Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

If, as you say, you are counting on the diary to advertise the film, maybe I should see a piece of it .

But a piece of what? Monty had seen a piece of the diary. Did he want more? I was between many people in many directions. The people I was looking out for may have exited through another part of the building site and the other people coming after the people of the first part may never come. And if so, will the site blow? The steps in the hotel pass Glasgow, Portland, Cincinnati — but a modest B & B where Lorna and I had a week just before American Labor Day is relatively hall-less and I had a chance to talk to my boatyard partner about ferro-concrete hulls and to his granddad about exactly what part of a wheel the felloes were and again about why the cleavage had to be so right, and in that B & B mopping up our egg and banger-grease with fresh white bread (for breakfast is what the second B stands for) the news came on the Irish landlady’s wireless on a shelf up among some bric-a-brac and it was Nixon’s devaluation, and Lorna said we could have feathered our nest even better and I said maybe now’s the time to sell the house and transfer the money through Canada and go home, and Lorna drank her tea and looked at me: It’s possible, she said quietly; I said Jenny would like that; Lorna said she wasn’t at all sure because Jenny was English — and now by the cabinet in the dark amid Dagger, Alba, Dagger plus Alba, Alba in Dagger, Dagger in Alba, I had to try the bedroom. But then I wheeled away from the luminous clock-face far and dim, for there was a bathroom closet that might hold more than bath crystals and pumice.

Yet setting foot again in the darkroom where Dagger developed his black-and-white stills, my shoe hit something, and I bent and put my hand not first on it (a comb) but on the fino tile which Alba had laid and which I knew to be black and white diamonds, but whose cold I could not foresee: it traveled across the heel of my palm and the inside of my wrist close to my blood, straight to my armpit, and turned me blue: not blue with cold: for Tessa’s haiku quoted to me in bed by Lorna emerged briefly along that vein of thermal action — some bare chill I could not recall the words for climaxed by: my dead wife’s comb under my heel: Lorna’s robin’s-egg blue comb, and then I did touch what my shoe had felt, and it was a wide comb — Alba’s? — with a tuft in the teeth — I had a hard-on, the two of them Lorna and Tessa in that smooth untouched bed in the next room — with me — and with the lunar intruder coming in at an extreme angle, a pilot’s five o’clock, and the shttp came again and again like the film paying out in my dream, and amid the mere things of this household beyond which or in which I must find the film or its history, I could have lain in a hot tub as I did on the night of the Marvelous Country House and been fingered by Lorna while defining Māyā for her and seeing the Southeast Asia of my sex enlarge and straighten and some time later swell and vanish like some multiple dream of achievement into the huge faded black towel she surrounded me with blotting out Dagger tooling away toward Hamp-stead with the boys and girls in the VW minus Sherman, and the Marvelous Country House in two cans and the Beaulieu — and no doubt using his talent to stir up a little friction if there wasn’t any or calm things down if there was, though when he retorted to Sherman on the way to the MCH that Yucatan was just as tough as Africa, Sherman seemed to leave that for Dagger to explore — which he did not, for he told that tale of the dwarf which purported to be first-hand from his supposed wanderings in Yucatan but derived from my idea of tying into power possessed of momentum but undeveloped purpose which Monty Graf had pondered while I ate my New York fish, though out of loyalty to myself I would not have told him my sense at the end of June that some almost too adequate purpose of mine was being drawn into Dagger’s new lack of momentum which was not his New Jersey Italian dolce far niente but his willingness to believe what his man the cine-film processor in Soho promised and his determination to use this man rather than someone who’d do the job for us at once, even though driving home from Wales in the early hours of Saturday, May 29, with (at that moving point in time) three scenes in the can (the May 16 Softball Game, the May 24 Unplaced Room, and the May 28 Bonfire) he had said it was possible but not probable we could get the man to do our work as early as Monday.

However, Stanton the charter man in London got after me to book some tours that were a new extension of our services to American tourists including hotel accommodations and tight time tables for visiting Stately Houses and Civil War castles, the American Museum at Bath and cathedrals up as near the Scottish border as bare towering Durham where the Venerable Bede seems to be interred — which was what saddled me with this chore in the first place, for I’d told Stanton I’d be away the first part of that week seeing a man at Union Carbide’s plant in Durham, and Stanton had made it hard for me to refuse, and it meant money, so I didn’t think about Dagger for a few days during which I was home just often enough to take Lorna to a party at Geoff Millan’s and to have a discussion with Jenny about her social life interfering with her Latin A-levels — her social life being the guerrilla-theater actor — and when she spoke of the trips she and Will (then Billy) and I took to the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum in the old days to push the buttons and clock the dinosaur, it stuck in my head and when I not Dagger suggested the Underground not at Tottenham Court Road or Piccadilly where you might expect to see kids banging guitars but the old long dusky I tunnel under the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum I connecting with the South Ken Underground and Dagger didn’t say anything but looked through his supplies in a shelf of the glass cabinet and brought out two 100-foot-reel cans in their boxes and said absent-mindedly, How much of this are we going to need for sound track, and when I said That’s film , I thought Alba’s coolness might mean they’d had a fight and Dagger was going around in circles for the moment like me more than two months later in face of Lorna’s coolness over breakfast in the seaside B & B getting Nixon’s devaluation on the news but being more conscious of the first B than of egg and sausages.

Which made me hungry through my heat and through the pain in my stomach (which might well be less Kate’s sandwich than a shtip of guilt which even a minor god can feel) and spinning from ’the bathroom darkroom past the comb of whatever color and in another direction away from the entrapping axis of living room/balcony room into the kitchen I found hanging near a window a salami in its unbreached skin, and to find a knife I switched on a light which set off a ventilator, and then grasping the knife I spun away again into the dark of the hall and the balcony room to the glassed cabinet, for Dagger’s absent-mindedness put me in mind of what I now withdrew from the low shelf where the Sony no recorders were: and indeed three of the little cassette boxes, resealed so that in Krish’s light I made out only a tiny almost imaginary line of slit, contained not cassettes but Nagra spools. These I put in the tight pockets of my jeans, turning involuntarily to lay my hand on some ordinary thing in that room that would tell me the truth about Dagger.

The sheets of mica in the indirect light from the kitchen felt very like Red Whitehead’s plastic-encapsulated sample sheets I’d shown Dagger to illustrate the behavior of certain organic chemicals being developed for use in the display-panel numerals of cheap microelectronic calculators which like Mylar insulation for ordinary sleeping bags are yet another spin-off from space research. Dagger uncorked another bottle and said, OK how did I know what our warm fingerprints were really doing to what I had been calling liquid crystals encapsulated in that “there” plastic sheet, but this altercation differed from the one we had toward the end of June when Dagger showed me three spools of reversal film which, when he said these were the Softball Game, called up a cylinder of unspecific cinders, my grandfather in his can which the weekend of his death in a Maine hotel I saw only the outside of — I demanded to know why the Unplaced Room and the Bonfire in Wales were not here as well, and Dagger was visibly unhappy he couldn’t divert me with his idea to shift the Softball Game to between the Hawaiian Hippie and the Suitcase Slowly Packed which we had just shot, so as to leave the Unplaced Room first — a far simpler opening, no? I asked why we had to do business with this lab; Dagger said again this was a fellow who’d give us a break.