I was curious, said Gilda on Friday; you’re not responsible for me. She had at last got a call through to me at Sub’s to report that the man who had called himself Cartwright had come again and she had got into the spirit of the thing, couldn’t help it, and had told him a scary bald man had told her Cartwright was meeting Claire — at which this impersonator of me had been strangely shaken.
I walked from Paul’s cab to Monty’s house, which was dark. Later I phoned Claire and got her answering service.
Paul would not knowingly kill me.
I must find out what it was I knew that was so important to these people.
I would have to ask.
The black man who’d said We all part of the system, man, had chuckled when Paul’s cab crunched the glass of a bottle the black man would have hit John with if my steps or the inevitable field of my presence had not made John stop and look back, and the bottle crashed in the gutter instead, there to insert some of itself into the arriving tire of my cab.
Friday I waited in Sub’s apartment.
For Incremona, Nash, the Frenchman, Jenny, Chad, June — I wasn’t sure.
I phoned Claire’s answering service and said I’d be seeing her.
Nothing happened.
I found if I waved at the TV from a distance of four feet I could stop the picture rising.
In the evening Sub phoned from the hospital. Keep the sound down, Ruby had bad dreams. Then Sub remembered the children were with Rose, and I heard him breathing erratically.
At home he watched the news and thrillers, thrillers with the sound off. Educational TV was starting a series of good films, old films, no interruptions.
What are you doing in? said Sub.
At ten the phone rang but the caller did not speak.
At eleven and at twelve the same.
No one tried the door.
Incremona had seen the children with me.
I tried to get you, said Dagger Saturday.
But in fact it had been Claire who’d phoned Saturday morning just as I was leaving for her apartment, and when I told her it was a pure accident my leaving the letter from Dag on Phil Aut’s desk, Claire did not know, she did not know — she had not been told — she had not been to her office.
Why did I believe her? I let her talk. I could not stop her. But something stopped her, after she had told me Monty was not a fool no matter what our meeting at the restaurant might lead me to think. In London he’d told Dagger I’d be staying at the King Street house, I was extraordinary but Monty was afraid of me; but I must not, please, think him a fool.
Her goodbye came so fast then that it seemed cut off; I had not answered his challenge about the letter on Aut’s desk, so Monty must have heard from Jan.
But there was so much he had not asked. Like the sound. The sound tapes he’d asked about like a madman outside my cab the first time we parted so long ago it seemed. Why didn’t he ask this time? Three of those tapes were in a parka under a bed in his house. Where were the others?
But here was my friend Dagger who at length had opened Claire’s door on a beautiful October Saturday in New York and was jollying me along about “our” taxi whose flat I should have fixed, and my secret visits to his wife, and was I trying to put Jenny through a survival course, man, and Dagger had come very close to flying up to the Hebrides looking out for her.
He wore an Army jacket and a Castro cap; he took the dog’s leash off the closet door-handle. I was about to ask where Claire was and why Dagger had wished to put the Softball Game between the Hawaiian-in-the-Underground and the Suitcase Slowly Packed, but I reached down without looking and touched the familiar bulk of an untouched Sunday Times and was glad the film was probably destroyed, maybe I could conquer my weightlessness and sell the destroyed film to Jack Flint who must not wish his brother Gene’s wife and house on view, nor his agent Krish in the Softball Game, nor his brother Paul the guru in transit at the Bonfire in Wales (near where Brunel’s timber viaduct over the Usk burned and was replaced by him with iron) — nor would Jack want his brother, his youngest his magnetic brother Paul’s voice on a Nagra tape or his face in a stone doorway at the probable scene of Jim Nielsen’s liquidation. For you could never tell how someone would make use of film footage — U.S. Air Force planes acquired for a moment to illustrate power possessed of momentum but insufficient focus like Cosmo’s Sunday fastball; America and England mingling in some dream of action and peace; Brunel’s great Clifton suspension bridge across the Avon gorge failing to convey me, my son, my dreams, my daughter, my wife (so that one might almost agree with Ned Noble’s late conviction that the finished thing, contrary to Kelvin’s belief in demonstration, was inferior to the concept); an American couple making music in a passage I used to walk along with my children; the use of my life as background for something else; the nervous wife fluttering in anti-climactic 8 mill, stronger than she looked.
Strong enough to lift that carton out of sight last Sunday night.
Claire’s big black retriever lay across the living-room threshold while Dagger fumbled for the ring to snap the leash. The dog seemed very calm if it was really about to be walked.
Dagger must have been telling the truth that Claire was not in, for he was taking the dog out. Asking me to wait.
To wait?
Claire’s expecting a delivery man.
I don’t believe you, friend, I said.
That’s your fault, friend.
If Claire’s absence and her unexcited dog did not show I was being once again set up, all other signs pointed inward at me. All the reports.
I placed a call to Highgate. While I waited I reread Dagger’s letter. It had come from London to Monty’s house in King Street, been conveyed to John’s loft probably by Jan, read by Jan or Paul or John or Monty or some or all of these or more; so whatever of me Dagger had sent was there for them as welclass="underline" H.E.W. (on recommendations from, among others, a behaviorist friend of the English schoolteacher who’d been sacked from his job in the Bahamas) will take Mr. DiGorro on for pilot study to determine if the government wishes to get into sleep-teaching at federal level; and Dagger says in the letter, All bets are off with the film, sorry man you pushed too hard but you surprised me man and I’ll always wonder what you would have done in Corsica without me, right now the heat’s on and this heat confuses me but you know all about it — be good to Claire, we’ll be in touch.
It would work; it was not the piece of that retreating dream he’d had the morning of that little b & w crucifixion on the beach with the Bahama sand in his eyebrows and California sticking to his eyes and he’d been asleep enough to hold the thought that dreams are a species of sleep-teaching with a key difference that Dagger was just awake enough to lose; but now, what the hell — for peat’s sake — plain sleep-teaching would pay the bills — it would work, it would keep millions of kids away from violent schools during peak hours and Alba would work and transfer her closet to a new set of equally clear axes, Dagger did not get bogged down.
I said Cancel the call.
A man’s voice with an English accent said, No reply, sir.
Just as well. She would have asked where Jenny was.
Right, sir.
Well, Tessa had never except literally had her teeth in me, and I thought Lorna knew this by instinct, even if she did not know what she meant when on that July Sabbath that my own Hindu-American shtip had set off she’d said I had friends — married friends — to organize me on my travels.
I ran by others’ times and, cogged to one another, they by mine — which brought me near again to a formula but shunted off again at the memory of being shunted this terminal Thursday of October by Monty’s information and the thought and threat of Dagger’s letter but by being shunted given a gift, namely that on Tuesday night when Sub had already entered Roosevelt Hospital for tests and I fried cheeseburgers and told the kids the story of the Three Brothers and of how Dagger got his name, and watched a thriller in which everyone talked softly and walked loudly, and I waited for Jenny to phone and wondered if the Frenchman and Nash had gotten to her — I had dreamt my lookout dream, and now recalled nothing of it but that fact. But as if sound had been time, no time had passed while for me Monty had been soundless — and when my Sabbath shtip had ended I listened as closely to the dinner in Coventry as I had to the trivial news that had caused my shtip— Dagger’s H.E.W. and a carton of audio gear to fall back on.