by Martin Amis
All three of us know that John has a secret. Only one of us knows what that secret is. He leaves it undisclosed, which is perhaps the best thing to do with secrets.
For most of our lives we are all doctors to ourselves. Not when we’re old, and everything feels so numb and dead, and decency and disgust forbid inquiry. And not when we are young, and the body is an unexamined ecstasy. Just the time in between. Mark them, in coffee shops, on buses, wincing, wondering, doctors to themselves, medicine men and faith healers, diagnosticians and anesthetists, silent consultants to themselves.
Doctor yourself. But don’t doctor others. Leave them alone. Let them be.
If John’s moral life came to me I would say:
There is malocclusion and diplopia. The pulse is thready. Auscultation would reveal dyspnea, rich in rales, also tachypnea, suggesting mediastinal crunch. Eyes show strabismus and nystagmus, also arteriovenous nicking and silver-wiring. In the mouth the buccal mucosae are lesioned, the oropharynx inflamed. The heart: thrills, lifts, heaves, rubs, with a systolic ejection murmur at both sternal borders. Mental status: alert, oriented; memory, judgment, mood—normal.
Meanwhile, on their beds and trolleys, the victims look on with anxious facies.
You can see the stars, now, in the city, or everybody else can, and not just an attractive smattering here and there. No: the inordinate cosmos. Most people behave as if the stars have been visible all along. To them it’s no big deal. But John likes the stars, surprisingly. His eyes roam the heavens, the patterns, the clusters. He will pick out these celebrated nightspots to the cooing nurse on his arm, and meticulously expatiate, say, on their relative distances to the earth—and to each other. It’s interesting. Those two there that look like twins half an inch apart: they may in fact be nauseatingly sundered by a long light-time of depth, united only by the angle of our point of view. One a dwarf, one a giant … The nurses smile and half-listen, their thoughts hardly less fantastic, but much more local. Me, I’m all ears. For to me the stars are motelike, just twists of dust. Yet I feel their fire. How they burn my sight.
Some affairs actually now begin with a medical procedure. John has started bringing his work home. There’s nowhere to hide. There’s nowhere to hang in the dark.
These prospective lady friends arrive quietly. John, who is ready, receives them quietly. They feel cold, and rest and cry for a while, and then mount the cleared table. They assume their half of the missionary position, though John, of course, is busy elsewhere, with the full steel bowl. A rectangular placenta and a baby about half an inch long with a heart but no face are implanted with the aid of forceps and speculum. He is always telling the women to be quiet. They must be quiet. The full bowl bleeds. Next, the digital examination and the swab. They can get down now, and drink something, and talk in whispers. They say goodbye. He’ll be seeing them. In about eight weeks, on average.
I am tentatively concluding that these are the bomb babies of Tod Friendly’s dreams. It adds up. The babies, so to speak, are helplessly powerful. This is the power they wield: the mortal importance of no one knowing they are there. Naturally, there are asymmetries: in the waking reality it is the mother who must be silent, not the baby. And these babies are incapable of sound: they have hearts but no faces, no throats, no mouths to cry. But dreams are like that, aren’t they. Dreams enjoy their own obliquity. After all, John Young, who daily straddles a storm of souls, which kick up in the wind like leaves, John Young wears his white coat—but no black boots. He wears gym shoes, or regular loafers, or of course those wooden clogs of his.
Nearby, the siren of an ambulance cries like a mad baby, its pitch rising as it passes us and heads on down the street.
Put simply, the hospital is an atrocity-producing situation. Atrocity will follow atrocity, unstoppably. As if fresh atrocity were necessary to validate the atrocity that came before. As if the atrocity that came before was necessary to validate the atrocity that will come after. Stop now and … But you can’t stop.
Atrocity upon atrocity, and then more atrocity, and then more.
I’m glad it’s not my body that is actually touching their bodies. I’m glad I have his body, in between. But how I wish I had a body of my own, one that did my bidding. I wish I had a body, just an instrument to feel weary with or through, shoulders that slump, a head that tips back to face the sun, feet that drag, a voice that groans or sighs or asks hoarsely for forgiveness.
I don’t understand. Irene still comes to the apartment but we never see her anymore except by accident. It’s over. She seems cheerful: she seems relieved. Twice a week she vengefully looks in here to dust the place, and dirty all the dishes, and worry the bed. She leaves like four bucks on the kitchen counter—though it’s since gone down to three fifty.
I don’t understand. At the hospital we reward our victims with money. I pay the hospital. Irene pays me. I don’t get it. Are we all slaves? Are we somehow less than slaves?
They wouldn’t believe me, even if I could tell them. They would turn away, in excruciation and contempt.
I’m like the baby taken from the toilet. I have a heart but I don’t have a face: I don’t have any eyes to cry. Nobody knows I’m here.
Is it a war we are fighting, a war against health, against life and love? My condition is a torn condition. Every day, the dispensing of existence. I see the face of suffering. Its face is fierce and distant and ancient.
There’s probably a straightforward explanation for the impossible weariness I feel. A perfectly straightforward explanation. It is a mortal weariness. Maybe I’m tired of being human, if human is what I am. I’m tired of being human.
PART 2
4
You do what you do best, not what’s best to do
We set sail for Europe in the summer
of 1948–for Europe, and for war.
Well, I say we, but by now John
Young was pretty much on his own
out there.
Some sort of bifurcation had occurred, in about 1959, or maybe even earlier. I was still living inside, quietly, with my own thoughts. Thoughts that were free to wander through time.
Our ship is loud with all the tongues of Europe, under the big sky and its zoo of cumulus—its snow leopards and polar bears. On the lower deck, where all the people are, there is the sense of an outrageous and clarifying happiness. When it is happy, the human face seeks a particular angle: perhaps you could pinpoint it—thirteen degrees, say, from the horizontal. Also, happiness contains its own ferocity: the right to life and love, fiercely seized. John Young is always especially smart and handsome when he visits the lower deck for his strolls, morning and evening, with ivory-topped cane, with burnished black shoes, with plausible perfecto. Rather forbiddingly he saunters along the lower rink, past the clumps of families, the young mothers, the babies’ cries. The cries of babies: we all know what they mean, in any language. Everybody seems to have at least one baby, suddenly. As if to get them safely stowed, before the violent renewal of war.
To begin with, the voyage seemed a form of evasive action, a form of flight. The sea glared on with a million eyes, a million witnesses to our getaway. Apart from wanting the law or whatever to catch up with him (which it didn’t), I had taken little notice, and no interest, in John’s furtive and elaborate preparations for travel—the series of interviews with the Reverend Kreditor, for example. I didn’t really wake up until we made the short boat trip to Ellis Island. Of course, months earlier, I had dully taken on the likelihood of major upheaval, on account of what was happening to John’s skin. At first it assumed a sallow glow; then, during the cold spring, it went all the way from hot-dog mustard to peanut butter. Jesus, I thought. Jaundice. Then I twigged: it was a suntan. I put two and two together. People often get this way before taking stylish vacations in exotic locales. The idea of John getting sick, the idea of John coming down with something: that’s a good one. His vigor, nowadays, contains something savage and tasteless. It is pink tongued. It is feral—
undoctored. The whites of his eyes sting like fresh frost. John’s torso now closely resembles one of his more miraculous erections. At any moment and with no warning he’ll throw himself onto the floor and do like a hundred push-ups. “Ninety-nine,” you’ll hear him grunting, ever the literalist. “Ninety-eight. Ninety-seven. Ninety-six.” Even during mealtimes, at the captain’s table, he’s forever girding his muscle and sinew. Under the table his feet jig on their soles. John’s body shudders deeper than the ship itself. This war will start at an appointed time, like a ball game. He is thirty-one.
We have our own cabin, scene of many a knee bend and chest flex, on A Deck. There are also communal exercises, on B Deck, which John leads in association with a swarthy purser called Togliatti. We do jumping jacks, and chuck a bit of hooped rope about. To begin with, in the evenings and mornings, during stroll time (the suit, the stick), all the people tended to gather at the sharp end of the ship, looking at where they came from, as people do. Only John is invariably to be found on the stern, looking at where we’re headed. The ship’s route is clearly delineated on the surface of the water and is violently consumed by our advance. Thus we leave no mark on the ocean, as if we are successfully covering our tracks.
And we seem to have got away with it, likewise. John’s feeling tone is buoyant: he seems wonderfully relieved. But if you had me on the table or on the trolley in intensive care—the submarine blip of the oscilloscope (like a lost code), the richly sighing respirator—then I’d be going, going, tumbling end over end. I didn’t get away with it. I came too close, I spent too long with suffering and its foul chemical breath; its face is fierce, distant, ancient. The hospital, tepidly humming—I can remember it all. To remember a day would take a day. To remember a year would take a year.
Something ails the ship’s engines. How they cough and choke and retch. The smoke that feeds our funnels is much too thick and black. Our Greek captain puts in a courtesy visit during dinner and apologizes in his ridiculous English. Often, for days on end, we can only wallow helplessly or make grand clockwise circles. Ugly sea gulls backpedal in our path, seeming to break their fall through the sky. John fumes, like the ship, but the people don’t seem to mind. And I quite like it, the sense of suspension, far from land and the means of doing harm. At night, while John’s impatient body sleeps, I listen to the waves loosely slapping at the side of the stilled ship.
The slapping sea sounds nice but it’s insincere, flattering to deceive, flattering to deceive.
What with John’s new fitness program, and the salutary Atlantic air and everything, I myself expected some kind of halfhearted renewal. It didn’t really happen. Still, I couldn’t help responding, at least in spirit, to the orgy of general joy as we docked at Lisbon; and even John stiffly lent himself to various aromatic embraces. But then the ship idled there for hours, in its own sea mist of impatience and anxiety. Limply I gazed at the mortal oiliness of the water, in which no creature could prosper, and the dockside crowds of welcome floating and swimming above like tropical fish. After that, will and vividness again absented themselves. In fact I tuned out altogether for at least a week, while John checked into the hotel and ran around town shuffling papers and permits and palm grease and all the other shit you deal in when you’re firming up a fresh identity. We came out the other side of it with a temporary chauffeur, a good profit, and a really first-rate new name: that of Hamilton de Souza. I am assuming that this identity business is a foible of John’s, of Tod’s, of Hamilton’s, and not universal. But look outside, at the street-skinned hills, the wildernesses of the parks behind their railings, and all the people. This crowd must churn with pseudonyms, with noms de guerre. Those that the war will soon reel in. We’ve been through three names already. We seem to be able to handle it. Some people, though—you can see it in their faces—some people have no names at all.
Hamilton and I are well established now, of course, in our agreeable villa, with our three maids, plus Tolo the gardener, and the dog, Bustos. It lies in a shallow valley a couple of clicks north of Redondo. Listen: there go the goats, the faint arrhythmia of the bells on their collars, led by the white-clad peasant. The goats are white too, a little herd of souls. The herdsman’s infrequent cries are full of the Portuguese melancholy, the Portuguese humanity. Twice a month the fat lawyer whom I think of as the Agent comes to visit in his sweaty suit. We drink white port up on the roof here and converse in formal and limited English. The birds are excited by our garden and by the flowers that shine around us in their troughs and pots.
“So delightful,” says the Agent.
“We call that one Bouncing Bet,” says Hamilton.
“Charming.”
Hamilton points with a finger. “Brown-Eyed Susan.”
“So attractive.”
“John-Go-To-Bed-At-Noon.”
Below, from the lawn, a muscular blackbird crashes into the air.
Around us in the middle distance, which is as near or far as anywhere else seems to get, lie other havens of plaster and flora. I like it here. The villas loom pink and yellow on the arid land, like sweetshops on the planet Mars. The light has the color of fake gold.
We have three servants, Ana and Lourdes, and Rosa, the gypsy girl, to whom I will be obliged to return. I’m familiar with the servant thing, because I had one before: Irene. Oh, Irene!… The thing with servants is, you’re always cleaning up after them, but not very intensively, it’s true, and they’re terribly polite. Servants are poor, and I’m talking broke—I mean busted. They give what money they have to the Agent; yet they’re always finding that little bit extra, to give to me. Rosa, the girl, is especially insistent. We accept these dues with a seigneurial twinkle. Nobody said it was fair, but at least it’s intelligible. What’s the trick with money? Money, which might as well grow on trees? It all comes down to the quality of your trash. In New York government did it. Here we do our own. Tolo the gardener, with Bustos the dog tensely balanced beside him, on the cart pushed by the mule: they go to the village dump. Or we rely on fire. Quality not quantity. Our trash is class trash. Rosa, who is poorest of all, lives in the gypsy camp over the slope at the far end of the valley. We sometimes stroll out that way, in the evenings, and wait, and then discreetly precede her when she walks to the villa; she never turns, but she knows we’re there. The camp is made of trash but none of it is any good. Trash. I am its lord. She its bondmaid or prisoner.
Our hobbies?
Well, strolling. Impeccably turned out in twills and tweed, with hunting cap, with Bustos bouncing at our feet. It’s an appealing notion, that animals should contain the souls of gods. You can believe it of a cat. Even a mule. You can’t believe it of Bustos, loose-skinned and entirely frivolous, with his entreating eyes. The hide-faced peasants, the burdened women clad in black, they croak a furtive greeting, which Hamilton de Souza spiritedly returns. He picked up the lingo right away, but I can’t get any kind of fix on it. The only word I feel at home with is somos. There’s a game we play, Bustos and I, with that saliva-steeped tennis ball of his; and he likes to twirl those sticks. Across the valley, to the slope. The camp really is very dirty.
Oh, and gardening, too. No hands-on stuff, like at Wellport. We stand over Tolo’s bent form, and point with our cane. The flowers are amusing, but dreadfully vulgar. All those bursts of pink and crimson.
Our other hobby is gold. We collect it. We amass it. About once a month, with the Agent, we motor to Lisbon and pay a call on an elderly Spaniard in his office at the Hotel de Luxe. We have money ready, supplied by the Agent. We count the florid bank notes and hand them over across the desk. Then, after the old guy has examined, weighed, and wrapped it in a turquoise napkin, we get our gold, in little ingots the size of collar studs. Lassitude and shame and a dreamy disgust provide the medium for these transactions. We sit there, leaden. The heavy brown furniture, and Señor Menini: his eyepiece, the solder in his teeth, his dusty scales. Hamilton and I grow rich in gold.
Can you call Rosa a hobby? Does she q
ualify? A glimpse of Rosa, as she walks to the well in her pink tatters, and Hamilton’s blood slows and clogs, and his hair hums. He just seemed to walk right into that one: love at first sight. The very day we got here he cornered her in the scullery and embraced her with tears in his eyes, saying adorada, adorada. Rosa is pink and dirty; she is dusky, she is rosy. One of her duties is to replenish Hamilton’s chamber pot each morning. He is usually to be found in his pajama bottoms, shaving, when she comes through the door. In slow declaration he turns toward her. She crouches to place the embarrassingly heavy bowl beneath the bed. She leaves with her eyes on the floor, saying bom dia. Frankly, he’s missed the boat with Rosa. She’s much too young for Hamilton—or for anybody else, probably, except her brothers and her dad and her uncles and so on, or so Hamilton speculates (I can tell), when he skirts the camp at dusk. Last week she celebrated her thirteenth birthday, so now she’s only twelve. He watches her in the yard with her cloth and bucket, as she kneels to tackle the clean plates. The slope of her back, the way she wipes her brow. In her luminous scraps of clothes she is pink and bruised, like the inside of her mouth, the teeth still both big and little. Soon, to fill those gaps, she will get some milk teeth, purchased from the tooth fairy.… In women, what is he looking for, mother, daughter, sister, wife? Where is his wife? She’d better turn up soon, while there’s still time. Rosa gives him presents, which, on his trips to Lisbon, Hamilton fondly redeems.
But the body he is most interested in, these days, is his own. He is his own hobby. And his body is its own lover. What a love is this, between upper limb and external heart. Christ no, it’s not like the Wellport days, back when: poor old Tod and his one-man no-shows, his lone fiascos. Hamilton just can’t get over it, his body. You would think he’d never had one before. As he moves through the house, mirrors monitor him. Him, it, this, this: this is the body he primes and mortifies and shrewdly inspects in all the rippling fun-house mirrors of Portugal.
