Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

What was? asked Kate.

Running into Incremona in Corsica, I said.

But the other coincidence, said Kate, as if not wanting to change the subject — who is Jane?

I was picturing John the man in glasses from the Mercer Street loft holding a camera in the lurid flashes of our Stonehenge night. That cameraman hadn’t been wearing glasses, and this John of mine on the loft floor where I’d dropped him had been half-blind till he got his steel-rims back on. I told Kate Jane was the daughter of the man that Monty had been phoning for information, and I remarked that the real coincidence was that Jane knew Reid.

But my words were again almost too much for the occupant of that Unplaced Room amid the circuiting dark of many degrees of past: for hoping to look only out ahead, wherever I looked was back — the tunnel of pedestrians impeding our scene in static twilight while the boy from Honolulu banged his steel strings, the tunnel bearing me home from the fact of English twilight which that afternoon I had learned must preclude any undertaking to launch a Drive-in cinema in the Liverpool area, the tunnel of Beatle rock in my carriage drowsing me toward that mobile terminal the wheels of which are paved with peat but which recedes from what Ned Noble once called my pedestrian imagination, so maybe I will never except in daydreams catch it and patent it or in some weightless or depictured bare unsituated room plan it down to each revolution of each wheel, but there is no revolution, the wheel is at Yarner’s Coffee Shop in Upper Regent Street and it is a huge elegant coffee-grinder wheel for show, and Jane to be precise had said merely that Reid had waved passing the window: but to Tessa? or to the other woman? what was her name? Hunt, Winston, she was American, Simpson, Flint , it was Flint.

Oh Reid knows everyone, said Kate.

You didn’t know him when I asked you Monday.

Kate’s hand skipped her collarbone and went to her eyes. She crossed her legs.

I would try one more thing, then give up here in order to preserve momentum. I was going to Dagger’s to find out why he was holding the Unplaced Room out from Claire, why he’d wanted to put the Hyde Park Softball Game between the Hawaiian and the Suitcase; to find out if in fact the film I’d seen unwound and tangled on Dagger’s table (of even less value now than the strips of adhesive tape that had been used to seal the silver cans) had been our film, and if not, why not — and to find out where the sound was, that Monty outside my New York cab had suddenly thought of when the headless bike-rider whipped by. Also I had to cash a check.

I moved toward the foyer and asked, without looking back, if Kate would be surprised to know with whom Paul and Jan might be staying in Scotland.

Kate was close behind me, her steps left the rug and touched the floor.

You knew she wouldn’t be here, didn’t you! Why did you come?

I turned to Kate in the foyer and over her shoulder the crack of dark into the Unplaced Room flickered like a Highland chieftain’s thigh or Tessa’s, or like Dudley’s detached elbow in the pool lane parallel to mine, or like my face retracting from the bare window of my room in the Marylebone house in ’55 when Miss Topp and Mr. Sharpe the gardener looked around from the incinerator, or like the mystery snap packed quick as a blink between sweater and shampoo.

You don’t know Mary’s brother, I said, who used to be a force in the Scottish Nationalist Party.

I had the door open. I didn’t feel the weight of my pack. I had been editing the film as if it existed. Did I want it to exist? In my dream, miles of film paid out of my abdomen into the light as someone walked away holding the leader.

I’d nearly run through the cash I’d taken from the Indian’s wallet.

Kate had her hands crossed over her chest. Her eyes were wide. I had won her, if not her information.

Where? she said.

Mary’s brother?

Kate nodded.

I leaned toward the open doorway and shifted my feet.

Kate’s next words were barely breathed. Your daughter may be in weal twouble.

Jan before Jenny, I said, but pictured two heads on a motorbike and two hands signaling an impossible turn, and a diary cached at Callanish.

Even I am supposed to be tonight, she said. In danger.

England is not safe for me, I said. But neither is where I’m headed.

My voice sounded loud after Kate’s. Will you be seeing the Flints? I have something for them.

Kate whispered in reply: That was Nell who phoned .

I replied in a whisper. I stroked the cheek of this English girl wondering if my heart had shrunk like the brave dismembered Montrose’s into a secret cartridge: Māyā , Kate, means the world is not separate from me. It is color, it is black and white.

Kate and I talked low as if indeed there were someone in the Unplaced Room.

Your film, was it in color?

Some of it. The Unplaced Room was.

Oh, the paintings.

We took them down.

Where are you going?

Who was the third phone call?

Nash.

Whom were you going to tell what?

You never told me your dream.

My daydream will have to do.

What’s your favwit color?

You ask as if you knew.

Orange Monday, red tonight, said Kate.

So in return for inadvertently identifying the Flints for me. Kate had noticed the jaguar’s absence.

I thought of shadowing the building to see who went in and who left. But in return for the ten quid I borrowed from her, Kate said she’d phone me a minicab.

The driver was very young. I got hardly a glimpse of his face. His accent was not English, not European, a hint of Irish that he might have been hiding.

My pack was in the front seat and the pockets of my parka were lighter sitting down.

The second-floor windows were dark, but it was early for Dagger and Alba to be in bed. On the other hand, the baby was less than two months old and Alba had been tired. The house in Belsize Park in which they had their high-ceilinged floor-through flat was fronted with pillars like Geoff Millan’s. But theirs was part of a row of heavy cream-colored residences owned by the Church, whereas his was a narrower brown brick with gray and red on either side.

The names by the bell were lighted. The downstairs door has had no lock for as long as I have known the house. I did not ring. The cab motor idled; under the dome-light the young man was studying his A to Z as if he was aware of me. There was a white stripe painted down the middle of the bonnet.

I climbed the two half-flights of carpeted stairs.

I looked around the DiGorros’ door for a key.

When I went back downstairs I heard an engine fade. I found a ground-floor hall through to the rear and a door to the dark garden. The far end of the garden seemed higher than my end perhaps because of the mound of compost and junk that crested thornily above the low fence dividing it from the bottom of the opposite garden and two lighted windows at the back of the house beyond.

I got into a shed and hauled myself with surprising ease because it was dark onto a balcony. Behind me I heard a movement in the garden. The garden would be called a back yard in America. In the late summer sun I had had a drink on this balcony with Dagger and the baby and Alba nursing her. The French windows opened when I depressed the handle, and I was in the big room they used for everything except sleeping and entertaining. Dagger used this wonderfully full yet clear and open room to work in, but he often worked in the living room on the street side at the fatal table which you who have me may by now remember, if by now but dimly.

The familiar sweet and dairy-sour scent of the baby grew stronger in the hall. Yellowish light from a street lamp came through the baby’s room to where I stood as if projected in the hall with the doorway of Dagger and Alba’s bedroom behind me. Their bed was smoothly pale; a dial glowed, and by looking off-target I could tell it was ten twenty.