I do not know what went on inside me while unconscious if I was unconscious. I know what happened outside.
But my head filled the dark closet where I was slumped. The voices outside plus the thought that I was at last ready to be launched into the dream so as at last to control it led me to see myself still in that room with the newspaper, but the vivid faces that belonged to the voices I now heard did not belong to Len, Nash, Chad, Jan, Gene, Mike, or the big Frenchman, but to John-of-the-loft and someone else, and their faces were vividly visible because I was blind.
I reached for a Beaulieu sync button thus though unfilmable to record on the attached Nagra my remarks which I rehearsed in my body as if these remarks were to be my lookout dream. But as fast as I could evaporate the irrelevances with which this rehearsal filled the closet up to and beyond liquid level, more came.
But I needed the practice — my head felt inside a cartridge lined with training electrodes and was getting bigger to where it would fill the cartridge imbedding those electrodes in my head, and as for the readiness I had felt, it now needed just a quick rehearsal, but Lorna kept breaking in yet it was somehow I doing the talking and she didn’t answer when I said did she buy her new comb in London or New York, I could get two of those French tortoise-shells for the price she’d paid for one — but this one dyes, she said, and sure enough she took off her bluejeans and her hair was red in the form of Corporal’s chevrons.
But there’s a different darkness in a line across my feet; I’m not blind; whatever I was ready for has passed and I don’t feel it and I’m now not sure I had any lookout dream Tuesday, let alone just now.
I’m in a closet. It’s empty. The voices are about to stop. One of them is sorry to be late — held up in traffic. (On a Saturday? Is it still Saturday?) I smell something. A chemical used in the room where the voices are, or used on me. I’m the watchman of that lookout dream recovering consciousness, but what do I watch? It’s clear the man I haven’t heard before knows this equipment and this room but has only just arrived and is failing in some way; he can’t get John excited about the random possibilities. Of cartridge loops. John is saying Well that’s straight sixteen-mill. It’s John-of-the-loft.
John says he would follow Whitney’s early analog work complete with rotating discs, multiple axes, that whole multimovable table thing, and feed the patterns in and come out with flower targets and kaleidograms and concrete words exploding into galaxies — beautiful things, right; but now we’re going to have plasma crystals and that’s a digital system that changes the whole future for us, analog computers are antiques.
Not yet, the other says; plasma crystals don’t give you motion; you got 480 lines of resolution with 512 points per line and you need six bits of information for each of your quarter-million points all for just one single static image, man, and where you going to get that kind of computer capability?
John: Real-time projection direct — that’s what I’m after. We need two-megacycle-a-second capability in a computer to generate motion with the plasma visual subsystem, but we’ll get it. Progress is exponential now. Used to be subsystems weren’t up to the computers; now the shoe’s on the other foot.
Other: You got the subsystem?
John: My boss’s boss if we play it right.
The other is explaining plasma crystals and how you sandwich a layer between glass plates, and one plate has a mirror-conductor on the inside against the crystal and the other has tin oxide, and when you charge the crystal in between, you disrupt—
I know, says John. You know too.
But inside a headache that seemed like an old vacant idea, I knew too!
For they were talking about my product.
For these were liquid crystals, and to get motion what you do is lay on your conductive coatings in a collective mosaic like colors in successive silk screenings to produce one multicolor print and as you go along you electrically charge the tin coating and so the liquid crystal molecules are disrupted in just the patterns out of hundreds of thousands of picture elements that you want, and your preset mosaic is affected precisely as you want with your scanning signal.
Crazy turn-on, the other has said, but John says, Well, no.
The other: A visual, right?
It’s past words, says John.
It’s something else! says the other (and I could hardly hear).
No, says John. I don’t think that’s it. The liquid crystal — it’s going to be…
Exponential, the other says quietly.
Let’s not talk about it.
Like a new circuit? But not real-time projection, John — don’t give me that.
Steps, receding steps, supplant the voices.
My hand tries the knob, a button snaps into my palm. The lock works from inside too.
I see the room clearly. It’s dark. There’s a red light on a console. There’s a light somewhere else. I close my closet behind me.
My headache is the price of my power.
The footsteps slide along the light that widens as I reach another corner and two doors. I open one, I draw it closed behind me, I’ve picked wrong, I’m in another closet, and it has things in it, I fall back but sit down on metal that rises to my upper thigh.
A chance I’m still dreaming.
Because I recall no dream.
Just young John’s voice calling John-of-Coventry to the phone offstage long ago.
A new voice, an older voice, says something was terrible and someone won’t die of old age and this someone wouldn’t talk but is crazy and can be traced everywhere, England, here, France, the Flints, that crazy diary; but Jack is pinning it on someone else if that someone else stays lost.
You’d need a dozen x-ray helicopters to trace Incremona, says John. What about Mercer Street? What’s the matter with you?
It was terrible. He had trouble with her. She looked all chewed up. I don’t know what I saw, John. She looked wall-eyed. Think of it. When he got through with her.
Was she before?
And her hands were crossed on her chest and one knee was still raised. The house was OK but a windbreaker was on the floor in the basement. There’s a bedroom there. Right after she called out, the door banged and someone in the next house heard steps on the stoop, so Incremona must have gone through the house first. It was terrible.
Can I still use Mercer Street?
They thought it was an aerial. Then they found a stiletto. It springs out of a lighter. Oh God her neck, John, her front. She had the beginning of a black eye. Her hair was pulled out, John.
Who did she call for?
She just called. They said it wasn’t a scream. The steps on the stoop couldn’t have been more than one person.
I never met her.
That hair. Not exactly blond, John. They thought rape but it wasn’t after all. I never had a daughter. It was the color of wheat.
You never saw a wheat field in your life.
We’d be better off with rape. No motive problem. Why did he go after her? They didn’t close her eyes, John. Brown eyes with that light hair. They didn’t close them.
Just like a movie.
I never saw a dead girl, John. I felt responsible just looking at her. You know you can get a black eye after an extraction. You know she closed her mouth tight, can you imagine that? You know you always think of them with their mouth open.