Free Lookout Cartridge by Joseph McElroy

I pressed her hoping to calm her, but she held on to a signal she’d found in her just-uttered words, yet now not with a very young woman’s clear, spiky sex but a late adolescent girl’s subtler uncertainty as to how much she might have to hurt herself: as if the five words she’d come upon in cruel delight—bring me back a memory —had become a venture she must see through. Then with a friendliness I didn’t like she said, You and that film.
    You can’t help, I said.
    If I could only get away to my plane and to New York Jenny would be safer in London free of this nonsense about postponing A-levels and taking a job in San Francisco, where she’d never been, or New York, which she stuck in only so I’d think of her seeing her grandparents.
    I paid Goody’s by check using an old Shell credit card and a New York driver’s license in whose fold a snap of Will had got stuck. The woman took card, license, and picture, turned my check over onto the cash register’s little counter, poised her pen and asked me my address as if she’d forgotten it, and I automatically gave Sub’s, the one on the license. Will had on a bikini and below his snorkel mask his mouth was grinning.
    Back on Third I bought a pack of absorbent rings which give off sandalwood scent when the light bulbs they fit onto are lighted. How near the Outer Film office was I; I got out my wallet, my Manhattan address-locater, and as I finished dividing the first three figures by 2 and subtracting 12 for Avenue of the Americas I was accosted by a heavy-set black man in a lumpy overcoat and no socks who asked me for a dollar, and when I automatically said, Sorry I don’t have any change, he looked at my address-locater torn from some host’s Yellow Pages long ago, his hair was cropped close to his skull, he shrugged and I felt I had earned him his dollar and in the breeze carefully took it out of my wallet and handed it over. He didn’t thank me and as I looked at his splayed nose I got a spread of adrenalin in my face: I hadn’t paid Myrna the eighteen ten.
    He said, Don’t go too far downtown, man, the wind is blowing the high buildings and they got these flakes of asbestos coming down like first snow.
    I asked if he knew that at Mt. Sinai they’d found asbestos in someone’s uterus. His eyes followed my address-locater back into my wallet and he said, I believe you, man, that’s the important thing. Hard-hat fell thirty floors, you hear? I just got into town, I said, I’ve been away. I believe you, man, so you didn’t read it in the papers—fell thirty floors through a steel grate, some other cats are standing there but this hard-hat he just went right through, nothing left on the platform, only his helmet, right?
    Right, I said, and he nodded and turned away.
    The hem of his coat was coming down. He said over his shoulder, Got my back to the wall.
    At the corner of one of those phone booths that expose you as if to single you out, I tried Myrna. I listened but heard only the traffic and wondered if these booths ever got hit. Two taps came on the glass, I listened some more and the tapping got heavy and there was a face close to me and I left the booth and left my quarter in the broken box unreturned.
    If Tris and Ruby still liked bedtime stories I could tell them one tonight. How Sub and I when we were kids in Brooklyn Heights once burrowed a tunnel through a thirty-foot-long snowdrift and took our lunch in there and a friend of ours tried to wall us in; or how Sub got concussed in a doubles match against Brown, or how the Great Train Robbery got pulled off, or how Dagger got his name.
    Instructions repeat: If something from Outer Film, go on through new open circuit.
    If nothing, get looped.
    I could tell them Beauty and the Computer.
    Ruby wouldn’t like it.
    If Myrna had gone and Ruby and Tris were spending the night with their mother Rose, and Sub was at the dentist, I could be freer with the phone.
    When I got home Myrna was in the hall