Joseph McElroy: Lookout Cartridge

I could see Jenny get off Reid’s motorbike and plod up to the widow’s door with the pack on her back. I could see her as far as the door and hear her ask for a glass of water and see her step inside and the door close. But I could not see or hear her produce three or four or five quid and ask the crofter widow to wrap all these typewritten pages and mail them to Highgate, it was an emergency.

Again the phone rang and I looked out at the twilight, and the cab was still downstairs. I could hardly describe to John my experience of digital trivia, my sense even now that even if mine had been a gloved hand at last programming its way through a deep transparent wall to handle dangerously contaminated substances much less administer justice, bring peace, or transform my own oscillations into something more fixed (that would nonetheless then demand motion in the observer to be understood), I would still feel short of that direct current I had envisioned if not dreamed of.

And again the phone rang, and digital mosaics leafed over one after the other, and I saw John with the money I would provide thinking directly through a machine to something visible and new which might be no nearer Andsworth’s prophesied telepathy than my own shtip-like sense of other people’s pain but might be revolutionary, profound, and (who knew?) even profitable.

I answered. It was Gilda. Had I read the news?

It was probably in a cab somewhere.

The girl Claire who had been killed and whose answering service Gilda had been honored to impersonate had been murdered for a reason that had not been guessed till new information received just before press time, and this new information was that she should have had twenty thousand dollars there in cash in payment for a film deal she’d been mixed up in and it was missing: Twenty grand! said Gilda, where did she get twenty grand? The police had other leads.

The door came open and it was Sub with a suitcase and a huge, loaded brown paper bag of a kind almost unheard of in England, though one can buy a sturdy shopping bag with a handle if one has not brought one’s string bag or other bag with one to the shops.

His energy had risen. He stood as if waiting for me to disappear. He looked toward his bedroom. He said he was ready for a vacation.

He had gone way out of his way to find corn candies and a “revolting” Halloween cake, and I said, Look man, we bought bread and milk and a lot of other stuff — and Gilda was saying the same thing in my other ear as Sub took a deep breath through his genuinely wise gray beard and smiled bravely and said, You should know by now I am programmed to act in a certain way and I hope at some point in the future to be able to look back and say I have come through.

He put on some water, he carried his suitcase into the bedroom and put it on the unmade bed, he went into the living room and I heard him talking to his plants, he bumped me coming back into the kitchen, he laid out plates and forks and spoons and knives for three and put a cake on a plate and the candies in two orange-and-black dishes, and put a transparent package of hot dogs into the unde-frosted icebox, poured water onto his tea bag, took the hot dogs out of the icebox, dipped his teabag several times, turned and added a fourth place to the table, and I said I’ll be in touch, I’ve got the florist shop number, and hung up.

I went into the living room and looked out over the pumpkin and the cab was still there twenty feet beyond Sub’s entrance.

But where should I go?

My case lay on the day bed.

Sub said the icebox was the story of his life, it would take two days to defrost it.

I asked when Myrna was coming.

He said at least no one had broken in again — had I finished my business?

I said I would be out of his hair by tomorrow or Tuesday. I opened my case and the gray hat was squashed to one side of the money, but Sub in the kitchen was saying No and again No, and then he said No, that wasn’t it, and he sounded odd and I felt I had put too much strain on the friendship but also that I was out of place yet also not even wholly here, and I wondered if the strains of convalescence had made Sub a little crazy.

I heard the elevator and then steps and voices and I was going to offer to defrost the fridge tomorrow but the buzzer went three times fast and I wondered if Sub (who now strode from the kitchen) still wore that gray hat — but the children burst in before Sub quite got to the door. They were alone and excited. Ruby said Oh Daddy, Mommy made us turn off the TV, and Sub said where is she and Ruby said Connie brought us home, and Tris put down a small suitcase, said Hi Dad, how are you, and followed Ruby to the TV which being a solid state started making noise instantly and the picture was two or three seconds coming. I think my going now to the window where the pumpkin was and looking out infuriated my friend as much as his children ignoring him on the Halloween of his homecoming from the hospital and Ruby saying Fix the picture, but it was his laying hands on the TV that made Ruby scream and made me turn from my dreamlike vision of the sidewalk ten floors down and two yellow cabs and the brief gleam of a bald head bending beside the first cab; and as Sub with a hand on the top handle which enables the maker to call the set portable and a hand underneath bore an unreimbursed telly toward me past a day bed and a suitcase and his gray hat and dark Navy raincoat and a lot of money, I knew that right to the last moment Jack Flint had figured the south warehouse was going to be blown up by his hated brother’s people, and knowing this I wanted to protect with my own life these children and my friend who had just said the box was going out the window and seemed to mean it.

I met him halfway but seemed only to help him or to support the set which was small but heavy. Tris had his hands on the rotating base of the aerial, as if in response to Ruby’s request he were going to pull out the rabbit ear, I staggered back and recovered my balance and staggered again jamming my back on the windowsill and Ruby screamed and I seemed only to have helped Sub get the TV set to the sill and now I held it also back but Ruby screamed and I looked away toward the door and because of what I thought but did not see I relaxed my grip and Sub’s suddenly unrestrained force sent the TV set over the edge, yet — since my belief in the multiple and collaborative impingement of many systems beyond my own had suffered a new relapse sensing like a shtip that I and no one else had been the one to tell Dagger about Maya jaguars and to speak in his car the idea he gave to Jan, namely, that none of us knew enough, and to mention long ago to Jenny that the Hebridean crofters were utterly dependable and generous — I thought, Is it insured for this kind of thing? and in some final force as if one outer or inner system comprising all our mysteries blinked open for a micro-instant in me an instinct of collaboration — I think I gave the set an extra push.

I was higher for a second seeing the black-and-brown object pass strangely like a space capsule through an alien medium turning with slow force, but then I dropped five or six inches it seemed, as the set hit the hood of the first taxi and headlights speeding north through this most treacherous time of day could not have seen the figure in the hooded parka jump automatically to the cab’s front bumper as if released by the concussion of the TV set and spring past into the path of those headlights and flashing grille that sent him twenty feet through the air so narrowly missing the fender of the second parked cab that one might have seen some diagrammed triangulation of impulses Incremona had no control over.

The pumpkin was smashed on the carpet under my foot.

The driver of the taxi that had almost been hit by Incremona had him under the shoulders and was getting him into the back.