Time's Arrow by Martin Amis Read Free Book Online Page A

found them thoroughly disgraceful, all the same: aesthetically, they worked on me like violence. This substantial citizen, this old doctor—and his slobbering calves. Where have his feet gone, for Christ's sake? I knew then, I think, that Tod's cruelty, his secret, had to do with a central mistake about human bodies. Or maybe I just discovered something to do with the style or the line of his cruelty. Tod's cruelty would be trashy, shitty, errant, bassackward: flared. . . . Still, the pants caught on and now everyone is into them. They move down the street like yachts: the landlocked sailors of the city. Next thing you know, women's hemlines go up by about three feet. The sudden candor and power of female haunch. They're already coming down again, slowly, but Jesus.
    Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change. A few years ago, the pedophile, strolling through the shopping mall, or sitting at a quiet table in Salad Binge or Just Desserts, might have coordinated his assignations— his intergenerational trysts—by mobile telephone. Now you never see mobile telephones, and malls and restaurants are different, so the pedophile must manage things in some other way, in some other style.
    A war is coming. Just a little one, for now.  Several times, in bars, glancing up from our Bud or our Molson or our Miller, we have seen that same shot on the mounted TV: like a eugenic cross between swordfish and stingray, the helicopter twirls upward from the ocean and crouches grimly on the deck of the aircraft carrier, ready to fight.
     
    You'd think it might be quite relaxing, having (effectively) no will, and no body anyway through which to exercise it. Many administrative and executive matters, it's true, are taken right out of your hands. Yet there is always the countervailing desire to put yourself forward, to take your stand as the valuable exception. Don't just go along. Never just go along. Small may not be beautiful. But big is crazy.
    I don't want to sound too flame-eyed and low-blink-rate about it—and, all right, I know I'm a real simp in many areas—but I'd say I was way ahead of Tod on this basic question of human difference. Tod has a sensing mechanism that guides his responses to all identifiable subspecies. His feeling tone jolts into specialized attitudes and readinesses: one for Hispanics, one for Asians, one for Arabs, one for Amerindians, one for blacks, one for Jews. And he has a secondary repertoire of alerted hostility toward pimps, hookers, junkies, the insane, the clubfooted, the hairlipped, the homosexual male, and the very old. (Here, incidentally, is my take on the homosexual male. It may be relevant. The homosexual male is fine—is pretty good news, in fact, on the whole— so long as he knows he's homosexual. It's when he is, and thinks he isn't: then there's confusion. Then there's danger. The way Tod feels about men, about women, about children: there is confusion. There is danger. Don't get me wrong. I'm not fingering Tod for a fruit, not exactly. I'm just saying that things might be less confused, and less dangerous, if he could soberly entertain the idea of being homosexual. That's what I'm saying.)
    All these distinctions I've had to learn up on. Originally at least I had no preselected feelings about anybody, one way or the other (except about doctors: now where did that come from?). When I meet people, I wait for a pulse from their inner being, which tells me things like—how much fear, how much hate, how much peace, how much forgiveness. I suppose I really am the soulful type. Visualize the body I don't have, and see this: a sentimentalized fetus, with faithful smile.
    There's a graduate student at AMS who's Japanese, over from Osaka on a six-month exchange deal, companionable enough at first, of course, but becoming increasingly glazed and remote. He's lucky he wasn't here a few years ago, when we really hated the Japanese. His name is Mikio, funny-looking kid, with his heavy