Arc of the Comet

by Greg Fields

  “Glynnis is more than that. She’s more than a lover. She’s . . . hell, I don’t know. But it goes beyond the here and now.”

  “Wonderful. Does she radiate a white glow, too? Jesus, come back to Planet Earth, Conor. That’s always been one of your greatest strengths. I can see where Glynnis might feel some pressure. I’d hate to be thought of as someone’s ideal.”

  “She’s part of something broader, Dan, and I can’t explain it. If I tried we’d probably end up in an argument, and you’re the first friendly voice I’ve heard in three days.”

  “You’re stuck with a pretty grim group at the office, huh?”

  “Humorless bastards. They’re all a few years older than me. They come in every morning, sit behind their desks all day—Jesus, most of them don’t even go out for lunch. There’s never any sense of activity, never any sense of urgency. Even though the work is essentially trivial, we can still infuse it with some vestiges of life, can’t we? At the end of the day, off they go back to whatever little holes they come out of. I’m still trying to figure out cause and effect, whether dull work makes dull people or whether dull people are drawn to dull work. Either way, they’re sad. There’s no spark to any of them at all. Sometimes I wonder why they want to keep doing what they’re doing, if it makes them so lifeless. But I’m a part of them now. A colleague.”

  “A process of absorption, Conor. Be careful.”

  “I know. These people are all taking the path of least resistance and it’s killing them. There’s no joy in what they do. I hate being around them. They’re barnacles hooked to a ship’s bottom, just hanging on for the ride.”

  They finished their meals. Rosselli cleared the dishes and put them in the sink. “I’ll clean up, Conor. Go call Glynnis.”

  He did. But again she did not answer. Finnegan let the phone ring twenty times, then hung up with a curse. Tonight he knew would be no different except that Dan Rosselli would be around to observe his frustration. His humiliation.

  That evening Rosselli stayed in the living room and read. Finnegan tried to concentrate enough to do some reading, too. He had read very little lately, his nights customarily a depressive stupor that exercised itself either through his music or the television.

  A week earlier he had started The Brothers Karamazov. Upon leaving school Finnegan had come to recognize how pitifully underread he really was. He had spent four years exposed to the greatest literature, philosophy and history, yet had absorbed little of it. Often he had failed to complete his reading assignments at all. Early in his career he discovered how to extract relevant ideas from a written work without having to pore over its entirety. He knew enough to give his professors what they wanted, he learned to interpret them well, and to understand how they viewed the major points of their offerings. He found he could prepare himself to get his grades with minimal effort. Only he knew himself how tainted his Phi Beta Kappa key really was.

  Now, out on his own, Finnegan perceived his shortcomings. He had spent too much time playing basketball, joking with his friends, or reading fluff. The allusions he came upon constantly in his research, in newspapers, in conversation with his better-read acquaintances or colleagues left him dry, and he saw his intelligence as narrow, lacking sufficient depth to be as flexible as he would like it. Consequently, he had committed himself to reading the classics he had spurned in college. When he had worked for the senator he had spent most nights during the week reviewing his work, planning for the coming day or following up on his research. Now that he no longer felt compelled to take his work home with him, his evenings were free for his own pursuits. His goal was to complete something worthwhile every three days. In this fashion, before things grew as dark as they were, he had run through a fair number of books he should already have read. He had knocked off most of Hardy and Fitzgerald. He had consumed all he could find of Steinbeck, that resigned, faithful cynic, T.S. Eliot, il miglior fabbro, Hemingway and the twisting mists of Faulkner. It had been a good start.

  Of late, though, his concentration waned. Finnegan found it increasingly difficult to home in on a piece of literature, after dragging himself through days that numbed him and drove his expectations into dust. The immediate task at hand became the restoration of those peculiar Finneganian tenets in light of the unforeseen circumstances that had dismantled them. Although he had no doubt his readings could help him in the process, Finnegan saw his mind wander elsewhere. The intellectual pursuits in which he had taken such pride showed themselves to be luxuries afforded a more contented soul.

  Finnegan picked up his Dostoyevsky and read, but he knew that little was sinking in. Across the room Rosselli seemed completely absorbed in one of the medical texts that Finnegan, in glancing through, had found impenetrable. Was there really any practical knowledge in all that? Does every ache and malfunction really have a name, and can they all be compressed into neat categories?

  He read for almost two hours and covered only a few pages. He had reached the section wherein Alyosha recounts the life and thoughts of the saintly Father Zossima. Most of it struck him as the stunted philosophical angst of a neurotic Russia, a paranoid rationalization of inflexible thought. Yet Dostoyevsky’s agonizing struggle to comprehend his people and his times, despite its technical defects, had fascinated Finnegan enough to accept the challenge implicit in opening the book. He wished he could appreciate it better.

  Finnegan read Alyosha’s manuscript on Father Zossima, and tried to make sense of the dying mystic’s exhortation:

  My friends, pray to God for gladness. Be as glad as children, as the birds of heaven. And let not the sin of men confound you in your doings. Fear not that it will wear away your work and hinder its being accomplished. Do not say: “Sin is mighty, wickedness is mighty, evil environment is mighty, and we are lonely and helpless. Evil environment is wearing us away and hindering our good work from being done.” Fly from that dejection! There is only one means of salvation. Make yourself responsible for all men’s sins. As soon as you sincerely make yourself responsible for everything and for all men, you will see at once that you have found salvation.

  Tension agitated him. He could not sit for long, yet moving between rooms in the small apartment did not satisfy him. He thought of taking a nighttime run, but the steady rain discouraged him and he felt weak. Finnegan had not run for days, for weeks. His body was growing a bit puffy. Dostoyevsky’s wisdom rang hollow. He could think of nothing to do to break the edge. Only Glynnis, and the unfolding demise.

  Near midnight he called again. He had no expectation now of hearing her voice. He called only to hear the ring, to affirm that indeed there was another end to this line even if no one was there to pick up. The phone gave back its familiar buzzes—eight, nine, ten, eleven of them. Finnegan waited. After a while, he put the phone down and went to bed, unaware that as he undressed, Glynnis Mear was just then sitting up in another bed with a start.

  The room there was dark, its foreign geography casting odd shapes against walls that she could not decipher. Her chest rose and fell with a quick, desperate breathing set off by her nightmare. She did not remember what it was, only that she had been totally helpless. She had been the object of some irrepressible force that she could not escape, and whatever it was had taken away her capacity to move, to flee, to breathe. Her sudden waking had wiped the details clean. Only the panic remained for a few brief seconds until consciousness beat it back through its affirmation of darkness, quiet and peace.

  Glynnis reoriented herself. The shapes, the smells were so odd, the angle of the veiled light so different. She blinked her eyes until things came into focus. She shook her head with a jitter to clear it, and felt her hair swish against her naked shoulders. She took a deep breath, then another. As she inhaled, her breasts pressed outward against the thin sheet, her only cover on so warm a night.

  The broad muscular back on her right reassured her. He had not woken; there was no need to disturb him now. Glynnis sank back down on her pillow and rolled to her sid
e against him. She threw her arm over his shoulders. The heat of his splendid body radiated through her and caused her flesh to cloy to his. The strong musky scent of him flared her nostrils. Glynnis took the nape of his neck in her mouth, feeling the short strands along his hairline. She ran her tongue and lips across the sensitive tissue there. She tasted the salt of his dried perspiration and let it linger in the front of her mouth. Gently, so as not to rouse him, she dropped her hand from his shoulders to his flat stomach. With the tips of her fingers she nestled the fine silky hair that grew from the center of his belly down to his loins. She sighed, and pushed herself closer against him.

  ’Please God,’ she whispered to herself. ’Let there be no more nightmares.’

  ***

  Conor Finnegan knew there would be no Glynnis on the Friday evening train. Still, he went to Union Station anyway. It was a futile gesture, but it bound him to those earlier and happier evenings when he would press himself through the crowd there to find her stepping off the hissing train. Perhaps she would be there, and they could instantly dismiss their complications in the sheer joy and surprise of their unity. Perhaps, by going to meet her there, Finnegan could transport himself across the past few months and, in so doing, find evidence of the crime yet to be discovered.

  The rain had stopped that morning leaving the city neither cleaner nor cooler. Waves of sultry heat rose from street and sidewalk. The cavernous station held it all, a giant stone oven. The soggy heat made people cross. Women pulled their children along with harsh jerks and harsher admonitions. Men scowled, perspiration soaking their foreheads. Areas under people’s arms and small of their backs were marked with dark gray rings of moisture. Even the ticket sellers and porters, locked into their stifling black uniforms, sneered with a general annoyance. The crowd as a mass moved slowly, an amoebic gelatinous fluid that shifted without direction, merely occupying the space it was allotted. No one spoke unless he had to, and then only in muted voices. It was too hot to be alive.

  Finnegan moved carefully through the crowd to the platform for the Philadelphia train. He did not want to disturb anyone. Tempers were too short. He had already seen an argument in the grand atrium between two men who had been standing too close. One, a tattered old black man drenched in sweat, had clearly been the aggressor, but the other, a young white man perhaps twenty who might well have been a student, had not backed down, and the argument had nearly come to blows. Finnegan didn’t know the issue. Chances were, it was trivial. People wanted to bark, to bite, to sink their teeth into the unbearable heat.

  Down the track the cycloptic train made its turn into the station. The eye grew bigger, the sibilant hissing more demonic. Metal clanked on metal, there was some thumping, then a whirling screech of brake as the train slowed. Few people got out. The train had been nearly empty. Too hot to travel; too hot to go anywhere at all. Finnegan walked briskly from one end of the platform to the other, checking each open door to see who emerged. He looked behind him and saw the people heading up the stairs to the lobby, to the Metro, to their cars or to the taxis. The platform cleared and he stood there alone except for two porters who surveyed the area with obvious disinterest. The train continued to hiss malevolently. Finnegan stood for a few minutes. The emptiness seemed so anomalous; he had so much space all to himself. He could stay here, against the congestion, against the heated press of a snarly mass, and breathe the noxious fumes of his solitude.

  One of the porters came up to him as he stood there, looking at nothing. “Can I help you, son?” There was nothing polite about him. His face frowned out his displeasure—with the heat, with his job, with this fatuous young white face in front of him. The porter was a burly man, taller than Finnegan, with a thick mustache above unsmiling lips. His eyes threw forth an unsubtle challenge.

  “No,” replied Finnegan, glancing up at those angry eyes then immediately looking away. “No. I just expected to meet someone who didn’t show.”

  “Well, move on then, son. You can’t stay down here.”

  Finnegan nodded, then walked back to the stairs. Why, he asked himself, had he even bothered to come? Hadn’t he had enough of futile gestures and naïve symbolism? He gave himself back to the crowd, as latently hostile as before, and back to the overwhelming heat.

  CHAPTER XXVII

  Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

  Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

  —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

  There was no heat in Ireland, or very little of it. The days adhered to each other through damp gray and rain, delineated only by the cool dank nights that evoked shivers even under the warmest of blankets. The moist air was almost palpable. One inhaled it and felt his lungs thicken with the physicality of something foreign, leaving a flat taste on the palate.

  Ireland’s south coast was sparse. The small college where Tom McIlweath had come to cleanse himself was easily the most notable feature in the immediate vicinity. The townspeople treated it fondly as their own peculiarity, a shard of meteor landed in their midst that, because of its accidental location, set them off from surrounding neighborhoods and gave them reason to boast a bit. Whether college or space-rock made no difference. Neither could have the slightest effect upon the daily lives of the natives. But the students were generally well-mannered, the masters spent their earnings in the area, and the college added a distinction that few could really comprehend. Theirs had been a part of the island given to famines and rebellions. A college was an aberration in the quiet patterns of their existence, one complete with its own traditions and legends. Most were glad they had it.

  A wind seemed constantly to blow off the Celtic Sea from the direction of St. George’s Channel. It brought with it a pungent odor that Tom McIlweath had never smelled before. He could identify its parts—salt, fish, tar, rotting wood—but the components blended indelicately. It was not unpleasant, but the odor had soaked irremediably into the flesh of the natives so that, even on calm days, the smell was everywhere. One could not escape it. The shops, the bakeries, the grocers, the pubs and the people who ran them all carried it. They did not notice it themselves. Having grown up with it and grown into it, they had become inured, yet it was as much a part of them now as their noses or their ears. To outsiders, though, the odor was a badge, a clear indication of the wearer’s place of origin.

  Given the sameness of that town and its environs, McIlweath could, after a few weeks, note the smell, look at the individual who gave it off, and piece together his or her entire background. There was no mystery to it: the options in this damp part of a damp world were extremely limited. McIlweath made a game of it. The men were often fishers or farmers. Their garb would give them away, the farmers carrying overtones of dirt, mud and peat, rough-hewn hands and sometimes with a number of rips or tears in their clothing. The fishermen were usually cleaner but more heavily dressed, wearing extra layers as if the chilling waters of the gray-green sea had washed through them with such force that their bodies could never be warm again. A scattered few worked in the handful of small mills or manufacturers. The merchants, shopkeepers, and tavern owners were better dressed than the other groups, although they remained casual. A smattering of bankers and businessmen were clean-shaven, and their hair was combed, moderate in all their pursuits, constituting what amounted to a social elite, although no one seemed to place much stock in place or status. As far as McIlweath could tell, these groups constituted County Cork.

  Their backgrounds would be uniform, but this did not limit McIlweath’s fascination with them. In fact, it heightened his desire to know the timeworn currents that had locked this part of Ireland into place.

  The fishermen had always been fishermen. They had been born into it, the sons of fishermen. Boats would remain in the same family for generations. They were clanky, rickety things, barely able, it seemed, to chug
their prows through the unpredictable sea. And the Celtic Sea was indeed unpredictable. Storms whipped up suddenly with terrific fury, sending ten- or twelve-foot waves pounding the shores and blowing a mist well inland behind vicious gales. The effect was truly frightening—one could not help but feel completely dwarfed, completely impotent, completely unimportant. Yet casualties among the fishermen were quite rare. The collective memory of their forebears gave them a sixth sense. When the boats came in early, a storm would surely follow, no matter how incongruous the current weather would make it seem. Despite the acquired knowledge of hundreds of years, these fishermen were hopelessly poor. They had always been so, and would always be so.

  The farmers, too, were a struggling lot. McIlweath saw farmers and fishers as opposite sides of the same coin. Their fields differed, as did the crops they reaped, but their condemnation was the same. If anything, the farmers had a tougher go of it. There would always be fish, regardless of the market. But Ireland’s coquettish climate made the farmers’ livelihood more precarious. Witness 1846 and 1847. Moreover, traditional family farmlands were often divided, and many were purchased outright by conglomerates. The emigration of farm boys to the city or to other countries further weakened it all. Farm plots were often small, the damp, saline soil adaptable to only a handful of low-yielding crops: grains, beets and the ubiquitous potato. A farmer might only see the scantest of profits even in his best years. During hard times, or when the economy itself fell victim to international pressures that dictated recession, it would be all he could do to survive with body and spirit intact.