Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

It was necessary now to talk. We had had our sips, and now I had given thanks for hospitality and said how different this room looked with the northwest light let in past the opened blinds, and Monty had said I must be eager to get back to London and Claire could live there and he and she had talked about it.

Claire said Dagger had had the right idea. I asked if she’d give up her job with Aut or work for him abroad. She smiled at Monty, who was a very good twenty years older, and he said to me gently looking back at her that Outer Film didn’t do all that much in Europe.

I said, But Phil Aut.

Monty said Claire knew more than he about Phil Aut, but what he knew was simple: Phil Aut was his brother-in-law, he was doing OK but was having to support his operation increasingly with porn imports and educational films and Claire thought he had a new silent partner; Phil was younger than he looked, lived in Connecticut, had no contact with Monty, and had a cousin attached to the twelfth precinct.

Claire was looking like Jenny again, in a blue blouse and pale green jeans, her light hair parted in the middle and flowing down beside her eyes. Her feet were tucked under her and against the white couch she was more vivid than she had been last week, an autumn sacrifice plucked from the fingers of a god by Monty Graf, who knew how old he was now and how old he’d be in ten years.

He was talking oh so calmly, very quietly; King Street was as quiet as Highgate, a car ran by, Claire bent her head looking at nothing, Monty was explaining that she didn’t know as much as I thought but did know more than he did, and that now on the basis of what she knew, she reckoned the time had come to change.

On what she knows about what? I asked.

I want to do something creative, said Claire.

Right, said Monty, also she thinks it’s time for a change.

I asked if Aut was getting to be too much, and Claire had a sip and Monty opened his mouth but Claire said, Lately we haven’t talked much.

Monty came to the point, though if it was the true point my name is Graf, his Cartwright. Well, what I’d said about the aim of the film that I’d made with Dagger had stayed deeply imbedded in his mind , he said, brows scoring key words which may have been just sounds.

And had this, I asked, aroused our Claire’s creative instincts?

She may not have liked the sound of my words; her only movement was to purse her lips.

Monty said he’d loved the ideas I’d outlined — and I heard something genuine in what he thought he was saying — and, he said, if I could give him a clearer picture, then he and Claire might be prepared to make me a proposal.

I said to tell me the proposal, I’d give him a picture to suit it.

But I felt I had to let go of something. I was tired.

Monty smiled and said all he could say was it had to do with beginning with the rush Dagger and I still had and the sound , and the 8-millimeter cartridge I’d mentioned we’d shot between air base and Stonehenge — was it destroyed? (no reply from me) — and then to build on the original purposes as uncompromisingly as Dagger and I had tried to the first time through.

Claire said, Did we ever pay your gas to Corsica?

I didn’t like her tone. She was still working for Aut.

I said to Monty as far as I could tell we’d stuck to our guns whatever had gone on at this end, and I thought Dagger would agree. When Monty pressed me, I went beyond what Dagger would have been able to accept. I said yes: power poached on or tuned in on when it lacked direction but had momentum. The religious group circling the fire but not united on what they all surely believed and the agitation and energy which the camera called forth was also part of this power poached on. Likewise the Hawaiian with the steady guitar seen as if by a series of travelers who were moving down the corridor toward a ticket booth out of sight, toward stairs, the train platform — the camera passing again and again at different speeds to suggest different persons but going over the same stretch of corridor, bobbing, leaning toward the swelling cheekbones of the large-eyed boy and his girl from Hempstead, Long Island, in her wool sergeant’s jacket over a plaid shirt with the tails out over her bluejeans rocking in the London chill clapping hands, swinging her long tangled wheat-colored hair — their energy spent on those passers-by but protected by Dagger’s saving Beaulieu 16-millimeter camera. To see Claire’s reaction I mentioned the color snap briefly seen in the Suitcase Slowly Packed, a flickering glimpse of a person then instantly packed between a black sweater and something else — well, the power angle was just part. But through all the scenes mingling England and America and deliberately unplacing the scenes, there was a cool theme of America itself—

Monty said Yes, yes. And the 8 between air base and Stonehenge?

— the softball, the space shot ignored on the rainy terrace, a NATO First-Strike Base in the English countryside. But Dagger, I said, didn’t know that all or exactly this was coming into his camera, and it doesn’t matter that he didn’t know.

Claire had risen suddenly. She wanted a cigarette but she had risen because of me: And likewise, she said, there are things in the film that he knew and you don’t. Right?

No doubt, said Monty, reaching her a cigarette like a wand and she fell back into the sofa and murmured, No doubt; indeed no doubt.

A new weightlessness was upon me, the circle of Clahe’s light body filming the strong square of mine, erasing without a trace so that attachments to our film or even Outer Film, wife or friend, pearl scar or narrow Jewish shoulders, went like a radar weather-scope, and came again and went. My heart beat hard and a sweat cooling the roots of my moustache brought my empty glass to my mouth and then Monty’s hand to my glass.

Claire said, But is Stonehenge so American?

Somewhere a cartridge grew and melted into its system, and though I did not know where, I was glad. It might have been a unit of protected memory. It might. It might have been Connecticut, Jenny’s Reid’s Connecticut, which on the map seems so much smaller than its space when you hear of all the prosperous people who live there on their own land, though my gravity just now was shaky and my concern for Jenny raised Connecticut to some north-bound Mercatorized acre as great as Greenland; and my words to Claire and hers to me and my thirty-odd-block walk with too few diagonals weakened me, especially as it was toward some new strength I may not have had the equipment for and another longer way lay behind me that I could not quite recall and either that way itself or my unlikely hardship recalling it weakened me too, but in the direction of this new strength like a salmon finding that unlikely electric path upstream generated by the downstream rapid.

I said that long before the first night we seriously talked about doing a film, Dagger had wanted Stonehenge and had said if we couldn’t buy it and ship it to Berkeley we could at least shoot it. But he was full of passing tricks and he forgot about Stonehenge. One July 4th he had got a box of fireworks through an air force friend and had set them off in Hyde Park to the delight of Will and some other children and played as background a cassette of “My Country ’Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty,” which my son of course called “God Save the Queen” just as he called cherry bombs thunderclaps . I had first opposed including Stonehenge. I pictured a fed-up American couple having a public argument at the altar stone, I pictured a midwestern small businessman with rimless glasses (and gray suedette loafers and four children in bright shorts and a pretty wife) saying, Excuse me, sir, to a guard he was about to ask the age of the stones — it was the old tourist thing, and both too well known and too immeasurably dubious, what did it mean? And this was even before television commercials were showing Sunset through a Stone Age Doorway, Dawn at the Henge, the Beginning of Time Told Round an Ancient Clock, the Holy Slice of Druid Sacrifice, the Mystery of Life. A void.