Free Genesis by Jim Crace

and Action were equal partners. Collaborators, in fact. He’d signed up with the Mime/Scream Community Drama Collective in his first month as a student and was active, too, in Street Beat Renegades, Provocations & Co., and the Next Stage (as in Paul Roesenthaler’s “The next stage is the elimination of captains, chaplains, and kings”). He didn’t have a repertoire, Lix said (adapting Roesenthaler yet again, our city’s feted radical), he had “an onstage manifesto.” Actors seemed to be the partisans of change back in those simpler times when appointees and the army controlled our lives even more completely than they do now, now that—to chant the cynics’ chorus—theater is unfettered and trifling, all our leaders have been democratically imposed, and Freedom has destroyed our impulse to be free.
    Lix had a democratically modest fourth-floor room amongst the tenements down on the wharf, with not only skylight views across the newly named City of Kisses toward the river but also a narrow glimpsing view from his box kitchen into Cargo Street, where now there are boutiques and restaurants instead of groceries and bars and “working folk.”
    The woman who had set her heart that night on Lix stood with his binoculars (where he had stood and spied on her so many times), her back against the little stove, her face veiled by the curtains, the rubber eyecups pressed against her lids and focused
on the late night customers, the waitress, and the owner in the sidewalk cafe below, across the street. His stolen daily view of her. She was surprised how large the people seemed—they filled the lens—and how unsuspecting, uninhibited, they were, free to mutter to themselves, or stare, or rearrange their belts and straps, or swing their legs, with no idea that they were being scrutinized. “So!” she said. So this was where the owl had his nest. “I’ve often wondered what the view would be like if I were looking down on me!”
    Lix was embarrassed, obviously. Caught out. He was also frightened and aroused. For all his noisy confidence, he’d never had an unrelated woman in his room before. What might it mean? He watched her from the kitchen door, his arms stretched up to grip the lintel, his printed T-shirt riding high above his belt to inadvertently display an adolescent abdomen and the apex of his pubic hair.
    She, too, seemed large and detailed, in a way she’d never been through his binoculars. Her outfit was familiar, of course, her general shape. He recognized the fashionable “Sandinista” tunic suit with its half sleeves and “rough-look” calf-length skirt. He recognized the matching spangled rebel scarf. But mostly she was unfamiliar. The angle, for a start, was different. He’d mostly seen her from above, the shoulders and the head. Binoculars had shortened her. Binoculars diminish the world, reduce the senses to one. Precision optical instruments, no matter how finely ground, fogproof, waterproof, and vision-adjusted, could not hope to convey true proximity, the candid softness of the flesh, the spiciness of scent, the rustling, independent simpering of
clothes, the clink of her bracelets, the perfect imperfections and the blemishes of someone close to thirty years of age. Until that night, he’d only seen this woman from afar.
    Lix, actually, like many young men, was practiced in the art of watching women from afar, not always through binoculars, of course, but women he could only dream of touching, women he could only scheme about: his voice tutor at the Arts Academy, the swan-necked student called Freda from one of the science faculties, the daughter of the concierge at his apartment house, the overscented cashier in the campus cafeteria, the tiny half-Greek actress in his course, the bursar’s haughty wife in her white suits, the many tough and visionary women in his “groups,” and—let’s