Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

I’d seen enough movies to check my window ledge on either side. It was inaccessible from other rooms.

I laid my map back on the bed where I could look at it comfortably. The stones of Callanish seemed days away from Mount Clisham to the south, and in Clisham’s vicinity there was hardly a hamlet where I might learn exactly where Paul’s hut was.

I lay back on the bed with my legs on the map. But that map was a one-incher, so the distance from Callanish to Clisham direct was less than twenty miles. I sat up to check.

The distances were not great. Yet cross-country there was no telling how much of the peat moor among the dozens of lochs was blanketed with that spongy sphagnum moss that over the millennia replaced the trees of an earlier drier climate. The alternative was a roundabout road that went back toward Stornoway then wound down thirty-odd miles into the mountains of Harris.

I took off everything and sat on the bed again. Jenny’s circle must mean something. That was where Paul was or had been. What if no one was there now? What if they were all behind me when I got there? Or at the rim of a wheel, with me at the center and a few spokes gone.

Someone came by my door puffing.

The Indian wanted me. That meant someone was in Lewis or Harris whom I was to be prevented from encountering.

The Venetian Renaissance palace on the wall placed this room.

I didn’t know what had been on the walls of the hotel where my grandfather died. Sub said one good thing now we were in our forties was that we couldn’t die young. I heard steps coming back but no puffing. In Monty Graf’s basement bedroom in the presence of Claire I had written Gulf of Honduras on a pad and circled it and then run upstairs on a pretext in order to pinch Claire’s keys. I expected her to look at the pad and think I was chasing a lead to do with Dagger’s missing school-friend whose deranged father she and Dagger had visited and if she thought what I wanted her to, she’d forget that a few minutes ago in Monty’s living room we’d been looking guardedly toward the Hebrides.

This was a case for Ned Noble, who said at the time of his early death that he was designing a time machine. We were juniors in high school. Sub never liked him.

Just keep going, said the boy deserter in the Unplaced Room.

Ned’s diagram of steps for assembling this time machine was less like a sequence than a map; I had a glimpse of isometric sections and formulas familiar but altered, then Ned folded it up closing between its folds a sheet of paper also folded where he said he had drawn the time machine’s logo, which his father Hy Noble was going to get patented.

And (said Ned Noble with friendly contempt for my peacemaking after I’d restored the autographed ball to poor serious Boyd four years earlier) you might find your little brain growing again — who knows? — so that whereas this time the hole in your left ear felt the draft of your mother swinging open your bedroom door and your right shoulder responded by launching you out the window to snare my shot, someday you will know how to turn your mind toward greater tasks.

I lay on my Glasgow bed, kicked the map off, felt myself all over counting forty-one years by fives, tried once more to will into my sleep the lookout dream I had thought out so often in vain but hoped to dream in order to find a power. But each part of the dream turns me out and away. A building site at night in a great American city: the steel frame is up, concrete forms have been poured — but unfortunately one of the upper unfloored rooms corrupts the dream, for it is Lorna in one of three scenes I think and it’s afternoon not night (though no one is working at the site) and she has said I’ve no business traipsing out to Pittsburgh when she has a concert in four days and I was in the States just eight weeks ago. Out sounds like Australia, not Pittsburgh, and I try to get back to my housing site; but my word jealous turns the day up like a baring of light at one stopped point and next thing Lorna says she’ll ask Tessa what Tessa thought I was up to when she and Dudley saw me in New York — as if I were some snake in the grass, not the husband of Tessa’s best American friend. Which puts me between her and Tessa and returns me to my lookout dream where I am in another way between.

Between two dangers: and again the mind of my hotel bed disperses but now into love space where the outer glaze on a lady’s eyes may also be a film on mine, I can’t recall a single wall of her flat that Monday in New York except far, far away in this same city pictures of the gods and their ruined houses that her husband was making it his business to get acquainted with; and when I bring my thumb from her thighs to my mouth and then the same distance to her mouth she says with a nip that this city will be the ruin of her. I don’t ask if I am better than a bombed house to play around, but I think it, and think of her mother whom Tessa will never settle, who was rolled into a concentration camp the week Tessa was eight, and never sent word: which returns me to my lookout site in a great American city through the gated areaways of Brooklyn Heights brownstones and pale gray clean old Dutch wood-planked town houses that were going in ’38 for as little as $10,000—back through those grassy yards (now cut off by a two-level parkway) like the yard behind Sub’s house that looked over Furman Street and its dock warehouses and the superstructures of freighters loading for the South American run, across the East River to a charmed range of financial skyscrapers whose steel rose stonily out of the old wood-frame theme of those certain houses of our neighborhood Sub took for granted till years later he found himself working in New York, compelled to inhabit Manhattan because the quieter Brooklyn Heights where we grew up was too deep down the substance on which all the forkings of his first life seemed printed and grounded, gated through the northern rectangular faces of our mothers and fathers in their respective Persian lambs and dark velvet-collared or herringboned Chesterfields rising up the steps of a red-brick house on Cranberry Street to a dinner party whose guest list contains two cultured Quaker Jews, contains the house itself on which is superimposed (like one of those dinner parties that traveled in evening dress course by course and drink by drink to different homes) a brownstone four blocks away where an eighteenth-century dinner table made in New Jersey by the host’s ancestors is discovered in a candlelit back wing flanked like an ancient apron stage on three sides by high-window exposures to the huge flickering harbor upon which in daylight from the roof of my apartment house I’d look out to find around the Statue the patterns of a continent winding and rewinding back to my lookout site through a neat field where in addition Rommel’s Egypt and Hitler’s Jewish law and haggard flyers on a raft in the Pacific and Goering’s nightly noise against England stood equal on some grid of weekly events to lone unlighted hands caught grabbing or waving out of a landslide of Polish rubble in a Saturday newsreel short at the St. George Playhouse on Pineapple Street and to my own boy voice assuring my sister who was sightreading bent tensely forward at the piano, that there would be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover: but I almost do not make it, and only long enough to see that at this night site of my undreamt dream where a building that’s a keystone in a master American plan is going up by day, I am a lookout, I am a lookout between two forces, not between Dudley and Tessa, or Dudley and Lorna, or Jenny and Cosmo’s Indian, but between forces: but they leave me so apart that my hotel bed concentration on the one hand or the other disperses as if over all the mustered parts of my open body to Tessa’s lips on a Monday afternoon in New York saying to my thighs Oh ho ho! you are a bearded god Kokulcan and you have been released to come to me, oh ho ho! because Dudley is watching your temple, oh Kokulcan I have seen you before in other places, other beards, you were the snake that came to feather me and I will bite you back.