Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

Go open the door?

Wait?

The steps went on down the hall.

Should I phone Lorna? What future did we have?

The question, godlike, blinked open before you knew it was there.

I stepped off the map. Mount Clisham looked so far away. Gods didn’t have incomes to live within, nor credit cards to buy extempore outdoor gear with either. Nor did they have to send their sons to private school.

The confused young deserter in the Unplaced Room had said: I started not being able to remember what happened to me, just knew I had to keep going on.

Wednesday nights Lorna had chorus rehearsal. I’d hung up on Dudley so some consciousness of power would recede instead of the power itself. I could have found change for the operator. I’d thought the circuit would take me the wrong way. But each fork finds new forks. When the booth phone rang I could have answered instead of exiting. The rich girl from Mississippi whom I’d told about Jules Verne I could have stayed with on that train; and continued to make my contribution to her year abroad. I bought her a gin and tonic and a flat, communion-white sandwich. Walking back to the buffet car we had equaled and canceled the then decelerated train’s forward speed, a rate which, unlike that of the Down escalator Ned Noble and I once walked up, was not constant. But each of those equalizings is like a treadmill not like that signal escape through equalizing which was Boyd’s ball’s exit through a dimensionless chink between laws. Instead of boarding the Glasgow train to begin with I could have bought an apple in the station and gone home to worry about losing Red Whitehead’s business in England. Instead of leaving my Druid’s house and its smell of fennel and tangerine and dry spines of nineteenth-century cheap editions, I could have stayed to talk about my shoulders and lungs, head and hand — for I trusted him in these things at least. You must talk to people while you have them. I had not told him about the softening of the cartridge, and yet I thought he might understand, for he it was who had told me that the gate a pulse finds open may revise a whole future of gates, for the gods to each of whom are proper certain provinces of possibility in the field of forces, know each other — as through Tessa and me those two huge figures are mutually known, her pictograph giant 167 feet tall seen from the window of Dudley’s chartered plane (and later described to me in New York), and my Giant of Cerne, 181 feet tall seen so close up I had to see him through my children’s chase up and down him which I’d unsuccessfully photographed. Mr. Andsworth knew something, not everything. He could not map or remap my head, but his friend at the Cerebral Functions Research Group who did it with rats had found that cells deprived of input by injury are often taken over by other cells that sprout fiber-branches — which is growth, and therefore likely to be good, but may too often produce a retargeting of messages so that (to take my own willed or unwilled case of the softening cartridges) steps heard continuing down a hall could anesthetize a finger and thumb holding a match over Claire’s desk drawer but at a later stage steps heard continuing down a hall could bring to my fingers the feel of a receiver phoning my wife and through Highgate a sensation about my future with Lorna that with gently tingling discomfort caressed my now giant eyes with the shimmering air of New York. It wasn’t as if I’d have been asking my Druid why my head ached when I stepped on the map and it crackled, or why just before that great shove in my shoulder blades I should have received that sensation of the fast-approaching steps being both slow and close. But fork upon fork, fibers sprouting deltas, alternatives routed into huge parallel families ignorant of each other — and my only daughter Jenny chases Will into the private parts of the Giant of Cerne who looks out of chalk-rimmed popeyes of earth into a rainy sky.

I laid out my purchases on the bed. The phone rang. It was Lorna. Savvy Van Ghent had asked us for the same evening as Geoff Millan.

I asked if there’d been more trouble. She said Dudley had learned from the operator that my pay phone was in Glasgow and when she’d phoned BEA she found they not only had me booked but knew my hotel. I asked if there’d been any trouble.

Why didn’t you come home? said Lorna. What did you tell Mr. Andsworth the Druid? I said. Tessa’s the one who knows him, said Lorna, not me. Well he talks as if he knows you, I said. Do you think Tessa spilled the beans? said Lorna, being funny. I wasn’t able to get hold of Tessa, I said. What did you want with her? said Lorna. Just as well I got Dudley, I said. Oh you’ll be glad to know, said Lorna, Jenny and Reid picked up your Xerox. Who told them to? I asked. I did, said Lorna, I was in a hurry to get into the West End and they said they would.

Who told you, I said, Will?

Lorna paused. No, come to think of it Jenny mentioned it to me as I was rushing around collecting my music and keys and checkbook — this was our last rehearsal before the concert — and I said would you be a dear and collect it whatever it is, and she asked me for a receipt but I didn’t have one, but I’m sure she and Reid didn’t have any trouble.

That was an error, I said.

Oh fuck you, said Lorna.

Give me the number of Jan Graf, she’s on the list on the table there.

Lorna gave it. She said, Lucky for you I’m at the downstairs phone.

Why didn’t you sleep at Tessa’s last night?

Why didn’t you come home today — because you were in New York?

I hung up.

I phoned down to the desk leaving a call for the morning and asking that I not be disturbed no matter where the call was from.

I was too hungry to go to bed. I was not myself, but it was incredible.

Look out at the walls of your hotel room with its print of the four-story Venetian palazzo that houses municipal offices in Glasgow’s George Square. Look out at the cheap Van Gogh flowers in the hotel off Boston Common or was it New Orleans or Baltimore, or Portland’s Congress. Look at the watercolor cliff scape in the motel in Cincinnati where you lie eyes closed, English shoes still on, listening on black-and-white TV to the news of Kennedy’s nomination campaign and thinking some English woman (in New York of course) told you American men go to conventions because they like a hotel room where they can masturbate in peace, and you woke up in the middle of the night to a bright ashy-blank screen and didn’t know where you were except that it was a motel you didn’t know how to get out of but as your father had said more than once in the fifties you hadn’t burnt your bridges behind you, you kept a foot in the door while enjoying the advantages of life in London. And what are they? I asked the two sedately linked hangers in my wardrobe. State schools in England are mostly better than American public schools: but face it, your own Will happens to be attending a private school, else he wouldn’t have had that group trip to Chartres whose 176 stained glass windows so exercised his engineering imagination. They stayed in the cathedral for four hours and saw the light change. They stayed in hotels down in the square where the traffic noise is dreadful. My grandfather whom I am like in looks died in a hotel.

In Stornoway tomorrow I did not look for a hotel and did not hop into a red rented Formula sports car but got my feet on the road at once and hitched almost to Callanish, then walked. In Callanish tomorrow I stayed in a crofter-widow’s house and had a large tea and a peat fire and asked questions that might open my way to the next fork.

But tonight I dined in Glasgow, and Dudley’s phone call from New York was on my plate. A man of fact, he hadn’t hesitated to say that Lorna had not slept in his home last night. He was my friend not through Dagger-type laughs or warmth or in the usual way of shared concerns, but through my curiosity. But even in ’66 in bed before Tessa and me, he was still just a stolid American living off and on in London whose wife had made her mark in our household. When at Blum’s kosher restaurant she offered a toast to a vestige of Dudley, her father raised his glass with what was left of his Moselle and said, My son! and as Millan and Lorna and the Irish mathematician Christy Conn raised theirs, Lorna at last broke the day’s ice between her and me with a pursed smile across the table. Millan was saying an operation is such a violent thing and Tessa’s father vaguely demurred — oh no. Beyond Lorna in a line from me there was a couple at a table whom I knew but who did not seem to know me; Lorna opened up a real smile, then sensed that for an instant I was looking past her and she turned around only enough to see the pediatrician’s wife who had a tan as deep as paint. Tessa’s father was explaining why America would never have a Health Service like England’s, but Tessa broke in to say that service of any kind was a problem where there was such a high standard of living, and having said that, she turned to her right and removed her tongue from her cheek and stuck it out at Christy who put a finger on the mole on his upper lip and said they’d be altering the sex of computers soon because women made better surgeons than men. But Tessa’s father interrupted what promised to be a wild Irish aria to say to Tessa that that was what her mother had wanted to be before she’d married him. At which point we all sighed, even I think Christy Conn, who was the only one present who didn’t know what had happened to Tessa’s mother. Tessa’s father shook his head and said, She was the image of my daughter. I sighted past Loma’s ear lobe and received from the pediatrician a faint mouth-twitch of recognition, and again Lorna turned and this time saw them both and turned back slowly surveying the room, and said their name to me quietly and I nodded (hoping she and I were friends again) — and the pediatrician’s wife nodded back. Tessa’s father was just saying that life is surprisingly rewarding when you look back; Christy had made Lorna laugh telling how his sister who taught the Irish harp in Armagh toured Florence in a nun’s habit so as not to be hustled while she was trying to admire the sculptures. Tessa said directly to me in answer to her father who was on her left and my right at the end of the table, Rewarding when you look back if you’ve come through perhaps. I said I would be patient. Tessa’s father said to Tessa in answer to me, Patient! — look what happened to Job. Tessa said if you can’t have what you want, you have to want what you have. I caught Christy the mathematician’s eye: Formula for a rainy day, I said, and he frowned and grinned as if I were mad, and said to Lorna, Where was I? and Tessa said to me, But it wasn’t a rainy day, remember? but at once added, That wasn’t what Father was speaking of.