My words — the groaning afternoon on the Mercer Street side of John’s window shades had passed into an early evening of such dingy delicacy under the lush sky that the air looked crystal clear.
In Mike’s London cab the questions are nearing an end two days earlier.
OK, I answer, say I give filmmaking a rest and leave you and Len and Sherman and Reid and Nash’s nosebleeds alone, what sanctuary have I? Any number of Xeroxes won’t safeguard me from Len Incremona or for all I know—
Don’t pretend you don’t know, said Mike, then whipped his head away toward his right-hand window having said the reverse of what he’d wanted.
— or for all I know I could be hit by Nash or you or Bob—
— No, Bob’s not with us any more, he got sentimental—
— or Sherman, I guess Sherman’s in the States with Reid by now, and Krish may find it harder to intimidate Nash than before.
Mike wants to know what I hoped to add to my leverage by shooting Len and himself and Marie (the fortress girl) in the setting of Ajaccio; they were there and even the action originally planned was not going to take place in Corsica — nothing happens there.
I answer that I was concerned with the ecology seminar the Americans were running at the école, for in my own view it could emerge in our film as a revolutionary though tenuous theme of displacement; however, his Edinburgh friend Mary had been an unexpected dividend.
The automatic stirred up off the seat back. The ammunition was in my head, film or no film. The gun had a moment of weight on the end of my bent arm like our damned camera hand-held or not hand-held threatening to drag down all it framed: down would go 2D slides of Hyde Park and the English country, and down also the screens of dusty fort and Mediterranean crag; down would go gaps in the Stonehenge circle filled for a moment with new Druids or a lurking American voice or Nash angry with Bob the dark-haired late co-star of our Unplaced Room who bickered with him outside the Sarsen ring: so that the literal weight of that Beaulieu dragged down out of sight even the hand of my wife touching me and the borrowed breath of Tessa in my mouth turning to words and out of words until (as you who have me may say) through manipulation, not real courage, I saved that New England drive-in movie screen by the waters of the Atlantic by placing at the base of that land-slipped clay cliff (cartridged long ago for later thought) Tessa’s uncle who was struck in middream thus not by a cruel-faceted quartz paperweight a German cat pawed off a high night-time ledge but by the very screen 60 by 100 that I couldn’t sell the merchant-investor near Liverpool. Hit but not killed, for in his early old age Tessa’s Uncle Karl became, for all his blindness, a Zionist settler dictating to his wife and her long, comforting fingers epistles from a Tel Aviv suburb to Tessa’s half-envious father in Golders Green which expatiated greatly and with Talmudic pomp upon the age-old zone of mystic In-Between carved like a moat of insulation (in Uncle Karl’s prose) to guard a Jewish self prior to actual territory, yes the inner and spiritual claim to separation from others and claim to a place that was a claim that created that place (that beautiful place) by fiat of communal will. Tessa’s father would tell his neighbors in their well-watered gardens about Karl’s commitment as if he and Karl were collaborating, and about Karl’s theory that despite a permanent eclipse of his main sight, he had intimations he was recovering of all things peripheral vision.
Now Jan might disdain “mere completions,” but I with my parka-full of others’ weapons and my Druid’s counsel on how to make my body breathe had never laid claim to any kind of completion. I had more than once in recent days found myself poised weightlessly mighty like a god, held in a field of my own generation or finding, in a space between impingements of other fields like the short moment between forces when I snatched the autographed ball flung up by Ned Noble (who when he would jauntily take leave of us would say, I shall return). Yet now from either of two random parallels — the minicab in London Sunday night, the loft in New York Tuesday, each ending with offspring, the ominous mention of Jenny by Mike, the queer allusions to Jerry by Jan — I was now being situated in an independent power way past even what I had pretended.
Perhaps it was true, the god bit.
Yet no: my hero the Franco-English engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (in whom my own beloved and neglected Will may not have been so intrigued as I hoped) was much struck by the collapse of a bridge near Manchester in the late 1820’s: the steady tread of troops across it one day set up a harmony so deep it shook loose a pin in one of the suspension chains and the bridge at one end let go. Fields impinge. You must build yourself into the life around you. Which sounds so like good advice I must find another way to pass it on to Will.
Paul was misconstrued, you see. His views these last months had grown apparently more abstract, not less. But Mike, Chad, John, Nell, Incremona, Sherman, even Gene at first (until then likewise suspect) saw Paul defecting because of the target. This target, which no doubt I knew the logistics of even better than she, touched the Flint family enterprises, and she did not want to know more than that. And John, with his English sense of sinister unity within great families, insisted Paul himself had proposed the target. But Chad and Len believed Paul planned to join Jack in the business at last; Mike and Gene believed Paul had found a new strange reverence for the father who had founded the firm, but Mike thought Paul wished only to safeguard the firm while Gene believed Paul had learned to love his brother Jack. Sherman and Len believed Paul would blow the whistle, and so did Reid, who did not otherwise agree.
Jan said Paul had gone to Wales in May to see the Prescelly Mountains whence the Stonehenge bluestones had come heroically by land and sea and hand, and Paul had been thinking in a new way about Stonehenge from a new distance.
And Callanish?
Jan did not know the name, she said, and I neither challenged her there with my superior evidence from the dilettante geologist in the red mini that in fact she had been at Callanish nor let her know other dates I believed she did not know: that Paul was in the Hebrides sometime before May 24 when we shot the Unplaced Room and heard the deserter’s half-squelched words of praise for Paul, and in South Wales with Elspeth the Bonfire night of May 28 by which time, to judge from Jan who saw him in Edinburgh in June, he’d made up his mind to break with the group.
Mike said, for we had arrived, Who lives here?