Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

Dagger didn’t come back.

I answered the phone.

I had to go.

The scene shifts and I with it.

Heartless they both called me — Jan, angry, then fearful; Tessa weirdly tremulous then angry at herself: heartless it was of Cartwright to gamble Jenny’s life.

Ah Tessa, there’s more than one way to gauge hormone levels (mine, Dudley’s, or a kilted chieftain’s in orbit). The two wheels cogged to each other turn their calendars toward one special day in the mesh of Maya teeth, the sacred cardiectomy proceeds upon a sunny pyramid, no sutures needed but the stress is real, four priests spread the victim on the stone, the fifth so marvelously brings down the knife and up the beating heart in his free hand that watching from below you know the heart came up to meet the hand; but not today, for here, my dear Tessa, the victim has no heart — that’s right — the breast is parted, blood goes on, there is no heart; the priest must improvise — but dares, since only the four can really see him stick the beautiful knife here and there hunting the heart the people want, who if they get to see the frantic hack-marks may go after the surgeon.

Kill him, he can disappear, said Incremona who’d been looking beyond me, and so saying he looked away from me to the doorway of a larger room that had been dark when they’d whisked me through.

For you see, Jan had said Cartwright could make people appear; and Incremona listened when she said she felt in her bones that I had made Reid appear Tuesday for I had said he was with Paul and yet when Reid entered Monty’s house Jan could see Reid was stunned to see Paul.

Skip the magic, said Chad, who was the last person I’d looked at as I was struck in the chest downstairs (if in fact where I now was was upstairs and not the basement). In the dark room that we’d come through to reach this red-and-blue room there were two great square metal housings, a TV screen, a typewriter-like keyboard, a light-pen attached to a console by a telephone-type cord — other hard edges. There were voices there now, and Chad shut the door. I knew where the building was but not where in it I was.

I was there they thought because of Jenny. I had not really expected to see her and I was not disappointed in my expectation. The blow sent my breath away and the word Stupid occurred but whether said by someone else or me or merely thought, I didn’t know, and when I could see again and think what I was seeing I was being helped through a hall to that dark room by Chad and Mike and it had not been Chad who’d hit me in the dilapidated marble vestibule, for I had turned toward him where he stood against the wall, and the blow, the fist, the arm into my chest had come from someplace else.

In the empty red-and-blue room there were newspaper headlines on the carpet.

I did not ask where Jenny was. When Chad sat down on the floor, that is where they all were — Gene, Mike, Jan on a bright cushion, Nash in a half-lotus kneading his lips with a knuckle, beside him the white-haired Frenchman leaning back on his hands shifting his legs, Incremona kneeling back on his heels at the far end by the other door, Chad’s tribal cuts seeming both more raw and more leathery in my state of altered alertness after the blow to my chest — all of them on the floor except John-of-Coventry leaning against the wall and he later went out through Incremona’s door to find a chair.

I moved above them, moved about the room. No one stopped me. I passed between Len and John, Jan and Mike, and therefore Chad and Mike, between Chad and Nash and therefore Chad and John.

I had brought them together. The headlines were medium big. I didn’t let John go further with Len than the curtest rebuke before I broke in. After all, I said, Len had never liked the film except as a cover, and after we caught him in Corsica with the girl Marie who could be traced to the Druid’s macrobiotic community in South London, the area where on a certain summer Sunday Len had given a pal of his a beating without visible injury in particular that tell-tale bloody nose, Len had liked me less and less; so John-of-Coventry should not stop Len from saying what he felt, any more than John should stop knocking our film which was for us, if I might speak in a pedestrian way for myself (and here my words threw up an improbable idea) an ongoing form of communication whether with Beaulieu 16, later Kodak Super 8, or now in New York (and here was the idea) slides, slides shot with an Olympus-Pen brought in from the other side by Dagger DiGorro — so, from first-strike U.S. bombers taking off, to our burly French operative in Dagger’s flat in August betraying as much with his uncomfortable face as with his taped voice (but betraying exactly what?), to a blank momentum of white screen, the plunge now to slides would be like a movie’s ultimate still — like Morse code for Beethoven, eh Lorna (dot dot dot daaa) better yet 3 (dot dot dot daaa daaa) — or a heart, Gene, which having raced like a bomb beats easier transplanted to a fresh system; listen, Jan, in this growing work of ours this jump from movie through blank screen to slides feels like a jump between two rates of Maya time that bypasses the cogged tangent where the sacred and the solar calendars, great circle, small circle, move each other meshed; so this communication grows, Nash, from Stonehenge, where you thought one rite concealed another wrong (which Jim Nielsen’s folks would have paid to hear from you in their new windbreakers if you had stood at my door in Highgate a week ago today), on up to Callanish, Chad, where by a miracle your gun helped kill the Indian agent Krish who after all was not hired to break in and destroy the film, though was indeed employed by Jack Flint with whom I’ve on occasion been inseparable as Elspeth’s mother will attest. So all in all, John, it isn’t surprising Incremona wants to liquidate me, for he’s quite right — I and this film that never says die and is worth quite a lot of cash are no good as a cover, for the cover doesn’t cover, it reveals.

CUT to CLOSE SHOTS, mosdy reaction shots where THE FACE IS NOT THE SPEAKER’S:

Chad (mouth open as if singing, while the speaker who is not Chad says): Don’t listen to him, he had the gun in my cab Sunday night in London pointing at my head — the gun isn’t in Callanish.

Nash (looking over his shoulder, but at whom? while the speaker who is not Nash shakes his head and snaps his hand with its finger stuck out like a conductor’s): Had I known what was going on I wouldn’t have merely disparaged your half-baked ideas, I’d have had the film destroyed. And that is what, Gene, you should have done. Power unfocused in process, Graf told me last weekend. Balls, I say! Sow confusion.

Gene (blue eyes into the camera, while the speaker who is not Gene says): I never called it a cover. What cover? Sherman called it a cover, not me. Cartwright lost his job with Whitehead. You didn’t know Whitehead, but I know Whitehead. Cartwright needed money. You should see the bills stuffed in the desk in his living room. I say we hit him and the girl.

Jan (slowly shaking her head while the speaker who is not Jan says): I have it on good authority through June that Callanish was not in the film. Or is it in the diary? But the film was liquidated, and so, I gather, was the diary (CUT to CLOSE SHOT of Gene ). So what we need is your head, Cartwright, that is to say, how serious you are about (a) blowing the whistle and/or ( b ) using the original plan as Mike alleges but which seems to me strange indeed if you are working with Jack Flint.

Incremona (the decathlon star tilting as if to spring through Chad’s verbiage — but in the direction of no one, while the speaker who is not Len says): My brother didn’t find Krish. So how do you know he’s dead? And would you mind telling us (CUT to CLOSE SHOT of Jan ) what you’ve done with a red jaguar.