Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

Paul never had that key from me, said Monty Graf.

A duplicate cut from mine maybe. But probably cut from Claire’s, though who knows what Nash will think — or Incremona or the Frenchman?

You mean the boyfriend of this French girl I hear about? said Monty. Is he in New York too? Look, if we pooled our information—

But in the crowded restaurant our waiter saw Monty’s hand at last and came, and as he made his right-angle turn into our aisle I wondered if it was by guess or false report that Monty thought me part of Dagger’s traffic in old maps and audio gear.

Another Frenchman, I said.

Look, said Monty, it wasn’t Claire, it must have been my sister got Paul into the house — she could have waited till I arrived. But what’s it matter, he’s gone now, isn’t he?

It’s known he was there. But if Claire was the one who got him in you shouldn’t stop trusting her for not telling you.

Don’t tell me how to treat Claire.

What do I know of Claire? What she tells me. What Dag tells me. What he does without telling me, like not telling Claire we filmed a scene in Jan’s studio.

What do you know of Claire?

A weightlessness I felt in your basement bedroom partly through Claire’s presence.

She’s such a giving person, said Monty.

I have no formula for this weightlessness as yet, any more than the secret of peat or how to build mobile terminals with it or change it into power I can use but may not then be able to see or touch — like what Ned Noble did not in the end leave me.

Claire doesn’t know any Ned Noble. Was it from the Jersey shore?

At school Ned said that the real spelling was Nobel and that they were related to Alfred Nobel’s family through a maverick uncle who set out from Stockholm to visit the torpedo works in St. Petersburg that Alfred’s father had started during his sojourn in Russia. But this uncle trapped bear in Finland and around the time of Lincoln’s assassination found himself on the southern coast of the Baltic being taken for a Polish Jew because of the company he kept and for some reason he never protested. My friend on Parents’ Day asked Ned’s mother and she said no, Ned was wrong, it was Noble with an le .

The Nobel prize for gunpowder, said Monty.

The waiter had paused along the way.

The crystal oscillator Ned built by himself at thirteen was deliberately old-fashioned, not just pre-radio but subtly primitive he said with uninsulated connections and a second-hand crystal diode but more than one station if you knew how to turn the tuning condenser. He told his parents they were stupid to praise it like it was some epochal invention; he’d gone back to a proto-tuner, in order to sense the thinking by which sound-wave reception had developed, because what he was interested in was a new volume to be created out of nothing — or nothing more than the imaginary boundaries between volumes that already existed. I think it was during his first stay in Brooklyn Hospital when he had a semiprivate room that he sketched a rough plan for his time machine (as I called it) which was less a device to go back or forth than a pictured formula for slipping between and creating a space that was not there before.

Sort of a fluid concept, said Monty Graf.

I described it once to Ned’s parents and his roommate the first time Ned was in hospital with jaundice and from what little he’d said about it weeks before, I could fill in the blanks.

From crystal set to liquid crystal, said Monty as slyly as he was able, which a film-frame might or might not have caught, depending on whether it could show how Monty under duress was between me, the waiter, Claire, and something I was sure had happened to him in England.

Not quite, I said, though I am not sure how much of what follows I said and how much I thought (or thought because I had said): for no matter how subtly my drift takes me from Mercator to computer to some as yet unformulated future mode where I believe old Andsworth’s intimation touches young Ned Noble, I am (as Ned said during that first illness) of pedestrian imagination, yet (as he did not say) even more fit therefore to poach upon, understand, and (with a patience Len Incremona once but no longer had with the radio-telescope nitty-gritty he’d been on the verge of real involvement with in New Mexico) underwrite the marketable futures of power-systems already in existence and more or less under way, as Graf in his efforts to tie himself and Claire into our action clearly saw himself, though the error he and, to her peril, Claire made was to meddle in what they imagined was a single or closed system but in which really let’s say Jack Flint’s mercantile angle might well remain the same visàvis Gene, Jan, or Aut, yet figure in systems very different whose peculiar open impingements must be sensed, else violence might befall Claire, let’s say, and possibly as a direct result (and here I reached out on impulse to last weekend at Coventry) of Monty’s interrogating that bumptious voluble John who was in danger himself from Incremona, but Ned knew something about me, which led him to tell me just enough and then do the terrible thing he did.

I , said Monty Graf, did not interrogate John: John of his own free will told me , and I’ve known him much longer than you.

But Sub disagreed. He said that what Ned had done was not terrible, that my question to Ned’s already grieving father Hy was not heartless, and that Ned’s mother following me out into the hospital hall still holding the book Ned did not want her to read to him and hearing my question to Ned’s father and then her rebuke to me, was reacting as helplessly to the messages coming in as Ned was himself in that high bed she smoothed every hour, or as I was myself, coming out of Ned’s private room to ask a question that meant I did not want this undependable friend (whom Sub never liked) to die, but in words as clear as the messages in my head were scrambled.

Look, said Monty, if you want to know exactly what John—

But the waiter asked if we were ready to eat.

Ned had promised me his crystal receiver. He had done so on the day I reached far out my window in Brooklyn Heights to grab between its upward and downward course (like two gravities) his vertical throw. But when I visited him in Brooklyn Hospital the autumn of ’45, he said he’d destroyed the crystal set precisely because he’d promised it to me, and having committed the plans for the other thing to memory (I called it a time machine but Ned never labeled it) he’d soaked the page in rubbing alcohol blurring the ink and when it had dried and what was flammable had (so he said) evaporated, he had burnt the page, though not the logo he had designed for the formulas. And since the night I came home to Highgate from Liverpool having failed to sell the drive-in movie project (and all the way to Euston toyed with the vision of mobile terminals for trains or new conveyances) and arriving home heard the climax of Tessa Allott’s tale of Uncle Karl who was blinded by the same blow that woke him up, which in turn was to Tessa first of all an intimation of some other (or after-) life rooted in her vision that a thought properly held just before and during death carried into timeless survival with it the person whose brain (no doubt, as I suggested to her, tuned and integrated to the whole bodily life) had for its part helped to crystallize the idea and then had flickered out hundred-cell-parcel by hundred-cell-parcel (heca-cell by heca-cell if you think of Welsh cows offered up as unsacrificed accidents to a would-be god), I have seen Ned’s act as another kind of gift and as a model for futures even further than Andsworth’s vague next stage, which may be really like what I felt after Mrs. Noble came to the door of Ned’s private room (now awful again, its colorless door ajar at my back) and heard me ask Mr. Noble if Ned was kidding about the crystal set and the time machine — she said, You are heartless.