Good Bones - Margaret Atwood [13]
Aliens! What can he do? And to make it worse, they surround him with animals – bears, rabbits, cats, giraffes – each one of them stuffed and, evidently, castrated, because although he looks and looks, all they have at best is a tail. Is this the fate the aliens have in store for him, as well?
Where did I come from? he asks, for what will not be the first time. Out of me, the bulgy one says fondly, as if he should be pleased. Out of where? Out of what? He covers his ears, shutting out the untruth, the shame, the pulpy horror. It is not to be thought, it is not to be borne!
No wonder that at the first opportunity he climbs out the window and joins a gang of other explorers, each one of them an exile, an immigrant, like himself. Together they set out on their solitary journeys.
What are they searching for? Their homeland. Their true country. The place they came from, which can’t possibly be here.
2.
All men are created equal, as someone said who was either very hopeful or very mischievous. What a lot of anxiety could have been avoided if he’d only kept his mouth shut.
Sigmund was wrong about the primal scene: Mom and Dad, keyhole version. That might be upsetting, true, but there’s another one:
Five guys standing outside, pissing into a snowbank, a river, the underbrush, pretending not to look down. Or maybe not looking down: gazing upward, at the stars, which gives us the origin of astronomy. Anything to avoid comparisons, which aren’t so much odious as intimidating.
And not only astronomy: quantum physics, engineering, laser technology, all numeration between zero and infinity. Something safely abstract, detached from you; a transfer of the obsession with size to anything at all. Lord, Lord, they measure everything: the height of the Great Pyramids, the rate of fingernail growth, the multiplication of viruses, the sands of the sea, the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. And then it’s only a short step to proving that God is a mathematical equation. Not a person. Not a body, Heaven forbid. Not one like yours. Not an earthbound one, not one with size and therefore pain.
When you’re feeling blue, just keep on whistling. Just keep on measuring. Just don’t look down.
3.
The history of war is a history of killed bodies. That’s what war is: bodies killing other bodies, bodies being killed.
Some of the killed bodies are those of women and children, as a side-effect you might say. Fallout, shrapnel, napalm, rape and skewering, anti-personnel devices. But most of the killed bodies are men. So are most of those doing the killing.
Why do men want to kill the bodies of other men? Women don’t want to kill the bodies of other women. By and large. As far as we know.
Here are some traditional reasons: Loot. Territory. Lust for power. Hormones. Adrenalin high. Rage. God. Flag. Honour. Righteous anger. Revenge. Oppression. Slavery. Starvation. Defence of one’s life. Love; or, a desire to protect the women and children. From what? From the bodies of other men.
What men are most afraid of is not lions, not snakes, not the dark, not women. Not any more. What men are most afraid of is the body of another man.
Men’s bodies are the most dangerous things on earth.
4.
On the other hand, it could be argued that men don’t have any bodies at all. Look at the magazines! Magazines for women have women’s bodies on the covers, magazines for men have women’s bodies on the covers. When men appear on the covers of magazines, it’s magazines about money, or about world news. Invasions, rocket launches, political coups, interest rates, elections, medical breakthroughs. Reality. Not entertainment. Such magazines show only the heads, the unsmiling heads, the talking heads, the decision-making heads, and maybe a little glimpse, a coy flash of suit. How do we know there’s a body, under all that discreet pinstriped tailoring? We don’t, and maybe there isn’t.
What does this lead us to suppose? That women are bodies with