Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

Jenny turned into King Street, hesitated as if under direction, and began to run up the north side, receding, as June said, Please.

Jenny had run beyond Monty’s house (which I, even more than you who have me, remember is on the south side) when I saw Reid, and when he reached the corner of King she had turned the far comer at the end of the block no doubt wondering where Jan and Jerry were.

Where’s Chad? I said into the phone.

The English guy John said he’s supposed to be in the city.

Did you set me up?

I like you. Don’t I like you?

June was more visible than Reid. I heard the helicopter flapping somewhere and asked June if I could have an overseas call from a pay booth charged to another phone, and I realized as I said the words not mentioning the dreaded Hebrides that Jack with his connections could tie me up royally if he found Krish dead in the peat bog.

June had asked where it was I wanted to call.

I said, Incremona hasn’t caught up with John yet; so maybe I can help Chad.

June was complaining warmly that this morning I wouldn’t tell her where I was, and I wouldn’t now. She’d said she worried about me like Claire worried about Monty.

Reid reached Monty’s and vanished into the areaway.

June said, Please, baby, all I know is what I said — someone blew the whistle and John said my brother was to do nothing but nothing except contact John.

I said I was meeting Claire and was phoning from near Claire’s (which in fact was thirty blocks north and east of my present position). I looked behind me but saw only children.

You know I love Claire, said June.

I said I’d get John’s number from Claire, but then June said please not to ask Claire, she didn’t want her getting into Chad’s problems, she had enough of her own — was that a deal?

As June said the number — slowly, twice — Jenny reappeared at the end of the block looking back down in the direction of Monty’s house and me, and Reid popped out of the areaway and ran up the front steps, probably seen by Jenny.

I told June she had set me up.

The helicopter swayed back toward the Hudson but it looked bigger. The blades have to swivel to develop horizontal thrust and they could not swivel without a swash-plate that wobbles on the rotor shaft. Prince Philip is a competent chopper pilot.

June was protesting that when I’d asked her this morning to find Jan, she had phoned Claire and Claire had quietly flipped out and said Monty didn’t like her dog and what was she going to do, her uncle was out walking the dog right now and she felt she had started something she couldn’t finish.

Jenny had started back down King toward me, and I felt the lower circle of the phone receiver beaming on my Adam’s apple, and I observed to June that Claire wasn’t the only one who felt that way and I for one was trying to just go with events, and Saturday night in the Western Isles I had not foreseen that forty hours (clocktime) later I’d be here in New York.

Her uncle thought you were still in London, said June.

I said I’d call from Claire’s, and then instead of asking how she had known where to reach Nash and his nasty companion, I hung up just as Jenny turned around and started running back to the far corner; but now too late I caught the sense of June’s last words. The helicopter swung off up the Hudson like a glider tuned at will to any wind in a field of winds, and as I made my move wondering if in the twilight Jenny with her fine pale hair and broad-brimmed blue hat had been seen from Monty’s house when she’d stopped opposite it, I saw in simple form that it would be harder to make my move than I had registered looking west along King and glancing behind me here and there at children vaguely aware of me; and the simple form was a right angle whose two lines meeting at me came east from Jenny, who had run now almost out of sight, and south from (speak of the devil) Nash’s white-haired Frenchman who had stationed himself near the playground. The chopper slid sideways and lower, lower, it may not have been the same one, it made a great clatter that would have competed with the northbound traffic had that not by now thinned.

I recall hearing on BBC a witty speech Prince Philip gave to some science body and wondering who’d written it and being smartly put in my place by Tessa who said all his speeches were written by Philip himself.

Prince Philip with his engineering and nautical interests may remember enough cartography to know the law of deformation: which is that there will always be at least two pairs of directions perpendicular to each other at a given point on the globe that will reappear when that curved surface is turned into a flat map.

Monty Graf when he and I caught up with each other Thursday found this law less urgent than the right angles that gave rise to my memory of it. But persisting, I said that Tuesday opposite King Street I suddenly had not known whether I’d moved from sphere to plane or plane to sphere, which was a discomfiting application of my Druid’s thought—

But Andsworth’s not in this, said Monty on Thursday; not deep anyway. Or is he?

Less than I, more than you, more than he knows, less than he fears.

Yes, but what was his thought you mentioned? He helped set up Stonehenge for you. He wasn’t on the film was he? And who was Marie’s boyfriend?

My knowledge of operations seemed to go unquestioned; it was my knowledge of policy that seemed dubious to me and others. There comes a point at which one wants to compute no more of these facts. Still, as my Druid says, in each age arise unlikely tongues which nonetheless may help us: the gods of the body’s warm organs may show themselves now not through a burning bush or a martyr’s funny bone on fire or in the mysteries of appetite, but along intangible electronic canals where slippery loops joining pancreas and lung, bowel and eye, become, for the sake of a diagram’s current, straight lines and right-angle transits, and clarity’s pulse waits for the gate which if open may flip whole futures of gates drawing that pulse like a spasm of the greater body through gods who blink and gods who do not blink (for Andsworth ever was a closet polytheist) until at some crux near the analogic cog or digital core a twinge of harmony is heard like someone else’s pain. But at that moment Tuesday I was not clear if those right angles had survived from true sphere to projected plane or from plane to sphere.

But when you saw Andsworth before you took the train to Glasgow, said Monty Graf, was he disturbed that you tried to pass as Jack Flint to get by the housekeeper?

If the merchant deforms himself seeking the direct route, credit him at least with not knowing till he gets there what the project is he is merchandising. It might be a film, might be words, or from Red Whitehead’s science-supply firm a gross of liquid crystal newly marketable in a cartridge that approaches the condition of music; or it might be the Montrose heart discovered like Mercator’s 1538 map of the world — famous, lost, then rediscovered in New York thirty-six years after Catherwood’s panorama burnt. If the deformation from sphere to flat yields you straight-line bearings from here to there, the fact that your trip is expedited by an illusion costs you no more than the way taken by Raleigh to vast and undefined Virginia or than the routes abstracted to a straight line in the partial Underground map Dudley Allott stares at traveling with dear Jane (for like the Druid, Dudley seldom takes a cab, though unlike Dudley the Druid drives everywhere — an ancient English Ford).

He wasn’t on the film? asks Monty Graf again, not knowing that at least since Tuesday night (diary or no diary, film or no film) there has been a hunt on for my life.