Joseph McElroy: Lookout Cartridge

For Incremona clambered between two cylinders along the north wall and shoved the pistol into a hole in the bricks, an oblong hole in the bricks that was wider than it looked which I’d been staring toward without recalling the old hypothesis I’d posed but neglected and was on the point once more of not remembering, and there was a pronounced pop like what I’d heard above and Nash and I stared at each other for a moment whose miraculous length Ned Noble would not have scoffed at and during which I wondered what the one question was that Jan wanted to ask the black revolutionary woman Erika Huggins — and Incremona knocked Nash down and made off down the stairs and Nash got up and plunged after him calling, He didn’t do it, did you do it?

Upstairs John said, What happened to Flint?

Must of had a hard night, said the other voice.

I risked time and ran to the windows on the east side, but Incremona was not waiting for me.

What had they thought I might be going to do here, and why had Jack wanted to film the children’s science filming secretly?

Nash was down on the right in the middle of the street looking north, and Incremona was running up toward the theater corner; then Nash was running to the Ford and I made out the Frenchman’s hair, Chad’s face, and someone else. And I was as sure Incremona had meant to kill Jack as I was that Jack had been possessed by the deepest hatred of his younger brother Paul who was not here. John called Hello?

The work resumed upstairs.

I was on the sidewalk. I crossed and paused. Nash at the driver’s window looked as if he was giving directions.

The front door on the other side of the car opened but no one got out; Nash set off toward me and I ran west across the lot and into the alley. Then around its first sharp turning I waited to hear how many feet came after me. I set my case down, and I wondered if a bullet hole through a pack of hundreds inside my case would be easier to trace than a finger-mark on a busted aerial.

The steps were light enough not to be the Frenchman.

My pursuer veered right and with both hands I grabbed his right arm and used his momentum to swing him out against the wall, and it was Nash.

He was on the ground under my knee, his eyes were choked, and when I demanded to know who had fired at me his nose began to bleed, and he said no it was the suitcase, the suitcase. And when I said what about the suitcase, I was told by this now receding figure whose colored rings might have done me damage if he’d tried to hit me but whom my own madness might cure of his loose tongue, that they had thought I might hit the Flint warehouse, they didn’t know who I was working for, Chad had shot at the suitcase.

I couldn’t hold Nash. But it was not his strength. He receded.

Len let you down, I said.

Krish sold his boss old information.

I didn’t know if Nash was armed. I slapped him, it didn’t seem to matter, increased deep in his being a certain resigned determination to get away.

Was that Chad’s gun Len had?

Nash mustered last-ditch contempt: You don’t fit a silencer onto a recoil.

What little he then said I took with me. We ran in opposite directions.

I had to talk to John. Nothing to save a soul. But a proposition.

I was in a helicopter level with the tops of buildings.

I was nothing.

A godlike thought.

What had I lived through?

Would Incremona liquidate me if I didn’t keep after him? But it had been Wheeler Jack planned to frame, not me; and they had let me get out of that closet — maybe because they thought I wouldn’t leave without my trenchcoat.

Back through the vacuum of unremembered lookout dreams in a closet near a display console, I recalled the red-and-blue room, a paper on the carpet, Mike’s voice just before or after I got slugged saying of Incremona, He’s going to blow up a few police tow trucks, and saying it with a quiet scorn that I heard the more clearly for seeing it in Corsica, it was like his scorn for Paul’s pastoral archaeology that had led to some dumb mysticism of distances and muscle enslaved in a pre-proletarian dream of big stones dragged from here to there, and the night Nielsen was killed at Stonehenge there were those who might have killed Paul Flint not just because of Jim’s renegade devotion to Paul nor for what Paul knew about them all or a plan of theirs he’d helped to put in Chad’s head which was about to be called off (and which two months later they had begun to think a London-based American who’d come almost out of nowhere or out of some film was going to pursue on his own) but might have wished to kill Paul on account of what he’d given and then disowned for reasons more numerous than some formula that real revolution in America was as unlikely through violence as it was just plain unlikely.

But here was I with strange detachment recalling my daughter who would do whatever she was going to do; here was I pondering Minuit’s famous payment to the savages of Manhattan ( menahanwi , isolated thing in the water, in Sub’s Webster), pondering Stephens’ fifty-dollar Maya city his gifted English friend Catherwood was to draw wearing a hat like the broad-brimmed high-crowned affair with a buckle Ned doodled on a cloth at Fraunces Tavern down to my right, and a logo not Ned’s, not wholly mine, I scrawled for myself alone on a scrap torn off a newspaper in a red-and-blue room — pondering real estate inflation only suddenly to see as if evoked by me Manhattan bulge below me, bulge as if to split — but the bulging I saw below was in fact an illusion due to wave cadences from the changed blades of our helicopter, and the flash below was an explosion but not antiaircraft, and there was not at this moment of radio static and altitude-loss any way to be sure Monty held me accountable for Claire or therefore had got his locksmith nephew with the one noiseless and one organic nonnoiseless shoe to unlock the overhead rotor’s swash-plate before lift-off, but I was now, through another (an orange) emptiness, sure that my Jenny could not have helped save me by revealing Savvy’s receipt of Corsican Montage, because she knew those people had read in his copy probably as long ago as early August my recorded swimmer Mary saying once not overloud to Mike, as they floated and flirted between me and the naval engagement he had left, the word Halloween , though who besides me knew that Savvy would probably never have received Corsican Montage had Lorna not come to the softball game that Sunday after our Saturday night fight and appeared just as Savvy behind his catcher’s mask was speaking of open ends.

But Jack, I now knew, had received from Krish old information: the time of the hit, Halloween morning. Inaccurate because canceled, but when Mary (with the Montrose heart on her mind) had phoned Dudley’s lawyer friend at the Westbury (when?) to ask if he knew a link between a Maya jaguar and a New York bombing and Mary mentioned Halloween, the lawyer (the New York history buff whose services Dudley had decided he did not need) had mentioned to Dudley the phone call from the Scots woman, and from Dudley the connection had reached Tessa (now faintly impressed by his protectiveness), thence Alba, Cosmo, Krish, Jack.

Seeing — yes seeing seeing seeing but what was seeing — smoke flow from the flash that had now vanished (though was the emptiness in Sub’s flat yesterday before Jenny’s call merely the pumpkin grinning or was my cockeyed idea right that it was an emptiness that belonged to me like a grin I might grin through that emptiness appropriating it) — I weighed what Nash had said: they had feared I would go ahead with what had been called off; and Nash and the Frenchman had learned from the janitor last night that Jack Flint had cameras going right through the walls of the north warehouse to make a scientific film of what went on in the south warehouse.