Or, as with me, the image emerged out of standard elements while you sat in a dark projection room during an intermission half-listening to a couple of computer-filmmakers argue whether one can compose more freely with plasma-crystal panels.
You may never be called to account for what you’ve seen, but you’ve seen the glove port and the white coveralls and some of the semi-automated gear on the other side; and you’ve seen, let us say, radioactive material the glove hand handles without contamination.·
Like me, you have in your head things you may not have exactly seen.
Like a lookout cartridge.
Or the Landslip Drive-in Movie, whose monumental screen under clean and clement American stars and in front of you and a hundred other cars without audible warning one summer night began to lower, to tilt back hugely and drop as if into a slot in the earth.
The image became yours even more surely by disappearing. It disappeared with a distinguished rumble mixed with what still came out of the speaker draped over the edge of your car window. An actress and actor in the corrected colors of the spectrum had been touching each other’s colossal faces and their breaths kept coming faster and more intimately loud to bring right into your car this whopping slide of mouths and fingers and nostrils inserted into the night-pines and sea-sky above the locally well-known clay cliffs that had just enjoyed their first clear day in two weeks. But now for the first time since before World War II a section of cliff gives way and the famous faces are swept as if by their camera right up off the monumental screen until you have only the upper half of the two torsos thrown onto the remaining upper half of the descending screen as it tilts back toward the sea; and now where’s the movie? The drive-in screen’s rear props fall with the clay cliff, and mouths and cheekbones and eyelids have tipped away under the projector’s light.
Then you have before you ocean sky — not to mention an experience tomorrow’s news won’t do justice to — and you get your feet on the ground as your speaker with its static swings with the car door. You look to the rear of the drive-in and see many silhouettes doing the same as you.
You find the cone of light still projected.
Circuits in the head make the image feasible. These often bypass other printed circuits neater and newer. These newer circuits can ask questions not so sharp as the images streaming from older circuits but still of interest to me. Questions like: Is there an insurance group prepared to write a policy to cover Landslip Drive-in up to and including landslip itself? Would fissures appear well in advance of such a major landslip? What are the dimensions of such a cinema screen? How many outdoor drive-in screens one hundred by sixty feet exist in England?
The American girl said no to breakfast. She then shifted under the clammy-looking khaki blanket she’d tucked round herself in the deck chair sometime the night before and looked apparently through a break in the bushes toward the Thames and a barge pilothouse passing, and said well yes she would, then stared up at me and said after all no thanks, and instead of asking what I was doing in Embankment Gardens at seven, which is early for a commuter to be coming through Charing Cross, she said, How long you been over?
Most of them don’t know a fellow American short of an Alabama twang or an American Express travelers check. I said I had a daughter almost her age who was born a year before we moved to England. The barge pilot-house had moved beyond the corner of my eye, pigeons walked along Brunel’s Embankment wall, the girl smiled back up at me from her deck chair on the grass near the band stage and said, Lucky scrounger.
I thought, A girl doesn’t have to shave first thing in the morning.
In the summer of ’53 Lorna laughed and laughed when I couldn’t zip our sleeping bags together because one track was half rusted out.
When I was a boy my grandfather wouldn’t shave till after we came back for breakfast and cleaned our white perch. The loons the other end of the lake would toss out their watery laugh. No one else would be on the still surface. My grandfather would bob his rod a couple of times and so would I. If the Maine sky was gray he’d say, They love that sky.
The American girl’s suede desert boots were propped on her knapsack. My hand on the top of her deck chair felt the drizzle beginning. She looked up and said, You homing on me? and I said, Scrounger.
In summer I let the odd bus conductor take me for a tourist. What does it matter? But also English people down from the North with their children for a weekend have asked me the way. I know London as only an American can. They’d say how long since you’ve been back to America, and I’d say I’m always going back.
If you are not sure where you are, you have me.
Lorna came with me to the airport when I went to Chicago in ’64. Her perfume and her pallor went together. The cabbie when he let us out at the Departures Building said, Had a good time then? and Lorna quickly said, Oh we’ve lived here for years.
What do you mean, always going back? said the American girl. She worked the blanket up under her chin. You must be rich or you’ve got a racket. Spain’s cheaper.
No surprise in any case to be once again entering a holding pattern over Kennedy listening to the captain’s baritone pass on to his passengers the commuterized forecast of an autumn cold front coming in from Ohio, which to a New Yorker is the Midwest.
No surprise to be held up getting into Manhattan from Kennedy.
No surprise in ocher twilight on the expressway to see slowed, outbound cars with their lone drivers float toward us over the rise.
No surprise to find New York hard to enter, though perhaps always a surprise to find New York.
No surprise to be on a sidewalk Wednesday morning walking north trying to use the Druid’s advice.
Surprising only that this time I brought a venture whose principal product had been virtually ruined a month before. So instead of concentrating on letting my neck muscles ease into my lung mass, I was imagining that the Druid had secretly pondered Dagger’s film and my diary of it.
I knew just how much I was going to tell Claire.
Twenty blocks north the mauve and amber air waited retreating before a glittering length of vehicles. Down into the deafening business of the avenue down through the late-morning film the dots of light thirty-six stories up gave alternately time and temp. The traffic here close was spaced and moving. On the small panel truck that passed me was my name.
To feel the sheaf of diary inside my jacket I put my hand to my breast like a hatless bigwig hearing a national anthem.
I knew roughly what I was going to do.
However, I could not know in advance that at an intersection in Manhattan I would abruptly have to think about a piece of equipment common everywhere but put now to unusual use.
On such an instrument the stabber will leave no usable prints: at most a few curves broken from a second, still more fugitive set of marks in his moist palm. Recompose the two sets if you can, but it won’t be with an expert’s dust and a police photographer’s plate.
The stabber may reflect that given the instrument’s diameter there could be no prints worth developing. But what he will not recall is what he did not see or feel in his skin gripping the instrument — to wit, the presence behind him of an old college classmate Cartwright whom he might have known if he’d turned around.
At the comer ahead, sandy hair and a tanned neck became now the profile of Jim Wheeler, who turned his head sharply as if to peer at the couple on his left who had stepped off the curb and stood looking at each other.