Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

Lorna spoke about a country house. First back in New England. Then later nearer to home, as we increasingly thought of it.

We had six hundred feet, mostly of that dining room. Over twenty minutes. Pretty extravagant I thought then and that night when I got started writing. But the film shrank and my diary account (which I had to stop working on when Lorna came in and I noticed I had a headache) began to seem a rightful decompression.

The dwarf had told Dagger that after he’d killed the gobernador his mother died. But at another village there is an immeasurable well leading to a cave that goes miles and miles to another town, and in this cave by an underground stream an old woman with a snake at her feet sells small portions of water in return not for legal tender but for a tender criatura to feed the snake. And that old woman is the dwarf’s mother.

Dagger slapped me on the right arm and I tried to be companionable and said I bet he’d made half of this up.

A little editing, said Herma’s boy.

One of the boys asked if Herma had read Vonnegut.

I said my daughter had read him for days at a go.

The dwarf when Dagger talked to him was pretty well off, but political changes had come and he was no longer top dog, but the locals were afraid of him and he is afraid to go down that well to see his mother because he is after all not much bigger than a criatura .

When Dagger dropped me off in Highgate the summer light was still with us.

Out of the back seat Elizabeth said, If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go live in America?

I reached back and touched her leg and said I’d phone her, we were shooting Stonehenge in two weeks. As I straightened up outside the VW, Lorna and Will pulled up in the Fiat and Dagger waved frantically.

Parting, I still had one big thing to myself. Dagger hadn’t mentioned it and I didn’t think he’d believe me. And the morning in Ajaccio when the three people passed the wall of the fort he hadn’t had the 12–120 zoom we borrowed, and then the three didn’t like being filmed and hurried away. If Dagger hadn’t seen it himself, he wouldn’t now believe me — that the skinny bald man in that threesome in Corsica had been Len — a face which (along with Tessa’s “moments”) I recorded early in the original diary of that day we shot the Marvelous Country House, but which now in this swollen uncartridge-like and maybe no longer so replaceable memory of day and diary I put practically last.

I lay at length in our high-sided tub. Lorna knelt on the mat resting her arms along the edge.

I watched my risen hair gather bubbles and thought how Will had likened Vietnam on the map to a somewhat misshapen seahorse and I had said it was even better if you threw in Laos and Cambodia. My fingers stirred under the water.

I told Lorna that in Hindu thought Māyā has opposing qualities. It is a force of illusion, and illusion is inferior to truth, and truth lies beyond the senses. But Māyā is also a force of illusion that helps us to believe in this same world the senses give us, and this makes Māyā a force powerful, even good.

Who told you that? Tessa?

Lorna released one of her arms and took my flesh in her hand and lifted it above the water. I took the soap from the dish that is in the aluminum frame that rests athwart the tub on opposite edges, and I rinsed off the gray that Will invariably leaves. Lorna let her fingers slide up, and then let me drop, larger.

No one told me, I said. I looked it up.

Do you think they’ll get off tomorrow?

Irwin and Scott? I said.

It’ll be worth watching, said Lorna. We saw some today. Jenny even took pictures of it and Will made her mad.

Lorna and Will had been to Kew with Tessa and Jane, who was now almost thirteen. To my surprise, Tessa and Dudley had had a long talk with Dagger and Alba, at a party the evening of the day Dagger and I got back from Corsica. Whose party Lorna didn’t know. Dudley was quite animated for him and had embarrassed Tessa by asking out of the blue if Dagger knew someone called Nash.

Who was Mary Napier? Tessa said Mary knew Cartwright.

Someone I met in Corsica. But why did Will make Jenny mad? Tell her a shot of the telly screen wouldn’t come out?

No. That she ought to watch what was happening in front of her eyes instead of transferring it to a camera.

I thought of our twenty-minute shot today and could not imagine it cut up, transposed, reduced.

Tessa came to mind today, I said. There was unexpected violence on the set. It would have amused her.

The bath ended, and the night began.

The Sunday after Apollo 15 Dagger and I played softball in Hyde Park. Chad didn’t appear, but he seldom did. Our umpire Mr. Ismay had told me long ago that Chad had postponed his Rhodes to fulfill his ROTC contract, then had come to Oxford without returning home. Well, now he was an Oxford B.A. with an automatic M.A. to follow and maybe he had gone back to New York.

Dudley Allott was not in right field.

I gave Jenny the Marvelous Country House to type and said I had even surprised myself this time, there were people in it who were not on the film.

I told Dagger the Allotts were at Cape Cod. Dagger said Dudley had been in New York checking out letters supposed to be in the possession of a relative of Samuel Cabot. Cabot was the physician-ornithologist who had traveled in Central America with Frederick Catherwood.

I was surprised. Yet Dagger knows everyone eventually.

What Dagger would not have known was that Dudley was not only tracking the elusive character of this Englishman Catherwood in his own unique drawings and in the words of his sponsor and companion the American John Lloyd Stephens and of others. Dudley hoped as well to solve a mystery heretofore accepted as part of Catherwood’s odd story. Destined to drown in a collision between the Arctic and the Vesta , Catherwood suffered a tragedy almost as great by fire. The night of July 31, 1842, at a rotunda in New York, Catherwood’s Panorama of Thebes and Jerusalem, together with hundreds of sepia drawings from his recent Central American trip with Cabot and Stephens and a treasure of pottery, sculpture, dated wooden lintels, and on them certain glyphs that were a revelation and precipitated a revolution in Central American archaeology, all burned, leaving Catherwood only his determination to embark again.

But by now Dagger had more pressing interests. One of them was Alba. The week after the Marvelous Country House he took with his double-lens reflex a delicate nude of Alba in profile at the end of her eighth month.

The basement bath offered the best shower spray money might buy. It needled my scalp and hung my beard in mats and revived my eyelids when I turned my nose to the nozzle breathing the water which for all I cared could have come underground through sewers, then to be washed up into Monty Graf’s tanks by the free swing of interborough sludge. But under pressure the fine tines of water this Tuesday in October at 6 P.M. struck me like ozone, and I looked up into them.

We have never installed a shower in Highgate. A hand nozzle and hose is what we have, and so we take longer to bathe but it is more relaxing, though on the other hand or knee we don’t bathe so often.

I kneaded my buttocks and abdomen, there was an amber oval of Pears coal-tar soap, I did not care how deeply Monty Graf might be in conversation about me on the phone upstairs or if one call had ended and the phone had rung again and a new conversation about me or not about me had begun.

I did not care, and yet the weightlessness had passed.

And now I feared it I think.

But I was glad about a thing I’d decided under the water, and those against whom I would now move would be unlikely to forestall me. What was known of me? Even from the diary what would Phil Aut know of me beyond certain technical interests or a difference between Dagger and me drawn so faintly Aut might guess at most that Dagger was impulsive and casual, I reflective, also imaginative, also plodding. Jerry and his friend John, the fellow in glasses, had made up their minds we were a couple of hacks. Anything of use must follow from that.