Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

I cut quickly past the boys playing soccer in the square.

Will let me in. There was not that little surprise to pass through, for Lorna had told him I was back. He didn’t even ask about the film, the suddenness of my return, what airline. He did give a succinct report of the robbery. He asked me to come at once to his room, he had found in Jenny’s room an ordnance survey map that was fabulous, he’d never known about them, it was just that his maths master digressing from averages into applications of averages had spent the whole hour on how map elevations are shown and how you can stick pins at various heights and make a sculptural drape to give a perspective view of what the master called a smoothed statistical surface. I said to Will that I’d had ordnance survey maps around the house for years. In fact, didn’t I recognize that one?

You said we could go up there camping, but we never did.

There?

Well, Scotland. And you said the people had a hard life up there and were very honest.

I could never remember.

Will said he’d come up the stairs from the kitchen figuring just what a burglar would look at coming into our rooms but not knowing what was there and where to begin — and on Jenny’s mantel — Will liked Jenny’s room because she was always changing it — he’d found this ordnance survey map.

Will had jumped ahead and was in his room saying, I’ll show you what you can do.

But he made me think of the carbon. I called to him that I had to ring someone up.

I plunged three steps at a time back into the hall.

The Xerox shop didn’t answer.

I had been on the landing in front of the stained glass, and I could have used the upstairs phone in the bedroom. But I had come down to this hall.

I rang again, I thought of finding the proprietor at home and getting him to come back and open up. But even if he lived on the premises, which in Junction Road I doubted, he was as English as anyone else and five thirty closing would be as final as lunch time.

Will would break in with me if I asked him.

It was out of the question.

There was nothing in this hall inconsistent with a thousand interiors.

I had had to come back.

When I put the receiver down the phone started ringing.

Will called to me.

The man’s voice could be Reid’s. It moved around behind my back, it tried to loop a tense smile about me but my son called again, Come on, Dad! I want you to look at this; and then the voice, having heard me answer rather than Jenny or someone else, seemed to stop before starting, maybe just take a breath.

I said Jenny was out. I thought, Maybe with you.

The voice said boldly that it had expected her to be in.

I said You might call in an hour.

That’s true, the voice said — ask her if she left a message for Reid.

Are you Reid? I said, though the question didn’t do for me what I was beginning to think coloring in Jan Graf’s portrait had. If you’re Reid, I said, the lady at the gallery wants you to stop using their phone number as an answering service.

I am Reid, the voice said, and smiled again I swear.

Yet if I were to go to the vastly empty center, vaster than its actual circuit could ever really enclose, empty I suspected of me — and say straight out, Who’s the woman in the picture? What’s your connection with Krish the Indian? — what would I do with straight answers if I got them?

Reid said, We met at second base.

I said, Well we played against each other more than once Sundays.

Right, said the voice further away now.

I’ll give you her message, I said.

Wait. She can’t phone me. I’ve moved.

Where are you?

There’s no phone here, said Reid, and rang off.

Lorna was entering with two shopping bags hanging from either hand. Reid’s last words aside, Lorna’s entrance opened in me a desire to find a formula to express the day, the day had been a thought, and if I didn’t say in a few words what the thought was I would loop forever about a fascinating capture that must be killed to be known.

What would I say if the Indian phoned to ask why I’d defaced Jan Graf’s picture.

We had a list of numbers Scotch-taped to the table. I heard Lorna put her shopping down. I felt her hands on my shoulders but I didn’t turn. I felt her breasts under my wing-bones.

The gallery wasn’t in the phone book under Aut. In the second book out of curiosity I found Jan Graf. I put down the number. I knew the area, it was rough.

Come on, Dad, called my son above.

Come on, Dad, murmured my wife below.

Where is my daughter, I said, I have a message for her.

In his room Will was kneeling on Jenny’s map.

If I could only get the film across to Lorna I would find something beyond her.

She was making stuffed pork chops and a ratatouille out of the New York Times Cook Book .

How do you gauge the height of someone like Will upon his knees and leaning over the hilly folds of this map? Three years and two months ago he had been a child. He and Jenny and Lorna and I had taken a rainy-day leave from the seaside village where we were spending August and I was considering what to do about my share of the hire-boat business; and we had driven east to the Giant of Cerne. Jenny had been our road-map reader. You’re always looking after our education, Lorna had said to me when we got out of the car into a drizzle. She decided to get back in and leave us to make the ascent. The children scrambled and raced so it occurred to me they might expect to find at the top of the chalk slope a giant looming upright above them. But he was on his back, at least as we could see him; the turf was cut away from the lines of his white chalk form 181 feet long. He was hard to see, like the rugged coast of an island you spend two or three days hiking along, and you can’t grasp the indentations with a clarity other than your small map’s. I had shown Will the aerial picture in the Dorset guide but we’d left that in the glove compartment. When we reached the top, we were all alone; we walked the craggy slant of the giant’s shillelagh, the valley of his rubbery, dipper-like right arm; we jumped from eye to circular eye, and below we paced the span between nipple and circular nipple; and then Jenny and I on either side of his torso crossed his three ribs like five-yard stripes on an American football field, and then found Will between us standing on the tip of the Giant of Cerne’s upward lying cock, and Will, facing down its twenty-foot length to the twin coves at its root, said, Is this…? And Jenny said, What did you think it was, stupid. And Will chased her, and she eluded him, all over the giant’s genitals, deliberately stepping and stamping and contouring the marvelous marks in the deep earth, while I tried again to get an over-all view and wondered what the original incisers (Roman Britons or earlier cultists) had been able to see without the moving wand of a plane’s aerial height.

The map that Will now kneeled on in his room in Highgate was almost half blue, the land area was coast, maybe island. The rest was white and tan, the tan mainly elevation contours.

He stopped talking as I entered, but began again as if we had a briefing deadline.

You see, he said, you have to think of each of these isarithms as if a plane has been passed through the land at a certain height. These are the z levels, Mr. Ogg said. He read maps during the war; he is going to retire soon. The x and y values are horizontal, see, and the z is vertical, I don’t think we all understood that, but you should have seen Mr. Ogg, he got all excited drawing on the board, and Stephen laughed.

I knelt beside Will and felt the relative lightness of my beard against the darkness of his hair whose fineness didn’t lie flat because he didn’t give it a comb very often and our English water is hard.