Dot in the Universe

by Lucy Ellmann

  For Todd McEwen

  Technical information was gathered from several sources, including Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm.

  Contents

  Part One

  Dot on the Horizon

  Dot on the Carpet

  The Ratty Tea Cosies of Jaywick Sands

  Dot in the Kitchen

  Dot in the Distance, Seen from the Side

  Dot in Pompeii

  Dot in Danger!

  The Traumatic Year of 1996

  Dumping the Body

  Dot on Trial

  A Taste for Blood

  Dot Reborn

  Dot Reborn (Again)

  The Man in the Street

  Shit in the City

  Dot as a Decimal Point in the Wrong Place

  John Finally goes Swordfishing!

  Part Two

  The Cloaca Maxima

  Dot in the Underworld

  Infinite Dots

  A Skeleton Band

  Death Stinks

  Death is Debatable!

  The Thing about the Underworld

  O Egg, O Egg

  Dot Reborn!

  Dot’s Infancy

  Fuck Science

  Dot Wins a Prize!

  Part Three

  Dot Reborn (Again!)

  Dot’s Infancy

  George Washington as a Baby

  The Wholly Irrelevant Year of the Barbecue

  The Best Game in Town

  Onions & Lemons

  Limbo Land

  Destruction and Dismay

  Dot the Body

  Removing the Thymus

  Dots on the Body

  A Single Solitary Dot

  Footnotes

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Part One

  There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

  There is a rapture on the lonely shore.

  Byron

  Dot on the Horizon

  When surveying a landscape you imagine yourself GOD. You long to pat the clumpy tops of trees, turn rivers with a muddy palm, cup hills and, stretching out, caress an entire abdomenlike valley. Tiny despots in a universe too BIG for us, we tower over things, but other things tower over US. I’ve always wanted to be able to fly, about twenty feet up. I’d just like to get a good LOOK at things. We’re held so tightly to the earth.

  Dot Butser was flying, but not happily. She was crawling up the aisle of a plane that had hit a spell of ‘turbulence’. Dot was returning to her hubby who had earlier fainted, apparently DIED, after eating too many jalapeño peppers at the airport. Not long after the plane took off, he’d CONKED OUT. Dot had screamed for assistance, which resulted in four stewardesses administering oxygen to John and a Kleenex and a glass of water to Dot, who was crying. It was this water that Dot was PEEING OUT when ‘turbulence’ struck. She emerged from the loo to find everyone else safely strapped in, except one other woman who was also crawling along the floor. But SHE soon got to her seat; Dot had a lot further to go.

  This is HELL, thought Dot. I will be forced to exchange FAREWELL GLANCES with STRANGERS, I am going to die clinging to this musty little avenue of carpet instead of my lovely HUBBY, whose cheeks so please me, whose cock is so thick, I crawl to him!

  When she finally reached him, John was READING. The plane’s shifts from air pocket to pressure front, swaying like a CAMEL not a plane, merely made him CROSS. Dot clambered over him, satisfied that at least now they would die together, yelling endearments and shitting themselves in adjacent seats.

  A MIRACLE, is it not, that two people, unrelated, can meet and mean so much to each other? Yet coupledom is taken for granted. The whole world organises itself around the fact that people manage to get their awkward bodies in position to FUCK, an achievement honoured by toasters, tandems and tax cuts. How nice, how CONVENIENT heterosexuality is. You may not even have met the guy yet but already useful items are being made for you: a two-door sedan or an electric underblanket with two sets of controls. Complete STRANGERS know that you’ll want to share meals, beds, homes, even a burial plot, that you will long for each other’s touch and seek to exclude others. The intimacy and anarchy of it all!

  ‘This is the worst flight I’ve ever been on,’ Dot informed John. He nodded. They both stared at the screens in front of them. Each seat had its own individual TV screen stuck on the back of the seat in front, so that everyone could watch their own individual choice of CRAP as they flew to their DOOM. Dot couldn’t even find anything to watch. She stared out of the window.

  The sun rose suddenly, much too FAST, missing out on the best bit, when time creaks on its hinges: twilight. It is such BULLSHIT that you can see nice sunsets from planes, the aurora borealis, UFOs, whatever. Nothing you see from a plane MATTERS. I once saw the entire ARCTIC CIRCLE from a plane, for HOURS, hundreds and hundreds of miles of cracked ice gradually turning blue as the sun went down. I searched it for Inuit. But none of this COUNTS. To really feel you’ve been to the North Pole you’ve got to TRUDGE, with sleighs and huskies, troublesome companions and weird food-stuffs. You’ve got to get frostbite. In fact you’ve got to be an IDIOT. There’s a REASON why such places are uninhabited:

  How did we all get so AMBULANT anyway? (In our flight socks!) Everybody’s two-week holiday is now spent being shot through the air to some sunny spot, the more distant the more impressed your pals will be. You don’t have time to learn the LANGUAGE or really get to KNOW anybody or even digest your FOOD before you’re back at your desk with your festering insect bites, the office sandwich and intrigues, abundant tea with milk, reliable loos and a GP who has your records (if he could only FIND them). Your cat, all unknowing about Lanzarote or the Seychelles, still needs feeding at 7:00 on the dot. How is any of this more meaningful than the life of a BUG? They too get around.

  Dot and John were herded like SHEEP off the plane, but regained some individuality when they located John’s car and set off for Jaywick. Jaywick in January. A deserted holiday camp echoing with furious family fun (long past) is all that separates Jaywick Sands from Clacton-on-Sea which is not far from Colchester where you used to get OYSTERS and Queen Boadicea but NOT ANY MORE. Originally conceived as a low-cost summer retreat for car-factory workers, Jaywick was subsequently taken over by ill-judging old folk like John’s grandmother (who’d left her house to him).

  You’d THINK a house with a sea view must be redeemable but you’d be wrong: there was something terrible about that big grey sea whenever you got a glimpse of it. Nobody in Jaywick wanted anything to DO with the sea! They huddled behind their mile of concrete sea wall righting garden gnomes, mending miniature picket fences and replacing the quotation marks on their house plaques (“Casa Blanca”, “Starfish Vista”, “Hydra Hideaway”), their damp stucco and buggered begonias no match for the salt spray off the North Sea.

  John tootled happily up Broadway with its boarded-up bucket ’n’ spade shops and defunct hair salon, then on to Sea Cornflower Way, turning left on Sea Rosemary Way, right on Sea Lavender Way, right again on Sea Thistle Way, then zoomed down Morris Minor Avenue. Dot was getting quite a tour of her new neighbourhood! After Ford Motorola Boulevard they headed east and finally reached Abalone Avenue where John’s house stood: “Oceania”.

  John picked Dot up and carried her to the front door, giving her a quick glimpse of the garden. On some propitious day of bachelorhood John had planted two little birch trees which had so far survived their tussles with the wind, perhaps because they were still so small. The rest consisted of shells, dead crabs, ice-lolly wrappers, a prostrate dustbin and a slice of red lace clinging to a shrub.

  After letting Dot into the house, John raced off to the chip shop (one of the few businesses willing to b
rave the Jaywick winter). Dot surveyed her humble home. There were no obvious comforts, apart from a tall pile of Scientific Americans stacked against a wall. A layer of sand on everything seemed to speak of a secret happier life the house led when unoccupied, as if it had never reconciled itself to human habitation. EVERYTHING in Jaywick is hostile to human habitation. Jaywick just wants to be mere and grey again. It doesn’t know what people are DOING there, with their sea-thistle ways and their salt-and-vinegar chips, their cars nosing through storms and their deep stupid fear of the sea. Jaywick doesn’t see the point.

  Dot stood in the middle of this unwelcoming scene and thought, I want to DRINK him, SWIM in him. He could KILL me and I’d like it. I would let him shit in my hand! How I need just to be near him.

  She loved to watch him talk: she loved the light in his eyes. Maybe everyone has a light in their eyes when they talk, but these were JOHN’s eyes, John’s mouth. She loved to TOUCH him, meet his hips with hers, roll her fingers in the groove of his spine. She loved his hands, his chin, his chest, his LOWER LIP.

  She loved his manliness, and he her womanliness: they fitted together according to the usual fashion. It’s not our FAULT we got the idea we could UNITE, that we might not be forever all alone in the world — fucking is very suggestive of merging.

  John returned with two fish suppers but they didn’t eat them. Some fish DIED for them, got FRIED for them, but they didn’t care. They were too busy KISSING. Dot knelt before John and put his hard cock into her warm red mouth. He turned her. John loved Dot’s ASS, liked to see her bending over, liked to clutch her ass and spank it and fuck her from behind. This now left Dot staring at a dull corner of the unfamiliar living room, but she concentrated on the animal nature of the act and her own feral position in it and was content. She trembled as he opened her legs. She gripped the mantelpiece but kept sinking with pleasure to the floor. John pulled her back up and fucked her some more.

  A young couple with no real impediments to happiness, basking in calm seas without worry or care! But who can contain and order the rampages of the human heart, its desires and despair? Love, like defecation, is never a settled matter. It forms and re-forms itself, makes itself felt, makes itself a NUISANCE. Merely a vehicle for physical exchange with another — illogical to place so much importance on it.

  Such a hideous species after all, so unprepossessingly UPRIGHT, gangly, and so BARE (fur or feathers would have helped, or a pronounced canine SNOUT), the only thing distinguishing one from another: gestures, habits, hairlines, like OLD SHOES moulded to your particular shape — take ’em all down to the charity shop!

  What does it matter what we DO or what becomes of us, flesh and bone that moves and thinks for a while and then cuts out? What does it matter what we THOUGHT? Does it even matter if you DIE? A few people will notice and then they’ll die too! Life continues around the deathbed itself — people must EAT. Nothing is left of you but a sour voice in your daughter’s head every time she loses her keys, or an empty seat on the bus — and there are MORE BRIOCHES for everybody!

  Hungry in the middle of the night, hopeless too, alone or not, always alone really, Dot gets up. John’s back against hers in the bed is not enough. She is full of FEAR, a conduit for emotions that come with their own INTENSITY, their own intent. Raw, violent life-or-death stuff! She doesn’t RECOGNISE herself. She wants to DIE or KILL, for fear of how much she cares about him. And why not? In a world so full of death, the law against murder seems an arbitrary whim.

  Eating a stale cracker, Dot returns to her lover’s arms beneath the eiderdown. Outside, the two birch trees stand rigid in the wind. Muscular and gleaming like dancers’ legs, they barely connect with the ground. The DRAMA of it all! The passing cars don’t know what’s going on in these trees.

  Dot on the Carpet

  John liked Dot in a tight corset with her breasts and ass bulging out above and below. He liked tying her with silken cords while murmuring in her ear — tying, teasing and taking her. Dot was never happier than when helpless, bound by her wrists and ankles to the bed! With corsets, kimonos, stockings, suspender belts, camisoles, wigs, tassels, vagina balls, high heels, blindfolds, handcuffs, and an all-rubber French Maid outfit, Dot and John attempted to contain and order the rampages of the human heart.

  John was pleased with his pretty wifey. She reminded him of his MOTHER, whom he hadn’t seen for many years. John’s mother lived in Switzerland. Her influence on John was minimal — she might as well have been on the MOON (in fact he only thought of her about twelve times a year). He was amazed to have found Dot and her sudden abundant LOVE, a woman willing to be with him anywhere, any time.

  Dot had the perfect face for her era: tight-lipped, pointy-nosed, pink-skinned, blonde-haired. MOST WOMEN IN ENGLAND CURRENTLY LOOK LIKE THIS. It is the face that has WON THE DAY. Jill Dando, Mariella Frostrup, Zoë Ball, Anthea Turner, Julia Somerville, Ffion, Sophie, and that rugby player’s ex-wife1 (his next one looked just the SAME). All would-be DIANAS, the dumb blank eyes perfectly offset by the sharp nose-and-chin combo, fake innocence seamlessly shading into utter indifference. It’s the look of all TV presenters and PR people, and no doubt the look they advise in OTHERS: it’s photogenic and low-maintenance, the short hair undisturbed by a swimming, skiing, airport press conference, neck massage, blow-job lifestyle — and it goes so well with a dark-haired boyfriend!

  But Dot had something that set her apart from all the other Dots and Ffions, a Fatal Flaw (everyone should have one). She hid it rather well but it was a great SHAME, an UGLINESS, which put a damper on things and filled her, when she let it, with despair. (AND IT WOULD DO THE SAME TO YOU IF YOU HAD IT.)

  Dot modelled her life on American SCHLOCK, those TV movies about women who suffer and solve things. Men play only rapists, ineffectual bosses and exasperated husbands in these dramas. It is always the WOMAN, stubborn, maligned and well toned, who wrestles the judicial system to the ground or SAVES LIVES or in some other way TRIUMPHS OVER ALL. There is comfort in the myth of the Lone Woman. You think YOU’VE got problems until you spend three hours watching a TV movie about a nice scientist lady who never hurt a fly (except in the vivisection lab) but finds out one day that her dead son has been cloned EIGHT TIMES without her knowledge or consent. Now that’s TROUBLE. She has to drive through many leafy suburbs and approach petty officialdom with WILD BESEECHING EYES before she can correct this moral outrage and reinstate perfection throughout America.

  But it wasn’t the plots that obsessed Dot. It was the spick-and-span KITCHEN COUNTERS, the self-sufficient GOLDFISH, the SPAGHETTI that hadn’t moved from its JAR for years. Not a pubic hair out of place, all bodily functions approved by the sponsors and the decor plagiarised from hotel chains. You need very little in a place like that, having done away with desire, dread and disappointment. No pain, no paperwork, only yourself to worry about and YOU’RE a well-groomed DOT IN THE UNIVERSE.

  Dots abound in the universe. Sheep shit nice little black dots, ladybugs shit the tiniest. Dot’s OWN shit sometimes came out in dots. Drips are really dots, as are tears and raindrops, atoms and molecules, cells, nuclei, dust particles. The sun and stars and, intermittently, the moon. Roses on watering cans. Gum on the pavement, and those little metal discs nobody knows the meaning of. Sparkles from sparklers, sprinkles from sprinklers, and vice versa. The Japanese flag. Spots on birds, frogs, dogs, butterflies and leopards. Speckles on eggs and feathers and fruit and flowers, and the little white dots on the rumps of fawns. Buds, buttons, berries, beetles, barley, balls, beads, beans, burrs, berets, buckshot, BRAILLE. Poppy seeds, cherry tomatoes, chocolate chips, currants, raisins, zeros, umlauts, periods, decimal points, coins, egg yolks, musical notation, Seurat, radar, the dots on dominoes or dice, hail, snowflakes, hubcaps, headlights, tumbleweed, lighthouse beacons, portholes, buoys, limpets, pearls and other jewels. Pupils, irises, painted toenails, earrings, nose-rings and tongue studs, pimples, dimples, nipples and nostrils, pores, pox, the mouths of surprised or singing peo
ple, vaginas, assholes and the upholstery work of stomach and rib-cage held together by the button we ALL have. The EARTH is a dot from far enough away.

  Dot in the universe. Dot was insignificant, but who isn’t? So much EFFORT we put into life, all the feeding, clothing, educating, medicating, fornicating, masturbating, cleansing and conversing. All the ANXIETY. When it really doesn’t matter if a single person gets happy. The universe DOESN’T GIVE A DAMN.

  The Ratty Tea Cosies of Jaywick Sands

  Dot lived for John, and John for Dot. He was the man for her, and she the woman for him (it’s important to get these things the right way round). He was so NICELY MADE (as was she). But they were conducting their idyll in JAYWICK SANDS, the arsehole of the universe! Though Jaywick opens and shuts itself annually, it farts away its future without regard. So it came to pass that the outside world INTRUDED on Dot and John, and the inner world was allowed to sort of POP OUT: a hernia of cosmic proportions ensued.

  For one thing, there were a hell of a lot of old ladies milling about out there. John had only just rid “Oceania” of old-lady clutter when Dot arrived. He had shorn it, driven it back down to the bare boards and sand it was meant to be, tamed the jungle of old-lady equipment and paraphernalia with his scythe (and plenty of rubbish bags). Out with the comfy crap of his grandma’s arthritic end. In its place, the clear straight lines of wood and metal that gathered the dust of MANHOOD that mollified John. Outside, the two birch trees he’d planted: sturdy straight lines, like John himself.

  But John had an address book full of old ladies’ names (friends of his grandma) and Dot ended up having tea with them all when John was out on the boat. Dot would clip their toenails and listen to their bubbling memories of husbands (long-gone) and children (ungrateful) and THINGS, icky glass paperweights, china balls of flowers, crocheted head-rests, eyesores from Mysore.

  As a result, Dot developed her own taste for junk and started foraging in the junk shops of Essex. She would descend on the shop, quickly evaluate stuff in her own way, assigning meaning indiscriminately, until she found something, ANYTHING, to buy. She feared the junk-shop owners, sitting like GODS amongst their junk: they alone knew what it was and where it all came from.