Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

Cut it out. So what if there’s no film?

Don’t give me Bob— Bob knew Nielsen had to go.

Twisting to be free of the arms, I want to know whose. The other door where Incremona left to take his call now shuts. Incremona’s right behind me, and he has himself shut the door he reentered by — Chad’s door. Ned Noble is dying in a movie theater, the children’s section smells of peanuts and warm chocolate, there’s a rustling arithmetic of nickels and dimes dropped in the dark of the St. George Playhouse on Pineapple Street on Brooklyn Heights — and in the darkness the starched white matron leans over my sister and me to tell Ned to stop groaning; I can’t quite see the movie, can’t quite hear whose words in Dagger’s VW receding from the National Film Theatre, key words — but all that opens is Sub’s ripe fridge, a snowdrift round the freezing compartment, semisoft Birds Eye cardboard thus insulated from subfreezing temperatures; and Ned, dying, can say only that Kelvin was a jerk; and while I want to dream of peat wheels and hand-hewn oak subway carriages and the Brunel-Cartwright memorial moving terminal founded on that original Maya system using twenty and the breathtakingly original concept of zero, and a hand claws a scrap out of my palm, I feel but cannot understand a law that lies beyond increasing improbability and the more I feel it the less I can claim it as let us say Cartwright’s Law; but not quite hearing the words in Dagger’s car I am ready to be at home with the unexpected which is a concussion that inserts itself like the Om of an overhot stereo in a space in my body not previously there, an emptiness eased in with dry oil of whispers:

The gell.

Tourists have accidents.

What are you doing? What’s that?

Lighter fluid.

Where are you going?

Back to Taos, New Mexico. How about that?

He’s going to blow up a few police tow trucks.

The Bay of Bengal tidal wave blobs like a fingerprint that didn’t hold still, the dead align along mud terraces that I see now too late were the isobars of my fingerprint, reaching for the strings of two helium balloons my wife has just yanked from the ceiling and punched out the garden door. Through a crystal clarity equating a kind of silence, a hand in glove reaches to you — you are dangerous, worth study, valuable, and what seems at first to be Tessa’s word twenty disperses itself into Tessa saying, So what, twenty”? so what, zero? the Maya got that from China — that’s not what matters about the Maya! — but no, the word twenty cut off so it turned into an absolute or an idea was my word, my last word.

I do not know what went on inside me while unconscious if I was unconscious. I know what happened outside.

But my head filled the dark closet where I was slumped. The voices outside plus the thought that I was at last ready to be launched into the dream so as at last to control it led me to see myself still in that room with the newspaper, but the vivid faces that belonged to the voices I now heard did not belong to Len, Nash, Chad, Jan, Gene, Mike, or the big Frenchman, but to John-of-the-loft and someone else, and their faces were vividly visible because I was blind.

I reached for a Beaulieu sync button thus though unfilmable to record on the attached Nagra my remarks which I rehearsed in my body as if these remarks were to be my lookout dream. But as fast as I could evaporate the irrelevances with which this rehearsal filled the closet up to and beyond liquid level, more came.

But I needed the practice — my head felt inside a cartridge lined with training electrodes and was getting bigger to where it would fill the cartridge imbedding those electrodes in my head, and as for the readiness I had felt, it now needed just a quick rehearsal, but Lorna kept breaking in yet it was somehow I doing the talking and she didn’t answer when I said did she buy her new comb in London or New York, I could get two of those French tortoise-shells for the price she’d paid for one — but this one dyes, she said, and sure enough she took off her bluejeans and her hair was red in the form of Corporal’s chevrons.

But there’s a different darkness in a line across my feet; I’m not blind; whatever I was ready for has passed and I don’t feel it and I’m now not sure I had any lookout dream Tuesday, let alone just now.

I’m in a closet. It’s empty. The voices are about to stop. One of them is sorry to be late — held up in traffic. (On a Saturday? Is it still Saturday?) I smell something. A chemical used in the room where the voices are, or used on me. I’m the watchman of that lookout dream recovering consciousness, but what do I watch? It’s clear the man I haven’t heard before knows this equipment and this room but has only just arrived and is failing in some way; he can’t get John excited about the random possibilities. Of cartridge loops. John is saying Well that’s straight sixteen-mill. It’s John-of-the-loft.

John says he would follow Whitney’s early analog work complete with rotating discs, multiple axes, that whole multimovable table thing, and feed the patterns in and come out with flower targets and kaleidograms and concrete words exploding into galaxies — beautiful things, right; but now we’re going to have plasma crystals and that’s a digital system that changes the whole future for us, analog computers are antiques.

Not yet, the other says; plasma crystals don’t give you motion; you got 480 lines of resolution with 512 points per line and you need six bits of information for each of your quarter-million points all for just one single static image, man, and where you going to get that kind of computer capability?

John: Real-time projection direct — that’s what I’m after. We need two-megacycle-a-second capability in a computer to generate motion with the plasma visual subsystem, but we’ll get it. Progress is exponential now. Used to be subsystems weren’t up to the computers; now the shoe’s on the other foot.

Other: You got the subsystem?

John: My boss’s boss if we play it right.

The other is explaining plasma crystals and how you sandwich a layer between glass plates, and one plate has a mirror-conductor on the inside against the crystal and the other has tin oxide, and when you charge the crystal in between, you disrupt—

I know, says John. You know too.

But inside a headache that seemed like an old vacant idea, I knew too!

For they were talking about my product.

For these were liquid crystals, and to get motion what you do is lay on your conductive coatings in a collective mosaic like colors in successive silk screenings to produce one multicolor print and as you go along you electrically charge the tin coating and so the liquid crystal molecules are disrupted in just the patterns out of hundreds of thousands of picture elements that you want, and your preset mosaic is affected precisely as you want with your scanning signal.

Crazy turn-on, the other has said, but John says, Well, no.

The other: A visual, right?

It’s past words, says John.

It’s something else! says the other (and I could hardly hear).

No, says John. I don’t think that’s it. The liquid crystal — it’s going to be…

Exponential, the other says quietly.

Let’s not talk about it.

Like a new circuit? But not real-time projection, John — don’t give me that.

Steps, receding steps, supplant the voices.

My hand tries the knob, a button snaps into my palm. The lock works from inside too.

I see the room clearly. It’s dark. There’s a red light on a console. There’s a light somewhere else. I close my closet behind me.

My headache is the price of my power.