The PowerBook

language costumier To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself I stay on the run. It's night. I'm sitting at my screen. There's an e-mail for me. I unwrap it. It says--Freedom, just for one night. Years ago you would have come to my shop at the end of the afternoon, telling your mother you had an errand for the poor. At the tinkle of the bell you would have found yourself alone for a moment in the empty shop, looking at the suits of armour, the wimples, the field boots, and the wigs on spikes, like severed heads. The sign on the shop says verde, nothing more, but everyone knows that something strange goes on inside. People arrive as themselves and leave as someone else. They say that Jack the Ripper used to come here. You stand alone in the empty shop. I come out from the back. What is it you want? Freedom for a night, you say. Just for one night the freedom to be somebody else. Did anyone see you arrive? No. Then I can pull the blinds and light the lamp. The clock ticks, but only in time. From outside, looking in, there will be only a movement of shadows--the looming of a bear's head, a knife. You say you want to be transformed. This is where the story starts. Here, in these long lines of laptop DNA. Here we take your chromosomes, twenty-three pairs, and alter your height, eyes, teeth, sex. This is an invented world. You can be free just for one night. Undress. Take off your clothes. Take off your body. Hang them up behind the door. Tonight we can go deeper than disguise. It's only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it--creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I. The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself. What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story. Begin. OPEN HARD DRIVE I want to start with a tulip. In the sixteenth century the first tulip was imported to Holland from Turkey. I know--I carried it myself. By 1634 the Dutch were so crazy for this fish-mouthed flower that one collector exchanged a thousand pounds of cheese, four oxen, eight pigs, twelve sheep, a bed and a suit of clothes for a single bulb. What's so special about a tulip? Put it this way . . . When is a tulip not a tulip? WhenJeanette Winterson is the author of 'The PowerBook', published 2000 under ISBN 9780375411113 and ISBN 0375411119.