Time's Arrow

by Martin Amis

  My career move? One night about a month ago Tod woke up in an unusually desperate condition, half clothed, in fact, and with everything intolerably slewing around him—as if the bedroom was moored to a loosening capstan inside his gut, where his secret moans. I thought: No wonder I felt so terrible yesterday. For yesterdays are always terrible, when Tod hits the tea. Then he upped and did something … “significant”: coyly significant. We went into the living room and seized the brass clock that has always adorned the shelf above our fireplace (oh, what strong hands he has), and violently enclosed it in the festive wrapping paper he found in the trash. Tod stood there for a moment, staring at the clock’s face, and then the mirror’s face, with a sallow smile. The room was still circling around us. Counterclockwise. In the car we bounded off to the reception at AMS, or Associated Medical Services, on Route 6. Tod, incidentally, unloaded our clock on one of the nurses, little Maureen. Little Maureen was agitated, but she made a nice speech. Little Maureen, whose face so disturbed me, fair, freckled, abjectly Nordic, the mouth too big or just too external, designed to express only powerlessness. Powerlessness: hope and no-hope, both at the same time.

  Well I can’t pretend that this doctoring business came as a total surprise. For a while now the narrow house has been filling up with medical paraphernalia, with doctoring tackle. Books about anatomy, born from fire in the backyard. Prescription pads. A plastic skull. One day Tod took from the trash a framed certificate and went and hung it on the toilet doornail. With amusement he surveyed the wrought script—for several minutes. And of course I get a big boost when something like this happens, because words make plain sense, even though Tod always reads them backward.

  I swear by Apollo Physician, by Health, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath and this indenture.… I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art. In whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm.…

  Tod had a good laugh at that.… Also, the characteristic black bag, swung out of a closet. Inside, a world of pain.

  A little stadium of pain, with darkness at the bottom of it.

  Irene telephones Tod regularly now. I suppose it’s good that we should get to know each other: first. She is calm and (usually) sober; Tod accepts these calls as one of his many duties, and settles down to them with resignation, with whiskey glass, with patient perfecto. Irene says she is sad. She is lonely. She finds she is less and less inclined to blame Tod for her unhappiness. She says she knows he’s a bastard and can’t understand why she loves him.… Nor can I. But love is strange. Love is strange. Sometimes she contemplates—quite dispassionately, it must be admitted—the option of suicide. Tod warns her that such talk is sinful. Personally, I think we can dismiss suicide as a hollow threat. I’ve been thinking about it. Suicide isn’t an option, is it. Not in this world. Once you’re here, once you’re on board, you can’t get off. You can’t get out.

  She weeps, controllably. Tod keeps his counsel. She’s sorry. He’s sorry. That’s the way it is.

  I hope he makes it up to her in the end.

  The actual doctoring I’ve become pretty stoical about. Not that I have any say in the matter. I don’t give the orders around here. I don’t wear the pants. So stoicism, I reckon, is my only hope. Tod and I seem to be on top of the work, and nobody has complained so far. So far, too, we’ve been spared any of the gorier stuff they do here—and some of this stuff you just wouldn’t believe. Surprisingly, Tod is known and mocked and otherwise celebrated for his squeamishness. I say surprisingly because I happen to know Tod isn’t squeamish. I’m squeamish. I’m the squeamish one. Oh, Tod can hack it. His feeling tone—aweless, distant—is quite secure against the daily round in here, the stares of vigil, the smell of altered human flesh. Tod can take all this—whereas I’m harrowed by it. From my point of view, work is an eight-hour panic attack. You can imagine me curled up within, feebly gagging, and trying to avert my eyes.… I’m taking on the question of violence, this most difficult question. Intellectually I can just about accept that violence is salutary, that violence is good. But I can find nothing in me that assents to its ugliness. I was always this way, I realize, even back in Wellport. A child’s breathless wailing calmed by the firm slap of the father’s hand, a dead ant revived by the careless press of a passing sole, a wounded finger healed and sealed by the knife’s blade: anything like that made me flinch and veer. But the body I live and move in, Tod’s body, feels nothing.

  We seem to specialize in the following areas: paperwork, gerontology, maladies of the central nervous system, and what they call talkdown. I sit there in my white coat, with my reflex hammer, tuning forks, small flashlight, tongue blades, pins, needles. My patients are even older than I am. It has to be said that they usually look fairly cheerful on their way in. They turn, and sit, and nod bravely. “Good,” says Tod. The old party then says, “Thank you, Doctor,” and hands over his prescription. Tod takes the scrap of paper and does his little stunt with the pen and pad.

  “I’m going to let you have something,” Tod says grandly, “that will make you feel better.” Which is the purest bull, I know: any second now—so invasively, so grimly, and on the basis of so little acquaintance—Tod’s going to stick his finger up the poor guy’s ass.

  “More scared,” says the patient, unbuckling his belt.

  “You seem fine to me,” says Tod. “For your age. Do you feel depressed?”

  After the business on the couch (a rotten deal for both of us: how we all whimper), Tod’ll do stuff like palpate the carotid arteries in the neck and the temporal arteries just in front of the ears. Then the wrists. Then the bell of the stethoscope is deployed, low on the forehead, just above the orbits. “Close your eyes,” says Tod to the patient, who, of course, immediately opens them. “Take my hand. Raise your left arm. Good. Just relax for a while.” Then it’s talkdown, which will typically go like this:

  Tod: “It might start a panic.”

  Patient: “Shout fire.”

  Tod: “What would you do if you were in a theater and you saw flames and smoke?”

  Patient: “Sir?”

  Tod pauses. “That’s an abnormal response. The normal response would be: ‘Nobody’s perfect, so don’t criticize others.’ ”

  “They’ll break the glass,” says the patient, frowning.

  “What is meant by the saying ‘People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones?’ ”

  “Uh, seventy-six. Eighty-six.”

  “What’s ninety-three minus seven?”

  “1914–1918.”

  “What are the dates of the First World War?”

  “Okay,” says the patient, sitting up straight.

  “I’m now going to ask you some questions.”

  “No.”

  “Sleeping okay? Any digestive problems?”

  “I’ll be eighty-one in January.”

  “And you’re … what?”

  “I don’t feel myself.”

  “Well, what seems to be the problem?”

  And that’s it. They certainly don’t look too cheerful on their way out. They back off from me with their eyes wide. And they’re gone. Pausing only to do that creepy thing—knocking, quietly, on your door. At least I can say that I do these old guys no real or lasting harm. Unlike nearly all the other patients at AMS, they go out of here in no worse shape than when they came in.

  The social standing enjoyed by doctors is of course formidably high. When you move, as a doctor, through society, with your white coat, your black bag, the eyes of others seek you upward. Mothers express it best: their postures seem to concede that you have the power over their children; as a doctor, you can leave the children alone, and you can take them away, and you can bring them back, if you choose to. Yes, we walk tall. Us doctors. Our presence chastens others, renders other serious. The tilted eyes of the others gives the doctor his
heroic, questing mein, his humorless nimbus. The biological soldier. And for what?… One thing that’s helping me through it, aside from my chats with Irene, is that Tod and I are feeling so damn good these days: physically. I can’t understand why Tod doesn’t show more gratitude for the improvement. When I think back to how things were out in Wellport, man, we were still walking, but only just. It was taking us twenty-five minutes to cross the room. We can bend over now with scarcely a groan, scarcely a knee-crackle. We’re up and down those stairs—hey, where’s the fire? Occasionally we get spare bits of our body back, from the trash. A tooth, a nail. Extra hair. The effortful shepherding of one’s confusion and faint nausea, which I assumed was the basic existential package, turns out to have been a temporary condition. And sometimes, and sometimes for minutes on end (especially if you’re lying down), nothing hurts.

  Tod doesn’t appreciate the improvement. Well, if he does, he’s pretty nonchalant about it. On the whole. But get this. You know that sexual thing we started doing, so very perfunctorily, out in Wellport, that sexual thing with ourself? Tod’s working at it much harder now. In celebration, perhaps, of his increasing vigor—or as a form of training. All the same, it’s by no means clear to me that we’re making any progress.… Tod? I don’t know. How is it for you? Any good? Because from my point of view it’s still a total flop.

  His dreams are full of figures who scatter in the wind like leaves, full of souls who form constellations like the stars I hate to see. Tod is conducting a long argument, and he is telling the truth, but the invisible people who might hear and judge luckily refuse to believe him and turn away in silence, weariness, and disgust. Often he is resignedly mutilated by sour aldermen, by painfully fat lord mayors, by put-upon railway porters. Sometimes he glows with great power, which rushes out and solves and clears everything: a power lent by the tutelary maker who presides over all his sleep.

  The pimps, and the little hookers …

  I puzzle at the local economy, the commerce, the apologetic arrangements of the ignored, of the cooled city. And this I get plenty of opportunity to do—to puzzle at it, I mean. I puzzle a lot, if the truth be known. In fact I’ve had to conclude that I am generally rather slow on the uptake. Possibly even subnormal, or mildly autistic. It may very well be that I’m not playing with a full deck. The cards won’t add up for me; the world won’t start making sense. It’s certainly the case that I appear to be hitched up with Tod like this, but he’s not to know I’m here. And I’m lonely.… Tod Friendly, stocky, emollient Tod Friendly, moves around at large in the city’s substructures, the shelters, the centers, the halfway houses, the flops. He isn’t one of the entrenched busybodies or Little Annie Fixits who, for pressing personal reasons, somehow need to police these mysterious institutions, where abuse is the buzzword. He comes and goes. He suggests and directs and recommends. He’s one of grief’s middlemen. For life here is junkie, is hooker, is single-parent, is no fixed abode.

  Hookers have this thing for mature men. They do. You hardly ever see them bothering with guys their own age. Watchfully the johns back their way into the significant rooms, the short-lease apartments of the low tenement on Herrera, a building that basks in its own brand of damp and dread. An act of love occurs, for which the john, or the trick as he’s called, for some reason, will be swiftly remunerated. Afterward the fond couple will stroll back onto the street, and part. The men slope off, looking ashamed of themselves (doing it for money like that). But the hooker will ravenously remain, on the sidewalk, in tank top, in hotpants, killing time before her next date. Or hitching rides to nowhere with the additional old stiffs who cruise by in their cunning old cars. Tod is quite often to be found in the tenement of whores. He’s a senior citizen, so the girls are forever putting their moves on him. But Tod’s not there for the sex and the dough. On the contrary. He shells out (token sums, like a couple of bucks), and invariably keeps his pants on (he doesn’t even consider them; they are other). Basically it seems that Tod scores drugs here. Not for his personal use: the tetracycline, the methadone—it all finds its way back to the pharmacy at AMS. Then, too, there are physical injuries to be tackled, in the tenement on Herrera, with its twisted sheets, its stained bidets.

  At the flops, the bums all eat the same thing. Unlike in a restaurant or the AMS commissary. It isn’t good, I think, when everyone eats the same thing. I know that none of us has any choice about what we eat; it’s all down to drainage, and some systems are obviously better than others. But I get a woozy feeling when I watch them spoon away, and the plates—twenty or thirty of them—all fill up with the same thing.… The women at the crisis centers and the refuges are all hiding from their redeemers. The crisis center is not called a crisis center for nothing. If you want a crisis, just check in. The welts, the abrasions and the black eyes get starker, more livid, until it is time for the women to return, in an ecstasy of distress, to the men who will suddenly heal them. Some require more specialized treatment. They stagger off and go and lie in a park or a basement or wherever, until men come along and rape them, and then they’re okay again. Ah shit, says Brad, the repulsive orderly, there’s nothing wrong with them—meaning the women in the shelter—that a good six inches won’t cure. Tod frowns at him sharply. I hate Brad too, and I hate to say it, but sometimes he’s absolutely right. How could the world fix it so that someone like Brad could ever be right?

  I don’t see eye to eye with Tod on all issues. Far from it. For instance, Tod’s very down on the pimps. The pimps—these outstanding individuals, who, moreover, lend such color to the city scene, with their zootily customized clothes and cars. Where would the poor girls be without their pimps, who shower money on them and ask for nothing in return? Not like Tod and his tender mercies. He just goes around there to rub dirt in their wounds. And backs off quick, before the longsuffering pimp shows up, and knocks the girl into shape with his jeweled fists. As he works, the baby in the cot beside the bed will hush its weeping, and sleep angelically, secure in the knowledge that the pimp is come.

  * * *

  Irene still telephones regularly but I mustn’t get my hopes up. I thought she was slowly coming round to us. She isn’t. She’s turned against us again, with a vengeance. Why, I don’t know. Is it something we’ve said?

  It’s mildly encouraging now, though, when Tod looks at a woman in the street. For once his eyes point where I want them to point. Our imperatives or priorities are by no means entirely congruent, but at least they overlap. We like the same kind of woman—the womanly kind. Tod looks first at the face; then the breasts; then the lower abdomen. If it’s a back view, he goes: hair; waist; rump. Neither of us, it would seem, is much of a leg man, but I suppose I could do with a bit more than I get. I’m also annoyed by the timespots Tod allows for each section. He is done with the face way too soon. A single downward swipe of the eyes. Whereas I’d like to linger. Maybe the etiquette forbids this. Still, I’m mildly encouraged. There’s hardly any of the usual vertigo effect, when I’m trying to see things he’s not looking at, when I’m trying to look at things he’s not seeing.

  Vivified, perhaps, by all this fieldwork we’re doing, our lone sex sessions have, of late, become unrecognizably livelier. The missing component, the extra essence, is to be found, of course, in the toilet. Or in the trash.

  Where would Tod and I be without the toilet? Where would we be without all the trash?

  Mothers bring Tod their babies in the night. Tod discourages this—but he’s usually pretty sympathetic. The mothers pay him in antibiotics, which often seem to be the cause of the babies’ pain. You have to be cruel to be kind. The babies are no better when they leave, patiently raising hell all the way to the door. And the moms crack up completely: they go out of here wailing. It’s understandable. I understand. I know how people disappear. Where do they disappear to? Don’t ask that question. Never ask it. It’s none of your business. The little children on the street, they get littler and littler. At some point it is thought necessary to confine th
em to strollers, later to backpacks. Or they are held in the arms and quietly soothed—of course they’re sad to be going. In the very last months they cry more than ever. And no longer smile. The mothers then proceed to the hospital. Where else? Two people go into that room, that room with the forceps, the soiled bib. Two go in. But only one comes out. Oh, the poor mothers, you can see how they feel during the long goodbye, the long goodbye to babies.

  And about time too.

  Now that it’s eventually started happening, I find that my attitude is one of high indignation. Why has Tod been frittering my life away like this? Overnight the world has opened up and revealed its depth and color. And the self has opened up, also. We’re not just surface anymore but voluminous and deep-sea, with our wiggling flora, our warped fish. Everybody’s like this, I realize: touchingly—no, grippingly—vulnerable. We have nowhere to hide.

  Love didn’t catch me entirely unawares—I had fair warning. Love was heralded by a whole new bunch of love letters. But these weren’t love letters from Irene. They were love letters to Irene. Written by Tod. In his squat and unvarying hand. They came from the trash, of course, from the innards of a ten-gallon Hefty. Tod went and sat in the living room with this red-ribboned bundle on his lap. He had his black chest out too. Then after a pause he took a letter at random from the middle of the stack; he stared at it with an unfocused, an uncommitted eye. I made out what I could:

  My dear Irene,

  Thank you again for the cushions. I do like them. They brighten up the room as well as making it more “cozy” … quite ruined. With scrambled eggs it is better to leave the pot standing with cold water, not hot … You must not get too concerned about this matter of your veins, which are superficial. There is no pigmentation and no edema. Remember I like you just the way you are … I look forward to seeing you on Tuesday with the usual impatience but Friday might be more convenient.…

  Blankly Tod turned to that chest of his. The photograph he wanted was all crushed and curled but he soon healed it with a squeeze of his fist.… Wow, I thought. So she’s the one. No spring chicken. And a really big old broad. Smiling, in a tan pants suit. When he went to work that evening, Tod left the letters by the front step, encased in a white shoebox on which someone—presumably Irene—had scrawled the words The Hell with You. It didn’t seem like a very good sign. But then Tod’s letter, in my view, wasn’t very promising either.