Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

John the Englishman, who looked like Teddy Roosevelt, was talking with his mouth full as we entered. He was saying, I don’t see how you get from one to the other, I grant the first but how does the second follow?

Chad nodded to Dagger and me; he was careful, but he would smile and then forget to drop it; he wound his spaghetti on his fork slowly as if he were understanding something through it. He was about to answer before raising his neatly wrapped fork to his mouth, but John who had now swallowed continued in the same vein so you didn’t know what the subject was except that John was not going to be inhibited by us. Dagger said the light was going to be strange but OK with gray day outside and electric globes here. He had the camera on me as well as on the triumvirate while I placed the mike and brought the cable toward me and under the table and back toward the camera and our window, so the person nearest the cable coming out on the camera side of the table was Elizabeth’s boyfriend but he was a few feet to our left. Herma said I’m Herma, when she came in, and John finished his rapid-fire points about the perfect mechanism, the given, being subject to accidents which you may call solutions if you like, accidents, yes — and just before he said thermal accidents (which made Len turn his head abruptly to look at John), the Nagra began recording— thermal accidents you know, perturbations.

Chad said, But these accidents can be anticipated and built into the mechanism.

He looked up at the camera, then to his left to Herma and grinned sheepishly; he was perhaps twenty-five. She smiled back, and shrugged happily as if to say I haven’t a clue but it’s nice to be here and I’d be happy to fuck soon.

Herma’s sensational, said Dagger, who hadn’t shifted his aim from the triumvirate; she’s from Toledo and her father produces glass.

Oh, Daddy’s incredible, said Herma.

Len burst into a loud laugh, but John burst out with more words: Glass? What kind? You say he produces glass? I was in Toledo last spring when I had an appointment in Detroit, do you know Lambertville, I’ve a friend there who’s in the coal-shipping business in Toledo, what are they going to do about Lake Erie?

But Chad said, But if accidents happen to this perfect system you’re talking about, they’re a minor factor.

Randomness, said John (and the camera still had not moved, and Len pushed back his chair to rise), obviates a master plan, I don’t care if you’re talking about replicating molecules or gambling—

Len rose and asked Elizabeth if she’d like something to eat, and she said a glass of the wine, but I had the distinct impression Len had wanted to interrupt the ongoing John, who now said Stop gnashing your teeth, Len.

Chad said, We don’t disagree all that much, just about sequences.

I whispered to Dagger to shoot the painting, the pewter, the curious molding where the room’s corners rounded, the dartboard on our left oddly hung to the right of the kitchen door and beyond the left end of the sideboard; I suggested a shot through the kitchen (a mere distant brainstorm, the kitchen door wasn’t open and I only imagined a shot through the kitchen window above the sink to an ancient branching farm implement, its oak fittings standing low against the stony sky).

The randomness, Chad said, might be said to precede a plan, but the plan can forestall all kinds of accidents.

Randomness creates purposes, said John before lowering a helping of spaghetti into his mouth like some shredded, limp-blooming cephalapod. Dagger I am almost certain missed this, he had cut to Len pouring Chianti for Herma, Elizabeth, and the English boy, Dagger and I declining.

Far off, I heard the sea, it was a recording that had replaced the music. I had a physical sensation like being forced to breathe compressed air from a tank on my back — preternaturally abstract language getting out of hand. I asked what in particular was random, there was no such thing as randomness — but I think Dagger may have switched off for a second to pivot from the 15- to the 25-mm. lens, which isn’t all that close, but we wanted enough width to get a good stretch of table — and he had cut round to the hall door where Gene’s wife had appeared.

John at once said, Your film is random, you speak, a woman comes, a hand opens, the rain might be raining or not, though within that accident you might film it or not—

Oh shut up, said Len, and took his plate out into the kitchen leaving the door open, but there was no window from where I stood. I turned to the window behind us here in the dining room with its rounded corners and its discussion and its cast all so awkward you felt it was perfectly spontaneous except it seemed rigged — and under the striped umbrella stood two children and Herma’s English boy watching the moon tour so I couldn’t see the screen. I remarked that this was the first trail of the lunar rover. Dagger pivoted the turret to 50 mm. for a shot of the kitchen through the open door. Len stopped on the way back from the kitchen, asked Elizabeth’s boyfriend why he didn’t turn around and look at the camera and seemed testy about something as he moved around the table to his chair, and Dagger moved with him. He said he was going to turn off those seasounds upstairs, but at the hall door blocked by Gene’s wife he turned to Dagger who was still with him, and said What the fuck is the point of this?

There was a little physical business at the door with Gene’s wife but Len didn’t want to play and he pointed his index finger toward her chest as if to touch her but then pushed past and then his steps were on the hall stairs.

John said what were we up to, then quickly called out to Len not to be so bloody restless; and Dagger, who was back on 25 and was filming Chad with the pink gentleman in the portrait behind, said we’d know when we saw it all together.

And where have you been? said John, who seemed unaware that Herma was wandering behind the duumvirate hoping to be filmed.

I said we had borrowed a zoom in Corsica but they were very expensive to rent and we figured the three standard lenses we had would—

Turret mount? said John.

The sea sound continued.

Dagger was filming Gene’s wife, who looked more and more like a model. It even made her smile for a second, and John and I went on talking, and when I said we’d been in Corsica filming and he asked what and didn’t let me speak but quoted a long Corsican song about a dead dog that ended with a proudly irrelevant chorus about Napoléon Napolé on Napolé on , I knew he had his facts off, though all he’d done was put two truths into one instance.

I asked for the camera. I pivoted it on the tripod ball and focused through the window. The patio was deserted, the TV screen snowy, then clear; the landscape beyond Hadley Rille Canyon disappeared and there was a man in street clothes standing by a lunar rover, the child in the olive green mac chugged by and this green against the rain-flattened color of the field was a subtle moment of life. John was asking about Corsica, had we been to Calvi, Bastia, Filitosa. Dagger was saying we’d gotten good footage of a naval battle but we weren’t sure what political context to put it in, and John narrowed his puffy eyes instead of smiling uncertainly.

We needed more film. Dagger unscrewed the camera and tried to put it in my hands, but I said I’d go for the spools in the hall and Dagger indecisively said maybe we should reload out there, there was less light.

Gene’s wife had disappeared. I heard her talking to Len upstairs, it didn’t sound good, her even sound sort of combing through his rising falling intensity. I thought, We’ve been unlucky, Dagger muffed it.