I breathe away the pain, the room is in my blood, breathing. Gene squints as if in pain, he doesn’t dream it’s the Montrose heart Mary’s here in New York for. Nash bites on a ring staring at Len’s empty door.
I say to Nash: It was Nell — it was through Nell that Tessa’s daughter knew Reid.
Nash to Gene: Tessa knew Nell!
Gene to me: Savvy knew the husband Dudley.
Nash to me: You were balling Tessa. Nell told Savvy.
Gene to no one: Tessa got him into Mexican stuff, she said.
I’m queasy. The uninterrupted expanse of pale carpet looks new. Headlines say 2500 to 5000 are dead and there’s a follow-up on what seems now recent news I’ve missed — Britain has opted for the Common Market.
There’s talking outside this room from beyond each door, but then also around — like an axis turning into motion.
What Mexican stuff? says Jan.
I believe Dagger the source of Jan’s film no more readily than myself the source of the Marvelous Country House described by me to Dagger then really found by him — nor the source Tessa either, who in March described to me that very house known I see now through Nell Flint, but Tessa did not meet the DiGorros till mid-July.
System probably moves toward increasingly improbable states: Cartwright’s Law?
My shtip Thursday with Graf is now far off as the point of its twinge, to wit Other Life at some harmonious remove from me — which is my power that I’m on the point of formulating in front of Monty when I remember having had my lookout dream; but power about to burst in through Chad’s closed door and Incremona’s open door plunges me again, in mid-formula, beyond its knowledge, and the body that Andsworth’s ideas have given me is mine but not mine: pulses swash more ways at once, there’s a chopper coming apart in my future, the Dagger-loop blinks through evenings of discussion and through the Beaulieu’s advertised featherweight six and a half pounds but greater far through a growing diary now marked by a megalith near where Krish’s body if unfound by Jack may have risen with the aid of a dilettante geologist in a red mini whom Jan must know — Dagger-loop parallels other pulses, loops or not loops: red jaguar darting (Mexico, Jack, Dag, Jan, me): plot against Flint that Jack seems himself part of; and (near, yet tracked apart from, John-of-the-loft’s authentic care for his real work surrounded but not touched by Aut’s cash) the Druid’s holy sobriety leads near but past a cache of organic exile hash, near but past a quiet downstairs bedroom where Nash was sorely beaten, near but past more of Andsworth’s survival economics — a Napoleonic fake of the French cartographer Nicholas Sanson’s 1658 map of the British Isles with two delicate scroll cartouches and thickish yet delicate outlines that make the land look singed out of the sea, survival economics — near but clear of the undevalued strait gate of the one flat map thence through the strait-jacket of the body’s network to Ned’s sixteen-year-old face not to be saved by any bell the despised Lord Kelvin rings from his demonstration models yet not marked by a cancer frantically circuiting within to carry the message out, petulant sixteen-year-old futures leaving a go-Dutch-yourself blank for a Brooklyn Heights Gentile hand of pedestrian invention to fill in with its own magic shtip reaching between gravities but not in time for an autographed sphere along a flat shelf that exists only in that hand’s instinct.
I’m hungry. Sub’s children are with Rose for the weekend.
Nash eyeing me laughs and speaks; but it has no more to do with his real thoughts about Nielsen and Stonehenge and me, than on the day of Boyd’s autographed ball my stabbing reach was conscious of a meaning in it that Ned and I later tacitly shared without benefit of demonstration. Nash is telling me of all people that Incremona’s been in a rage ever since the cops towed his taxi off day before yesterday, and I ask if he’s planning to blow up a few police tow trucks, and when Jan (behind me as if behind my eyes) asks if Len had the necessary cash to bail the cab out, Nash and I laugh in such a way that I know the cab was stolen whether or not they knew Paul had it — and now the Frenchman lets go with a great laugh like the ground rushing up to meet you, and I am sure the twenty thousand is some deal Len has with Jack.
Gene says, You don’t know what you’re doing. Mike says, He knows all right, but there’ll be no doing.
Between the two truths a space occurs, a new volume there was not room for.
I get out my pen and search my pockets and say, Oh Jerry’s got the address book. And I reach down and tear a corner of newspaper just above the headline. I put it in my palm and draw spontaneously a logo for Ned’s lost time-machine.
There is a space I’m trying to use, having seen it come into being. Mike is questioning Jan.
Chad is saying that I gave parts of the diary away.
To my wife, for instance.
That doesn’t count, says Nash (and then irrelevantly but with relish), she was holding hands Sunday night.
At Savvy’s of course — whom I told to look up Dudley Allott in the North Library when Savvy had to use the British Museum one week long ago.
But the space that I have reached into existence fills with the memory of a stabbing pain due to past or future hard to tell — (a) a train ride up from the south coast, a boatyard mentioned to a Frenchman who kept saying, Correct, and would not discuss the May événements (“CONSUMER SOCIETY MUST DIE A VIOLENT DEATH”—“TAKE YOUR DESIRES FOR REALITIES”) or (b) the prospect of a drink with Lorna, Dudley, Tessa, and Tessa’s father — or some jellied eels in between that may have been as pivotal as the depressing old man in the bog (English for john) who kept my hands wet and bent my ear about his dream of a wheel-shaped radially compartmented pub to please everyone — yes after him my stab dissolved and I went back upstairs to have a drink and hear about German Jews wandering the wartime Heath.
Why not, says Nash — you took his wife to Mexico.
And the space I have reached into being fills on the eve of the Allotts’ sailing for New York with Tessa’s suitcase and with the stone she gives me, then, hearing Dudley and Jane, takes away to give Lorna.
I’ve never been to Mexico, I say to Nash. I’ve been to Stonehenge.
And before I can do the job myself, the space fills up with something other than Tessa’s third moment: it is survival politics, stop-gap, and crass, a curtain of flesh and failure, both the Māyā Lorna had her hand on firming it up so it didn’t look like Southeast Asia any more, and the purpose Dag and I in an old Volkswagen receding from the National Film Theatre settled at last, a film-to-be, settled in words.