by Kevin Barry
‘Peter . . . please.’ She began to cry. ‘You’re being silly now.’
‘I’m serious! Just picture it – imagine it. Who would you save?’
The image of her beloved dog, Captain, near the end of his life, appeared before her, raising his head, his misty eyes, rising on his stiff old bones to come to her when she entered the house. She thought of a fire, and Captain running through the rooms. And Peter.
‘Answer me. In a fire, who would you save?’ His eyes were penetrating her.
‘I’d save you both,’ she whispered.
‘Not allowed! You know the rules. Choose.’
She took a step away from the window but there was nowhere to go. She thought of her father’s cattle locked in the shed the night before their journey, sensing something – the approach of an awful dawn. Yes, a holocaust, she wanted to say. And we are all complicit. And I am complicit too – because I say nothing, I do nothing. But she could not say it – how could she say these things? What words would she use? How could she say that when she saw her father walking into his barn in springtime with a tin of rat poison in his hand that a vision of such catastrophic, such apocalyptic, proportion loomed before her – of rats, legions of rats, gasping, dragging their swollen bellies on the ground? Crazed running rats. Females shedding the contents of their wombs on the concrete floor. How could she say such things? How could she ask if the terror of rats is less than that of any other species?
‘I cannot help it,’ she said. ‘It’s what I see. And it’s getting worse – I see it everywhere . . . in sheds, in fields . . . their waiting. And at Christmas when your mother lifts the turkey out of the oven and bastes it and prods it with a skewer till the juices run clear, I think of her, and my own mother too – good women, full of human kindness – as executioners. And everyone around the table feasting on this poor corpse – and Amy too, sweet Amy, growing more tainted and tarnished with each bite – and all I feel is shame, and I sit there thinking, Are they all mad? Has the world gone mad? Or am I the mad one? Am I, Peter?’
He was staring with wide open eyes. For a second she thought she glimpsed a hint of mercy in them. But then a look of bafflement, or dread, began to take hold. She turned away and felt herself sway. She was almost dreaming now, with everything swimming before her. Peter was right – Luke had put this into her. He had left her afflicted. She saw him again on the roof that night, hardly a body at all, his gaze cast down for a long time, but then his senses slowly sharpening and heightening until every sound reached him distinctly, and he became alert to something – a dawning, a dizzying realisation that he was coming into something that might never again be his – a slowly turning earth, the opening of a vision, a vista, a promised land – the face of a father, a beautiful serene mother, a vast plain with all the beasts of the earth, wild and tame, assembled there, and in the air a note, a song, the sated sound of immortal longing rising from the tongues of birds and beasts and inanimate things. She closed her eyes and became momentarily free. She had the feeling of being there on the plain with him, called to follow, suffused in a beautiful phosphorescent light.
After a time she stirred and turned her head. Peter was sitting in a chair now – she had not felt him move. On the TV a man was silently rearing up on a woman, his face twisted in ecstasy. Peter was leaning forward, staring into a corner with desolate eyes. He put his head in his hands. At the sight of him something in her shifted. She began to perceive the damage she had done. She crossed the room and put her arms around him. She kissed the top of his head. She lifted his right hand and pressed it to her breast, urging him, willing him, to take hold, and for a moment she felt a give, a fleeting submission, in him. But then, as soon as she let his hand go, it fell away and he let it fall, and it swung for a moment and then hung by his side, pale and limp and indifferent.
The Mark of Death
Greg Baxter
From the top of Franco’s building in the seventh district we watched the city in a gold, quivering blaze gnash itself into the smoky and loud paralysis of lunchtime. We: Franco, me, and Sylvia. Franco hasn’t worked in months. He was so broke that he was wearing little rusted saucepans for house shoes. He was an electrician, and there wasn’t much work left anywhere – not in offices or houses. His mother had died in winter. If he didn’t make the rent this week, they would turf him and he would lose the view. He used to say, Even if I lost both my arms, it wouldn’t be much worse than it is now; what do I need arms for? Sylvia was a hopelessly happy schoolteacher who had decided it was her destiny to cheer him up, except she had no money, and that was really all that could have cheered him up. Nevertheless – or perhaps I mean to say inevitably – they became lovers. I had come by with a bit of money to lend and a few drinks, and to try and convince Franco to dump Sylvia and come with me into the city and find some normal – slightly unhappier – girls. But she wouldn’t leave us alone. She kept saying, And look at the cathedral! And look at the city hall! And look at the castle! As though she was not up on the roof once a week. When Sylvia suggested that we go see the new exhibit at the museum of modern art, which was not very expensive, I thought, No no no! But I shrugged and when Franco agreed, I took the empty bottles and put them in a bin and thought, Why not? What’s there to lose?
Over the few days preceding that one, I had taken on the kind of look a man gets – they say (I have heard) – when his death is imminent. The mark of death. I saw this in myself one morning, in a mirror, after I had brushed my teeth. It took some time to figure out, but in the end it was unmistakable: it was no longer my face. Not entirely: it bore the strange sign of a fate that cannot be avoided. So, I immediately thought of Lermontov (I was quoting him before I remembered him), and for these few days I have had dreams and waking dreams in which a man comes and whispers in my ear: You’re going to die soon! I believe in the predestinative power of the imagination, so I called work and told them I was dying, and wasn’t coming in. My boss said to have someone contact him when it was . . . he searched for a word . . . over . . . to arrange a collection in the office for a gift for the funeral. I cleared out my bank account (there was not much). I sent all my belongings to my mother, so she might distribute them to my cousins. I did not tell my mother I was dying. I told her I had become religious. I should have said I was dying, because now she is chasing me around the city.
I go around now exclaiming things to myself, as though I am not a real human being. I, sitting in my armchair at home, listening to slow piano music, exclaim: O life! O life!! O life! As though I ever lived a second worth an exclamation. I spent so much time in cinemas and in the office, at concerts, or on holidays, in bars, cafés, on roads and streets, in aeroplanes, in museums, in trains, looking at the sea, in houses, looking upon streets and roads in rain and snow and sunshine, in all the apartments I have dwelled, and rooftops I have stood upon, on highways, on water, in buses and streetcars, and many different countries, and in bed, but I have spent so little time in my own mind – so little time in the vast and slow universe of thought – that nothing I achieved or experienced had meaning. And now there was no time to correct it. O Life! What an unfathomable and fast darkness you became! What will become of my thoughts when our association has ended? Are my thoughts worth so little that when I am gone, they are gone, or are my thoughts the thoughts of all men, and in that way men and women are no more than vessels for ideas that exist externally in the universe, like matter, or divinity, or a lab experiment?
We left Franco’s building and argued over the best way to travel. The options: walk ten minutes to the underground and arrive five minutes from the museum, or wait ten minutes for the bus and arrive at the front door of the museum but make a dozen stops along the way. Only a city dweller understands the terrible unanswerability of such a conundrum. In the end I don’t remember which we took. The city life is a life of continuous forgetting – like seizures: gaps in time that are filled with great activity and motion. These moments are filled with thousands or tens of thousa
nds of individual angles of perception like ever-rearranging ballistic lines through space, and they have flashed and exploded and expired before you, and you have banished them to darkness. Just as now, at this moment, who you are and what you are thinking is the multi-forked ballistic trajectory of your life, and it is tumbling into the amnesiac darkness of the crowd that surrounds you.
Franco and Sylvia slowly and without any words at all created a very severe and acrimonious argument. I sensed that Franco either suddenly did not want to go to the museum, or that something Sylvia said or did had inspired a little bile in him. Sylvia’s response – she was cheerful, but she had feelings – was to be hatefully disappointed with him and very interested in me, and this enraged Franco. By the time I paid for everybody’s tickets, Franco and Sylvia refused to look at each other.
The museum was crowded with tourists – especially young men and women in shorts and flip-flops and backpacks, taking photographs of the coat-room lady, the museum shop, the guards, the lifts, and themselves in front of the toilets. They also took photographs of the exhibit.
The man said to start at the top – Étage 8 – and work our way down. Franco immediately said to me: I’m doing the opposite. Sylvia said to me: I’m doing as the man says.
So we separated. I went with Sylvia, as the man had suggested. Franco went to the bottom floor – Étage 0 – which was four flights below the ground level. I was happy with this arrangement, because Sylvia was not a bad person when Franco was gone. Franco tended to be a miserable person all the time. I loved him, of course, but preferred not to be around him too often. As soon as we were in the lift, Sylvia and myself, I knew we were not going to make it through the day without having sex. She was very pretty – or rather she was prettier than many of the girls I had slept with. She had brown hair that was straight and cut short over her eyes, and brown eyes, and she was more interesting than Franco. Why had I always considered her such a dullard? Was I always in love with her? Is that the reason I despised her? I decided to stand close to her and reveal that I hadn’t much time. But the doors of the lift opened, and suddenly the eroticism of the tight space released into the dark and vast open structure of the building – the lifts, which were glass, rose through metal scaffolding, and all around them was open space, and the black-grey walls of the central structure. From the top, you could see the bottom. I looked over some rails and saw Franco staring up at us. He waved, and I waved down.
I have seen everything I ever wanted to see, and it amounts to little more than extreme pessimism. What is an art exhibit to a man like me? What are those mice on the ceiling to me? What is that ant on the newspaper? I have seen more art in a dried-up bowl of cereal. Yet, I must mistrust myself. I must allow for the possibility that its impactlessness is my fault. I cannot. The art disgusts me. The tourists who are not moving through at top speed are reading long brochures to understand the meaning of the maze created by rails under the ceiling covered in white mice. The brochure argues that it is the scale of the work that creates art from the obvious. Well, why stop? Why not simply open a window that overlooks the city and say, Is that big enough? Do you want more? Shall I put a mouse suit on every citizen and make them walk on all fours? Shall I paint the city in the sky above the city?
But, yet, this pessimism. It enrages me more than the art. Sylvia has the mark of disappointment on her face, since she can see that I find it all quite pointless, and she wants to have a nice afternoon. I think it’s really interesting, I say. No, you don’t, she says; don’t lie on my account.
Who is this woman? I think. I feel humiliated and say, Would you mind if I am completely honest?
She shrugs, and this shrug says, Anything is better than the misery and falsehood and the bitterness that men create to protect themselves from real unhappiness (which is not fair, since men are more alone than women). And I am just about to speak, and say all of the above, when I realise the shrug did not mean that at all. It meant something quite indescribable.
On Étage 5 we ran into Franco. He was delighted that he had gone a different direction, and told me: I was right not to listen to the man; it flows much better from the bottom to the top. Sylvia said to me: I’m very glad I went with you, because you don’t seem to like art, and it’s interesting to observe you; you’re like a caveman. Then she said, And it definitely flows better from the top to the bottom.
We separated once again. I felt sick with love for her. I could not imagine a day without her. I began to touch her – I put my hand on her back, or took her by the elbow. On the bottom floor there was an exhibition of short films in which women tortured themselves while naked. Why are they naked? I asked. So that men are repulsed by the desire they feel for women, she said. Is that true? I asked. I don’t know, she said; what do you think?
My God, I thought, imagine. But I said nothing. I scratched my chin. I also thought: if that is the point, then it is lost on me, because I feel desire for naked women being tortured. Then again, it was art; it was not real torture. I felt proud of myself for an hour, thinking I had outsmarted the artists, and then after that hour, slowly, near the end of the afternoon, while I was drinking a coffee with Sylvia and Franco at a café next door to the museum, I began to feel completely ashamed.
I suggested we take a walk in the city. It was five or six by then, and it would be mayhem – yet we were immune, since we had no destination. Franco said: I want to go home. I have no money, and I will feel humiliated if you buy me anything else. Suit yourself, I said.
He got up to leave, and, to my surprise, Sylvia got up as well.
You’re leaving? I asked rather desperately.
Franco looked at Sylvia. Sylvia sat down in a mood that expressed dejection and rage and incomprehension. She was, I realised, very in love with Franco. But I could now see that her optimism was in ruins, and Franco was smashing it to smithereens, on purpose, to finally get rid of her. Wasn’t this my original plan? But now I was with Sylvia, and in love with her!
And there it was! There! The mark of death upon Franco’s face! How absurd! He threw a small bag over his shoulder and took out a music player and some earphones and when he was entirely ready to go, he looked at himself in the mirror. Then he looked at Sylvia, who was no longer looking at anything, with something like sympathy, and I no longer knew what to make of anything. I only knew that Franco was going to die soon, and I was going to die soon, and this was how we spent our final hours – bickering, drinking coffee, going to an exhibit, trying to dream up interesting conversations.
As soon as Franco was gone, I said to Sylvia: Would you like to come home with me?
Yes, she said, with some embarrassment.
I am in love with you, I said.
She said nothing.
I am in love with you!
At my apartment, I undressed her the moment we entered. I threw her clothes down in the hallway and pulled my jeans down and lifted her legs around me and penetrated her, and she moaned, and I told her I loved her again. She said, I love you too! I love you too!
What did it matter? The end of the world was coming. The evening had arrived, and on our walk home the air had dropped a few degrees, and we had kissed under many large trees, and looked very deeply at each other – I had never looked in the eyes of anyone at all, and here I was, fearless, as though I had a soul that existed in my eyes, and her soul was alive inside her eyes. I got her into bed. She cried for a moment, but wiped her eyes and forgot why she was crying. She was, I suppose, about my age or a little younger – around thirty – and I felt that our combined hours on earth were scattering excitedly and twirling in the air like useless cash – cash from some other country, or from long ago – that some old man with half his wits might throw into the street below him to no one, so that after the hysteria he must go downstairs, outside, and gather up the coins and bills and carry them back to his apartment.
O life! What a swift and bewildering odyssey you became! What a delusion! My hours, scattering down upon the str
eet like confetti – to the sound of Sylvia making such terrific cries, and my own stupid grunts, and the bed making noise like a marching band – take them! Take them! Take them! Anyone! This is my life! I give it unto the city of mice suits and traffic and rooftops and horrific, obvious art! I beg you! Pick something up!
The street below remains empty. I ask Sylvia if I may come inside her. Yes, she says. Yes. Yes. Yes.
A little while later there is a knock on the door. At first it is soft, but it gets louder and louder, until it is banging. We both think it is Franco, so we say nothing. I begin to tremble. Sylvia does not. I sense relief in her. Then my mother screams into the apartment through the door. Answer the door, she screams. I know you’re in there!
She knows you’re in here? asks Sylvia.
She’s probably having me followed, I say. She thinks I’ve joined a cult.
My mother has brought a man from the university – a professor of classical philosophy – though he is quiet and shy. I think everyone immediately understands that I have not joined a cult, and so he feels somewhat out of place. So my mother and Sylvia and the philosopher and I have an awkward cup of coffee in the kitchen – and now the city is dark – and no one says anything of substance. On three separate occasions the philosopher says, This is lovely coffee.
I knew you were going to say that, I tell him, each time, and he shyly blinks and arranges his spectacles on his face. My mother coughs. I wait for the phone call to tell me that Franco has shot himself with a revolver – it must be a revolver, something from the war, a war – that he has undressed himself and walked to his roof, and absorbed, corporeally, the irrelevance of his unhappiness or jealousy or disillusionment upon the curved and twinkling body of the city – a city that does not even exist: it waits to exist; it always waits – it is a city in the future. But no call arrives. My mother says to Sylvia, That’s a lovely jacket.
