I know where I am. And it is something of a mystery. His name’s Whitehead like mine is Rap Brown. The New York “So call me Red” didn’t fit the firmly modulated warning in what he said about Bristol. I was potentially redundant. But nothing seemed inevitable yet.
Or was I envisioning from my Sub-encapsulated headquarters a casting off of everything inessential to the film? I asked what was new. He said some audio-visual stuff for schools. I said did he know a Phil Aut. There were two rings and then he said, Can I put you on Hold, and I said, I’ll be in touch.
But if Phil Aut phoned, what could I offer him in the way of a threat? Tell him what happened in the Unplaced Room and guess what it was he didn’t want to hear? I became the film’s sound, not at all an echo but (from a written diary) a delayed voice now printed on the original image’s absence, though Aut could not know if the Unplaced Room had survived the fire. I was figuring he knew through Claire that a fraction of the film did still exist.
A lot had not happened.
It was well to be at last at the Unplaced Room. I must find its proper audience. You can’t just recall something, like Savvy after the Softball Game telling Dagger he was afraid UPI might reassign him to St. Louis.
A lot never happened in England.
Jenny took Dagger to a shop near us one lunchtime to pick up a couple of emergency wine glasses — she liked to be baited by Dagger and she may have told him things she’d not tell Lorna — and the two proprietors of this smart shop with its window full of casseroles and design mugs and French vegetable choppers were locking up — a white man and a black girl — and they refused to make the sale — closed one to two — so Dagger said what would happen if they broke their rule and the man said, We couldn’t have lunch together. But across our own lunch table Jenny afterward turned on Dagger saying, Fair enough, after all they’ve a right. Dagger got right to her saying, No one has any rights, Jenny, and as for fairness, that’s the great empty virtue; and when Jenny said, But fairness is in fact why you like living in England, Dagger laughed and said she was so right, fairness was like loyalty, and Jenny got mad and said he didn’t take her seriously. She took her glass and as she drank, Dagger said, I’ll drink a toast to not taking you seriously, and he drank and I drank and Jenny drank her whole glass, which was an old-fashioned glass, and Will asked if Dagger could get some thunderclaps again this year for July 4th.
But Dagger’s footwork, however prone to seasonal gout, seemed unconvincing when we lost our film. Look, he said, if we could get it back, then sure let’s go after it, but we can’t.
I said, We might get something — like what was the motive? — passing vandal breaks in when you just happen to be out, leaves I don’t know how many camera lenses and a miniature telly and a hundred pounds cash in a cupboard he’s taken the trouble to jimmy open, and three new Sony cassette-recorders unopened in their boxes — but wait, this fellow is a cinephobe, smells film in quantity, and passing your house that morning his crazy nostrils inflated scenting twenty-five hundred feet of movie film and up he came to your flat and, if I may reverse the likeness, saw like a tourist-vampire what he could smell.
Something may happen yet, said Dagger, but so we find out who did it, what then? Beat up on him? confiscate his wife?
Maybe my friend was getting tired. But hadn’t he cared as much as I? Think how he’d darted from face to face at Stonehenge, from robes to giant stone to bluejeans, from one of the new Druids to the American mute with his green beret to the American Indian we’d dragooned through the little long-haired English woman at the bonfire in Wales — back to the midnight mumbo-jumbo which in some sentimental transcendence engrossed the lay cast into a scene not false, not trivially tourist, that through a luck like magic seemed then — and even now when I know some of what else was going on — to complete our film, so I almost thought Dagger’s sense of it was like mine. Such intentness, the on and off of the Beaulieu motor, the certain passionate defensiveness of rhythm, the concentration of forehead, mouth, wrist, shoulder that framed Dagger off from all the others there who unlike him were, until the last invisible sprocket, potential for these last feet of our film. No, I could understand in his later resignation only fatigue, not reason. For he had been as much into that film as I.
At least he didn’t say now, Well anyway we shot it.
Yet if I failed here now in New York, that’s what I’d be saying: At least I tried.
But if I took the gloves off, my openings might disappear and there’d be nothing to get hold of.
Well, as I was checking to see if in the pages I’d brought there were any references to the Unplaced Room, Monty Graf phoned. Had I thought about his proposition? I said I thought I might sell the diary as a scenario for a feature film. He said Very funny, and said by the way I didn’t expect him to believe we’d only had one small rush and the rest hadn’t been processed. For why have that and nothing else?
It’s certainly implausible, I said.
I think your film isn’t destroyed, he said.
I would like to think that, I said.
And you and DiGorro are holding out for something.
If so, I said, why have I had no offer from Aut?
You haven’t fed him enough of the diary.
Haven’t fed him any of it.
The guy who gave you those pages works for Aut. But OK, how does the stabbing fit the pattern?
Claire can’t have seen much of it, I said.
But you seem to have seen a lot in it, Cartwright.
I looked at the phone receiver by my chin thinking the gloves were coming off.
I was not speaking while thinking. I was only thinking, while there was either silence on the line or Monty Graf speaking, mentioning again that we were holding out for a big payday (but not suggesting we were blackmailing anyone), mentioning the time of the stabbing (but not mentioning the florist’s). I was thinking Sub would be in the nation’s capital till Sunday, and Monty Graf seemed to conceal more about my presence at and interest in the stabbing incident than I thought Claire (unless she had information beyond her own actual experience) could have given him to conceal.