Lookout Cartridge (43 page)

In the morning where you said.

I like you I like you. She hung up.

Something genuine there?

I was making things happen.

Monty Graf phoned to see if I’d meet him for lunch. Ruby swayed, squinting up. I drew her shoulder to me. Monty was saying Claire had gotten the day wrong for picking up her dog at the hospital, it had had distemper, it was all right, she’d found she could take it home tonight. Monty wanted to know who had told me about the two films, Claire had said I’d said
he
had, but we both knew that was a load of rubbish, eh?

I asked if Dagger knew about the second film Claire and Aut were going to use ours in.

She’s coming out of the bathroom, said Monty, and I could hardly hear.

Your sister, Monty, I said, what’s she like?

Claire’s voice off phone asked who it was and Monty said, No, we’re at Claire’s. We brought the dog home.

Ruby went away from me and padded to the bathroom.

At Claire’s! I said, and Monty hung up.

How big was the dog? If small, she might have been holding it; then Monty if
he
had a key to her place would pull it out and she wouldn’t discover her own keys gone.

But there was the doorman. Yet now and then he disappeared leaving those TV scopes that were like stills except for a passing flaw in the scanning signal.

He might not have been there when Claire and Monty came in. Or if he had, Claire might figure she’d dropped the keys, but in her
house
, for else how could anyone have turned them in?

If Jerry was Aut’s son, was Jan the red-haired woman or the gray? Ruby came from the bathroom holding up her pajama bottoms, and I embraced her gratefully and carried her back to bed. She was getting taller, I laid her down and she didn’t answer me.

She wasn’t awake long enough to tell me what she’d dreamt.

What I’d told June about addresses wasn’t true; there you have me. Yet what mattered was not the addresses of some old American acquaintances who might well have moved on, but their names. And yet that didn’t matter either.

I was looking at the moving picture of the TV screen that I was going to have to pay for. In London cinemas they put a series of commercials on the screen between features.

Sub when he got home stood in the hall in the dark as if deciding what to do and did not explain
what
had been up in the air, and I did not ask. I do not know how he handles women. A gap in my attention. And should they in that sense be handled? Once his trouble was he asked too much of them and too little; now he asked too little, which was, I later learned, too much for the woman he was seeing who wished to see him more.

Nor, when he came in, did Sub ask what it was that I had brought into his life, the smashed screen, the cracked window—red crayon crushed in the carpet.

We looked at a film we’d seen twenty-five years ago. No doubt if I gave a capsule glimpse of its action, you would find parallels. I wanted to get away. I couldn’t phone Lorna now about the Xerox, it was too late in London.

I wanted to go to bed and dream about being a lookout between forces. I had known about the lookout for years and had often foreseen a night dream that would field me the formula; but I’d never dreamt that dream or some others I had been brought to think about. There are dreams and dreams, the lookout was one I’d hoped to explore.

But Sub talked on, on the couch-day bed. He had discovered the Small Claims Court. You could sue for $300 or less. Rose worked near the court downtown and if in initiating the suit you couldn’t go yourself during working hours, any parent, relative, friend over twenty-one—or your wife—could go for you to plunk down the $3.01—$2.00 plus mailing fee. But Rose had forgotten, and then she claimed she’d originally begged off because she went to a gym most lunch hours. On a football team, said Sub, who had been watching only thrillers and the news he said, a good running game is to a good passing game
not
what on a baseball team good pitching is to good hitting. In any case, Sub ended by going down to Centre Street himself. If you won your case, the person sued sent you a check or money order. If he didn’t you got a city marshal to collect for you, which cost $4.00 but cost the other person up to $15.00, but if a marshal asked for more, there was a number to call at the Department of Investigations. And after the marshal collected from the suee, you got your $4.00 back.

I was tired. I turned on the set.

We’re too near the Empire State Building; we get a lot of interference, said Sub.

But that’s where the TV comes from, I said.

Not all of it, said Sub.

Till he spoke I hadn’t really seen the signal’s quivering grain, for the news and TV were so much better and worse than in London. But Sub was right, you could discern a marginal outerlap like camera shake in stills, and the picture-element scan-lines had noticeably emerged. So though you couldn’t touch it except with your eyes, Sub’s screen surface became what Cartwright was looking at much more than a zoom to a tenement cache of TNT, and Sub’s words about a well-dressed minister with a ponytail spiriting two Bermuda onions into his dark green book bag at the supermarket ran like a U.N. translation over the commentator’s comment near the close of which came the word
weather
yet also weathermen, succeeded by a silent commercial which silenced Sub. The picture started to rise like frames on a reel and I reached to wave a hand across the screen and the imaginary wheel stopped turning.

I saw myself now having to find Jan Aut. She had nothing to do with the break-in here, but she was interested in Reid whom Jenny was chasing, and there were the Indians too.

You’re a good citizen, I said to Sub.

What’s the use? he said.

Did you win? I said.

It was over that TV that I had to get fixed every weekend. But now I can’t blame a smashed screen on defective merchandise.

I’ll write you a check for the Sony, I said, and as I then shuttled my slot in Sub’s life outward to a margin, another coin dropped through my mossy tubes, a foreign object saucering in like the rear prop of a helicopter on the blade of which slow but mercurially revolving craft like great figures approaching by nonvehicular hydrofoil were the red-haired woman and Dagger.

Let’s split it, said Sub.

It’s my doing, I said, and got up as if to leave. Which made Sub rise, as though he thought I
were
going.

I asked if he trusted me, and he said, To do what?

But I was now thinking what Aut would make of Dagger’s letter on his desk as an evidence that Dagger was between Jan and Claire. For Dagger had mentioned the three figures on the grass in Hyde Park and had said the one he hadn’t known was the other Indian. So he did know the red-haired woman, and as if pressed by Monty Graf’s will to close some deal with me and by my prematurely gray-bearded friend Sub’s pollution-watch cards on certain window-sills (for on Manhattan nights you’ll see like linear pressures the secret smokes from unupgraded incinerators of colorful old residence hotels or textile firms where, say, in a cutting room on one high floor past six windows one long unrolled bolt flashes its pigment) I kept catching myself assuming the red-haired woman was Jan Aut.

At nine forty-five the next morning I descended the subway steps. It was turning cold. Again, I had not dreamt of the lookout, though for a moment in the night I’d seen Lorna smudged by black powder and pierced above the knee leaning negligently bare against our Highgate doorway watching for me I thought.

I did not know what day it was.

Escalators are common in the London Underground, less so in the New York subway.
Subway
in London means pedestrian underpass.

Hard to imagine now the adventure of building New York’s subway. They had the Elevated, but when they went underground the El in Manhattan was doomed. And yet its scrapping much later might not seem to have cleared the skies to those who, like Tessa, come from London’s low profile to live here in some towering closet where you can’t decide if there’s a lot of sky or none—for in New York Tessa did not like looking up, though one Friday and one Monday she did look up to me.

My father stands, two or three years after 1900, at Sixty-fourth and Broadway. For support they use a great extension girder at right angles to the Elevated where it crosses above the excavation trench. The first fifty-one-foot subway cars are to be four feet longer than the existing Elevated cars. Mahogany for the car doors, galvanized corrugated sheet iron for the bed on which is laid the fireproof flooring called “monolith.”

Ah what happened to the wheels! So shining in 1903, steel-tired with cast-steel-spoke centers, now their gray gleam has turned to screaming space. I envision a constructive nightmare in which please find the formula for a new asbestos-veined synthetic tire, balance perfected as if in space, soft as rubber, softer-sounding than the London Underground, diamond-hard.

What Brunel would do with space! Run a vacuum bridge to Jupiter’s lakes. Will, my son, asks about Skylab; I mention sun-sensors which from earth-orbit may learn how the sun turns hydrogen to energy, thus teach us a thing or two to solve pollution. Will tells his friends at school. They mention my accent, a sound I hear but not so loud as they.

I had a purpose. It was to see June in order to pass information to the Jerry-John cluster, thus to Outer Film. The London system tying Reid to the red-haired woman to the gallery and thus to the Indian and even to acts of a subversive sort aimed at removing our film from the DiGorros’ flat lay parallel and (for today) secondary. The New York sequence had seemed to rule the field whose forces formed it, singled it out like a crescent or some other line, but as I came to the change booth (an oak original from 1903) the field seemed to equal the noise from the walls which in turn equaled the power whatever it was of our film destroyed unedited; and the noise came from the sidewalk concrete where I was born and then from deep under the tunnel the presumed bedrock above which, buried during construction, how many bodies will rise again when New York falls; and the noise was all those machines blowing past on the street above yet also on a dozen superimposed semipriceless maps of the Thames estuary Dagger juggled through customs, and on the tracks below (for a train was pulling out); and maybe the noise was some escalator ahead whose noise was also the breath of shyness in Rose’s college friend Connie when I helped her ride the elevator; and the noise was rock from the change booth where a black girl stared at her newspaper through blue-smoked cartwheel glasses as big as Jenny’s the once I saw her riding behind Reid in daylight with her knees out and she stuck out her arms as if Reid spinning past on his black motorbike built for two would turn two ways at once; and the retreating noise of the train that might have been mine was like ten tomcats and the noise above and below was not something you’d turn tail from because for one thing I thought that besides the black girl pushing tokens, there was no one but an old fellow in a herringbone with the hems drooping toward his ankles who preceded me through the turnstile and made for the stairs maybe because he didn’t like escalators, which I see now made no sense, for the old do like escalators down or up.

But you’ve been here before and you’re looking back and forward, so you know the escalator wasn’t running. All those grooved steps dropping away in front in a noise like motion weren’t moving, but the new steps behind me were, and their nature would have made me turn (for the clicks were at once close and slow, fast closing yet dream-slow like two rates simply merged), but I could look only ahead: for as you know I got a shove bang like a silent noise in my sacrificial shoulder-wings which when I told this before seemed
coincident
with my hands fast-stuck in the tight slash-pockets of my raincoat but now seems to have trapped my hands, and the rest you know as well as I, down to almost the foot of the fast-dragging grade all stopped as only an escalator can be stopped. I’d found a beat, so I kept myself from plunging head under hem, arms pinioned by hands socketed; and if I had fallen thus, no telling what I might have done to myself, my dry-mouthed momentum crashing into this moveless sequence of stairs. Yet when I began this story did I think this momentum mine? I think I did. But it was my pusher’s first, then mine, which I see now is like what I, if not (no surely not) Dagger, saw us doing in the film, taking other energy in process and using it for our own peaceful ends. But was not the end there that of my pusher?

Plunging then up the dead escalator as if I had taken its energy, I reached the top again and would have run on up to the street but thought of June and stopped and asked the change-booth woman what she’d seen, but she mustered a moist smile with a new mild dreamy song for background on her transistor and she said how busy she was and in her glasses like a wide-angle fish-eye out of some bad movie about nerves and death I saw that the pusher had pushed me because I must have in some way pushed him; but I saw that I might not have in my head why my film got destroyed, I’d have to do more than just recall things. And I had better not go back. It may be a bad rule of detection, but the right way now had been don’t go back. And as soon as I had thought this, I saw that the way to survive the pusher’s push was to use its force to move on.

The pusher would not be at June’s stop. I caught the old man’s train just.

A pale brown woman next to me on the subway seat yawned, and I smelled on her breath a doughnut with coffee in the hole. Live in New York and you might have subway dreams. Of white men sitting and black men roaming. White men reading newspapers and engrossed in some inner page so they don’t seem to notice the black men loping through the car as if it has no movement, the black riding between cars, returning to the head of your own car, batting his eyes for action, tramping through again patrolling his space station, not catching your glance which is like a blink, then passing into another car, leaving your door open sliding to and fro with the car’s rushing lurch. A white woman with fat hands does her crossword with a white, company ballpoint. The black women do not look either.