Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

Too much even if you did not think of that playpen’s history in our Marylebone house and then as mere clutter in the Highgate house when we didn’t have a third child. Too much whether you knew or not that Dagger had once sold to a rich Swede a forgery identical to that framed forgery of that Map of the World executed by Mercator in 1538 just eight years before the set of observation instruments he had made for Charles V for his campaigns was destroyed by fire — the map lost for three centuries to be found in New York just thirty-six years after Catherwood’s Jerusalem holocaust, a mental montage which in the dark of this room might be more visible than the object itself behind the glass of Alba’s impeccably cut, narrow white frame.

Too much even if you did not place among the college youths who came down to Coyoacán to help guard Trotsky the New Yorker Bob Harte paneled with Trotsky in this poster visible to the eye of memory if not to the eye of Krish’s flame from where I stood at the balcony end of the balcony room looking on a table for a film.

The stiletto button touched my palm and I pulled out of my pocket the papers which the draft I had caused by leaving the French windows open had blown off the table. The third letter was from an Air Force sergeant alerting Dagger to a special sale of Super-8 in minimum large lots. I blew out Krish’s flame and strode out to the hall closet, Alba’s closet; for one piece of our film was the 8 cartridge shot the night we came back from the base, and the 8 that Dagger said had burned was the cartridge Alba had taken of a friend’s baby, but if Dagger was concealing the fact that the film had not been destroyed, and he’d slipped up somehow telling me the spoiled cartridge on the living-room table was the baby picture, why not put together the possible existence of our own Super-8 cartridge and the inviolate privacy of Alba’s closet — where, as I fit Krish’s lighter and pushed the closet door all the way open, I remembered Alba’s flippers were kept, for the morning we departed for Corsica I had neglected to remind Dagger of them. This closet, with perhaps more of Alba in it than the balcony room or the master bedroom, was exactly between the box and the rucksack, and roughly (along the warped axis aforementioned) between balcony room (or garden) and living room (or street).

In the shelf facing me were boxes of Pampers and layers of baby clothes, the sleeved little vests (that Dagger called smalls and that are undershirts in American), the nightgowns, the Baby-Gro stretch suits waiting for Michelle, and all the other stuff I’d forgotten about, stacks of blankets the size of towels, more than she’d ever use.

Alba made friends easily in London. She said she could get excited by Dagger’s absence, but the truth was she had many resources beyond her life with him, friends he hardly knew, a Milanese couple who designed furniture, a Greek engineer with twelve toes, an American golfer who had found life in England married to a Spanish girl congenial, several Italian, French, and Swiss au pairs , and an old Rumanian Yiddish poet more personally anarchist than his ideologue friends from the Whitechapel of 1914, a good poet who was said except when he was with Alba to speak only Yiddish, who drank anything and sang, and whom Alba had thrown out on one occasion for pissing on the bathroom floor.

She kept her stationery supplies here in this cupboard, not at the long and vulnerable table where her typewriter kept its distance from Dagger’s. In the large lower space from waist-level down she kept her heavy equipment. An olive green tool box, planes, a drill, a level whose window blinked its bubble at Krish’s flame, and hanging from the sides and from the underside of the shelf saws that glinted like swords — then right above a shellacked box marked BITS (and beside a hammer) a brace fixed angular on the wall, in shape like the zig-zag crank of the Angenieux zoom we’d used to shoot the naval engagement in the very bay for whose depth I had used flippers hired in the sight of Incremona’s blond sidekick sitting with a girl in a port café across the cobbles from the plongeur van. Alba’s flippers — bought for her by Dag — lay one on top of the other at the back of this neat dark closet forgotten the day we left for Corsica and recalled with Corsica tonight. Alba’s Super-8 camera came into view at another cavelike level of her closet. The cartridges in their little yellow cartons were all unexposed, for you could not imagine Alba not having a cartridge developed as soon as she’d shot it; in fact, she rarely used the camera. The cartridge of baby film bizarrely burned by a brief ray of radiance through the atmosphere, through a bright clean windowpane, and through the lens of a magnifying glass had been on its side when I arrived in response to Dagger’s call. There were burn marks on the sides; my feelings I had thought at the time were like the 16-mill. corkscrewed around the table but may have been more like the ruined 8 still acrid and even (I thought for a moment, visibly) smoking inside — a cartridge browned at the edges but not noticeably harmed.

I wheeled out of the closet mouth, three rooms and more distances in mind at once — the bedroom clock and cupboards (closets in American), the living room with Dagger’s work table that must have burn marks from at least the first inches of leader I saw lying on the table that day, and the bathroom darkroom off the hall in quite another direction the thought of which staggered my already warped line so I kept turning and faced again this packed closet whose cartridges might be the heart of the matter somewhere in their relative unimportance to Alba, and wheeling again I moved past Cosmo’s heavy-looking carton and into the living room where I switched on a light and examined the table and found nothing on Alba’s finish but the wine spill.

I switched off the light and saw parked five doors down across the street a driverless vehicle that had the same broad white stripe painted down the middle of its bonnet from windscreen to grille that my minicab had had — it looked like the same car. The silence of Dagger’s and Alba’s things seemed at this displaced time better far than to ask — to interrogate. Dagger’s old cousin in Farmingdale, New Jersey, was a Trotskyite hanging on to a future that was the socialist nostalgia of his Jewish friends there. Bob Harte gave away the key to a builder who was working at Avenida Viena; Trotsky saw him do it and warned him; the young American was easy-going. Who else had a key to Dagger and Alba’s? Lorna didn’t have a key to Tessa’s. I hadn’t a key even to my own fresh lock in Highgate.

It was not ten twenty any more. I went for the balcony room and its cabinet, but passing Cosmo’s carton and my half-full rucksack slumped softly against the wall and between them Alba’s closet with the cartridge boxes that had made me wonder about those apparently unopened cassettes in the glass-fronted cabinet, I turned into the dark bathroom.

This was an impulse, a godlike move veering and light as if Red Whitehead had given me an expense account. Here baby flesh was overcome by the acid of urine and the foggy perfume of talc. I was getting closer. A red light went on beside the sink. I avoided the mirror. There were chemicals and two pans but no film cans or spools. I got a shtip in my gut — Tessa’s Yiddish for stab —and I wanted a long hot bath. I got away from the smell.

The film if it existed might be in the bedroom where, as I passed it again, I could tell at a glance the clock didn’t say ten twenty any more. Now the cabinet in the garden room; the shelf with the lenses and blower-brushes: the Kodak 4X movie film: three boxes open in the dark then under Krish’s flame betrayed no images; I opened the rest — for why not hide old film in new cans? — but it was the same story. If Maya as I had said to Kate meant the world was not separate from me, maybe (but I did not believe it) the film I sought had nothing to do with a world of mine.