felt inside a cartridge lined with training electrodes and was getting bigger to where it would fill the cartridge imbedding those electrodes in my head, and as for the readiness I had felt, it now needed just a quick rehearsal, but Lorna kept breaking in yet it was somehow I doing the talking and she didn’t answer when I said did she buy her new comb in London or New York, I could get two of those French tortoise-shells for the price she’d paid for one—but this one dyes, she said, and sure enough she took off her bluejeans and her hair was red in the form of Corporal’s chevrons.

  But there’s a different darkness in a line across my feet; I’m not blind; whatever I was ready for has passed and I don’t feel it and I’m now not sure I had any lookout dream Tuesday, let alone just now.

  I’m in a closet. It’s empty. The voices are about to stop. One of them is sorry to be late—held up in traffic. (On a Saturday? Is it still Saturday?) I smell something. A chemical used in the room where the voices are, or used on me. I’m the watchman of that lookout dream recovering consciousness, but what do I wa
tch? It’s clear the man I haven’t heard before knows this equipment and this room but has only just arrived and is failing in some way; he can’t get John excited about the random possibilities. Of cartridge loops. John is saying Well that’s straight sixteen-mill. It’s John-of-the-loft.

  John says he would follow Whitney’s early analog work complete with rotating discs, multiple axes, that whole multimovable table thing, and feed the patterns in and come out with flower targets and kaleidograms and concrete words exploding into galaxies—beautiful things, right; but now we’re going to have plasma crystals and that’s a digital system that changes the whole future for us, analog computers are antiques.

  Not yet, the other says; plasma crystals don’t give you motion; you got 480 lines of resolution with 512 points per line and you need six bits of information for each of your quarter-million points all for just one single static image, man, and where you going to get that kind of computer capability?

  John: Real-time projection direct—that’s what I’m after. We need two-megacycle-a-second capability in a computer to generate motion with the plasma visual subsystem, but we’ll get it. Progress is exponential now. Used to be subsystems weren’t up to the computers; now the shoe’s on the other foot.

  Other: You got the subsystem?

  John: My boss’s boss if we play it right.

  The other is explaining plasma crystals and how you sandwich a layer between glass plates, and one plate has a mirror-conductor on the inside against the crystal and the other has tin oxide, and when you charge the crystal in between, you disrupt—