Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

My suitcase was at Monty’s, the case that in the minds of Mike and Jan might still be checked in Glasgow, and of whoever had spread word that in Jan’s Mexican jaguar was hidden after all not Mary Napier’s Montrose heart (conveyed to me, it was said, Stonehenge night by the Alabama archaeologist) but a bomb no less. Which, when I learned this shortly after leaving Jan, might have explained why, when I put my hand in my raincoat pocket, I said in answer to her question (What is left if all copies of your diary are gone?), Rub a whiff of nitroglycerine on a table-top, drop a book there and Bang.

Highgate, I might have told Mr. Nielsen, is at its highest 423 feet above sea level. Decomposition sets in more slowly than at peat level.

Jan would like to go shopping with Jerry, she said. Silly of her. She was too bohemian to miss that side of marriage, wasn’t she?

Bohemian? I said.

Get him new boots, or get the ones he was wearing resoled. You never knew what he’d show up in. He had beautiful hair. Why wasn’t it red? His was fine, hers tough.

Where had she gone when she left Alba’s? I asked. I got up; but I couldn’t go, as if she were painting me into her picture.

Jerry wants to do things for himself. He installed two new locks in his loft. He started resoling one boot but that was as far as it went. You’re not as bad as Jack. I didn’t mean to imply that. Just that without you the film could have come off. Paul said there should be some right-wing revolutionaries in the film too. We do not know enough; from that to a series of quiet interviews, and some close-face, calm exposures of some people telling what they want and why; it might have spread a spirit of relenting. But everyone not knowing enough wasn’t the only point; another was just not tricking up some neat script-story but taking power in process, other people’s ongoing energies and tying into them, that’s the way I express it but I got the idea from someone else and that’s appropriate too. I think Jerry understood. But for him as you know Phil is an exploiter.

Jan and I getting together to talk about our kids. Her son the locksmith. My daughter the photographer. Jerry and Jenny. Each child defending its parent. Oh the joy of Jenny discovering American comics. Not in America but in the funnies my mother wrapped the children’s presents in. The inner wrapping waits while Jenny who used to be too polite about presents stops to read the outer.

I’ve really talked to you, I said: and Jan nodded vigorously and showed a small but pleasant gap between her broad front teeth; and so saying, I understood: not what Mike said I was wrongly igniting or what Jan said I had stopped: but through telling Jan what Lorna had told me of the Nielsens, its meaning: Mike had said Bob was not with them any more and did I know where he could be found, and Jan had said the Unplaced Room increased the chance of violence through Jim’s being squelched on the topic of Paul: now Bob referring the Nielsens to us and then like ancient history Elizabeth at Stonehenge running up to report the boy with the blond beard missing: well, the meaning was this: that Jim, having taken steps to end his war and having (from place to place, mainland to island to studio to Stonehenge) thought his war was over, had now had it ended for him: Jim had been removed, and probably by Nash.

That was my reading.

But if Jim had been killed, was it for protecting Paul or advertising him?

Tessa had said she had walked over some bodies.

Jan had never had much interest in comics. Slick drawing. Cheap color. The English have a wonderful sense of humor. Sly. Droll.

I said they felt it was a national asset.

Jan had narrowed her nostrils. She is about the age of Gilda the florist, and of Renée whose hot copper hair had come all the way from the kiss-proof rouge of a Brooklyn Heights tease through the romance of the Golden Gate.

I am out of my chair. I had forgotten the chorale downstairs which now ends.

If, now that my diary is thought defunct, I myself am the hit, will they bother to find out what is in my head — whether, say, I’m trying to stop something or pull it off? Jan is telling me how I have too much power; her vagueness is convincing because she is trying not to weep, and I point out that I am under surveillance — witness Wheeler, who might have stabbed me instead.

But he knew you — that’s why he was hired.

I tell her to tell me where Paul is, but I am deeply and privately wondering whoever said Wheeler knew me, for Wheeler never knew me except as someone in a poli-sci class or playing tennis two courts down.

Tell me where Reid is, she says.

Reid for Paul, I thought.

A god has no morale, needs none. What if they got hold of me and hooked an amplifying system to my heartbeat? What might come out? How could I be a god? An emptiness or semi-conductor at the heart of their system.

Reid is with Paul, I said. Jan cocked her head. Not with Sherman? she said.

If I am a god, it is precisely because I am not independent.

There came steps on the stairs below the chorale, but their seeming familiarity may have been the music they rose to. Jan urged me to the loft’s far end.

There were quantities of time as the steps came on. I was behind the curtain where John’s slit-scan track ended, and Jan may have told me more now when she touched the empty pocket of my new raincoat touching at last upon the most intimate and least rational connection between us: “He” would not forgive what had been done to her picture — stay out of sight.

But wait: did Jan think Kate had been in the main room when the blank hair had been colored? Did anyone imagine Kate knew what hung in Aut’s gallery well enough to walk out into the main room and see at once the white space absent in the flat orange freshly laid on? Oh no indeed. And indeed even if I paid the bills, I could not be held responsible for my daughter’s magic marker.

A look from Jan’s dark eyes brightened her heart-shaped face and she said in a whisper, Jenny then! — the Suitcase snapshot! — and receded swiftly toward the center of the room rented for John by the growing boy who I heard now bash open the door and exclaim, I knew you’d be here! Guess where we’re going?

Tell me on the way, said Jan his mother, and at once took him off downstairs.

I wanted to take home a tale to my family they could understand. But it might be too late. They were dispersed.

Who had recruited Wheeler, a mere acquaintance at college years ago?

I wanted time to myself.

I wanted to know for sure the film was destroyed.

Cooking came up to my mind from the direction of the Bach chorale — oil, tomato, even cheese, even the pale slick filling steam of pasta, a bland blend doughy and delicate: I could see a pan of lasagna being layered. And I tried to recall which of Paul’s two brothers back in that northern hut had said Sherman was the only one of the lot that Incremona trusted.

Cut to an idea: initial system highly improbable moves toward increasingly probable states: the bog will seep into Krish and thus equalize pressures either side of his thin skin: with Krish gone, the next Nash nosebleed will have fewer probable causes: Phil Aut (legal spouse of Jan, the film’s apparent source) and John (whose loft is rented for him by their son Jerry) will prove to be still closer: pairs of namesakes crop up: two Jims — the newly bearded lately departed deserter, and the lunchtime stabber of the man in the target T-shirt; beautiful Mary who told her tale of a dismembered heart to my secret cassette, and pretty Marie , who crossed our Corsican field first at the fort and then at the Son des Guitares café; John , the Coventry munitions expert, transatlantic technologue, bumptious debunker of our film, and owner of a house near Portland, Maine, and the other John whose glasses I’d knocked off, whose friend June had helped me, and whose loft conveyed an authenticity beyond the sum of its video-synthesizer, slit-scan gear, and formulaic poster with the computer code-word NAND in a lower part: further probabilities are that Len Incremona, who disliked the English John enough to blow a bullet through a dartboard, will if given cause to think John a private opportunist act upon it, though Len would not fly to New York just for that: and probabilities are that the package of pages typed by Jenny Cartwright and left by her under an ancient megalith in Callanish where the great stones are like petrified tree-shards is less and less likely to stay a secret, for the dilettante geologist now possibly joined there by Jack may spot it while seeking Krish, or I could phone the crofter widow to retrieve it (which forty years ago you could film with that trick of the diagonal wipe bundling two distant talkers into one magic frame), or I get Dagger to drop everything and go collect the package — or Jenny is made to talk, in which case anyone (if anyone truly operative is left on that side of the watery world) could zip up to Glasgow, Stornoway, and Callanish and grab what may now be the single copy of a diary whose interest seems increasingly to be in what it yields about its manufacturer and his life and less and less in what it hints of certain schemes.