Cat's eye

Cat’s Eye

Margaret Atwood

Foreword

The paintings and other modern works of art in this book do not exist. Nevertheless, they have been influenced by visual artists Joyce Wieland, Jack Chambers, Charles Pachter, Erica Heron, Gail Geltner, Dennis Burton, Louis de Niverville, Heather Cooper, William Kurelek, Greg Curnoe, and pop-surreal potter Lenore M. Atwood, among others; and by the Isaacs Gallery, the old original. The physics and cosmology sideswiped herein are indebted to Paul Davies, Carl Sagan, John Gribbin, and Stephen W. Hawking, for their entrancing books on these subjects, and to my nephew, David Atwood, for his enlightening remarks about strings.

Many thanks to Graeme Gibson, for undergoing this novel; to my agent, Phoebe Larmore; to my English agents, Vivienne Schuster and Vanessa Holt; to my editors and publishers. Nan Talese, Nancy Evans, Ellen Seligman, Adrienne Clarkson, Avie Bennett, Liz Calder, and Anna Porter; and to my indefatigable assistant, Melanie Dugan; as well as to Donya Peroff, Michael Bradley, Alison Parker, Gary Foster, Cathy Gill, Kathy Minialoff, Fanny Silberman, James Polk, Coleen Quinn, Rosie Abella, C. M. Sanders, Gene Goldberg, John Gallagher, and Dorothy Goulbourne.

When the Tukanas cut off her head, the old woman collected her own blood in her hands and blew it towards the sun.

“My soul enters you, too!” she shouted.

Since then anyone who kills receives in his body, without wanting or knowing it, the soul of his victim.

—EDUARDO GALEANO

Memory of Fire: Genesis

Why do we remember the past, and not the future?

—STEPHEN W. HAWKING

A Brief History of Time

One - Iron Lung

Chapter 1

T ime is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.

It was my brother Stephen who told me that, when he wore his raveling maroon sweater to study in and spent a lot of time standing on his head so that the blood would run down into his brain and nourish it. I didn’t understand what he meant, but maybe he didn’t explain it very well. He was already moving away from the imprecision of words.

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away.

Chapter 2

“S tephen says time is not a line,” I say. Cordelia rolls her eyes, as I knew she would.

“So?” she says. This answer pleases both of us. It puts the nature of time in its place, and also Stephen, who calls us “the teenagers,” as if he himself is not one.

Cordelia and I are riding on the streetcar, going downtown, as we do on winter Saturdays. The streetcar is muggy with twice-breathed air and the smell of wool. Cordelia sits with nonchalance, nudging me with her elbow now and then, staring blankly at the other people with her gray-green eyes, opaque and glinting as metal. She can outstare anyone, and I am almost as good. We’re impervious, we scintillate, we are thirteen.

We wear long wool coats with tie belts, the collars turned up to look like those of movie stars, and rubber boots with the tops folded down and men’s work socks inside. In our pockets are stuffed the kerchiefs our mothers make us wear but that we take off as soon as we’re out of their sight. We scorn head coverings. Our mouths are tough, crayon-red, shiny as nails. We think we are friends. On the streetcars there are always old ladies, or we think of them as old. They’re of various kinds. Some are respectably dressed, in tailored Harris tweed coats and matching gloves and tidy no-nonsense hats with small brisk feathers jauntily at one side. Others are poorer and foreign-looking and have dark shawls wound over their heads and around their shoulders. Others are bulgy, dumpy, with clamped self-righteous mouths, their arms festooned with shopping bags; these we associate with sales, with bargain basements. Cordelia can tell cheap cloth at a glance. “Gabardine,” she says. “Ticky-tack.”