A Country of Eternal Light

by Darby Harn

  What does he see here, Gavin. What does he want for.

  He goes on with his tale of woe. Finally, the stores got smart about flagrant cheque bouncers and one day the sheriff came for his ma. It was summer. Sticky. The electricity wasn’t on. It was sweltering inside the house, the two of them clustered around a portable television/radio combination box that ran on batteries. Johnny Carson by candlelight. The world still black and white. His ma stood in the door and argued with the police.

  I won’t leave him.

  The sheriff took her away. Gavin sat there, for hours, in front of the TV, looking back at the door, expecting her to come through. Sometime near dusk his father came over.

  It’s two hundred dollars for bail, he said. Get your shoes on.

  The two of them went out to some place called K-Mart out on the old highway. Father and son, on an adventure. Each of them picked out a pair of tight jeans and went into the dressing room, one after the other. They pulled the jeans they came in wearing over those and walked out. They did this five or six times and then because the store took returns back without receipts then, they returned each pair of jeans that same night, one after the other.

  My laughter escalates with each pair of jeans. “Did your man not wonder where all the fucking jeans were coming from?”

  The two hundred dollars came quick and they got her out of jail. With the little extra left over they all went to the truck stop, the three of them for the first time in years, for the last time in their lives, 1987.

  “I still steal things,” he says. “Sometimes.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “Ink pens. Batteries. Gum. I don’t know why.”

  “But you’re money, now.”

  “I just fix on things.”

  “You’ve stolen things here on the island?”

  He brushes my lip with his thumb. “Feels like it.”

  Everything feels stolen: your life. This moment. His being here at all. Mine. We are thieves all of us, and our punishment is for our lives to be stolen back. There were nights growing up for him trying to fall asleep in a house without power, belly rumbling, as railcars full of grain rumbled down the tracks a few blocks away from his house. Oceans of corn stretched into Iowa infinite. Inishèan yields little beyond some of the most staggering sights on Earth. That is the magic of the island. Beyond is at your doorstep. Our bellies may rumble, but our souls never do. I am starved. I am mad with hunger. The monster in me devouring all my living so quickly the force of the feast sets my entire life in motion, spinning about an empty center. Everything I know and love swirling down the drain, crashing and colliding into each other, reducing down to nothing until poof.

  All gone.

  “Here?” I say.

  Gavin and I inch down grass carpeted limestone steps from the buckled road to a strand the sea exposed. This is foolish of us but then this is our fashion so we go on, being fools, further out into the moonscape the retreating sea exposed. Crabs skulk through the seaweed. The rock slick. The seals beach hundreds of yards off shore and we just keep going, skipping from one pink stained stone to the next, like playing hopscotch with no end.

  Do I want it to end?

  A rogue wave could come in. I could slip on a rock and brain myself. He could. Could I? Could I slip, right now, and pull him with me? I squeeze his hand. He squeezes back. He’s got me. I pull and then he’s done; he guides me to a flat bit of rock and we sit, where people have not sat or stood since there was ice covering the world.

  His hand touches his coat pocket. “Maybe.”

  For a long time we watch the seals sleep. They rest their hairy chins just over the water. How tired they must be, spending all night in the turbulent sea. How sad they must be, to fight this war with the water every single day. How angry they must be. Who do they blame.

  Do they know.

  Gavin holds the pill bottle in his hands. The current surging through him to twist off the cap. The strain on his face. The trap he’s set for himself. It’s like giving up the drink. You want to. You just can’t. It’s nothing to do with wanting. You’ve no control over it.

  He can’t let go.

  He never had any handle on his father to begin with if I understand him, and this pilgrimage he’s taken to Inishèan is not so much about his father as it is him. He never knew his father. There will never be an answer as to why; why his father disappeared and reappeared in his life like a comet. No one could tell him why his father ignored him, his brothers, his sisters from other women, his own health until that gave up on him the same as the rest.

  There is no letting go.

  There is only the loosening of your dead fingers as the current rips you away from the thing you’ve held most dear. Why does he want me to be here for this. Why do we go through this. I wouldn’t tolerate someone sitting over me, watching me, tapping their watch and I brush his cheek. The dust of a beard on him now. The gray in it gives him this quality. How to describe it. He seems his age. Himself. He buttons me up in his coat. Heavy with the weight and smell of days of rain. Of the sea. In his frayed sweater and tattered jeans and wrinkled shoes he seems one of the men of the boats. A man of Aran. He could be a man. I could be a woman. We could just be, fighting over our bit of earth every day, for as long as we can.

  We kiss long and sweet. He holds me close. So close. The pill bottle like a rock between us. Would you have wondered over your father. Would you have known anything was missing.

  Would I have ever told you.

  You can see the black hole in the day now. Properly it’s all the mess of planets the black hole is gobbling up so fast it can’t get to it. I don’t know a thing about the planets. You would have liked them. Frontiers. Possibilities.

  “At least there’s no one suffering out there,” I say.

  Gavin rubs my back. “What?”

  “On those planets. Saturn. Whichever one it is.”

  “There might have been life on Titan once,” Gavin says. “There’s probably life on Europa. We’ll never know.”

  “Europa?”

  “One of Jupiter’s moons.”

  “How could there be life?”

  “Europa’s covered in ice, but under the ice there’s this ocean. Europa gets pulled back and forth between Jupiter and the other moons, so it has an active core like we do, which heats the ice and creates the ocean. There’s no sunlight at all, but there’s none on the bottom of the ocean here, so there could be little guys down there.”

  “Little guys?”

  “Like anglerfish or something. Lanternfish.”

  “And they’re going to be killed, just like us.”

  “Maybe the black hole yanks it loose, like it did Pluto.”

  “So… say Europa got spit out, like. This ocean would still be there? The little guys would?”

  “So long as the core remained active,” he says.

  “Say it happens. It will happen. The little guys survive.”

  “The little guys survive.”

  The cold of the water settles in me. The sober clarity of the air. Gavin’s eyes linger heavy on the shadowed mainland.

  “You know… there’s this theory, in quantum physics. Information can’t be destroyed. Anything that goes into a black hole, it comes out somewhere. So it’s not the end. Stephen Hawking said this thing once… he said if you ever find yourself in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.”

  “Joke’s on him.”

  Gavin brushes my cheek. “There’s always a way out.”

  The seals bark in confusion. The tides answer in the quickening rhythm of distant thunder. We scramble back to a ledge. Tangled in the seaweed we find a dead dolphin. Blood caked at its nose. I’ve never seen a dolphin before. We climb the steps back to the road. A boy stands on the shoulder.

  “Declan?”

  Eithne draws him back. The color goes right her face when she sees me. She looks back down the road, like she’s afraid of what I might see but I hear them. The lash of their laugh
ter. The punch of their joy. The raw scrape of their boredom. Lord God. She’s brought the entire school out here. The children that still bother going, at least. Eight of them. Her smile is the smile of a stroke victim. She can’t look me in the eye, Eithne.

  “Slan,” she says.

  The fuck do I say. The fuck do I go. There’s nowhere to go. Gavin takes my hand. He’s taking my hand and she’s looking at us queer like and I snatch it back.

  He clears his throat. “Field trip?”

  “The school’s all boarded up, you know,” she says.

  “Right, right.”

  “It felt closed down. It felt like we weren’t to be there and I thought, the sun’s out. What’s reading books? Especially now. So. We’ll take a walk, then. I’ll teach them the seals.”

  “Cool. I think you’ve just missed them, though.”

  The boy stares at me. His hand gripping hers. Nose red and crusted in snot. His jumper streaked with it.

  “You can kind of see one,” Gavin says. “See?”

  “Oh, yes,” Eithne says. “Do you see him, Colin?”

  The boy shakes his head. Gavin leans down and helps him out by pointing. The other kids cluster around him, their awe and indifference scattered on the breeze like buckshot. He points out the bobbing heads of the seals in the swelling sea and his enthusiasm bleeds into theirs. His boyishness becomes nauseous and Eithne tries her smile again. The rigor won’t come out her face. She’s stricken with the same paralysis everyone has been since you left me. Everything frozen here except the days. The tides. The erosion of the roads and the island and the soul.

  Her hair is the end of a flamethrower in the wind off the sea. “Youse are on a field trip as well?”

  “What?”

  “Showing him around, are you?”

  I step back. “I am.”

  “That’s grand.”

  “You shouldn’t be on the road with them, Eithne.”

  The words grind in her teeth. “There’s no traffic.”

  “But the tides.”

  “They seem polite, today.”

  The tide crashes into the rocks below. Children squeal under the splash of spray. The most washing their clothes have seen in a while. Giggles rupture with the breaking of the waves. Their little teeth like fences of irregular stone.

  “It’s not safe,” I say.

  She nods. “Every day, I ask myself… what do I bother for? What point is there teaching them any of this that they’ll never get to use and… I can’t send them home. There’s nothing for them to do there. There’s nothing to eat.” Her fingers pinch my jacket. “Isn’t it awful?”

  Another year. Another year and you would have been in the preschool. I would have dressed you in a red jumper and taken your picture in it and put it on the fridge, like and your schooling would have been brief but you would have been.

  “Awful,” I say.

  “I can’t think of it,” Eithne says. The numbness loosening in her tongue. “Their parents. The hell they must be going through, knowing. I think myself lucky, I suppose. All the doctors and the money, but now… I don’t know. Maybe it’s better this way. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Better?”

  “Oh. No. Mairead.”

  I start down the road home. The confusion of the children stabbing me in the back. Their quick indifference. Gavin runs after me. That dog. I cut off the low road up a boreen snaking up into the hills and he doesn’t know why I’m going or why. I leave him there stranded, like a rock. A dead dolphin. Every single one of us, shrouded in seaweed soon enough.

  Chapter Nine

  Back at the house I dig that bottle of Jameson’s Aoife left out of the cupboard. My hands shake as I pour a deep, quick glass. Ma smacks her lips as she passes through the kitchen like a gray meteor and I dump the glass down the sink. The rest of the bottle.

  Bleeding coward.

  Aoife made me out to be some hero, going to the States. Maybe I made myself out so, back then. Anything to get my blood up. Truth is I was scared to death. Lord God. That first year. I shared a one bedroom on the ass end of Bergen St. with Delphine. Delphine the talker. Everything excited her about the city. So it did me, but fuck’s sake, there was no need to yammer about it all night and day. She couldn’t be blamed, I suppose. Delphine was a Dub, so she was keen for a proper city. It didn’t matter we lived on top of each other, or that hot water was a theory more than a practice. My theory of New York disproven in lonely nights trying to ignore the kids making games out of running up and down the stairs, the industrial music of the street outside, the moaning and wet snap of lips from her room.

  I wanted the city. I hated the city.

  I hated myself more for not liking New York the way Delphine did. The way everyone did. I took my guitar and sang at open mic nights. I pulled tabs on bills for WANTED: SINGER. Answered online ads. I’d sing a while in this band or that one. The Piss Jitters. Ghost Jail. Back Issue Diver. Nothing ever clicked. I wanted to play in an Irish band; I didn’t. I wanted to write my own songs; I couldn’t. There was something wrong with me. This cavity opened in me. This monster. Hungry. Thirsty. Always. I was in this drain, funneling down with all my doubt. It was my fault I wasn’t getting on. My fault I was spending my nights alone in a city of 8 million people, sick for home. Ma’s voice in the back of my head: It’s like I told you.

  Every time I rang home, Da gushed down the line. My American girl. He understood the dreams of a distant country. He tired of Belfast, past its troubles but stubborn in the memory of its hurt. He fell in love with the idea of some rustic peace in the foggy moors with his doting, country wife and his quiet, respectable daughter. He imagined me weaving a life of promise. I never had the heart to disappoint him. That wasn’t me, pouring my fear of failing, of fulfilling her prophecy of me into the drink. Drowning out her nagging with the hum of the bell I rung myself with. That wasn’t me who disappeared Wednesday nights when I got paid at the bar and returned, unscathed like, for the weekend. No one noticed. She’s quiet, that one. Steady. I never touched the drink at work. A person must have rules. Temptation is a fact of life. A rule of physics, like gravity. Gravity can be escaped. You first must understand it. And did I ever achieve escape velocity; I got lost in the void. I became separate from her, the drunk. She became a completely different person.

  That wasn’t me, chewed up and spit out on the rooftop of a building down on the waterfront in Brooklyn with not a fucking clue how I got there or how long I had been. My knickers gone. I thought that was the bottom. I went to a meeting and I turned to God. Deliver me, Lord. Please. That wasn’t me, let off the hook by Da getting sick. In the market in Kilbanna just back, everyone fawned on me. The prodigal daughter returned.

  Here I am.

  “My name is Mairead and I’m an alcoholic,” I say and my name comes back at me. We are four, gathered in a circle on the dance floor at the Halla Fáinne. “I am three years sober. I saw a boy today.”

  Angus twists out of his chair for the coffee stand. Trevor McDonagh stays put. He is one of the few men my age still on the island. Other men went to London or Sydney. New York, like I did. His parents own one of the hostels. He works there as a cook. Or he did. I’ve had no talking to him for months now. Most people here think he’s your father. He’s no woman. He’s never had one, not even Aoife. Not that she could tell his interest.

  “I saw them all,” I say. “Down the seal colony. They’re all going to be buried in those uniforms of theirs.”

  The hall creaks with men shifting in their chairs. I hear this scratching somewhere outside.

  “If they’re buried. We’ll all be washed away, won’t we? Like Declan was. Swept away. We should bury ourselves. We should anchor our bodies. Scar the earth.”

  The Earth should bear the scars of its living. Her grief should be ours. Her children gone before her. We’ll be the first to go. The last living things to die on earth will be the little urchins on the bottom of the deepest sea. The telly said so. The old th
ings. First ones in. Last ones out. The sea vacuumed off of them. Their deaths this achievement. Sea urchin to astronaut in a single move. Better than we’ve ever done. Fuck evolution. All you have to do is wait.

  Thank you, Mairead. Glad you came.

  Colm scratches his chin. “I’m Colm. I’m an alcoholic.”

  He had a drink today. He had a drink yesterday. He drinks and is a drunk and so it is. Thank you, Colm. Thank you for your ensuring that we drunks would have whiskey yet at the end of the world. A desert, always, the end of the world. In films. The truth is we’re all going to drown. May as well be a pint as the ocean deep.

  The door creaks open. The dog nudges through. He scampers across the hall and spreads out at my feet.

  Angus mashes his gums. “You’ll let anyone in here now.”

  Colm grunts. “You knew that coming in, Angus.”

  I expect Gavin to be behind him, but he’s not. He’s not cursed with the drink as I am. His father was. And yet he told me how his father was sober over twenty years. A sponsor, at AA. He met them all the first time at the funeral. Gavin had no idea. He didn’t understand how his father could ignore his family and then at the same time, be there for strangers. I don’t understand.

  The door opens again. Aoife comes in out of the rain. Hair drizzled like amber all over her face.

  “Singles night is Saturday,” I say.

  “Ha ha ha.” She kisses my cheek and sits beside me. “Hiya. I’m Aoife. I’m an alcoholic. A drug addict. Sex addict.”

  “This here is just for the drink, Aoife.”

  “It’s the same hole, no matter what we fill it with.”

  Trevor sighs. “I’m Trevor. I’m an alcoholic.”

  She rests her chin on her hand. Lord God. She’s dripping wet with the drink. “Spill it. Ha.”