Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

I needed something to write with. The ballpoint in Will’s hand was a very special one given me by a man I knew in NASA.

When I went up, Lorna hadn’t moved. I didn’t tell her precisely what had happened in Sub’s apartment, only that I must go.

But, she said, what was so marvelous about this country house? What did it look like?

From about any angle except a helicopter the house looked circular; but in fact it was shaped like a squat egg with the ends sliced curved, and it had a circular stone wall around it. The odd thing was that I in fact had told Dagger I wanted a house that looked circular but wasn’t and he found the exact thing.

Lorna simply lay curled on the bed. I did not want to say what the film was about.

I’m sorry, I said.

I’m thinking, she said. That Dudley found a house in the country just like that. And Tessa spoke of it at dinner here. She’d been in Scotland with her friend. You were here part of the evening. You left to meet Geoff Millan, he wanted you to meet an American.

When was it?

Lorna told me.

It had been way back in March long before we shot the Marvelous Country House.

But not long before we laid our plans.

OK, I was fallible. I did recall hearing the beginning of Tessa’s account.

The three key moments moved among all those perhaps trivial pages that I’d written and Jenny had typed.

I remember Tessa’s description of the house. Her having in some eerie way been waiting for me was the least of my worries at this point.

Top-secret lips like a soft book closed. Random elation. I forget during, I forget after, almost. The skin of the back bends from a gloam like Attic honey — late sun behind — to a stretch beyond the couched shoulder blade blue and amber near gray. Does sound from the street in a current of day under the window shade color us? It is skin I finger, not hue, but I have forgotten her first name for a second, and remember that it was a lot like this before with her or someone else, do you remember how the memory slides out or you slip into it? I speak for myself, not for her, though — and for her ribs and a down above the knees and for her fleshly shoulders that are not what you would think from her tense figure clothed, the parts of her body I speak for still speak for themselves, but I can’t speak for her, I have her, I breathe with her, have in my hands even what I wouldn’t ever want to get at in her, like one of my whole memories I can’t divide.

She is on her stomach, hair over wrist, her behind white with a red dot and a pale mole across the way, her legs just open to show a fold of sex puffed downward. This shifts as she lifts the small of her back, and now I comb my nails up either side of the gates that space her spine. She sits up like a dancer slowly, I am behind her in the Japanese position. She settles on me like part of a multiple exposure of bending forward or back. My fingers out of sight catch what they must have forgotten: that the hair coming three inches from her cunt up onto her abdomen is in three plantings, with some of the skin between so the lines don’t feel trimmed. I raise a finger to her eye, it does not shut, it is lidless but there is a fold at the corner by her nose, I can see it.

Before, when we came in the apartment and emerged from our clothes and she stood on the soft bed and then pointed her elbows at me and unhooked herself, these plantings seemed elegant — a sign of truth. Now, kneeling back on my heels behind her, I recall them with a hand and with a hand I fit myself under across an isthmus to hook in her as she bows for a memorable moment forward angling opener, and leans back as I lean forward into her back like this, I look at small shoulders rising, lowering by my mouth, and I can’t imagine her face and I move my hand from forking a nipple way down her belly to touch her slippery tab as big as her nipple seemingly and larger than some other memory told me, unlike a childhood place years later revisited that is smaller — but softer than nipple and without direction, and I put my other hand to her mouth and feel the mouth widen across dry teeth. A fingertip of each hand upon the tongues of two mouths. An eyelid shudders, it is mine; I think of the room as hers, but the bed’s dark footboard and beyond it a chair with a manila envelope extending off its edge and beyond that a chest of drawers all do not belong to anyone, she’s between me and them but I have nothing to tell them if she were a gate to them, they are not hers either. She has a pretty stone or two hidden under a sachet in the top drawer, for she has shown me. I lean back on my fists and I empty my head into my prick, this is this time more muscle than bright flood, for aimed up, and therefore I feel less sure of reaching her than if we are prone and she my horizon, though aimed up now and lifted over my inner ridge along my underside because I am behind her I feel she can’t get off me sitting right down on my pelvis even if she were conscious of not wanting to get off or away. Yet aimed up and become one of her muscles veined and vesseled can I get away? It is not worth thinking, she is straining her neck, arms up, I reach round, she’s looking blind toward the ceiling of this double bed, breast firmed upward, back now arched so for a time I am not so deep.

She says, Hold me, which I was doing and as if I or it mercurial might launch her into an outside.

Our being here hangs upon someone’s absence in a like time that goes at like rate but other kind. Whose is that absence, how many occupy it? What is the name of this woman I force forward and turn onto her right side doing what you want before you know what your will (that’s more at rest but more alive) does want, yet it is she your will who does what you didn’t until you got it know you wanted, rolling a hip beyond gravity and drawing knees to chin in honor of your arching back so now you lie face-to-face having pivoted along her thread to get here, her fingers doing bump after bump of your spine as if she is making the phone ring which is breaking you both up because it stops and starts again.

Do you, she breathes lest the phone might find the bed, do you think of anyone else when you fuck me?

What is she made of inside? I don’t answer her but begin circling, I have not much of a self only the change through which I drop and afterward don’t recall except in that other time zone parallel. Her question grips me and is answered as if later in that other time but maybe it is right now as my hardness is felt in these circles I describe.

Someone else? Sure. With one person, have others; wife, think of friend; friend, think wife. Enemies? heavy.

Tom cat, she says. She dabs with her tongue a point in my left hand where if the fingers were spread the thumb and index finger extended downward on two imaginary lines would meet. This touch for some beatific technical reason the Chinese have doubtless understood for centuries seems to trace a light fingernail up the longitudinal dividing line of my scrotum.

Now, if you are thus between, then that accounts for your weightlessness, extended between bodies. But are you in fact weightless because she says you taste like custard.

(I taste like custard.) She says or will say inside her you split her right up and she is real again. Hurt? Inner structure be damned; here’s a soft slot only.

I am about to do something different, I feel it in my chest hairs, but as if again she is ahead and waiting she cries out or laughs or something, and is coming with a force like sound but as submerged as the words I didn’t speak answering her a moment but what a moment before, and I am not circling, I have come into her and time has come and gone by, into her and out her nose’s nostrils each now to be kissed. And her smooth knee.