I knew only what others knew.
As you who have me know, I did not seek top secrets from the bottom of my heart. But that is where they seemed to fall, and I had no hard-hat to leave above the grating’s grid. I become all these data shredded into their oscillations. A Zen voice from Lorna’s crisis of the late fifties comes home with her: it is late at night: she stands over me still in her coat, I look up at the smell of her soap and the damp rain on her shoulders: I love her: she smiles a brave matinée smile that asks for an understanding no man can give, no real man, or maybe just not me: she quotes her koan: Open yourself as wide as the sky: she laughs silently.
Open myself as wide as the sky?
But that was not Brunel’s way. Consider the astronaut. Unlike those wartime shipyard workers who now know that the asbestos they breathed a generation ago may yield a fiery carcinoma, the astronaut cannot know what lesions of the eye or breakdowns of the head may hit him in his earthly autumn from those flicker-flashes radiating by night through his helmet and out the other side into the unresisting space of his late youth. Meanwhile we do what we can. We look at the unmediated glare of the sun in space and devise a visor and rethink certain properties of imperviousness in gold. We look at the fact of heart shrinkage in the weightlessness of space where it works less; and it is possible to do something; we measure stress in the elevated levels of activity of a nerve-transmitter called catecholamine related to hormones. And Brunel with his banged head sunk in an overflow that has collected — Brunel breathing air and water and fire — will think not of the devoted waiting wife, or his centrifugal solution to the threat of suffocation by a coin caught in his throat in the bosom of his family, or his dawn horseback ride to Bath thence to survey the valley of the Avon and the soft hill clay along a canal, but thinks rather at once about what caused the fire on the Great Western—and the clear answer in his new Great Britain is David Napier’s new feed-water heater, not to stop the excess heat around the funnel but to use it. I do not wish for a technology of wedlock. Still there are times — a problem could have been stated, a pain received as a message. Dagger got Alba’s phone call at the école in Ajaccio and at once saw that even if her false labor did not last, she had to know he was on his way back to London — though in Paul’s October cab I wondered if Dagger had used the false labor (which must have been nerves because Alba took methodical care not to overtax her body) to get us out of Corsica before I poked into something that was not our business. Now Brunel’s Great Britain had another problem on her maiden voyage to New York. She lost her way and ran aground on the coast of Ireland, and at daybreak the skipper looked for the Isle of Man and saw the Mountain of Mourn, but this was because there were errors in a new chart that had not existed in the old. More important, this was a mishap that Brunel’s unprecedented longitudinal iron girders (like his earlier timber viaduct that survived the head-on collision of two trains) could withstand but not forestall. And so in the transfer from the old chart to the new the Great Britain (51 feet broad, 289 feet long between perpendiculars) survived, and so did Brunel’s name, which was enhanced.
I was on the verge of a formulation. Ned Noble’s terminal breaths lay ahead but near, and Andsworth’s Integrated Breathing beckoned me on past my concern for a shrunken heart and my concern about why he did not urge me to attend macrobiotic meals at the Community though I would have declined. He kept his activities in compartments, as Geoff Millan did his friends, and as once in those long drizzly safe winters in London I had thought Dagger did not.
Speak of the devil!
I said it aloud.
We were bumping to a stop at the red light and John’s cab ran on ahead.
It was what Dagger had said coming away from our preliminary visit to Stonehenge.
Slowing down to help the Druid, Dag had said Speak of the devil, as if recalling negotiations through Andsworth and not our present dispute about what film we’d used for the threesome against the fortress wall in Ajaccio. But Dagger had been stubbornly attentive; and now I understood.
But I had no time; two of that threesome were Marie and Incremona, and John-of-Coventry said she had been after Len to go on a macrobiotic diet, and Dagger’s stomach had been kicking up after breakfast at the école and I’d told him to change his diet, and he’d been reaching with his free hand for a Turns when the three appeared, and whether or not it was at Andsworth’s in South London that Incremona had beaten up Nash after the South Ken fiasco, it was clearly Andsworth’s Community that drew the Druid into the fortress scene in Dagger’s mind as we sighted the old Ford on Salisbury Plain and slowed down to help him fix his flat.
But I had no time, because that was precisely what Paul’s cab had — a flat.
No time to figure Andsworth’s collaborations with friends, enemies, and neutrals; nor for the unlikely prospect that my train of thought had caused this flat.
Guiding Ruby and Tris across the islanded double road of Park Avenue South at 7 A.M. for breakfast at a coffee shop, I saw Incremona and a blond man half turned away at a postbox on the southwest corner, I could have raised my voice in song and no one would have heard, for the sound around us was that great; I could have been one of those street singers of yore who materialized out of Atlantic Avenue and wandered the fine enclosed streets of Brooklyn Heights on a Sunday morning and looked up to our windows for a couple of buffalo nickels tight-folded in a chewing-gum-sized scrap of the Sunday Times—and no one here in Manhattan (perhaps even including Incremona who at that moment tracked my physical presence only) would have known much less taken me for a mad yeller attacking the system diagonally from some corner — the sound around us was that great.
But now as I bolted from Paul’s cab and ran after John’s, thinking if nothing else I could ascertain that he was not after all leading me where I thought, Paul shouted into a quiet that can be a city’s powerful charm at night be it London, New York, or somewhere in between — a humming quiet like an afterglow of glare, a field just out of sight voicing a guarantee that something has happened and will again: Paul shouted, I only wanted to help!
In the last word the deep voice out of that narrow tall chest contained still like an obscure unvoiced quiet surrounded by all the windy vacuum of other answers, those words It comes to that, and that alone.
Two hundred and forty miles without the wheel.
But where then was the calm Jan said Paul had found beyond stones and stars, beyond contemplation? But hell, here he’d been driving me into a trap.
To help me?
I could not find John’s cab. It turned west where I expected but did not then turn into the block of Mercer that I’d thought I was being drawn into. I was out of breath. There was no light around the shade in John’s loft.
When I got back to Paul’s cab, it was empty in the middle lane with its lights on and the traffic light ticking from green to red, and John-of-the-loft seemed not to have come back. I ran my hand around the tread of the tire that had gone, and I found what I was looking for.
Rose had Ruby and Tris till Sunday. Sub’s tests would be over then.
Should have kept the cab, said Dagger on Saturday — fixed your flat, hundred percent mobility, drive and park till the city towed you away, could have had it as our first car for weeks.