Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

I had begun to dial, begun amid my host’s words as if only rudeness could roll me through (and I even whispered audibly the third number).

— any more than one would ever now talk seriously about human sacrifices at Midsummer Solstice.

Of my daughter Jenny? I shot out at him.

Or a substitute for her! he shot back, startled into automatic humor.

I dialed only two more numbers, for I’d decided a real Dagger on the other end of the line might Cramp whatever now occurred to me. I held the receiver to my ear. Mr. Andsworth in retort raised his forearm so the sleeve of the dark green jacket of his suit pulled back to reveal his gold-banded Timex which he consulted with pursed lips.

To the phone (which began to crackle and then to whisper with one of those crossed connections one often overhears in the London telephone system) I spoke as if to Dagger.

Admit, friend, I said, you wanted the snapshot of Paul to appear in Suitcase Slowly Packed.

I waited. I said, I don’t care what it would have looked like with the film slowed down. Why didn’t you tell me in the first place? We might have saved our film.

I waited, then said, I don’t care, Claire’s told me what she and Graf have for their own film using our remains.

I paused for a long count, then said, I know all about that. They can pinch a dozen Xeroxes, they still have to find my original.

But pausing yet again — recalling Dagger’s tales of summer stock in St. Louis and a screen test in which he had to talk on the phone, I saw (through this seeming irrelevance) that Dagger might often have been tracking and shooting people whose significance in this story he himself could only guess from what Claire had told him.

No, I said, when I finish here I’m going right back to New York. I’ve got to see Monty about his sister and above all I’ve got to see Claire.

Oh I paused, I paused! And you who have me, whatever is inside me, must imagine what energy I tapped from that almost dead phone. I said, Of course we’re still pals, Dagger, but listen man, we got work to do on the Bonfire in Wales.

Mr. Andsworth was panting in an easy chair by the gilt-tooled encyclopedias and folios and some portfolios that might hold prints and maps. The color had so gone from his gaunt cheeks that last night’s white stubble was now hard to see. I had been almost tired in the cab, but rather than lean too close to one time or the other I had kept my body buoyed in some gimbaled space, I’d passed through one gate, then another. And now through my thoughts about Dagger roused by an imaginary conversation with him, I’d found such energy that I could have rushed on foot eight London miles to take Lorna twice before tea.

Wales, said my Druid.

I know, I said, and taking a chance added, the meaning of the grove, the man in the grove whom you called a guru whom that lovely stern woman with the apple cheeks tried to shield—

I almost said Elspeth! as in my own talk I found the softening fade from present to past to present through the fat red little old woman at the door, some outer or other image of Elspeth herself beyond any difference between color and black and white.

I have to go, I said, hoping for what I now received (and wondering where my suitcase was). I hung up.

Mr. Andsworth looked ill.

Crazy Wednesday, I said.

I, he said, could see no reason why you should not film Stonehenge. It was what you wished. I knew your friend’s acquaintance with certain people. You know my vision of a benign violence I will not live to see. I sincerely wished some new order for you yourself and for your dear wife — even a return to America. I did not know after all what I see I should have divined — that you would become involved in the violence that Paul in May was determined to sequester himself from once and for all. Believe me, I knew little, and know little more perhaps than you — it’s Thursday not Wednesday — and maybe knew more then than now — only that these people are beyond me. I do not want to know what you know, do you see? I was concerned about Paul as I was about others whom I know in their individual contributions to — the continuum — even you, who were at best a marginal case. I was amused; yes, that’s it, I was amused; and that is why I made my little remark about Cape Kennedy.

And about being a tourist? I said.

No. That was more serious.

Do you know Chad’s brothers?

Not Chad’s.

Who were you phoning? Your phone was warm.

Who were you phoning just now?

The Druid’s door came toward me and I opened it. I bade Mr. Andsworth as gentle a goodbye as I could find in me.

But when I reached the front door and had my case in hand, he spoke again. He was at the end of the hall’s twilight— entre chien et loup is the quaint French for twilight — and Andsworth said, Mr. Cartwright, someday the destruction of your film will seem part of a large endless harmony, believe that. Mary told me (and I enter it here like a stabbingly mysterious communication)—

The destruction, I replied, will be only one part.

I did not point out that he was repeating himself as if on a loop. But I was not particularly sorry for him.

Elsewhere in the field of the day I was lightly telling a girl on a train how right Jules Verne was to insert capsule lectures in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea on technical topics such as geology and the submarine isthmus which once joined and (in a literal sense Dudley would appreciate) still joins Europe to Africa.

And I found in what I said, like liquid crystals I sold in another life, an orderly solid, extremely firm yet also mobile or if you will nonrigid, through the normal course of three or four dimensions, reaching out east across the Lake District to the west coast and the declining town of Whitehaven where (as I told my companion) the parish church where George Washington’s grandmother sleeps was gutted by a strange fire last August, east across the valley of the Eden River to the Yorkshire moors and the oil rigs of the North Sea where Dudley’s appendix swam free, south (more or less) to Lorna in Highgate or the Druid in drab Wandsworth, until as I escorted the girl back three or four cars for a drink and the train slowed for one of those hushed operational reasons so the train’s speed north suddenly equaled that of the girl and me stepping toward the buffet carriage, my own words retrieved the Druid’s suddenly peculiar your dear wife .

I knew she knew his name and knew his address, for it was she who’d passed them on to me from some friend. But she had never visited such a man herself. Someone had mentioned his renown as an adviser on diet and psychosoma. He was a wise man who Dagger said had once treated a gigantic California politician by walking upon him. But I would have known if Lorna had gone to see the Druid personally.

Say Andsworth had talked to Lorna; what might he not have heard about the film?

The answer was, nothing; for Lorna would keep calm and friendly, and tell him nothing. But someone else?

At Glasgow I got off and phoned Tessa’s flat in London.

I hadn’t had time in London to pick up the Number 12 Ordnance Survey map I needed, so I decided to break my trip and took my case with me.

In a phone booth I dialed random numbers and let a look of preoccupation veil my survey of the immediate sector for anyone shadowing me. Across it men and women in dark-colored clothes passed, perhaps to places I knew the names of, to outskirts, Paisley, Renfrew, Barrhead — and because they came from my left and my right I could not easily think I was the one moving and they stationary.

A lookout stays in one place. But what of a moving lookout with a stationary trust?