Joseph McElroy: Lookout Cartridge

And to get what I thought I otherwise couldn’t get I’d asked a question of this dependent and erratic Nash which was of zero value to me (for I knew the answer), namely had Len left a time bomb in there? but which stirred one small pulse in Nash who began to splutter breathlessly that he’d finally gotten a phone call through to Len at five this morning to tell him there were cameras in the other warehouse and a Norwegian watchman and Cartwright and Jack Flint, so Len knew but he had said merely have you seen the newspaper, and hung up.

The change in rotor rhythm had sounded like a flat. The pilot was edging us left or uptown toward the nearer of two East River helipiers. He had called in the explosion.

As Nash had receded and begun to run I had called out, What did you tell Len?

Meaning just now at the warehouse.

I was a second-story witness.

The way does not belong to things seen, nor to things unseen, or so says Lorna’s koan. It does not belong to things known or to things unknown. Do not seek it, study it, or have it. To find yourself in it, open yourself as wide as the sky.

Was that why she’d had a plug-in phone installed upstairs?

I did not expect to see my address book again.

The clouds were rising and we were wobbling down and Manhattan did not look like a surface now.

That initial system highly improbable would indeed have yielded increasing probabilities, things coming together, the bog seeping into Krish to equalize pressures either side of his thin skin, the dilettante geologist finding the diary — but only if that system had been to begin with one system and not many systems which I had to forget in the living, and whose multiple impingements I had easily imagined operating through me in the chance of my life but operating through this impure semiconductor like many parts of me or as through one terminal albeit moving. But that was not the case. For look at the life of Jenny — so far from me I could be a collaborative cause of someone else’s accidentally dying for Jenny; look at Dagger and his health, his education, his canny welfare, and the jaguar and the idea he gave to Jan Aut; look at Jan the rival of Jenny twice her age, look at Dudley all by himself entering to safeguard Tessa — or was it pure systematic curiosity? — and look at Claire and at Krish whose unfound body still eventually yielded the name of the lighter-stiletto’s owner who thus came to share Claire’s half-solved murder with J. K. Flint in whose hotel room was found a cross of delicately compartmented enamel in a technique Monty Graf identified for the police as cloisonné.

But that was then some future or past beyond what we had to go on. And what we had to go on was a certain forward capability like a plane’s and enough lift to get us down before we hit the veterans hospital or that main peripheral artery FDR (or East River) Drive, where traffic was light to medium on this autumn Sunday and moving at a good clip. But then as if our advance was merely added to and overweighed by the vector force of that traffic north and south, we were not moving forward now, we were hovering, and I went forward to see why, for the rotor system maintained its slowed and laboring cadence and we were in trouble. The pilot verified my guess about the swash-plate but said there was more to it, he was testing our turning action, that was why we had momentarily stopped going forward, and he said go back and sit down it could be worse we could get flipped by a cross-current and come down in the river upside down and as I turned away he asked what I made of that explosion and he said he never worked on Sunday, and was this something special?

At the East River pier I gave him a hundred dollars which was on top of what I’d paid on the Hudson side.

A cab let me off near City Hall Park.

I could ascertain from two Sunday strollers only that a police tow truck had been badly damaged by an explosion that had destroyed a car the instant the tow truck started to tow it away.

I phoned Jack Flint’s hotel, and was asked who I was. I said we had an appointment tomorrow but I had to be in L.A. and wondered if I could see him today. My name? James Wheeler.

Mr. Flint died this morning.

That is incredible, I said.

I phoned Sub’s hospital. Incremona knew Ruby and Tris by sight, and I was concerned. Sub’s doctor couldn’t see him till late afternoon and Sub wouldn’t come home till suppertime, which was when Rose his gifted wife was bringing Tris and Ruby.

I went to Mercer Street.

I pressed the top button beside the nameless slot and got no answer and pressed the next one down and was admitted. I passed the door behind which the music was playing and from where I was sure I had been buzzed in and went on to the top, where over the door of all places was a key and I opened the massive metal door and walked between the two TV sets, once more facing each other, to the work bench where I left a note which read Real-time projection is still financially possible and wrote my last name.

The music volume rose and there were steps but going down.

I phoned Lorna and she was home. And she was cool enough for me to sense anger, which was all to the good probably. I asked her to find out if one could open an “external” account at a bank for someone without the nerson’s signed annroval or at least without the person being there. I said I would try to catch a plane by tomorrow or Tuesday, I had two pieces of unfinished business. You don’t say, she said sounding like my father, and added that a package had arrived from the Hebrides.

I stared at the word NAND in the corner of John’s formulaic poster, and Lorna asked again, and the twitch or pulse or whatever it was in my shoulder went away into the mystery of my body and I said under no circumstances even touch it and that goes for Will too, and Lorna said she already had touched it and Will was at Stephen’s but due home any minute, and what about Jenny, and I said Jenny was OK.

I locked up and left the key.

I did not walk into King Street. I found a phone booth a block north — the one Jenny and Jerry and Jan and Reid had all passed — and I got the deep gong you still got for a quarter and dialed Red Whitehead.

No, he said, the bald man who’d asked about me had identified himself as an Immigration agent and had nothing to do with any higher-up at Red’s end because there was no big holding company controlling “our” operation, how did I ever get that idea; it was independent. I said I was leaving and did Red have anything for me.

Leaving? You hardly got here.

He had his stuff at the office and he was busy right now. He would be in touch.

I went looking for John in Chelsea in the building where I might have been killed or dreamed my lookout dream. There was a pane missing in the street-floor hall door. I plodded all the way up. The service door was not locked, but the inner room with the display console was, and I didn’t have a loid.

In the red-and-blue room there along the wall was my trenchcoat.

I tore off a bit of newspaper and wrote John another note and stuck it in the door to the computer room. I packed Sub’s coat and hat in on top of the money, put on my trenchcoat and left.

The last piece of the sun was visible down an aisle of high buildings. There wasn’t a car in sight. I was in the shadow of Sub’s apartment house and I went in carefully.

I did not answer the phone.

I phoned Mercer Street but John was not there.

I raised the window all the way, it was a beautiful late afternoon despite the clouds.

I leaned out over the pumpkin and there was nothing to see except a cab passing and a cab parked twenty feet past Sub’s entrance. No Opel.

The package was from the crofter widow of course. That was what Jenny had meant when she said, You know the woman.