But now beyond this, my new idea: three men lifting their hands in parlor talk so slowly that the audience (if Phil Aut would distribute us to one) would feel the endless distance from those real and rising bombs just as Alba’s reappearing wrist and long American cigarette and solo activity would flute the edges of the room with nerves — a woman’s service, her unease, the seeming ceremonies of men. Add sound at too few revs per second slow-motioning small talk into garbled agony, and Lorna if her blue eyes ever saw the film would see the struggle of our years, the reach from somewhere less real to something more, which might be less likely the cadres and secret councils of terrible change — CONSUMER SOCIETY MUST DIE A VIOLENT DEATH — and more the unchecked wages of Sub’s days at home and at work, unchecked actuality of a small-claims suit and his lack of a divorce, a historic Bach sweatshirt on a heap of spin-dried sheets, hamburger the color of crushed strawberries on a table near an old blue cut-glass tumbler that holds the water Sub washes his deep-yellow-urine-producing Stress Supplement vitamins down with while on the sink beside the steaming kettle his red-white-and-blue Japanese mug stands ready with its teabag damp from the film of water left in the bottom (for Sub washes last night’s late teacup first thing in the morning) while Tris is drinking orange Tang seeing in the middle distance floating astronauts squeezing their breakfast into their mouths as he and Ruby spread their white toast with grape jelly that comes in a jar with a picture on the side which Ruby will use to drink her skim milk from when the jelly is gone — and Ruby anticipating opposition announces over the radio news that Sub some time in the past ruled that tonight she may stay up late for a TV program because today is Monday (which she turns to Tris to confirm), and then the news on this good-music station ends with the weather and a calm commercial for stereo systems and Sub tells Ruby also calmly that he would like to drop the TV set out the window (the new smaller portable I haven’t reimbursed him for), but at that instant his Japanese radio slips off its band onto another with those hermaphrodite voices singing “You Are Everything, and Everything Is You.”
But the steps of Nash and the Frenchman went up the loft stairs toptoe in unison drawn by the prospect of Cartwright. The escalator was in my pocket in red ink. From two things Jan had said, I knew I had been unjust to John; he had not been the breaker of Sub’s TV and Sub’s window, nor had he pinched the pennies out of a recycled tin. And the hands that had shoved me down the escalator likely belonged to the person whose fingers must have found my letter on Sub’s kitchen table beside the phone pad this morning (the letter itself having come yesterday Monday) because Sub on his way to work at 9:15 digging in his jacket for a token so as not to have to stand in line at the subway change booth might leave some of his mail where he found it in the postbox in the lobby — though lately it is never distributed until ten — but he would never go back upstairs just to leave, say, a letter that had come for me. The unison toes passed above me. I had the ponderous street door open and my other hand in my raincoat for Dagger’s letter. Mother and son were into the next block north, still on Mercer; once I got past two trucks parked pointed south with their right-side wheels up on the sidewalk, I could see diagonally ahead of me on the other side of the street also walking north and looking it seemed diagonally ahead to Jerry and Jan who were on my side of the street someone I should have been seeking but was not, yet someone who did not act as if she might be in danger but was trailing two people I thought would be willing to harm her.
I wanted to catch up and ask her the whole sense of her note on the top page of the manuscript Gene had burned in the peat fire Saturday. If I quoted the Sorbonne poster TAKE YOUR DESIRES FOR REALITY in order to ask Jenny what she took mine to be, she might know at once, better than I. I had dismissed our film yet made it what it was, composed a parallel diary yet incited its theft, suffered this girl ahead on the other sidewalk (this Virginia Ginny Jenny in a U.S. Army corporal’s tunic and a high-crowned blue denim hat Lorna had had made by a theatrical hatter in Soho) to become my English hostage, yet I’d let her be drawn toward the claws of a confusion that could use her as a hostage against me.
In turn the four of us turned west and when Jan and Jerry hit a light and he started to dart across but she wouldn’t go he stopped and waited, and when she turned to look back I was already in a phone booth hoping Jenny had not seen me.
I dialed June who at once complained that her brother Chad had been using her; I told her she had set me up for Nash but Nash was by now sorry he’d tried to jump me.
The fight changed, the sky was clouding over, I turned away and as Jan looked back in the corner of my eye I felt a figure stop or turn or in some way change; June was saying it was Paul’s fault what had happened to Chad and she only wanted to help me, not harm me, and she didn’t know anything except about taking the heart out of the red jag and putting a bomb in instead and she didn’t know what that meant but had heard it only when Chad asked what she knew about it.
I said I was slowing things down and was getting several pictures different from before and would ask her and her nice friends to my Halloween slide show. Meanwhile, I said, find out more about the jag, it would help Chad — and Chad needed help, I had come back from the Hebrides and I knew. Stay there, I said, and hung up.
The four ahead were moving.
Jan turned south, then west, then north, then west again. Three trucks got tied up and I could not see Jenny.
At a light Jan looked back and I stepped into a café that was closing. A headline said the U.N. had seated Peking. I phoned June. She had gotten new information awfully fast, it seemed to me. Gene had told Chad only what sounded to her like a riddle, that Paxton had passed the heart at Stonehenge and that I had hidden it in a hole I’d bored in a red jaguar but I had taken it out and inserted plastic but the way he said it it sounded like a trade name.
I think someone’s coming, I said; stay there. I hung up; but folding back the booth door, stepping out and pulling back, I knew I had made a prophetic projection in what I’d said; for through the café’s plate-glass front I’d seen passing at a slow springy tread the figure of Reid across the street who if he had been watching me might have lost me when the trucks got tied up. So we were now five, and I in possession of the rear and no longer between Reid and Jenny though now forced further behind Jan who was leading me to Paul.
But from Macdougal and Bleecker I saw her cross the cobbles of Sixth Avenue chased then by the sudden northward swarm of cars and trucks, a blue bus full and a green right behind it empty, and a wildly high-slung old gypsy cab skipping the potholes. Jan and Jerry turned south.
Jenny waited at the light, which held up Reid who was halfway between Bleecker and Sixth in the doorway of an electrical shop eyeing me. The expulsion of Taipei did not affect the flow of cheap umbrellas from Hong Kong.
That Paul was holed up in the same house as my parka and my suitcase was so improbable I accepted it, and when Reid looked away I ran south on Macdougal to the corner of East Houston where I followed the high, wire-mesh playground fence and saw that my right-angle shortcut parallel to Jan’s course on Sixth and risking a loss of visual contact had left me closer than Jenny and Reid, almost too close, for as Jan and Jerry increased speed (and just before they turned into King) Jan looked round again but I automatically like a soldier given the order “To the rear, march!” reversed my direction and was approached without enthusiasm by two old Italian ladies, all in black. Then I crossed East Houston and pursuing Jan and Jerry from my own angle I reached a phone in a cleaning establishment across Sixth from King Street whence I saw what my daughter and her boyfriend were not in time to see but what I’d imagined and did not need to see: Jan ascending with her son the stoop of her brother Monty’s house, the address Dagger had expressed the air letter to.