A Country of Eternal Light

by Darby Harn

  All I have, she says. All I have.

  “I can’t help you,” I say.

  She reaches into the sling, and starts to take the baby out. She’s shoving the baby at me. Into my arms.

  All I have.

  I push on through the crowd. The woman melts into all the others. I come to the bridge. Under a calved lamppost, a man stands beside a fold out chair with these obvious self-made books laid out on the seat. He holds one flat against his chest and shouts on repeat about the great conspiracy behind the black hole. How it is all a lie.

  Can you even see it, he says. This so called doom.

  “The sky, like,” I say, pointing to the comet of the day as I inch my way through the crowd. “Or can you not see that?”

  “They’ve got their probes, don’t they? To visit comets and asteroids. The world can’t sustain 8 billion people. There’s not food, there’s not water, there’s not oil enough. They got to thin the herd and best we kill ourselves as they walk in behind, collecting all the tokens. The fuckers.”

  “As theories go, it’s decent.”

  “You’ll buy me book, then?”

  “I’m poor as Jesus.”

  He looks at me. “You up the pole?”

  I pull my sweater down over the curve of my belly and I keep on. The crowd delivers me to the north side of the river. An angel looks down on me. Hand on her heart. Resigned. Restrained. That dog at her feet, like all us Irish dogs. Begging. Looking for something more than we will ever find.

  I keep on.

  I try cutting across the median. The woman from before, All I have, coalesces out of the crowd. That sling of hers empty. She’s confused, like. Stupefied. She opens my hands, and places the sticky, melted bit of chocolate bar in my palm.

  “Where’s your baby?”

  “All I have…”

  “Lord God, woman. What did you do with him?”

  I run around the terraced base of the monument, thinking she had set him down. No one knows what I’m talking about. I drag her back with me back to the bridge, searching the crowd, anyone with a bag or a stroller or who’s stopped in confusion. I scour every inch of the bridge up and down both sides and the Bachelor’s Walk down to the Ha’Penny Bridge and back again and I look over the edge, down into the Liffey, the pale blue color of frosted glass. Brown paper bags floating past. Protest signs. The body of a dead dog.

  “What have you done?”

  The woman lists against me. “All I have…”

  “Why did you come here…”

  Her head shakes. “All I have.”

  The WALK signal goes off like the timer to some homemade bomb. Traffic flows as it always does on O’Connell. The crowd propels me off the median, away from her numb confusion and I stumble on the 90. I fall into a seat. Usher’s Quay is next.

  An old woman says, “Why all the blood?”

  “What?”

  She nods, precisely, downwards and for the first time I feel the tautness of the dried chocolate on my hands.

  Lord God. I’m covered. “I tried…”

  She sighs. “There’s no sense killing yourself.”

  “I didn’t – ”

  “We all have the same pain. We all have jobs. If you don’t, find a job and keep yourself busy. Always keep moving.”

  My mobile trembles in my hand. Ma picks up, bothered by the ringing as always. “Ma… I’ve changed my mind.” Her voice scratches at me. “I know, Ma. I didn’t want to do this. I want him to live. I want us to live. Please, Ma. I’m just for the train. And then home. I’ll be coming home.”

  I close my eyes. I imagine myself in the bath back home, warm and floating in stillness and peace, you afloat within me. This life and purpose I never had. You’re all I have. I imagine giving birth to you. Your first days and nights and your first walk and your first word and you’re coming into your life like the flowers on the island in May, straining through the grikes to the sun for the little living they’d get before the rains of the summer drowned them. I imagine you so beautiful. So perfect. So flush with life and energy and joy you will not be denied, not by fear or circumstance or the jealous sky.

  I imagine all these meteors and comets missing us. The black hole. The tides lose their fever. The sky. I imagine you leaving the island a man for your life in the world, spared, and I imagine I am not sad or sore but proud and vindicated in my living. I imagine all my mistakes and missteps and false starts justified. I never finished anything so I could start with you. Declan.

  Mo leanbh. Mo stór.

  I imagine scrubbing away all this mess and dirt and fear. The water red with it. The water is red. Like the ocean has gone to rust. The water sloshes in on me with every movement.

  The water is getting in on me.

  Salt crusts my lips. I must have fallen asleep. Still dark. I don’t know if it’s been hours or minutes. The raft a little paper tray for chips, floating down the Liffey toward the sea.

  The rhythm of the waves quickens.

  One comes fast after the other. I go up and then down and I know I’m going over. Any second now. I hold on the grip hard as I can. I’m weak. So weak. Days now without food. Water. The monster in me starved. All this ocean and still I can’t drown this thirst. I can barely close my fingers around the handle. It’s slick. A wave comes.

  Lord God.

  I’m not going to last in the water. This is it. The ocean swells beneath me. The raft teeters. I vault right out of it, over the side, face first into a bed of fierce rocks.

  My lips bleed into the water pooled in the bored rock beneath me. I hear the punch of water colliding with rock. The call of seagulls. I push up on my arms. Land. I’m on land.

  Lord God. Thank you God.

  I crawl up the shore, propelled by the frustrated waves chasing after me. Somehow I find the strength to make it off the rocks up some scalloped earth to soft, flat land. I lie there and quake with guilt.

  Where am I?

  I try and sit up, but I can’t. All my strength gone. The ground is so soft. Warm, even. I close my eyes. Don’t close your eyes.

  Spray flicks me out of my sleep.

  It’s near dark. I crawl away from the beach. High tide rolls in fierce. The raft long gone. Shells litter the ground all around me. I crawl on all fours along the ground and then I am crawling through a yard. I’m in somebody’s yard. That’s not the beach out front; it wasn’t before at least. I stagger up to my feet, using the wall of a gutted house to prop me up. I get out of the yard, into the street and the broken hull of a yacht juts out of a two story. A couple barefoot kids excavate watches, rings and coins, any shiny thing, from out the heavy silt caking the street.

  “Help,” I say. Do I even make a sound.

  A boy, five years old at best, salvages a laptop from the muck. The other kids howl in jealousy. The boy runs away from them, clutching the mud-caked thing against his chest and runs right into me. Dirt smears his chubby face. His entire body, like he came out of the ground. He smiles toothless at me. Such a beautiful boy. Undimmed even in all this ash and dark.

  “Help me…”

  A stringy girl, a bit older than the boys, fishes through my pockets. “She’s no money.”

  “Help… I need help…”

  “She’s gone sick,” another boy says.

  “Don’t touch her, then.”

  “Please… I need to get back to the island…”

  The girl looks out at the vicious coast. “What island?”

  “Inishèan.” Their mouths drop. “Where am I?”

  As soon as I ask, I know it’s not one of the Arans. The ground is too soft. The air is different; less warm without the Gulf Stream. Less clean. I’m on the mainland, somewhere.

  “Westport,” she says. “This was Westport.”

  A frothing hell swallows the housing development behind. Westport, she says. Westport is miles inland of the coast. In fucking Mayo. I’m fifty miles north or more. If this is Westport, then all the lowland areas, Barna, Inverin with
its airstrip, Rossaveal with its harbor, they’re all gone.

  There’s no getting home.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Eleven miles and three days later I make it to Castlebar.

  Soaked through. I just kept moving, driven to get back as fast as I can and Lord God. I’ll be in Galway the next day. I’ll find the pilot and I’ll be back to the island the day after.

  Three days. Three days to home.

  My legs throb and my hands are numb but I could keep on going, all the way through. Nothing will stop me. As I cross the bridge over the lough, my confidence dies. Hundreds of people line the high street, all of them carrying pillowcases and grocery bags stuffed with clothes and food. More pool in the interchange beyond. Some on bikes. A few horses and carts. Oases sprout in alleys and car parks, under canopies made of those large umbrellas you’d find just inside the door at Marks and Sparks for five euros. No one says hello. No one asks after me. We all look the same. Frozen. Haunted.

  I bunch up against the clot of people in the interchange. No one is moving. I don’t know why. I’m too short to see over everyone. A skinny teenage boy in a Dublin mandated tracksuit perches on the pedestal of a street lamp.

  I go over to him. “What is it? What do you see?”

  “Police,” he says, shrugging. “Soldiers.”

  “Russians?”

  “What you mean, Russians?”

  “Ours, then?”

  He comes down off the lamp. “Where you headed?”

  “Galway,” I say.

  “You’re going the wrong way.”

  “The coast roads are gone.”

  “How’d you get through the checkpoint?”

  “Checkpoint?”

  His face screws up in confusion. He drifts off into the crowd, looking back now and then. Unsure. I chat up some others. Most are headed to Connemara and the mountains. Many are headed to relatives or friends. Some have no idea where to go. Anxiety sticks to all of us. Rumors move faster than the refugees. The loss of power and the strange red haze in the sky produces endless theories. For the folks here from Dublin – they’ve walked across Ireland – the most common is a solar flare had struck the earth. The sun rent in spasms from the black hole. The more people I meet come from the border counties, the idea there had been a nuclear war becomes more prevalent. Flashes in the north. Across the Irish Sea, in Scotland. I say nothing of what I know. What do I know. I don’t know anything other than I am getting home. I am getting home to you.

  I’m coming home.

  Dozens of soldiers armed with assault rifles man a roadblock in the interchange between the high road and the N5, going east. An older tractor from the 50s or 60s sits in the roundabout behind them. Bullet holes riddle the rusted chassis. Blood stains the seat of the open cab. The concrete below. On the far side of the roundabout, coming from the west, there’s another river of people trying to get through. Lord God. The state of them. Old, rusty bandages. Their clothes like they’ve been sleeping in ashtrays. Soldiers escort them off the road down another.

  I don’t know where.

  I come to the head of the queue. A soldier points his rifle at me. My hands go in the air. I’ve had enough of this for one lifetime. Another soldier pats me down.

  The soldier lowers his rifle. He’s twenty, if that. He looks as much a mess as the rest of us. “Destination.”

  “I’m trying to get to Inishèan.”

  He sniffs. “You hit your head, mate?”

  “I’m not any trouble. I just need to get back home.”

  “Back?”

  “It’s a long story,” I say.

  “Identification.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Gimmie your license, c’mon.”

  “I don’t… I don’t drive.”

  Snot flies out with his sigh. “Where you from?”

  “Inishèan, I said.”

  “You sound a bit North.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Yeah,” he says, wiping at his nose. Stepping toward me. “You do. I can hear it. How’d you get through?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  He calls over another soldier. What is this. What the fuck is going on. The other one is even more scraped than the boy, down to the raw red skin around his eyes.

  “Identification,” he says.

  “I told you, I don’t have it.”

  “That’s a problem. Where are you going?”

  “You know what’s going on.”

  “What’s going on?” He says it with a straight face. He has no idea. None of them have any idea.

  “Why are you blocking the road?”

  “Martial law has been declared. Haven’t you heard?”

  “I’m trying to get home.”

  “Belfast?”

  “Are you not hearing me? Inishèan. I need to get to bleeding Inishèan and you lot need to come with me. There’s Russians. They’ve taken over the island.”

  They both snort.

  “Put her with the illegals,” the other says.

  “The fuck you mean illegals? I’m not going anywhere with you. I need to get home. They need me. You have to help me.”

  “We’ll get you looked at, alright? We’ll get you a nurse, yeah? You’ll get a lie down and some protein in you and some of this will click back into place for you. On you go.”

  The one with the rifle puts his hands on me. I shrug him off. “You put your hand on me again and you lose it. I’m a citizen of this country. I have rights.”

  He grabs his gun. The other one puts his hand out.

  “I don’t know how you got through the checkpoint, or why you are trying to go back and I don’t care. You’re not a citizen of this country. You are here illegally and we are at war.”

  “I’m not from Belfast.”

  “You’re giving your vowels a stretch, just because.”

  “It was my Da.”

  “Take her away.”

  “Please… just let me pass. I have to get back.”

  He sniffs, the boy. “You’re better off here.”

  “Please,” I say, but there’s no arguing. He grabs me by the arm and pulls me through the checkpoint down a side road where all the people bandaged and bloody coming from the north and east are stuffed behind a fence in a car park. I try to run away. He chases me down. He pushes me down and then he’s dragging me across the pavement, my nails shredding and my knees scabbing and I’m coming home, Declan. I swear to you.

  I’m coming home.

  The Defence Forces reclaimed an old barracks building in Castlebar. A hundred soldiers or so guard the barracks, turned into a detention center – or as they say it, a ‘hospitality zone’ – for refugees from the North. They man the checkpoint and patrol the streets, sometimes on horse. Mostly they seem to be waiting. For orders, I suppose. They put me in a room with a handful of others in the basement of the barracks. Most of the people here are from the suburbs around Belfast. Bangor. Holywood, Carrickfergus and Whitehead. Belfast is gone to a bomb. There may have been others as well.

  Lord God.

  Panic lurks in the room. Fear. There are some foreigners as well. Germany. France. America. I half expect to see Gavin in here. He was on his way back, and got swept up with the rest of the illegals. No passport. It makes so much sense it has to be. Give me this. Give me something.

  He’s not here.

  I ask around. Have you seen this bloke from the States? Gavin? Bald? Every time you turn around, there he is. No one has seen him. A few of the Americans came from Dublin. Dublin did not see a bomb so far as they know, but expecting one, they left. There were thousands of people on the N4 out of the city after the attack. Hundreds of thousands. People scattered across the countryside, fleeing the failure of civilization only to catch in its web.

  The Brits sit together. Five men, all Gavin’s age or older. Typical pub guys. Cannons of beer bellies poke out from under their T-shirts. They keep up a verbal assault on the guards outside thro
ugh the night, expanding my vocabulary of British slang and keeping anybody from sleep. Not that I could sleep, anyways. The Brits try recruiting me into bum rushing the guards the next time the guards come in with food. I decline.

  The hothead Brit walks toward me, armored in body odor. “I thought we was supposed to be friends.”

  I ignore them. The guards ignore them. The prisoners ignore them. The Brits needle this woman. Australian. A long, thin curl of string of a girl, always bent at her hip, leaning a bit to the side as if to disguise how tall she actually is. The Brits call her the Leaning Tower of Pisa. You tip over make sure you do it over here. You’re as long as any of us. She keeps looking over at me through hours of their bullshit as I slowly become part of my folding chair. To rescue her, maybe.

  There is no rescue.

  They let us out in the morning for some air. Soldiers watch us as we mill around the boxed in courtyard, the frustration of just standing out there no less than sitting in the room. I’ll be coming home. I’ll be right out of this prison and these soldiers will be escorting me back to the island big style. Do you hear me. I’m talking helicopters now. Paratroopers. The bleeding Seal Team Six, like. You’ll be defending your country. You’ll be trading me in for a Russian.

  You’ll be trading me in.

  Tempers flare. The Brits engage in a passive aggressive hour of insults with the guards before the hothead escalates from screaming in the face of a soldier to giving her a shove. The other guards fire into the air, and the shouting is over. They beat the man savagely with Billy clubs. We all get marched back to the basement and as soon as the door slams shut the Brits try and coax the rest of us into a mutiny.

  No one takes the bait.

  Every day, more refugees flood into Castlebar. There aren’t soldiers or space enough for them all to be prisoners. Just my luck, I guess. Thousands settle into migrant camps. Hundreds shelter in train cars. Buses. Schools. The soldiers attempt to filter out the non-nationals, which by turns is both easy and impossible. They get wise I’m a nurse. Everyone needs a nurse.