Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

Back of third an English schoolboy in gray cap, gray knee-socks, monogrammed gray jacket, and dark blue shorts had a box camera over his eyes. He snapped us and turned away. I felt Jenny somewhere close, as if I were confined to a viewfinder’s tunnel-window ruling her out below and above.

Cosmo said, What you doing in the Underground all day, moving hash? The batter left his Louisville slugger in Dagger’s hands and lunged at Cosmo who with a wrist flick released the ball overhand and hit the other assailant in the bridge of the nose. I almost had his name.

Why did the batter not retaliate? He carried his bumped nose away toward Umpire Ismay.

I saw the hit just as exactly as in the second inning our Beaulieu caught the Indian-head patch on the seat of the right-fielder’s jeans and the drag bunt he laid down letting the bat give slightly with such finesse that the camera must have caught that instant of cushioned impact when the ball’s substance tried to melt back upon the curved wood of the bat and the right-fielder seemed to bear the ball around with him magically so my eye believed that if he hadn’t dropped the bat to head toward first he could have carried the softball indefinitely on the front of the bat by the sheer force of attention, like what he gave his long-time British Museum subject Catherwood. I said to Dagger as the camera stopped that it reminded me of the time in college when I’d put down a bunt, the third baseman overthrew first so I went to second, the first baseman overthrew second and I went to third, the shortstop overthrew third and I ran home only to be denied a bunt home run when the third baseman nailed me at the plate. Dagger said hold onto that, we can use that.

He had given up on peacemaking, but the batter, having walked away holding his nose and his bat, had been persuaded to play ball again by Umpire Ismay and was going to resume with a 3 and o count. Tempest in a teapot. Umpire Ismay had been rolling a cigarette and Dagger at the Beaulieu caught the concluding lengthwise lick.

Dagger with the camera on the tripod again showed his toothed grin beneath the moustache like a silent-film villain’s. I said, We could tape me telling that about the bunt homer and make it our sound track here.

The next pitch jumped straight through like a white weight — give Cosmo credit, he had a fastball. I said in Dagger’s ear, When we edit we’ll slow it down there and run a few stills to fix the ball. Dagger murmured, Depends on the lab.

Cosmo walked his man on the next pitch. But Dagger fooled me, he wasn’t focused on the plate but a bit to the right across the third-base line. The batter — whose name, Nash, came to mind when Jenny typed my notes — dropped his bat and trotted off, while Savvy Van Ghent complained to Ismay that Cosmo’s letup should have been strike two, while Cosmo as if he couldn’t resist called out to Nash, If you got to blow up the subway go do it in New York.

Nash turned at first base, shrugged as if at Cosmo but his face had blanched. But Cosmo may have sensed the shrug was aimed beyond him, for he turned toward third and behind third stood an Indian or Pakistani in a white shirt who was looking at Cosmo, who himself now shrugged.

I believe that I, rather than the camera, got the full gaze of this new figure just before he turned his back and put his hands in his pockets and went off. But Dagger panned around to a medium shot of Nash leading off first — just as Nash’s nose began to bleed as if the camera’s focus had drawn the blood.

My boy Will called, You’re bleeding. And when Nash touched knuckle to nostril, Cosmo threw to first and caught him off.

Dagger had every bit of this, and now switched off. I took the camera gingerly and through the viewfinder observed the Indian. He turned again and stopped and when I opened my other eye he seemed to make Cosmo look at him. Dagger said, Let’s see what’s left.

Reviewing all this now weeks, months later late at night in Sub’s New York flat high above a woman’s streetcorner soprano delivering a demented oration, I knew with a new natural ease as if I’d often known and it were somewhere among the luminous inhalations of my head, that this man, yes this man in the white shirt, had been the Indian I was later to see in the Knightsbridge gallery. He was Cosmo’s Indian.

Godlike I said, Get a long shot of these girls pushing the pushchairs ( strollers you say in American).

Right, said Dagger, and swung toward right-centerfield and ran through a hundred frames or so as one of the tots lurched up in his harness and tried to fall out. Dagger said, That’s it. Two hundred feet.

We had another spool but didn’t want the hassle of loading it in the light and threading it through those sprocket wheels so the divider would go in just right.

Our first footage was finished and the game was only into the third inning. The sequence was too full of nothing and I had missed something, yet something possibly not on the film; however, like some roving sense I hadn’t controlled, Dag’s focus had shifted with such natural drift I would have to watch it next time.

I couldn’t see opening the film with that softball game, and later I couldn’t see anything wrong with Dag’s idea that it should go between the Suitcase and the Hawaiian.

I woke to coffee deep in my nostrils and saw through my narrowed lids the smell standing in the air’s bright dust and listened to Sub in the kitchen taking a step here, a step there, having breakfast this third morning of my stay, and of all things Monty Graf’s remark last night about two films seemed now, as I awoke, to fill the long evening of that inaugural Sunday we shot the softball game, for Jenny didn’t come home till one and Lorna was off singing the Fauré Requiem with her chorus and Will had shut himself in, and as I wrote the opening record of the film, I needed family sounds around me. Our road in Highgate is by a quiet square, and on a Sunday evening you’ll hardly hear a car or a passing laugh until the pubs let out at ten thirty, the kids who go by don’t live in Highgate many of them, they come from around North London to the old courtyard pub called The Flask at the end of our road. Lorna came into the house at midnight with her music in her hand, a flush on her cheek, and her eyes dark, and I put down my pen. Her head snuggled down next to mine. Her hair covered her profile, I didn’t see her eyes but smelled her vanilla scalp. She was reading my page and it seemed from the tilt of her head the last lines not the top lines.

So what I think she read was this: that after Jenny chased the actor up toward third base he circled and made it back to the plate ahead of her just as the batter struck out on a rising pitch that Savvy had to go up for. The actor grabbed the bat and Jenny stopped short at the umpire’s elbow and she turned as if in a continuous motion and sank down cross-legged but so close that Ismay asked her to move and she got up with her head and long light hair dipping for an instant to the green grass, then interrupted Cosmo’s full-circle windup to the actor asking if she could play now.

Sub seemed to know I was awake. He asked from the kitchen if I wanted a cup of tea.

Lorna mouthed my lower lip. She said, Is Jenny in?

I said I hadn’t seen her since suddenly not seeing her at the game, and I blamed Cosmo because he needn’t have said she had to wait three innings to get into the game. Lorna said it wasn’t Cosmo who brought her home on the motorbike last night. I said, That actor’s at least twenty-five.

Dagger phoned just as Jenny was coming in at 1 A.M. He’d lined up two surprising guys, he said, and we would let them sit at a table and rap. I said I hoped he could get hold of a Nagra unit and an omnidirectional mike and he said he didn’t know about a Nagra but we’d do a tape, never fear, and he said he’d known from the beginning I was a born sound-man and he thought it was great that I’d dreamed up this idea of the Unplaced Room, and he told about his Uncle Stan in Yonkers who got one of the old wire recorders before the war and when he heard his voice on it he got a whole other idea himself, grew a moustache, and left his wife and went to live in New Jersey where he became a phone salesman for encyclopedias. Dagger asked if Jenny had come home and I said Why and he merely said, We’ll put her in the outfield next Sunday, I think she’s got ability. I wondered what made our filmed softball game either typical or on the other hand one particular softball game and not another.