But the Druid my sometime source says that in the current between lungs and shoulders, head and hand, breathing and pancreas — or one’s own breathing and that of others — the gate which a pulse finds open may then flip a whole future of gates; for the gods, to whom are proper certain provinces of possibility in the field of forces, know each other and know that Yes sometimes equals Yes and sometimes No, and my Druid agrees all this lore looks and is parallel to computer talk because in every age arise partial tongues that may do violence to some truth but that you learn to use to find the gods who themselves have given the tongues. Think but of the difference between the true (if flattened) globe we live in (says the Druid) and Gerardus Mercator’s plane grid on which regardless of the deformation of sphere into flat map Raleigh unlike Columbus could plot a straight-line course to the New and virgin World and know he had a line of constant compass-bearing.
Which, as my Druid may not have known, is a rhumb line— really not straight at all, a gentle loop from one point of the great circle you were following to another, but in practice a plottable and constant bearing the wheel-watch could hold till you ordered a change. Look at Mercator’s Greenland (said the Druid), it dwarfs your United States because the price of transformation is that as you move away from the Equator your scales change, latitude parallels widen, Greenland grows into a new space that both does and does not exist.
And is for my Druid more mysterious than at this stage of my film inquiry it could quite have been for me. Yet for the sailor seeking some calculated haven beyond guesswork, Greenland could grow and grow till it covered the pole — what mattered was that you could draw a line from Cape Farewell straight to Norfolk and allowing for drift and other measurable accidents actually get there.
But weighing my head in the glass of the wrong (the uptown) bus, and touched by some words above in an ad that ran the length of the bus, I asked a question more appropriate to London than New York, and it was this: What will you have in your hand if you do get to the bottom of your film mystery?
I run into people in midtown Manhattan. Old acquaintances. People in a hurry, sort of like me, people I now began to list as I walked south thinking I could better bear the full threat of that London question if I met a casual handshake creased with the offspring of the years — and these you understand are many of them in my address book — people, not years, but years too in various colors of ink — and I phone them on some of my trips; but now what I wished was for one of these persons to happen without my dialing a number — as if there were nothing odd about my trip or about its enclosing me as so many of those things are enclosed that we know but put separate in their slots or soft portable places. But I did not run into such friends from school, from college, from Brooklyn Heights, from London, from the systems of business and entertainment. And I stayed west of Claire’s pastel flat and east of Gilda’s florist, I was inevitably east of Outer Film, then south, and inevitably north and then at last west of the man in glasses and Jerry who claimed to pay the rent; and I was, in my course, several directions from Brooklyn Heights, where at this time of year my parents may or may not have been — the directions to begin with all relative (as my father might say about many matters) since Manhattan is thought of as a north and south grid only by convention, and in fact moving south in Manhattan (or one should say most of Manhattan) is moving south-southwest, take it from there.
A newsstand headline said PROBE — but the rest as I swung by was half blocked by an oblong iron weight marked LIFE. The names and hastening faces in the thick city had begun to come at me one after the other clearing me like a fence. I might be early to get into Graf’s house. The day had turned warm. I passed south to Twenty-third and thus unintentionally missed one of my few chances for a diagonal through Madison Park, the south side of which I now traversed so I saw the statue with Lincoln’s body and Seward’s head. A bum was leaning forward gripping the railing as if being searched, and as I passed, thinking he was vomiting, I saw he was peeing into the scraggly grass inside the railing, no hands, and feeling my eyes he lifted his tan face and opened his mouth to say the words asking me for something but couldn’t bring it off in that position and looked back down. Two blocks north on the park’s west (or Fifth Avenue) side the Statue of Liberty’s right forearm, hand, and torch once stood displayed as if the rest of her had been buried by time. For several years money was raised for the pedestal and then in 1884 the arm returned to Paris.
I’d passed the Seward-Lincoln story on to Will when he was studying the assassination, but now as I walked down lower Fifth Avenue thinking I’d just take a turn into Tenth Street to look at where one of the Allott aunts had found Tessa and Dudley a flat in ’64, that bony bronze touched me. First executed as Lincoln for some middle American city that in the end would not pay for it, then capitally altered when New York wanted a Seward, the statue now seemed more curious than the bare fact featured in one of Will’s pages for his history teacher. It followed me down Fifth and went into Tenth and I was finding like my Druid currents from the quill in Lincoln’s right hand up to his Secretary of State’s fine frowning brow or from the long right leg (crossed over the left knee) through Lincoln’s lap up to Seward’s cool shaven chin, but wondered too if I had Sub’s brain dommage and was sinking forward after too many trips here from London into some incontinent tourism.
A penny dropped again, but one out of many, and though its slot took it with a snug cluck which is one of my minor pleasures in machines, its meaning was more potent than clear and all I had in my hand was Tessa’s hand, yes my wife’s best friend, and we were strolling across Union Square past black and white junkies doing their skits and old Jews who might have just come from the socialist book shop. Yes, autumn ’64, seven years almost to the day — and she was saying, Well you can see I’m at least trying to become a tourist, but saying it not so disconsolately as you’d expect after a bare two months settled sleepless in New York.
And curiously that was what the Druid had said to me now a fortnight ago in 1971 before I set out for America again to make inquiries about the film: But you try to become a tourist.
I was telling Tessa about the first Negro volunteers in 1864 presenting their colors in Union Square; but she squeezed my hand, stopped me, and looked up into my face, her pale brown eyes deceptive and lucid, and said with a flick of her hand, New York squares aren’t in fact square, I mean some of them are rounded.
She refilled a prescription on Sixth Avenue. She complained of the price but she couldn’t sleep. She liked the mail chute on each floor of their apartment building on Tenth Street and she liked the shower. Dudley was beginning a second week practically living at the Museum of the American Indian way uptown examining an eight-foot drawing of Maya ruins by Catherwood. Tessa complained about the taste of the water. She had a London A to Z on the desk. Her daughter was going from school to a friend’s house. Tenth Street wasn’t as noisy as Tessa said.