Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

But if he thinks I made probable Claire’s death in this system that so many think I engineer, did he arrange to have our swash-plate loosened?

We can go only down and forward, it feels, but not fast-forward any more, and can a god evolve?

Lorna speaks her Zen koan out of earshot, Tessa calls me heartless but that is in the future and all the open ends I might use to escape some other sequence come so near telling me something I seem once to have known that I gladly take that sequence down to earth.

Though not below all there is.

Not below Gilda’s digital manipulation: of my hair, my ear, my fingers.

Nor what followed the crank of the door (whose lock Jerry had picked) and his familiar slow-fast heterodyne tread dissolving as he now from what I could hear sprinted for the corner, but nothing followed him but Chad saying That wasn’t him.

The steps that had proved to be Jack and his Scandinavian employee had been descending, so I would take the stairs, yet I felt here on the first floor a great space.

There was no watchman. That was him, the Scandinavian. More a janitor. The car had turned that corner just as he did. I was the reason the car was here, perhaps why Jack too, therefore probably the janitor.

Who had what to watch? A great area of floorboards.

Would Chad and Gene have heard the last creak of the door and thought it came not soon enough after Jerry’s exit? What if they thought I hadn’t come? What had happened in the red-and-blue room came back gradually but not a bit of what was in my head while unconscious. Chad had said it would be strange if I was both with Jack and in the original plan.

I heard nothing. The south wall was bare brick. I tripped over a stool and then another.

The car came back and stopped and I went to the window. I could see no one in the car. Chad and Gene had been in front of that other door to the Flint warehouse designated as the place.

I moved my ear slowly along the south wall toward the rear or west and then there was a hole just below eye level. A square. There was no sound in it. I put my hand in, and I kicked over what felt like a chair.

I picked up a tripod. I put my hand in the hole again. There was a square metal housing inside with a square cap. I raised the latch and the cap opened out and there was an oblong tunnel maybe eighteen inches long I couldn’t get my hand through. I felt the top of the tripod. It was a big one.

On my hands and knees I felt around and along the wall and there was a case maybe a foot and a half by two feet which I snapped open.

I lit a match and wanted a cigarette.

An oblong camera lay packed with some accessories, in compartments. It was a videotape camera. My head contracted on the left side where the blood had been. If I was still lying in a Glasgow hotel preparing my lookout dream, where was a skeletal building in process of going up? Instead, this turn-of-the-century warehouse complete, and across the way the lot, empty.

What did I look like from that other Flint warehouse through this hole? What would I be doing there?

Through a third-floor window I saw a pale movement under the car windshield. I went over to the south wall and moved my ear along the cool rock.

Halfway west there was a square hole again and the square housing and the cap and a stool and a tripod I didn’t kick over this time, but no case.

The car started and I went back to the east wall to see it move up toward the theater. The case was under the next window.

On the fourth floor I found what I foresaw.

On the second, third, and top floors, then, Jack had the means of shooting what went on in the next building, or for that matter in the street. In Paul’s hut in the Hebrides, Jack had mentioned one warehouse.

I couldn’t see the roof. At each window on my way down I checked the street. I waited at the second floor, and the car came by twice from south to north, and a third time parked, then moved off.

It was eleven thirty. The car had gone north. I’d have to go that way probably, for if I went south I’d pass Chad and Gene in the doorway. I saw Jenny’s abdomen spread-eagled spinning on Reid’s dome with someone else at the controls.

At the ground floor with my hand on the door knob I let go as if by instinct; I called out over different distances: Take the roof! Claire! Jack! (I opened the door a crack.) She was killed by more than Incremona. What Len doesn’t know can hurt us. (I let the door close.) Incremona! Cops! No no no. (I opened the door.) Jack can’t frame me: he needs me. Get finished fast and leave by the roof, ten to one they’ll send a squad car. No! — (I closed the door. Then I opened it.) OK. Good luck tomorrow. You’re on your own. See you in London.

But struck in the comers of my eyes by two figures on my right out on the sidewalk not in the recessed doorway and on my left up near the theater corner by headlights swinging round, I looked neither way but without knowing where I was going hastened like Jack Flint in his peajacket and white helmet into the depths of the dark lot directly across the street and found a moment later that I had disappeared.

We meet again, said Jack Flint holding out his hand, but at my touch he seemed to reach back for something he couldn’t quite find. And when we shook hands on my departure forty-five minutes later, same thing — but by then there was more for Jack to reach back with .

By then I had his Scotch in my system and twenty thousand dollars in Sub’s pockets and mine, and Jack didn’t know he had Claire’s cloisonné cross left by my unaccountable impulse in his raincoat on the window-seat, and both of us had new information.

I had said my head ached but (I said) whether from the whiskey or the shot his brother’s crowd had given me I wasn’t sure, and Jack had said, Which brother, the good one or the bad one? and I had said, Maybe neither. That’s the one thing I don’t know.

That, and one other thing, I went on: since red was Jack’s favorite color — the jaguar, the plane — had Jack in fact given that dilettante geologist the red car that he was tooling around the Hebrides in?

To which Jack replied, He’s got money. But it was easier to buy his services than for Aut to please his own wife. And that was the exact thing she didn’t even know she wanted so much, even more than dashing up to Clisham to protect my little brother.

But was it so easy to buy the geologist’s services? I said, and wondered again as I looked at the peajacket on the hotel TV why Jack had needed the disguise, and I didn’t understand the money I was taking with me, I had to reach closer; and I said as for reimbursement Paul would never have approved of the geologist taking Krish’s fighter, if he was lucky the crofter widow didn’t see his car; and Jack said, she couldn’t have seen what was in it but it wasn’t there for long and isn’t it like you to take the fighter which was useful and leave the body; but when I said What body? You didn’t see it, Jack shot back at me Just goes to show how efficiently your dilettante geologist served me — and if I was under the illusion his brother commanded undying loyalties etcetera, that guy was on his way to Chile; and when I said did he mean his brother, he said no, the dilettante geologist as I called him — and by the way I was funny; but Jack’s square-boned face that resembled some police photographer’s reconstruction had a haggard tuck around the mouth and there was deep and genuine anger in his throat — so I asked if the d.g. knew Gene, and Jack said, See you tomorrow, Cartwright, and I said, Is Wheeler really out of it, and Jack couldn’t quite let me go and it wasn’t the twenty grand and he said, So you and Wheeler went to college together — well, he had a checkered career, that was the other reason we picked him, and Jack at once (so I didn’t believe him) added, Actually I never met Wheeler.