Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

But then I’d gone there on my own for the first time, with Jenny, with our cameras, staying the night in Salisbury across the road from the Cathedral Close, driving over to Stonehenge in the morning but not early enough to climb the barbed wire unobserved. I found it then. By myself. Without any but the unavoidable advance word you get over the years about sun worship and remains and calendars and, of late, computers. I let Jenny know more than I. Lorna had complained that I’d been unable to persuade Will to come.

What I found was a ground so old and powerful I could not be lessened by others’ relation to it. In the midst of the partly ruined circle I knelt to draw my hand over a fifteen- or sixteen-foot-long gray-brown stone that must surely once have been standing; it was neither rough nor smooth, and there were glints of something else in it, and I let myself feel at peace touching it where there were no initials to be seen, a fresh touch upon a thing thus real, a feeling like one of those days in the fifties when I sensed that without being in any way exiled Lorna and I were going to stay in England. And when Jenny reappeared stepping inside a circle, her slender back to me, to take a picture outward through one of the linteled arches, and I heard but ignored the imprint upon the earth of steps behind me, I gently clawed this gray-brown rock and felt that Stonehenge had been planted here in my planet turning about the sun so as to use the constant-bearing energy of the earth-turn as if Stonehenge were a mind. And as the light footprint behind me coughed, my daughter wheeled to me radiant and excited and slightly vague of eye and said, It’s a message! and I fancied the earth fading like your green-edged blue fingerprints on a dark sheet of encapsulated liquid crystals when you put it on a cool window — fading to leave, all by itself in space, Stonehenge and its revolutions as together as an orbiting station. But the cough cleared into a voice, a man in a plastic mac who wanted to tell me that they called this stone here that I was touching the Altar Stone, though without any reason in the world, it had probably been standing back there — he pointed to a huge trilothon arch near us on the far side from Jenny — and there were two horseshoes of stones where we were in the middle of the circle and the circle was really two circles though you couldn’t easily tell unless you knew, the Sarsen Circle outside the Bluestone Circle, and the diameter across the Sarsen was ninety-seven feet, and most of the lintels of the Sarsen Circle were gone and only sixteen of the original thirty standing stones in the Sarsen were here now but they were ten feet apart if you measured from the centers and each was thirteen feet six inches high. The man gave us many more measurements, a high narrow face and full lips and a narrow red-veined nose, and before we got away he had altered my consciousness of what was here, and Jenny had giggled because as she later said I was nodding so much and all of that could be found in the guidebook and she wondered if he expected to be paid because of my American accent.

Dagger could see with his own mind. I need not protect Stonehenge.

Who from? said Claire.

Dagger? I said instinctively.

Don’t knock him, she bridled again, he’s sensitive, he’s smart, you talk like it was all your idea.

Monty raised a gentle hand toward Claire.

When I was just his twelve-year-old niece he’d come up from Mexico and bring me a present. He always had a story. He showed us an old wheel-map worth a thousand dollars once when he visited us in Philadelphia. Once he told me the saddest story and when he laughed at the end I was crying, but I didn’t mind. When I think of him now I feel like a child.

What was the story, said Monty.

He’d come in from L.A., he was going to see someone in New York, he said he was giving his friends in California a rest, he said friends can be dangerous, I remember him saying that, but it isn’t the kind of thing a kid takes you up on but that’s what he said and it was about his friends in Berkeley, and this from a man who has more devoted friends than anyone I know who is so frank, maybe that’s why. He was staying in a tenement in L.A. just before he came east, and for several mornings he didn’t do anything but look out a window and on the roof of another building just like half a floor higher than his. There was a black man who would come out on this roof in the sun and move around as if he was blowing his mind, looking down to his feet as if he’d once been a dancer, tossing his head, seeming to stagger, looking here, there, breaking into a run looking over his shoulder. Six or seven floors up with a four- or five-foot barrier. He would talk to himself and Dag wished he had binoculars because he once learned to lip read when he had a deaf girlfriend, I’m not joking, that’s what he said. Well the fourth or fifth day the black man came up and did his thing like practicing for a part and after a while he stopped and was staring over at Dagger but it must have been too far to see Dagger sitting at the window. When suddenly the man dodged to one side there all alone in the middle of the roof and made a dash right at Dagger, I mean from a hundred yards away and all that space in between. And suddenly close to the barrier he stopped and a white dog appeared in the air landing on the narrow ledge that the man had been running toward, and he’d been playing with this dog and the dog couldn’t get its footing, I can hear its nails scratching, couldn’t stop its momentum, and over it went and the man fell down on the roof and must have crawled because Dagger saw his head again and then he was peering over the edge down all those floors to the street where his dog was. And Dagger laughed and laughed, I never saw him laugh so hard, tears came to his eyes. Is that the Dagger you know? I mean it’s quite a performance, true or not, and then I thought the tears had come first.

What friends were those? I said. But Monty wanted to get something accomplished and he at once asked if Stonehenge was the scene we’d got a rush of.

Claire looking at me said, No no no, that was the last scene they shot, they had their rush long before that.

Oh of course, said Monty gently.

His power with Claire did not come from his knowledge of our film, though in some indirect way maybe from his being Phil Aut’s brother-in-law. But this wasn’t the main hold on Claire. She liked Monty, liked the house and the couch. She had smiled at him after her first sip (it was only tonic) and had drawn her bare feet up under her like a daughter or wife.

I was losing Monty and Claire, the attachments here in this picture-lined room asserted their drab gravity, and my stomach complained and I smelled bluefish and lobster and fennel-stewed squid, and cheeseburgers, and I gulped my drink and schemed.

I decided to lie.

You asked about the rush. OK, it was the night scene originally number three, then two when we shifted the Softball Game.

This shifting, said Claire, it’s all pretty much in your mind, right, because you never got a real print to cut.

But she was interested.

The night scene I told you about, the second day I got here. Wales and the fire. We had to see if it had come out. We couldn’t be sure. The light, the dark. Silhouettes. And that grove.

Claire didn’t blink.

So we took it next day to the man in Soho, you know the man.

I don’t think so, said Claire.

Dagger said you knew him.

Monty watched Claire as he drank.

And the man who came out of the grove, we wanted to see if he was just another thing like the flank of a cow or a shape of shrubbery. Dagger probably wrote you about this scene, didn’t he?

I stood up and stretched and yawned.

No, said Claire, he didn’t write.