I wanted to take home a tale to my family they could understand. But it might be too late. They were dispersed.
Who had recruited Wheeler, a mere acquaintance at college years ago?
I wanted time to myself.
I wanted to know for sure the film was destroyed.
Cooking came up to my mind from the direction of the Bach chorale — oil, tomato, even cheese, even the pale slick filling steam of pasta, a bland blend doughy and delicate: I could see a pan of lasagna being layered. And I tried to recall which of Paul’s two brothers back in that northern hut had said Sherman was the only one of the lot that Incremona trusted.
CARTRIDGE
Cut to an idea: initial system highly improbable moves toward increasingly probable states: the bog will seep into Krish and thus equalize pressures either side of his thin skin: with Krish gone, the next Nash nosebleed will have fewer probable causes: Phil Aut (legal spouse of Jan, the film’s apparent source) and John (whose loft is rented for him by their son Jerry) will prove to be still closer: pairs of namesakes crop up: two Jims — the newly bearded lately departed deserter, and the lunchtime stabber of the man in the target T-shirt; beautiful Mary who told her tale of a dismembered heart to my secret cassette, and pretty Marie, who crossed our Corsican field first at the fort and then at the Son des Guitares café; John, the Coventry munitions expert, transatlantic technologue, bumptious debunker of our film, and owner of a house near Portland, Maine, and the other John whose glasses I’d knocked off, whose friend June had helped me, and whose loft conveyed an authenticity beyond the sum of its video-synthesizer, slit-scan gear, and formulaic poster with the computer code-word NAND in a lower part: further probabilities are that Len Incremona, who disliked the English John enough to blow a bullet through a dartboard, will if given cause to think John a private opportunist act upon it, though Len would not fly to New York just for that: and probabilities are that the package of pages typed by Jenny Cartwright and left by her under an ancient megalith in Callanish where the great stones are like petrified tree-shards is less and less likely to stay a secret, for the dilettante geologist now possibly joined there by Jack may spot it while seeking Krish, or I could phone the crofter widow to retrieve it (which forty years ago you could film with that trick of the diagonal wipe bundling two distant talkers into one magic frame), or I get Dagger to drop everything and go collect the package — or Jenny is made to talk, in which case anyone (if anyone truly operative is left on that side of the watery world) could zip up to Glasgow, Stornoway, and Callanish and grab what may now be the single copy of a diary whose interest seems increasingly to be in what it yields about its manufacturer and his life and less and less in what it hints of certain schemes.
Does Jenny grow more like Claire or less? Claire lacks that fine detour like a wave or illusion in the bridge of the nose where Jenny’s new camera came up to hit her after Will backpedaled into her, teasing a friendly neighbor’s hound that had in turn been excited by a turtle, and she fell, both hands clutching the camera. Jenny and Claire will approach each other, probably.
Yet on the other hand how improbable the procession now to come.
But this idea is cut from me, or I from it: not to a timeless scheme of parted window shade, doors ajar on two floors, dark stairs tapped into cadence; nor to a course laid out as on a map projection where curves and zig-zag turn into one bearing, straight from the slit-scan track to a blue air letter typed in red on the workbench beside the video-synthesizer thence to a dark corner three flights down where I Frederick Dudley Jack Paul Monty Mercator held my breath till two unlikely fellows and one voice tiptoed past on the way up: instead cut from that glimpse of conversely increasing improbability to what I merely did.
In the loft I opened the shade to the city and outcroppings of sky. Mother and son came into Mercer Street below. The fine billowing brown hair and the shorter, coarse red lost some of their color in the aisle of shade northward. The air letter was from Dagger DiGorro postmarked London, and it was addressed to me in New York but not at John’s loft. There was grit on the stairs. On the floor below, the spitüng of oil in a pan covered my steps. The letter in my pocket was another weapon, this time mine though already used by others though not therefore useless to me.
At the last instant before I would have emerged into the street and been seen, the ground-floor door opening made me find, in the luck of its deepening shadow, a corner to stand in, but just in time to find only a mass of trouble which seemed to have no bearing on American society or international commitment, on the poster in Dag’s living room of Trotsky and his American aide Bob Harte in Mexico or in the Sorbonne courtyard in May ’68: TAKE YOUR DESIRES FOR REALITIES. But the mass of trouble bore not merely on the cross-hatched plots and the faces heart- or cartridge-shaped and sounds (dry wet soft hard) excised from tracks, and parallel beards and that strong swimmer Mary’s two missing finger joints, my wife’s underwear, my son’s Chartres, the characters of Dudley and his daughter Jane, and endlessly inescapable informations beneath if not a god maybe a man, such as Jenny saying she and Reid had been in the pedestrian passage leading under the museum to South Ken tube station, which moved me to urge that site on Dagger who it turned out was planning to find the Hawaiian boy and Hempstead girl precisely there that morning, which is where they had been the day Jenny passed through with Reid. No, the mass and waves of trouble I found in this dark dusky ground-floor corner of a New York Manhattan loft building bore not just on all this but (I swore) toward a formula for how such power could be ascribed to me at the very moment my own field seemed less definite than ever.
The one voice spoke: Believe me, somehow that bastard knows we’re coming, he’s got Chad’s gun, remember.
And when I saw the speaker’s long concave profile and short coiled body of prowling legs and shoulders and arms and on his hand, for it was Nash, those three colors that in the glance of late light from the street flashed like sound being heard somewhere else, I found not the formula but the red that Jan said I’d made a certain someone see. I felt it in Sub’s address red-inked under my name on the typewriter of the much-connected man my friend, collaborator, and protective deceiver Dag in whose Hampstead flat I’d met the other of these two the evening of the day we filmed the air base.
Yes, the man with Nash was the big Frenchman with a shock of prematurely white hair. He and the other two waiting in Alba’s chairs had been glum or contemptuous when they heard my brainstorm. I said two new minutes of them now slow-motion would beautifully top what Dag and I had just filmed at the air base thinking it would be the end — namely, men sending trained hawks to kill starlings so the starlings from the fifties deployed like the regular trees along avenues administered with street signs and speed limits like those in U.S. bases and towns anywhere — then (and here had been our finale) the bombers themselves in quick repeat (like the Hawaiian hippie approach shots) again and again stiffly lifting off into the sunset which to an audience wouldn’t be necessarily northern or August — on the way back to the stationwagon the U. Maryland part-timer we’d run into at Stonehenge asked if I knew John, and when Dag said, No, he doesn’t know John, I at once said, Sure I know John, was it John I was going to be introduced to? and the U. Maryland part-timer who was our host because he taught here though Dagger had done one term a few years ago, said No, unfortunately he changed his plans at the last minute. Dagger was not amused.