Do you blame her for fearing you? said Alba; Dagger has feared you since the day you proposed filming in that Underground tunnel. And this time Alba did shut the door.
But as I passed out of the house and into the very same cab with the stripe down the bonnet that had let me off here at 10:20, Alba’s words made me powerful again.
A power of destruction?
Her words seemed to say Dagger had seen a print of the Unplaced Room.
17
Once upon a time I dismissed our film, but told no one, for I am a secret noncollaborator.
I could not see what Phil Aut would want with it. But I went ahead and it began to make sense.
My life reflecting a larger life. Not your usual formula documentary.
Dagger talked of editing it this way and that way, but it was still only an exposed emulsion. He talked about control over the final product.
Why did I begin a diary? Did I foresee the film’s ruin?
I learned to look more closely in order to see what Dagger was seeing through the viewfinder. But later to recall what ought to go into the diary. But perhaps always to take for myself a depth that was in our film if not on it.
For instance, a leader and reputed beautiful person preceded out of his grove into the light of our camera by a sacred beast.
Or a thick apricot bob above a green blouse, in turn above my son’s just visible chestnut hair — the whole preceded by a forty-eight-state flag-tattoo blown up in my chosen words.
Or, say, a Church of England vicar among his rainy roses and photos of Marilyn.
The depth I refer to was also harsh Corsican hills praised by Boswell, touched with scrub pine whose contours might have looked at dusk like children’s mountains or the evergreen armies in my grandfather’s New England but in fact were sparse and crabbed and were seen hazy from a warm sea where I lay buoyed by the nearby wave-rocked words of Mike to Mary: Your brother is a bad influence on Paul.
The film, or some pause it gave my life, made me sit at Sub’s window in New York and contemplate a high window-washer for his own sake.
Only hear Sub mention the Bronx or Staten Island and you still sense that in Manhattan you don’t think of yourself living in the whole city. (Not even in the now capsuled forties when the Heights was barely within Ned Noble’s Brooklyn and for Sub and me the Broadway theater district under the river and twenty minutes away from Brooklyn by Interboro Rapid Transit was in the true New York which we could contemplate like its harbor from our residential stoops like early Dutchmen.) But in London even with its villages you do live in the whole city. Never mind Geoff Millan’s velvet-legged friend Jasper languidly claiming not to know what lay “south of the river,” or, in that evening circle at Geoff’s (which you who have me must recall cartridged in relation to our present position not so far back or forward that you’d have to stretch to put your finger on it like the other icepick point of a draftsman’s compass) the bearded intellect with puffy eyes who said that he ventured south of the river once a year.
My cab with the stripe down the hood rolled toward a fictitious address. But when we paused at a Belisha Beacon for a car to cross I realized we were going the wrong way. I leaned forward and in the amber which outside was the foggy glow softening the dark terraced houses to an aura of privacy but inside the cab gave things a lurid point, I knew my driver’s profile. I said to him that we were going the wrong way. I got no response. And if you who have me are way ahead here and know already that my driver was Mike, the quarterback of my imagination who at a table under the stars of Corsica and under a string of festal lights in Place Foch had asked me if I could kill, you will be glad I now move under my true colors, and shoot and twist among layers of distance as if they were mere liquid films or gelatin, and not forth and back but out and in at all angles sanctioned by my sphere. But as soon as I’ve said that, and see the sphere opened flat on a bed bounded by east and west like cliffs at each edge of the world — and recall the stopped escalator, and recall my legs and feet that would survive apart from me if need be and hence slowed their motion to fit my plunge — I find my position resists the formula I’ve sought; for my position belongs also to that shove in the back whose force dies near the foot of the escalator yet turns then into my own heart rebounding up those grooved stairs after the shover who recedes into an elastic field not mine yet not wholly his since he was moved to push me by a great love including him in its reach like a larger plan. And if John’s white-nosed automatic did not let me very far into Mike’s life as I now lifted it from my parka pocket, changed hands, and laid it along the leather of the driver’s seat near Mike’s head with the magazine-grip away from me and asked Mike if he recalled his question to me in the restaurant in Place Foch — and another car came up behind us and beeped as Mike looked along his shoulder at the white barrel and asked if I was really a lefty — there was no gloved window between me and him.
The cab advanced but Mike and I hesitated.
I said, Ask away. He said, What? (as if surprised that he was to do the asking when I was the one with the gun). Why wasn’t I looking out for my daughter, he said, she was looking out for me.
Was she looking out for me by letting my diary go? I said.
Listen, said Mike, we know what Jack told you. But suppose he burned one copy for Gene to see but kept the other?
Mike had turned back toward the fictitious address which if we ever got there was a ten-minute walk from Geoff’s.
They were all acknowledging my power. Could I solicit information they thought I already had? And did Mike know what the Highgate burglar had taken?
Furthermore, Jan in New York two days later told me Paul’s story not only as if her openness might deter me from further aggression, but as if its meaning was beyond secrecy. On the other hand, Dagger’s new sense about me the morning we filmed the Hawaiian Hippie had made him not more frank but more secret.
But now — in the cab with Mike, or forty hours later in New York alone in John’s loft with Jan — I had to question what the full tale could be worth if it came to me as easily as the bedtime freedoms I once took with “Puss in Boots” or “Beauty and the Beast” when Jenny and Will were small. For Mike (who voluntarily identified the pistol at his neck as Chad’s) assumed I knew that Jack felt the vagrant astronomer who’d come out of the island murk into Paul’s hut was an equal. And Jan forty hours later seemed to assume I knew that Jack the eldest of the three Flint brothers was cobacker with her husband of her film plan. And both Mike and Jan — as if joined in some mind of mine that had never left the Glasgow hotel room — asked humbly, yes humbly, if there was another Xerox of my film diary in the case I’d checked when I left Glasgow for Stornoway.
Mike asked why I’d wanted to get Incremona all stirred up with hints of a link between Phil Aut and John, for after all John only knew Phil through Gene: why had I had to go and do that? first thing we knew the whole thing would blow up — didn’t I know? — I must know — how crazy Len was? ate deep-fried shark for breakfast stuffed with Roman sausage — I must have known his temper, otherwise I wouldn’t have been so careful not to flush him out of Jan’s studio when I was talking to Kate tonight, which must mean I knew John was giving two lectures in the New York area—
To all of which there was no need to reply that the John I’d meant was the other John in New York (who I now saw must have acquired this pistol from Chad some time before my last visit to John’s or Jerry’s Mercer Street loft). I merely said that Incremona was so stirred up that my contribution hardly mattered. And Mike, as we neared my fictitious terminus, asked in vain if Gene had known that John was involved with Phil Aut, and I could not ask the key question: what thing would “blow up”?