Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

It was true. But only when he said it. I now knew where Jenny was held. Incremona’s door opened a crack and John was called to the phone by a voice that was John-of-the-loft, and as John-of-Coventry went out he was saying God save us from bourgeois adventure.

Incremona pulled shut the door. Who’s Lana?

Nobody knows her, said Mike.

A friend of a friend of a friend of mine, I said automatically (meaning Millan’s Jasper). You drove me to her Sunday night.

It was true, as if by my saying it.

The idea wasn’t all that came from Dagger, said Gene. The jaguar did too.

You knew that? said Jan.

My brother told me.

Paul! cried Chad like an explosion.

Jack, said Gene.

You been talking to Jack? demanded Incremona.

Don’t get onto my loyalty, said Gene. This whole thing started as a test of that, and I passed the test, right Len?

Jack , mused Len.

Jack of course, I said — old money bags, eh Len? was twenty thousand the figure you mentioned? — and I shook my head and smiled, and Mike said to Gene, Mary Napier is in New York.

But the pain came back through my chest and the name I’d said Jack instead of was Dagger, but the shtip right through to my back was too bony and bodily to be out of a mere intelligence report about Dagger that seemed to place me again outside some system that in the past fortnight I had on the contrary felt at the crux of.

Again outside, though near.

Will has made a six-year-old movie out of cards each subtly different from the one before so you riffle them and there’s a motion picture — it’s Little Red Hiding Hood. Incremona riffles my doctor bills.

I look at Jan. I shouldn’t have let her think Jenny magic-markered the self-portrait.

I look beyond her to Len who is staring at Gene who (mouth open) is pointing at Mike as if to let follow his finger the memory inside his body of what Mike has reminded him of to do with Mary.

Where are you going? asks Jan.

Like Len now vanishing in fury through that door, waves of improbability pass outward: Lana and the woman John is traveling with are probably one and the same; sow confusion , her phrase at Geoff’s was likely taken from John; Mary is here in New York for the heart of Montrose, but Gene recalls her brother the one-time Scottish Nationalist Party activist who urged Paul to retire; Gene knows about Dagger and the jaguar from Jack who used and may own Red Whitehead who was in turn the object of some further attention here that was less improbable than potential or, like liquid crystal Red sold through me, shifting and mysteriously double-duty; and Dagger the donor I can hardly believe — and Dagger the source of Jan’s film I can’t or won’t: In June I send my aged parents a pre-release carbon of the Bonfire in Wales, in June I send Sub the Unplaced Room, in July I send Dudley the Softball Game, in August only now in this receding room I recall dispersing Corsican Montage at his request to the only hard-nosed pro among these likely readers the horny onetime world-traveler Savvy Van Ghent, and to complete this impulse-distribution there’s Lorna closeted in the October night with yet another part of the film record, unsure why I insert our friend Tessa into the Marvelous Country House, but curious only for a moment because then comes the tread in the dark Highgate house which she takes for an intruder, the very thing that the intruder, her dark-haired blue-eyed son Will prowling with his new aluminum racket, takes for her.

I breathe away the pain, the room is in my blood, breathing. Gene squints as if in pain, he doesn’t dream it’s the Montrose heart Mary’s here in New York for. Nash bites on a ring staring at Len’s empty door.

I say to Nash: It was Nell — it was through Nell that Tessa’s daughter knew Reid.

Nash to Gene: Tessa knew Nell!

Gene to me: Savvy knew the husband Dudley.

Nash to me: You were balling Tessa. Nell told Savvy.

Gene to no one: Tessa got him into Mexican stuff, she said.

I’m queasy. The uninterrupted expanse of pale carpet looks new. Headlines say 2500 to 5000 are dead and there’s a follow-up on what seems now recent news I’ve missed — Britain has opted for the Common Market.

There’s talking outside this room from beyond each door, but then also around — like an axis turning into motion.

What Mexican stuff? says Jan.

I believe Dagger the source of Jan’s film no more readily than myself the source of the Marvelous Country House described by me to Dagger then really found by him — nor the source Tessa either, who in March described to me that very house known I see now through Nell Flint, but Tessa did not meet the DiGorros till mid-July.

System probably moves toward increasingly improbable states: Cartwright’s Law?

My shtip Thursday with Graf is now far off as the point of its twinge, to wit Other Life at some harmonious remove from me — which is my power that I’m on the point of formulating in front of Monty when I remember having had my lookout dream; but power about to burst in through Chad’s closed door and Incremona’s open door plunges me again, in mid-formula, beyond its knowledge, and the body that Andsworth’s ideas have given me is mine but not mine: pulses swash more ways at once, there’s a chopper coming apart in my future, the Dagger-loop blinks through evenings of discussion and through the Beaulieu’s advertised featherweight six and a half pounds but greater far through a growing diary now marked by a megalith near where Krish’s body if unfound by Jack may have risen with the aid of a dilettante geologist in a red mini whom Jan must know — Dagger-loop parallels other pulses, loops or not loops: red jaguar darting (Mexico, Jack, Dag, Jan, me): plot against Flint that Jack seems himself part of; and (near, yet tracked apart from, John-of-the-loft’s authentic care for his real work surrounded but not touched by Aut’s cash) the Druid’s holy sobriety leads near but past a cache of organic exile hash, near but past a quiet downstairs bedroom where Nash was sorely beaten, near but past more of Andsworth’s survival economics — a Napoleonic fake of the French cartographer Nicholas Sanson’s 1658 map of the British Isles with two delicate scroll cartouches and thickish yet delicate outlines that make the land look singed out of the sea, survival economics — near but clear of the undevalued strait gate of the one flat map thence through the strait-jacket of the body’s network to Ned’s sixteen-year-old face not to be saved by any bell the despised Lord Kelvin rings from his demonstration models yet not marked by a cancer frantically circuiting within to carry the message out, petulant sixteen-year-old futures leaving a go-Dutch-yourself blank for a Brooklyn Heights Gentile hand of pedestrian invention to fill in with its own magic shtip reaching between gravities but not in time for an autographed sphere along a flat shelf that exists only in that hand’s instinct.

I’m hungry. Sub’s children are with Rose for the weekend.

Nash eyeing me laughs and speaks; but it has no more to do with his real thoughts about Nielsen and Stonehenge and me, than on the day of Boyd’s autographed ball my stabbing reach was conscious of a meaning in it that Ned and I later tacitly shared without benefit of demonstration. Nash is telling me of all people that Incremona’s been in a rage ever since the cops towed his taxi off day before yesterday, and I ask if he’s planning to blow up a few police tow trucks, and when Jan (behind me as if behind my eyes) asks if Len had the necessary cash to bail the cab out, Nash and I laugh in such a way that I know the cab was stolen whether or not they knew Paul had it — and now the Frenchman lets go with a great laugh like the ground rushing up to meet you, and I am sure the twenty thousand is some deal Len has with Jack.