Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

I was on the verge of a formulation. Ned Noble’s terminal breaths lay ahead but near, and Andsworth’s Integrated Breathing beckoned me on past my concern for a shrunken heart and my concern about why he did not urge me to attend macrobiotic meals at the Community though I would have declined. He kept his activities in compartments, as Geoff Millan did his friends, and as once in those long drizzly safe winters in London I had thought Dagger did not.

Speak of the devil!

I said it aloud.

We were bumping to a stop at the red light and John’s cab ran on ahead.

It was what Dagger had said coming away from our preliminary visit to Stonehenge.

Slowing down to help the Druid, Dag had said Speak of the devil, as if recalling negotiations through Andsworth and not our present dispute about what film we’d used for the threesome against the fortress wall in Ajaccio. But Dagger had been stubbornly attentive; and now I understood.

But I had no time; two of that threesome were Marie and Incremona, and John-of-Coventry said she had been after Len to go on a macrobiotic diet, and Dagger’s stomach had been kicking up after breakfast at the école and I’d told him to change his diet, and he’d been reaching with his free hand for a Turns when the three appeared, and whether or not it was at Andsworth’s in South London that Incremona had beaten up Nash after the South Ken fiasco, it was clearly Andsworth’s Community that drew the Druid into the fortress scene in Dagger’s mind as we sighted the old Ford on Salisbury Plain and slowed down to help him fix his flat.

But I had no time, because that was precisely what Paul’s cab had — a flat.

No time to figure Andsworth’s collaborations with friends, enemies, and neutrals; nor for the unlikely prospect that my train of thought had caused this flat.

Guiding Ruby and Tris across the islanded double road of Park Avenue South at 7 A.M. for breakfast at a coffee shop, I saw Incremona and a blond man half turned away at a postbox on the southwest corner, I could have raised my voice in song and no one would have heard, for the sound around us was that great; I could have been one of those street singers of yore who materialized out of Atlantic Avenue and wandered the fine enclosed streets of Brooklyn Heights on a Sunday morning and looked up to our windows for a couple of buffalo nickels tight-folded in a chewing-gum-sized scrap of the Sunday Times —and no one here in Manhattan (perhaps even including Incremona who at that moment tracked my physical presence only) would have known much less taken me for a mad yeller attacking the system diagonally from some corner — the sound around us was that great.

But now as I bolted from Paul’s cab and ran after John’s, thinking if nothing else I could ascertain that he was not after all leading me where I thought, Paul shouted into a quiet that can be a city’s powerful charm at night be it London, New York, or somewhere in between — a humming quiet like an afterglow of glare, a field just out of sight voicing a guarantee that something has happened and will again: Paul shouted, I only wanted to help!

In the last word the deep voice out of that narrow tall chest contained still like an obscure unvoiced quiet surrounded by all the windy vacuum of other answers, those words It comes to that, and that alone.

Two hundred and forty miles without the wheel.

But where then was the calm Jan said Paul had found beyond stones and stars, beyond contemplation? But hell, here he’d been driving me into a trap.

To help me?

I could not find John’s cab. It turned west where I expected but did not then turn into the block of Mercer that I’d thought I was being drawn into. I was out of breath. There was no light around the shade in John’s loft.

When I got back to Paul’s cab, it was empty in the middle lane with its lights on and the traffic light ticking from green to red, and John-of-the-loft seemed not to have come back. I ran my hand around the tread of the tire that had gone, and I found what I was looking for.

Rose had Ruby and Tris till Sunday. Sub’s tests would be over then.

Should have kept the cab, said Dagger on Saturday — fixed your flat, hundred percent mobility, drive and park till the city towed you away, could have had it as our first car for weeks.

I was curious, said Gilda on Friday; you’re not responsible for me. She had at last got a call through to me at Sub’s to report that the man who had called himself Cartwright had come again and she had got into the spirit of the thing, couldn’t help it, and had told him a scary bald man had told her Cartwright was meeting Claire — at which this impersonator of me had been strangely shaken.

I walked from Paul’s cab to Monty’s house, which was dark. Later I phoned Claire and got her answering service.

Paul would not knowingly kill me.

I must find out what it was I knew that was so important to these people.

I would have to ask.

The black man who’d said We all part of the system, man, had chuckled when Paul’s cab crunched the glass of a bottle the black man would have hit John with if my steps or the inevitable field of my presence had not made John stop and look back, and the bottle crashed in the gutter instead, there to insert some of itself into the arriving tire of my cab.

Friday I waited in Sub’s apartment.

For Incremona, Nash, the Frenchman, Jenny, Chad, June — I wasn’t sure.

I phoned Claire’s answering service and said I’d be seeing her.

Nothing happened.

I found if I waved at the TV from a distance of four feet I could stop the picture rising.

In the evening Sub phoned from the hospital. Keep the sound down, Ruby had bad dreams. Then Sub remembered the children were with Rose, and I heard him breathing erratically.

At home he watched the news and thrillers, thrillers with the sound off. Educational TV was starting a series of good films, old films, no interruptions.

What are you doing in? said Sub.

At ten the phone rang but the caller did not speak.

At eleven and at twelve the same.

No one tried the door.

Incremona had seen the children with me.

I tried to get you, said Dagger Saturday.

But in fact it had been Claire who’d phoned Saturday morning just as I was leaving for her apartment, and when I told her it was a pure accident my leaving the letter from Dag on Phil Aut’s desk, Claire did not know, she did not know — she had not been told — she had not been to her office.

Why did I believe her? I let her talk. I could not stop her. But something stopped her, after she had told me Monty was not a fool no matter what our meeting at the restaurant might lead me to think. In London he’d told Dagger I’d be staying at the King Street house, I was extraordinary but Monty was afraid of me; but I must not, please, think him a fool.

Her goodbye came so fast then that it seemed cut off; I had not answered his challenge about the letter on Aut’s desk, so Monty must have heard from Jan.

But there was so much he had not asked. Like the sound. The sound tapes he’d asked about like a madman outside my cab the first time we parted so long ago it seemed. Why didn’t he ask this time? Three of those tapes were in a parka under a bed in his house. Where were the others?

But here was my friend Dagger who at length had opened Claire’s door on a beautiful October Saturday in New York and was jollying me along about “our” taxi whose flat I should have fixed, and my secret visits to his wife, and was I trying to put Jenny through a survival course, man, and Dagger had come very close to flying up to the Hebrides looking out for her.

He wore an Army jacket and a Castro cap; he took the dog’s leash off the closet door-handle. I was about to ask where Claire was and why Dagger had wished to put the Softball Game between the Hawaiian-in-the-Underground and the Suitcase Slowly Packed, but I reached down without looking and touched the familiar bulk of an untouched Sunday Times and was glad the film was probably destroyed, maybe I could conquer my weightlessness and sell the destroyed film to Jack Flint who must not wish his brother Gene’s wife and house on view, nor his agent Krish in the Softball Game, nor his brother Paul the guru in transit at the Bonfire in Wales (near where Brunel’s timber viaduct over the Usk burned and was replaced by him with iron) — nor would Jack want his brother, his youngest his magnetic brother Paul’s voice on a Nagra tape or his face in a stone doorway at the probable scene of Jim Nielsen’s liquidation. For you could never tell how someone would make use of film footage — U.S. Air Force planes acquired for a moment to illustrate power possessed of momentum but insufficient focus like Cosmo’s Sunday fastball; America and England mingling in some dream of action and peace; Brunel’s great Clifton suspension bridge across the Avon gorge failing to convey me, my son, my dreams, my daughter, my wife (so that one might almost agree with Ned Noble’s late conviction that the finished thing, contrary to Kelvin’s belief in demonstration, was inferior to the concept); an American couple making music in a passage I used to walk along with my children; the use of my life as background for something else; the nervous wife fluttering in anti-climactic 8 mill, stronger than she looked.