Three Dreams in the Key of G

by Marc Nash

  My husband finally gave notice that I was going to get a pummelling. And I don’t mean he was treating me to a full body massage for our anniversary. Threatened to pulp me to within an inch of my life. Imagine that? The sheer bloody presumption! How could he know anything about my life, when he elicited no awareness of it outside of any intersection with his own realm of needs? Were he in full possession of the seams, strands and flyaways, then I well believe that he could have pinpointedly measured the cut of his violence to make his point. Always supposing his calculations weren’t suddenly deluged by a surge of pug-ugly passionate fury. Actually, no, that wouldn’t have happened. Passion would not have figured in any equation. Rather his staking of me might have got out of hand and triggered a more primitive bloodlust.

  But the fact was he never had full vacant possession of me. So how could he cinch an inch? Which inch was he proposing to leave me with anyway? Which tidbit of my soul would remain beyond his bruising north and south paws? Surely in his mind, that would have remained a festering sore, one day requiring to be lanced, as he stooped to conquer fully. And then, shucks, I would be dead and not worth possessing any longer. Possession may well constitute nine-tenths of the law, but that last zero-point-one fraction sure exerts some traction. A siren calling him to sink me for the last time, wholly and irrevocably. Forcing him to lash himself to the masthead so as not to succumb to a single, final one of my charms. My last request. Taunting him, it will be murder and not assisted suicide. He will not put me out of my misery, as I would not deliver him from his. Of course, the fiendish move on his part would have been to leave me with just the inch I have always craved to shave off my waistline. But that assessment was way beyond him.

  So I beat it. Beat his feruled rap. Beat off the beat off. Left him to flog his own flesh. I quit on his quirt, as he brandished his ratty rattan, and I scoffed at his scourge. Catcalling before his mangey cat o’nine tails, I wondered how many of our shared lives we had mutually destroyed. I abandoned him to do the maths. Me, I had some other numbers to crunch. And that was how I entered the world of counter-espionage.

  So yes, in a way, maybe it makes sense that the bug-eyed telephoto lenses and cauliflower-eared listening devices are zeroing in on me. They’re just a bit late that’s all. Séancing into the wrong incarnation of me. Knock twice if you’re there. For Jane Bond has passed over. She is not with us any longer. But what a time we had with her. When my body was still lissom, my mind still lithe. Jean Ohm OHM’s. On Her Majesty’s Service. Lavishing it up at the finest casinos and night clubs of the world. The places where the global dirty dealers liked to unwind. Me, the glamorous escort perched (yes, we’ll palm one of HIS terms then double-deal it) on the arms of dashing playboys. Bringing them luck and me information. The marking of cards. Sharping. A double identity, life as a fluttering, a throw of the dice. Blow for luck. On dead men’s bones, in the crapshoot of Judas kiss intimacy. Deep-veined thromboses lying in wait just beneath my thimble-rigged smile. My locket-borne powders.

  One high roller with a line of cocktails laid out tossed me a gold sovereign with which to lace each. Another bobbed each pair of dice in my stirrup cups before shooting craps. Neither were sufficiently unfettered by my charms to notice how the subtle outcomes shook out. Gold should not react chemically, nor should the same face of the die keep surfacing. Two loaded men just got a soupçon more encumbered. Enough to tip them over the edge into oblivion.

  And then on to the dancefloor. Me, scintillating in my spangled, silver mirror dress. Shimmering like a miraged desert oasis, while thirsty men’s tongues lolled uselessly from their mouths. Chained-male. Each sequin scattering the disco lights into a hundred thousand coruscations. The excitation trail of my magnetic forcefield. I was that colossus glitterball astride the gyrating throng. Radiating colour therapy. Laser-healing the engrained retinal prejudice. So that everyone fell in love with me.

  Actually, Jane Bond was really only the daydreams of a bespectacled, bruised wallflower. Sat around in New Haven branch libraries accumulating the data I sought. Well, it was 1959, in pre-internet days after all. When you had to work a bit harder for your fantasies. Tripping the light fantastic meant more than just tripping a digital switch. Once I had culled the requisite information, then I could truly act like Jane Bond. Though I’d have to sow my own sequins on.

  And when it came to bibliothecal intelligence gathering, without being colonial about it, I can honestly say that Encylopedia Britannica knocked Webster’s into a cocked hat. Maybe it had something to do with sourcing from the same continent as the pertinent information I was seeking. But there again, my ex-fellow countryfolk still exhibit a twitching vegetative resistance to metrification. An inbuilt parochialism I myself shared and that ultimately contributed to my downfall as a would-be global subversive. The Lady of Misrule.

  For I was after the holy grail. The numerical Rosetta Stone. The definition of all definition. The measurement of all measurement. That slab of metal which represented ineradicable, incorruptible, unimpeachable scale. Lying in state somewhere in the bowels of France. Clumpy and cardinally unique, I was going to steal it and dissolve the solid state. Vaporise all surety. Render mutable all fixity. Distance the world from over-reliance on magnitudes. They couldn’t rule without rule. Wouldn’t be able to quantify without amplitude. Would necessarily fail to co-ordinate without bearings. Nothing could possibly count for anything anymore. Tabula rasa in place of tabulation. Gulping for oxygen, they’d surface too abruptly and contract a bad case of the bends. I couldn’t deliver one inch of myself or anything, but I knew where I could get my hands on a metre. I was about to seize the standard and mankind would no longer be able to cut his cloth to size.

  The encyclopedias soon led me back to the reliquary of materialism. The shitty brick, the cardinal corrosive, resided in Sèvres, just outside Paris. A lump of lumped-together alloy, ten percent iridium and ninety percent platinum (not exactly lumpen then). With two lines scratched on, the distance between denoting the length of one metre. Since the alloy was resistant to corrosion and maintained at a constant temperature, so it would neither contract nor expand, this prototypical metre ought remain unbending. Such a standard had been established back in 1889 by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, replacing the somewhat franco-centric previous definition of one metre. That being one ten millionth of the quadrant of the Earth’s circumference, running from the North Pole to the Equator, via Paris. Well, we had shanghaid both longitude and time from the rest of the world and stationed them in Greenwich, so why not? In those pioneering days of numbers racketeering and extortion, there were only two press gangs in town. The Dutch and Phlegms were too busy slavering over oil painted fat bird pornography and the Iberians, they were too busy pursuing fools gold and pumping their god brand to secure their own competitive advantage.

  Only, the French had got their sums wrong, the silly sausages! (Damn near sufficient to get mankind into space though). What purported to be a metre, a couple of striations on a block, was wide of the mark. Didn’t come up to scratch. They changed their minds. There was me, all balaclavad up in my imagination, hoisting the thing above my head before dashing it down like Moses did with his first lot of stone cold restraining orders. Now I’m frozen in the spotlight holding it up, but I’ve to proclaim it more bogus than the Turin Shroud. And then I got to thinking, just like the Shroud, the bar is a post-facto proof. The metre wasn’t derived from the bar, but the other way round. It hadn’t imprinted its ghostly dimensions on any mineral blotter. Just as the Son of God didn’t organically spoor some Semitic schmutter. They’d always had a measure, they’d just needed some tangible way to get the measure of it. The French stick was nothing but a palimpsest. I’d traced it back and cuffed it to within 0.0254 of a metre of it’s miserable counterfeited life. I was on a roll now.

  The same metal alloy also defined one kilogram. And one second was relative to the radioactive decay of a caesium 133 isotopic atom. Was there somewhere in a le
ad-lined glass case a caesium rod, with or without markings? How typical that a fixity of measurement should be defined against an algorithm of decay and deterioration. To consign us all into a half-life race against time unto death. I envisioned the atomic clock as an egg timer with isotopic sand. I was on to something here.

  The whole miserable SI units of measurement, the unified, decimalised, seven numerical one-ders of the world, with which the French had devised to rule over the more haplessly homespun Imperial System, was now ripe for disfiguration. All it would take was a series of guerilla raids on each of these holy cow relics to debase everything they stood for. The kelvin and ampere of course have no artefacts to demean. Yet since they were named after real men, I could maybe steal their headstones and reduce them to footnotes in history. Meantime, I further degrade their memories by publicly effacing some symbolic analogue measuring stick. Pull the hands off a giant coulometer. Or castrate a thermometer into unresponsiveness. And all the while, as these beacons to oppression are snuffed out one by one, the light at my theatrical showpiece grows progressively dimmer. For which the audience will not require some huge analogue pointer to flash diminishing candelas of luminescence.

  But what about the seventh and final unit? What arse de résistance for that humble mole of molecular valency? Undoubtedly a figment of idealised imagination, a square peg in round hole shorthand. But therefore short of both artefact and real-life titular sponsor. I could certainly stage a representative scything of a skin blemish from some seized male’s exposed posterior. And then the lights go out as the world collapses into precision-free entropy. But I was forever pricked by the doubt that this last one needed more thought. Too much stretching the point. An over-playing on words. Besides, it’s too small scale for a finalé. Arggh goddamnit! I’ve lurched into their perfidious idiom. You see how pernicious it is? There wasn’t a (metaphorical) second to lose. Even if I haven’t sewn up all the details, nor the sequins on my dress.

  XVI.VI.MMI

  I could forgive my daughters almost anything. If they became addicted to drugs, intermarried or turned out to be gay. In fact, in my vengeful moments, I have often hypothesised either of the latter two, just to inflict beguiling anguish on him and the grandparents. Imagining just how they’d fail to cope with either eventuality. Of course these are not the purest of motives for anticipating your children’s determination of their sexual identity. Only I just want it appreciated that I would be terribly supportive come what may. I’d have to be, for we’d be fighting the queer fight together. Since as Mother, I’d inevitably be castigated as the root cause for their prescribed deviation.

  But I digress – well, there is a blank page to be filled after all and now I’m digressing from the digression. Yes, I would forgive either of my daughters anything, save if they stole in and read my journal. I say stole in, when in fact they wouldn’t have to descry terribly hard. I leave it in open view, wishing, I think, to be noticed. Wanting someone in my nuclear family to turn aside from their own slow-breeder meltdown long enough to evince interest in that private half-life of mine which doesn’t involve them. Principally my husband-consort I reckon, who might idly flick open the covers. Fists balled on the dresser, staunch against contaminative contact, white-knuckling the further he inclines into my black run. Until he passes out from guilt. Or plops on to the corner of the bed, sweeping up the book for a more blanket coverage of his roll of dishonour. An unabridged crossing into the currents of his wife’s mind. Of course, in all likelihood he’d heave to immediately, at first sight of the Roman Numeral appointing. Such would be the cardinal white heat of my mutiny.

  Equally, it could be one of the girls who might, just might want to learn about the person who brought them life. To find out what makes my second hand invisibly tick, beneath the minute hand that licks around at sixty Sisyphean labours an hour, just to drive their own ponderously imponderable hourly hand by one heartbeat. In order to underpin and redraw the routine and regularity of their world for them. Or maybe not.

  And yet I utterly do not want them to read me. To solve me. I’ve already turned my curd over to them unfailingly, as they are my flesh and blood. Now I ache after suturing my skin. Were they to penetrate my paper refuge, the stitches would be rent asunder and I’d bleed to death. Well might I understand their urge for an impregnable place, to seek the knowledge of where they come from totally and indivisibly loved. But to attempt to re-fuse with me in pursuit of a redoubt would necessarily deny me my own haven. In truth, what useful shelter could my jellied mass provide, if I had nowhere left to turn to myself, in order to feel secure? One of us has to forgo and return to face the world. They are at the beginning of their lives and must embrace such immersion. I have served my time, I just want my body back. It’s a space reserved for me. In the lending library of life. I’m overdue. Perniciously fined. Membership withdrawn. I need to renew myself.

  Still, even without all the details being ironed out, preparations for planetary re-alignment necessarily proceeded apace. I saved towards the air fare. Other logistics smoothed out and decreased with each trip to the shopping mall (okay, okay so the air fare fund went West on these occasions). The exercise regime was honing my body and reflexes. I kept dreaming of my mirror dress to spur me on and my thighs no longer chafed together when I walked. My nerves were steeled, for I just had to keep reminding myself of the galvanising motive behind all this, Gene’s vaunted meting out of justice by the inch. He had granted me an inch and by crikey/crimminy I was going to go the full nine yards.

  But then disaster! They changed the rules. A Reformation to sweep away all relics and artefacts of fabricated veneration. In 1960, the French Bureau of yada yada yada decommissioned the old volumes and sanctified light waves as the new canon. One metre (purportedly) equalled 1,650,763.73 wavelengths, in a vacuum of the orange-red line in the spectrum of the krypton 86 atom. Clear as mud to me. But I knew krypton was a gas and therefore the great heist was off. There could be no ‘End of the Pierre Show’. The bastards had vaporised their assets before I could swoop to sequestrate. Had they got lucky, or had they been tipped off? The mole and its parasitical associates would seemingly live to burrow and undermine our sense of worth for another few decades at least.

  My undertaking was only finally laid to rest in 1983. When graduation went digital. A metre was now the distance travelled by the constant velocity of light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second. Ahem, let me refresh my decaying memory for a moment, just how did they define a second again? Nevertheless, they had still outmanoeuvred me. The whole world was in the process of being digitised. Put beyond reach. Beyond touch. Beyond theft. Stashed somewhere out in the never never. Soon out of mind and therefore of zero interest. Somewhere over the rainbow and transmitting ‘meaning’ back to us. Cunning bastards. The metamorphosis was complete. I had gone out hunting with my butterfly net. But all along, they were grubbing about reversing the tide of history and working to draw the butterfly back into the chrysalis, before conjuring the caterpillar from out of the silky pouch. Compression was all and my eyesight was already fading with age.

  So now in my dotage, when it is too late to strike and I shall never have course to wear my bugle bead dress, I take to the digital airwaves in order to track them down and engage them. And in turn, they follow my vapour trail and come to me. I must have been getting close. What could be more digitised, more condensed, than the enigma DNA code of life? Three billion chemical letters in each cell of your body. How’s that for a spot of compression! And therein lies my advantage. For they are hidebound by their corporeality. These historical masters of the large-scale, of expansion and enormity, face a crisis in downsizing. Their whole conceptual apparatus will have to be overhauled. They will face a spiritual crisis of faith when they do so. Everything I’ve laboured so tirelessly for all these years will be brought to delicious fruition. By their own hand. They will implode. Finally, Pandora gets her own trinket box back. Eve gets a second bite at the apple.

&nb
sp; I know how they’ll operate. At a loss, as per usual. Compression of the infinite, reduction of all potentia. Promising Polyphemus a cure for his mono-sightedness, as he meekly allows these lab-fleeces to round up all of Apollo’s flock touched by numinous fecundity. How they’ll trample down the grass and enclose the creatures in a pen. The control test; as in, can it be controlled? Contained? The light in the withered herbivores goes out and they are picked clean off the bone, in the voracious search for the ovine spark. In their throttled rage, the seekers and seers blind the Cyclops for good measure. The double-blind control test.

  They will not cease until it sits atop their fingertip. In a chip, communing with the circuitboard beneath the keypads of their digits. Fleshing out precisely who they are, beyond the individualising whorls and eddies of their imprinted identities. They will seek to catalogue, to reference, to source. They will chisel and whittle away all fine matter that pertains to us. And they will blow away the pulverised ceramic scoria, the plaster of paris shavings, to reveal what, the genetic genius of Michaelangelo? Give over! As I gaze at the gnawed cuticle at the end of my finger and nod appreciatively at true, unbounded creativity. Cut to the quick. Cut to the chase. Cut, cut, cutting. Forever slicing and dicing, these would be empire-builders. Their jerry-building heaped upon foundation stones of fragmented matter and subsiding meaning.

  The collapse is starting already, with this genome project now well underway. Their twin verves of compulsive greed and righteous altruism have crossed swords over ownership of the data. As a bold patent pre-emptive, the forces of fairness and public knowledge publish their findings on the internet. Where I can be found lurking, ready to google bushwack for my own Roberta Hood redistribution. With their hands grasped around the twin helical pillars of evolutionary wisdom, I, Delilah whet my pruning shears...