Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

For me the film was just one speculation. I had some irons in; the fire and I expected to be solvent no matter what happened. But it seemed on Saturday with Dag, on Thursday with Monty, and on Tuesday listening to June while watching Reid, Jenny, and the Frenchman — that my film could not have developed parallel to Dagger’s without disturbing it.

His had been one open and neat part of Aut’s exploitation of Jan’s plan. Like getting rare maps from one part of the world to another. The serial route of some man-made automaton. Background footage for insertion, a piece here a piece there, in something else.

I, however, had deliberately used this thing as a point through which attention might be distributed. But whatever the film now meant to me, I must succeed in selling it, I must get us both a decent return on our parallel inputs.

I thought, That’s it! My shtip is simply that by not letting Dag’s film alone, I’ve cost him some money.

But at once that line of thought lapsed like blips on a weather scope into new blips as the radar pulse sweeps full circle but never quite full because never through quite the same weather, though from sweep to sweep the blips may seem as stable as a map or a fleet at anchor. No, my shtip had no neat equation in cash or rueful credit. You would not exactly measure it as a Hyde Park home run stretched for years of Dagger’s extra bases to a right-angle two-phone desk at H.E.W. in Washington, where he had been recommended by the English schoolmaster whose Bahama contract had not been renewed. Nor would you exactly measure my shtip in the two U.S. Coast Guard weather balloons Dagger picked up through an Embassy attaché inflated now almost eight years later not by the local or imported American helium inside the sheer white elastic that Will and Jenny got their hands on and bombarded briefly the day they got those gifts from their father’s jolly new friend, but rather by regret — inflated so to constantly enlarge their equally lessening size loose over Hamp-stead Heath — adrift yet not moving, not moving, and yet the Heath itself was retreating.

Nor would you trace my shtip one thing at a time as fast as a gun crew’s range computer in a sequence of digital trivia thus: (1) Precisely because I had mentioned my dream of a moving terminal (for monorail or other unspecified conveyances) to Dagger in the car coming back from filming the air base, it was the moving terminal that occurred to him that August evening at his flat as a topic calculated to keep me quiet when I was about to shoot the little group including the three men and I inspected the exposure ring on Alba’s Super 8 and challenged the f-number and Dagger said, It’s all set, man; (2) but set wrong (and at the cost of a cartridge): because he did not trust me: had not since that morning two months before when I amazed him by urging for our location the very Underground passage he himself had planned for us to use; so he automatically judged my motives dangerous even if akin to his own; and (3) of at least as long standing: or so I learned in this terminal week in October from my no longer so jolly swashbuckling pal forty hours after my talk Thursday with Monty Graf: for, driving the old Volkswagen with its faulty windscreen wipers to South Ken that June morning (to film, as Dagger thought I must know, the Hawaiian and his girlfriend), Dagger’s swift, mechanical hindsight now credited me with having known of this pedestrian passage under the Science Museum even before he — indeed as far back as Nash’s nosebleed precipitated by Cosmo as if Cosmo’s indiscreet taunt from the pitching rubber were a valve flipped by Krish’s watchful silence across the diamond behind third, a taunt which had led Dagger that night of May 16 in a redecorated Hampstead Village pub to bribe out of Cosmo the following facts: (1) that Savvy Van Ghent had been followed from his health club in the Finchley Road, watched at his flat in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, phoned by his UPI superior in New York and asked if he’d had dealings in hash or with Americans lacking passports, and had since then smelled reassignment in the wind: which, he’d told Alba, had just plain disoriented him, he’d always thought he could just pack up his books and his banjo, his shrunken head and his catcher’s mitt (which he was ruining playing softball) and sell his motorbike and weigh anchor on as short notice as a University of Maryland “regular” on a two-year contract (who, unlike the resident part-timers who took what they could get from the U.K. director at 3rd Air Force H.Q. South Ruislip at the start of each of the five eight-week terms, had to be ready from term to term to fly off whenever courses had materialized and a teacher was needed — Madrid, a base in Verona, or a mountain vale in Germany); (2) that Nash had been instructed to use as a point of contact the Hawaiian Bill Liliuokalani whose cover was his guitar and his emaciated girlfriend from Hempstead, Long Island, whom you glanced at if you could bear her pallor and bad posture so fast you never lost sight of the end of the tunnel; and (3) that a U.S. Army deserter named Jim Nielsen from Heidelberg via Sweden had slipped into London and found help through the Hawaiian, and had been through hell, and Krish could not tell Cosmo how to go about meeting this cat (because Cosmo would like to rap with him) but when Cosmo named a pub in Camden Town where Nielsen had been seen, Dagger rose to go to the bar for two more pints of best bitter and privately guessed that Nielsen knew a certain American with dark kinky hair, who lo and behold as if from the magic print of Dagger’s index finger dialing one two three local or trunk calls the following day became Nielsen’s co-star in the Unplaced Room a week later on May 24.

Cosmo’s silence at the outset Sunday night, May 16, had drawn from Dagger like a warm little confession an offer of a carton of blank cassettes on which to record some collector’s-item jazz Cosmo had said Dagger was holding out on him. But Dagger’s silence when he came back to the table with two more pints drew from Cosmo a blank, blanched stare and a stammering announcement that he did not want the cassettes after all.

No, the shtip I felt at Monty’s words went beyond your ordinary schemer’s adrenal spurt blinking at danger.

It went beyond my blow to Dagger that June morning that set off some servo-circuit beeping him back to what we had seen and done in Wales: back to the Notting Hill Gate flat that he wrongly thought I knew was Jan’s: back to May 16 and Nash’s nosebleed: back to New York, Claire, and Aut where the servo having found no resolution could only loop, and my blow to Dagger signaled him also instantaneously then forward to all he did not know about Bill Liliuokalani and Bill’s Long Island girl Ronnie. But Dagger betrayed nothing except to Alba who confided in Cosmo who told Krish while Alba crossed the Channel alone that June weekend of her seventh month. Now these were the days which marked Monty’s first involvement in the films, for Claire phoned him to report her Uncle Dagger’s alarm call from London and to ask of Monty what she’d never asked before — his advice on a business matter. Which may have joined (by warmly mingling) the two divisions of his face, for as he told me about the moving moment of Claire’s call, the pocks seemed to fade from his cheeks into some vibrancy received from the black eyebrows and his voice, and the chin deepened and the mole made its cleft seem as ample or sensual as the area above his lip beneath the nostrils of his fine nose; yes the parts seemed to join now, warmly mingling, but not gently — for whether or not he had felt from the bar the flash of young John’s steel-rimmed glasses whom Monty in this restaurant two weeks ago had taken prophetically for my associate, Monty now faced not Claire but a strange antagonist.