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.
Charging no doubt through the Indian and West Indian neighborhood where Jan’s Notting Hill Gate flat placed itself: and through her to the Druid’s busy phone south of the river: or miles southeast to the trees and the old gray stones of a Marvelous Country House that I could only look forward now to understanding better: beyond even these to whoever had thrust me onto that unmoving rapid-transit escalator back up which I then rebounded like a wave myself through an unmoved medium but found at the top only the moist smile in the change booth and her transistor enlarging itself with the mumbo jumbo of You Are Everything and Everything Is You.
Where the hinges are missing, saith the priest, I will spark the gap.
Ah Mumbo Jumbo, said Dudley Allott when I’d described from start to finish the shooting of what I’d thought was our final scene: but capital M and capital ], Mumbo Jumbo means among the Mandingo of Western Sudan a priest who keeps off evil.
Action, yelled Dagger, and for this early part of the six hundred feet we shot at Stonehenge that midnight in early August of this year 1971, I had the Nagra in its case on my shoulder strap and the mike on a short boom.
I moved parallel to Dagger across the interior of the Sarsen Circle northeast among the battery lamps and torches slowly as if we were the procession; for outside the circle the line of New Druids and others proceeded toward us from the misnamed Heel Stone some eighty meters off as Dagger and I inside the circle came to the central and misnamed Altar Stone with the huge pi-shaped trilothons either side of us southeast and northwest unbeknownst to our faithful Beaulieu whose focus on the New Druids was at this point narrowly framed through another arch on the far edge of the ring.
Dagger had shortened his depth of field, as we’d agreed. We would get an effect of some flaming conglomerate body back in the heavens clearing the horizon and getting bigger and nearer until it was persons singling themselves out of prickly fight. Individuals from the void but coming communal, like parts of our film: the earth of Corsica yielding the brick and plaster of Ajaccio, the stone home which takes in and lets go yellow and olive and red slickers (and from which several communicants here tonight had come), and now these windy megaliths built in circles and avenues, barest of dream-able forms.
Concentric circles of stones and vanished stones ring the half-fallen horseshoe of trilothons, once two horseshoes: all forms broken, some of the twenty-ton Untéis gone almost as wonderfully as they came: one of the thirty-ton Sarsens fallen in ’63, raised in ’64: the mind completes the architraves, the eye describes the circles, no bloody gags about Druids and old doomed maidens can fill the gaps devised hundreds or thousands of years before the Druids, who nonetheless deserve this place too, no technical chatter about loop pans from Cosmo in his poncho off in the shadows toward the car park can rattle the Beaulieu’s snakelike advance, and we will presently hear under one cloud-lit trilothon visiting statistics in an Alabama accent about a Stone Age computer whose spokes turning through fifty-six-year cycles predict the future of the sky.
I knew more about Stonehenge now than when I’d told Rose’s friend Connie about Merlin; more than when Jenny (not here tonight) giggled at the bank clerk; and more even than when I told Tessa (tonight distinctly here) that a cremation barrow nearby yielded blue beads from Egypt, 1400 B.C.
The Indian from Kansas City came through the circle across our advancing path from right to left — as if heading for the trilothon through which one aligns with midwinter moonset — and as he grinned, I asked what he thought of the place, and he and his Hollywood cheekbones were off camera when he said: I wish my brother could see it!
Coming along the Altar Stone, I had for a moment no sight of the procession and Dagger’s must have been through the 29–30 portal to the left of the one into whose alignment with the distant Heel Stone we now bent, for we were around the Altar Stone, it was behind us now, and stretching behind it through the great southwest trilothon was the alignment of midwinter sunset. And ahead — though I had to stay next to Dagger to keep our personal parallax from blocking my view — the procession we were shooting had come from the wide avenue and was passing the probably misnamed Slaughter Stone, and as we moved toward our trilothon picking up laughter, shouts, and the flat dry voice of the procession, its torches filled our frame ahead at a rate not fast enough to match our rate of nearer approach so there was more rather than less of the night sky in our portal as we came up to it and then went through, camera first, mike second.