Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

Jenny was in bed, lights out, by the time I hung up and went upstairs, though I wasn’t so sure what I wanted to ask about the Connecticut actor, just sure I should speak to her, whatever came out. I didn’t put the upstairs hall light on.

I opened Jenny’s door (I never do) and she said in the dark, Did you know Reid’s from Ridgefield, Connecticut? His father’s in real estate. Oh, I said, his name’s Reid —you mean the actor. I’ve never been to Connecticut, said Jenny.

I looked into the dark, my daughter wasn’t waiting for me to speak.

Reid built a dome on his parents’ property. I want to see it. He never studied acting.

She wasn’t waiting for me to speak, she was contemplating probably a number of things, how he swung a bat, or walked, or stepped down on the starter pedal, or stood when speaking lines onstage though I’d heard guerrilla theater was something else — how he listened to her, or took off her shoes, pulled off her American bluejeans that I’d paid for. I said goodnight and shut the door, turning the knob not to make a sound as if that would smooth a cut to some new footage of our film.

Lorna was near the doorway of our room in a blue bra, her near thigh in shadow, the light behind her setting the skin aglimmer beneath her Venus hair. She said, You’re betting your soul on this film. Why?

I went to her and murmured something to the effect that she was my Connecticut, my California, my Hawaii. I undid the top hook but she turned away and moved swaying to the cupboard, and reached over her shoulders to get the other hook.

Was I asleep? I felt the knob and lock of Sub’s front door turn so finely he could have been entering, not leaving.

What did he do weekends?

The Beaulieu, as I had hoped, had caught the name of Umpire Ismay’s tobacco tin just as a flake of leaf fell to the English grass. If I knew these things and had even for mood’s sake recorded in my diary what Savvy Van Ghent had said to Dagger after the game, still I did not know exactly what Claire was up to with Monty Graf, whether she knew of the 8-mm. cartridges we’d saved, what my man in glasses posing as Monty had hoped to find in my diary when he went through my suitcase, whether Cosmo’s Indian who’d shown an interest in the Beaulieu had known Dagger and Alba’s flat was empty the morning the film was destroyed, and how close Phil Aut’s connection was with the Knightsbridge gallery he owned exhibiting his wife Jan Graf’s work, and happening to employ the very same Indian. As for meeting Claire at the scene of the strange murder Wednesday — not to mention being for a moment bound between Claire and Jim — I’d decided I’d also know more about that.

The woman Gilda had seemed to locate me significantly at the event.

The charter man when I eventually got a phone call through to him had left a message to phone him at four. I had to be around for a call from Aut so I could turn down the inevitable lunch with my man Whitehead at the science-hobby firm. I called him and he talked nonstop about liquid crystals and a firm in Bristol that his file showed I had never mentioned, and now they’d written direct to New York for a wholesale price on Encapsulated Liquid Crystals in the sheets that show temperature variation by color, and the discs that do roughly the same but are advertised as a Wet Show. Whitehead had told them they should try also the Non-Encapsulated LC Kit which gives you great freedom in experiments with air density, friction heat, and thermal fingerprints. He couldn’t quote them a wholesale price because he himself got the liquid crystals practically retail from a warehouse right in New York. He didn’t see why the Bristol people hadn’t gone through me. Evidently I hadn’t gotten to them. The market over there wasn’t looking so good; how did I explain that? Somebody’d said liquid crystals were revolutionary in the market, keeping pace with what was happening in several branches of science, he forgot exactly, it was a space spinoff. But like, think of those English kids in that famous school system, and the scientific tradition in Britain ( Breaking the Sound Barrier had a rerun on TV), and all those kids with their insects and their microscopes and their three-inch reflectors ruining their eyes — liquid crystals for crying out loud were a natural for that market — well what did I think? vat vass der problem (he laughed), brain-drain? (He laughed.) Better joke than he knew — and he’d forgotten that that somebody who’d said LC displays were of revolutionary significance was me. But while Whitehead went on to retail to me as if I did not know then the practical applications and the fun things a boy could do with liquid crystals like testing the warmth of your fingerprint by the colors that emerged on the encapsulating plastic sheet, it was plain that Whitehead for all his happy LC slogan “DIGITAL COLOR CALORIZING!” had no feel for the real inner properties of liquid crystals: structure of a solid but mobility of a liquid, structure ordered clearly yet not rigid in the normal course of three dimensions, molecules bonded like a liquid’s, other properties complex and marketable. Whitehead was saying again “So call me Red,” and he was saying “So why you’re so formal? You’re in England too long.”

I know where I am. And it is something of a mystery. His name’s Whitehead like mine is Rap Brown. The New York “So call me Red” didn’t fit the firmly modulated warning in what he said about Bristol. I was potentially redundant. But nothing seemed inevitable yet.

Or was I envisioning from my Sub-encapsulated headquarters a casting off of everything inessential to the film? I asked what was new. He said some audio-visual stuff for schools. I said did he know a Phil Aut. There were two rings and then he said, Can I put you on Hold, and I said, I’ll be in touch.

But if Phil Aut phoned, what could I offer him in the way of a threat? Tell him what happened in the Unplaced Room and guess what it was he didn’t want to hear? I became the film’s sound, not at all an echo but (from a written diary) a delayed voice now printed on the original image’s absence, though Aut could not know if the Unplaced Room had survived the fire. I was figuring he knew through Claire that a fraction of the film did still exist.

A lot had not happened.

It was well to be at last at the Unplaced Room. I must find its proper audience. You can’t just recall something, like Savvy after the Softball Game telling Dagger he was afraid UPI might reassign him to St. Louis.

A lot never happened in England.

Jenny took Dagger to a shop near us one lunchtime to pick up a couple of emergency wine glasses — she liked to be baited by Dagger and she may have told him things she’d not tell Lorna — and the two proprietors of this smart shop with its window full of casseroles and design mugs and French vegetable choppers were locking up — a white man and a black girl — and they refused to make the sale — closed one to two — so Dagger said what would happen if they broke their rule and the man said, We couldn’t have lunch together. But across our own lunch table Jenny afterward turned on Dagger saying, Fair enough, after all they’ve a right. Dagger got right to her saying, No one has any rights, Jenny, and as for fairness, that’s the great empty virtue; and when Jenny said, But fairness is in fact why you like living in England, Dagger laughed and said she was so right, fairness was like loyalty, and Jenny got mad and said he didn’t take her seriously. She took her glass and as she drank, Dagger said, I’ll drink a toast to not taking you seriously, and he drank and I drank and Jenny drank her whole glass, which was an old-fashioned glass, and Will asked if Dagger could get some thunderclaps again this year for July 4th.