Lookout Cartridge (56 page)

Upon which, Gene made some heavy noise on the table and, his voice moving around in its registers, he said, The Bonfire was shot by DiGorro.

It’s in there? I thought Jack said.

Well no film could have caught both all this and my thoughts under the wind and the new rain wondering if last night’s jeans had dried in my pack.

Clearly, Incremona was Len, the bald fractious presence of Corsica and the Marvelous Country House. Clearly Phil Aut had been shooting parallel footage to which ours might have been added as cut-in or complementary expansion; but Claire must have given Jack the idea that the Bonfire had been shot by Outer Film, not Dagger and me. It was moderately clear also that Gene was not acknowledging our Marvelous Country House footage, for though he’d been away that day, he must surely know we’d been there filming his kids and his dining-room pewter and his patio telly and his wife whose name I guessed was Nell. And it was possible, if not clear, that Jack knew about the Marvelous Country House: and if so, then he knew Gene was pulling a fast one.

It seemed to me they knew different things, and this might be why or how they were going round in circles.

But as I moved back from the hut keeping low and tried to get a sight through the west window to see more of the table than Gene’s arm (but for a second purpose too), most interesting was Jack’s answer now to Gene’s saying why had Jack gotten Krish to come way up here: Jack said that there was a man who had a place and a boat on the other side of the island who had information Jack could get only directly and Jack had thought this man could give Krish a lift down here while Krish was pumping him.

Gene said, Do I know him? and I silently asked if he had a red mini.

Jack passed my window several times. He was talking
Geney boy
talk, big brother saying Gene had come up here for the same reason he had except Gene might feel even more responsible for little brother Paul because these people Paul was involved with had been some of them Gene’s friends; my God there’s Incremona armed, and Sherman armed, and now I hear Cartwright’s armed.

I came up here, said Jack, to stop Paul, and I think you did too.

Gene said, Of course, Jack, of course, and Jack said he didn’t like Gene’s tone, and Gene said, How would you stop Paul?

He came into my frame, and suddenly with the words What
is
this? he picked off the table a black portfolio on which even at my distance of twenty-five yards I spotted blue at the corners which would be flowers Jenny had stuck on when I’d brought it to her from the States.

Gene went after Jack. There was a crash out of sight, probably Gene falling, he looked the type.

My second purpose came due, and projecting my voice away from the hut I called dimly Hello! and again, Hello! and moved back toward the ridge out of the light. By the time I was around to the east side of the hut and the door had opened, and I had tramped in, a god from the bog, showing mad merry eyes above my sparkling beard and muddy jeans and saying Good-O a couple of times to limber up my English accent (which Geoff Millan has told me is a good imitation of a Portobello Road antique dealer) the portfolio with my diary indubitably inside had found its way back to neutral object-hood on Paul’s rough-hewn table in the center of the room, and whatever I knew that they did not, they were right in not imagining I was primarily after the portfolio, for since Glasgow I had cared less about the film and some meager muddle of my past that it held, for what I wanted was information that would take me into the future.

Jack introduced himself and Gene, and as I felt in Jack’s handshake his great breadth across chest and shoulders I introduced myself automatically as Paul Wheeler. Jack gave me a drink and said the name was familiar, and I stood in front of the small fire. Gene was sitting at the table, his arm across Jenny’s portfolio. He was tall and slight and he slouched.

Paul Wheeler? he said.

You know the name? I said, bristling and jolly.

Jack asked if I’d come across anyone out there, and Gene, who grew tense, asked what I was doing and I said, Mad dogs and Englishmen, I’d come from clocking Callanish with a compass in my hand and hoped to find a shepherd’s hut on the mountain before dark—check an alignment with Callanish at dawn—the stones? didn’t know the stones!—I said I’d been taking bearings but couldn’t write them down in the rain; I nodded toward the table, You don’t by chance have some paper, I want to get them down at once. When Gene shook his head, Jack said of course, strode to the table, unzipped the portfolio, found a page with only a few lines of typing on it, tore it in half and handed it to me, leaving the portfolio open and his brother looking as if the manuscript were his mother’s last poems. Gene said didn’t I carry paper, and I said yes indeed but it was in my rucksack.

There was something wrong. I had it in my head, and you who have me may have guessed what it was. But floating free in front of the fire surveying the bed, the books, a pot, a kettle, I had too much in my head to be sure, and I was after all in the presence of so many of my own words that I needed a certain silence and economy, and feeling full of these last few dreamlike minutes outside in the dark I wanted to be sure not to know too much. I jotted numbers, I used a small book of French prayers to write on.

I observed the size of the manuscript there in front of sullen Gene, though a silly irrelevance looped lyrically through my new brain and out into the night, that Dagger had wished to cut the Suitcase Slowly Packed into the Marvelous Country House at the end to go with Len Incremona’s restiveness and John’s calling out to him asking if he was going anywhere just before Len entered with the pistol.

Gene asked how I’d seen my compass in the dark. Jack said, How’s your drink?

I kept Krish’s lighter in my pocket and extended my glass. I was a mile from that table, twenty years. The distance was temptingly great.

Got a sleeping bag? said Jack.

We’re expecting some others, said Gene, it’s going to be crowded.

Sheep-hunting party, I said.

Things are a bit confused, said Jack.

I said I was pressing on, and remarked that this didn’t look like a shepherd’s hut, with books on early Christian gnosticism and Hindu thought.

Who said it was a shepherd’s hut? said Gene.

Jack inquired about my trip, he was a good host, and I had to dream up a theory that the Callanish Stones might be coeval with Stonehenge, even a model whose existence had been rumored hundreds of miles south so the Stone Age people who brought the Stonehenge bluestones from Wales may have been carrying on a tradition though the Callanish stones probably didn’t come from far away.

I sat on the bed but I kept my shoes on in case I had to go fast. I didn’t know what I could get from these brothers. Jack was diverting his irritation with Gene into cordial inquiries about my learned interests. I said Stonehenge was marvelous enough to look at—almost animate in the shapes—and easy to feel something about, and mysteriously suggestive to the mind—computer or calendar or some sun-worshipping lookout post or just a magnificent neolithic burial ground or a sacrificial site centuries after—I subscribed to all these theories in a way and had a private one of my own (which in fact I had just at that moment remembered, staring into the red wine) but to tell the truth (I said) Stonehenge was rather a typical American tourist stop and all the mystery had gone out of it with the car park and the souvenir stand and the barbed wire and I preferred Callanish up here in the lonely windy north because it was untidy and perhaps undramatic and left more to the imagination, like the difference between a movie and some overexposed family snapshot you find in your suitcase unpacking.

Jack got another bottle and was pulling the cork when Gene said, What about Krish? and Jack nodded curtly. I said there’d been a missile base a mile north of Stonehenge, and then I couldn’t think of anything to say and Gene asked rather pointedly where I was from and I said Wandsworth in South London.

Jack was walking around the room again and said the man who owned this hut was much involved in the study of Callanish and other such sites and I said what was his name, maybe I’d heard of him, was he also an American—but Gene said bluntly, He’s not here.

I said, Oh you’re expecting him.

Jack said, I’m just beginning to wonder.

He paused at the table and read from the page on top,
A lock to look at, a cross to bear, a memory to bring back
. Very poetic, he said.

I couldn’t get up and look because I wasn’t sure of Gene; but the last words were surely Jenny’s.

Jack flipped a few pages. Gene sat upright and stiff.

I pretended to ease the situation.

I’d like to meet your friend, I said, find out what he thinks about the Celtic cross idea, the limbs that make the cross may be just as neolithic as the avenue and the circle—just other alignments. Mind you, Stonehenge might be a still more curious calendar if you link it in with the Maya, but Callanish leaves more to the imagination.

Jack came and stood over me. You said Maya? Maya Indians?

Why yes, I said, sensing a certain lack of concentration in someone who’d been drinking, and watching Gene as he carried the diary manuscript to the fire.

Thinking swiftly, I said that there were possible associations between two of the Maya calendars which turned upon each other like ratio gears in an analog computer (the first time I’d expressed it so persuasively to myself) and on the other hand the inner and outer circles at the Henge.

Jack heard the paper crackling and turned. Some pages were burning like a fan. Jack reached and retracted and reached again.

Gene said, Dynamite you said?

Jack asked why the hell Gene had done that, and Gene said Jack knew why and Jack knew something about destruction.

Jack said, I did
not
destroy that film and neither did Krish, and I’m suddenly wondering where you got the idea it was destroyed.

A good diversionary maneuver, brother.

Do you need some film? I asked from the bed, and as they turned to me, and the burning pages of my diary were visible past them at shin level, I was aware of having created an idea that had not been in my head prior to my lurch into the thin and broken areas of my knowledge, but there was no time to think about those circles or even about how
two
things that I felt in my head somewhere were wrong where there had been just one before; for I must see through Jack and Gene forward. I was already beyond this hut headed somewhere, and there was something wrong with the peat fire here.

That isn’t
your
portfolio, said Jack, it has flowers on it. It isn’t Paul’s either.

What? I said.

It’s Jan’s, said Jack.

It’s not her kind of thing.

But we know she was here.

I stood up and my new shoes felt like bones not yet filled with blood.

I said I had to go.

Jack the man of action stared at the fire thinking by some executive fiat he could run it backward and extract the diary. He put a hand on Gene’s arm and asked who had given him this idea about the film.

Gene seemed easier with the diary gone. He said when you came down to it Dagger had told someone and it had gotten to Nell, and then everyone had been talking about its being ruined.

Jack said, Then you think…

Gene said, Maybe.

So the Bonfire?

Gene said again, Maybe.

They seemed still far apart but Jack with his warm Rotarian muscle thought he and his brother Geney were friends again.

And as I reached for my pack, Jack asked Gene how many pages it had been and Gene told him and Jack smiled and shook his head, and I thought of the 8-millimeter cartridge we’d shot the night we came back from shooting the air base, and I thought of Dagger’s strange slowness in getting film processed and thought that in the end I’d seen only two and a half sections of film—the Softball Game and Corsican Montage, and a little joke of hands laying out TNT like a vertical xylophone; for Dagger had delayed the processing of several scenes, either because the man who was giving us a special deal was away or had too much regular work to fit us in, or in the case of the Bonfire in Wales and the Hawaiian Hippie in the Underground, something special had to be done to bring up the light because it turned out we’d shot in semidarkness; and what occurred to the two brothers in this hut in the middle of nowhere where you could be sure James Boswell and Dr. Samuel Johnson (of the clipping in Claire’s Manhattan lav) had never ventured in their eighteenth-century junket to the Hebrides, occurred now to me: that Dagger DiGorro might have faked the ruin of the film.

If so, the film I’d found myself content to cross off, in lieu of something else I was finding, was now the future too.

Unedited. Possible.

But the reason it evidently
could
have been destroyed stayed with me. And whatever the protection of Paul had to do with this, the film,
my
film, had now been called Jan Aut’s idea. Which hinged an eerie angle between my idea of the Unplaced Room and the actual room we’d used, which was hers.

I must get to her. Through her I might see Paul.

Through understanding, I might protect Dagger, though he was right when he’d told Jenny loyalty might not be the most interesting thing.

But as I bade goodbye to Gene and Jack thinking if I didn’t run afoul of Krish I’d find a bed a few miles south in Tarbert and get to Glasgow tomorrow by steamer and plane, I was glad the diary was finished yet through this struck by the fact that the black leather case I’d brought Jenny as a present from America had yielded one copy not two.

And Jenny and Reid would have picked up at the Xerox her original closet carbon as well.

HINGE

Waves preceded me. Advance word framed my entrance into Jan Aut’s flat, I couldn’t simply go in. I must learn her idea for my film.

Did I like making waves? If I hadn’t invented them, still they were made personally by me and conveyed something of me. The cork among the molecules bobbed only up and down, but the wave-front advanced through both like spells of middling motives charging up a static slot.