Joseph McElroy: Lookout Cartridge

My children aren’t children any more. Not like the Kodacolor display ad propped high on this glass counter — a regular neighborhood snap enlarged and backed — five kids aged say six to ten: if I could draw them out from behind their u-v filter, slide away the health spectrum, leave them black and white, they’d hear the tale of my trip to America and dismiss it in none of the adult ways your own family can.

The weekend had been confusing. Jenny had picked an argument Friday night but dropped it until Monday night and then Lorna seemed deliberately to have stayed upstairs packing my bag when I knew she’d normally get into the act.

I hadn’t told Lorna and Jenny and Will the trip was more than business, though Lorna unlike Dagger knew I had an appointment with Claire, and Lorna must have thought I wanted support for a second try on the film and wasn’t just having a friendly lunch with Dagger’s beautiful niece. And Lorna knew nothing of the Indian I thought might have slipped into Dagger and Alba’s flat during the three hours when someone had broken in and ruined most of our film.

My son Will would not dismiss the trip’s true purpose if he could understand it. But he’d think big, he’d imagine international manipulations.

Feed facts to wife, son, daughter: before you’re through you’re retrieving responses.

You take these little Americans in the Kodacolor blow-up who would be just as multiracial in black and white: whip them out of their crush of color-corrected health, polarize them into Tri-X prints, and they’d ask good questions.

About Dagger’s film. They’d ask why and how. Maybe not when.

And who ruined the movie? And why did they?

Were the cops there—? The pigs, you mean, says the oldest, a ten-year-old black girl, her full lips moving in this still enlargement and my mind moving with her lips — let’s say she had fish-fingers for lunch at her school on Ninth Avenue this noon — fish- fingers ! What’s fish- fingers ? calls a nine-year-old oriental boy whose mother does not permit him to take advantage of the new hot breakfast how many New Yorkers in the highest-taxed city in America know is given at that same public school on Ninth Avenue — It’s fish- sticks! And the rest giggle, and two little ones add their motion to this blow-up ad for Kodacolor and start wrestling saying Fish- fingers ! Fish- fingers! — and I’d tell them that in London fish-sticks are called fish-fingers (hot, fish-fingers old, which little piggie stays home with a cold), and I’d remind them it was in London that the film was destroyed.

Yeah? Anybody get killed in it? What’s it about?

I could be mysterious and the kids would take it. But if after I said, What would you rather do, see the film or hear me tell about it? and they said, See it, and I said, But it’s ruined, wrecked, exposed, burnt up by the light of day, then they’d squint in the New York sun, shrug and maybe nod and say, Yeah you could tell about it.

Last year when Will was fourteen he asked for a book on analog computers. (Or did I suggest it?) This trip it was brochures from the Stock Exchange. He is thinking of opening a numbered account in a Swiss bank with a hundred pounds.

At my end of the display case under the glass were some used items. Cameras mostly Japanese, then four lensless boxes with lens cap covering the hole; then some lenses on their own, at waist level black barrels ribbed with white-numbered distance scale, depth of field, f numbers, cylinders so rich you could just reach through the display case’s plate glass (avoiding the smudges) and lift out the heavy zoom and adjusting it to your eye and the subject snap without a box directly into your head like an act of thought. A 12–120 zoom with a crank and a little steel bar either of which turns the barrel. On sale also an Olympus-Pen just like Dagger’s; the half-frame means on a thirty-six-exposure roll you get seventy-two shot s, said Dag, and it was one of my bad days and I said to him, What if they’re lousy?

At the avenue door through which I’d first entered, I was weighed back by a thing in my eyes and chest like the damned sickness in my wrist when I fell off a ladder in Highgate and Lorna couldn’t stop laughing and Jenny ran to me and cried. (My Maine grandfather died not in his boat casting for lake bass but in a hotel.)

A new breeze blew steam to the doorway of the camera shop, sewer steam was what I smelled looking out. A smell not of London.

When I had asked what she wanted this time, Jenny said Bring me back a memory. But maybe because Dagger had just been on the phone to me I didn’t decide what she’d said and filed it away in my head as a request for a Memorex, which for a start was unlikely because you can buy them in London.

Outside I couldn’t see through the crowd up at the accident. Two cops were backing them off, but you’d think the trick would be clearing a way for the ambulance.

Crosstown vehicles were now locked into the uptown traffic. The black car hadn’t been moved. One cop was very tall and had a moustache.

In reply to my letter Claire couldn’t see what there was to discuss: her Uncle Dagger’s film as she saw the situation did not now exist even if it had been shot with a 16 that blows very well to 35, and Phil Aut doesn’t exactly promote nonexistent films. Furthermore, Claire went on, Mr. Aut had only said originally that he’d look at it, you never know what you can sell to TV, it wasn’t necessarily going to be a commercial proposition; he liked Claire, she said, and so he’d said he’d look at it when it was finished. What was there to discuss now?

If I’d wanted her just to hear my voice I could have sent her a cassette explaining myself.

How often had I seen her? What did I know?

She was in New York.

I was coming to New York anyway. I didn’t write her that.

Did the appointment stand?

Forty-eight hours before my flight from London, there was a cable. WEDNESDAY NOON INSTEAD MY PLACE CLAIRE.

England is not safe for me. Is that it? The tempered voices in Geoffrey Millan’s living room above me as I pad up his stairs are past and future. I trail him into the long room that has at the street end some of his curious work and at the garden end some people. The round healthy face of the pediatrician and across the circle his sleek wife who has illustrated a children’s book. A bearded grim intellect whom I don’t know, with eyes either puffy or with an eastern fold at the corners. A splendid dark-haired woman not my wife who rises for some purpose. A girl named Nuala who once looked up my friend Sub in New York. A white-haired lady in a tweed suit who is a maths don and a vigorous violist and asks where my wife Lorna is tonight. A tall, long-haired boy of twenty named Jasper stretched in brown velvet trousers on his side on the rug between the chairs of Nuala and the woman who has risen, so he forms the one explicit arc of the circle.

The subject is not dropped on my entrance. It is a person — something he has done. The splendid woman is leaving. I’ve arrived even later than I knew. The pediatrician’s wife is insisting to her husband that violence on the contrary can make one more authentic. Geoff embraces the woman who is leaving; she gives me a nod, disappears, and I acquire her chair. There comes a time, says Nuala, when one has to act. Nonsense, adds Jasper, and giggles.

I can’t tell if everyone knows the person or no one.

The pediatrician is arguing that this man they’re talking about would do better to consult the authorities, a man who has appointed himself a committee of one to attack and undermine an organization of potentially violent exiles by sowing confusion here and there among them. The mathematician argues that violence nullifies itself and that hewing to a line of moderation while less attractive particularly to people of certain temperaments and even more of certain ages is more delicate, difficult, and complexly responsive to the really human.