Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

But the cast! the cast!

I didn’t say this out loud and still Paul looked round.

Something was wrong with Paul’s cab. Less swing and swash but no increased structural tightness. A shock gone? A waterbed losing water? Brunel would have the door open at once and be two-thirds out hanging under the body, the back of his brain six inches off the street whose potholes, ridges, and cracks at this speed had a liquid flow of which in turn the great man pushing through cave-in, shipwreck, and fire to success would be unaware, giving his undivided attention now to this cab’s under-carriage, not (or not yet) the larger related problems of paving material and traffic stress, or the soluble and insoluble problem of his own gravity, for I am inside the cab’s passenger compartment holding his feet.

Now my own Māyā proverb may be 75 percent right — a shtip in time must suffice to be merely its own reward. However, that Sabbath stab in Tessa’s father’s front hall reached also some system of attention that felt less my own than borrowed or shared — whereby the message on Jane’s itchy cast came to me through others: and the message was that the woman Nash and Incremona had come to meet on June 27 in the pedestrian subway leading under the Science Museum to the South Kensington tube had been Tessa Allott, and by some improbable accident she had been proxied unknowingly by Dudley and Jane.

This was a message fleeting enough; for the cast had hardly any future: two days after our Sabbath lunch July 3 and within hours of Dagger’s call to say Corsica was on after all, Jane’s cast was hacked and scissored off in Dudley’s presence while Jane pretended agony at every cut. But she did not pretend when she looked at last at her mended arm. She ran a finger over the crease in the soft flesh above the elbow where the cast had reached, and she looked at the diaphanous pallor against the warm color of her other arm that had been exposed to London sun and Edinburgh rain and the Channel winds of the Kent coast where she had visited a schoolmate whose parents had a cottage in Deal. You see, Dudley talked to me. I would sometimes guess why, but I didn’t know; and he’d have been embarrassed if I’d asked.

Tuesday, July 6, we rested in the water at the far end of the pool, an elbow lying on the tile, feet idly treading for pleasure, and Dudley told me how he had not liked the doctor’s rough handling of Jane’s cast but when she looked at her arm he had felt something else, a shtip —he stopped, he smiled the scholar’s quick mad smile to himself — a shtip indeed, a shtip —for her reaction hurt him, her arm was a thing the way it is when circulation gets cut off and you have to pick your arm up and hold it while you shift your position in bed, and what hurt her hurt him.

But even more idly than I was treading, I was staring idly at his pale and hairy stomach enlarged in the tile-blue-tinted water, a lens for Corsica — not so much Dag’s call the night before to announce that it was on again he was glad to say, but more what I’d proposed: the women looking ten years older than the men, a woman flogging Napoleon souvenirs, a university student in a café explaining in English to an American the meaning of the ’68 slogan THE MORE I MAKE LOVE THE MORE I WANT TO MAKE THE REVOLUTION, American dropouts living in the coastal caves, sharp CUT to a construction crew wiring sticks of dynamite apparently (because of the sharp cut) on top of the very cliff that housed the caves, and finally (or as far as I had gone with Dagger on the phone) a Corsican breaking open his fowling piece and cleaning it and laying it back in the boot of his car.

Thus preoccupied, I wondered only later if my reason for not asking Dudley why he talked to me openly the way he did was that I was afraid he would reply in his direct way something that on the contrary would embarrass me , or lead if you will beyond the inherent reward of Dudley’s candor on certain accepted subjects.

He is an honorable man.

There in the water he said, Well I couldn’t let her go to the doctor on her own with Queenie, could I?

But he would never have said, That bitch of a wife of mine had to pick yesterday morning to go to the British Museum to try to identify the person on whom the romantic hero of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White is based who also may well have given his name or most of it to the heroine of that book.

But Dudley — as a combination of waters now washed glimmeringly into my view — could embarrass Tessa when he wanted. Yes, that Sabbath shtip apart from its inherent reward had its 25 percent of incremental information gossiping through gate after gate like a digital sum to the hot and nice but (because Will had not washed the tub) faintly scummy bath water from which I delivered to Lorna my two-part definition of Hindu Māyā and she for her part told how Dudley had angered Tessa at that party by asking Dag and interrupting to ask again and yet again who was this Nash, eh? who was Nash?

A query I now saw came from Jane’s cast, destroyed to reveal the true limb it had been made to mend — first inspected — inspected rather casually I should have guessed that Sunday, July 3, while Tessa washed the teacups and Jane looked up the movie they would see with us that night.

But Jenny did not go after all. She phoned Reid, and they met, and the quid pro quo of their meeting I imagined now in Paul’s cab that had gone strange on us this October Thursday in New York just as accurately as Jenny herself told me when I got it out of her Saturday.

But why did Nash want to call himself to Tessa’s attention?

Mike! I exclaimed.

Mike indeed. Mike who had heard me answer Mary Napier that the name of my friend who visited in Edinburgh was Tessa Allott.

But Mike had heard this in Ajaccio, whereas on the Sunday Nash autographed Jane’s cast Dagger and I had not even been to Corsica. A valve had opened with a blink like the Mercurial god of film, cutting some prefigured Corsica into a Marvelous Country House as yet unshot, and some coordinate part of me had leaned naturally toward that vacuum blink, but must say No, and in lieu of an answer ask the question Why did Dagger change his mind and say on Monday night, July 5, that we were going to Corsica after all?

I knew only what others knew.

As you who have me know, I did not seek top secrets from the bottom of my heart. But that is where they seemed to fall, and I had no hard-hat to leave above the grating’s grid. I become all these data shredded into their oscillations. A Zen voice from Lorna’s crisis of the late fifties comes home with her: it is late at night: she stands over me still in her coat, I look up at the smell of her soap and the damp rain on her shoulders: I love her: she smiles a brave matinée smile that asks for an understanding no man can give, no real man, or maybe just not me: she quotes her koan: Open yourself as wide as the sky: she laughs silently.

Open myself as wide as the sky?

But that was not Brunel’s way. Consider the astronaut. Unlike those wartime shipyard workers who now know that the asbestos they breathed a generation ago may yield a fiery carcinoma, the astronaut cannot know what lesions of the eye or breakdowns of the head may hit him in his earthly autumn from those flicker-flashes radiating by night through his helmet and out the other side into the unresisting space of his late youth. Meanwhile we do what we can. We look at the unmediated glare of the sun in space and devise a visor and rethink certain properties of imperviousness in gold. We look at the fact of heart shrinkage in the weightlessness of space where it works less; and it is possible to do something; we measure stress in the elevated levels of activity of a nerve-transmitter called catecholamine related to hormones. And Brunel with his banged head sunk in an overflow that has collected — Brunel breathing air and water and fire — will think not of the devoted waiting wife, or his centrifugal solution to the threat of suffocation by a coin caught in his throat in the bosom of his family, or his dawn horseback ride to Bath thence to survey the valley of the Avon and the soft hill clay along a canal, but thinks rather at once about what caused the fire on the Great Western —and the clear answer in his new Great Britain is David Napier’s new feed-water heater, not to stop the excess heat around the funnel but to use it. I do not wish for a technology of wedlock. Still there are times — a problem could have been stated, a pain received as a message. Dagger got Alba’s phone call at the école in Ajaccio and at once saw that even if her false labor did not last, she had to know he was on his way back to London — though in Paul’s October cab I wondered if Dagger had used the false labor (which must have been nerves because Alba took methodical care not to overtax her body) to get us out of Corsica before I poked into something that was not our business. Now Brunel’s Great Britain had another problem on her maiden voyage to New York. She lost her way and ran aground on the coast of Ireland, and at daybreak the skipper looked for the Isle of Man and saw the Mountain of Mourn, but this was because there were errors in a new chart that had not existed in the old. More important, this was a mishap that Brunel’s unprecedented longitudinal iron girders (like his earlier timber viaduct that survived the head-on collision of two trains) could withstand but not forestall. And so in the transfer from the old chart to the new the Great Britain (51 feet broad, 289 feet long between perpendiculars) survived, and so did Brunel’s name, which was enhanced.