Gut Symmetries (20 page)

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 fish. 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.

Yes, my life. You are what you eat. There was nothing to eat. I kept slipping backwards in my mind to the night with Alice when she confessed that she would like to do it with a woman. We were eating liver. Liver. I couldn't get my mind off the liver. When Stella and I finished the last of the cheese biscuits I was salivating liver. I'm sure you know it is the largest internal organ in the body weighing between two and five pounds. When I looked at Stella what I saw was her liver.

I had to do it. She was dead. She was nearly dead or I could 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?

We had made love. We were close that night. We had talked and argued as we always did. Stella's people are genetically engineered to dispute. Even their god, Jehovah, passes most of the Old Testament in dispute with someone, often Himself. My people are as many-shooted as our grape vines. We have our own opinions and we change them if we want to. What flourishes today may be clipped off tomorrow. Until then, nothing else is. So Stella and I argued. It was our intimacy.

We had made love. I had been joking with her. Her old self surfaced in flashes, then the sea took it, and she was out of my depth again. She asked me to give the Jew the diamond. I wanted her to shut up. That kind of talk frightened me and I was scared enough by then. When she said we might have slipped through a kink in time, I almost, almost, started to believe her. Our isolation was uncanny. It felt as though we had sailed off the sea and into the stars themselves. I kept my sanity by making little cuts in my arm with a filleting knife. As long as it hurt I was real, I was alive. 'I think therefore I am' had no meaning anymore. Quite often I had the disagreeable sensation that I was being thought. This is a common effect of attenuation.

The night was cool and silent. The moon was bladed. The wash of the sea on the boat had the sound of my mother's ham slicer, the swish, swish of the keen edge through the easy pink. I fell into a kind of dream, almost a trance, a hunger trance, I suppose, and I was a child again and my mother was feeding me. There was a plate of fresh olives and bread, and swish, swish, she was slicing the ham onto my plate. Uta loved ham. She used to come to us on Saturdays, the Jewish Shabbat, and eat platefuls of forbidden pig. Stella always refused and her Mama had to buy her spaghetti. Little Stella, eating the pale strings one by one. Uta, mouth open, a contrast to her prettiness and delicacy, every finer sense brought beneath her cured idol. When she had finished her course of parma ham, she ordered liver and onions.

I woke up. I could smell liver. I half rose over Stella's body. She was talking, what was she saying? It was something about the diamond again. I said
Stop it stop it,
but it was as if she couldn't hear me, as if my voice, high and cracked, was snatched upwards, while she, lying still, aimed her words at my empty belly, each one a punch.

I wanted her to be quiet, that was all, for both our sakes, and I must have picked her up, doll-like-dead as she was, still talking, and I must have dropped her head against the swollen splitting planks, or was it her head that was swollen and splitting? I said
Stop it stop it.

Then she was quiet.

I made the cut so carefully. I made it like a surgeon not a butcher. My knife was sharp as a laser. I did it with dignity, hungry though I was. I did it so that it would not have disgusted either of us. She was my wife. I was her husband. We were one flesh. With my body I thee worship. In sickness and in health. For better or for worse. Till death us do part. Till death us do part. I parted the flesh from the bone and I ate it.

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?

THE LOVERS

My mother and I were aboard the
QE2.
A spring cruise of fun and fantasy where every day had been parcelled and labelled with a mortician's care. There was an undertaker on board but his services were not usually required.

My mother had been intending to travel with my father to Hong Kong. It had been part of his retirement package, now guiltily extended over sea miles, calendar months and attendant family members.

I had agreed to accompany my mother to Cherbourg, Capri, and as far as New York. On board ship, after I had put her to bed with a sedative, I had gone to the bridge to visit Captain Ahab, my father's friend, my childhood adventurer. While I was waiting for him, I idly read the maritime bulletins.

MISSING PRESUMED DEAD

A yacht sailing off Capri was last sighted on Sunday June 16 at 18:00 hours. The boat was in difficulties. Severe storms prevented rescue attempts for 24 hours. It is thought that the boat could be drifting at sea.

It was a hoax. It had to be a hoax. My thoughts, such as they were, my panics, my suspicions, my hatred, blew easterly and blew sour. Wherever they were, they would be safe, moored in their love. They had known that my father was dying and they had abandoned me.

MISSING PRESUMED DEAD... Not true. Not true. Impossible that she should be dead. My gut was still connected to her. The present was not cut off from the future, emptied of blood. It was not Stella who was dead, not Stella and Jove, playing the games of the living. It was my father, my father who was dead. My father who was dead. Repeat it. Repeat it. Would the dead pile on the dead in an open grave?

Here is the Captain. He will tell me the truth. The Captain, my father's age, my father's build, as kindly and dependable as the sea underneath him was not. No more tricks. No more lies. He would tell me the truth.

As I embraced him I thought, 'Suicide pact?' Jove, who loved a flamboyant ending, Stella, who could not fail to be seduced by one. Jove, unstable as uranium. Stella, a living fission.

And I? Closed off behind lead shutters; heavy, soft, blue-grey unhappiness dumbing me.

I told Captain Ahab about my relationship with Jove. I did not tell him about my relationship with Stella.

In London, before my mother and I had left for our Southampton tide, I had gone into my father's room and opened his top drawer. The handkerchiefs were there, gaudy, luxuriant, waiting their turn for display. His watch was among them, silent now, no more quarters to the hour.

I had sat on the floor, sieving the silk through my fingers, the weight, the smoothness, thinking about him. Deep in the drawer out of easy reach, I had found a bundle of letters, each envelope postmarked Berlin, the packet held together by the remains of a red silk tie. I looked at the signatures.

'Your loving Uta.'

'Never tell all thy love.' My father in the Algonquin Hotel fastening his collar with a woman's red-silk memory.

I am my father's daughter.

The Captain promised me that he would find out all he could. I walked back to my cabin with a faint mixture of resignation and hope. Faint because nothing seemed able to penetrate my numbness. The sump of me was full already. The pain had nowhere to drain away and I could not hold any more. New pain did not, as yet, mean more pain. There was pain and I was airless under it.

I kept thinking back to the Algonquin Hotel. Myself with my father in his tie, myself with Stella, dressed against hurt. As I half slept, I could not fully distinguish which was my father/myself, Stella/Uta, whether the distance we imagine separates one event from another had folded up, leaving the two clock faces to slide together, plates of time, synchronous.