Joseph McElroy: Lookout Cartridge

Something else is making Manhattan bulge.

It probably isn’t the Flint warehouse. This turns out to be a grab-bag full of things left over or waiting — surplus acupuncture models; surplus science treasure chests with magnets, one-way mirrors, materials for many experiments a ten- or twelve-year-old can do; 25-foot surplus weather balloons (for holding up swimming-pool covers, facilitating aerial photography, marking scuba divers’ descents); a dry-chem component of a surplus experimental liquid fertilizer destined for Cambodia; thousands of rounds from a Minnesota cartridge firm now lobbying to weaken the ’68 gun control law; and to plug the ears, cartons and cartons of Swedish Wool made of glass down best for frequencies of 2000 to 4000 cycles per second. Don’t forget also surplus Science Fair projects, geodesic dome kits, Digital Counter Kit with integrated circuits, and water that goes uphill.

Where are the armored vests found by the forces in Vietnam to be defective? Are there any left? Or the 40,000 emergency artificial respirators sold in the U.S. though known to be badly designed and ineffective?

Don’t forget also acres of thin plastic sheets that change color because of the liquid crystals inside them but compared to other liquid crystal displays will have uses far more sophisticated (to use a term from weaponry, confides the man himself, J. K. Flint, approaching a flagon of Scotch during an encounter so fatally fortuitous Saturday night very late that now these five moments of October 30 and 31 turn slowly at different speeds in an equilibrium more spatial than genuine: attempted ambush earlier Saturday night; attempted helicopter-watch Sunday afternoon; the bombing of Incremona Sunday at twilight; the eye of all this terminal action Sunday morning, and the midnight chat with Jack Saturday). I said we had talked about women and the Hebrides and my various accents, and speaking of liquid crystals Jack must know that our old associate Red Whitehead would shift his ground at the drop of a toy bomb and kept his mouth shut only at home watching color TV (though it wasn’t, said Jack, just the TV that shut him up at home and he might be my associate but he wasn’t his ), and (I got up, I went on, I could capitalize on what lay behind the affability) I couldn’t trust anything now except cash, I said, Dagger had set me up never guessing what I wanted out of the carton in Claire’s closet of which I could make interesting use, though what I really hoped to get into was the digital mosaic capability with John who had the real-time-projection ideas (mind through machine direct, though he was getting a bit irritated at delays) while I had as Jack knew a certain commercial acquaintance with plasma crystals, as I suspected so did Jack (who now again grinned affably saying Commute from London but my only tie with “Whitehead was what Len got out of him about you and as I moved to the window-seat he leaned to take up the decanter again with the smooth coordination of an alumni fullback whom the pressures of domestic life have not kept from staying in shape), so since I said the footage showing the revolutionaries was just going to get in the way of my work with John whom I was going to see first thing tomorrow after he got through with Aut, the footage was for sale and — (and recalling some Yucatan or Hindu and in some way Maya proverb about plunging ahead without too much thought if you’re going to get what you didn’t know you wanted) I slipped something in Jack’s trenchcoat lying on the window-seat beside Sub’s black navy mac and gray forties fedora, returned to put my glass on the desk in this hotel room and after he asked if first thing tomorrow meant Monday, for it was now past midnight and it was Sunday, I said, Twenty thousand cash tonight would almost do it.

Give Jack credit for madness, my God.

Almost! he laughed, and never spilled a drop of that old Scotch and pulled out the desk drawer and produced four green, white, and black stacks of hundreds.

He asked if I knew what Incremona was capable of if I didn’t come across, and if I knew that Krish had not been found. I said I knew whose weapon Len had used on Claire and who Jack was framing which I didn’t like at all, and this was the rest of the deal I’d meant by Almost .

I’ve got an almost too, he said, but don’t tell me you know Wheeler (and for a moment Jack thought back but couldn’t reach it, and was interrupted by me to hear the name of a New England college, one of the Little Three) — don’t you worry about Wheeler, he said. What the police know and what they can do are two different things, but that depends on you.

Why don’t you frame me for Claire, I said.

I like your style, he said.

Where’s Wheeler — South America?

Jack gave a stiff smile in my general direction and then and there could have killed me if I could have vanished. Then he laughed. Then he laughed again.

Mexico of course, he said. You could have figured that out for yourself. Hunting jaguars bare-handed. Maybe he’ll disappear.

Your almost?

The one remaining copy of the diary — arriving by mail from Callanish yesterday, tomorrow, immediately.

Jack did not know quite enough. And I leave it to you who have me to conclude that this one of the aforementioned five moments has its dreamlike features.

Like the strange collaborations early in the summer arising out of the London subway.

Like the liquid crystal warehouse elsewhere in this other city.

A warehouse not exactly central to the Flint enterprises but associated by multiple systems under the normal levels of commerce and product research which are coded not to make Manhattan bulge. What is that bulge seen from a hired chopper? Black kids move weightlessly from subway car to car. So do black men.

Although Incremona was given cause to think John-of-Coventry a private opportunist when Red Whitehead told him John had made inquiries, improbably Incremona won’t act on these suspicions.

And whereas the diary is less and less likely to stay secret at Callanish since the dilettante geologist (joined or not by Jack Flint a week ago) will probably spot it while seeking Krish, improbably this doesn’t appear to happen.

The chopper pilot looks back at a middle-aged businessman and shrugs. We have circled, but I recall this only later, staring at a smashed pumpkin, seedy and moist upon Sub’s sidewalk.

Wait for me, I said at eight thirty Saturday night to Gilda.

Not funny, she said, as if answering something insulated in my words.

After midnight Jack says It’s who you know.

I’m to wait for a call tomorrow, I give Sub’s number, no address; Jack has a car, a man gave him a left-over Opel unexpectedly yesterday, someone will pick up the carton tomorrow (wait for a call); a gift car? I say; oh that, says Jack — the warehouse janitor deserves it and will get it.

But twilight comes Sunday and still no call from Jack, yet no less risk to Ruby, Tris, and Sub whose new solid-state color TV with an unprecedented minimum of horizontal linearity I’m on the point of extracting four bills to reimburse the cost of, when the plug is yanked and the set is being lugged across the room and Tris is protesting and Ruby’s Daddy! sounds a crystal clear reproof.

But Sunday morning at either empty end of the warehouse street in lower west Manhattan on the edge of a market area, there is no one, and no one in the empty lot opposite. But I turn, feeling a presence, and at the double door to the warehouse I check all axes: up the street, down; up to lenslike windows adjacent and diagonally across; up to a sky where a plane heads slowly into Kennedy; across to the cement lot and its alley invisible from here — then sense a change. It was probably behind the windshield of a parked car up the block. I put my hand on the knob of the warehouse door, the left one of the double doors, and then my case twitches and almost tugs and simultaneously there’s a shot like a dry back-fire. And above me inside this warehouse a familiar man’s voice uninterrupted by that shot that hit my case is telling children’s voices something too broken up to be a story: they’re working for him, it sounds like.