Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

I have some malaria of the heart, and this young law student who’s at the ecology seminar for a holiday finds my bad spots like a dumbly true X-ray camera. He is extolling the Corsican Resistance which was so tough the island was free by September 1943. Not even the Green Berets could subdue this crazy island, he says in English. The French girl says she thinks the man from New Mexico may be violent. Guy shrugs.

I have a friendly wave of dislike for Dagger, and it passes. Melanie says she loves it here but can’t find anything made-in-Corsica that’s creative to bring home to her parents. Guy now gleefully tells how the Yanks bombed the swamps on the east side of the island at the end of the war to get rid of the mosquitoes, and this is where the Algerian pioneers went to work in so un-Corsican a spirit and created an agricultural showspot, grapes, vegetables — reclaimed the swamps as they had reclaimed the North African desert — Egyptian cotton, Guy believes too.

I point out that those very emigrants were of Corsican descent. Guy guffaws and says do I know how their prosperity has been greeted here? (I don’t think I put that in the pages Jenny typed. The Corsican capsule parts to let in which elements?) Sabotage, says Melanie. Correct, says Guy — certain unsavory elements blow up a power station over on that side of the island from time to time. Mike told me, says Melanie nodding reverently.

I raise my hands like a camera to frame a girl in a crisp flowered frock getting into a panel truck, and I murmur, The Egyptian cotton hasn’t taken, by the way. Taken? says Guy, puzzled.

Cut to a new street a quarter of a mile away at the end of a section of hot fortress wall. My eyes throb. Our cast has split to buy the French boy a swimsuit. Yes, that is what Guy needs.

Copy of Figaro in Dagger’s hip pocket. You can buy newspapers at Hachette’s. Dagger conveys the heat shooting a second or two of a Chinese sweating in a laundry. We cross to the petrol-station side of the street. I cross back to look in a shop. My position matters here only in that I can now presently cross so as to be caught on film by accident after the minute or so of equally accidental comedy Dagger himself will track. Yet in turn my being caught is possible because in a moment Dagger himself will cross. But this might not be implicit enough in the finished film, so perhaps it doesn’t belong in my diary; yet the Corsican montage has enlarged beyond the hours Jenny took to type it in London, the magazine opens to let in a future unphraseable there on a street in Ajaccio, never mind. My spine between my shoulder blades is wet, my temples hot. Dagger ambles powerfully along, and I have again this sense of introducing my motion into a field without motion, and now in my brain (that is suspended in fluid and has, they say, no sensitivity to pain) the amateur thought circles like a series of instructions performed repeatedly till some specified condition is satisfied whereupon a branch instruction is obeyed to exit from the loop — the thought that Dagger doesn’t have a clue, maybe he knew once but he doesn’t now know what he’s doing. But I can’t take the exit offered because Dagger has stopped and though I’m across the street and can’t hear the hiss of the camera I know it’s turning.

Is there a knob that turns visibly? I pan to what even from my acute angle I see he’s shooting in the near-noon glare and the sharp shade here and there along the street fragrant of petrol and hot olive oil: his subjects are moving slowly up their street which crosses where ours ends, or up that portion of their street that’s all we can see; they are three, a girl in a little white and black skirt and a white midriff blouse, a blond man in shorts and an orange terrycloth shirt, and a man also young but totally bald whose head seems to contain the deep brownness of the three of them — he’s lean and bony and looks lithe and swift. They walk single-file like tourists who’ve had a drink in one of the fisherman’s cafés and are now strolling toward the beach, except that the girl isn’t carrying anything so maybe they are going somewhere else first. They are so slow they seem almost acting. The fort wall is glaring bright, the sidewalk is narrow. But now the girl points at Dagger, her midriff blouse stark white. The blond man steps off the curb toward us but is checked by the other young man who now jabs him in the ribs with his index finger. The three continue along the fortress wall, the bald man has his hand on the girl’s back where it’s bare. We are fifty yards from the end of our street where theirs crosses coming up from the port. I cross to Dagger’s side. The three go almost out of sight to our right and he has the camera right on them. Dagger breaks to the left and is almost brushed by a car as he crosses the street to the side I was on in order to shoot a bit more of the three. I can’t see them now, for I am still on the right side. Dagger trots to the end of the street, shoots again. They did not want to be filmed. The English have that sense of privacy, but the English would never so openly assert it and would suffer it and ignore it.

But I didn’t give Dag £12 in London for film just to piss it away.

I cut across toward him, at an angle, for he’s already at the intersection. I’m calling something to him, I cannot know what the three are doing, but now as if they are just part of a larger scene Dagger pans to me running toward him, switches off saying that I’ve run right out of focus. I don’t know why I was running. I felt for a second almost between him and them. I turn again and the girl and the two guys are there almost out of sight up their street but turning out of it toward Place Napoléon, and the blond man looks back and then they’re gone.

The exit from that loop swings by again and I don’t quite make it out but I say to Dag (and feel this takes me part way, for maybe this is a soft exit), On film I’ll look like I’m running at the cameraman to protect those people from him.

Dagger is at once, though with a certain casual slowness, into a tale about a New York friend who in the early fifties was doing a TV history-simulation called See It Now . So one day he was taping the show and put his eye to the viewfinder to check that he was getting what he wanted — and suddenly like a face from another dimension into the viewfinder comes an old college pal who owes him money and plans to borrow more and figures if he wanders onto the set he might even get a bit part.

Dagger’s Beaulieu may have caught in my face some record of the French boy knocking America or Melanie touching me through my wet shirt and setting off a fatherly nerve that circles a memory that, because they grew up in London, I never had of taking my daughter fishing in Sheepshead Bay on a Sunday, my family to Lindy’s in Coney Island for lobster, my children to see the sea lions and giant turtles in the aquarium that moved from the Battery to Coney Island the year Will was born in England.

Tourists, says Dag, tourists, against the wall of a fortress.

But I don’t believe him, I don’t believe he has a real idea.

But if he’s using me — for what? fun and friendship? camera practice? Will Claire’s boss pay our gas and film? I kicked in £12 in London for color stock Dagger ordered from L.A. I thought there was energy in his good nature as in the rechargeable power pack that drives the Beaulieu motor and can “transport” as many spools as we’ll conceivably need. A chance plunge yields new power. My exit comes again and I find my branch instruction and leave the loop. I have seen how to use the Corsican footage. Between the silent Softball Game and the Marseillaise game of bowls with its arcing, thudding steel balls, there will have intervened the Unplaced Room with its barren venue and its military subject matter; the Bonfire in Wales with its burning branches and the Unknown Man running from darkness to darkness; the Hawaiian hippie (whose face will connect with that of the American Indian of the preceding scene) steadfastly drumming his guitar not on the road any more but in the great long pedestrian subway that leads to the South Kensington tube station; the colors and names of things going into the Suitcase Slowly Packed opening into the colors of the pier crowd here in Ajaccio. We will then cut ahead to footage not yet taken of the U.S. Air Force base in England but just for ten seconds of NATO first-strike bombers taking off silently against Guy’s remarks about the bombing of the malaria swamps (which we’ll get him to repeat at the casino tonight against the baccarat croupiers’ calls). Then to Carlo and Letizia’s house and Melanie’s spiel, then use what she said when she wasn’t being filmed or recorded (talking about Paoli’s supporters driving Letizia out of her house) as sound track for the tourists against the fortress wall (though we’ll have to establish that it is a fortress).