Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

And as I ran up my window, Ned on the wings of his own private laughter had reached the curb below my window and said, Let’s scuff it against the brick, and Boyd called out, Hey no! but instead of rubbing the ball against the building with his own hands, Ned turned toward my apartment house and unfurled a monumental throw almost straight up, but the ball never quite reached the bricks of my house, yet came so high it came just up to my level past the silence of the watchers but perhaps three and a half feet out from my window and as it came to rest in a moment of equality that I’ll never forget, I lunged with one strange half of my body, and my mother who had felt a draft and come into my room shrieked behind me, and I took that white sphere out of the air at the instant it stopped rising and stopped spinning so it might have been a knuckleball in space and facing me as I took the ball was the name of Ed Head whose steady no-hitter one day was a mercurial once-in-a-lifetime he never survived.

Something had been interrupted and as I withdrew into my parents’ well-ordered apartment Boyd said, Goddamn Brooklyn Indian, and Sub said, Oh come on Boyd. But Ned may not have heard, for he seemed speechless.

For Ned knew he’d thrown the ball so nearly straight because he had not wholly wanted to scuff it against the bricks; and then at some interior angle of his act he had seen me behind a window and thought to throw to me. Later he said he’d thought of busting my window with all those dumb autographs Sub and I had given Boyd, but Ned said he’d had something else like prevision in his mind and now I feel it was like a prevision that he’d lost in the act but which averted time.

I felt I knew what it was, but I did not tell him, for Ned was quite possibly a genius.

When he mentioned the ball at school Monday he then dropped the matter with that electric or fanatic abruptness, and told of an experiment he was doing on his sister and father where he would speak so as to attract them to either side of what he was saying (that, for example, the rabbi might throw him out because he was playing with dynamite in the rec room but there were no synagogues on Brooklyn Heights) which resulted in what was for him a trance of power, like eyes independent of each other, or a balance of pulls — so he became free beyond the clear blackboard explanations of a physics teacher who ridiculed Ned’s sci-fi magazines but gave him A’s. But Ned’s loss of that something else that had been in his head when he threw the autographed hardball out of a divided mind was, I felt sure, displaced by the energy transferred to my act of snatching the ball at its interval between thrust and fall — I mean Ned had acted, and the act had a velocity greater than any memory of its origin.

I’ve just come from America, I told the little fat red woman on the Druid’s threshold, and she said in a polite and gently whining Cockney, Oh you’re American, yes.

But I was way ahead of myself looking into the dark possibilities of our ruined film and into Dagger’s idea broached to me August 4 or 5 that we better shift the Suitcase Slowly Packed and use it as a cut-in in the Marvelous Country House. The token dropped into a slot and on the chance that Jenny’s mysterious bookmark snapshot was in fact of Gene’s brother the great and notorious Paul, I said, Did he leave a message for me? I’m…

I paused, and she said, Mr. Andsworth’s at the Community.

Ah, the Community, I said. It was the macrobiotic community where they breathed together. I could never go that far.

You’re…?

I’m Gene’s…perhaps you know…

Oh, said the woman respectfully as if I’d reported a disaster in my family, oh yes. But then she seemed so knowing — that in retrospect I wondered if she didn’t know enough to guess my ruse — she added, Oh, you’ll be Jack from America.

Thinking this was enough work for the moment before the major journey upon which I was bent, I took a fingerful of my beard and smiled and said I had had reason to alter my appearance.

The little woman stepped back into the shadow suddenly fading into the face of someone I was sure I’d seen not long ago. She seemed to expect me to come in and wait, but I raised my hand and asked the address of the Community, I’d go there myself.

The Druid opened his door at the far end of the hall. I had presence of mind to forestall the woman’s introduction by greeting the old man heartily and apologetically. I had just a question or two for him, I’d been experiencing difficulty in New York.

I nodded over my shoulder to the woman, having made my way past her. I told the Druid I regretted inserting myself so crudely into his schedule and not to blame the lady, for I’d been fully as insistent as he knew me capable of being — or do you? I added.

Yet now as I approached the old man through the dusk and the familiar untart scent of tangerines which brought to mind the French vegetable cutter I’d given him, I recalled that if Dagger had wanted in early August to shift Suitcase Slowly Packed because it contained a snapshot of Paul — and if the Marvelous Country House was occupied by Paul’s brother Gene and his family — why had the Softball Game been shifted to between Suitcase Slowly Packed and Hawaiian Hippie? The time had come to phone Dagger.

With the distance between me and the Druid, as well as my growing need to trust fewer people with the weight of my private inquiries, this lookout cartridge narrows from the walls of its slot. But it enlarges too so that that which lies between, crowds that between which it lies.

Your breathing, said my Druid Andsworth, and stepped aside as if to reveal the thing I next saw in his tome-lined den, the phone on the desk.

You’re back from New York. Was it a necessary trip?

I told him that once begun it had become necessary.

There was a fire in the grate. The phone receiver when I touched it was warm. (There was a copy of English Country Life open on the desk.) I took my hand off the phone and straightened up.

But I’d passed beyond Mr. Andsworth, having seen through that strangely familiar little woman in the front doorway that he was somehow involved with Gene and thus part of the network I had thought him authoritatively separate from. And if he could not yet know how I’d identified myself at the door, he knew either from reports or by the way I had walked into his study that I had knowledge which altered him.

I feared for you, he said, remaining at the open study door.

I let him talk — he said he’d sensed in me a need for cures that he could never satisfy, I might as well set off thunderclaps on Guy Fawkes night — he’d had only a handful of principles which might but only might be received in the body of my mind, he said, in such a way as to open currents between cell and cell, recollection and recollection, lungs and shoulders, head and hand, even (to let the fancy play a bit) between on the one hand America and England on a Mercator grid, and on the other America and England on some other representation — oh he’d sensed in me when I’d first come (in March, wasn’t it?) a failure of collaboration with myself which he felt could not be especially helped by his macrobiotic community (which even if I’d been interested would have been inconvenient since I had a family I was devoted to way up in Highgate who incidentally — and he underscored the words — he hoped were well ) but—

I interrupted to ask if I might use his phone.

He closed the door and continued.

I must have known, he said, that the film good or bad could hardly make a revolution in my life, and if it became an obsession might interpose itself between the Logos in me and the active instincts that, as Poseidonus tells us, must be organized by Logos. And if he did not hold dogmatically with the old arguments by which this control is articulated — as I myself must know from his efforts to associate the electronic idiom (which he thought closer to my personal interests) with the gods who are aspects of the one total Nature — any more than he necessarily believed with ancient Druids that the world is literally consumed from time to time by fire or water — any more than he disbelieved in the Norse gods—