by Kevin Barry
He is priapic. He is humid. He is ambitious. If there was no ambition, he would not write at all. When it is so insistent—so flagrant, so grabby—it poisons every word that he writes. He can see the words queering on the page. And he sweats in the night and even as he drinks and even as he makes love, what he thinks is this: maybe I can make my own mythology still. Maybe it is ambition that can trace my name across the skies and years. And you will commemorate me then with greenéd brass plaques, in bars, and on piers—Theodore Roethke had a crack-up here.
—Would it apply to the countryside also, Ted? In terms of places being sexed. What about the island, for example?
—The island I would say ambiguous.
On Bofin the baby rabbits tumbled white-assed from the ditches and scurried like our plans. The sheep were terribly fretful; the birds were so beautiful and played on the air. On the hospital corridor, in the night, an old man sat in a puddle of yellow piss and sang over and again a sentimental dirge:
—I’ve been to a great many places, and wonderful sights I’ve seen, from Agernavoe to Ballinasloe…
—And back to Ballyporeen. You have the air of it lovely, Ted. It’s a Percy French song, though arguably not from his finest hour.
—I think everything is going to work out just fine between you and me, Dr. O’Reilly.
—We’ll see how it goes. The most important thing is that there should be sleep.
—Oh, I agree, absolutely.
—The medicine will take hold of you and there will be sleep.
Take hold like a mother’s arms. Well, that would depend on the mother. The doctor rises and pleasantly retreats, this beany-headed soldier of reason. The large man puffs out his cheeks. The fields that he can see rising in the distance are lit now in a breakthrough sun, lit green like reason. This large, dishevelled but somehow still dapper man unties his laces and takes off his shoes. He somewhat casually loosens his tie, as if the workplace today was slightly difficult, darling, but no more than that. When you say you’re going into work, as a writer, what you mean is you’re about to crawl into your fucking nerves. He takes off his jacket and folds it away, careful as a boy. Soon there will be sleep and it will be a while then before I wake to my high, irreputable smile again. When I walked the cliffs on Bofin, yes, I was in an agitated climate. There were sudden recitals, blackouts, vitriol. I could see Theodore in the third person. The cliffs so pocked with rabbit holes, a rabbit metropolis, populous as Delhi. He uncapped the bottle as he walked the cliffs and the wind made eerie music in it—he swallowed the notes. They play inside him still in the caverns where the water is dark and hisses.
He lies down on his narrow hospital bed. He faces the high, cracked ceiling that makes the vault for all these sweet-natured sobs and all these dark seethings. His mind runs now along a clean narrative strait and ambition once more is the motor—if such happens, then such will happen, and so on, all the way home on the heavenward line, and do you see now the way I can swing my jivey notes from all that happens?
Unkillable Roethke lies breathing and smiling in the sour hospital morning. Off Bofin the sea changed colour eight thousand times a day. Voices were held in tiny pockets inside the wind and travelled. His own words moved and came back to him and he could hear so clearly his lies and wheedling, he could hear his true and fervent love. He made notes incessantly even as he walked the hills and drank. The pages of the notebook filled up with his spidery scrawl. He grinned out the lines of it. And now from his bed in the morning in the hospital ward he calls out crossly:
—Oh! Can a man get some fucking sleep around here, please? Shut the fuck up you fucking loons or get the fuck out!
He has been to a great many places. He slaughtered a dragon once on Second Avenue in Seattle. He battered some fiends in White Harlem. He has made some beautiful work, he believes—who the fuck is better than me? He has given himself a fucking shot at it, he believes. Because brokenheartedness is the note that sustains always and this he can play at will.
—Gentlemen! Quiet, please! I won’t fucking ask you again!
By the time they get you in the bughouse, usually, the worst of it is over. His left hand rests on his fat belly to feel out each breath as it moves through his ribs and eases him. His right hand lies limply by his side but the index finger is busy and scratches quick patterns on the grey starched sheet—it makes words.
About the Author
KEVIN BARRY is the author of the acclaimed novels Night Boat to Tangier, Beatlebone, and City of Bohane and the story collections Dark Lies the Island and There Are Little Kingdoms. His awards include the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize, and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. His most recent book, Night Boat to Tangier, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and one of the New York Times’ Best Books of 2019. His stories and essays appear in The New Yorker, Granta, and elsewhere. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter, and he lives in County Sligo, Ireland.
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