Joseph McElroy: Lookout Cartridge

Around me are the years in London, years of evenings in which people listen and talk and do not drink too much, get a ride home after the Underground closes down or phone a cab that comes in seven minutes. The bearded man has been expatiating on American allegiances; what after all can one expect of Americans, they never reflected seriously upon their own revolution, they cared only to put it behind them. The mathematician interjects that Charles the First’s last word before they chopped off his head was Remember .

The bearded man seems not to hear her. He says that indeed Americans confused the natural resources of their continent with their own ability to exploit those resources, even mingled those minerals and plants with the illusion of philosophical ideas, and now in the interest of holding violence down, whom does America back?

I am about to intervene, as I have on some other evenings with a glass in my hand on the side of ideas I do not hold defending, for instance, American internal security systems (for after all we do have something to be secret about!); challenging the standard of living here which for ten years the English middle classes have comfortably not let themselves inquire into; and gently (though later at home Lorna often says I was terrible) attacking…what was it?…the Truman Doctrine? Churchill, self-fulfilling Cold War prophecies?…the ease of friendly intercourse has buffered my memory-but I don’t intervene now, for the bearded man is saying he’s not sure what violence is and he can sympathize with the man in question. And Geoff Millan returns us to the man in question himself, an American resident here from whom now for lack of information the talk finds its exit into sex, and I have the odd sense that no one in the room in fact knows this mythical committee of one, and it turns out that Geoff doesn’t know the name of the man.

I stay and stay.

When the other guests are gone, Geoff does not betray surprise when I ask if I can stay over. It’s very late, a new stage of talk.

Who is Claire?

Claire is in New York.

Cartwright’s contact.

For the film.

Yankee dollar.

You measure the pound by it.

You rely on the American connections.

My boats on the south coast were bought with money I made here in England. So were the French stoves, you have one yourself.

You bought into those young married boutiques, you started an antique bottle shop.

Was it money I wanted?

It was cordless electric carvers from the States at the time of the assassination. And who ever heard of exporting brass beds from here to Manhattan?

My margin was surprising.

And quilts from Maine and Appalachia, some old, some new, and antique stoves from France that aren’t really antique. And then that University of Maryland education racket at your Air Force bases here.

I’m hardly involved.

And this film.

Which film?

Cartwright, international businessman.

Sounds like the title.

What did you hope for?

More than what we have.

Is it all a waste?

What can you do with several pounds of ruined film?

You’re the American.

The English take photographs too.

Not so many.

Maybe they don’t see so much.

They’re not so busy snapping pictures.

They would know better than an American what to do with a load of ruined film.

You said some burnt. Well then, blow up the negative, silkscreen it, rephotograph the print, hang it over that flak hole in your study—

It’s a crack—

Or just hang the blown-up negative.

Find me the negatives and we’ll go into business. There are no negatives. Or just one.

But you had other prints. I don’t understand.

You really don’t, The point is, it hadn’t been processed. So no negative. Dagger was taking most of it in on the Monday to someone he knows in Soho. When Dagger found it, it had been just yanked out of the cans, most of it.

Were you actually there?

He’s my friend.

What was it all doing lying about?

When Dagger shot most of it he put off thinking about rushes. Anyhow a lot was shot in the boondocks.

Not exactly a home movie. Real art.

This was real. This was something.

Where was it lying?

On a table Dagger uses. For working, eating, talking. A big table by a window.

You said yanked out of the can. Was it burnt then?

There was a magnifying glass on the sill and a couple of inches of leader was trailing out of a cartridge.

You’re not saying it was burnt by the English sun.

During a bright interval.

Is it so easy to pull film out of a cartridge?

Sixteen-millimeter comes in spools. This that was burnt by the magnifying glass was eight.

Did you plan on a mixture of eight and sixteen?

We planned to blow the whole lot to thirty-five. Eight doesn’t blow to thirty-five, though we did have a cartridge of eight that Dagger’d been against using one evening when we were out of film, but I wanted to blow it to thirty-five so you’d see sprocket holes and frame lines.

This was what was incinerated.

No, the eight that was burnt by the magnifying glass was a baby movie Dagger’s wife Alba took of a friend’s baby.

What happened to the sixteen-millimeter film that was yanked out of the cans?

It was unspooled and exposed.

Ah, Burnt by light, as it were.

You should be endowed.

My father is entirely too old to have a thirty-five-year-old son on a permanent family fellowship. Why don’t you take some money out of the Cartwright trust and endow me; sell some of that cheap land you bought in the Norfolk Broads, you’ll never build there.

I’ll let your father take care of you.

Let him give me what he’s going to leave me, then leave me and disappear into his retreat in Sussex and if he lives long enough escape death duties or the added hazard of dying before he endows me, for then we might find that not having in the end to face me, he’s posthumously endowed the retreat instead.

Someday Will and Jenny will sell my Millan originals for ten times what you let them go for.

No one knows what they are.

Admit they’re hard to describe. Music, painting, sculpture, dolls, even in my humble view engineering.

Why describe?

It might help you finish things. Look out for yourself.

Look, you start things, others finish them. But how was the magnifying glass fixed? I should have thought sort of on end. That is to say, on its side. Was the sun burning through the glass when your friend came in?

This was later. When Dagger and Alba came back from shopping, there was a smell. The sun had gone in.

The smell of course was from the eight-millimeter baby film. Your vandal was indiscriminate.

He didn’t get it all. But what he got is almost irreplaceable.

Why don’t I know Dagger? I feel I know him.

Dagger DiGorro. Everyone else in London knows him.

American of course.

Irredeemably.

Now why should someone want to destroy your great American film?

I should have stayed in waterbeds.

Wasn’t it water bumpers?

You do listen.

So do you.

Who was the American they were talking about tonight?

No name mentioned. Lana was the one who knew him—

The splendid dark-haired woman—

And she only knows through a friend of hers. But why did you say a moment ago almost irreplaceable? And if the baby film wasn’t part of yours with Dagger DiGorro, then there must be some more eight-millimeter unaccounted for.

At least you listen. They don’t always listen in New York.

Looped London minutes with pink-faced Millan, I insert them in front of Claire even though they haven’t happened yet. They come equipped with what I don’t like about him-his automatic ironies-and what I do like-his attention. Once looped, those moments of friction will never run out of sprocket holes, the loop runs as long as you want, its hard data too hard a vita of me I cannot pause to understand for if I do I cannot, or not yet.