Gut Symmetries

by Jeanette Winterson

  Inevitably it is not only the gastric juices that are stimulated by luxury and fresh air. What could be nicer than pre-prandial fellatio in a foreign tongue?

  The Exotic, the Other, the orient of interest that floats at sea. Where else could anyone have access to a Thai chambermaid, a bored Countess, a fading rock star and a briny boy, all for the effort of a stroll on deck?

  Here is a Faustian world of self-gratification. Set outside of time, it looks real, it tastes real, inevitably it vanishes. If that brings bitterness it also removes responsibility. Outside of time there is no responsibility.

  HE: Are you married?

  ME: No.

  ME: Are you married?

  HE: Yes.

  There was a long pause.

  HE: My wife and I live on different planets.

  HE: Are you separated?

  HE: We have our own bathrooms.

  After my opening lecture on Paracelsus and the new physics, a balding man, bristling with energy, had bounded up to me and grasped my hand, hands, no matter how many I might have had, he would have grasped them all. He introduced himself as my companion lecturer for Cunard’s spring cruise, theme, ‘The World and Other Places’.

  The world of physics has few places more prestigious than the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, New Jersey. This man, Jove, was based there, working on a new model of the cosmos, dimensionality of hyperspace, ghost universes symmetrical with ours. He was the future.

  I said ‘You are the future.’

  He said ‘Does time wear a watch?’

  Jove was lecturing on Time Travel. Every morning he had to explain to elderly gentlemen why they would not be able to regain their hairline by stepping into a time machine. No one was interested in Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and its impact on what we call time. Everyone wanted to know when they would be able to extend their lives indefinitely by living them backwards. Theoretically it is possible to slow down the effects of ageing by altering the rate of time. Travelling at speeds close to those of light (186,000 miles per second), time’s flow trickles. If we break the light barrier, time seems to go backwards, that is, we need no longer move forwards.

  ‘They want me to tell them how to find Reverse,’ said Jove, ‘when most of them have spent sixty years wondering how to shift out of Automatic into First.’

  I did not believe in fate but it can be a useful excuse.

  How strange that I should be working my passage to New York, bags in the hold, my body harbouring a new start.

  How strange that I should have won two years of research funding at Princeton.

  How strange that I would be seeing this man every day.

  · · ·

  As the rest of the audience shuffled away to their favourite binary opposition, gin/tonic, a woman came forward and asked Jove, ‘If we were to travel back in time would it be advisable to don the costume of that period before we set off or to buy it when we get there?’

  What a fashion opportunity. While the physics fraternity are just beginning to wrestle with the implications of time travel, the travellers are worrying about what to wear. The world is ready for Ralph Lauren Mediaeval.

  ‘I’ll leave you ladies to discuss it,’ said Jove.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘You are the one in the Armani,’ and I walked away.

  He caught up with me later, part furious, part beaten.

  ‘You should meet my wife.’

  ‘How will I know which bathroom to use?’

  I said there was a love affair. In fact there are two. Male and female God created them and I fell in love with them both.

  If you want to know how a mistress marriage works, ask a triangle. In Euclidean geometry the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees and parallel lines never meet. Everyone knows the score, and the women are held in tension, away from one another. The shape is beguiling and it could be understood as a new geometry of family life.

  Unfortunately, Euclidean theorems work only if space is flat.

  In curved space, the angles over-add themselves and parallel lines always meet.

  His wife, his mistress, met.

  · · ·

  Perhaps if this story had happened before 1856 I should not be telling it to you at all.

  In the nineteenth century, most people knew their place, even if they did not know the mathematics that predicated it. In a strictly three-dimensional world, where the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, the comings and goings of sexual intrigue could be measured with a reassuring accuracy. On a flat sea the boat hardly rocks. What happens when the sea itself plunges away?

  1856. A poor obscure tubercular German called Reimann delivered a lecture calculating that Euclid is valid only in terms of flat surfaces. If the surface were to turn out not to be flat then two thousand years of mathematical smugness might not be smiling.

  Sixty years later, a poor obscure German called Einstein realised that light beams bend under gravity. Therefore, the shortest distance between two points is a curve.

  If light travelled in a curved line it would mean that space itself is curved.

  (Pitch of her body under me.)

  ‘Alice?’

  I could see him standing behind me. He wrapped himself rug-like round my shoulders. We made an elegant pair: dark/fair, older/younger, assured/uncertain. The mirror offered us a snapshot of our own desirability. He was gazing past me with some satisfaction.

  I looked too, but what disturbed me was another face in the mirror and another room behind.

  It began. Of course it did. Simple, solid, knowable, confined. A love affair. A commonality of life as dependable as life itself. We are what we know. We know what we are. We reflect our reality. Our reality reflects us. What would happen if the image smashed the glass?

  ‘Ice?’ Jove handed me my drink.

  ‘How many more of them will ask me whether or not they should be refrigerated at death until science can defrost them into the warmth of perpetual youth?’

  ‘What do you say?’

  ‘What I should say is that if you go in like a turkey you will come out like a turkey.’

  ME: What will you do with your old age?

  HE: What I have done with my youth and middle age.

  ME: Your work?

  HE: Purché porti la gonnella, Voi sapete quel che fa. (He sang.)

  ME: If she wears …? La gonnella?

  HE: A petticoat.

  ME: You know what he does.

  HE: Don Giovanni. I’ll take you to the Met. I’ll take you everywhere.

  That’s how it was/is. The story falters. The firm surface gives way. Nine months ago I was on this boat sailing towards my future. Nine months later and I am balanced on it as precariously as if it were a raft. On this raft I am trying to untangle my past. My past/our past. Jove had a wife. I was in love with them both.

  That’s how it is/was. Jove and his wife have disappeared. He crying in salt waterfalls, she scattering her tears like gunshot. I should have been with them.

  Why was I not?

  Here I am, all aboard the eternal triangle reduced to a not quite straight line.

  Here I am, man overboard, woman too. They are gone but there are no bodies.

  I am still here but there is no feeling. I cry lead.

  If there was a body perhaps I could feel. He would say if I could feel there would be a body. Energy precedes matter.

  She would say ‘Until you are ready to love there is no one to love.’ Would say/did say, caught in the curve of her own light.

  Is that her breast under me? Sphere of the thinking universe, wilful plunge of the sea?

  Stabs of time torment me. What use is it to go back over those high rocks that resist erosion? My life seems to be made up of dark matter that pushes out of easy unconsciousness so that I stop and stumble, unable to pass smoothly as other people do. I should like to ramble over the past as though it were a favourite walk. Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutu
al view.

  Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as I start to run?

  Past. Present. Future. The rational divisions of the rational life. And always underneath, in dreams, in recollections, in the moment of hesitation on a busy street, the hunch that life is not rational, not divided. That the mirrored compartments could break.

  I chose to study time in order to outwit it.

  When I was ten I heard my headmaster tell my father, ‘She’ll never be top drawer.’

  I looked at the pockets of their tweed coats, their knitted pullovers and knitted ties. I looked at their tawny jaws, their bottled eyes. I felt myself caught between two metal plates, crushing me. The pressure on my head was intense. I wanted to say ‘Wait’ but I was so low down that they could not possibly hear me. I lived in a world below their belts, not an adult not a child, smaller than small at the indeterminate age. The plates ground together and my father started to talk about the cricket.

  We got home, my father and I, self-made man, poor boy made good, and while he poured himself a sherry, I went into my parents’ room where they kept their chest of drawers.

  There were two top drawers. My mother’s held her jewellery and scent. My father’s stored his handkerchiefs. His hobby was magic tricks.

  When children learn to count they naturally add and multiply. Subtraction and division are harder to teach them, perhaps because reducing the world is an adult skill. I had long believed, and still did, that my father had at least two hundred handkerchiefs and that he had handkerchiefs as kings have treasure. Silk, spotted, plain, embroidered, cotton, paisley, patterned, striped, linen, raw, spun, dyed, lace like a periwig for his evening clothes. When he put one in his top pocket he sometimes gave it rabbit ears.

  ‘Alice?’

  And I followed him through corridors of make-believe and love.

  Right at the back of the drawer was his gold watch; a full hunter that chimed every fifteen minutes. Essential for a man whose time was measured in quarter hours.

  Is this what I would not be? Solid, reliable, valuable, conspicuous, extravagant, rare?

  I scattered the handkerchiefs like soft jewels. Is this what I would not be? Fancy, impudent, useful, beautiful, multiple, various, witty, gay?

  In what was left of the afternoon light I opened the lower drawers.

  Underwear, talcum powder, balled up socks.

  ‘Do you have to work so hard?’ said my father, when I was anorexic and hollow eyed.

  I got a scholarship to Cambridge to read physics and I started eating again. Of sleep I remained suspicious.

  When I sleep I dream and when I dream I fall back into my fears. The gold watch is there, ticking time away, and I have often tried to climb inside it and jam the mechanism with my body. If I succeed, I go to sleep within my sleep, only to wake up violently because the watch is no longer ticking but I am.

  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 went 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 me 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 = MC2. 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 h
ave. 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 now, 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?