A Country of Eternal Light

by Darby Harn

  On a calm day a hooker can get into Galway Bay. Sometimes it comes back with fish. Sometimes it doesn’t come back. Women stand on the rising shore waiting for their men to come back in body or evidence of death. The sea gives only anger. The promise that in time, the water will claim you as it did your love. All this time I’ve been waiting for you. Mo leanbh. Mo stór.

  You’re waiting for me.

  “I’ll do it,” I say. “I’ll write something, explaining.”

  “Explaining? They abandoned us, Mairead.”

  “All the same, I want it clear how and why we got here. I’ll do it. It’s my responsibility. It’s my decision.”

  “It’s been the two of us this far.”

  “You and Saidbh… I’ll dismiss you, before.”

  “I won’t let you live with the burden of it on your own, Mairead.”

  “I won’t be living with anything,” I say.

  Aoife sinks into the chair beside the bed. Sometimes at night I hear this clenched sobbing of hers down the corridors of the home, from within some dark, cold and forgotten room.

  “You were doing so much better…”

  I sit down with her. She curls up in my arms, sobbing into my shoulder like she did after every shipwreck of a boy back in school. Most dangerous approach in all Ireland, Aoife.

  “It’s over,” I say. “It’s over now.”

  “There’s got to be some other way…”

  There’s no other way. Three years. Three years this cancer has been growing in the sky and it’s terminal. That’s it. Nothing more to be said. Nothing to be decided but choosing the casket. No. I’m going to choose how my story ends. Not God. Not chance.

  Me.

  Chapter Thirteen

  On my way to the home, I go up to Colm’s.

  The high road slick with momentary ice. Snow falls light, streaked with ash. This has gone on a week or more now. The sky dark with it. Colm sorts through boxes and bins inside the garage and he looks the same as he always looks, mad and dirty.

  He wipes his hands on his coveralls. “How’s herself?”

  “You know. The same. How are you getting on?”

  He limps out of the garage into the drive. “Damn arthritis has locked up my knees.”

  “The starvation will take some of the weight off you.”

  “This is your father’s bedside manner I’m hearing.”

  “Has its uses.” His pockets are full of loose wires. “What are you working on?”

  “I have an old HAMM radio I’m trying to get working. No luck so far. Though it may be static I hear, anyways.”

  Clouds race against the shale sky, soundless of planes.

  “Do you even want to know, Colm?”

  He shrugs, a little. “Passes the time.”

  “Keeps you busy,” I say, “tinkering as you do.”

  “It does.” He shakes his head. “Sometimes, though. Sometimes I think I ought to leave well enough alone.”

  “How do you know when to?”

  “It’s me you’re asking?”

  “Who else can I ask?”

  He scratches his chin. “Seemed you two were sorted.”

  I don’t have to ask who he refers to. I know. We all know. “We were ahead of ourselves is what we were.”

  “Two lonely people. Tends to happen.” His hand glances my shoulder. “Your Da used to come up here and we'd work on cars all day, and drink. Or we'd go fishing, and drink. Or we'd go to the pub, and drink. To dull our pain. This ache, in our souls.”

  I understand perfectly. I was Da’s understudy, after all. While he was sick and dying, Colm and I both needed someone to fill that space at the bar, or here at the house.

  “But you,” Colm says. “You haven't had a drink since the day you found out you were pregnant. You're the strongest woman – you're the strongest person – I've ever known. It's me who should be asking you how to get through my day.”

  “How do you?”

  “By imagining you coming up that walk,” he says. “And me saying I'm sorry.”

  My cheeks burn with tears. “I need to be getting back to the home. I thought I’d come by, and…”

  “You’re strong, Mairead. You’ll be the last of us.”

  This confusion dawns on his face. What does he see in mine. He always knew me. The birds circle the feeder, looking for a place to land. I look east, toward the mainland. Lidded in gray.

  “Gavin made it back,” Colm says. “I’m sure of it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Whatever I can do for you, Mairead. Just ask. I know I can’t… I’m happy to help. Whatever I can do.”

  “I know you’ll have to break the house down,” I say. “Could you leave the cot? I know it’s wood, but could you?”

  He ages years right in front of my eyes. I think he might crumble to dust right there in the drive, but he manages, Colm. He stands his pain, like he’s always done.

  He nods. What else can he do.

  I go down the drive. I look back at the feeder. The cluttered yard and garage. Colm. Seanfhear. I wave goodbye. He blows me a kiss. The softy. There are good men in the world. Failures, all of them.

  They are good because they endure.

  The school is perched halfway up the bowl of the island on the high road. This is the new school, built in the aughts like the nursing home when the country was flush with money.

  Why should you leave, Ma said. There are jobs now.

  Never on the island, though we were always sore for something. Another doctor. Nurses. Teachers. I gave Dublin a go after I turned eighteen. Dublin was new. Dublin was the business. The indifference of Dublin made me sore. It was all so pinched together, the people, the streets, the row houses, snug up against each other like twins in the womb. It was too much city for me. So I did what I always do. I went looking for more.

  Eithne continues in the school, even without power. She’s nothing at home for her, I suppose. That’s cruel. Ian left her after eight years and moved to Galway for some girl with tits like deployed airbags and they had a baby the spring after you. A girl. She won’t see her next birthday. None of these children sitting at their desks in a cold and damp and dark school will see another birthday, or fulfill the promise of their youth. There is no more vile crime than the squander of a future.

  The class has been eroding since the discovery of the black hole. Those parents who could leave, left. Those who thought an education was pointless pulled their children out. Others had the foresight and the resolve to pile the kids in the car, close the garage door and turn the motor on.

  Now there are five.

  I check their noses. Throats. Ears. Lord God. Have they ever put cotton to them. I make them stick their arms up in the air and when they do, I tickle their ribs. The ones that laugh, I pinch their noses. The ones too old and too cool to react, I make faces until they do.

  The boy I thought was you on the road that day is too shy to do anything. He’s too bashful. Beautiful boy. Eoin. I play keep away with my stethoscope. Cat and mouse with my light pen. He’s terrified of me. He must sense it in me. The loss. The absence of you. The wanting to fill it. I tried making Gavin fit into this depression inside me. The boy knows it’s still there. The boy knows I’m still wanting, even now. I’m still looking.

  Do you know.

  When I’m done examining him, I hug him. My arms just spring. His go flat down his sides like boards and he doesn’t breathe a breath the time I hold him. His heart doesn’t want to beat and I let him go and he runs back to his desk.

  Eithne smiles her paralytic smile. I should be embarrassed. I should be ashamed. I am only sorry I didn’t scoop him up in my arms that day by the seal colony, and give some of this love I will die with. A person should not die with love to give.

  “Kind of you,” Eithne says, walking me out.

  “It’s no bother.”

  “You’re basically the doctor now.”

  “Only took the end of the world.”

  Her l
augh, like everything about her, is exaggerated, as if she’s on stage and I’m in the back of the house.

  “Your father would be proud,” she says.

  “He’d be out of a job.”

  The hall moans with the breeze creeping in through the plywood Gavin covered the windows with. Drawings in what must be watercolors flap on the wall, taped up alongside banners celebrating Easter they never took down. The ceiling painted in finches. Butterflies trailing dot, dot, dot from one room to the other, one year to the next, one level after the other.

  “How long will you go on?” I say.

  She takes in this breath, like she hasn’t thought about it. “Until they stop coming, I imagine. It’s just a few hours a day now. A walkabout. Collect some wood. Pick up some trash.”

  “How are you, Eithne? Your health?”

  She waves her hand. “Oh, I’m grand.”

  “You sound as if you’ve a bit of a cold.”

  The boards breathe in. The boards breathe out. “I think we’re all a bit under the weather these days.”

  “Aye, yeah.”

  “I thought he’d stay. The American.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’d see him on the road and I’d say, ‘I’ll bet. I’ll bet you’ll be here this time next week,’ and he’d smile. I’ll bet. I thought I’d ask that man for his time one night. Why not. And then I found out about you.”

  “I should get on.”

  “Do you know what I thought? Good. Good for you. Good you’re having some joy. Not joy. Not happiness, I know it wasn’t that. Not even peace. But good. I was glad for you.”

  I try to smile. I am numb.

  “I should let you go. Thanking you, Mairead.”

  “Slan.”

  “A bit of sun today,” she says, holding the door open as I step out of the school. “I’ll take them for a walk.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “You know, they’ve never been to the monastery. Not a one. Today is as good a day as any, I suppose.”

  “I could take them.”

  Now she doesn’t even try to smile. “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “I know the way.”

  “Thank you, no. I’m sure you’re busy.”

  “I’ve got time.”

  “Thanking you again, Mairead. Thanking you very much.”

  The door pumps like a brake. She’s gone back to the classroom. I’m just standing there, feeling sick. Feeling slighted some way and I don’t know what that was just now.

  I don’t want to know.

  Domnhall’s cart idles in the intersection of the harbor and low roads. Three bodies wrapped in blue tarps rest in the back of the buggy. Their names scribed across each of their chests in black marker: LURGAN. JACKSON. BOGLE. I don’t know them. Domnhall comes out the little gift shop tourist flytrap kitty corner the pub, with a bundle of rope. He sets it in the back of the cart. Rocks piled between the bodies.

  He doffs his cap to me. “Fine day for it.”

  “What happened?”

  He shakes his head. No. We won’t speak of it.

  I don’t see a shovel. “Going to the cemetery?”

  “Garda says: to be no more burials at the cemetery. The ground is not secure. I’m taking them to the pier.”

  “I see.”

  He climbs into the cart. “Slan, Mairead.”

  “Are we not to burn them, either?”

  “We’re to conserve all wood and consumables for the living. There was a meeting. You must have been up the home.”

  “I must have.”

  The horse ambles around the curve of the sea wall the short distance to the pier. Domnhall ties the bodies together with the rope. The end around a rock. The rock he tosses over the side and as the first body is pulled out, Domnhall snaps the reins. One, two, three the dead fall out into the water as the horse trots away. Domnhall tips his cap to me as he goes past, back up the road, looking for fares.

  I wake up early.

  Fill up bottles down at the shore. The quiet unnerving. I assign my anxiety to this being the last morning and that despite my resolve I billow with excuses, the same as someone does anytime they’re hammered with some aspect of the fine print of a contract they signed without reading. Life gives you everything. In the fine print it says it will take it all back but you’ll never know when, how or why. That’s the deal. Everyone chooses the deal. Everyone cries foul.

  I sing you your lullaby

  Seoithín, seo hó, mo stór é, mo leanbh

  Mo sheoid gan cealg, mo chuid gan tsaoil mhór

  I imagine coming back out here tonight once I’m done at the home. I walk out on a scab of limestone crusting the sea. Seaweed mushes under my bare feet. The sharp edges of broken shells stab at me. My hands lift with the tide and I’m nearly there, Declan. Tonight.

  Here I am.

  Edna Malloy wanders out of the dining room. I let her go. She’s the only one of the residents still mobile. Why cheat her or her good genes. Aoife speeds around me all day like one of those moons of Jupiter, tangled in my static, stretched and torn from Are you doing it? You’re not, are you? and hours pass in the dining room with me in the medicine depot, counting out the vials of morphine. Ten for the residents. One for Ma. One for me. My skin feels taut, like I still have the sweat of my enthusiasm on me. It’s right here. The shape of my life. The form. The symmetry. All this pain and suffering comes into focus and it becomes this defined thing, separate from me I can gauge and measure. I have found the limit of my grief.

  Aoife plops down on the cot with me in the sitting room. Smirk on her face. A plastic zip bag unfurls out of her hand.

  “Get yourself up, woman. Enough of this sulking.”

  “What’s that you’ve got?” I say.

  “It’s the disco biscuits, like.”

  I sit up. “Where did you get ecstasy?”

  “I’ve been holding on to it,” she says, leaning into me. “It’s my use only in case of emergency type stash. I’d say this here situation calls for breaking the glass.”

  “I’m an addict, Aoife.”

  “Not after we empty this bag, you’re not.”

  I take the bag from her. “What about Saidbh?”

  “We make her earn it.”

  The walls are pillows, like.

  I am sinking into the walls. Pillow fort. We need to make a pillow fort, Aoife. YES. We’ll turn the dining room into a pillow fort. We’ll have rooms for the residents and an A.V. room and a dungeon, like.

  A sex dungeon, she says.

  Right now I’m more focused on the building it than I am what’s going in it, so one thing at a time. We must be proper with this to ensure architectural stability. There will be no weak foundations in this fort. No building it from the inside out and destroying it trying to get out. This isn’t going to be fucking Dublin, Aoife. This is going to be Paris, like. Loot the home of pillows and cushions. Position the furniture just so. No blankets. Too heavy. Sheets. Use sheets. They use blankets over on the mainland. The idiots. We’ll show them. We’ll show them all. Knock down this fort. Send your wind and your waves and your comets and your asteroids and knock down this fort.

  I dare you.

  I draw up the plans. I’m brilliant at drawing. Do you see this, Aoife? I’ve missed my calling, I have. Think of it all. Tortilla hammock brasseries. Origami strip malls. This love. A city of this love in me, deep and dense and strong from all the pressure pushing down on it. We have to be smart. Saidbh is our primary construction liaison/engineer/gateswide when it comes to organizing and such and you want it, Saidbh? Work for it.

  She drags beds and couches together and arranges them all just so and sometimes she makes a mistake but seeing how she’s our only manual labor I can’t dispose of her like some nameless Egyptian slave despite Aoife’s insisting I do, so I publicly shame her and occasionally her ancestors since this seems like a thing I should be escalating towards and then I send her back to work. She’s young and fit and very fit now she’s
out of her clothes. Mostly. Aoife removes a piece for every infraction and pulls on the scrubs over her own.

  I’ve never been in a sixteen year-old, Aoife says.

  This is going well for us, I’d say.

  The fort is fucking deadly. Saidbh suggests we vote on a name. Pillowtown is her contribution. We flirt with democracy but resources being what they are, it’s best this remains a dictatorship. That way I can preserve the illusion of a stable, functioning government until the eventual collapse crushes all my critics and opponents with me. I do like Pillowtown, though. I consecrate the fort as Pillowtown and to commemorate the foundation of our downy empire that will last at least until the E wears off, we hold a parade crawl down the main boulevard. Then I force Saidbh to recreate scenes from the Amsterdam Nights. The fort consumes us.

  I have all these plans.

  What planning is there in Ireland? We can’t even plan for the end of the world. There aren’t stories as such of the apocalypse in the Celtic legends. So much of our identity was in the church, but before that, we were pagans and people of a deep connection to the earth and sky. In our soul, the Irish believe life and eternity are knotted together and cannot be separated. No lines. No Armageddon, no Ragnarok, no kingdom come.

  No life. No death.

  I suppose that’s why we are who we are. We’ve picked up our guns and set off our bombs but we’ve never had the apocalyptic drive of say the States. We are gentle. An eternal creature is gentle. You might say weak. Weakness is often confused for grace. We endure. So Da said. Listen to me. Here I am trying to convince myself. Our conviction found at the bottom of a bottle of the drink. Pills. This is the fucking business, the ecstasy. ‘Tis, Aoife says. She licks my hand.

  Tizzzzzzzzz.

  Water. I need water. I’ve planned poorly. There’s no water. I deserve to be punished. Punish me, Aoife. Take my clothes. Wait. Let me check your nails, first. Ah, you’re grand. You’re grand, Aoife. This will all be yours when I’m gone. My kingdom, for you. I’m sinking. We’re sinking into the wet, into the slick, the melting in our mouths. Slow. Slow, now. Aoife. A-O-I-F-E.