Lookout Cartridge (82 page)

You see even now I can’t be in that closet simply, but must flash-forward into some known future, for what do you think about when you’re eavesdropping on someone’s revelation of your daughter’s body? I kept my cigarette in my mouth, sauntered to the north side to the cathedral shop to look at pictures. In Seward’s day you could leave your daughter a little town house on Madison Park but there is no refuge in history; John Stephens may have given for the Maya city Copan, whose plunder Catherwood was to preserve in his drawings, twice what the Dutch paid for Manhattan, but twenty-four dollars was a lot of money and look at what the Dutch got fot it—real estate inflation—always depressing—and I look down over an area near City Hall Park and some warp of air or temperature from the overhead rotor makes the grid nine hundred feet below bulge slightly, the pilot is looking where I am looking, and I have more than one picture of the man who looked like Dagger in Chartres.

What picture? says John, and my hands are colder than the steel I sit on in the closet I chose by mistake. I have missed nothing. But am I Tessa’s Maya god Kokulcan who was exiled yet at once relanded and never really went away? Not quite.

My wife’s, says the voice. I see her in a whole new way. The gallery was a mistake. I was measuring her with something she couldn’t resist. I should have let her go. But instead I gave her presents.

Why did Incremona do this?

You don’t want to know.

Why did she have nothing on?

She lives there half the time.

Why did the cops call
you?

They found a letter from my secretary telling her to come in and clean out her desk. I got nothing against her. It’s my brother-in-law.

John says, Can I use Mercer Street?

Incremona hangs out in that area.

But can I use Mercer Street?

Aut says he has to go.

John asks if Flint is doing anything on the real-time project, and did Aut contact U.K.?

Aut says he’ll see John tomorrow.

A famous hotel is mentioned.

The last I hear as they recede is Aut: so what’s the matter with your eyes?
You
didn’t know Claire; you wear glasses, don’t you?

Data from Chad and Nash tumbled into the absence of my lookout dream, and with them two contact lenses dropping in search of a soft slot and shimmering now between two Sarsen stones, for John in contacts had been the strange photographer, Aut’s man at Stonehenge. Now if Jack planned to frame me for Claire’s death and to do so not just with the lighter-stiletto but by means of my absence, how had I got away? I went from one closet to another closet of that detached room, I clipped my knuckles on a steel corner somewhere, I plunged down the service stairs.

In a cab up Tenth Avenue I was thrown forward and braced my hand against the back of the front seat next to the pivoting V-shaped fare-receptacle marked
PLEASE PUSH
and
PAY HERE
. The meter clucked, I found blood around the nail I’d ripped at Claire’s and blood on my knuckles, and as if at some consequence I made a quick stop at a corner booth to phone the florist, and told Gilda I’d nearly been killed and in fact my head
was
kilting me—she’d heard nothing more of Incremona. Then it was crosstown from red light to red light and to a news dealer with a gray fedora who could not see what his hat made me feel in my shoulders, that I’d left my expensive trenchcoat behind—and who sold me a paper that had no news of the war.

I went through Sub’s unmanned lobby and up to his empty apartment which had something to tell me but not in answer to what I wished to know of my daughter whom I might have been responsible for killing if she had been where I had thought she was, and now, assuming Claire had been improbably killed by Incremona who had set out to kill Jenny, what I wished to know was this: when the Frenchman had said, The Cartwright girl, and then Incremona had said, We got her—who was
we
and why hadn’t Incremona known where to go?

And there was an emptiness here in Sub’s place I could not put my finger on. It was an absence I might have believed was watching me (to see, say, if I picked up Sub’s phone before it stopped ringing). I was looking through it, and I left the living room and lifted the receiver and said Yes, and I felt an emptiness grin, except if I was looking through the emptiness the smile might be my own.

Can a god have a religious experience?

Can a god be isolated?

It was Jenny and she said thank god I was all right. She’d been told I would probably be killed if she didn’t tell who else had installments of my diary. Sherman had found Incremona’s copy at Mike’s apartment and had thought the best thing was to liquidate it. Incremona had found out.

Crescendos of highway cars behind her were between us. I’m in Connecticut, she said.

I could not speak.

You who have me may put some construction other than clinical on my inability this Saturday, October 30, 1971, to speak to my daughter who was alive. I must warn her Incremona had missed once and wouldn’t miss again. But that is what she now said to
me
. And because I could not bring out those or other or any words, she said nothing more, except to ask who this was.

The first thing Sub’s wife Rose did when she moved out was get an answering service.

It had been more than probable that Incremona would go after Jenny. However, Claire, who looked like Jenny though wouldn’t be taken for her by anyone who knew them both and had not been taken for her by Incremona because of looks, had improbably been hit
as
Jenny.

In part because of me.

But did I know why Incremona had gone after Jenny?

Incremona (who had stared at me as through a gap beyond which was his object) couldn’t know that through the scene of Claire’s killing, Aut had seen Jan in a whole new way. And as for Phil, she didn’t know (what Jan just might) that that moment of insight had required me.

Was there a dream looking into my head while I was out cold in the closet? All I recall is emptiness but also way out across it like punctures in a dartboard words said in the red-and-purple room with the headlines on the carpet: You
know
when; we know that from Sawy—It was Chad’s idea, man, but it came out of the group, man.

On the phone one may lose some sense of where places are. But I’d never even had June’s address to lose, though it would have been as easy to find out as it was hard to stop her from saying as she did again and again that whatever the idea was and no matter what Nash said, it wasn’t Chad’s idea, it was Paul’s, it must have been Paul’s.

Hard to stop her—for this was said not quite direct to me but to Claire’s answering service since it was Claire’s number I automatically gave June when upon feeling the special pressure I applied she said she couldn’t talk and I said call back at eight—I didn’t want June to know I was at Sub’s.

I may sit in a hired helicopter and see what was not quite there when I had the real chance at it. But by now I’ve lived through the thing.

From Savvy it had been learned that I knew
when
.

Yet how could he know this from me?

From Tessa maybe other things (she butted in between Dudley and Savvy and toyed with Savvy because she sensed his secret, that he wouldn’t lay a hand on her), maybe other things. But not this.

I could not quite see why Jenny hadn’t tried to save me when she could have. She knew where at least two other parts of the diary were, and could have mentioned one. Not the Bonfire, for even if those pages were still over in Brooklyn Heights, why jeopardize her grandparents (if they were home?). But why not mention Corsica? By now Savvy Van Ghent’s dustman had probably carted it off.

My headache was gone but my neck was stiff.

I lit the pumpkin when I left Sub’s at seven thirty.

When I came back later I blew it out. It scared me. I was by then no longer alone.

By then I knew when: but not till I’m in the chopper the next day Sunday noon swashing gracefully hither and yon do I see that what I finessed from June Saturday I could have known in Sub’s twilight flat even before I lit the pumpkin and saw it on its window-sill against the dark slots of Manhattan and made out among cool dry American clouds what looked like a stretch of virgin white screen and was a close-up of one of the two big weather balloons Dagger gave my children that rose above Lorna’s rage one Sunday years too soon for the Beaulieu to catch their flight and together floated toward the Heath. On page three of the
Times
by the light of Sub’s TV and next to Webster’s open at
mania, manhunt, man-hour, manhood
, and
manhole
is former Prime Minister Macmillan, old hound bags under the eyes, coated, scarved, moustached, an overexposure behind him which the caption identifies as a bonfire on the Dover cliffs set by the old Tory himself to mark Heath’s Common Market victory in Parliament—old hound who knew the cause would overcome.

As far back as ’65 Savvy had called it inevitable but said England wouldn’t get in until it cost too much. But Savvy did not talk shop. He filed his dispatches and he lived his life. July 25, while batting, I heard his voice behind and below me saying, I hear I’m a star in your journal.

Dudley it seemed had mentioned the Softball Game when they ran into each other on Bastille Day at the British Museum, but I hadn’t turned up to play last Sunday. (Still in France, said I—Sightseeing again, said he—How did you know? said I) and well, said Savvy, the diary sounded almost better than the film (I swung and missed) and was it for public consumption, said Savvy, hunkering down behind the plate again (but now dark hair and bluejeans, there was Lorna first time ever at a Sunday softball game come unexpectedly on her own having slept late, now fingering a shy wave from the third-base coaching box if there’d been one); oh I use all the help I can get, I said (and Ball! called Umpire Ismay, for Cosmo’s bomb had risen high outside); I wouldn’t presume to help, said the voice behind, but I wouldn’t mind a peek at the next installment, and by the way how do you concentrate with that incredible creature giving you signals at third? (So blame it on Lorna’s not wearing a bra that Cosmo now spun a drop-ball by me at the knees) but it’s more than insurance, Bill, said the husky voice behind me, it keeps the record straight, makes the film open-ended, nothing like hearing someone tell it like it was in words—hey take your time. I signaled a change-up, said the voice below and behind (and Cosmo snapped furiously through but then at the last micro-second let up like some silent-comedy Jock calmly turning away into Jekyll), and the Air Force softball floated in and a slot was open
I’d
thought was closed and I hit that change-up with a waiting rhythm thanks to Savvy’s warning and felt the ball soften at the meat end of the bat and by the time I was rounding first it was just coming down over the left-fielder’s head and I wound up with a triple and a pat on the ass from Lorna and in the next fortnight Savvy who in what he’d said about open ends had touched a pulse connecting my knees and shoulders, fingers and head to a body of salt water where my heartbeat had once enlarged, dispersed, then vanished into the co-labor of other organs, received in his voluminous mail a Corsican Montage which I now at the end of October see through (past bits of a power station on the east side of the island blown up like burnt strips of Aut film)—through a hired face-mask to a far open end where immigrant sandhogs brave the bends to build the Brooklyn Bridge, and where beautiful Mary’s Montrose heart draws forth from my cuckolded Swiss Cottage swimming friend doubt about the Faeroes but fact that that matchless Scot had Germans among his water-borne troops—(for by a method Andsworth would judge well short of telepathic) the mind that made that Corsican Montage was secretly admitting further forces which the fine-printed channels of a daughter-typist’s finger-pads might pick up even more truly at a hundred words a minute where love may now be sheer energy of attention and the person typing knows in some new unbroken instinct the person typed. And so at half past seven I opened Sub’s door to go, and there was Gilda with some pale streaks through her hair saying she almost had not answered the phone because they were closing when I phoned, and she shouldn’t have come—and I kissed her and she touched my ear and said there was blood, and I took her with me. For, amid my fruitless survey of Savvy—his barbells, his parties, his lack of response to Corsican Montage (except to say he liked the diving), his flying lessons, his soft hand-made low boots, his drunken fag nephew who came to London for the theater once a year and was Savvy’s only connection with his own family, did I know Savvy any better than I knew Gilda?—a desperate though mechanical and trivial problem had struck me as I put my hand to the knob, and Gilda was the answer.

Such a hand, she says, a hand like a face!—but think of Savvy’s homy hand spearing Cosmo’s high outside bomb saving the wild pitch with a bare-fingered stab, for why did he say
sightseeing?
because he knew the man who looked like Dagger under the street lamp who came with Cosmo to deliver the carton but stayed outside? the man who shadowed me at Chartres?—such a hand! my God what a hand! she says again (and I put mine on her), it was like he would crunch the cash register like a beer can, such a hand (mine jumps an inch, for this is another bad cab, we’re all over the road, coming apart at every crossing, plenty of time, bullet-proof plastic divider completely plastered with notices in more than one language, some nearby religion its address lost in the shadows but its theme as clear as the formula I’d barely mined in Monty’s presence—You will not have both power and the understanding of it)—
Estamos temprano
I call from our compartment but he accelerates so there seems still more time for Gilda to speak of Incremona’s hand which she says is like a face and I say they’re planning new very thin beer cans that squeeze like foil; while I’m thinking around Savvy and getting no answer, and I should find a neutral corner on a flight to London but I’m increasing the improbability of a system at whose increasingly empty heart I am by being too well dressed for the service entrance twenty-five yards west of Claire’s gray awning and dressed too evidently for outdoors to be Claire’s next-door neighbors we’d pose as, if a cop answered Claire’s buzzer and I am too probably wanted in Claire’s death to be softly with a valid key letting myself into her dog-less flat together with a woman I know only through a stabbing I don’t understand who must wait a plausible number of rings (for June knows about answering services) but not so many that Claire’s own service picks up—and a woman whose breath I’ve just breathed who laughs a familiar laugh and says the dog’s been playing with the Sunday
Times
and whose shoulders I incredibly could make time now to undress (even as I note on the
Times
a letter whose letterhead U.K. means Universal Kinetic—the film distributor) and who says to my fingertip on her hip where her hip extends from her waist to meet her green flowered raincoat, There isn’t time, just as Claire’s phone goes fifteen minutes early and as I turn the other way Gilda recedes into the bedroom and the name of parents who never fought in front of Claire because they never fought—or never fair—and left the blood to be shed by her from her own thirteen-year-old womb without warning when Dagger brought her back to Philadelphia from a day at the races and a night in Freehold’s American Hotel to a home that in her absence had at last been broken, and a living room that had always seemed large, and she sent Dagger (uncle or cousin or whatever he was) a pair of slippers for his birthday which never got forwarded to him and a year later asked him in person never to tell her mother about the onyx elephant from the gift shop in Freehold, unlike the red Mexican jaguar which she broke her promise and told Monty her fond employer Phil Aut had asked her to secretly pass on to DiGorro for Jan, which I did not know at the moment Gilda hung up in the bedroom and I in the living room pocketed the cloisonné cross and left the living room.