Gut Symmetries Read Online Free PDF Page B

back in the pain. Back in the sex. A stilted portfolio of anatomical drawings, genital insults pushed into my mouth and hair. Wherever I tried to rest my eyes, I saw the two of them making love. They were gessoed onto the walls and varnished into the floor. The chairs and tables that had belonged to my father were an Ottoman découpage of delicate limbs and flaming breasts. Their arms, their legs, her belly against his, here in my house, like dry rot. I crawled into the kitchen away from the horror and opened my eyes. The fridge rubbed itself against me. The floor tiles were hot. As I clung to the door it clung back. I wiped my face with a dishcloth and smelled their sex.
     
    To betray with a kiss. The reek of Judas. I took the brush to clean my teeth and thought of his mouth. Kiss of life, kiss of death. Come kiss me so that I can read your lips, deceptions scripted and waiting to be staged. His lying heart is in his mouth. When I kissed him this morning I tasted his fear.
     
    HE: What's the matter with you?
    ME: Nothing.
     
    Nothing slowly clotting my arteries. Nothing slowly numbing my soul. Caught by nothing, saying nothing, nothingness becomes me. When I am nothing they will say, surprised, in the way that they are forever surprised, 'But there was nothing the matter with her.'
    Nothing. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, love to love.
     
    When I was a child I imagined love as a glass well. I could lean over and dabble my hands in it and come up shining. It was not a current or a torrent, but it was deep and at its bottom, flowing. I knew it was flowing by the noise of the water over the subterranean pebbles. Were there ships in there and ports that depended on it, and harbours where people naturally built their settlements? I saw the world beneath the water only by reflection. To enter it would have meant climbing into the well and letting myself drop away. My mother cautioned me against swimming.
    Day by day I returned to the edge, watching what I could, dabbling my hands. Later, when I was grown up, I met a man carrying two buckets, who plunged them into the pellucid waters, took one for himself and gave one to me. I had never held so much water. Never found any container that could. I lost interest in the well, I had my bucket.
     
    Other people envied Jove and me. We were clean, wholesome, sexy, together. We displayed our marriage like a trophy and we did think that we had won it well. We polished the trophy but forgot to polish ourselves. As it shone brighter we dimmed. Did it matter if we were a little dusty, a little worn?
    Our marriage became a thing apart; that is, a thing apart from the two of us. Both of us had a touching faith in its talismanic powers of protection, and it is true that for a time a symbol can outlive the plain fact that the symbol makers have turned elsewhere.
    We had built our safe tower, put the trophy on the roof and dared lightning to strike. He wanted to shut out temptation. I wanted to shut it in. I wanted to be tempted by him, re-tell the story of Adam and Eve. He wanted Paradise, a sacred temenos where he would be free of his own pain. My father used to warn me, 'Never turn your back on the serpent.' He was right that the enemy of Paradise is always already inside. Jove used to laugh at my Jewishness but wasn't the serpent under the foundations of our house even then? Once or twice I caught him drinking from the buckets.
    Then my husband took what was left of the stale dirty water and threw it in my face.
    No escape now. I stink of it. I smell like the sluicings from the abbatoir.
    He said, 'If only you would try to understand.'
     
    I understand that pain leapfrogs over language and lands in dumb growls beyond time. A place where there is no speech and no clock, no means of separating either the moment or its misery. Nobody comes and nobody goes. It is a place unvisited by civilisation. Civilisation has not happened.
    Look up at the bloody clouds made angry by the sun. Cower back from