Joseph McElroy: Lookout Cartridge

I recall it absolutely, you see.

I get your point, said Claire, and cast a look out the far window beyond her circular dining table as if fifteen floors up she might see a secretary if she had one waving an urgent message.

I said I recall it absolutely.

How do you promote a film that doesn’t exist?

That’s my line, I said.

The soft angles of my eyes were soiled with grains of the bright haze outside that either was the product of a sievelike process or was the sieve itself, and must be both the substance beyond which stood what you wanted to see and the abundant ground that was all you were going to see.

She kept looking and I said, So you see your Uncle Dagger’s film isn’t wholly destroyed.

Do you mean there’s still you? Is that what you mean? I haven’t heard a thing from him since it happened. Where were you shooting besides England and Corsica?

It began with a fire, you know that.

Claire shrugged. A helicopter sounded close enough to be outside her clean window. She said she couldn’t care less how the film was destroyed, and I said I meant the bonfire, we’d wanted a bonfire and it was there in a foggy midnight field in Wales ready for us sooner than Dagger expected.

Claire got up again and went and stood looking out toward the East River and fuel storage tanks like giant drums beyond in Queens, and the sound down in the street seemed to increase. She said something about vandalism everywhere, even in London; and I thought, How sure am I the stabber was Jim? Very sure.

I went on through the foggy midnight field making it graphic for Claire, and the sun was in her long straight hair that seemed to have had a gray or heathery tone rinsed through it so it wasn’t as sandy-bright as Jenny’s. I was telling about the ditch, how Dagger switched off the lights fifty yards before he pulled over to the right side and how he half-tilted us into a ditch. He reached into the back, needed two hands, turned all the way round. He said he didn’t know about the light. He hauled the Beaulieu out of the sponge-lined aluminum case. It had the zoo-foot magazine screwed to the top. To find the mechanical button to unscrew so he could pistol-grip the light meter independently of actually running the camera, Dagger needed more light. So he pushed the door handle down but the dome light would have advertised us and I stopped him with my penlight. I said, Wait — we want eight frames a second for this light. Dagger was trying to make out the light meter’s hair-line Maltese Cross. He said I’d been reading the wrong books, he was going to stick to twenty-four.

I flicked the overhead switch. He opened the door. The dome light stayed off.

Claire looked back from the window. In my light, I said, every black hair of Dagger’s moustache was distinct, and the lowered eyelids when he looked from me down to that French camera in his hand showed some tiny red and blue dots from all the Beaujolais and the good times that just seemed to come to him the first years in those Hampstead pubs or later when he was married and pubs were too public for him and he wanted to know who he was drinking with.

He gets his way, said Claire, and I could tell she loved him.

Dagger was in profile against the fire in the field, and I turned off my penlight.

I was telling Claire an odd, graphic tale, yet some knowledge I hoped she had could put a secret pivot in my own story to which meanwhile she seemed indifferent.

He looked straight out the windscreen, the heavy nose, the cheek bone, the mouth a bit open on his overbite. He said he’d had enough trouble loading the Beaulieu why didn’t we load it with color, here we were in the dark and a great fire and probably someone from Berkeley over there in the ring-they couldn’t all be Welsh hippies and what have we got but black and white. I said they probably weren’t Welsh, they were probably from London, and I said overall we’ll mix color and black and white, we’d be wasting color here, we need fast film.

Well even before we reached the hedge he was shooting, hand-held, and I said Steady. We stood in soft earth that gave but wasn’t mud. The inevitable stone farmhouse must have been nearby but the inevitable dogs must have been friendly or deaf.

Where’s yours? I said to Claire.

Hospital, she said, and came back from the window to the sofa.

Jenny’s crazy about dogs. I guess she’s quite English.

Manhattan’s crawling with dogs, said Claire.

It’s different, though, I said. You never see children.

I never do. You probably see plenty.

London’s more of a family city.

You must be right.

You get the picture, I said. Fog damping the sound. The chanting soft, close. Māya Māya . Somewhere not in the circle a guitar drummed alternating chords like somebody learning. I couldn’t see where it was. Māyā Māyā Māyā was one word. The others I didn’t understand. Hell, I didn’t understand Māyā either. Not then. But I could make it out and I said it in Dagger’s ear. We’re in South Wales. How we got there is plausible enough. I had business on the Dorset coast. Then we drove up past Bristol where we had a mutual actor-friend. So far, Dagger was the casual traveler. I was the one talking about the images we needed to go with what was then the third section of the film. But when we got into South Wales and night had come into the soft farm valleys above Newport and dew chilled the manure and sweet grass and we were running snug between hedgerows, Dagger was scooting around curves and shifting down and accelerating as if now he had a purpose. And now he’s saying let’s find a bonfire to film — which seemed right to me because I’d said in the beginning that we ought to find visions intermingling England and America so you wouldn’t be able to tell. And here we were between villages hunting for a bonfire, though Dagger was also now saying he was looking for a roundabout that would get us onto the A-40 east to London.

Claire was looking at her hands wedged between her thighs.

The fog partly hid Dagger and me from these people. Claire didn’t yet know I was recalling my diary. Fog stood here and there as far as the edge of the ring. But passing through the ring the fog became something else gassy and jumped and bent through the forms of those people into the inner circle where it passed into the fire but freshened and inflated the colors of their clothes, the woven oranges and denim blues, a brown cloak, some yellow, some olive green.

A baby’s cheek flashed on a girl’s back. Dagger tracked a little boy in overalls who as he walked stared at the blaze they were all circling. The camera’s drive motor seemed loud, a softer or more musical dentist’s drill, a buzz saw under water. Dagger switched off and focused on one corner of the ring and shot till they’d all gone by once. I whispered wouldn’t it be funny if some were Americans. When he said, Recognize someone from Berkeley? he may not have been kidding, though he often speaks of his old bailiwick and feeding some friend who later became an official in Washington, for Dagger unlike me keeps up with the old Alma Mater. A big woman with a red and yellow blanket over her shoulders burst from her place and surged across the circle to hug and kiss the boy in overalls — and they all shouted something. And she, in a glad tantrum of head-wagging, stood aside till her spot in the circle came by.

My ankles were wet and tom. Sheep bleated. Dagger flipped the turret to get a closer shot of the fire.

What were they burning? They stopped circling and clapped. What was burning? I saw two branches sparkling and one gray label with letters that didn’t mean anything.

Is that all? Claire murmured, staring at her hands.