Gut Symmetries

  ‘I am afraid,’ said Jove at night-time.

  We were in the bizarre circumstance of being in sight of land but unable to reach it. Without rudder or engine we could not steer ourselves, and when the tide brought us close enough to register the full outline of a series of coves and inlets, a few hours later it took us away again back to our watery blur.

  The strain of this sublittoral existence was affecting Jove. He proposed that we swim for it. What if the land was barren and we were without food or water? He proposed that we use the sail. What if the wind carried us crazily away?

  ME: I can’t swim that far.

  HE: I’ll go then. I’ll get help.

  ME: All right. You go.

  · · ·

  Then he wouldn’t go, hesitating at the side, trying to use the angle of the sun on the mast to calculate the distance to shore.

  HE: Someone must see us soon.

  No one did. It was as though we had floated off the world’s edge into a science-fiction sea. We saw no other craft, no aeroplanes, no sign of movement on the cruel clifftops. We had begun by tacking elegantly along a string of fishing villages overflowing with food and wine and now the storm had flung us out into a desert sea.

  ‘How can we be nowhere?’ said Jove. ‘There is no nowhere left.’

  ‘Maybe we’ve sailed through one of your wormholes and come up in a parallel universe. In this universe, identical to our own, there are no people.’

  He turned on me in a fury. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid. The probability is beyond calculation. A large quantum transition such as that is virtually impossible.’

  ‘Virtually?’

  HE: We’re at sea, in Italy, in the world, in the here and now, we’re both alive and we’re going to be rescued.

  He kicked the radio. Its dial fell off.

  ‘Who cares?’ said Jove. ‘It was squegged anyway.’

  We had halved our daily water ration. We were sun-raw, wind-burnt, salt-swollen and dehydrated. We took it in turns to watch on deck. I sitting at the mast. Jove, cross-legged, determined, high as he could get on the cabin. We were both beginning to imagine things.

  ME: If this were a film we would have to be rescued by the end.

  HE: It isn’t a film.

  ME: No.

  And back to the difficult silences.

  ME: Jove, if I die and you don’t will you do something for me?

  HE: What?

  ME: There’s a diamond at the base of my spine. It belongs to the Jew you noticed at the port.

  HE: What Jew?

  ME: The Ashkenazi in the long coat.

  HE: You mean the man in black?

  ME: If I die you must cut out the diamond and give it to him.

  HE: Stella …

  He stopped. He was looking at me with that liedown/sweet tea/long sleep/nut house/make allowances look that he used as a portcullis in front of his tongue. Jove considers me mad. Does that make me mad? The authorities have declared me dead. Does that make me dead? Where is the Archimedean point? Inside? Outside? What is the proper perspective on my existence?

  HE: Help me to fish?

  I nodded and took the line like a garden gnome. I seem to be suffering from a kind of apraxia; an inability to perform voluntary purposeful movements. Like Papa I sit and stare at worlds visible and not.

  The golden disc of the sun and the wave-curve. Sun like a disc-saw cutting the blue sheets of the sea. The sun-cut sea carrying the boat. The boat serene with its ragged crew.

  Jumping fish escort us and crying birds watch overhead. At night, our white deck in the black space makes a landing pad for the moon. Moonlight in the portholes and in washes on our bunks. We lie under it, eyes like craters, moon-filled.

  La Lune. Card XVIII of the Tarot. A mysterious light over an eremic landscape two dogs howl upwards. Below, a crayfish, ancient, armoured, lifts its claws from a blue pool.

  ‘We are lost, Jove.’

  ‘Not yet. Don’t say it yet.’

  HE: Do you remember the first man on the moon?

  ME: We were in Vermont.

  HE: No clock only the oak spreading over the evening.

  ME: That oak must have been two hundred years old.

  HE: You said, ‘It will live for two hundred years more. Why should we hurry?’

  ME: We had been making love in the dirt since the Declaration of Independence.

  HE: Wars and Empire and the passing of Empire had not disturbed us.

  ME: It was as if we had made love always and always would.

  HE: We rolled over to look at the astronaut, stepping clumsily in his dumb-bell suit, picking up rocks for NASA.

  ME: It was history.

  HE: You were naked and the night was cool.

  ME: It was a long way to fly for a rock.

  We were in our separate bunks, his hand over the side towards me, his familiar arm, solid as an anchor. His voice a harbour.

  HE: History has no smell.

  ME: Is that why we are nostalgic for it?

  HE: Breathe in, breathe out. The past doesn’t stink like the present.

  ME: Were we happier or do we pretend?

  HE: We pretend.

  ME: You said it was my smell you loved.

  HE: The hidden world of pheromones.

  ME: This armpit seducer.

  HE: This armchair Don Juan.

  ME: Your mother had truffles from the forests outside Rome. They smelled of earth and roots and sweat.

  HE: They use a machine now for rootling truffles.

  ME: A pig is pork.

  HE: They use a machine now for matching couples.

  ME: Love is money.

  HE: I don’t know what love is.

  ME: You never waited long enough to find out.

  HE: Patience isn’t a vice of mine.

  ME: Not all experiments yield their results in a single night.

  HE: Why do you confuse love and sex?

  ME: Why do you continually separate them?

  HE: Are we going to spend our last hours arguing?

  ME: Yes.

  He laughed and swung off the bunk and knelt down by my head. In the moonlight I might have mistaken him for a knight in shining armour. His T-shirt was neon-lit. He had grown a beard, or to be fairer, a beard had grown over his face. His eyes and teeth were wolfish. He was emblematic of safety and threat as knights in shining armour are. The drama of the rescue conceals its implications.

  HE: There isn’t anything to eat.

  ME: No.

  HE: Would you like to eat me?

  ME: What?

  HE: I’m sure there are certain parts of me you wouldn’t object to lopping off.

  ME: Stop this.

  HE: No, seriously, what’s it to be? Die with both legs, survive with one? How much of me could we eat and still say that I am alive? Arms. Legs. Slices of rump. Your grandfather was a butcher. Try me.

  He reached over for the curved filleting knife, gave it to me, and raised his bottom into the air. The sight of him, jacked over under the moon, made me start to laugh, quietly at first, then as the pain in my head increased, louder, and harsher. He started to laugh too, a pair of jackals we were, crouched and baying at the moon.

  The boat was still, hardly rocking at all. Stumbling together, we half fell, half climbed, up the steps to the deck. He gripped me, his prick straight in, the swollen saltiness of it dirty in my dirt. I was dry and cracked, unwashed, closed. I had a weeping rash on my inner thighs.

  I held onto him, holding onto the years in between, the years notched in his back, his vertebral column, twenty-four separate, moving irregular bones, the years of our life together.

  When the push of him stopped we were both still. He rested his head in the cradle of my shoulder and I felt him crying. Not the salt sea but these few tears capsized what hope remained. I thought of Alice’s hand, her long thin fingers like leaf-nerves. I thought of the leaves falling on my back when I had made love in Vermont. Or had that been Alice? Or had it been J
ove?

  Fragments of coloured glass, radiating fanwise, a diadrom of feeling spreading out through my mind, its life-jacket lost. The reassuring buoying padded stuff that floated me and insulated me has been ripped away. I am exposed now, and my discriminating, differentiating functions are useless tools in this unmoored sea. Where is the beginning? Where is the end? Where is the horizon? Where is the land? The moon swings down on me like a hook. The boat is a blade, knife-edge of consciousness precarious on the unconscious sea. Whatever it is, it is deeper. Whatever it is, it is unfathomable. The point that I am, the definite bounded thing in time, is beginning to break up. I am dispersing myself through my known past and my unknown future. The present is without meaning.

  Does it live? Does it all live? I know that other worlds are lost to me as surely as I am lost to other worlds. I know that what I am is clouded, refractory, partial. That to a lightwave I am already dead, my small circuit of time entirely belted by his, His? Shall I call him Lucifer, Lord of the Lightwaves? Vite, Vite, to God’s steady tread?

  Cast up in a body, I find the long past of me like a fossil in stone. What was it that moved so determinedly, and slunk at last into bas-relief? The fern is preserved but it will not grow. The creature in its coildom is safe and safe it stays. What risk? And without risk what movement? Better that I release my bones into these waves than lie still in this body of stone. It is too heavy for me now. What matters is outside it. I cannot at will raise an arm or a leg. The patient fuse of my pain has burned down. My head is a firework display. The sense of who I am is strengthening and weakening simultaneously. Papa said, ‘Learn to remember your real face.’ He never looked in a mirror. Is that him rowing towards me, his dark figure upright in a moon-scooped boat?

  Papa! Papa! Yes, he has seen me. In a moment he will be here.

  Alice. My voice over the water, skimming in a bright curve to where she is. What distance? What measure? Nothing that separates us but a moment’s thought. Dear girl, there is so much to say. Words unbottled splashing over our feet. Did you get my message, thrown out to sea, my message to you that we are a single, clear happiness?

  How simple it is now. I seem to be tumbling over myself, ready to tunnel out of the womb of the world, my hands and feet bouncing off its warm wall.

  On the night I was born the sky was punched with stars. Diamonds deep in the earth’s crust. Diamonds deep in the stellar wall. As above, so below. Uniting carbon mediated in my gem-stole body. When a baby is born, its anterior fontanelle, at the back of the skull and diamond-shaped, is the last of the sutures to close. Resisting ossification, it is an eloquent wound. What has been, what will be, star-dust that we are. Uniquely the carrier of history, this vulnerable human cell, cosmos-hurled.

  Knave of Coins

  I had to do it. She was dead. She was nearly dead or I would not have done it. If I had not done it she would have died anyway. I did it because I had to. What else could I have done?

  It was after the storm that she began to complain of headaches and dizziness. The unnatural calm of the sea, our Neptunian isolation, seemed focused and magnified in her behaviour. While I tried to do everything I could to save us, she sat in Buddha-calm against the mast. Psychologists call it abaissement du niveau mental. It was as though she had been overpowered.

  By what? There is a history of psychosis in my wife’s family. Her father was a crank. He built for himself a shuttered world, out of touch with reality, dangerously divorced from the hit and miss of humankind. As a young man, like any other young man, I used to visit the meat-houses around Times Square. The girls were clean and cheap and it was a process of initiation. My pals and I talked politics while we were waiting our turn. It was the mid-Fifties. There had been a lot of unrest. At least late-night shagging was not considered to be an un-American activity.

  I used to see my wife’s father, crossing Times Square in the dead of night, carpet bag in hand like a dealer. He talked to himself, sometimes slamming to a stop for no reason, never noticing anyone else. He used to drag his little girl around with him.

  He and the mother lived in separate rooms in their apartment. Most of the time he stayed at the bookstore he kept for a living. Even the windows seemed to repel the light.

  My wife’s mother had an affair with an Englishman brought over to run a shipping sideline. I think his name was Pinkerton. Maybe not. When he left for his real wife back home, Uta had a breakdown. Soon after that, the Jew, the wild man, her husband Ishmael, killed himself. I never found out how. Or maybe I have forgotten.

  Mother and child returned to Berlin. Nine years later, when Stella came back to New York she walked into our family business carrying a Bowie knife. I had to disarm her. She was fragile, gentle, wide awake in a sleeping world. I was attracted to her energy without realising that it was a kind of craziness. Her father had been magnetic too. I used to follow him all night sometimes. Why did I do that?

  I thought that if Stella lived with me and my family in a normal family way that she might regain the equilibrium she needed. After all, she was born on a sledge.

  All of us have fantasies, dreams. A healthy society outlets those things into sport, hero-worship, harmless adultery, rock climbing, the movies. Unhealthy individuals understand their dreams and fantasies as something solid. An alternative world. They do not know how to subordinate their disruptive elements to a regulated order. My wife believed that she had a kind of interior universe as valid and as necessary as her day-to-day existence in reality. This failure to make a hierarchy, this failure to recognise the primacy of fact, justified her increasingly subjective responses. She refused to make a clear distinction between inner and outer. She had no sure grasp either of herself or of herself in relation to the object. At first I mistook this pathology as the ordinary feminine.

  I had to do it. She was dead. She was nearly dead or I would not have done it. If I had not done it she would have died anyway. I did it because I had to. What else could I have done?

  I am in sympathy with an organic view of nature; a symbiotic participating structure that in no way resembles Newton’s Mechanics. Every day my work surprises me and I am sceptical of theories that seem to point to truth but just don’t fit the facts. Physics cannot rig the evidence, either it is honest science or it is not science at all. Call it alchemy, astrology, spoon-bending, wishful thinking. All of which my wife enjoyed, along with a mystical disposition that sadly, some of my colleagues share. There is nothing mystical about the universe. There are things we cannot explain yet. That is all.

  Matter is energy. Of course. But for all practical purposes matter is matter. Don’t take my word for it. Bang your head against a brick wall. The shifting multiple realities of quantum physics are real enough but not at a level where they affect our lives. I deal in them every day and I, like you, still have to wash my underpants. In a parallel universe somewhere near here I may never have to wash my underpants, but until then, no mystical union with the One will muffle the stink.

  · · ·

  SHE: Why not join the Flat Earth Club?

  HE: The earth is not flat.

  SHE: For all practical purposes it is.

  HE: Not all.

  SHE: For my purposes a single objective reality will not do.

  HE: You still have to wash your underpants.

  SHE: How about joining the Flat Brain Club?

  Stella, wide awake in a sleeping world, never understood that it is better to let sleeping dogs lie. The world is not ready to wake up yet. The world is still sleeping in its coverlet of stars. I touched her face, her eyelids fluttering, tears under them, where the pain was. No more crying. No more pain. I would be tender as the night that covers up your foolishness and mine. The world is real and it has hurt us. Signs, shadows, wonders, do you still believe that, now that your multiple world has hardened into this brick wall?

  She had banged her head. The blow had concussed her. Poseidon-lost on our lonely sea, she would not let me swim for help. She would not try to fis
h. When the water was gone I survived by draining the engine. There were a few pints of oily fluid in there. Just enough to near poison me and to save my life. If only she had been stronger. Just a few days stronger.

  I had to do it. She was dead. She was nearly dead or I would not have done it. If I had not done it she would have died anyway. I did it because I had to. What else could I have done?

  She had been talking about the diamond. When we were first married she told me the story of her gem-besotted mother, which I can believe because Uta loved jewels. I can even believe the swallowing and the retrieval but I cannot accept that Stella had a precious stone in her hip. She showed me an X-ray, and sure enough there is a pea-like thing in there but it looks like shot to me; an air-rifle peppering from a gun-loose kid. I talked to a couple of doctors about the story and they both confirmed that it was impossible. I don’t mind my wife telling me stories. I worry when she can no longer distinguish between the fanciful and the actual.

  Perhaps it was a mistake to write to her about Alice. That is, to write as though Alice were writing. To reveal an affair. To shock her. I wanted to bring her to her senses.

  When she took up the game, though I suppose it wasn’t a game to her, I was surprised, excited. I wanted to find out what would happen next.

  A threesome? I suppose so. I wanted to see them together, myself as the invisible other. I watched them in the bar, followed them to the diner, walked behind them to the Battery, saw them in to my own apartment. Imagined what they would do. Oddly, I never thought that they would really do anything, the sex was a surprise. I made the mistake of thinking that I could control the experiment. I won’t make that mistake again. This time it nearly cost me my life.