Gut Symmetries (3 page)

I told this dream to my father who advised me to slow down. It was not necessary to win every prize for physics in the University. There was a small mirror in my room. When I looked into it I did not see Alice, I saw underwear, talcum powder, balled up socks.

I know that my father feared for me a lonely old age and a lonely young one too. He did not say so, but the words behind the words told me that he would rather have launched me into a good marriage than watch me row against the tide at my own work. It remains that a woman with an incomplete emotional life has herself to blame, while a man with no time for his heart just needs a wife.

When I \vent up to Cambridge, my mother said to me, 'Alice, when you are at dinner with a man never look at your watch.'

Like many women of her generation she expected to let time run its course through her without attempting to alter it. Her timepiece was my father, and it was by his movement that she regulated her life. She liked his steady ticking, although she once admitted to me that he used to make her heart beat faster, in days when the sun on the sun-dial was a game.

They had come in from the garden, got married, settled down, and my father seemed not to mind the demands of his pocket watch. My mother never learned to be punctual and always has been vague about any appointment not directly connected to my father. She had a habit of taking my sisters and I to the dentist on the wrong day of the wrong week, and once, a year late. She had turned up a visit card in a coat pocket and marched us off to refill our filled molars. The dentist took it well. He said to my father, 'Women are like that.'

When my mother began any sentence with 'When you get older' I thought I would perish in despair. I knew that she never remembered to wind the clock and that I would stay the same age forever. Only with my father could there be a chance to grow up.

All children stumble over what Einstein discovered; that Time is relative. In mother-time the days had a chthonic quality, we ate, slept, drew, played, world without end, waiting without knowing we were waiting for my father to come home and snap his fingers and whisk us into the golden hour. We became aware, though I can't say how, that he was giving us four whole quarters of an hour. Perhaps that is when I began to study the vexed relationship of one minute to the next.

After we had been put to bed, my mother got an hour too, and I was glad that she and not we had to share her hour with the dinner. Then my father went into his study and the house was dark.

March 14 1879. Ulm. Germany. Sun in Pisces.

A man slow of speech and gentle of person. What patterns do the numbers make breaking and beginning in the waters of his spirit? He floats in numbers. Now he rests on a nine, now he swims hard against a seven, numbers iridescent, open mouthed, feeding off him as he feeds on them.

The numbers come when called. From the strange seas of the galaxy the numbers shoal to him. He knows the first words of Creation, and nearly sees, but not, the number that hides beneath. He hears the Word and tries to write the number but not all numbers are his.

The untamedness of numbers is in their order, resolving upwards into a speculated beauty. Too close and language fails. He believes that Number and Word are one and he speaks in numbers and words, trying to remake in his own body the unity he apprehends.

Einstein: the most famous scientist in the world. Everyone knows about E = MC
²
. Not everyone knows that:'If a body falls freely it will not feel its own weight.'

The implications of this stretch beyond the theory of gravity they maintain.

I know I am a fool, trying to make connections out of scraps but how else is there to proceed? The fragmentariness of life makes coherence suspect but to babble is a different kind of treachery. Perhaps it is a vanity. Am I vain enough to assume you will understand me? No. So I go on puzzling over new joints for words, hoping that this time, one piece will slide smooth against the next.

Walk with me. Hand in hand through the nightmare of narrative, the neat sentences secret-nailed over meaning. Meaning mewed up like an anchorite, its vision in broken pieces behind the wall. And if we pull away the panelling, then what? Without the surface, what hope of contact, of conversation? How will I come to read the rawness inside?

The story of my day, the story of my life, the story of how we met, of what happened before we met. And every story I begin to tell talks across a story I cannot tell. And if I were not telling this story to you but to someone else, would it be the same story?

Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars.

I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other.

The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.

Walk with me. On the night that Jove and I first slept together I left him half covered in the vulnerability of a strange bed and walked from Central Park down to the Battery. I don't own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don't want to drown. My head is my heart's lifebelt.

I ignored the Stop-Go of the endless intersection traffic lights and took my chance across the quieted roads. Not night, not day, the city was suspended, its cries and shouts fainter how, its roar a rumble, like something far off. In the centre of it I felt like a creature on the edge. This is a city of edges, grand sharp, precipitous, unsafe. It is a city of corners not curves. Always a choice has to be made; which way now? A city of questions, mouthy and insolent, a built Sphinx to riddle at the old world.

I learned to feel comfortable in New York the way a fakir learns to feel comfortable on a bed of nails; enjoy it. Beauty and pain are not separate. That is so clear here. It is a crucible city, an alchemical vessel where dirt and glory do effect transformation. No one who succumbs to this city remains as they were. Its indifference is its possibility. Here you can be anything. If you can. I was quite aware that much of what gets thrown into an alchemical jar is destroyed. Self-destroyed. The alchemical process breaks down substances according to their own laws. If there is anything vital, it will be distilled. If not. . .

Undeceive yourself Alice, a great part of you is trash.

True, but my hope lies in the rest.

I walked quickly, purposefully, wearing Jove's leather jacket. I wanted clothes about me because I felt I had been bone stripped. The solid knowable shape had gone. My flesh was there, part pleasure, part sore, and the antennae of my nervous system still processing the facts of a second body. The body is its own biosphere, air entering cautiously through an elaborate filter, food attacked by hostile acids. Nothing from outside is given a long-stay visa. Oxygen is expelled as carbon, even champagne and
foie gras
are pummelled into turds and piss. The body is efficient but not polite. It uses and discards. Enter a second body and there is some confusion. In or out? Which is it?

The curious fact of love is that it overrides the body's rubber-sealed selfishness. Sex and procreation easily fit in with the body's plans for Empire; it wants to extend its territory, needs to reproduce itself. It resists invasion. Love the invader compromises the self's autonomy. Love the rescuer is the hand held out across the uncrossable sea.

Trust it? Perhaps. It may be the right hand or something more sinister. My body is unconvinced, my mind would like to throw down the keys. I am of the generation brought up on romance. Where is the one for me?

Biologically there are thousands of ones for me. If I want to rut I can rut. I should be wary of ties that are chains and hands that are handcuffs. What should lead me out is very likely to wall me in. The bitterness of love is twin of its hope.

Walk with me. What kind of a woman goes to bed with another woman's husband? Answer: a worm? That might explain my invertebrate state. Boneless woman; heart breast and thighs, not the kind of woman I thought I was. If I am so ignorant of my own self, how can I claim knowledge of another human being? My body still damp with him I am afraid.

'"Even the hairs of your head are numbered"' isn't that what God said?'Jove was lying on his back smiling at me. He rubbed his temples and pulled a face. 'In my case God need only count to twenty.'

Then he was serious, which he hardly ever seemed to be and he took hold of the weight of my hair. 'This is the mathematics of God.'

Later, admiring his own erection, he said, 'This is the physics of God.'

Both statements should be read carefully because Jove did not believe in God.

At the Battery I leaned on the rail and looked out at the water. There was a fog coming in and the lights of a tug bunking its coded message. The darkness and the water did not feel like a threat. Darkness-water felt like a response to the fluid place that had become my heart. As a scientist I try to work towards certainties. As a human being I seem to be moving away from them. If I needed any proof of the provisional nature of what is called the world I was beginning to find it. Of what could I be sure? Absolutely sure? And yet I tended towards him as light to a bright object.

I realise that is an optical illusion.

I started to walk back, away from the water, away from the dark. I would have to go back into the day just beginning.

Love affair:
amour
honourable or dishonourable. Jove had a wife.

THE TOWER

My husband has started an affair.
Cherchez la femme.
Where is she?

Ransack the bedroom. The master bedroom well named. In a rip of pillow and sheet I shall tear her stigmata off the mattress. Is that her imprint, faint but discernible? My radioactive hands will sense her. Whatever bits of hair and flesh she has left behind I will find and crucible her.

Give me a pot and let me turn cannibal. I will feast on her with greater delight than he. If she is his titbit then I will gourmet her. Come here and discover what it is to be spiced, racked and savoured. I will eat her slowly to make her last longer. Whatever he has done I will do. Did he eat her? Then so will I. And spit her out.

I am not seeking revenge.

I am not a vengeful woman.

I must proceed reasonably.

Where is the screwdriver? I will have every hinge off every door. There will be no privacy in the bathroom. No place to read a billet-doux with one hand. Let him shave in front of me, shit in front of me, talcum powder his armpits under my stare. I will count the hairs on his razor and the rings around his tub. I will fact-find him as though he were a rare breed of insect.

I will do all this sanely.

Give me a drill. I will bore holes in his shoes and spy on him as he walks. Eyes beneath the pavement will be watching him. While he sleeps I will trepan the back of his head and with my fingers pull out his dream of her.

I shall of course be quiet.

Where is the chalk? I shall mark out a new Berlin Wall: two feet each in the hallway, his study he can keep, and the side of the drawing room that is furthest from the window. I will give him one lighted ring of the gas oven and the kitchen cold tap. Let him eat cake. I will mark the doorways as did the Jews on Passover and pray that the Angel of Death takes the male first born. Him.

The sex bed the love bed the afternoon and night bed where I held him he held her bed the ripe rotting sly bed. Where is the saw?

First sever the headboard. Second, disembowel the mattress. Third, gut the springs. Fourth, amputate the footboard. Fifth, neatly arrange the halves at either side of the room, one dazed blanket each.

Blankets? Blankets? What has he to do with blankets? Warm enough in borrowed arms. His secret heat.

At least I am sail calm.

Her address. He must keep it somewhere.

I entered his study and began to go through his papers. What a pretty avalanche of white. I began to think of last year when we went skiing together and made love against the dunes of snow.

Look away. Who wants to salt themselves into a Lot's Wife of memory?

Above all, now, do not give way to pain.

My hands shook and the papers under them and. the study under there and the stacked up lives below shook and the newsboy on the news corner grabbed his news sheets and felt a second's agony and did not know.

Where was she? Under the carpet? Pressed between the glass and window frame? I was breathing her. Her dust, her molecules, the air was fat with her, the droppings and gatherings of a living body.

Purge the place, purge it.

I opened the windows of his study and conducted an experiment in gravity. If I drop a CD player and a lap top out of the same window at the same time which one will hit the ground first?

Let the words fall with them. Hate. Anger. Pain. I have been told that words are cheap. Words are light things that change nothing. Shuttlecock words raqueted between us. Nothing real only skill in the play.

Why did the rubber and feather words not fall? Why did they stick to my fingers? Photo frames and files I discus-hurled, watching them hold the air for a second before they dropped. I felt Olympic. I was champion of the world.