Lookout Cartridge (71 page)

But Andsworth’s not in this, said Monty on Thursday; not deep anyway. Or is he?

Less than I, more than you, more than he knows, less than he fears.

Yes, but what was his thought you mentioned? He helped set up Stonehenge for you. He wasn’t on the film was he? And who was Marie’s boyfriend?

My knowledge of operations seemed to go unquestioned; it was my knowledge of policy that seemed dubious to me and others. There comes a point at which one wants to compute no more of these facts. Still, as my Druid says, in each age arise unlikely tongues which nonetheless may help us: the gods of the body’s warm organs may show themselves now not through a burning bush or a martyr’s funny bone on fire or in the mysteries of appetite, but along intangible electronic canals where slippery loops joining pancreas and lung, bowel and eye, become, for the sake of a diagram’s current, straight lines and right-angle transits, and clarity’s pulse waits for the gate which if open may flip whole futures of gates drawing that pulse like a spasm of the greater body through gods who blink and gods who do not blink (for Andsworth ever was a closet polytheist) until at some crux near the analogic cog or digital core a twinge of harmony is heard like someone else’s pain. But at that moment Tuesday I was not clear if those right angles had survived from true sphere to projected plane or from plane to sphere.

But when you saw Andsworth before you took the train to Glasgow, said Monty Graf, was he disturbed that you tried to pass as Jack Flint to get by the housekeeper?

If the merchant deforms himself seeking the direct route, credit him at least with not knowing till he gets there what the project is he is merchandising. It might be a film, might be words, or from Red Whitehead’s science-supply firm a gross of liquid crystal newly marketable in a cartridge that approaches the condition of music; or it might be the Montrose heart discovered like Mercator’s 1538 map of the world—famous, lost, then rediscovered in New York thirty-six years after Catherwood’s panorama burnt. If the deformation from sphere to flat yields you straight-line bearings from here to there, the fact that your trip is expedited by an illusion costs you no more than the way taken by Raleigh to vast and undefined Virginia or than the routes abstracted to a straight line in the partial Underground map Dudley Allott stares at traveling with dear Jane (for like the Druid, Dudley seldom takes a cab, though unlike Dudley the Druid drives everywhere—an ancient English Ford).

He wasn’t on the film? asks Monty Graf again, not knowing that at least since Tuesday night (diary or no diary, film or no film) there has been a hunt on for my life.

Oh Andsworth calls film evanescent.

But he wasn’t on your film?

He
isn’t
on it, no.

You say isn’t! How much
is
there, then? More than you said?

There’s so much a film can’t find. It catches the dull gleam and choppy chill of the sea when the dilettante geologist was bringing Jim Nielsen into a Hebridean cove; but not the sea’s curve over the horizon, for you have to reflect upon that, formulate it, imagine it. The film catches the look of Paul’s shoulders so narrow they seem to have been framed in a vise which simultaneously heightens him. Film claims his shaggy moustache, frames the lanky hint of ungainliness when Paul stumbled and braced himself as Tessa tried to tug him through a portal toward the light. You could catch that on film, but not the posthumous alignment on the one hand of Paul’s widely suspect conversion from violence which he’d come to believe was not authenticity but the mere figment of change, and on the other hand (
his
hand that’s being tugged!) Tessa’s long fling with Maya blood, and the heart-excision atop the priestly pyramid, and some half-chewed creed of cruelty whose roots plot their length through the other violence of a tame marriage which was in turn one yield of a wifeless father (seeking angrily, fearfully his wide-eyed daughter hiding in a bombed house) and of a mother crystallized into ash or bone-meal or, at best, thought. Catch even on a sound track as if from under a stone in response to the bank clerk’s account of how far some of Stonehenge had to come, these words: It comes to that, and that alone—Paul Flint’s words, as you who have me may have guessed.

But take the film in daylight or night light or from the air even if—action!—we restage the wheelless haul from Wales by neolithic land and water with bare brawn and animal hides and at the end on Salisbury Plain log stages for raising the lintels—and instead of a star in the lead a blond or swarthy tall unknown—think of all an emulsion, a lens, a drive motor, and a mind running the contraption can’t convey. There’s so much more.

I suppose you’ve seen your swashbuckling friend Dagger since he arrived, said Monty. If there’s more, did he bring it with him? Claire said all he sneaked in was a carton of audio gear he’s going to sell.

So much more: not only the idea of the sun cutting across the eyeball as if its vitreous arc were a gate giving a million alignments to that other energy the brain—oh not only the hot god or mere star or grid-fixed force passing from parallel to parallel across that useful fiction the celestial sphere (not parallel—
declination
, blinks Ned Noble from someplace in my system which is not only
my
system, for I have grown into the impingement of other fields on mine and this sense should in theory mean I’m in less danger than, say, Incremona, Jerry, or Claire) each day each year each 26,000-year cycle of the whole solar system. (Whole? Who says it’s whole? blinks a light which may be Ned at an outpost of my lung or may be just my thought of what he’d say.)

What is this danger Claire is in? asks Monty Graf fresh from England, continuing to smoke to keep his weight in hand, and now less clear what it is that he and his young beloved are trying to salvage for themselves.

But Monty old friend, having like you and Claire set too high and narrow a hope upon the film, I then let the contrary occur, let its scenes come between me and it, so what I valued was not the film at all but the fog at the edge of the bonfire ring, the fog becoming something else gassy to jump and bend (I told Claire) through the forms of a boy in overalls, a big woman in red and yellow swinging across the circle, her glad tantrum of head-wagging, two burning branches bearing a gray label—all that was left of a carton—not the label even but letters once on it like some instance of Hindu Māyā that lets us believe in the rest that may not really be there.

Then was it you who destroyed parts of the film or let people think parts were destroyed?

Instead of the film as all or nothing (which is dangerous) let us conceive something else: beyond the Druid’s circuitries with Yes or No gods at the gates of our bodily systems which in the idiom of computers become newly strange and finely limited and whole and, hence, beyond Jenny at Stonehenge stepping back inside the circle but facing out with her back to me taking a picture through a linteled arch then turning radiant to me as if she were my transit outward or my charged gate and calling to me (where I stood by the altar stone with the bank clerk behind me), It’s a message!—while he, rustling in his clear plastic mac coughed and the cough turned into hard facts about two circles (not one), sixteen Sarsen stones left out of thirty, exact measures of consistent distances from midstone to midstone—

Did you take your daughter to the Stonehenge filming? asks Monty, who fears me now and in a moment will ask the waiter first for another gin and milk, second for the Men’s Room, and go phone Claire instead.

No, instead of the film as all or nothing, which is dangerous, very dangerous, Monty—something else: something beyond the straight routes the globe’s arcs become when opened flat upon Mercator’s grid, something beyond the mere choice of flat to sphere or sphere to flat.

I happen to know, said Monty, that you and Dagger DiGorro do a little quiet trade in rare maps.

Beyond, to what Andsworth has hinted are new modes of mind that likewise will do violence in order to pan from state to state, but benign violence by which a mind that has become whole with the personal body it is part of can project force into other minds without the medium of plotted motion or verbal circuits, to live with others in a new privacy of collaborative process in which getting there or back here has become so minor as to be forgotten—

Monty is almost angry: Claire had nothing to do with the rare maps or the electronic equipment, and she does not know Andsworth. Do you recall when you introduced him to Dagger?

—and there won’t be Time in the old sense of resistance that impedes what in some old sense of Space is unresisted or unlimited, and hence there will be no motion in the old formula synthesizing the two—

One hears that in Andsworth’s macrobiotic community there is an American girl quite hung up on him. Why do you speak of danger to Claire? From what John said to me in Coventry, your daughter Jenny is the one who is in danger.

—which I only now see may yield, through the old man’s prophecy and then my intervention, a formula for those still more distant futures loosed in 1945 by the bitter shrug of an adult who seemed in that corridor of Brooklyn Hospital to be neither breathing nor holding his breath, Hy Noble, with the olive pallor left like some helpless health below his tan from a month at the Jersey shore. I had come from Ned’s private room where Hy’s young-looking wife (if she was now jumping up to crank Ned’s bed) sat with her horn-rimmed glasses in her lap across an open book. I came out into the corridor, and my future like Lorna’s at fourteen when she asked an intern in the middle of the night if her father would live would hinge on the question I now asked Ned’s father: Is there any chance Ned was kidding about the crystal set and the plan for the time machine?

Mr. Noble’s shrug holds very still now, as I look out across two empty glasses at Monty Graf—the shrug so still that the shoulders and their anguish sink into a negative to which the son Ned undying might well have conceived an entry that would interest if not ravish old Babbage with his skeleton key (given to the world as naturally as Bob Harte lent away the key to Trotsky’s gate or, Monty, you gave Paul Flint a key to your house in King Street), and behind Babbage, Lord Napier the inventor of logs, with his early computer, bits of wood or ivory, Napier’s Bones.

Paul never had that key from me, said Monty Graf.

A duplicate cut from mine maybe. But probably cut from Claire’s, though who knows what Nash will think—or Incremona or the Frenchman?

You mean the boyfriend of this French girl I hear about? said Monty. Is he in New York too? Look, if we pooled our information—

But in the crowded restaurant our waiter saw Monty’s hand at last and came, and as he made his right-angle turn into our aisle I wondered if it was by guess or false report that Monty thought me part of Dagger’s traffic in old maps and audio gear.

Another Frenchman, I said.

Look, said Monty, it wasn’t Claire, it must have been my sister got Paul into the house—she could have waited till I arrived. But what’s it matter, he’s gone now, isn’t he?

It’s known he was there. But if Claire was the one who got him in you shouldn’t stop trusting her for not telling you.

Don’t tell me how to treat Claire.

What do I know of Claire? What she tells me. What Dag tells me. What he does without telling me, like not telling Claire we filmed a scene in Jan’s studio.

What do you know of Claire?

A weightlessness I felt in your basement bedroom partly through Claire’s presence.

She’s such a giving person, said Monty.

I have no formula for this weightlessness as yet, any more than the secret of peat or how to build mobile terminals with it or change it into power I can use but may not then be able to see or touch—like what Ned Noble did not in the end leave me.

Claire doesn’t know any Ned Noble. Was it from the Jersey shore?

At school Ned said that the real spelling was
Nobel
and that they were related to Alfred Nobel’s family through a maverick uncle who set out from Stockholm to visit the torpedo works in St. Petersburg that Alfred’s father had started during his sojourn in Russia. But this uncle trapped bear in Finland and around the time of Lincoln’s assassination found himself on the southern coast of the Baltic being taken for a Polish Jew because of the company he kept and for some reason he never protested. My friend on Parents’ Day asked Ned’s mother and she said no, Ned was wrong, it was Noble with an
le
.

The Nobel prize for gunpowder, said Monty.

The waiter had paused along the way.

The crystal oscillator Ned built by himself at thirteen was deliberately old-fashioned, not just pre-radio but subtly primitive he said with uninsulated connections and a second-hand crystal diode but more than one station if you knew how to turn the tuning condenser. He told his parents they were stupid to praise it like it was some epochal invention; he’d gone back to a proto-tuner, in order to sense the thinking by which sound-wave reception had developed, because what he was interested in was a new volume to be created out of nothing—or nothing more than the imaginary boundaries between volumes that already existed. I think it was during his first stay in Brooklyn Hospital when he had a semiprivate room that he sketched a rough plan for his time machine (as I called it) which was less a device to go back or forth than a pictured formula for slipping between and creating a space that was not there before.

Sort of a fluid concept, said Monty Graf.

I described it once to Ned’s parents and his roommate the first time Ned was in hospital with jaundice and from what little he’d said about it weeks before, I could fill in the blanks.

From crystal set to liquid crystal, said Monty as slyly as he was able, which a film-frame might or might not have caught, depending on whether it could show how Monty under duress was between me, the waiter, Claire, and something I was sure had happened to him in England.

Not quite, I said, though I am not sure how much of what follows I said and how much I thought (or thought because I had said): for no matter how subtly my drift takes me from Mercator to computer to some as yet unformulated future mode where I believe old Andsworth’s intimation touches young Ned Noble, I am (as Ned said during that first illness) of pedestrian imagination, yet (as he did not say) even more fit therefore to poach upon, understand, and (with a patience Len Incremona once but no longer had with the radio-telescope nitty-gritty he’d been on the verge of real involvement with in New Mexico) underwrite the marketable futures of power-systems already in existence and more or less under way, as Graf in his efforts to tie himself and Claire into our action clearly saw himself, though the error he and, to her peril, Claire made was to meddle in what they imagined was a single or closed system but in which really let’s say Jack Flint’s mercantile angle might well remain the same visàvis Gene, Jan, or Aut, yet figure in systems very different whose peculiar open impingements must be sensed, else violence might befall Claire, let’s say, and possibly as a direct result (and here I reached out on impulse to last weekend at Coventry) of Monty’s interrogating that bumptious voluble John who was in danger himself from Incremona, but Ned knew something about me, which led him to tell me just enough and then do the terrible thing he did.