Free Time's Arrow by Martin Amis

bar-restaurant, in this drool parlor, in this fancy vomitorium. The woman has come, and now it's meat and tears, with the food growing in heat on our plates. Wait. This one's a vegetarian. She says she loves all animals—but she won't put her money where her mouth is. Soon . . . Jesus, the whole routine is like the very act of lust. First the sadness and disarray, then the evanescent transcendence; then the bodies put on clothes again, and there is a prowl of word and gesture before they go their separate ways.
    Tod features another kind of dream in which he is a woman. I'm the woman too: in this dream I am participant as well as onlooker. A man is near us with his face averted, his slablike back half-turned. He can harm us, of course. But he can protect us, if he likes. On his protection we gingerly rely. We have no choice but to love him, nervously. We also have no hair, which is unusual, for a woman. I am delighted to say that we don't see any babies in this dream. We don't see any babies, powerful or otherwise. We don't see any bomb babies, babies with the power of bombs. This dream is childless.
    Time is heading on now toward something. It pours past unpreventably, like the reflection on a windshield as the car speeds through city or forest.
     
    Identical twins, dwarves, ghosts, the love lives of Caligula and Catherine the Great and Vlad the Impaler, Nordic iceclouds, Atlantis, the dodo.
    Hold on. All of a sudden Tod has started reading travel brochures that praise certain semiremote areas of Canada. Yes, he finds them in the trash. Now Canada is where young
    men hang out when they really ought to be in Vietnam. Maybe Tod is considering Canada. Maybe Tod is considering Vietnam. Vietnam might do him good. The gibbering hippies and spaced-out fatsoes who go there, they come back looking all clean and sane and fine, after a spell in the war, in the Nam, in what they call the shit.
    Nicholas Kreditor's latest letter reveals a hidden talent for detail and amplitude. The weather down there in New York, "although recently unsettled," Kreditor writes, "is temperate once more!" I think he's wrong. I think it's changing. I think it's definitely getting stormy.
     
    I knew something was up the minute Tod started selling all the furniture. Throughout the whole process I looked on in wronged silence, like a wife. First every stick of furniture gets carted off, and all my labor-saving appliances, then the carpets and the curtains, if you please. Why was Tod punishing me like this? He got a real kick out of it too, always looking for new ways to uglify the home. On would come the dungarees at the weekend. He prowled around in a simian hunger, searching for things to splatter and deface.
    He did a real blitz on the electrics. He took me down for many terrible half hours beneath the floorboards, beneath the joists, with cord or cable in his questing hand; the platonic darkness of this underworld became a figure for our nightlife, candlelit, torchbeam-pierced; our old existence I came to picture as a boundless cathedral of light. He did a similar job on the plumbing. God-awful work, plumbing. Everything's back of everything else; you're all elbows and kneecaps with your cheek crushed against the copper viscera. Anyway, it worked: we now have no water. Just the garden tap. Going to the bathroom these days is quite a heavy trip: the can becomes a kind of geyser, and Tod has to look lively
    wit  that bucket of his. Life clangs and swings and scrapes with all these buckets and pails. Until there we are on the bare boards downstairs, with candles and bottled gas and a deli picnic on a paper plate. That's what Tod has brought us to. I mean, when I started out with him I never thought . . . Outside, the defoliated back garden, its bald bush, its sorry grass, its scorched earth.
    It wasn't the belt-tightening that depressed me, nor Tod's refractory and sinister cheer, which in any case didn't last long. After all, I am stuck with the old