A heavy carton? Dagger had surely swung a hop from a U.K. base and skipped the excess-weight charges. Alba loved London. She was excited by Dagger’s absences, but she would not like Washington. But they would find a flat or something larger and there would be room, and they would have another child. And Alba would be careful. And have I lulled you who have me?
Well I was over Claire’s living-room threshold in a second as if the room were a thought and from that clear pale indefinably oriental order I carried in my eye in another second back to the bedroom door the living-room blow-up of Claire’s grainy arm, and as I opened the bedroom door knowing what I wanted in her closet, I feared I would find something awful between it and me. But the king-size low expanse was flat as a motel bed and I whipped open her deep closet and hauled out from under the longer hems of dresses and the shorter limits of pants suits what Alba would never never have made the mistake of lifting Sunday night in London if she had not feared I would find out what was inside.
I clawed at the seam.
Tore my right index nail.
Two amplifiers a snug top layer.
Below were Nagra tapes.
And the rest was 16 mill.
Ours.
Dated and Placed. In my hand.
Developed or not I could not easily tell.
My blood was on the amplifier carton.
I gathered all the tapes.
I put them down on the bed and left blood there too.
I laid the amplifiers back in the carton.
A picture of Claire on the night table reminded me of how Jenny is like my sister.
In the incinerator room shared by the other tenants on this floor I unrolled our black-and-white Stonehenge and it was a developed negative, tiny and lurid.
Near the hundred-foot mark of the second Stonehenge reel I looked for Paul being tugged through a portal by the witch Tessa in her green beret but found Nash instead and remembered that not Dagger but the other man in the plastic mac had probably shot Tessa tugging Paul, and then I gave up unrolling the cork-screw celluloid and took the reels out of their cases and dumped the lot and heard the rattle halfway down fifteen floors to the basement furnace, then read the white letters on the black plastic plaque telling what not to put down the chute, and wondered if in fact film was still made out of celluloid.
Liquid assets you say?
Not liquid enough.
I took last Sunday’s Times from Claire’s hall table. I opened the pages and scrunched them as if to start some kindling and filled the top of Dagger’s carton and found some Scotch tape (called one of America’s signal inventions, by a famous English writer with famous scientific forebears who himself died an American citizen in California taming his terminal throes with LSD).
I sealed the carton, shoved it into the closet, realigned two pairs of slippers in front, and went to answer a buzz that proved to be not the door but the housephone.
Dagger had been told by Claire all right.
Delivery man.
Two: a tall old man in bell-bottoms, a red bandanna under his chin; and a woman my age or older whom I felt I knew from a negative somewhere — platinum shag, a plump pretty face matured by comfort.
O.F. pick-up, the man said.
Had Claire known Dagger would be out?
O.F.? I said.
Outer Film, the woman said.
Your key, the man said, and handed me the key to Claire’s flat.
Now where would it be, I said, thinking of Peter Minuit and the Indians.
Bedroom closet, said the woman. Which is the bedroom?
So Claire’s triple game had now been left to simplify itself for safety’s sake.
I thought, There goes a box of newspaper; but the old man in the bandanna asked what the hell was in here, couldn’t be just film.
I pocketed Claire’s key, as her door closed.
I imagine that if you (who have me) cut me open at the right points you’d find Will, Lorna, Jenny, some others, each in motion in some way but you would find them. Yet there is something in what Jan and Tessa said of me later; and I wonder if, in the trap that I presently had to choose, my morale could have been worn down by an amplifier tuned to my heartbeat: the thunder thud: a closed system growing conscious of itself till it thinks itself into pause as if it guessed some lightning ought to have preceded it: and it waits breathless: and sometimes it waits too long.
Dagger didn’t come back.
I answered the phone.
I had to go.
The scene shifts and I with it.
Heartless they both called me — Jan, angry, then fearful; Tessa weirdly tremulous then angry at herself: heartless it was of Cartwright to gamble Jenny’s life.
Ah Tessa, there’s more than one way to gauge hormone levels (mine, Dudley’s, or a kilted chieftain’s in orbit). The two wheels cogged to each other turn their calendars toward one special day in the mesh of Maya teeth, the sacred cardiectomy proceeds upon a sunny pyramid, no sutures needed but the stress is real, four priests spread the victim on the stone, the fifth so marvelously brings down the knife and up the beating heart in his free hand that watching from below you know the heart came up to meet the hand; but not today, for here, my dear Tessa, the victim has no heart — that’s right — the breast is parted, blood goes on, there is no heart; the priest must improvise — but dares, since only the four can really see him stick the beautiful knife here and there hunting the heart the people want, who if they get to see the frantic hack-marks may go after the surgeon.
Kill him, he can disappear, said Incremona who’d been looking beyond me, and so saying he looked away from me to the doorway of a larger room that had been dark when they’d whisked me through.
For you see, Jan had said Cartwright could make people appear; and Incremona listened when she said she felt in her bones that I had made Reid appear Tuesday for I had said he was with Paul and yet when Reid entered Monty’s house Jan could see Reid was stunned to see Paul.
Skip the magic, said Chad, who was the last person I’d looked at as I was struck in the chest downstairs (if in fact where I now was was upstairs and not the basement). In the dark room that we’d come through to reach this red-and-blue room there were two great square metal housings, a TV screen, a typewriter-like keyboard, a light-pen attached to a console by a telephone-type cord — other hard edges. There were voices there now, and Chad shut the door. I knew where the building was but not where in it I was.
I was there they thought because of Jenny. I had not really expected to see her and I was not disappointed in my expectation. The blow sent my breath away and the word Stupid occurred but whether said by someone else or me or merely thought, I didn’t know, and when I could see again and think what I was seeing I was being helped through a hall to that dark room by Chad and Mike and it had not been Chad who’d hit me in the dilapidated marble vestibule, for I had turned toward him where he stood against the wall, and the blow, the fist, the arm into my chest had come from someplace else.