Lookout Cartridge (81 page)

I reached for a Beaulieu sync button thus though unfilmable to record on the attached Nagra my remarks which I rehearsed in my body as if these remarks were to be my lookout dream. But as fast as I could evaporate the irrelevances with which this rehearsal filled the closet up to and beyond liquid level, more came.

But I needed the practice—my head felt inside a cartridge lined with training electrodes and was getting bigger to where it would fill the cartridge imbedding those electrodes in my head, and as for the readiness I had felt, it now needed just a quick rehearsal, but Lorna kept breaking in yet it was somehow I doing the talking and she didn’t answer when I said did she buy her new comb in London or New York, I could get two of those French tortoise-shells for the price she’d paid for one—but this one dyes, she said, and sure enough she took off her bluejeans and her hair was red in the form of Corporal’s chevrons.

But there’s a different darkness in a line across my feet; I’m not blind; whatever I was ready for has passed and I don’t feel it and I’m now not sure I had any lookout dream Tuesday, let alone just now.

I’m in a closet. It’s empty. The voices are about to stop. One of them is sorry to be late—held up in traffic. (On a Saturday? Is it still Saturday?) I smell something. A chemical used in the room where the voices are, or used on me. I’m the watchman of that lookout dream recovering consciousness, but what do I watch? It’s clear the man I haven’t heard before knows this equipment and this room but has only just arrived and is failing in some way; he can’t get John excited about the random possibilities. Of cartridge loops. John is saying Well that’s straight sixteen-mill. It’s John-of-the-loft.

John says he would follow Whitney’s early analog work complete with rotating discs, multiple axes, that whole multimovable table thing, and feed the patterns in and come out with flower targets and kaleidograms and concrete words exploding into galaxies—beautiful things, right; but now we’re going to have plasma crystals and that’s a digital system that changes the whole future for us, analog computers are antiques.

Not yet, the other says; plasma crystals don’t give you motion; you got 480 lines of resolution with 512 points per line and you need six bits of information for each of your quarter-million points all for just one single static image, man, and where you going to get that kind of computer capability?

John: Real-time projection direct—that’s what I’m after. We need two-megacycle-a-second capability in a computer to generate motion with the plasma visual subsystem, but we’ll get it. Progress is exponential now. Used to be subsystems weren’t up to the computers; now the shoe’s on the other foot.

Other: You got the subsystem?

John: My boss’s boss if we play it right.

The other is explaining plasma crystals and how you sandwich a layer between glass plates, and one plate has a mirror-conductor on the inside against the crystal and the other has tin oxide, and when you charge the crystal in between, you disrupt—

I know, says John. You know too.

But inside a headache that seemed like an old vacant idea, I knew too!

For they were talking about my product.

For these were
liquid
crystals, and to get motion what you do is lay on your conductive coatings in a collective mosaic like colors in successive silk screenings to produce one multicolor print and as you go along you electrically charge the tin coating and so the liquid crystal molecules are disrupted in just the patterns out of hundreds of thousands of picture elements that you want, and your preset mosaic is affected precisely as you want with your scanning signal.

Crazy turn-on, the other has said, but John says, Well, no.

The other: A visual, right?

It’s past words, says John.

It’s something else! says the other (and I could hardly hear).

No, says John. I don’t think that’s it. The liquid crystal—it’s going to be…

Exponential, the other says quietly.

Let’s not talk about it.

Like a new circuit? But not
real-time
projection, John—don’t give me that.

Steps, receding steps, supplant the voices.

My hand tries the knob, a button snaps into my palm. The lock works from inside too.

I see the room clearly. It’s dark. There’s a red light on a console. There’s a light somewhere else. I close my closet behind me.

My headache is the price of my power.

The footsteps slide along the light that widens as I reach another corner and two doors. I open one, I draw it closed behind me, I’ve picked wrong, I’m in another closet, and it has things in it, I fall back but sit down on metal that rises to my upper thigh.

A chance I’m still dreaming.

Because I recall no dream.

Just young John’s voice calling John-of-Coventry to the phone offstage long ago.

A new voice, an older voice, says something was terrible and someone won’t die of old age and this someone wouldn’t talk but is crazy and can be traced everywhere, England, here, France, the Flints, that crazy diary; but Jack is pinning it on someone else if that someone else stays lost.

You’d need a dozen x-ray helicopters to trace Incremona, says John. What about Mercer Street? What’s the matter with you?

It was terrible. He had trouble with her. She looked all chewed up. I don’t know what I saw, John. She looked wall-eyed. Think of it. When he got through with her.

Was she before?

And her hands were crossed on her chest and one knee was still raised. The house was OK but a windbreaker was on the floor in the basement. There’s a bedroom there. Right after she called out, the door banged and someone in the next house heard steps on the stoop, so Incremona must have gone through the house first. It was terrible.

Can I still use Mercer Street?

They thought it was an aerial. Then they found a stiletto. It springs out of a lighter. Oh God her neck, John, her front. She had the beginning of a black eye. Her hair was pulled out, John.

Who did she call for?

She just called. They said it wasn’t a scream. The steps on the stoop couldn’t have been more than one person.

I never met her.

That hair. Not exactly blond, John. They thought rape but it wasn’t after all. I never had a daughter. It was the color of wheat.

You never saw a wheat field in your life.

We’d be better off with rape. No motive problem. Why did he go after
her?
They didn’t close her eyes, John. Brown eyes with that light hair. They didn’t close them.

Just like a movie.

I never saw a dead girl, John. I felt responsible just looking at her. You know you can get a black eye after an extraction. You know she closed her mouth tight, can you imagine that? You know you always think of them with their mouth open.

I don’t.

Just a kid.

This spring-loaded lighter…

Can’t be traced to Incremona.

Will anyone come here?

And that picture on the wall. My God! This mess makes me see her in a whole new way.

A cartridge flies like a wingless bus into the future. I must get away from these words. Three overhead rotor blades sweep their segments of air, they do the work; but perpendicular to their plane there is at the tail like a light wheel feathering its own gleam a smaller vertical prop that checks the main rotor’s tendency to rotate the fuselage.

Static gravels the voice on the police frequency. We slide left like a diagonal vector-product. Under the two sets of blades perpendicular to each other, what am I, as I look below me, looking for? Under that grid lie bones and for that matter flesh of New Nether-land, sixty guilders or twenty-four dollars worth of 1626 goods.

We are rising, but (down by the Battery where the grid turns into a fingerprint if you could just see the streets) I can’t find the tavern founded by the black man whose daughter Phoebe saved Washington from a bodyguard’s poison. The story was told to us at a lunch there by our retiring American history teacher Mr. Johnson, John Paul Johnson, who having told us that we will presently go up to the third floor to the museum now stands above our empty ice cream dishes as if we were Rotarians or utilities analysts; and Mr. Johnson as he does when he’s caught up in what he’s saying brings his hands together under his pink, dimpled chin and round, rimless glasses as if he’s praying or giving a Zen goodbye—he’s saying farewell like Washington in this very tavern to his troops who when he suddenly says, How many Presidents came from Virginia? answer (as one) Eight! and who laugh when Ned Noble who’s been here before with his father drawls irreverently from a far corner of our oblong circle, George left his hat here.

Not up to Ned’s usual standard—for he’d told me during the main course. Also I’d seen it coming in the doodle on the tablecloth.

And Lafayette his pistols, Noble, which I’m sure you also know, said old John Paul, who completed his remarks and was applauded and made his way round to Ned just in time to offer him (improbable as it seemed) a light—because Ned had produced from under the sleeveless sweater he wore under his camel’s hair jacket a pack of Raleighs with a book of matches inside the outer cellophane and had tapped out a cigarette and put it between his teeth, the only time I saw him smoke.

As we climb higher, Ned Noble is not at the controls.

Nor am I.

New York approaches the condition of a map. Nothing comes through.

The pilot in a turtle-neck looks over his shoulder and shrugs.

I’m responsible for our being here.

Want to keep your friend out of trouble, meet me:
Nash deftly delivered this on June 27 not knowing Tessa was in Scotland. Dudley was not expected to see the note.

Dudley felt responsible. He knew that passage under the museum. The Maya hated empty space.

Problems may have solutions.

The pilot slides off toward the 40 Wall Street tower—pauses. Our swash-plate leans and straightens.

The things way high in Chartres Cathedral meant only for God may perhaps be reached by diagrams. I didn’t tell Dag I meant to pay a visit to Chartres. When I said on the way up from Marseilles and the carferry that he could drop me in Paris, he merely named a hotel I should stay at, he didn’t register surprise. In Paris he offered to wait until my affairs were completed, but I reminded him of Alba’s false labor. He left me at a small hotel near the Odéon Métro. He went on to Dieppe. French roads in that area are to Paris what a system’s electrical power is to a main “bus” or distribution terminal. I took an early train.

Dagger would be waking up in London.

I walked from the station.

I stood under a windowbox in my sturdy, shoe-backed English sandals and looked up at the western front.

Knowing the heights of the two so different spires, I reckoned as something under thirty meters the average distance between the taller sixteenth-century north (fine, decorated, obvious) and the twelfth-century south (a steeple strangely steep, a wizard’s hat, also isosceles), though as I went closer and away from two women with knapsacks chattering about Americans who say
châtre
(castrate)—this great flat-sided tower became octagonal.

Entering, I can’t see for a moment. I peer to the left where they’re selling pictures, and my eyes adjust.

Where are the things up high meant only for God toward which Will would hoist himself by means of his mother’s behind bent at the open fridge? I’ll get back my feeling for the Corsica footage. I have bought a guidebook and it is in my hand open to a title-page photo of a twelfth-century sculpture of Pythagoras writing. God knows what is on that Corsica footage. Mike having a long silent chat with the student who lent me the cassette recorder who I’m told (by the woman who identified the date palms) has a great deal of money in his own right. I will think about it when I get to London. Daylight stands beyond the crystal green hills and the still waters and the crudely outlined sometimes leaded heads of cartoon martyrs. I’m sure there’s bearded Noah, and some craftsmen at the bottom and a wheel and much higher a rainbow and some man, and below the rainbow maybe Noah and his wife. I go east and south. Light slides past noon. I am between two groups and two languages. Is it a cloud passing, that for a moment invests with motion all the compartmented colors of a window like a sound wave made visible? I am in Chartres. Time is light. My son was here. A tear films my vision. There is a huddle of some kind to the west, and as I pass, an English guide grabs me. I am to give my hands, arms, shoulders—he’s explaining Gothic vaulting—my arms are crossed, hands gripping other hands, I lean, I look away and over on the north side several yards away almost in shadow I catch the eye of a man with a moustache who looks like Dagger, and I grin but he turns away toward the photo and postcard place no doubt thinking this demonstration mad; I am part of the vault of our Lady the Virgin’s mystic city, it is a surprise.

We should all breathe together, I say, and suddenly I want a cigarette.

And the guide, a good English schoolteacher type, parental, clear, brisk, interrupts himself to say to me, Good, good, yes indeed, that’s the idea, one body co-laboring for the Lord.

This isn’t London Bridge he’s playing now. He’s inside.

Now knees up he is hanging from the vault to show us how miraculously strong its structure is.

The man with the moustache looks out from behind one of the piers of the north tower as if he can’t believe what we’re doing, and in my semiconductive cartridge slung forward above New York on Sunday, October 31, that instant of cool cathedral twilight in July borne by some rhumb and random constancy in me from Corsica to England via Chartres yields almost those words said on Waterloo Bridge in Dagger’s car receding from the National Film Theatre in March but instead not quite, for they are the words right after, which are (from Dagger) We’ll use Claire, (from me) and Jenny too, (and then from Dag with a casualness that made his next words seem merely part of some larger harmony) They
look
alike (which I hadn’t myself seen on meeting Claire the preceding fall, but saw now).

The vault broke up, pack it and send it air freight to Arizona, I found a cigarette, I saw the moustached man and called Hey and moved toward him to ask for a light, but he was out the door into the sun and as I reached for my matches and put my cigarette between my lips and caught sight above me again of the West Rose, an affable English voice said, Mustn’t smoke in
here
, and I turned suddenly but the wrong way and saw not a red double-decker which could not have squeezed down the nave aisle between the flanks of folding chairs, but at the east end an intricate shine of color overpowering my ignorance of the tales told in all the compartments.