LOOKOUT
Think if I found the source of my undreamt lookout dream. And turned a profit too. Think if I grew soft hardware out of grain and could sell it in Middle America.
I had been looking for what had happened to the film, and now some who were concerned were looking for me, taking from me. Dagger and Monty and I were looking out for ourselves. I did not know how much June knew; but as I went up the subway stairs forth into the street (which at once became not a roof of light but a walled floor) and crossed against the light and went down into the uptown side of the station, I knew that the film and my daughter’s welfare had come together through June.
Someday a formula could be named for me.
A thrown ball snared by someone’s instinct leaning way out of a fourth-floor window in Brooklyn Heights during the war does not come back down into the street. Much need not come back. Go ahead. That’s what an old English upholsterer told me America was: go-ahead.
June’s boots came from a London shop; had she gone to them or had they come to her? Her brother Chad had been in London; it was June who made me think he might be here instead. The starry-eyed chick — what if her last name was Cartwright and June knew? Did I trust June because I wanted to touch her under the label and she was warm?
A ceremonial plane slides into a corridor between New York and London, and I am on it.
My man Whitehead — my contact Red so call me Red! — at the scientific hobby firm that is growing and growing — pales into distance, an event whose key might not intrigue a young person enough to merit inclusion in a catalog offering Cartwright’s Analog Formula Kit.
Tessa once flew over that extreme southwest frontier of California near the Colorado River, not very high but high enough to make out on the ground a man 167 feet tall. So long is he that he wasn’t discovered till 1932 when an Air Force plane took his picture. Which was just thirty-three years prior to this Mexican trip of Dudley’s that Tessa went along on. Dudley was the one who had stomach trouble, Tessa said because she upset him with her theory of the epicanthic eye-fold linking the ancient Maya with the east Asian psyche, though she followed Le Plongeon who in the last quarter of the last century argued that the earth’s westward motion helped to account for the spread of Maya culture to the Nile and the Indian Ocean, the holy deserts and the Asian paddies, astronomy, art, words without prior roots — but, first and last, vivid violences disseminated over the earth until, like Maya language (falsely for example translated in one famous line, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? when Eli, Eli, lama sabachthami is Maya for Now, now, I am fainting; darkness covers my face), these violences became diluted into the less vivid, more crude and calculated cruelties and routines and illusory surfaces of dominant East-West culture.
Maybe I’d find that the Picts — the tattooed people — planted evidences in some northern isle knowing someday someone named Paul would turn those evidences into power. I leave the Picts to Dudley Allott. Or more likely his wife, whose tabby cat Spirit proved so dangerous to Dudley’s lungs that he was on a bottle of allergy pills a week until Tessa gave Spirit away.
No — I leave the Picts and the laws of their mysteries to Tessa and leave her also those iron files of prime tribes she saw (much against Dudley’s judgment) trekking the top of the world by Bering’s isthmus so that — lo! — a fourth-century Maya calendar follows an old habitual rhythm from Tibet. Dudley did not believe all cultures kin; but for reasons of love and fear he did not discuss Tessa’s notions. Dudley tried to be more interesting than himself.
Reach into yourself even with kid gloves, you must find something. For instance, a ball that went up so accurately it didn’t come down. Or a Tessa kiss rising from Lorna’s dinner table.
Or Dudley’s appendix. It went into Charing Cross hospital acute. But then they decided to observe him. And after forty-eight hours, Dudley said he was now surrendering his appendix only because he’d wasted so much time. But why was I there? You don’t visit someone who’s about to have an acute appendix out. Well, there was the two-day delay. So he was more visitable. And then, as it happened, I knew Tessa was stopping in to see Dudley on the way to meet her father and Loma and Geoff Millan and an Irish mathematician who was doing a piece on Geoff’s work, and me. So I turned up in Dudley’s ward in time to see him stare at the other patients’ supper trays — he was being operated on that evening.
Tessa wasn’t there. Dudley accepted my Evening Standard. I was conscious of our accents, Dudley was the only patient with a visitor, and although it wasn’t like visiting the boy who threw the ball during the war that did not come back down into the street, to wit Ned Noble in Brooklyn Hospital years ago when he had to let his roommate and his roommate’s relatives crammed into the other side of a semiprivate hear his every acid witticism, Dudley was less alive than I to the fact that some of his ward-mates were listening with a certain digestive satisfaction.
A sister swished by, came with a thermometer and Dudley opened his mouth. She slipped it in, Dudley closed his eyes. The sister — she was oriental — went to another bed to plump the pillow of a pale old man with a sharp profile. Dudley, now mute, opened his eyes and Tessa appeared at the bedside dressed like a spy in tailored brown trenchcoat and brown floppy hat, a cigarette in her mouth. After a day in the open city you arrive at a hospital bed and feel the passive undress of the patient, as if your energy were ink entering a blotter. Tessa thrust her Evening Standard at Dudley and when he did not move she put it down beside his leg and touched his hand lying pale, hairy, and separate on the sheet where the edge had been turned down over his dark gray blanket. She gave him a letter from a New York lawyer Dudley had barely known until after they’d come back to England earlier this year of ’66 who was curiously interested in the Catherwood holocaust and had in his possession a copy of Catherwood’s 1844 portfolio of drawings. Tessa asked if Dudley was in pain; he shook his head. She’d left Jane with the Indian neighbors. Dudley nodded; she said there was a letter from his mother but she’d left it home, and Dudley nodded and smiled and the thermometer leaned with his smile; the sister called from the other bed to hold it in place.
There was a teardrop of some kind in the corner of Dudley’s eye, and Tessa looked at me next to her as if just noticing me and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
We were going to an opening in the old Jewish quarter of Whitechapel Tessa’s father once fervently described to me as a great early immigrant ghetto full of heroic poverty and vivid roots. Then we were going to Blum’s which is almost next door to the Whitechapel Gallery.
The sister — Cambodian I recall — held the thermometer up, smiled at Dudley. Nothing, dear, she said. Dudley asked when it would be, and she said, Eight thirty.
She turned away and Tessa asked if there was a lav. The tailored trenchcoat made her taller and neater yet more fragile. The sister answered.
Tessa said to Dudley, At eight thirty we’ll just be finishing the sweet and sour mackerel. Is the lady doctor going to operate after all?
Dudley did not smile; he was beyond objecting. He said, I cannot help it. He raised up on an elbow, had a spasm and doubled forward and lay back. He said he hadn’t believed his feelings, he was a rational man, but if it was the case it was the case: he didn’t want her going into his insides.
A big ruddy man two beds away said, You’ve got the best surgeons in the world in England. Still, it’s all hormones.