Ghostwritten

by David Mitchell

  Tomorrow, mainland Asia would swallow me whole.

  Father Wally and I sat nursing our cups of tea, watching Liam fish in front of creation. Mount Gabriel rose on the peninsula to the blue north.

  “Fine lad,” said Father Wally. “Your da and ma would be proud of him.”

  “Do you know, Father, in the last seventeen years, I’ve spent only five years and nine months with Liam? That’s only thirty-four percent. Am I crazy? It’s like John and I have been divorced. I didn’t mean it to be like that. I sometimes worry I’ve deprived him of his roots.”

  “Does he look like a victim of deprivation to you?”

  All six feet of Liam, because of John and me.

  St. Fachtna crossed the water towards Baltimore. I tried not to see it. “Have a digestive biscuit, Father.”

  “Don’t mind if I do, thanking you. Remember the day Liam was born?”

  “I was thinking about it this morning, funnily enough.”

  “I’ve christened some ugly babies in my time, Mo, but …”

  I laughed. “I wish John could see him now.”

  “John sees better than most. He’s a hell-bound atheist and slippery as an eel when it comes to the Russian Bishop’s Switchblade, but he’s got the patience of Job.”

  “He’s got a better choice in friends than Job.”

  “Folks with most to complain about seldom complain most.”

  “John says, self-pity’s the first step to despair for blind people.”

  “Aye, I can see that, but nonetheless …”

  Father Wally wanted to say something else, so I waited and watched a flotilla of puffins. Across the bay, in the harbor, sheets were drying in the wind. I found myself calculating how long one Homer missile with a Quancog module would take to decide where the optimum point of impact would be—thirty nanoseconds. Inside eight seconds the hillside would be a fireball.

  “Mo,” began Father Wally, making a tent with his hands. “John’s told me nothing. But that tells me a lot. Then there’s the chain of people passing on tapes to John and back all year, you know how people jump to conclusions—”

  “I can’t tell you, Father. I want to, but I can’t. I can’t even tell you why I can’t.”

  “Mo, I’m not asking you to discuss any of that secret hoipolloy. I just wanted to say that you’re one of us, and we stick by our own.”

  Before I could answer mechanical thunder scattered the sheep and ripped the air. We watched the fighter plane fly off to the north. Liam waded back towards us.

  “Infernal things!” growled Father Wally. “There’s been a spate of them recently. They’ve reopened the old army range over on Bear Island. Now we’re a Gaelic tiger, we’re getting airs about power. Won’t we ever learn? Ireland, and power. Fine by themselves, but bring them together and it all goes wrong, like, like …”

  “Kiwi fruit and yogurt,” said Liam. “Bitter.”

  “We’ll be wanting our own satellites next, and nuclear bombs.”

  “Ireland pays into the European Space Agency already, doesn’t it, Ma?”

  “There you go,” said Father Wally. “We’re one of the last corners of Europe, and Clear Island is the last corner of Ireland, but it’s catching up with us, even here.”

  Electrons in my brain are moving forwards and backwards in time, changing atoms, changing electrical charge, changing molecules, changing chemicals, carrying impulses, changing thoughts, deciding to have a baby, changing ideas, deciding to leave Light Box, changing theory, changing technology, changing computer circuitry, changing artificial intelligence, changing the projections of missiles whole segments of the globe away, and collapsing buildings onto people who have never heard of Ireland.

  Electrons, electrons, electrons. What laws are you following?

  John came down the road from Lios Ó Móine with Planck.

  “Ahoy there, Da!” said Liam.

  “Liam? Caught lunch yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Eighteen years of devoted parenting, and all I get is ‘not yet’? Is your ma here?”

  “Present. And Father Wally.”

  “Just the man we need. Any chance of turning no fish and no bread into lunch?”

  “I confess, I stopped off at Ancient’s for contingency sandwich supplies.…”

  “Aha! My kind of Papist!”

  “It’s only eleven-thirty,” said Liam a little huffily, rethreading his fishing rod.

  “You’ve got until noon, son,” said John.

  John held my arm as we walked. He didn’t need to, his feet knew every inch of Clear Island: that’s why he moved back here permanently when his blindness closed in. He held my arm because he believed it made me feel like a teenager again, and he was right. We turned left hand at the only crossroads. Only the sounds of wind, gulls, sheep, and waves floated on the silence. “Any clouds?”

  “Yes. Over Hare Island there’s a galleon one. Cumulonimbus calvus.”

  “They the cauliflowers?”

  “Lungs.”

  “Camphor trees. What colors can you see?”

  “The fields are mossy green. The trees are bare, apart from a few hangers-on. The sky is map-sea blue. Pearly, mauve clouds. The sea is dark bottle blue. Ah, I’m an Atlantic woman, John. Leave the Pacific to the Pacificians. I rot if I’m left anywhere Pacific.”

  “One of the stupidest things that people say about being blind, is that it’s sadder to have been sighted once and to have lost it. I know color! Are there any boats out today?”

  “The Oileán na nÉan. And a beautiful yacht anchored off Middle Calf Island.”

  “I miss sailing.”

  “You’d only have to ask.”

  “I get seasick. Imagine being on a rollercoaster, blindfolded.”

  “Aye, fair enough.” We walked on for a bit. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Father Wally had St. Ciaran’s woodwork renovated. Everyone says it’s quite something.”

  The last warm wind before winter. Way, way away a skylark sang.

  “Mo, I was worried sick about you.”

  “I’m so sorry, my love. But as long as nobody could reach me, nobody could threaten me. And as long as nobody could threaten me, you and Liam were safe.”

  “I’m still worried sick.”

  “I know. And I’m still sorry.”

  “I just wanted you to know.”

  “Thanks.” Even from John, tenderness made me tearful. “You were like a one-woman electron in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I either knew your position but not your direction, or I knew your direction but not your position. What’s that noise? A ten-foot sheep?”

  “Cows lumbering over to see if we’re going to milk them.”

  “Jerseys or Friesians?”

  “Brown ones.”

  “Noakes’s Jerseys.”

  “What wouldn’t I give to stay here like my mother and plant beans.”

  “How long until you started itching for your ninth-generation computers again?”

  “Well, maybe I’d write the odd paper while I was waiting for my beans to grow.”

  Red Kildare’s mighty motorbike pulled up, spitting stones and smoke. Maisie was in the sidecar. “John! Mo!” she had to yell over the engine. “Mo! Here’s a piece of bacon for your wart!”

  Maisie put a thumb-sized thing wrapped into aluminum foil into my hand. “Rub it on your wart before nightfall and bury it, but don’t let anyone see or it won’t work. Red’s milked Feynman. See you at The Green Man later.”

  I nodded at Red and Red nodded at me.

  “Mind how you go. Red! Frape it!”

  The Norton roared away, Maisie whooping and flapping her arms like a dragon.

  • • •

  The same pew, the same chapel, a Mo different and the same. I gazed up at the ceiling, and saw the bottom of a boat. I always imagined the chapel as the Ark on Ararat. A smell of new wood, ancient flagstones, and prayer
books. I closed my eyes, and imagined my mother, a prim woman, and my father, either side of me. I could suddenly smell my mother’s perfume: it was called “Mountain Lily.” My father smelled of tobacco, wheezing slightly as his large stomach rose and fell. He squeezed my hand, turned, and smiled. I opened my eyes, suddenly wide awake. John was feeling his way around the organ stops, cleared his throat, and launched into “A Lighter Shade of Pale.”

  Bars, shafts, clefs in stained glass.

  “John Cullin! An anthem of the shameless sixties in a house of God.”

  “If God can’t dig the spirituality of Procol Harum, that’s His loss.”

  “What’ll you do if Father Wally comes?”

  “Tell him it’s Pastoral in E minor by Fettuccine.”

  “Fettuccine’s a pasta!”

  “We skipped the last fandango …”

  Naomh’s road led up to the highest point on the island. We took it very slowly. I guided John round potholes.

  “The wind turbine’s cracking round at a fair old rate.”

  “It is, John.”

  “The islanders still believe you were behind the turbine.”

  “I wasn’t! The study group chose Clear Island independently.”

  “Badger O’Connor was going to organize an ‘It’s an eyesore’ petition to the Euro MP. Then people discovered they’d never have another electricity bill in their life. When the committee proposed Gillarney Island at the eleventh hour, Badger O’Connor organized a ‘Give us back our generator’ petition.”

  “People said windmills and canals and locomotives were eyesores, I’m quite sure. When they are threatened with extinction, then people wax lyrical. There’s a couple of crows picking their way down the wall.” I thought of two black-cloaked old ladies, beachcombing. They looked up at me in unison.

  The buzz and whoosh of the wind generator grew as we neared it. If each rotation a new day, a new year, a new universe, its shadow a scythe of antimatter … then—

  I almost stepped into the black thing that was suddenly at my feet, the flies buzzing around it. “Yurgh …”

  “What?” asked John. “Sheepshit?”

  “No … Argh! It’s a fangy little dead bat with its face half-eaten away.”

  “Lovely.”

  There was a stranger walking along the cliff path far below. She had binoculars. I didn’t tell John.

  “What are you thinking, Mo?”

  “While I was in Hong Kong I saw a man die.”

  “How did he die?”

  “I don’t know.… He just collapsed, right in front of me. His heart, I guess. There’s this big silver Buddha who lives out on one of the outlying islands. There was a coach park around the base of the steps that led up to it, with a few stalls. I’d bought a bowl of noodles, and was slurping them up in the shade. He was only a young man. I wonder why I thought of him? Big silver things on island hills, maybe. The peculiar thing was, he seemed to be laughing.”

  I lay entombed in a slab of rock, in an embryo curl.

  Out of the wind. Hold your ear to the conch of time, Mo. The tomb had lain here for three thousand years. I imagined that I had too. Nobody knows how pre-Celtic people lacking iron technology could have hollowed out a block of granite in which to bury their dead warlord, but here it is. Nobody’s sure how they dragged this block, the size of a double bed and twice as thick, across from Blananarragaun, either.

  John’s hairy legs dangled down in front of the entrance.

  Beyond, dune grass waved, sea horses rode the breakers. Beyond the breakers were waves, all colors and shades of eyes, all the way to the sleeping giant.

  As kids, we used to dare each other to sleep in here: Clear Island folklore said that a person who slept in Ciaran’s tomb would turn into either a crow or a poet. Danny Waite did one night, but he turned into a mechanic, and married the daughter of the butcher of Baltimore.

  I reached out and poked John’s knee-pit. He yelped.

  “You know, Cullin, I could handle being a crow right now. It’d be a no-questions-asked way out of my dilemma. No, I’m terribly sorry Heinz, Mr. Texan, Mo Muntervary would love to teach your weapons to think but she’s gone looking for twigs and earthworms.”

  “I’d like to be a crow, too. But not a blind crow. I’d probably fly into the turbine. Will you come out of there? It’s morbid, curling up in a tomb just for kicks.”

  “More morbid things have happened here. I remember Whelan Scott telling stories about the mass of St. Secaire being celebrated here.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You city slickers, you don’t know anything. It’s the Catholic Mass, said backwards, word by word, and the person whom the Mass is dedicated to dies by next midwinter.”

  “I bet that went down a bomb with Father Wally.”

  “Only the Pope can provide absolution.”

  “It’s amazing you became a scientist, growing up in the middle of all this.”

  “I became a scientist because I grew up in the middle of all this.”

  Even time is not immune to time. Once the only times that mattered were the rhythms of the planet and the body. The first people on this island needed time four times a year: the solstices and the equinoxes, to avoid planting seed too early or too late. When the Church got here, it staked out Sundays, Christmases, Easter, and began colonizing the year with saints’ days. The English brought short leases and tax deadlines. With the railway, the hours had to march in time. Now TV satellites beam the same six o’clock news everywhere at the same six o’clock. Science has been as busy splicing time into ever thinner slivers as it has matter. In my Light Box research on superconductors, I dealt in jiffies: there are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them in a second.

  But you can no more measure the speed of time than you can bottle days. Clocks measure arbitrary meters of time, but not its speed. Nobody knows if time is speeding up, or slowing down. Nobody knows what it is. How much time is there in a day? Not how many hours, minutes, seconds: how much time do we have?

  This day?

  “What’s the sandwich scenario, Mo?”

  “Ham and cheese; ham and tomato; cheese and tomato.”

  “And ham, cheese, and tomato.”

  “How did you know?”

  “You’ve never noticed how you group sandwiches into Venn diagrams?”

  “Do I?”

  “It’s why I married you.”

  I remembered the little knuckle of meat Maisie had given me for my wart. I took it out of its silver paper, resisted a fleeting temptation to pop it into my mouth, and rubbed it against my wart.

  “Excuse me a moment, John. I have to bury a little bit of meat.”

  “Maisie’s wart cure? Go ahead. I won’t peep, Scout’s honor.”

  I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

  And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

  Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

  And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

  “I haven’t thought about physics for a whole thirty minutes.”

  “The old Clear Island magic. Is anyone looking?”

  “No. We have the whole hillside to ourselves. And the man in the afternoon moon. And Noakes’s Jerseys.”

  “Then come here, my ocean child, my buxom island wench.…”

  “Buxom! John Cullin …”

  • • •

  We left The Green Man before teatime. John, Planck, and me, walked back to Aodhagan. Liam standing on the pedals of his mountain bike.

  “So where did you learn to hold whisky like that?” I asked Liam.

  “Da.”

  “That’s scurrilous slander is that!”

  We walked on, Planck the only one who could walk straight.

  “It’s a rare old sunset tonight, Da.”

  “Is it now? What color is it?”

  “Red.”

  “What red?”

  “Inside of a watermelon red.�
�

  “Ah, that red. October red. That’s a rare old sunset.”

  I’d left John by the gate sitting on a stone with Planck. The turf was pucked with hoofmarks and molehills. Liam cycled on ahead to give Schroedinger his dinner.

  The garden was now a little forest. I was right, the roof had fallen in. I picked a way down what might have been the path. Were eyes behind the murk-glazed windows? The ivy on the walls rustled. Something inside clattered and flapped. Owls, bats, cats, bipeds up to their own business?

  “Hello,” I said, on the doorless threshold. “Anyone there?”

  My da collapsed with his silted-up heart, just here. With the deadly calm of a person who had seen the future, my ma told me to look after him while she bicycled down to the harbor to get Dr. Mallahan.

  Da had wanted to say something to me. I leaned close. He spoke like he had a ton of bricks on his ribs. “Mo, be strong, you understand? And study hard, and don’t let your Gaelic lapse. It’s who you are.”

  “Are you going to die now?”

  “Aye, Mo,” said my da, “and I can tell you, poppet, it’s an intriguing experience.”

  It had been a neat little house, smelling of fresh air and fresh plaster and bleach. My da had tiled it himself one summer, with help from the Doig boys, Father Wally, and Gabriel Fitzmaurice, who drowned that same October. We’d made a huge bonfire from all the old thatch, down on the beach.

  But any given system will decay from a complex order to a simpler condition. After my mother and I left Clear to enter the world of aunts on the mainland, storms and woodworm got to work. Other islanders needed building supplies themselves. My ma couldn’t face her ghosts, so she told everybody to help themselves.

  Now twigs hold up a roof of twilight and early stars.

  “Mo!” John is calling from over the fields. “Are you okay?” No messages were left. “Yes,” I shout back, zipping up my anorak.

  John made a yawling noise as he stretched himself awake. A mild day, rarefied by wintriness. I heard helicopters. “Sleep well, my love?” John hears smiles in voices.

  He degummed his mouth with his tongue. “Aye. I had this dream. I was floating in a shallow sea in Panama, no idea why it was Panama, it just was. I could see the light on the inside of the waves up above, and around me little puffy clouds were moving. ‘That’s odd,’ I thought. ‘You can’t have clouds under the sea.’ And when I looked closer, the clouds were jellyfish, Christmas-tree-light-colored, all glowing on and off.”