Free Time's Arrow by Martin Amis Page A

bastard, whatever the lifestyle. It was the solitude growing around me, growing under me: this I couldn't take. The shine of priestly indifference on the faces of shopkeeper and barman. In the eyes of the neighbors a watery oblivion. It's happening at work too now: I can feel it. As for the women—well, thanks, ladies. One by one they stepped out on me. Only Irene persists. She couldn't have been more tactful about the conditions, though her mood was understandably solemn and cautious. Something tells me I won't be seeing her for a while either. Christ, even the dog next door has gone off me, and now hates me. She used to squeeze through the fence and bring me her bones. She used to bounce and romp. Now I get the tensed snarl and the stare of malarial loathing. Bitch. . . . It's like the song says—it's the literal truth. When you're going down, when you're traveling downward through society, then nobody knows you. Nobody knows you.
    The evil day came. We moved into a "studio" in Roxbury. I won't describe the room. I can hardly see it anyway, through the mist of my hurt. Well, I hope Tod's happy. . . . He isn't, actually, not anymore. He spends a lot of his leisure, these days, in drunken prayer. The only time he perks up is when we go back to the old house for meetings with the estate agent. The two of them move from room to room
    and stand there nodding in apparent admiration of Tod's handiwork. The old house—Tod really did a number on it. I don't envy the new tenants. They're hippies or gypsies or squatters or whatever, and they've already started camping out there as best they can. Sorry, guys. What's that little rule about always leaving the bathroom as you'd expect to find it? Well, we played our part, one way or the other. You can't deny that the place is an absolute toilet.
     
    To complete the picture, we now undergo a series of embittering demotions at AMS. One Friday afternoon I hand over my gauzy cream tunic and slip into a kind of butcher's apron, epically and namelessly stained. You could say this for the new position: it took us back a way from the medical cut and thrust. It took us, instead, into the storeroom, the garbage kilns, the pickup truck, and the city dump. This special facility at the city dump, you see: that's where everything comes from. Back in the boiler room with the ten-gallon bags I roll up my sleeves and rummage in heaps of bloody lint and plaster, cracked phials and syringes, crushed cultures. You also get stuff from the incinerator, which I man. Then I divvy up the crap into the rightful pedal bins and trolley them around the building, where nobody knows me. That's who I am, the stained stiff in the industrial gloves. I smell like a major operation. My whole being snags and crackles with broken glass, but that's all right, because although they may smell me, nobody sees me and nobody knows me.
    We're as good as invisible now. Perhaps that's the point of this process: the search for invisibility. You find it, invisibility, for a while, in a crowd, or behind the closed door of the bathroom (where, during that heavy transaction, by common consent, everybody is invisible), or in the deed of
    lov ; or it can be found down here, where you are unknown. Jo, my collaborator in disposal (old, fat, black, and stationary, glued to the heat of the incinerator: "Hey!" "Yo!" "Jo!" "Hey!"), he knows me. And Dr. Magruder will sometimes glitter potently in my direction as I make the rounds. Friendless Friendly. We move with no friction, head down, staring at the floor. We're definitely on the way out.
    Is it that the human being is secretly nothing without others? He disappears. Even Jo has started looking at me oddly, as if I'm not quite there. The only body we have now is our own. And if we're wicked and shouldn't be seen, why are we becoming more beautiful?
     
    I'm on a train now, heading south at evening. The American Atlantic moves past me. All business is concluded. I don't know where we're going: