But there is still space, and for Uncle Karl who finds in his wife’s fine-fingered hand space for a postscript to Tessa’s father who phones me when “the children” are in Massachusetts to ask what is the matter with Dudley and to share with me Karl’s P.S. (you know he’s blind? yes, I know): that the early nomad Hebrews living “between the desert and the sown, between the most fertile of lands and the total negation of life, which in this remarkable corner of the earth lie cheek by jowl” may have developed a “tension…between a desire and a contempt for what is desired”: interesting, I agree, and the Dudley question fades, very interesting indeed; and is Uncle Karl still enjoying his dream house? Oh no, they moved to a flat in Tel Aviv. Still sleeps till ten in the morning? It’s possible, the voice turns uncertain. And have they a cat? Always a cat. A new cat? An Israeli cat.
By luck Karl is prepared; he dreams of a house he has often designed, bombs turn to rain showers and garden flowers spring up faster than mushrooms or the house itself; there is not even pain, or so he can’t recall — he has a bump later, and of course he is blind, but the dream house swung back and disappeared like a shooting-gallery target but then swings back up and Uncle Karl is awake: the German tabby dislodging an old heavy wedding present was four feet above him, so not even his cat’s paw did he feel, much less claws at a throbbing eyeball like body meat ripped out from under a river turtle’s shell by a jaguar unlike either the red jaguar throne at Chichen Itza near an ancient Maya observatory, the Caracol, with its square wall-holes giving sunset and moonset lines-of-sight which Dudley himself checked on March 21, 1965, nor the jaguar’s Maya name balam, hidden thing, which in Tessa’s troubled passion was just right for the camouflaged violence that reached its thirsty teeth down from the dark, and Dagger told me he wished he’d known all this before venturing into the heart of the jungle in search of his friend because he could have used a cultural rest-stop even a detour from time to time — he looked up the Mayas later in New Orleans.
I did not in so many words offer Lorna the Marvelous Country House. Was it Tessa I was offering?
You say my face betway? Betway what?
Oh at last the Frenchman’s come out of his visiting bulk.
Betray? I laugh to Gene. Well if this thing began as a loyalty test Len laid on you, it might end out of all your hands, so don’t sweat the loyalty angle, Geney.
Geney! says Nash. Geney!
In my mouth Jack’s big-brother name for Gene surprises me, it comes from the east and the north, from invented compass bearings scribbled with a wet hand on borrowed paper in a Hebridean hut a week ago tonight, and Gene grabs for the scrap in my palm and misses, and the Frenchman demands my answer and Gene in some collaboration that is out of my hands says low to me, Do you think Incremona would ever have settled for a Flint warehouse, do you think that? you know damn well the idea wasn’t Incremona’s just as Jack knew damn well your name wasn’t Wheeler with that fake accent coming in out of the rain—he knows Wheeler — but Incremona! forget it! the idea for a Flint warehouse—
Fingers jerking my arm are French and the question comes again, Betway? betway? betway what?
I shake my head with a pitying grin for Chad who has darted over behind Gene and grips Gene’s arm, but Gene thinks the grin is for him.
Nothing like sharing information, I say, you’ve told me where, why don’t you tell me when?
You know when, says Nash — we know that from Van Ghent.
I say (and laugh), Oh you guys are incredible, aw Chad boy you should never have visited Paul in the Hebrides, June told me all about it.
Nash moves close, he wants to hit me with those rings, he’s raised his voice to a pitch of purposeless energy: OK so it was Chad’s idea, man, but it came out of the group, man, and did you know you’re through, man?
Yet none seems to see me.
Chad has swiped Nash to the floor.
Gene eyes the other door. I know what Incremona will say. He is through Chad’s door and I am saying, Don’t worry about me, Nash, it’s Nielsen’s friend Bob Coronelli you better look out for, but the Frenchman yanks me around, and now Incremona is calling across the room as if across a considerable distance: how did Gene know about Jack and that jaguar? was Gene in touch with Jack? and whose friend was DiGorro anyway?
Not mine, says Gene—
Because (calls Incremona slowly) I don’t know the answer to that one — because “your” friend DiGorro pulled a fast one, right?
I was on the carpet, the Frenchman had shoved me down; but I’ve spun up to face Incremona, who stares through me as through a gap and says, not across the room but close, You were right there’s no film; you knew he wasn’t going to come across.
I was up; but hands from behind held me. So Dagger planned to sell the film. But who to?
Voices evoked by me pass through me:
Jack didn’t know him at Paul’s last Saturday so they’ve worked fast.
Paul’s behind this!
Paul’s gone to Chile.
What do you mean Chile? — that’s where I’m going with Jerry.
Cut it out. So what if there’s no film?
Don’t give me Bob—Bob knew Nielsen had to go.
Twisting to be free of the arms, I want to know whose. The other door where Incremona left to take his call now shuts. Incremona’s right behind me, and he has himself shut the door he reentered by — Chad’s door. Ned Noble is dying in a movie theater, the children’s section smells of peanuts and warm chocolate, there’s a rustling arithmetic of nickels and dimes dropped in the dark of the St. George Playhouse on Pineapple Street on Brooklyn Heights — and in the darkness the starched white matron leans over my sister and me to tell Ned to stop groaning; I can’t quite see the movie, can’t quite hear whose words in Dagger’s VW receding from the National Film Theatre, key words — but all that opens is Sub’s ripe fridge, a snowdrift round the freezing compartment, semisoft Birds Eye cardboard thus insulated from subfreezing temperatures; and Ned, dying, can say only that Kelvin was a jerk; and while I want to dream of peat wheels and hand-hewn oak subway carriages and the Brunel-Cartwright memorial moving terminal founded on that original Maya system using twenty and the breathtakingly original concept of zero, and a hand claws a scrap out of my palm, I feel but cannot understand a law that lies beyond increasing improbability and the more I feel it the less I can claim it as let us say Cartwright’s Law; but not quite hearing the words in Dagger’s car I am ready to be at home with the unexpected which is a concussion that inserts itself like the Om of an overhot stereo in a space in my body not previously there, an emptiness eased in with dry oil of whispers:
The gell.
Tourists have accidents.
What are you doing? What’s that?
Lighter fluid.
Where are you going?
Back to Taos, New Mexico. How about that?
He’s going to blow up a few police tow trucks.
The Bay of Bengal tidal wave blobs like a fingerprint that didn’t hold still, the dead align along mud terraces that I see now too late were the isobars of my fingerprint, reaching for the strings of two helium balloons my wife has just yanked from the ceiling and punched out the garden door. Through a crystal clarity equating a kind of silence, a hand in glove reaches to you — you are dangerous, worth study, valuable, and what seems at first to be Tessa’s word twenty disperses itself into Tessa saying, So what, twenty”? so what, zero? the Maya got that from China — that’s not what matters about the Maya! — but no, the word twenty cut off so it turned into an absolute or an idea was my word, my last word.