I, said Monty Graf, did not interrogate John: John of his own free will told me, and I’ve known him much longer than you.
But Sub disagreed. He said that what Ned had done was not terrible, that my question to Ned’s already grieving father Hy was not heartless, and that Ned’s mother following me out into the hospital hall still holding the book Ned did not want her to read to him and hearing my question to Ned’s father and then her rebuke to me, was reacting as helplessly to the messages coming in as Ned was himself in that high bed she smoothed every hour, or as I was myself, coming out of Ned’s private room to ask a question that meant I did not want this undependable friend (whom Sub never liked) to die, but in words as clear as the messages in my head were scrambled.
Look, said Monty, if you want to know exactly what John—
But the waiter asked if we were ready to eat.
Ned had promised me his crystal receiver. He had done so on the day I reached far out my window in Brooklyn Heights to grab between its upward and downward course (like two gravities) his vertical throw. But when I visited him in Brooklyn Hospital the autumn of ’45, he said he’d destroyed the crystal set precisely because he’d promised it to me, and having committed the plans for the other thing to memory (I called it a time machine but Ned never labeled it) he’d soaked the page in rubbing alcohol blurring the ink and when it had dried and what was flammable had (so he said) evaporated, he had burnt the page, though not the logo he had designed for the formulas. And since the night I came home to Highgate from Liverpool having failed to sell the drive-in movie project (and all the way to Euston toyed with the vision of mobile terminals for trains or new conveyances) and arriving home heard the climax of Tessa Allott’s tale of Uncle Karl who was blinded by the same blow that woke him up, which in turn was to Tessa first of all an intimation of some other (or after-) life rooted in her vision that a thought properly held just before and during death carried into timeless survival with it the person whose brain (no doubt, as I suggested to her, tuned and integrated to the whole bodily life) had for its part helped to crystallize the idea and then had flickered out hundred-cell-parcel by hundred-cell-parcel (heca-cell by heca-cell if you think of Welsh cows offered up as unsacrificed accidents to a would-be god), I have seen Ned’s act as another kind of gift and as a model for futures even further than Andsworth’s vague next stage, which may be really like what I felt after Mrs. Noble came to the door of Ned’s private room (now awful again, its colorless door ajar at my back) and heard me ask Mr. Noble if Ned was kidding about the crystal set and the time machine — she said, You are heartless.
But Hy Noble said no he was afraid his son wasn’t kidding, and then he stuck out his hand to shake mine. He said, You understand.
I said, Yes.
He said, I think you’ve helped. You’ve helped me.
How? said Monty.
Monty was afraid but cool. A camera could not show what I state: If I wouldn’t tell about those right-angles Tuesday and operations he assumed I was at least mentally in command of, then he would think of Ned and try to compute digital trivia.
The hand of Ned’s father held mine for several counts as if the hand-to-hand connection was still on the way. Time held. I looked behind still holding Ned’s father’s brown hand; the door was shut.
Always after that, I felt between them.
And I never saw them again, though Christmas of my freshman year in college Mrs. Noble phoned my mother to say they had an extra ticket for Streetcar and later on I heard Ned’s sister had graduated from Chicago and gone to Germany. Ned read my mind; but during these years in England perhaps he’s read it even more truly.
Wait — said Monty; he’s alive?
He died a routine drugged death in the fall of ’45. Hy founded a scholarship at our school. There’s no telling what Ned might have achieved. My father heard in Wall Street that Hy had talked to his partner about changing his name back to what it was in 1920 when his father had changed it to Noble, but Hy’s wife was against this. Hy was an expert doubles player. His feet, he said (though I never saw for myself), were almost perfectly flat, but there had been something else as well that had kept him out of the war. Why do I call him by his given name Hy?
How close are you and Dagger really?
Close enough to have read his letter to his niece about the project she contemplated behind Aut’s back. Close enough to have in a pocket of mine hidden at this instant in the King Street house a note Dagger had from you, Monty, in which you say that if he is counting on my diary to advertise his film, maybe you should see a piece. A piece of the action, Monty, your thing.
The waiter is thinking mainly that we haven’t ordered, and to judge from his permanently raised gray-tufted eyebrows and creased forehead and his skeptical eyes, he is not interested in what at first glance he or a camera would see in Monty’s now suddenly quite undivided face, a fixed look that could be dislike, could be rage, a hot antipasto that wasn’t sitting well (but the waiter knew we hadn’t eaten), or a coldly intelligent fear much more clearly coherent than its nearest cause, which was what I (in my hypothetical field of multiple impingements) was doing to him and to myself. I did not have to have the sharpness of a god to know that he did not wholly mean to let go his next words: Who put that letter on my brother-in-law’s desk.
I answered, A sequence of footsteps, phone rings, bucket clanks, lights, darks — words which reminded me that, godlike or not, my strength was in knowing what these others mistook: that all I had was my place in a multiple system. So I was not wholly responsible for now saying to Monty (what I knew would worry if not scare him) that Jack Flint wouldn’t like that letter, he wouldn’t like it one bit, and neither would the man who had almost shot John in my presence — did Monty happen to know Incremona?
Monty, whom a cine camera of any water would have shown to break his pose as soon as the waiter limped off, and a sound track would have voiced in cadences heavily ironic, now softly pounded out such words as Power already in process, right? like someone else’s crystal prototype? someone else’s formula? like some other boy’s baseball you happened to catch? someone else’s film idea you steal without understanding? isn’t that what it’s all about, Cartwright? like someone’s lighter which those who have not handled it before had better not reach for in your pocket?
There was no beer in the stein I tipped back to my mouth-tipped more calmly than a camera could see. Monty had heard about Krish, so Krish had been discovered. And Monty had heard I was suspected. I saw him through the stein like an old forgotten hypothesis, then set it down and looked for the waiter and waved, while Monty said how he cared about that girl and nothing must happen to her even if I was the one as he now began to think who was at the heart of the whole thing — and even if I already had the information he was about to give me, I was not going to have the chance to sneak it, he was going to give it to me free and then he was going to get up from this table and he hoped I understood where he stood.