Joseph McElroy: Lookout Cartridge

But at one on Sunday afternoon 900 feet up I seem to see out my window the pounding of a new tempo: it’s as if my optic nerves through the new vacancy made by the absorption of my former heart into the co-laboring of all my other body parts are now tuned to that tiniest muscle that operates the stirrup bone in the middle ear’s drum — itself a slot in the temporal bone guarding the inner ear’s semicircular circuits that compute my balance — and so Lower Manhattan bulges, or bulges in some inflationary sign to me that weightlessness may make those canals come unplugged and Terminus the god of boundaries and property may be subject to Mercurial delusions because of insecurity arising from the fact that his post was created to take some of the work-load and even responsibility off Jupiter’s back but the liquid stir of that city aggregate there below may be my post-Terminal sense that I’m at the center but overcommitted and underconnected. A plane makes its way above our new tempo and can it be we cannot go forth and back now?

But it was June not I who changed the time from Sunday morning to Saturday evening — whoever ordered her to, after that first explosion into my answering service’s willing ear. June did not guess who Gilda was, and the forces at June’s end did not see that I’d gladly settle for two times in place of one knowing that surviving the first, an ambush, I might be better covered to control the second, though surviving that first visit to the warehouse Saturday night I might risk seeming not to have come at all and so to be an even more vulnerably probable visitor on Sunday morning, the time June had originally divulged to Claire’s supposed answering service.

What’s happening to the helicopter? What would Philip do?

But the night before, I’m just in time to spot from my doorway two blocks north within range of music and talk emanating from a hole-in-the-wall theater where it’s intermission time at a multimedia dance recital, two figures coming from the south who suddenly disappear.

When I get there it’s not the Flint warehouse but one abutting it on my north side. I am early. A helicopter blinks by quite low, I can’t see its skis (if it has them) or its silver side — only a red light — so Incremona would see it before it saw him.

The door is locked. This is not the door that was my destination. The Flint is the next one down. A car races in behind me from the direction of the theater and parks at the Flint doorway and the man who bursts out of the back seat is Chad, and a man with Gene’s voice steps out looking over the car roof across the street. Both disappear into the Flint doorway but I hear only a murmur inside my own door and the car moves off, makes a U-turn, and parks across the street and fifty yards to the south and I can’t see who the two in the front seat are but though they drop down now, I think they could have seen the movement of my hat sharp gray in the extreme north corner of the wide old doorway — the dark is shadowed on the sidewalk and street by light only from the theater just round the corner two blocks north and from the south one of the experimental anti-mugging street lamps that with their dayglow have forced or persuaded certain trees in residential areas to drop their leaves in July or betray no signs even of color-turn by mid-October. My voices are now nearer but no louder, but Chad says, Nothing, so he and Gene have not gone inside the Flint warehouse and I wonder if Gene would have a key. My hair is tight, but I take off Sub’s hat and hold it behind me. My voices are even nearer but not louder and the south half of the great steel double-door creaks inward and the voice of Jack Flint says, Just between you and me it’s going to be an interesting bit of work in its own right, money’s secondary of course. The other, a high foreign maybe Scandinavian voice says, You’ve had experience, have you, Mr. Flint? and Jack says Oh enough to manage one of those things, and listen: Thanks. And the other voice says OK Mr. Flint, any time. And suddenly Jack’s broad back is to me, the peajacket and glimmering white construction worker’s hard-hat, and as he turns he seems to have on goggles. He crosses into the lot and is gone. There is more talk in the next doorway. Nothing to do with us, Chad says, but Gene’s reply is lost, except the word newspaper , but Chad says, Who was he going to pass it to? and Gene says Jan and some other words, and Chad says I guarantee it’s your brother. And presently steps from inside bear down on my door and a man with a flashlight that is turned off as he emerges walks south right past the Flint doorway. I extend a foot but my door has already closed. I wish I knew what to do. Time of some kind passes.

And then a long way away I feel the uneven grain of familiar steps, closing fast yet slow; there is no one in the street, the steps are inside and my door is about to open and the steps are those of the person who pushed me down the escalator but I already know, and what matters is that I not be seen and that I catch the door. In the middle of the street far down, the Scandinavian cups his hands to his face. My door is opening bit by bit and if I’m not seen it’s a miracle. But the car starts up and without lights pulls on up past me. It makes a U-turn and comes on back and keeps going, and when it turns out of the street at the south corner where the Scandinavian janitor is turning, my door opens.

And in the lookout dream that I once thought I must, by design, dream I am in motion across Ned Noble’s sunny sick room and its threshold, his mother behind me fixed in a chair, his father before me with a sitting alcove and a window behind him and on either side of him the corridor opening like oversized arms toward either end of the floor, and he’s waiting for me to tell him something about his son he doesn’t know — that Ned will live, for instance — and I am about to ask again about the time machine and crystal set but know tonight as I enter the warehouse next door to the Flint and hear the door crank closed that that bequest of nothing from Ned Noble (a terminal miser as if those mere possibilities, which is all they were, were chance transistors that might by some unknown system shunt the cancer messages out of him like waste) was really what I wanted — yes wanted — looking down either end of the hospital hall to recall where the elevators were but knowing I must speak to Mr. Noble, and even asking if he’d been to the beach (he looked so tan), upon which he said he was just buying a place on the Jersey shore at a very good price — but Manhattan’s bulge lets go a flash of light as if in some coordinate ignition with the new broken beat of the chopper blades which shakes us as if the cabin hangs on the tip end of a blade, and elsewhere on the circuit of revolution a peajacket is slung over the TV though the other item of Jack’s costume, the white hard-hat, is not in evidence for Jack would probably not wear it into this hotel, and elsewhere in this flat map of times is the hole in my case, a bullet hole not big enough to leak paper money I’m safeguarding against a search of Sub’s while I’m gone and still elsewhere is Sub’s fury bearing the new TV across the room and as it reaches the sill my hands get under it, Tris grabs the rotating base of the aerial, Sub, Tris, and I collaborate, and Jerry (whom the last figments of flexibitity in the helicopter enable me to say I am to see twice more — Sunday morning at the warehouse and Sunday noon watching me lift off the helipad) darts forth now Saturday night turning south toward the street lamp where the car he heard has just turned, and before I quite know it I’ve moved to block the door from latching shut.

But what does Gilda want?

And what will she want at dawn Sunday passing me the phone with Monty on it who with a strange dead mechanical energy says he wants to arrange the helicopter I’m asking about out of my sleep, for though I don’t say so to him I hardly know why I’ll need it later in the day.