Lookout Cartridge Read Online Free
smelled looking out. A smell not of London.
When I had asked what she wanted this time, Jenny said Bring me back a memory. But maybe because Dagger had just been on the phone to me I didn’t decide what she’d said and filed it away in my head as a request for a Memorex, which for a start was unlikely because you can buy them in London.
Outside I couldn’t see through the crowd up at the accident. Two cops were backing them off, but you’d think the trick would be clearing a way for the ambulance.
Crosstown vehicles were now locked into the uptown traffic. The black car hadn’t been moved. One cop was very tall and had a moustache.
In reply to my letter Claire couldn’t see what there was to discuss: her Uncle Dagger’s film as she saw the situation did not now exist even if it had been shot with a 16 that blows very well to 35, and Phil Aut doesn’t exactly promote nonexistent films. Furthermore, Claire went on, Mr. Aut had only said originally that he’d look at it, you never know what you can sell to TV, it wasn’t necessarily going to be a commercial proposition; he liked Claire, she said, and so he’d said he’d look at it when it was finished. What was there to discuss now?
If I’d wanted her just to hear my voice I could have sent her a cassette explaining myself.
How often had I seen her? What did I know?
She was in New York.
I was coming to New York anyway. I didn’t write her that.
Did the appointment stand?
Forty-eight hours before my flight from London, there was a cable. WEDNESDAY NOON INSTEAD MY PLACE CLAIRE .
PRINTED CIRCUIT CUT-IN FLASH-FORWARD
England is not safe for me. Is that it? The tempered voices in Geoffrey Millan’s living room above me as I pad up his stairs are past and future. I trail him into the long room that has at the street end some of his curious work and at the garden end some people. The round healthy face of the pediatrician and across the circle his sleek wife who has illustrated a children’s book. A bearded grim intellect whom I don’t know, with eyes either puffy or with an eastern fold at the corners. A splendid dark-haired woman not my wife who rises for some purpose. A girl named Nuala who once looked up my friend Sub in New York. A white-haired lady in a tweed suit who is a maths don and a vigorous violist and asks where my wife Lorna is tonight. A tall, long-haired boy of twenty named Jasper stretched in brown velvet trousers on his side on the rug between the chairs of Nuala and the woman who has risen, so he forms the one explicit arc of the circle.
The subject is not dropped on my entrance. It is a person—something he has done. The splendid woman is leaving. I’ve arrived even later than I knew. The pediatrician’s wife is insisting to her husband that violence on the contrary can make one more authentic. Geoff embraces the woman who is leaving; she gives me a nod, disappears, and I acquire her chair. There comes a time, says Nuala, when one has to act. Nonsense, adds Jasper, and giggles.
I can’t tell if everyone knows the person or no one.
The pediatrician is arguing that this man they’re talking about would do better to consult the authorities, a man who has appointed himself a committee of one to attack and undermine an organization of potentially violent exiles by sowing confusion here and there among them. The mathematician argues that violence nullifies itself and that hewing to a line of moderation while less attractive particularly to people of certain temperaments and even more of certain ages is more delicate, difficult, and complexly responsive to the really human.
Around me are the years in London, years of evenings in which people listen and talk and do not drink too much, get a ride home after the Underground closes down or phone a cab that comes in seven minutes. The bearded man has been expatiating on American allegiances; what after all can one expect of Americans, they never reflected seriously upon their own
When I had asked what she wanted this time, Jenny said Bring me back a memory. But maybe because Dagger had just been on the phone to me I didn’t decide what she’d said and filed it away in my head as a request for a Memorex, which for a start was unlikely because you can buy them in London.
Outside I couldn’t see through the crowd up at the accident. Two cops were backing them off, but you’d think the trick would be clearing a way for the ambulance.
Crosstown vehicles were now locked into the uptown traffic. The black car hadn’t been moved. One cop was very tall and had a moustache.
In reply to my letter Claire couldn’t see what there was to discuss: her Uncle Dagger’s film as she saw the situation did not now exist even if it had been shot with a 16 that blows very well to 35, and Phil Aut doesn’t exactly promote nonexistent films. Furthermore, Claire went on, Mr. Aut had only said originally that he’d look at it, you never know what you can sell to TV, it wasn’t necessarily going to be a commercial proposition; he liked Claire, she said, and so he’d said he’d look at it when it was finished. What was there to discuss now?
If I’d wanted her just to hear my voice I could have sent her a cassette explaining myself.
How often had I seen her? What did I know?
She was in New York.
I was coming to New York anyway. I didn’t write her that.
Did the appointment stand?
Forty-eight hours before my flight from London, there was a cable. WEDNESDAY NOON INSTEAD MY PLACE CLAIRE .
PRINTED CIRCUIT CUT-IN FLASH-FORWARD
England is not safe for me. Is that it? The tempered voices in Geoffrey Millan’s living room above me as I pad up his stairs are past and future. I trail him into the long room that has at the street end some of his curious work and at the garden end some people. The round healthy face of the pediatrician and across the circle his sleek wife who has illustrated a children’s book. A bearded grim intellect whom I don’t know, with eyes either puffy or with an eastern fold at the corners. A splendid dark-haired woman not my wife who rises for some purpose. A girl named Nuala who once looked up my friend Sub in New York. A white-haired lady in a tweed suit who is a maths don and a vigorous violist and asks where my wife Lorna is tonight. A tall, long-haired boy of twenty named Jasper stretched in brown velvet trousers on his side on the rug between the chairs of Nuala and the woman who has risen, so he forms the one explicit arc of the circle.
The subject is not dropped on my entrance. It is a person—something he has done. The splendid woman is leaving. I’ve arrived even later than I knew. The pediatrician’s wife is insisting to her husband that violence on the contrary can make one more authentic. Geoff embraces the woman who is leaving; she gives me a nod, disappears, and I acquire her chair. There comes a time, says Nuala, when one has to act. Nonsense, adds Jasper, and giggles.
I can’t tell if everyone knows the person or no one.
The pediatrician is arguing that this man they’re talking about would do better to consult the authorities, a man who has appointed himself a committee of one to attack and undermine an organization of potentially violent exiles by sowing confusion here and there among them. The mathematician argues that violence nullifies itself and that hewing to a line of moderation while less attractive particularly to people of certain temperaments and even more of certain ages is more delicate, difficult, and complexly responsive to the really human.
Around me are the years in London, years of evenings in which people listen and talk and do not drink too much, get a ride home after the Underground closes down or phone a cab that comes in seven minutes. The bearded man has been expatiating on American allegiances; what after all can one expect of Americans, they never reflected seriously upon their own
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