Greenwich is the Center of the World

“You know what I realized?” he says. I can’t see his face, but I can feel his mouth moving where it rests against my breast. “Zero longitude is completely arbitrary.” I laugh. His cheek bristles.

Since before he first kissed me, I have wanted to lie like this, his sweet head tucked into the crook of my neck, my lips conveniently resting on its smooth top. I cradle it. We have just finished making love, and there is a thin sheen of sweat I taste again and again. “No,” he says, “really, did you know that zero longitude is in Greenwich?” Greenwich, he tells me, is not even an interesting place. It has some museums. “But if you didn’t know you would just think you’re on the shitty outskirts of London.”

My lover is a small man, compact, born in Germany. His accent is like coffee ice cream: silky and a little sharp. His torso is perfectly white, with neat flares of chest hair around the nipples.  We talk about things like this in bed: glacial relics, the ocean floor, latitudes. My leg slung atop his in the peach light.

 “Why didn’t they just pick London?”

 “Well, there’s a bunch of observatories in Greenwich,” he says. “That’s where the explorers were launching from back then. Then someone just decided.” I can picture the mariners: pale men bending over maps, checking the ships at dock, crossing cool green fields, ducking into dark pubs to get out of the rain. It is the opposite of the desert heat that bristles outside my window now, eight a.m. and lurching toward a hundred degrees, the sky clear of clouds. My lover and I lie in the sheets with the cooler running, our bodies slicked hot. Outside the window the yard is gravel and cacti and everything looks crisped, burnt brown-orange.

“It’s just so arbitrary,” he says, pushing his body into mine, closer despite the heat. “I mean—I guess anywhere else in the world would be just as arbitrary,” and he is right, I am wracking my brain, is there anywhere that would be less arbitrary? Is there anywhere that would make sense?

Latitude, of course, is not so arbitrary: zero degrees runs the equator, each measure from there sixty-nine miles apart; the lines are parallel, equadistant, reading north or south in degrees between zero and ninety. It makes sense. Longitudinal measurements, on the other hand, converge at the poles. They are widest at the equator—sixty-nine miles apart.

And here is the trouble: Greenwich is the center of the world, Greenwich is zero degrees, the rest of the world is measured from there, up to 180 degrees east or west (east and west converging, of course, somewhere out in the dark ocean, along the International Date Line). The question is always: how far are we from Greenwich?

It was a foolish thing to do, this sex beneath the covers. It is very hot now, as I run my foot over his, as we scheme out loud—but so delicious, how could we not? Nairobi could be the center of the world, we decide, or an Eskimo village. We pick places those pale men wouldn’t have cared for, choose the most arbitrary places we can think of. Corners of jungles. Grey, post-Soviet cities. We care for these places, in a strange way, or maybe we just feel misrepresented about the center of the world, about the concept of the center of the world. If Greenwich, site of the British Royal Observatory, is the center of the world, it just as easily could have been here. Arizona. The low desert. Important things have happened here, too, between my soft, sweat-soaked sheets. We both need a long drink of water.

His phone alarm went off a long time ago, electronic bird chirps, and now he sighs, shifts off me, kisses me firmly. “Can I shower here?” he says. “Do you have a razor?” “Of course,” I say, pleased. He disappears into the bathroom and I am left in the sheets, latitude 32.2470519, longitude -110.956087, one mile from the university where we work, two weeks and one day into this thing, whatever it is. I will get up and make coffee in a minute, I know; I will pull out the sugar so he can make it the way he likes it. But for now I press my forehead into the bed, warm, arbitrary, oriented.