Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

Cartridges stayed hard when out of touch with other cartridges but when in touch opened and shifted — even to glows of high hue or even varying grays with a black as lush as Lorna’s suede gloves so richly wrinkled, from finger to elbow setting out for our first and last Embassy cocktail party where a matter-of-fact madam’s orange hat and blue-green eyeshadow or a patronizing young parliamentary secretary’s machine-matched mauve tie and snotrag stood out like senseless data next to my Lorna with her gray wool dress that showed her wholeness, her high waist and her hips and stomach, and with her dark almost black hair alive around the gray-blue eyes. I was proud enough of her not to get mad afterward in a cab when she said, You like that crap more than you admit.

The door wasn’t open when I reached the second landing. There was no key under Jan’s mat. The last time I’d come with a friend, two others, a camera, and sound.

Lorna did not know how near I was.

There was a new lock on our door in Highgate. Had Jack had our house broken into? I couldn’t tell on the phone from New York how badly Lorna had felt about it — scared, unready, sad. Her tears were never hot pools on the carpet (where Tessa had dropped her butt) but slow and steady as if measured out.

And as I heard a hand on Jan Aut’s doorknob, I knew I was still between — for I knew (for how could I not have seen that) lock in Jenny’s cryptic note had an h: a loch to look at, a cross to bear: whatever waves I’d made had traveled on ahead to here, but back as well to Callanish behind me where my American daughter had saved the other remaining copy of the diary.

Which put me between again.

But with what in front?

Godlike I saw through Jan Aut’s door before it opened. She was fresh from a bath, a twist of towel round her hair. But she’d been up on Lewis with Paul. She might be anywhere, South Uist, Edinburgh, Wales.

The turban was still a towel, but no — she looked like Jenny; that was it. I was ahead of my own sound, I could have been still asleep three nights ago in my Glasgow hotel. I reached out to her still feeling for Jenny, and in the instant that I checked the impulse Claire accepted my embrace and I blocked the new wish to draw back, and was glad because I knew I could not help her. But no: Claire’s dog had just come out of hospital and she hadn’t settled her affairs at Outer Film and there was no reason to think Monty would want her here in London with him on business. But why did I think Monty was in London tonight — because he’d phoned Dudley? because if this system, whosever it was, was closed, the probabilities were that things should be beginning to come together?

But I was rehearsing; and, even irredeemably between, I knew my power lay in not rehearsing; and so as the door came open I would still proceed as if I had a plan even if I were no god.

It was Kate, the girl from the gallery. Her hand, the fingers of her tanned hand, went to her collarbone. She’d been in no mood to imagine me a god when we’d first met. I inserted myself sideways past her, bumping my pack, saying Jan expected me.

My pack stood next to the brown velvet chesterfield; my parka I laid over the arm so the pockets rested on the cushions.

Of course, said Kate.

The portrait of Jan’s to which I had added leaned against the leg of a baby grand. The piano was a Yamaha, the firm that makes motorbikes and flutes.

There was no one here. I fell into the chesterfield. The room was full of things chosen over a long period of time one by one. It had not been right for what we’d wanted when we’d filmed here. I said this to Kate, who stood at the foyer entrance, one ankle almost touching my pack.

You filmed here?

Yet looking around at a delicate brown bowl, a solid red jaguar some ten inches by four, a silver belt of ornately worked links lain across a bright-woven shawl thrown over a table, I felt that this room impossible to unplace. May 24 was personal not local. That is, you would not have looked at it and said England. There was a turtle. There was a color photo of Jupiter on the music stand above the keyboard.

I got up and walked away from Kate to a doorway. It was evening. A blanket or two lay on the floor beside a large bed with dark green sheets twisted and draping. I turned away to a further door that was almost closed.

What did you film? said Kate.

I don’t know any more, I said.

The Unplaced Room of our film was dark through a crack, and I did not go in. I remembered morning light through the top of a green tree. A bold bright portrait of someone with long lustrous hair leaning against the wall near where I stood. Large open windows with those peculiar screw locks at the middle and along the sash. The garden didn’t appear in the film. Pale clouds were filling the early blue when Dagger and I and the featured performers arrived. The sky in New York is gross, it is a blue land that will get you.

She’s not here, as you can see, said Kate. She was by the couch now. She started to lift my parka but I stopped her.

I said, Saturday night. I need a bath. I’ve just been up to Paul’s.

Why had she said Of course when I’d come in?

She sat on the piano stool. It’s Sunday, she said.

In the corner of my eye something moved, inanimate. Kate’s small mouth dimpled, in a quiver not a smile. She did not point out that as of Monday I hadn’t known Jan Graf. Either she thought I’d faked ignorance then, or she was doing something very special now.

I asked if she’d been at the gallery the day Aut’s man filmed; I said I knew Jan and the four men had been in it, but I hadn’t heard Kate mentioned.

When she shook her head — almost as if she couldn’t speak — I put my head back and closed my eyes and intoned like a list of heroes the names of Reid, Gene, Sherman, Incremona. I sighed and said it was a sordid thing, this commercial competition, utterly cutthroat.

Take my film diary, I said, my eyes still closed; it was incinerated in Paul’s hut on Mount Clisham yesterday. So that’s that. A regular trade war. What’s the use?

I sighed. Even Paul got demoralized, I said — he stopped caring about all the deserters coming through Norway and the islands.

I let myself seem tired. Kate nodded once. My mind played in a field of someone else’s inventing, more than one someone, I thought. Maybe I was as tired as I was seeming. I rolled my head toward where the inanimate movement had been, and saw it again. The door to the Unplaced Room swayed. I said there was a draft, and with a groan I leaned forward but Kate was up, crossing to the Unplaced Room, saying she’d close the windows, but I said just shut the door, and she did, stopping short of it so she had to reach out for the knob, and pulling it to so quickly — as if she had other duties to pass on to — that I felt she’d never meant to go in there and close the windows. I asked for Jan; Kate said she was here looking after the cat while Jan was away. That was like a past part of the truth. Kate was being careful. I asked for a drink. I’d been dreaming in the plane from Glasgow, I said, I was wild, I had all the passengers looking back at me. What a dream! Could I tell Kate about it?

Please do.

It must have come from the daydream I’d had before I dropped off: to wit, putting Paul and Chad together; plus the deserter’s dark-haired friend when we filmed here and Nash’s nosebleed when Cosmo accused him of planning to blow up the Underground. Plus Len’s angry trigger at Paul’s brother’s house.

Kate passed me a wine glass of whiskey and asked if that had been my dream, and I said it might as well have been. The door of the Unplaced Room was open a crack again but there was no draft, as if interrupting the current of air had lowered the windows automatically like the line-and-pulleys I’d rigged from my bed when I was twelve. I carried my parka into the bathroom, and Kate laughed but I didn’t believe her. But I said, Got some plastic explosive I’m carrying around.