Lookout Cartridge (16 page)

He had given up on peacemaking, but the batter, having walked away holding his nose and his bat, had been persuaded to play ball again by Umpire Ismay and was going to resume with a 3 and o count. Tempest in a teapot. Umpire Ismay had been rolling a cigarette and Dagger at the Beaulieu caught the concluding lengthwise lick.

Dagger with the camera on the tripod again showed his toothed grin beneath the moustache like a silent-film villain’s. I said, We could tape me telling that about the bunt homer and make it our sound track here.

The next pitch jumped straight through like a white weight—give Cosmo credit, he had a fastball. I said in Dagger’s ear, When we edit we’ll slow it down there and run a few stills to fix the ball. Dagger murmured, Depends on the lab.

Cosmo walked his man on the next pitch. But Dagger fooled me, he wasn’t focused on the plate but a bit to the right across the third-base line. The batter—whose name, Nash, came to mind when Jenny typed my notes—dropped his bat and trotted off, while Savvy Van Ghent complained to Ismay that Cosmo’s letup should have been strike two, while Cosmo as if he couldn’t resist called out to Nash, If you got to blow up the subway go do it in New York.

Nash turned at first base, shrugged as if at Cosmo but his face had blanched. But Cosmo may have sensed the shrug was aimed beyond him, for he turned toward third and behind third stood an Indian or Pakistani in a white shirt who was looking at Cosmo, who himself now shrugged.

I believe that I, rather than the camera, got the full gaze of this new figure just before he turned his back and put his hands in his pockets and went off. But Dagger panned around to a medium shot of Nash leading off first—just as Nash’s nose began to bleed as if the camera’s focus had drawn the blood.

My boy Will called, You’re bleeding. And when Nash touched knuckle to nostril, Cosmo threw to first and caught him off.

Dagger had every bit of this, and now switched off. I took the camera gingerly and through the viewfinder observed the Indian. He turned again and stopped and when I opened my other eye he seemed to make Cosmo look at him. Dagger said, Let’s see what’s left.

Reviewing all this now weeks, months later late at night in Sub’s New York flat high above a woman’s streetcorner soprano delivering a demented oration, I knew with a new natural ease as if I’d often known and it were somewhere among the luminous inhalations of my head, that this man, yes this man in the white shirt, had been the Indian I was later to see in the Knightsbridge gallery. He was Cosmo’s Indian.

Godlike I said, Get a long shot of these girls pushing the pushchairs (
strollers
you say in American).

Right, said Dagger, and swung toward right-centerfield and ran through a hundred frames or so as one of the tots lurched up in his harness and tried to fall out. Dagger said, That’s it. Two hundred feet.

We had another spool but didn’t want the hassle of loading it in the light and threading it through those sprocket wheels so the divider would go in just right.

Our first footage was finished and the game was only into the third inning. The sequence was too full of nothing and I had missed something, yet something possibly not on the film; however, like some roving sense I hadn’t controlled, Dag’s focus had shifted with such natural drift I would have to watch it next time.

I couldn’t see opening the film with that softball game, and later I couldn’t see anything wrong with Dag’s idea that it should go between the Suitcase and the Hawaiian.

I woke to coffee deep in my nostrils and saw through my narrowed lids the smell standing in the air’s bright dust and listened to Sub in the kitchen taking a step here, a step there, having breakfast this third morning of my stay, and of all things Monty Graf’s remark last night about
two
films seemed now, as I awoke, to fill the long evening of that inaugural Sunday we shot the softball game, for Jenny didn’t come home till one and Lorna was off singing the Fauré Requiem with her chorus and Will had shut himself in, and as I wrote the opening record of the film, I needed family sounds around me. Our road in Highgate is by a quiet square, and on a Sunday evening you’ll hardly hear a car or a passing laugh until the pubs let out at ten thirty, the kids who go by don’t live in Highgate many of them, they come from around North London to the old courtyard pub called The Flask at the end of our road. Lorna came into the house at midnight with her music in her hand, a flush on her cheek, and her eyes dark, and I put down my pen. Her head snuggled down next to mine. Her hair covered her profile, I didn’t see her eyes but smelled her vanilla scalp. She was reading my page and it seemed from the tilt of her head the last lines not the top lines.

So what I think she read was this: that after Jenny chased the actor up toward third base he circled and made it back to the plate ahead of her just as the batter struck out on a rising pitch that Savvy had to go up for. The actor grabbed the bat and Jenny stopped short at the umpire’s elbow and she turned as if in a continuous motion and sank down cross-legged but so close that Ismay asked her to move and she got up with her head and long light hair dipping for an instant to the green grass, then interrupted Cosmo’s full-circle windup to the actor asking if she could play now.

Sub seemed to know I was awake. He asked from the kitchen if I wanted a cup of tea.

Lorna mouthed my lower lip. She said, Is Jenny in?

I said I hadn’t seen her since suddenly not seeing her at the game, and I blamed Cosmo because he needn’t have said she had to wait three innings to get into the game. Lorna said it wasn’t Cosmo who brought her home on the motorbike last night. I said, That actor’s at least twenty-five.

Dagger phoned just as Jenny was coming in at 1
A.M
. He’d lined up two surprising guys, he said, and we would let them sit at a table and rap. I said I hoped he could get hold of a Nagra unit and an omnidirectional mike and he said he didn’t know about a Nagra but we’d do a tape, never fear, and he said he’d known from the beginning I was a born sound-man and he thought it was great that I’d dreamed up this idea of the Unplaced Room, and he told about his Uncle Stan in Yonkers who got one of the old wire recorders before the war and when he heard his voice on it he got a whole other idea himself, grew a moustache, and left his wife and went to live in New Jersey where he became a phone salesman for encyclopedias. Dagger asked if Jenny had come home and I said Why and he merely said, We’ll put her in the outfield next Sunday, I think she’s got ability. I wondered what made our filmed softball game either typical or on the other hand one particular softball game and not another.

Jenny was in bed, lights out, by the time I hung up and went upstairs, though I wasn’t so sure what I wanted to ask about the Connecticut actor, just sure I should speak to her, whatever came out. I didn’t put the upstairs hall light on.

I opened Jenny’s door (I never do) and she said in the dark, Did you know Reid’s from Ridgefield, Connecticut? His father’s in real estate. Oh, I said, his name’s
Reid
—you mean the actor. I’ve never been to Connecticut, said Jenny.

I looked into the dark, my daughter wasn’t waiting for me to speak.

Reid built a dome on his parents’ property. I want to see it. He never studied acting.

She wasn’t waiting for me to speak, she was contemplating probably a number of things, how he swung a bat, or walked, or stepped down on the starter pedal, or stood when speaking lines onstage though I’d heard guerrilla theater was something else—how he listened to her, or took off her shoes, pulled off her American bluejeans that I’d paid for. I said goodnight and shut the door, turning the knob not to make a sound as if that would smooth a cut to some new footage of our film.

Lorna was near the doorway of our room in a blue bra, her near thigh in shadow, the light behind her setting the skin aglimmer beneath her Venus hair. She said, You’re betting your soul on this film. Why?

I went to her and murmured something to the effect that she was my Connecticut, my California, my Hawaii. I undid the top hook but she turned away and moved swaying to the cupboard, and reached over her shoulders to get the other hook.

Was I asleep? I felt the knob and lock of Sub’s front door turn so finely he could have been entering, not leaving.

What did he do weekends?

The Beaulieu, as I had hoped, had caught the name of Umpire Ismay’s tobacco tin just as a flake of leaf fell to the English grass. If I knew these things and had even for mood’s sake recorded in my diary what Savvy Van Ghent had said to Dagger after the game, still I did not know exactly what Claire was up to with Monty Graf, whether she knew of the 8-mm. cartridges we’d saved, what my man in glasses posing as Monty had hoped to find in my diary when he went through my suitcase, whether Cosmo’s Indian who’d shown an interest in the Beaulieu had known Dagger and Alba’s flat was empty the morning the film was destroyed, and how close Phil Aut’s connection was with the Knightsbridge gallery he owned exhibiting his wife Jan Graf’s work, and happening to employ the very same Indian. As for meeting Claire at the scene of the strange murder Wednesday—not to mention being for a moment bound
between
Claire and Jim—I’d decided I’d also know more about that.

The woman Gilda had seemed to locate me significantly at the event.

The charter man when I eventually got a phone call through to him had left a message to phone him at four. I had to be around for a call from Aut so I could turn down the inevitable lunch with my man Whitehead at the science-hobby firm. I called him and he talked nonstop about liquid crystals and a firm in Bristol that his file showed I had never mentioned, and now they’d written direct to New York for a wholesale price on Encapsulated Liquid Crystals in the sheets that show temperature variation by color, and the discs that do roughly the same but are advertised as a Wet Show. Whitehead had told them they should try also the Non-Encapsulated LC Kit which gives you great freedom in experiments with air density, friction heat, and thermal fingerprints. He couldn’t quote them a wholesale price because he himself got the liquid crystals practically retail from a warehouse right in New York. He didn’t see why the Bristol people hadn’t gone through me. Evidently I hadn’t gotten to them. The market over there wasn’t looking so good; how did I explain that? Somebody’d said liquid crystals were revolutionary in the market, keeping pace with what was happening in several branches of science, he forgot exactly, it was a space spinoff. But like, think of those English kids in that famous school system, and the scientific tradition in Britain (
Breaking the Sound Barrier
had a rerun on TV), and all those kids with their insects and their microscopes and their three-inch reflectors ruining their eyes—liquid crystals for crying out loud were a natural for that market—well what did
I
think? vat vass der problem (he laughed), brain-drain? (He laughed.) Better joke than he knew—and he’d forgotten that that somebody who’d said LC displays were of revolutionary significance was me. But while Whitehead went on to retail to me as if I did not know then the practical applications and the fun things a boy could do with liquid crystals like testing the warmth of your fingerprint by the colors that emerged on the encapsulating plastic sheet, it was plain that Whitehead for all his happy LC slogan “
DIGITAL COLOR CALORIZING
!” had no feel for the real inner properties of liquid crystals: structure of a solid but mobility of a liquid, structure ordered clearly yet not rigid in the normal course of three dimensions, molecules bonded like a liquid’s, other properties complex and marketable. Whitehead was saying again “So call me Red,” and he was saying “So why you’re so formal? You’re in England too long.”

I know where I am. And it is something of a mystery. His name’s Whitehead like mine is Rap Brown. The New York “So call me Red” didn’t fit the firmly modulated warning in what he said about Bristol. I was potentially redundant. But nothing seemed inevitable yet.

Or was I envisioning from my Sub-encapsulated headquarters a casting off of everything inessential to the film? I asked what was new. He said some audio-visual stuff for schools. I said did he know a Phil Aut. There were two rings and then he said, Can I put you on Hold, and I said, I’ll be in touch.

But if Phil Aut phoned, what could I offer him in the way of a threat? Tell him what happened in the Unplaced Room and guess what it was he didn’t want to hear? I became the film’s sound, not at all an echo but (from a written diary) a delayed voice now printed on the original image’s absence, though Aut could not know if the Unplaced Room had survived the fire. I was figuring he knew through Claire that a fraction of the film did still exist.

A lot had not happened.

It was well to be at last at the Unplaced Room. I must find its proper audience. You can’t just recall something, like Savvy after the Softball Game telling Dagger he was afraid UPI might reassign him to St. Louis.

A lot never happened in England.

Jenny took Dagger to a shop near us one lunchtime to pick up a couple of emergency wine glasses—she liked to be baited by Dagger and she may have told him things she’d not tell Lorna—and the two proprietors of this smart shop with its window full of casseroles and design mugs and French vegetable choppers were locking up—a white man and a black girl—and they refused to make the sale—closed one to two—so Dagger said what would happen if they broke their rule and the man said, We couldn’t have lunch together. But across our own lunch table Jenny afterward turned on Dagger saying, Fair enough, after all they’ve a right. Dagger got right to her saying, No one has any rights, Jenny, and as for fairness, that’s the great empty virtue; and when Jenny said, But fairness is in fact why you like living in England, Dagger laughed and said she was so right, fairness was like loyalty, and Jenny got mad and said he didn’t take her seriously. She took her glass and as she drank, Dagger said, I’ll drink a toast to not taking you seriously, and he drank and I drank and Jenny drank her whole glass, which was an old-fashioned glass, and Will asked if Dagger could get some thunderclaps again this year for July 4th.