Lookout Cartridge (47 page)

Something had been interrupted and as I withdrew into my parents’ well-ordered apartment Boyd said, Goddamn Brooklyn Indian, and Sub said, Oh come on Boyd. But Ned may not have heard, for he seemed speechless.

For Ned knew he’d thrown the ball so nearly straight because he had not wholly wanted to scuff it against the bricks; and then at some interior angle of his act he had seen me behind a window and thought to throw to me. Later he said he’d thought of busting my window with all those dumb autographs Sub and I had given Boyd, but Ned said he’d had something else like prevision in his mind and now I feel it was like a prevision that he’d lost in the act but which averted time.

I felt I knew what it was, but I did not tell him, for Ned was quite possibly a genius.

When he mentioned the ball at school Monday he then dropped the matter with that electric or fanatic abruptness, and told of an experiment he was doing on his sister and father where he would speak so as to attract them to either side of what he was saying (that, for example, the rabbi might throw him out because he was playing with dynamite in the rec room but there
were
no synagogues on Brooklyn Heights) which resulted in what was for him a trance of power, like eyes independent of each other, or a balance of pulls—so he became free beyond the clear blackboard explanations of a physics teacher who ridiculed Ned’s sci-fi magazines but gave him A’s. But Ned’s loss of that something else that had been in his head when he threw the autographed hardball out of a divided mind was, I felt sure, displaced by the energy transferred to my act of snatching the ball at its interval between thrust and fall—I mean Ned had acted, and the act had a velocity greater than any memory of its origin.

I’ve just come from America, I told the little fat red woman on the Druid’s threshold, and she said in a polite and gently whining Cockney, Oh you’re American, yes.

But I was way ahead of myself looking into the dark possibilities of our ruined film and into Dagger’s idea broached to me August 4 or 5 that we better shift the Suitcase Slowly Packed and use it as a cut-in in the Marvelous Country House. The token dropped into a slot and on the chance that Jenny’s mysterious bookmark snapshot was in fact of Gene’s brother the great and notorious Paul, I said, Did he leave a message for me? I’m…

I paused, and she said, Mr. Andsworth’s at the Community.

Ah, the Community, I said. It was the macrobiotic community where they breathed together. I could never go that far.

You’re…?

I’m Gene’s…perhaps you know…

Oh, said the woman respectfully as if I’d reported a disaster in my family, oh yes. But then she seemed so knowing—that in retrospect I wondered if she didn’t know enough to guess my ruse—she added, Oh, you’ll be Jack from America.

Thinking this was enough work for the moment before the major journey upon which I was bent, I took a fingerful of my beard and smiled and said I had had reason to alter my appearance.

The little woman stepped back into the shadow suddenly fading into the face of someone I was sure I’d seen not long ago. She seemed to expect me to come in and wait, but I raised my hand and asked the address of the Community, I’d go there myself.

The Druid opened his door at the far end of the hall. I had presence of mind to forestall the woman’s introduction by greeting the old man heartily and apologetically. I had just a question or two for him, I’d been experiencing difficulty in New York.

I nodded over my shoulder to the woman, having made my way past her. I told the Druid I regretted inserting myself so crudely into his schedule and not to blame the lady, for I’d been fully as insistent as he knew me capable of being—or
do
you? I added.

Yet now as I approached the old man through the dusk and the familiar untart scent of tangerines which brought to mind the French vegetable cutter I’d given him, I recalled that if Dagger had wanted in early August to shift Suitcase Slowly Packed because it contained a snapshot of Paul—and if the Marvelous Country House was occupied by Paul’s brother Gene and his family—why had the Softball Game been shifted to between Suitcase Slowly Packed and Hawaiian Hippie? The time had come to phone Dagger.

With the distance between me and the Druid, as well as my growing need to trust fewer people with the weight of my private inquiries, this lookout cartridge narrows from the walls of its slot. But it enlarges too so that that which lies between, crowds that between which it lies.

Your breathing, said my Druid Andsworth, and stepped aside as if to reveal the thing I next saw in his tome-lined den, the phone on the desk.

You’re back from New York. Was it a necessary trip?

I told him that once begun it had become necessary.

There was a fire in the grate. The phone receiver when I touched it was warm. (There was a copy of
English Country Life
open on the desk.) I took my hand off the phone and straightened up.

But I’d passed beyond Mr. Andsworth, having seen through that strangely familiar little woman in the front doorway that he was somehow involved with Gene and thus part of the network I had thought him authoritatively separate from. And if he could not yet know how I’d identified myself at the door, he knew either from reports or by the way I had walked into his study that I had knowledge which altered him.

I feared for you, he said, remaining at the open study door.

I let him talk—he said he’d sensed in me a need for cures that he could never satisfy, I might as well set off thunderclaps on Guy Fawkes night—he’d had only a handful of principles which might but only might be received in the body of my mind, he said, in such a way as to open currents between cell and cell, recollection and recollection, lungs and shoulders, head and hand, even (to let the fancy play a bit) between on the one hand America and England on a Mercator grid, and on the other America and England on some other representation—oh he’d sensed in me when I’d first come (in March, wasn’t it?) a failure of collaboration with myself which he felt could not be especially helped by his macrobiotic community (which even if I’d been interested would have been inconvenient since I had a family I was devoted to way up in Highgate who incidentally—and he underscored the words—he
hoped
were
well
) but—

I interrupted to ask if I might use his phone.

He closed the door and continued.

I must have known, he said, that the film good or bad could hardly make a revolution in my life, and if it became an obsession might interpose itself between the Logos in me and the active instincts that, as Poseidonus tells us, must be organized by Logos. And if he did not hold dogmatically with the old arguments by which this control is articulated—as I myself must know from his efforts to associate the electronic idiom (which he thought closer to my personal interests) with the gods who are aspects of the one total Nature—any more than he necessarily believed with ancient Druids that the world is literally consumed from time to time by fire or water—any more than he disbelieved in the Norse gods—

I had begun to dial, begun amid my host’s words as if only rudeness could roll me through (and I even whispered audibly the third number).

—any more than one would ever now talk seriously about human sacrifices at Midsummer Solstice.

Of my daughter Jenny? I shot out at him.

Or a substitute for her! he shot back, startled into automatic humor.

I dialed only two more numbers, for I’d decided a real Dagger on the other end of the line might Cramp whatever now occurred to me. I held the receiver to my ear. Mr. Andsworth in retort raised his forearm so the sleeve of the dark green jacket of his suit pulled back to reveal his gold-banded Timex which he consulted with pursed lips.

To the phone (which began to crackle and then to whisper with one of those crossed connections one often overhears in the London telephone system) I spoke as if to Dagger.

Admit, friend, I said, you wanted the snapshot of Paul to appear in Suitcase Slowly Packed.

I waited. I said, I don’t care what it would have looked like with the film slowed down. Why didn’t you tell me in the first place? We might have saved our film.

I waited, then said, I don’t care, Claire’s told me what she and Graf have for their own film using our remains.

I paused for a long count, then said, I know all about that. They can pinch a dozen Xeroxes, they still have to find my original.

But pausing yet again—recalling Dagger’s tales of summer stock in St. Louis and a screen test in which he had to talk on the phone, I saw (through this seeming irrelevance) that Dagger might often have been tracking and shooting people whose significance in this story he himself could only guess from what Claire had told him.

No, I said, when I finish here I’m going right back to New York. I’ve got to see Monty about his sister and above all I’ve got to see Claire.

Oh I paused, I paused! And you who have me, whatever is inside me, must imagine what energy I tapped from that almost dead phone. I said, Of
course
we’re still pals, Dagger, but listen man, we got work to do on the Bonfire in Wales.

Mr. Andsworth was panting in an easy chair by the gilt-tooled encyclopedias and folios and some portfolios that might hold prints and maps. The color had so gone from his gaunt cheeks that last night’s white stubble was now hard to see. I had been almost tired in the cab, but rather than lean too close to one time or the other I had kept my body buoyed in some gimbaled space, I’d passed through one gate, then another. And now through my
thoughts
about Dagger roused by an imaginary conversation with him, I’d found such energy that I could have rushed on foot eight London miles to take Lorna twice before tea.

Wales, said my Druid.

I know, I said, and taking a chance added, the meaning of the grove, the man in the grove whom you called a guru whom that lovely stern woman with the apple cheeks tried to shield—

I almost said
Elspeth!
as in my own talk I found the softening fade from present to past to present through the fat red little old woman at the door, some outer or other image of Elspeth herself beyond any difference between color and black and white.

I have to go, I said, hoping for what I now received (and wondering where my suitcase was). I hung up.

Mr. Andsworth looked ill.

Crazy Wednesday, I said.

I, he said, could see no reason why you should not film Stonehenge. It was what you wished. I knew your friend’s acquaintance with certain people. You know my vision of a benign violence I will not live to see. I sincerely wished some new order for you yourself and for your dear wife—even a return to America. I did
not
know after all what I see I should have divined—that you would become involved in the violence that Paul in May was determined to sequester himself from once and for all. Believe me, I knew little, and know little more perhaps than you—it’s Thursday not Wednesday—and maybe knew more then than now—only that these people are beyond me. I do not
want
to know what you know, do you see? I was concerned about Paul as I was about others whom I know in their individual contributions to—the continuum—even you, who were at best a marginal case. I was amused; yes, that’s it, I was amused; and that is why I made my little remark about Cape Kennedy.

And about being a tourist? I said.

No. That was more serious.

Do you know Chad’s brothers?

Not Chad’s.

Who were you phoning? Your phone was warm.

Who were
you
phoning just now?

The Druid’s door came toward me and I opened it. I bade Mr. Andsworth as gentle a goodbye as I could find in me.

But when I reached the front door and had my case in hand, he spoke again. He was at the end of the hall’s twilight—
entre chien et loup
is the quaint French for twilight—and Andsworth said, Mr. Cartwright, someday the destruction of your film will seem part of a large endless harmony, believe that. Mary told me (and I enter it here like a stabbingly mysterious communication)—

The destruction, I replied, will be only one part.

I did not point out that he was repeating himself as if on a loop. But I was not particularly sorry for him.

Elsewhere in the field of the day I was lightly telling a girl on a train how right Jules Verne was to insert capsule lectures in
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
on technical topics such as geology and the submarine isthmus which once joined and (in a literal sense Dudley would appreciate) still joins Europe to Africa.

And I found in what I said, like liquid crystals I sold in another life, an orderly solid, extremely firm yet also mobile or if you will nonrigid, through the normal course of three or four dimensions, reaching out east across the Lake District to the west coast and the declining town of Whitehaven where (as I told my companion) the parish church where George Washington’s grandmother sleeps was gutted by a strange fire last August, east across the valley of the Eden River to the Yorkshire moors and the oil rigs of the North Sea where Dudley’s appendix swam free, south (more or less) to Lorna in Highgate or the Druid in drab Wandsworth, until as I escorted the girl back three or four cars for a drink and the train slowed for one of those hushed operational reasons so the train’s speed north suddenly equaled that of the girl and me stepping toward the buffet carriage, my own words retrieved the Druid’s suddenly peculiar
your dear wife
.

I knew she knew his name and knew his address, for it was she who’d passed them on to me from some friend. But she had never visited such a man herself. Someone had mentioned his renown as an adviser on diet and psychosoma. He was a wise man who Dagger said had once treated a gigantic California politician by walking upon him. But I would have known if Lorna had gone to see the Druid personally.

Say Andsworth had talked to Lorna; what might he not have heard about the film?

The answer was, nothing; for Lorna would keep calm and friendly, and tell him nothing. But someone else?

At Glasgow I got off and phoned Tessa’s flat in London.