Walker Percy - Lancelot

“Here’s the technical problem. To tell you the truth, I don’t know whether it can be solved. Certainly I have no idea of how to go about it.” I took out my floor plan of Belle Isle’s second story. “You see these five rooms? Margot’s and Raine’s on one side of the hall, separated by the chimney and dumb-waiter. On the other side of the hall are these three rooms, Troy Dana’s here. Merlin’s here, Janos Jacoby’s here. They’ll be moving back to the house tomorrow as I had anticipated.”

Elgin’s eyelids flickered once, when I mentioned Margot’s name. Otherwise his expression did not change.

Elgin didn’t move, but his eyes went out of focus.

“Now here’s what I want. I want a hidden camera mounted in each room and the events which occur in the room between midnight and five o’clock recorded. For one, perhaps two nights. Three nights at the most.”

“No way,” he said at last.

But even as he said it, shaking his head and smiling, he was casting about in his mind — happily. Happy the man who can live with problems! It was this I had counted on of course, that the problem, its sheer impossibility, would engage him immediately so that he would not think two seconds about what I was asking him to do.

Even as he smiled and shook his head, he was casting about. It was the challenge of the thing. He was like a mountain climber, pitoned, rappeled, looking straight up a sheer cliff. It couldn’t be climbed. On the other hand, perhaps—

“No way.” He repeated the impossibility, savored it.

“Why not?”

“At least three reasons. Not enough light. Camera noise. And no camera will run five hours.”

“I see.” I waited, watching him thumb his glasses up his nose bridge, scratch his head.

An odd thought: I remember thinking at the time that nothing really changes, not even Elgin going from pickaninny to M.I.T. smart boy. For you see, even in doing that and not in casting about for the technical solution, he was still in a sense “my nigger”; and my watching him, waiting for him, was piece and part of the old way we had of ascribing wondrous powers to “them,” if they were “ours.” Don’t you remember how my grandfather used to say of old Fluker, Ellis’s father, that with Fluker along on a quail hunt you didn’t need bird dogs, that Fluker knew where the birds were?

That was part of it sure enough — not that Elgin was like a bird dog but that in being smart and through some special dispensation, perhaps by reason of our very need and helplessness, we could depend on them for anything, not just to smell out quail, but to be M.I.T. smart, smarter than we, Jew-smart, no, smarter than Jews. I could hear my grandfather: I’ll put that Elgin up against a Jew anytime, any Jew. Go pick your Jew.

“Does it have to be a film?” Elgin looked up at me; his tongue went sideways. I knew he had thought of something.

“What else—”

“How about a tape?”

“I want sight not sound.”

“Videotape.”

“How does that work?”

“Just like the closed-circuit TV camera you see in stores. Only—”

“Only?”

“Okay, look. How about this?” He swung round to the desk, picked up my pencil. His black eyes danced. It had come to him, the solution! “We use five mini-compact cameras here and here.” He put X’s in the dumbwaiter outlets to Margot’s and Raine’s rooms.

“I thought of that. But what about the three across the hall?”

“We’ll use the A/C vents.”

“The air conditioning?”

“Sure. We’ll use mini-compacts with twenty-five millimeter lenses — small enough to see through a slot in the grill.”

“What about camera noise?”

“No noise. No film. It’s a TV camera.”

“What about the dark?”

“We’ll use a Vidicon pickup tube, a Philips two-stage light intensifier — you know, it works on the fiber-optics principle, can pick up a single quantum of light.”

“Then we’ll need some light.”

“Moonlight will help.”

I looked at my feed-store calendar. “There’s a half moon.”

He picked up his glasses. “I might use infrared.”

“Good.”

“All I need is a control room. That could be anywhere.”

“How about my father’s library, here?”

“Don’t Mr. Tex and Siobhan use that? We have to have a completely undisturbed place.”

“All I have to do is move the TV set. I’ll put it in Siobhan’s room here.”

“That’s fine. I could bring in lead-in cables from the dumbwaiter and the A/C ducts by way of the third floor.”

“And what will you be doing in there?”

“Recording five tapes. I’ll need a Conrac monitor.”

“How long will it take you to rig up all that?”

“Well, I’ll have to go to New Orleans to get the equipment.” He looked at his watch. “Tomorrow. Then it would take the next day to rig it — if nobody was around.”

“They won’t be. They’re shooting in town the next two days. A courthouse scene and a love scene at the library.”

“Okay. I guess the best we can do is day-after-tomorrow night — and that’s only if everything goes well and I can get the equipment. But I’m sure I can get it.”

“I hope so. Because they’ll be shooting at Belle Isle in two or three days. Then it will be too late.”

“We can do it. All you got to do is clear the house tomorrow and the day after and clear the library at night.”

“How much will all that stuff cost?”

“The light intensifier is expensive, maybe four thousand. The whole works shouldn’t run over eight or ten at the outside.”

“Ten thousand,” I said. “I have that in the house account. I think I’d better get cash for you. The bank opens at nine. You could be on your way by nine-thirty.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. Then what will you end up with?”

“Five tapes. Something like this.” He picked up an eight-track cartridge of Beethoven’s last quartets. During the last months I found that I could be moderately happy if I simultaneously (1) drank, (2) read Raymond Chandler, and (3) listened to Beethoven.

“There’s only one problem,” said Elgin, turning the tape over and over.

“What’s that?”

“Time. Not even this will record five hours. Ah. ” He had it, the solution. For him now in a kind of exaltation of inventiveness, it was enough to put the problem into words. Saying it was solving it. He even snapped his fingers.

“We’ll have to use the new Subiru motion activator.”

“What is that?” In the very offhandedness of his voice I could catch the excitement, the exhilaration of his knowledge and skill.

He shrugged. “You know, the voice-activated sound tape recorder? It only goes on when there is a noise.”

“Like the President had?”

“Yeah.” He was too happy to notice irony. “Same principle. Transferred to light. The tape only moves when something or someone in front of the camera moves.”

“Something or someone. You mean it wouldn’t just record a sleeping person?”

“Only when he or she turned over. All he got to do is move — or talk.”

When something or someone moved. Yes, that was it. That was what I wanted. Who moved, toward whom, with whom.

It was necessary to visit the set, something I never did, in order to see how long the shooting would take and to warn Elgin should my houseguests decide to return to Belle Isle early. He must have time to arrange his own “set,” place and wire his cameras.

I needn’t have worried. They spent all day on one short scene between Margot and Dana. Fifteen or twenty times he had her up against the library stacks performing “simulated intercourse.” He was filmed from the rear doing something to Margot quickly and easily. He was clothed.