Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

The woman with blood-red lipstick recrossed her legs. I looked over my shoulder at lower Broadway to see where I was. A door in a brown commercial building was shutting, but like a circuit for an instant open a hall was visible and a second doorway full of white, and a truth reached me: what I’d been recalling was more than the gist of the two pages Claire must have lifted; it was so closely aligned with those words as to be virtually verbatim.

In truth I had these pages by heart.

So what did it matter if the man on the phone gave them back or had something else in mind?

I had them in my head.

And so I reached over my head for the cord and bent a magical smile toward the dark and leggy woman who without really catching my eye smiled back less magically.

I took a step toward the exit and was staggered by the driver braking for my stop.

I was in Soho going east on Spring. I reached Crosby and knew I was wrong. I turned back west along Spring. A small Chemical Bank branch was out of place among the loft buildings and drab commerce muted despite the trucks cramming the southbound street ahead. At Mercer I turned right and there were not only the trucks moving down the center but parked trucks tilted solid either side up onto the sidewalk and taking over the sidewalks with thigh-level roller-tracks running to basement loading windows or platforms-wool stock, nightgowns, leather. There were green pillars and posts on the east side, a lingerie firm was by a sheet-metal machinery firm and almost next to that I found my address halfway up the block toward Prince.

But the verbatim alignment between diary and memory had come not only without my trying; I wondered as I pressed the top button beside a nameless slot if I’d have been even capable of other words when I recalled the Corsica we’d discussed on the road from Stonehenge.

The latch clicked in answer and I pushed through.

Somewhere above as I started up the stairs, “Let the Sun Shine In” sang forth like an old chorale.

No one came as I passed the dark landings. The music which had been building leveled off, and then dropped away just as a door at the fourth or fifth landing swung open, but the song seemed to be from somewhere else.

Cartwright.

Over the man’s shoulder to one side of the metal rim of his large round spectacles, two television sets in the room behind him faced each other a yard apart. Beyond them, across what must be the width of a loft, a workbench was against the wall with two green-glass pool-table lamps hung coolly above some tools, a generator, the uncovered tubes of a tuner, two or three small, cheap printed-circuit boards, a red box with a greasy-toothed gear leaning on it, and a tangle of looped wires arching up from a panel that lay flat.

What are the pages worth to you? the man said.

You’ve got the question turned around, I said.

The man backed into the loft and I stepped over the threshold and saw how long the loft was.

He snickered and said, No, man. Would I make you pay for your words?

I asked if I’d had any phone calls, I’d left word at the place I was staying that I could be reached here. The man snickered again and said, No phone calls, not even any mail.

The loft seemed to go clear through from Mercer to the next street west. At that far end was an extensive rig with a long track connecting a camera and some kind of focusing-plate gear. Areas around this imposing rig seemed in shadow because of the light on it from ceiling spots hung from two parallel socket-tracts.

I felt a third person but I didn’t look around. I didn’t have to see the man with the steel-rimmed glasses who’d greeted me with the voice I’d heard on the phone. The loft, the lights — the equipment I saw at once and the equipment I made out when I looked away from the lights — plus something genuine which seemed at odds with my teasing reception — all absorbed our words to spread their quotable sound into meanings I find now but found even then I could describe but not quote. But you who read this have me even though here I admit there are things I have heard that I didn’t have in my head exactly. Do not withdraw your hand from the glove port, you haven’t yet found what you imagine you’re not looking for.

I asked if Claire was here and when the young man in the glasses asked who Claire was, the third voice said to him, You never met her.

The voice seemed so young I turned toward it and saw a child, virtually a child.

Or at most a fifteen-year-old, a boy with shoulder-length hair combed to a billowing sheen — and I checked the ceiling along which I realized I’d sensed transverse waves eight or ten inches deep flowing the length of the loft. God knows why they built those cement-and-plaster waves fifty years ago, but it was as strong and right as all the powder-smooth New York walls laid on by a generation of Italian immigrant plasterers.

I asked where my pages were. I asked again and sounded just anxious enough. Above a workbench was a poster showing formulaic sequences. Someone had written in the lower right the word NAND, which in computer logic means NOT AND — or, input signal zero, output one (which sounds like you get something for nothing).

The man in the glasses said my diary was…

I asked what kind of films he made and the boy said Original, original.

I said, Joined the filmmaking revolution, have you?

To you it’s a revolution maybe, he said.

I said my diary wouldn’t interest them if they were pros. The man said I seemed very into it, like the description of those two dudes and the chick in Ajaccio. I said there wasn’t any description of them in the two pages I’d left at Claire’s, there was merely reference to my having described in intimate detail to Dagger , right? The boy cut in that it was good to keep a diary, he wished he’d started when he was young, he’d lost so much. I asked if either of them knew someone named Cosmo, and they said no.

The man in glasses mentioned a cup of tea. I said thanks. I looked at the far end of the loft and said, What’s with the screen?

The man said it was going to be a slit scan when they got it finished, but it wasn’t really what he was into.

The boy asked what we thought we were trying to do making that film. Get something together, I said. Christ, said the man from over by a table where he’d switched on a hot plate, how much diary had I written about it? I said maybe thirty thousand words. The boy said, Those two pages make the diary sound better than the film — I thought he was high — and the man said how much did I bring to New York, and I said thirty pages about, I thought, and he said did that mean twenty-eight back where I was staying — but tried to interrupt himself with a semblance of enthusiasm saying were they about Corsica too. I said I wasn’t sure if it was twenty-eight or more, I sometimes got confused after they were typed up. The man dropped tea bags into two mugs and said why did I bring the pages to New York. I said I wanted to tell Phil Aut what had been in our film, so I wanted to be able to check my facts. The boy hummed.

The man said over his shoulder as he was pouring water that he’d show me the slit scan, he didn’t have the camera yet, he needed a sixty-five mill for a job but he had some good interesting panels behind the screen slit. I wasn’t in a hurry? This kind of film wasn’t really what he was into, he said.

The big metal door closed behind me. I took out my wallet and I murmured, Let’s see, how do I get to Graf’s from here. I returned my wallet to my inside pocket which wasn’t bulging as it bulged when I visited Claire. The big door scraped again and closed. There was the sweet smell of pot. I said what about the two pages I came for. The boy now surprisingly close behind me said, The great Phil Aut doesn’t know shit about film, he’ll quote you a price and tell you you’re not commercial, that’s Phil.