Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

Right, I said, and he nodded and turned away.

The hem of his coat was coming down. He said over his shoulder, Got my back to the wall.

At the corner of one of those phone booths that expose you as if to single you out, I tried Myrna. I listened but heard only the traffic and wondered if these booths ever got hit. Two taps came on the glass, I listened some more and the tapping got heavy and there was a face close to me and I left the booth and left my quarter in the broken box unreturned.

If Tris and Ruby still liked bedtime stories I could tell them one tonight. How Sub and I when we were kids in Brooklyn Heights once burrowed a tunnel through a thirty-foot-long snowdrift and took our lunch in there and a friend of ours tried to wall us in; or how Sub got concussed in a doubles match against Brown, or how the Great Train Robbery got pulled off, or how Dagger got his name.

Instructions repeat: If something from Outer Film, go on through new open circuit.

If nothing, get looped.

I could tell them Beauty and the Computer.

Ruby wouldn’t like it.

If Myrna had gone and Ruby and Tris were spending the night with their mother Rose, and Sub was at the dentist, I could be freer with the phone.

When I got home Myrna was in the hall with her coat on.

I entered to the tune of a commercial in the living room and Sub’s angry voice. Myrna called, I’m going now.

I said, I have your eighteen ten.

The TV stopped and Sub’s voice was saying, If this room isn’t picked up there will be no TV period . I’ll take this discount portable which has proved its portability between here and the premises of our gifted repairman who specializes exclusively in new discount sets and I will drop it out of this living-room window.

Sub came into the hall, he had on a white T-shirt and bore a pile of folded laundry just high enough to touch his shaggy beard. Myrna said to me, Got my money right here in my bag.

I paid her, said Sub.

What if it hit somebody, said Tris offstage.

They’d put Daddy in jail, said Ruby.

Tris said, In the Tombs.

I wouldn’t let them, said Ruby.

Myrna left and Sub was facing me and in the light from behind him his dark glasses seemed darker. He needed to speak, and to an intelligent white adult roughly of his background; but I wanted to ask about phone calls and I saw myself waiting for a phone call and saw the two of us over the midnight hill and deep into late late time watching on TV King Kong we saw together during the Korean War about the time I entered the Coast Guard.

Facing me Sub was nonetheless addressing Tris and Ruby who were still out of sight in the living room so his voice was loud: Myrna gets two-fifty an hour plus carfare for, among other things, cleaning up this apartment, and you come home from a private school that’s costing me five hundred dollars a month and not only spread your printing press and uncapped magic markers over the indestructible rug your gifted mother bought when we moved in but also the caran d’ache Swiss modeling dreck with guaranteed highly perishable gouache colors she was good enough to buy you today.

We didn’t want to mess up our rooms, said Tris.

You were at the dentist, said Ruby.

Myrna had gone. When the panhandler had accosted me outside the record store I hadn’t quite reached the result of my division and subtraction but I thought it was forty-nine.

Sub hadn’t budged and now he was addressing me too.

My hands came out of my trenchcoat.

I phoned the dentist for two solid hours, he said. I couldn’t get in between the busy signals.

You were calling him? I said.

Rose phoned Myrna she was taking the children, so I wanted to come home and give them some money and see that Ruby had her asthma medicine, so I’ve got to put off the dentist, right? But I couldn’t get him, and rather than pay for a missed appointment I find a gifted cabdriver who immediately gets stuck in traffic, and I reach the dentist’s just as his girl’s getting a busy signal at my office or so she says, she’s been phoning patients half the afternoon, Doctor Wall went home at lunchtime with a colitis attack. When I get home I find Myrna tried to reach me at the office to say Rose won’t be taking Tris and Ruby after all — if you want to know why I’m suffering from brain damage — Rose came over earlier in the day with the caran d’ache for them and would have left it with the doorman because she is a mysterious fairy goodmother but we haven’t had a doorman this week because he had some trouble getting into his own apartment house uptown the other night, but Rose was in luck, only Myrna was here because the children’s bus was delayed at the garage getting new shocks according to Tris. And meanwhile you, I suppose, have signed a contract for another film.

Sub disappeared into Ruby’s room so I was alone in the front hall. Sub behind me to my left, the children around a threshold to my right, rustling, straightening, fitting.

Any messages? I said.

Sub’s voice was as if he’d put his head in a closet. All I’ve achieved today is provide a setting for you to receive phone calls.

They were on a pad in the kitchen next to a package of chopped meat the color of crushed strawberries.

The charter man had only been able to wait half an hour.

The other call had been a woman who said if I wanted the diary I’d called about, phone this number. Myrna had written it down. It wasn’t Claire’s flat or her office.

Who then is Monty Graf? Sub leaned into the kitchen, hands on the doorway.

I held up the pad.

It’s not there, said Sub, Myrna was in the john when he called, Ruby turned up the TV, my head was full of broken glass. But I know he said he’d meet you tomorrow night about the film and it would be in your interest to deal directly with him and you’d know what he meant. I think that’s right. It’s been a day.

Where did he say to meet?

Someone will call. Is this another film?

If anything happens, I said (and took a deep breath thinking in London call can mean come but here it means phone ), remember the name Monty Graf.

Sub listened.

Two weeks ago tonight — which is just a week after the film was ruined — this American Cosmo who lives in Ladbroke Grove with a lot of other people tells Dagger that an Indian he’d mentioned Dagger to is still looking to borrow a movie camera. Cosmo’d phoned a week before, and Alba, who is Dagger’s wife, said Dagger and I were through filming. Cosmo told his Indian and the Indian said he’d phone Dagger the next day about the possibility of using his earner—

Hold it, said Sub, this is three weeks ago now.

Right. But the next day — which turned out to be the day the film was ruined — the Indian according to Cosmo forgets to phone Dagger, Cosmo says the Indian has no memory because he lives only in the present though he has a big white file cabinet and a big white flat in Swiss Cottage and works in a gallery in Knightsbridge so he can’t be so dumb—

Hold it, said Sub, who’s Cosmo?

An American who’s always over at Dagger’s eating little round slices of special Austrian wurst that Dagger buys at the Air Force PX. Well now a week after the film was ruined the Indian asks Cosmo to inquire about the camera. Dagger says sorry he gave the Beaulieu back, it was a liability after last week. So you can see I wondered if the Indian wanted just information, and I wondered if the Indian had phoned Dagger’s the morning the film was destroyed while Dagger and Alba were at the PX shopping.

I hope my brain damage isn’t catching, said Sub, and something was happening in the living room.