Time's Arrow

by Martin Amis

  Dear Tod Friendly: I hope you are well, as we are. It pleases me to inform you that the weather here continues to be temperate!

  Yours sincerely. Then the hysterical signature, under which the following name and title is complacently typed: The Reverend Nicholas Kreditor. “Here” (where the weather is ever temperate) is New York, according to the letterhead—more specifically the Imperial Hotel, on Broadway.

  And that’s it. All the letters get from me is an annual gasp of inanition. But Tod comes on as if New York were next door, and as if temperate weather meant rat showers and devil winds and the mad strobes of Venusian lightning. He’ll sit there by the fire for a long time, with scotch bottle, with alerted chemistry. In the morning, we’ll leave the letter on the mat with all the other trash, and it will go away, like Tod’s fear.

  How will he take it if the weather in New York turns really bad?

  It is significant, I am assuming, that nearly all our love affairs come to an end in the consulting rooms of Associated Medical Services. A professional formality prevails as we stand there with one or another of our girlfriends, against a background of height and weight graphs, nutrition rosters, scan and smear tips, and signs saying things like Do You Have Endometriosis? Don’t Panic. Nothing much happens, physically, except for some brow-touching and pulse-taking. Oh yes: Tod does his minor violence with the pins: “Any numbing?” Our girlfriends seem to enjoy the charade, at least to begin with; they are flirtatious and collusive. I think it must be Tod’s questions that eventually put them off. “How long have you been married?” “Is your husband an active man?” “Do you lead a … do you lead a full life?” Our girlfriends never lead full lives. They all claim, rather hurtfully, to lead empty ones. Anyway these questions go down like a lead balloon.

  Or maybe it’s simpler than that, and has to do with their seeing Tod in his natural environment, the doctor, the gatekeeper, with his white coat and his black bag. Our lady friends back out of here forever, with rewritten faces, pausing beyond the closed door and softly knocking, softly knocking, on love’s coffin.

  Still, there are plenty more where they came from. You find them all over. In the House of the Big One, in Alright Parking, in bars, in doorways on rainy nights, sometimes scarved and swaddled against the wind and the cold, sometimes naked in strange apartments.

  So it’s almost total, this immersion in the bodies of others. And bodies are nice, are they? Is that what I’m supposed to think? Yes, well, okay—they are nice. They forgive everything. When they’re old. They can’t judge. Irene, whose white voluminousness forgives everything. She says as much.

  “You don’t want to know,” Tod whispers in the dark, before he dreams.

  “Whatever it is, I could forgive it.”

  “You don’t want to know,” Tod whispers.

  She doesn’t want to know. I don’t want to know. No one wants to know.

  And then there is our own body, our own corporeal instrument, which we’re awfully proud of now. The bobbly briskness of our stride. My, the clarity and attack of our bowel movements. How perfectly we function.… It’s hardly surprising, I suppose, that the ladies go for us in a big way and come across so quickly, with our impassive oblong of a face, our clean and powerful hands. If you like the type, and though I say it myself, Tod is incredibly handsome.… This body: his pride in it, I firmly speculate, is connected to the fear that someone might hurt it—might mutilate or demolish it. Now why would anyone want to go and do a thing like that? Doctors may want to; but Tod doesn’t use doctors; he doesn’t go near doctors. “You don’t want to listen to doctors,” he tells Irene, coming as close as he ever does to talking and smiling at the same time. “They’ll try to get their knives in you. Don’t ever let them get their knives in you.” Sleek and colorful before the mirror in the bathroom, Tod feels pride that has a wince or a flinch in it. Go on, I want to say. Mime it out. Bend and cringe with your hands on your loins. Cover your low heart.

  Meanwhile I sit in the spacious bar-restaurant, in this drool parlor, in this fancy vomitorium. The woman has come, and now it’s meat and tears, with the food growing in heat on our plates. Wait. This one’s a vegetarian. She says she loves all animals—but she won’t put her money where her mouth is. Soon … Jesus, the whole routine is like the very act of lust. First the sadness and disarray, then the evanescent transcendence; then the bodies put on clothes again, and there is a prowl of word and gesture before they go their separate ways.

  Tod features another kind of dream in which he is a woman. I’m the woman too: in this dream I am participant as well as onlooker. A man is near us with his face averted, his slablike back half-turned. He can harm us, of course. But he can protect us, if he likes. On his protection we gingerly rely. We have no choice but to love him, nervously. We also have no hair, which is unusual, for a woman. I am delighted to say that we don’t see any babies in this dream. We don’t see any babies, powerful or otherwise. We don’t see any bomb babies, babies with the power of bombs. This dream is childless.

  Time is heading on now toward something. It pours past unpreventably, like the reflection on a windshield as the car speeds through city or forest.

  Identical twins, dwarves, ghosts, the love lives of Caligula and Catherine the Great and Vlad the Impaler, Nordic iceclouds, Atlantis, the dodo.

  Hold on. All of a sudden Tod has started reading travel brochures that praise certain semiremote areas of Canada. Yes, he finds them in the trash. Now Canada is where young men hang out when they really ought to be in Vietnam. Maybe Tod is considering Canada. Maybe Tod is considering Vietnam. Vietnam might do him good. The gibbering hippies and spaced-out fatsoes who go there, they come back looking all clean and sane and fine, after a spell in the war, in the Nam, in what they call the shit.

  Nicholas Kreditor’s latest letter reveals a hidden talent for detail and amplitude. The weather down there in New York, “although recently unsettled,” Kreditor writes, “is temperate once more!” I think he’s wrong. I think it’s changing. I think it’s definitely getting stormy.

  I knew something was up the minute Tod started selling all the furniture. Throughout the whole process I looked on in wronged silence, like a wife. First every stick of furniture gets carted off, and all my labor-saving appliances, then the carpets and the curtains, if you please. Why was Tod punishing me like this? He got a real kick out of it too, always looking for new ways to uglify the home. On would come the dungarees at the weekend. He prowled around in a simian hunger, searching for things to splatter and deface.

  He did a real blitz on the electrics. He took me down for many terrible half hours beneath the floorboards, beneath the joists, with cord or cable in his questing hand; the platonic darkness of this underworld became a figure for our nightlife, candlelit, torchbeam-pierced; our old existence I came to picture as a boundless cathedral of light. He did a similar job on the plumbing. God-awful work, plumbing. Everything’s back of everything else; you’re all elbows and kneecaps with your cheek crushed against the copper viscera. Anyway, it worked: we now have no water. Just the garden tap. Going to the bathroom these days is quite a heavy trip: the can becomes a kind of geyser, and Tod has to look lively with that bucket of his. Life clangs and swings and scrapes with all these buckets and pails. Until there we are on the bare boards downstairs, with candles and bottled gas and a deli picnic on a paper plate. That’s what Tod has brought us to. I mean, when I started out with him I never thought … Outside, the defoliated back garden, its bald bush, its sorry grass, its scorched earth.

  It wasn’t the belt-tightening that depressed me, nor Tod’s refractory and sinister cheer, which in any case didn’t last long. After all, I am stuck with the old bastard, whatever the lifestyle. It was the solitude growing around me, growing under me: this I couldn’t take. The shine of priestly indifference on the faces of shopkeeper and barman. In the eyes of the neighbors a watery oblivion. It’s happening at work too now: I can feel it. As for the women—well, thanks, ladies. One b
y one they stepped out on me. Only Irene persists. She couldn’t have been more tactful about the conditions, though her mood was understandably solemn and cautious. Something tells me I won’t be seeing her for a while either. Christ, even the dog next door has gone off me, and now hates me. She used to squeeze through the fence and bring me her bones. She used to bounce and romp. Now I get the tensed snarl and the stare of malarial loathing. Bitch.… It’s like the song says—it’s the literal truth. When you’re going down, when you’re traveling downward through society, then nobody knows you. Nobody knows you.

  The evil day came. We moved into a “studio” in Roxbury. I won’t describe the room. I can hardly see it anyway, through the mist of my hurt. Well, I hope Tod’s happy.… He isn’t, actually, not anymore. He spends a lot of his leisure, these days, in drunken prayer. The only time he perks up is when we go back to the old house for meetings with the estate agent. The two of them move from room to room and stand there nodding in apparent admiration of Tod’s handiwork. The old house—Tod really did a number on it. I don’t envy the new tenants. They’re hippies or gypsies or squatters or whatever, and they’ve already started camping out there as best they can. Sorry, guys. What’s that little rule about always leaving the bathroom as you’d expect to find it? Well, we played our part, one way or the other. You can’t deny that the place is an absolute toilet.

  To complete the picture, we now undergo a series of embittering demotions at AMS. One Friday afternoon I hand over my gauzy cream tunic and slip into a kind of butcher’s apron, epically and namelessly stained. You could say this for the new position: it took us back a way from the medical cut and thrust. It took us, instead, into the storeroom, the garbage kilns, the pickup truck, and the city dump. This special facility at the city dump, you see: that’s where everything comes from. Back in the boiler room with the ten-gallon bags I roll up my sleeves and rummage in heaps of bloody lint and plaster, cracked phials and syringes, crushed cultures. You also get stuff from the incinerator, which I man. Then I divvy up the crap into the rightful pedal bins and trolley them around the building, where nobody knows me. That’s who I am, the stained stiff in the industrial gloves. I smell like a major operation. My whole being snags and crackles with broken glass, but that’s all right, because although they may smell me, nobody sees me and nobody knows me.

  We’re as good as invisible now. Perhaps that’s the point of this process: the search for invisibility. You find it, invisibility, for a while, in a crowd, or behind the closed door of the bathroom (where, during that heavy transaction, by common consent, everybody is invisible), or in the deed of love; or it can be found down here, where you are unknown. Jo, my collaborator in disposal (old, fat, black, and stationary, glued to the heat of the incinerator: “Hey!” “Yo!” “Jo!” “Hey!”), he knows me. And Dr. Magruder will sometimes glitter potently in my direction as I make the rounds. Friendless Friendly. We move with no friction, head down, staring at the floor. We’re definitely on the way out.

  Is it that the human being is secretly nothing without others? He disappears. Even Jo has started looking at me oddly, as if I’m not quite there. The only body we have now is our own. And if we’re wicked and shouldn’t be seen, why are we becoming more beautiful?

  I’m on a train now, heading south at evening. The American Atlantic moves past me. All business is concluded. I don’t know where we’re going: our ticket, dispensed with a contemptuous flick by the station trash can, bears the name of our starting point, not our destination. I feel that something similar applies to me and Tod, to our identity. “Tod Friendly,” Tod Friendly keeps grunting without opening his mouth, as if he’s trying to remember it, or learn it. Our pitiful impedimenta: one uncarriably heavy suitcase full of clothes and money and our human remains; and one body clotted with rotten adrenaline. Tod’s heart cowers like an oyster at any quick movement from the other bodies in our car. Transports of heart and train … Shit, here comes the serge shoulderspan of the guard, his neck bent in judgment. He dots my ticket and moves away with an interrogatory stare. Oh, we really don’t feel so good. Maybe it would be better if we sat facing the other way? The train says Tod Friendly Tod Friendly Tod Friendly …

  Stop it. Stop the train! I somehow thought I was in a state of full ordeal readiness. Ready for continued descent—but on a modest gradient. Jesus, my poor bourgeois dreads: another undesirable residence, perhaps, more low company (if any), or possibly (I had faced this, with martyred mien) the life of the open road. But come on. Tod’s glands are in their dream mode, whinnying in nightmare. So maybe these are the things we’re heading toward: the white coat and the black boots, the combustible baby, the soiled bib on its hook, the sleet of souls. The wooden room where something lethal will be lugubriously decided. Everybody dreams about being harmed. It’s easy. Much tougher to recover from the dream of harming … America swipes by the window, cattle, timber, wheat, offerings from a younger world. With rushing eagerness I look for calm—to the ocean, not its nervous surface and its frayed edges, but the hidden depth to which everything is eventually returned.

  It must be New York. That’s where we’re going: to New York and its stormy weather.

  He is traveling toward his secret. Parasite or passenger, I am traveling there with him. It will be bad. It will be bad, and not intelligible. But I will know one thing about it (and at least the certainty brings comfort): I will know how bad the secret is. I will know the nature of the offense. Already I know this. I know that it is to do with trash and shit, and that it is wrong in time.

  3

  Because I am a healer, everything I do heals

  This business with the yellow cabs,

  it surely looks like an unimprovable

  deal. They’re always there when

  you need one, even in the rain or

  when the theaters are closing.

  They pay you up front, no questions asked. They always know where you’re going. They’re great. No wonder we stand there, for hours on end, waving goodbye, or saluting—saluting this fine service. The streets are full of people with their arms raised, drenched and weary, thanking the yellow cabs. Just the one hitch: they’re always taking me places where I don’t want to go.

  Our first thirty-six hours in New York were hectic but not frightening. They seemed to have to do with our identity. Getting a new one. Or getting rid of the old one. We also had to settle in at the new apartment, which I’m very impressed by (and only hope it’s a long let, but I’m scatterbrained about such things and leave all that to Tod). Or better say “Tod.” Tod won’t be Tod for much longer. He’ll trade in that name and get a better one. See you, Tod.… Then, too, we made the acquaintance of Nicholas Kreditor. I wouldn’t claim to know how it all added up. Anyway, I set it down, I lay it out. I sometimes feared for myself, at first, but not for others. This is what happened to us when we came to New York.

  We eased in under the city: Grand Central, where the train sighed, and the passengers sighed, one by one. The first people to leave went off hastily, while others lingered, girding themselves for the streets. Tod held his head down for a couple of minutes, then sloped off. Among the shadows of the platform he kept wrenching his neck around—for the first time in his life he seemed to be trying to look where he was going. As a result he kept bumping into everybody. His bows, his flourishes, his veronicas of apology. He jumped the queue at the ticket counter—his stub realized eighteen dollars—but went on standing there in line, his head babyishly lolling with impatience, before he peeled off into the store-flanked tunnels. Outside, the cab pulled up smartly, as they do. And we were traveling again, through ravine, under totem. Why not begin, I thought nervously, with a visit to the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty? But that would have been very old-fashioned. It was November. The humans had grown their winter coats, and the high buildings trembled in the tight grip of their stress equations.

  The new apartment consisted of a single room the size of a small warehouse: solid-wood d
esk and table, low-slung black leather chairs, filing cabinets, the playpen of the bed. Unlike our previous habitats, it had personality. It was butch. Unsmiling, hygienic, and butch. The man who lived here would have definite elixir theories about his yogurts, his knee bends, his nudist vacations. Well—whatever—now’s the time, one would have thought, for Tod and me to kick off our shoes and get the feel of the place. But no. We had our own personality question to straighten out. And in the second cab, heading east, seeing the personnel, those who are faceless, and those who are all face, all hair and gesture, I wondered if everyone needed new identities when they came to New York. Or was it just us. Just him. Not “Tod,” not any longer. The name on the bell, the name on the door, the name on the envelopes under the table lamp: they said John Young, John Young, John Young. Scraps of paper, issuing from the city, came twirling in through the cab window. We healed them with our doctor’s hands and placed them about our person. Letters, membership cards, bills, receipts. All said John Young. What else was out there? Cars, of course. Of course cars. Cars, cars, cars, as far as the eye could see.

  Next stop was the ID parlor, the identity basement, deep down, and hard on the senses, with that sharp dry-cleaner heat and, further back, the padded shunting, the press and release of enslaved machinery. We dealt with a wised-up kid, a specialist, an urban idiot savant, who wore a thimblelike monocle. At one point, early on, this kid was counting out money and saying something like, you haven’t got a choice there and if you don’t like it you can shop around, when we said, in a voice I’d never heard before, a voice that no longer pretended to be nice, a voice that expressed all the effort of pretending to be nice for so long,