Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

We should all breathe together, I say, and suddenly I want a cigarette.

And the guide, a good English schoolteacher type, parental, clear, brisk, interrupts himself to say to me, Good, good, yes indeed, that’s the idea, one body co-laboring for the Lord.

This isn’t London Bridge he’s playing now. He’s inside.

Now knees up he is hanging from the vault to show us how miraculously strong its structure is.

The man with the moustache looks out from behind one of the piers of the north tower as if he can’t believe what we’re doing, and in my semiconductive cartridge slung forward above New York on Sunday, October 31, that instant of cool cathedral twilight in July borne by some rhumb and random constancy in me from Corsica to England via Chartres yields almost those words said on Waterloo Bridge in Dagger’s car receding from the National Film Theatre in March but instead not quite, for they are the words right after, which are (from Dagger) We’ll use Claire, (from me) and Jenny too, (and then from Dag with a casualness that made his next words seem merely part of some larger harmony) They look alike (which I hadn’t myself seen on meeting Claire the preceding fall, but saw now).

The vault broke up, pack it and send it air freight to Arizona, I found a cigarette, I saw the moustached man and called Hey and moved toward him to ask for a light, but he was out the door into the sun and as I reached for my matches and put my cigarette between my lips and caught sight above me again of the West Rose, an affable English voice said, Mustn’t smoke in here , and I turned suddenly but the wrong way and saw not a red double-decker which could not have squeezed down the nave aisle between the flanks of folding chairs, but at the east end an intricate shine of color overpowering my ignorance of the tales told in all the compartments.

You see even now I can’t be in that closet simply, but must flash-forward into some known future, for what do you think about when you’re eavesdropping on someone’s revelation of your daughter’s body? I kept my cigarette in my mouth, sauntered to the north side to the cathedral shop to look at pictures. In Seward’s day you could leave your daughter a little town house on Madison Park but there is no refuge in history; John Stephens may have given for the Maya city Copan, whose plunder Catherwood was to preserve in his drawings, twice what the Dutch paid for Manhattan, but twenty-four dollars was a lot of money and look at what the Dutch got fot it — real estate inflation — always depressing — and I look down over an area near City Hall Park and some warp of air or temperature from the overhead rotor makes the grid nine hundred feet below bulge slightly, the pilot is looking where I am looking, and I have more than one picture of the man who looked like Dagger in Chartres.

What picture? says John, and my hands are colder than the steel I sit on in the closet I chose by mistake. I have missed nothing. But am I Tessa’s Maya god Kokulcan who was exiled yet at once relanded and never really went away? Not quite.

My wife’s, says the voice. I see her in a whole new way. The gallery was a mistake. I was measuring her with something she couldn’t resist. I should have let her go. But instead I gave her presents.

Why did Incremona do this?

You don’t want to know.

Why did she have nothing on?

She lives there half the time.

Why did the cops call you?

They found a letter from my secretary telling her to come in and clean out her desk. I got nothing against her. It’s my brother-in-law.

John says, Can I use Mercer Street?

Incremona hangs out in that area.

But can I use Mercer Street?

Aut says he has to go.

John asks if Flint is doing anything on the real-time project, and did Aut contact U.K.?

Aut says he’ll see John tomorrow.

A famous hotel is mentioned.

The last I hear as they recede is Aut: so what’s the matter with your eyes? You didn’t know Claire; you wear glasses, don’t you?

Data from Chad and Nash tumbled into the absence of my lookout dream, and with them two contact lenses dropping in search of a soft slot and shimmering now between two Sarsen stones, for John in contacts had been the strange photographer, Aut’s man at Stonehenge. Now if Jack planned to frame me for Claire’s death and to do so not just with the lighter-stiletto but by means of my absence, how had I got away? I went from one closet to another closet of that detached room, I clipped my knuckles on a steel corner somewhere, I plunged down the service stairs.

In a cab up Tenth Avenue I was thrown forward and braced my hand against the back of the front seat next to the pivoting V-shaped fare-receptacle marked PLEASE PUSH and PAY HERE. The meter clucked, I found blood around the nail I’d ripped at Claire’s and blood on my knuckles, and as if at some consequence I made a quick stop at a corner booth to phone the florist, and told Gilda I’d nearly been killed and in fact my head was kilting me — she’d heard nothing more of Incremona. Then it was crosstown from red light to red light and to a news dealer with a gray fedora who could not see what his hat made me feel in my shoulders, that I’d left my expensive trenchcoat behind — and who sold me a paper that had no news of the war.

I went through Sub’s unmanned lobby and up to his empty apartment which had something to tell me but not in answer to what I wished to know of my daughter whom I might have been responsible for killing if she had been where I had thought she was, and now, assuming Claire had been improbably killed by Incremona who had set out to kill Jenny, what I wished to know was this: when the Frenchman had said, The Cartwright girl, and then Incremona had said, We got her — who was we and why hadn’t Incremona known where to go?

And there was an emptiness here in Sub’s place I could not put my finger on. It was an absence I might have believed was watching me (to see, say, if I picked up Sub’s phone before it stopped ringing). I was looking through it, and I left the living room and lifted the receiver and said Yes, and I felt an emptiness grin, except if I was looking through the emptiness the smile might be my own.

Can a god have a religious experience?

Can a god be isolated?

It was Jenny and she said thank god I was all right. She’d been told I would probably be killed if she didn’t tell who else had installments of my diary. Sherman had found Incremona’s copy at Mike’s apartment and had thought the best thing was to liquidate it. Incremona had found out.

Crescendos of highway cars behind her were between us. I’m in Connecticut, she said.

I could not speak.

You who have me may put some construction other than clinical on my inability this Saturday, October 30, 1971, to speak to my daughter who was alive. I must warn her Incremona had missed once and wouldn’t miss again. But that is what she now said to me . And because I could not bring out those or other or any words, she said nothing more, except to ask who this was.

The first thing Sub’s wife Rose did when she moved out was get an answering service.

It had been more than probable that Incremona would go after Jenny. However, Claire, who looked like Jenny though wouldn’t be taken for her by anyone who knew them both and had not been taken for her by Incremona because of looks, had improbably been hit as Jenny.

In part because of me.

But did I know why Incremona had gone after Jenny?

Incremona (who had stared at me as through a gap beyond which was his object) couldn’t know that through the scene of Claire’s killing, Aut had seen Jan in a whole new way. And as for Phil, she didn’t know (what Jan just might) that that moment of insight had required me.