Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

If someone knew my destination — someone who knew what June had said to me in another old station not so many hours ago — why then have me followed? Why not wait for me instead?

If I knew anything about Jack the American (on whom I had grown my beard and into whose shoes I’d let myself be placed if not laced by the Druid’s doorkeeper), then I’d be able to gauge the forces released by my impersonation. For her — at least for the time of my interview in Wandsworth — I was this Jack. For others I might be a moving core of knowledge about Jack the American. Though no superman.

You could shoot half a thousand feet of film here in this station of the British Railways — a girl running, weaving through the mass of people making connections, a grandma waiting on a bench with a green shopping bag, men with folded newspapers wearing rumpled suits and white shirts without ties. And the film would never show or know that you were in Scotland. You could cut in “Loch Lomond.” A real sound track might yield grains of Gaelic or the sinewy joins of Glaswegian phrase to phrase tumbled and quizzical, not so curtly cadenced as other brogues. Or on your film a broad serious old man might pass, as in a fake documentary, in a pleated kilt, bound outward from this poor and difficult and deep city where joking young men who wait for a pub to open let the walking stranger calmly step over (like a fissure in the pavement) a vein of their danger felt in one column of thought — and where middle-aged men wait for ships to build in the yards along the sludgy Clyde back up whose inland reach in the 1840’s the Navigation Trust steam dredgers lifted two million cubic yards of (as they put it) “matter” and dumped it in Loch Long, and along a few miles of whose outward reach from 1812 to 1820 the first steamer to ply regularly on any river in the Old World, the Comet with an engine of three horse, made the run between Glasgow and Greenock which there is no need for holiday-makers and tourists like me to know who contemplate taking a MacBrayne steamer out past Dumbarton Castle on the right then down left to the Firth of Clyde and the North Channel then up past the mouth of the Firth of Lome on up to Mallaig on the west coast and across then to Skye where Boswell and Johnson deliberately walked and later beyond to the Outer Hebrides.

I wondered if no one would be there when I arrived.

In my glass kiosk like a functionary checking passengers, I listened for any loudspeaker that might betray over the phone where I was.

I dialed Tessa and was able before a voice answered to slot a two-shilling piece (which after all my years on the old scheme of sixes and twelves was no longer two bob but twenty new decimal pence).

The voice was not Tessa and it was not Lorna. It was Jane, and unlike my recent Jenny she did not at once abruptly say, Would you like to speak to my father, or, Would you like to speak to my mother — but addressed me directly and with what I can only call love, though it must have been a power already flowing from Jane in the home from which she spoke though the love in that home is not between the parents.

She might have been my own child glad to have me back and bursting to know what I’d brought, wanting my undivided attention, to tell me (as Jane did) that her grandmother was coming next month for Thanksgiving even though there is no Thanksgiving in England. And how were Jenny and her boyfriend? Jane had seen him once passing in the street when she was with Tessa having coffee at Yarner’s in Regent Street and just before he passed behind the big bronze grinding wheel Tessa and the other woman Mrs. Flint who was an American had seen him and he waved and Jane had waved too though she’d never seen him before and then he was gone, a super chap neat and rather small with long hair. Jane wanted to know if we still taped letters to our family in America, she would like to try it. Her grandfather was going to Munich for three weeks and her mother was probably going to Scotland. Everyone was going somewhere, Jane said. Tessa had spoken of my film and Jane hoped I would show it to them. I asked when Tessa had mentioned it, and Jane said only yesterday or the day before. Daddy would love you to come over, said Jane, and then I heard sounds in the room from which she was speaking.

I asked if Lorna was there and Jane said, No, did she say she’d be?

I said, Only last night, but I thought I might find her there now.

Jane said maybe it was tonight, for Lorna hadn’t come last night, Jane had played Go with Tessa till after midnight when Dudley came in, and there had been no Lorna that Jane could see.

Daddy doesn’t like games, said Jane. Jane laughed off-phone and said off-phone, Oh Daddy.

Jane said wasn’t I in New York though? Would I like to speak to Daddy?

I would, and I could see Dudley hauling himself out of a chair and leaning his bulk toward the phone from the other end of the high-ceilinged room as if the angle of inclination in the field of this powerful day of mine might equal what one experienced as movement on other days, and I wondered if Dudley knew he was in this field where static inclination as of mind might displace physical movement, yet again an energy quite other than any that movement bodes, embodies, or imparts. If so, Dudley’s gravity whose center was, God knew, too low, leaving him topple-heavy, might find who could know what powers in process around him and convert them to his own uses. I had been at a moment of what Sub calls major illumination and felt the risk of even knowing so, for something threatened to recede as Dudley reached his receiver and raised it to one large ear never dreaming his American friend Cartwright was in Glasgow Central Station still fairly weightless in a giant wheeling field where distance and duration decay into fresh equation embracing Tessa’s late blind uncle in Munich (where some of the stained glass in Glasgow Cathedral was made) being jarred awake near dawn in 1936 by the very waking agent that simultaneously stunned him back into dreamland from which his wife then roused him, having heard in her own sleep the concussion, and sensing something wrong with him there in the dark when in fact Tessa’s uncle, delivered by that blow into a new weight of pain and limit, may yet (reroused) have felt shared between dream-space and wake-time yet in a field between, instantly swollen to power that was more than a headache and that absorbed those rules that wall our normal slot.

No, said Dudley, as I raised his saffron appendix on the grid of my fork at Blum’s kosher restaurant in Whitechapel and inserted fork and forkload into my mouth knowing that while I chewed this sweet and sour most unkosher squidlike divination the tall bald festive waiter in the white coat would come to Tessa’s ear (bared that night gracefully below the tight pull of hair combed back into a ponytail) and tell her she was wanted on the phone (where I foreknew she would learn that the lady surgeon had gone in and the offending appendix had come out); no indeed, said Dudley, Lorna hadn’t been at the Allotts’. But Tessa never never tells me anything, said Dudley, she leaves me the odd message; today for instance someone called from New York to consult me about Maya glyphs but if Lorna were corning here for the night (which I’ll stake my honor as a man of fact she didn’t do) I wouldn’t necessarily hear in advance.

We both waited for him to continue.

Weightlessness also tires. There has been research on this.

I suggested that Tessa might have answered the questions from New York herself, and Dudley said he’d have been glad if she had, for with her tales of the White Woman of Honduras and the Indomitable Dwarf of Yucatan she was much more interesting than he was and—

And then the operator asked for more money. And Dudley’s end was accidentally suspended while I looked through shillings and sixpences and quarters and nickels and Lincoln pennies and Druid dimes and how many hard disks of black slate and white shell that are called “stones” in the game of Go that began in China four thousand and more years ago and then in some space between all these foreign coins there was that spotted dolerite from Wales which Tessa had told me to feel, to get the feel of, to see if I liked: and then as Dudley came at last preceded by their child into the bedroom where we were watching Tessa pack those suitcases, Tessa swooped at me almost in attack and took the stone from me and gave it to Lorna for a going-away gift: but I would not put that token into the slot, for one who like me finds in a Scottish phone kiosk that he has inserted himself into a dimensionless place Between, can refrain as naturally as act: I only knew later on that really I was previsioning myself a god and now like a tricky dream our systems use then let the light of day’s exposure fade, I swiftly lost the thought of being a god which I know in my bones was the thing Ned Noble guessed in retrospect he’d foreseen when he hurled Boyd’s autographed baseball against the elastic sheet of gravity aiming to put it (as in some perfect strike zone) exactly where I if I could instinctively risk my life could pluck it from between the two forces at the instant it had weight no longer.