Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

Strong enough to lift that carton out of sight last Sunday night.

Claire’s big black retriever lay across the living-room threshold while Dagger fumbled for the ring to snap the leash. The dog seemed very calm if it was really about to be walked.

Dagger must have been telling the truth that Claire was not in, for he was taking the dog out. Asking me to wait.

To wait?

Claire’s expecting a delivery man.

I don’t believe you, friend, I said.

That’s your fault, friend.

If Claire’s absence and her unexcited dog did not show I was being once again set up, all other signs pointed inward at me. All the reports.

I placed a call to Highgate. While I waited I reread Dagger’s letter. It had come from London to Monty’s house in King Street, been conveyed to John’s loft probably by Jan, read by Jan or Paul or John or Monty or some or all of these or more; so whatever of me Dagger had sent was there for them as well: H.E.W. (on recommendations from, among others, a behaviorist friend of the English schoolteacher who’d been sacked from his job in the Bahamas) will take Mr. DiGorro on for pilot study to determine if the government wishes to get into sleep-teaching at federal level; and Dagger says in the letter, All bets are off with the film, sorry man you pushed too hard but you surprised me man and I’ll always wonder what you would have done in Corsica without me, right now the heat’s on and this heat confuses me but you know all about it — be good to Claire, we’ll be in touch.

It would work; it was not the piece of that retreating dream he’d had the morning of that little b & w crucifixion on the beach with the Bahama sand in his eyebrows and California sticking to his eyes and he’d been asleep enough to hold the thought that dreams are a species of sleep-teaching with a key difference that Dagger was just awake enough to lose; but now, what the hell — for peat’s sake — plain sleep-teaching would pay the bills — it would work, it would keep millions of kids away from violent schools during peak hours and Alba would work and transfer her closet to a new set of equally clear axes, Dagger did not get bogged down.

I said Cancel the call.

A man’s voice with an English accent said, No reply, sir.

Just as well. She would have asked where Jenny was.

Right, sir.

Well, Tessa had never except literally had her teeth in me, and I thought Lorna knew this by instinct, even if she did not know what she meant when on that July Sabbath that my own Hindu-American shtip had set off she’d said I had friends — married friends — to organize me on my travels.

I ran by others’ times and, cogged to one another, they by mine — which brought me near again to a formula but shunted off again at the memory of being shunted this terminal Thursday of October by Monty’s information and the thought and threat of Dagger’s letter but by being shunted given a gift, namely that on Tuesday night when Sub had already entered Roosevelt Hospital for tests and I fried cheeseburgers and told the kids the story of the Three Brothers and of how Dagger got his name, and watched a thriller in which everyone talked softly and walked loudly, and I waited for Jenny to phone and wondered if the Frenchman and Nash had gotten to her — I had dreamt my lookout dream, and now recalled nothing of it but that fact. But as if sound had been time, no time had passed while for me Monty had been soundless — and when my Sabbath shtip had ended I listened as closely to the dinner in Coventry as I had to the trivial news that had caused my shtip— Dagger’s H.E.W. and a carton of audio gear to fall back on.

A heavy carton? Dagger had surely swung a hop from a U.K. base and skipped the excess-weight charges. Alba loved London. She was excited by Dagger’s absences, but she would not like Washington. But they would find a flat or something larger and there would be room, and they would have another child. And Alba would be careful. And have I lulled you who have me?

Well I was over Claire’s living-room threshold in a second as if the room were a thought and from that clear pale indefinably oriental order I carried in my eye in another second back to the bedroom door the living-room blow-up of Claire’s grainy arm, and as I opened the bedroom door knowing what I wanted in her closet, I feared I would find something awful between it and me. But the king-size low expanse was flat as a motel bed and I whipped open her deep closet and hauled out from under the longer hems of dresses and the shorter limits of pants suits what Alba would never never have made the mistake of lifting Sunday night in London if she had not feared I would find out what was inside.

I clawed at the seam.

Tore my right index nail.

Two amplifiers a snug top layer.

Below were Nagra tapes.

And the rest was 16 mill.

Ours.

Dated and Placed. In my hand.

Developed or not I could not easily tell.

My blood was on the amplifier carton.

I gathered all the tapes.

I put them down on the bed and left blood there too.

I laid the amplifiers back in the carton.

A picture of Claire on the night table reminded me of how Jenny is like my sister.

In the incinerator room shared by the other tenants on this floor I unrolled our black-and-white Stonehenge and it was a developed negative, tiny and lurid.

Near the hundred-foot mark of the second Stonehenge reel I looked for Paul being tugged through a portal by the witch Tessa in her green beret but found Nash instead and remembered that not Dagger but the other man in the plastic mac had probably shot Tessa tugging Paul, and then I gave up unrolling the cork-screw celluloid and took the reels out of their cases and dumped the lot and heard the rattle halfway down fifteen floors to the basement furnace, then read the white letters on the black plastic plaque telling what not to put down the chute, and wondered if in fact film was still made out of celluloid.

Liquid assets you say?

Not liquid enough.

I took last Sunday’s Times from Claire’s hall table. I opened the pages and scrunched them as if to start some kindling and filled the top of Dagger’s carton and found some Scotch tape (called one of America’s signal inventions, by a famous English writer with famous scientific forebears who himself died an American citizen in California taming his terminal throes with LSD).

I sealed the carton, shoved it into the closet, realigned two pairs of slippers in front, and went to answer a buzz that proved to be not the door but the housephone.

Dagger had been told by Claire all right.

Delivery man.

Two: a tall old man in bell-bottoms, a red bandanna under his chin; and a woman my age or older whom I felt I knew from a negative somewhere — platinum shag, a plump pretty face matured by comfort.

O.F. pick-up, the man said.

Had Claire known Dagger would be out?

O.F.? I said.

Outer Film, the woman said.

Your key, the man said, and handed me the key to Claire’s flat.

Now where would it be, I said, thinking of Peter Minuit and the Indians.

Bedroom closet, said the woman. Which is the bedroom?

So Claire’s triple game had now been left to simplify itself for safety’s sake.

I thought, There goes a box of newspaper; but the old man in the bandanna asked what the hell was in here, couldn’t be just film.

I pocketed Claire’s key, as her door closed.

I imagine that if you (who have me) cut me open at the right points you’d find Will, Lorna, Jenny, some others, each in motion in some way but you would find them. Yet there is something in what Jan and Tessa said of me later; and I wonder if, in the trap that I presently had to choose, my morale could have been worn down by an amplifier tuned to my heartbeat: the thunder thud: a closed system growing conscious of itself till it thinks itself into pause as if it guessed some lightning ought to have preceded it: and it waits breathless: and sometimes it waits too long.