gut symmetries by jeanette winterson

he: do you remember the first man on the moon?

me: we were in vermont.

he: no clock only the oak spreading over the evening.

me: that oak must have been two hundred years old.

he: you said, 'it will live for two hundred years more. why should we hurry?'

me: we had been making love in the dirt since the declaration of the independence.

he: wars and empire and the passing of empire had not disturbed us.

me: it was as if we had made love always and always would.

he: we rolled over to look at the astronaut, stepping clumsily in his dumb-bell suit, picking up rocks for NASA.

me: it was history.

he: you were naked and the night was cool.

me: it was a long way to fly for a rock.

we were in our separate bunks, his hand over his side towards me, his familiar arm, solid as an anchor. his voice a harbour.

he: history has no smell.

me: is that why we are nostalgic for it?

he: breathe in, breathe out. the past doesn't stink like the present.

me: were we happier or do we pretend?

he: we pretend.

me: you said it was my smell you loved.

he: the hidden world of pheromones.

me: the armpit seducer.

he: this armchair don juan.

me: your mother had truffles from the forests outside rome. they smelled of earth and roots and sweat. 

he: they use a machine now for rootling truffles.

me: a pig is pork.

he: they use a machine now for matching couples.

me: love is money.

he: i don't know what love is.

me: you never waited long enough to find out.

he: patience isn't a vice of mine.

me: not all experiments yield their results in a single night.

he: why do you confuse love and sex?

me: why do you continually separate them?

he: are we going to spend our last hours arguing?

me: yes.

he laughed and swung off the bunk and knelt down by my head. in the moonlight i might have mistaken him for a knight in shining armour. his t-shirt was neon-lit. he had grown a beard, or to be fairer, a beard had grown over his face. his eyes and teeth were wolfish. he was emblematic of safety and threat as knights in shining armour are. the drama of the rescue conceals its implications. 

he: there isn't anything to eat.

me: no.

he: would you like to eat me?

me: what?

he: im sure there are certain parts of me you wouldn't object to lopping off.

me: stop this.

he: no, seriously, what's it to be? die with both legs, survive with one? how much of me could we eat and still say that i am alive? arms. legs. slices of rump. your grandfather was a butcher. try me.

he reached over for the curved filleting knife, gave it to me, and raised his bottom into the air. the sight of him, jacked under the moon, made me start to laugh, quietly at first, then as the pain in my head increased, louder, and harsher. he started to laugh too, a pair of jackals we were, crouched and baying at the moon.

the boat was still, hardly rocking at all. stumbling together, we half fell, half climbed, up the steps to the deck. he gripped me, his prick straight in, the swollen saltiness of it dirty in my dirt. i was dry and cracked, unwashed, closed. i had a weeping rash on inner things. 

i held onto him, holding onto the years in between, the years notched in his back, his vertebral column, twenty-four separate, moving irregular bones, the years of our life together. 

when the push of him stopped we were both still. he rested his head in the cradle of my shoulder and i felt him crying. not the salt sea but these few tears capsized what hope remained. i thought of alice's hand, her long thin fingers like leaf-nerves. i thought of the leaves falling on my back when i had made love in vermont. or had that been alice? or had it been jove?

fragments of coloured glass, radiating fanwise, a diadrom of feeling spreading out through my mind, its life-jacket lost. the reassuring buoying padded stuff that floated me and insulated me has been ripped away. i am exposed now, and my discriminating, differentiating functions are useless tools in this unmooored sea. where is the beginning? where is the horizon? where is the land? the moon swings down on me like a hook. the boat is a blade, knife-edge of consciousness precarious on the unconscious sea. whatever it is, it is deeper. whatever it is, it is unfathomable. the point that i am, the definite bounded thing in time, is beginning to break up. i am dispersing myself through my known past and my unknown future. the present is without meaning. 

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