Notes from a Coma

by Mike McCormack

  I needn’t have worried. The two of them spent a few more moments sizing each other up and then Owen held out his tractor to JJ and JJ took it and turned it over in his hands and then put it in his mouth. And that’s how it was, their first moment together—one of them giving over his tractor and the other fella trying to take a bite out of it.

  That was the first day of their friendship, a friendship that joined them at the hip as they say. And a lot of it was down to Maureen; she became the mother JJ never had. Everyone knows he spent as much time eating and sleeping in Owen’s house as he did in his own. But I didn’t mind that, I needed all the help I could get. Good neighbours are a blessing and I knew from that first day I could rely on her. Looking back now I don’t know how I would have managed without her.

  Frank came in and saw them playing together on the floor. “The two men,” he said happily. “The men they couldn’t hang.”

  JJ’s health checked out fine. His medical records listed shots and inoculations but Dr Ryan said he’d give him booster shots just in case. He took a blood sample from him and said he’d have the results back in a few weeks—he wanted to do some tests on him to see if there was anything like MS or whatever waiting for him down the line.

  “But he looks healthy I have to say. A healthy lucky baby. He could do with a bit of feeding up but other than that there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with him. As I say we’ll know more in a few weeks. How is he feeding?”

  “He eats whatever I eat, he seems to have no problem. Spuds and meat and vegetables, plain food.”

  “Good. Just mash it up for him or cut it into small pieces. I’m going to prescribe a small tonic. Once a day after his dinner. Other than that he seems to be fine. Bring him in to me if he starts running a temperature or anything. If anything comes up in the blood tests or if I need more information I’ll give you a call. If you don’t hear from me you’ll know everything is all right.”§

  I didn’t get any call from him.

  He was baptised about a month after that—that would have been about the middle of May. I didn’t know whether he was baptised or not or what religious background he came from so I decided to do it just to be on the safe side.

  It was a Saturday afternoon, a lovely sunny day and there was good crowd in the church. Of course word had got out by then so everyone had turned up to have a look at him—his first public appearance so to speak. And he looked the part too. Maureen had come in that morning and smartened him up, put on his clothes and brushed his hair—a thing I could never do—and he was the smartest-looking little lad you’ve ever seen. He was six weeks with me by then and he’d come on in leaps and bounds. He’d got stronger and hardier and his face had filled out and as Maureen said it was the type of face that was quick to smile. Anyway, he walked hand in hand with me up the aisle to the christening font and there wasn’t a gig out of him throughout the whole thing. As good as gold he was. The same couldn’t be said for Frank, his godfather …

  Maureen told me he was all nerves that morning. You’d swear it was himself that was being baptised, she said. Nothing would do him but to have a few stiff ones before he sat into the car for the church and I suppose the heat of the place got to him when he was inside because when he stood across the christening font from me he had this high colour in his face and a smell of whiskey off him that would knock a horse. Swaying back on his heels he was with a smile on his face like a man who was going to burst into song at any moment. Maureen gave him a shot of the elbow and that woke him up and he looked around him like he didn’t know where he was. Then he started rooting in his inside pocket and pulled out his tobacco and a box of matches. For a split second I thought he was going to roll up a fag and throw the match into the christening font. Maureen looked like she was going to split him. Father Scallen was looking at Frank and Frank was looking off into the distance like he had other things on his mind. Then he turns the pack of tobacco over in his hand and takes out this folded handkerchief from under it and blows his nose. The whole lot back in his pocket then and that was it. It was as much as I could do to stop laughing. But everything passed off smoothly after that. Frank and Maureen forswore Satan with all his works and empty promises and JJ was held out so that the holy water could be poured over his head. He lashed out with his hand and nearly drowned us and everyone got a great laugh out of it.

  When all the fuss was over the five of us went for a meal in the hotel—Owen was with us as well. A lovely evening it was too, sitting round and having a quiet drink and the craic and people coming up shaking my hand and wishing us well. And when Maureen took the two boys home myself and Frank moved into the front bar and I bought a round of drinks for the house. It must have been near eleven when Frank gave us the first song. He could hardly stand by that time but no matter how drunk he is he’s still a fine singer. “The Streets of Laredo,” that’s his song. He got the hush and he just stood there with his eyes closed and one elbow on the counter and it was no hardship to listen to him. The odd shout of Good man, Frank, and Shhh and Give him a chance and then at the end a big round of applause and someone said Folla that and I was called to sing. And that was it for the rest of the night. We sang it out, one after another along the bar, some of us singing twice and the night ended where it began with Frank singing “The Parting Glass.” We were the last to leave—Johnny was wiping down the tables. When we stood out on the street the town was quiet, no one around except Sergeant Nevin standing on Morrison’s Corner with a flashlight in his hand. Goodnight, men, he said as we passed and we went on our way down to the bridge where the car was parked.

  It was around that time I applied for this council house. John Ryan was the welfare officer at the time; he was calling round fixing up JJ’s medical card and children’s allowance and so on. It was him that mentioned it.

  There was only two bedrooms in the old house: JJ’s behind the fireplace and mine at the other end of the house. It was big enough for both of us but you didn’t need to do much looking at it to know it was no place to raise a child in. There was a small bathroom off the back and a flat-roofed kitchen extension put on in the seventies that was never right. It needed rewiring and the roof needed to be redone. I talked about renovating the whole thing.

  “That’s only throwing good money after bad,” John said. “The sooner you get in an application for a council house the sooner you’ll be out of this place. Take it from me this house will be down around your ears in a few years. It’s no use reroofing or rewiring, a house this old will always be an old house, dampness and everything. Do the job right or forget about it. A child in your care and site on your own land—the whole thing’ll be ready in a few months.”

  So I took his advice, wired off a half-acre of land—this half-acre we’re on here—and filed for planning permission. Pete Mangan was peace commissioner at the time and he signed for it and the whole thing was in progress about two months later. It went out to tender that August and the foundation was dug and poured in the middle of September. John Finn put up the blocks and Ted Naughton—this was one of his first jobs—did all the plumbing and wiring. The promise was that we’d be in it by Christmas but between one thing and another it wasn’t till the first week in February we turned the key in it.

  JJ was nearly three years old by then. He’d grown strong and hardy and he was running around and up to all sorts of devilment; it was a full-time job keeping an eye on him. Up on tables and ladders and you couldn’t keep him down off the old Ferguson for love or money. And one day, when my back was turned, he went missing. Owen came over looking for him and my heart came up in my mouth; I thought he was with him. Out we went looking for him, the whole lot of us; Maureen and myself going through the sheds and barns and Frank, grey in the face, standing on the wall of the slurry pit with a length of four-by-two in his hand. Then Maureen comes round the house with JJ asleep in her arms. Up on top of the bales she’d found him. How a three-year-old gasúr managed to climb up there with no ladder was beyond me but
climb up he did. Up after the cat he’d gone and whether it was the heat of the hay or that he couldn’t get down Maureen had found him asleep with the cat curled up on his belly.

  That’s when I put him into the crèche. I couldn’t keep an eye on him twenty-four hours a day, not with the few cattle I had and doing jobs and everything. Maureen mentioned the crèche but I was in two minds about it. The way I saw it I hadn’t taken him out of one institution to land him in another.‖ Maureen laughed at me.

  “It’s not like that, Anthony. It’ll only be for a few hours a day, and besides, all those other kids there, it’ll only be good for him.”

  I knew what she was saying but I still wasn’t convinced. She must have read my mind because she told me then that she was thinking of sending Owen off for a few hours in the morning and afternoon just to get him out from under her feet.

  That settled it. JJ and Owen were packed off to the crèche till two in the afternoon when Maureen and I took turns picking them up and bringing them home. It worked out well enough. We’d get our day sorted out before they came home in the afternoon and put everything up in a heap and, as Maureen said, it was only for a few months, before they were packed off to school proper in September.

  JJ and Owen were solid buddies by then. They went to school together in the morning and came home together in the evening and sometimes it was as much as I could do to keep JJ here of an evening and spend a few hours with him. But he needed so little. As long as he was fed and foddered and had Owen, his right-hand man beside him, he didn’t want for another thing. Often, just so that I could spend some more time with him, I’d have Owen over for the dinner in the evening and the two of them would sit there at the table, laughing and talking and planning away together like two old men. Sometimes, looking back, I think it was Owen who reared JJ, not me. There was a brightness about him whenever he was with him, a glow, as if the happiness in his soul was coming out in his skin. Now with all that’s happened since I sometimes find it hard to find that happy JJ. All I seem to remember are the arguments and the heartbreak and the confusion we had later on. But for those few years he was happy and whatever part I had in it, if I never do another thing with my life, I will always be proud of that.

  * A child’s geography book will tell you that the Killary is the only proper fjord on the Irish coastline. Running six kilometres west–east through Ordovician sandstone and Silurian quartzite it forms part of the Mayo–Galway border. At one time its steep sides and sheltered waters called out for mineral prospecting, cheap holiday accommodation, mussel farming and marine leisure activities. Now hemmed in by protective legislation, it is the focal feature of an extensive national park and is marked down in tourist guides for sightseers travelling in this part of the world.

  What no tourist bumf will tell you is that this inlet is suffused with an atmosphere of ineffable sadness. Partly a trick of the light and climatic factors, partly also the lingering residue of an historical tragedy which still resonates through rock and water down seven generations of fretful commemorative attempts and dissonant historical hermeneutics. Now think of grey shading towards gunmetal across an achromatic spectrum; think also of turbid cumulus clouds pouring down five centimetres of rainfall above the national average and you have some idea of the light reflected within the walls of this inlet. This is the type of light which lends itself to vitamin D deficiency, baseline serotonin levels, spluttering neurotransmitters and mild but by no means notional depression. It is the type of light wherein ghosts go their rounds at all hours of the day.

  † In December of the previous year the Conducator stood on the balcony of the Central Committee building in Palace Square and addressed the crowd below. His voice, carrying in the sub-zero temperature to the back of the square, assured the crowd that the great collective experiment of the last three decades was in no way compromised by recent political developments in neighbouring countries.

  As always on such occasions his wife stood shoulder to shoulder with him. Through four decades this has been her place—it has indeed been a great love affair. They have drawn strength from each other and they have needed every bit of it; together they have destroyed an entire country. Bearing in mind that the country was one of God’s masterpieces to begin with this is no small feat …

  Eight minutes into the rally the crowd gets restless, a definite low-level hum begins to undercut the autarch’s speech. At first nothing more than a rustle but already it is the authentic sound of dissent, a sound without precedent in the annals of such occasions. It builds slowly, now clearly audible, strengthening under its own strength, three decades of shame and privation surfacing. The Conducator’s face twitches in disbelief, a fleeting shadow crossing the blankness of his cheekbones. His wife leans into him and quite audibly says, “Promise them something. Talk to them.” This is the precise moment when history fractures, the point at which a specific time has run its course. This moment separates before from after. A new epoch has begun, a new calendar starts from this moment.

  Four days from this, on Christmas Day, the Conducator and his wife will sit in a child’s school desk in a military barracks arraigned before a hastily convened court. The charges against them will range from corruption and impoverishment of a nation to mass murder. Recording proceedings against God knows what sort of reprisals the video footage will show that as the charges are being read out the Conducator gazes at his watch like a man concerned with missing an important engagement elsewhere. It will be a moment of studied, elegant contempt. Refusing a plea of mental instability he will hold his nerve and say that he refuses to recognise the court and will answer only to the Grand National Assembly; an old hand at this sort of thing himself he will recognise a show trial when he sees one. When the death sentence is read out and as he is being led from the room we will hear him humming “The Internationale.” His wife, however, in a last outburst will brush aside a young soldier who reaches to assist her. Her last recorded words will be, “Take your hands off me, motherfucker.”

  ‡ Registered to Interskan Shipping out of Antwerp, Le Soleil Noir, an eighty-metre cargo coaster, had for ten years plied its trade ferrying alumina trihydrate to the municipal water systems of coastal cities in the North Sea and Baltic. Detained by Dutch immigration authorities when a backload of pig iron from the Russian Federation was found to be bulked out with twenty refugees from Kaliningrad, the vessel had lain in Antwerp pending the trial of its owner, Hans Luyxx.

  Fifteen months later the liquidation of Interskan Shipping brought the vessel to the attention of the European Penal Commission. Its three-thousand-metre hold met the specifications of those architects on secondment to the EPC. Purchased at scrap value, renamed and registered, the Somnos spent the autumn of that year in Odense being refitted as a high-security neuro-intensive-care unit. On the twenty-fifth of May, after a three-week voyage, the Somnos was piloted into Killary fjord and dropped anchor in twelve fathoms of water. In line with naval protocol, captaincy of the ship was handed over to Norris Whelan, vice-governor of the Irish prison system. Three weeks of system checks followed, during which trial telemetry was relayed over the Astra satellite to Beaumont Hospital.

  § Too narrowly conceived as a notional boundary beyond which it is impossible to speak or relay information, the Event Horizon is more fully understood as a structure determined within and without the nature of the Somnos project itself, a structure which functions as an endo- and exoskeletal support which upholds and inscribes the project as a site within which identities as ongoing processes morph and shift through spatio-temporal planes. And while it is itself both speculative and conjectural and its arrhythmic moods are ever likely to falter and decay, it is an interweaving of shards and fragments linked by suggestive coherences we are compelled to reason with.

  While the Event Horizon lies beyond an appeal to scholarship, evidentiary texts, archival research, the historical record, etc.—marginalia as a buttressing authority—as an attempt to describe a definitive circumferen
ce around any singularity it will always fall short as a final statement of containment. Any site wherein identities are stressed and deliquesced beyond their stand-alone sovereignty, any site which facilitates the neither-here-nor-there ontologies of imaging and information technologies, will always resist such delimitative attempts.

  ‖ Footnoted beneath the Twin Towers collapse the Somnos takes its place amid the gathering iconography of twenty-first-century anxiety. Through reproductions on album covers and as a generative image in cultural studies it will achieve universal recognition. Filed in media memory it will become the nation’s first image of the new millennium to achieve such instant recognition.

  Centered in the surrounding darkness of the fjord, the ship’s security and navigation lights give it the incandescent appearance of an alien spacecraft, strobing and numinous with first-contact immanence. Its pallid occupants have come among us with their refined metabolisms and liminal communiqués from some higher-order teleology beyond our imagining. And while they are unlikely to play out the classic scenarios—stripping the planet of mineral resources, conscripting our womenfolk into some ghoulish reproductive project—they have already started to assimilate a whole culture. With all media commandeered and their names on everyone’s lips there is already something worshipful in our gaze. We are ready to move on, beyond our childhood’s end, into some transcendent forgetting of ourselves.

  FRANK LALLY

  I drive out once a week to the Killary to look out at that ship. Usually in the middle of the week when it’s quiet because at weekends you can’t get parking along that road with all those tourists taking pictures and looking out with binoculars …

  I try and picture JJ out there on that ship, JJ and those other lads wired up to those machines and somewhere along the way I’ve found myself praying for him.* He’d get a laugh out of that, the same JJ. Everyone knows that he himself has no truck with that kind of thing and to tell the truth it was news to me that I did. It just happened one day when I was standing on the old pier looking out at him. Without thinking about it or anything I said a small prayer for him and it was over and done with before I realised it. It was news to me that I believed in God; I’ve never given that sort of thing a lot of thought. As long as a man has his health and everything around him is going middling then it’s up to him to get on with it and make the best of things, that’s what I’ve always thought. But I surprised myself that day standing there with that little prayer for him. Now, and for whatever reason, every time I go out there to look at him I always find myself saying a prayer. JJ needs all the goodwill he can get and if people like me don’t do it, who will?