A Country of Eternal Light

by Darby Harn

  “Only if you let me go home,” I say, as if I’ve a choice.

  I spend more and more time in the tent they put up outside that passes for a triage. I have only the loot of the local pharmacies and I ration it for those I know can be put to work in the kitchen or the fields or the breaking down of the abandoned houses for their wood. The only thing I accomplish is seeing what the soldiers do outside. Anyone obviously foreign feeds the hungry bureaucratic machine the soldiers maintain to avoid their own boredom. Less obvious people go undiscovered in the tent cities, either by oversight or design.

  Stories pass between the soldiers about Irish hiding British, French, Americans. Presumably people they’ve some personal connection with. Rumors there are refugees protesting for the soldiers to release us spread among the prisoners. The tension among the Brits screws tighter into the barracks with every passing day. No one can ignore the strain they put on everyone with their bitching and whispering and plotting to get the lot of us killed.

  I curse the speed with which I got to the city.

  If I had run into trouble along the way. If I hadn’t sent Gavin home. If I had just done what I meant to do and I was with you now. I dream of it. Every night. The water grows heavy on me. I feel myself sinking. The current snakes between my legs. Pulls me further from the shore. I don’t know where the shore is. I don’t know where I am. Where I’m going. I’m afraid. I’m so afraid. But I hear this sound. This ripple in the water, like scratching against stone.

  Here I am.

  You come into my arms at last warm and alive and smiling. Declan. Mo leanbh. Mo stór. The weight of you carries us down. The water so soupy with weed it feels like suckers on my legs. I sink beneath the surface. The sun a distant, distorted hope. Willowy flowers flutter on the sea bottom like curtains in a gentle breeze. We descend, into the bed of our country. We fall and I hold you in my arms the way a mother does, the way Mary holds her son in the Pieta.

  Almost.

  My entire life. Too early. Too late. Never at all. I become as bitter as the cold setting on the country.

  I become as indifferent.

  The next morning in the courtyard, the Brits get into a shoving match with themselves. Hothead blows his top about some remark one of the others made, which turns into a rant about our confinement and he starts in on the female soldier again.

  This is it. I know.

  Part of me wants to disrupt their coup. Part of me wants them to succeed. Part of me wants to get killed. I’m half way into the courtyard when the female soldier’s rifle comes right out of her hands. Shots. Screams. Blood channels the stone.

  I spend the rest of the day picking bullets out of the wounded. Two of the Germans. The Australian girl. Tilly. She’s disappointed she wasn’t killed.

  I have nothing for that.

  The female soldier I can do nothing for, but spend a vial of morphine. She breathes, the routine drilled into her. Another soldier, a boy I think she was soft on, holds her hand. He tells her it’s ok. She can go, and she does.

  He says her name was Moira.

  The gang of Brits do not get treated. They are taken out of the barracks into the fields. Birds scatter on the gunshots. The soldiers come back, their faces pale and drawn.

  Are there any injuries, I say.

  The soldiers march us out to a farm down the road near dark. A horse and cart ahead of us carrying the rigored knot of the dead Brits. They put shovels in our hands and we dig a long, shallow trench in hard, brittle earth. I expect to top off the mound of bloody, dirty bodies we pile into it, but we live. Somehow we live.

  I don’t think I’m coming home.

  “You know, this is the perfect setting for a sitcom.”

  We’re down to the last of the cigarettes. Tilly and I pass the final stub back and forth, taking empty drags off the filter. Her hands calloused and blistered. I cough with hollow lungs. Snow trickles down on the courtyard. No doubt hot with radioactivity. Indifference turns within me. A key testing a lock. I hold the handle of the door hard.

  “Six young stranded tourists,” she says, “And we’re constantly trying to get out of this prison. It’s sort of Hogan’s Heroes, but it’s the end of the world.”

  “Except I’m not a tourist,” I say.

  “Neither am I. Exactly. I suppose I’m nothing.”

  “How long had you been sleeping in the rough?”

  “A couple years,” she says.

  “Lord God. What brought you to Dublin?”

  “Seemed really far away from Sydney. I had a job. I had a place, for a while. And then, I don’t know. It just went away.”

  “Do you miss home?”

  She puffs off the cigarette. “Who’s Gavin?”

  “Sorry?”

  “You say his name, in your sleep.”

  “I do not.”

  She smiles. “You have to talk to them somehow.”

  I sigh. “He’s an American. A writer.”

  “Was he stuck on your island?”

  “More or less. What do I say?”

  “I think you’re telling him you’re here. ‘Here I am.’”

  I take the cigarette from her. My hand shakes. From the cold. When I pass it back, her hand steadies mine.

  “Don’t tell me he was writing a book,” she says.

  “If he was, he didn’t say.”

  “Wouldn’t be any point.”

  “If it’s what you do, I suppose that’s all the point there is,” I say. “He was desperate. To write. To finish something.”

  She nudges my shoulder. “You were a distraction?”

  “I was, indeed.”

  “Sex was good?”

  “The sex was fairly spectacular. I don’t mind saying so.”

  “Well. Live your truth.”

  “He was good to me… he was a little much, sometimes. A lot of the time. Clumsy. But honest about it. Do you know what I mean? He was honest. And I punished him for it. I punished him.”

  The cigarette shrivels between her fingers. “We want to be punished,” Tilly says. “Don’t we?”

  “For what?”

  “This guilt… over living. Existing. This conscience we’re cursed with. Knowing. We know we’re alive. We’re dying. We fix on this fear of the end of the world, but we want it. All these films… these books… since Revelation.”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “The longer we go on, the more we want to be let off the hook. We want to be rescued. Don’t you think? That must be it. We’re prisoners, Mairead. This is our prison.”

  “We’re getting out of here.”

  “We’re afraid of being homeless but… sleeping rough or sleeping in some five star hotel, it’s all the same. It’s all here on Earth, isn’t it? Same prison. Just different cells. We die and we’re truly refugees. We’re homeless. We’re free.”

  Lord God. “I don’t know, Tilly.”

  “That’s why it’s a black hole. Nothing will survive. Nothing will be left. Not even guilt. Not even bad dreams.”

  Our lives have always been buttressed by knowing something of us lives on in blood and memory. Life goes on. The black hole drains all of our life. All of our time. The dinosaurs got an asteroid. The world survived. Life continued. Humanity got an interstellar ShopVac. Gone. Down to the last atom. The black hole made it as if we never were. Not Shakespeare, Harriet Wheeler, a baby boy from Inishèan. There is a cruelty in it, beyond the act itself. A meanness to it that felt personal.

  “What else do I go on about?” I say. “In my sleep?”

  “I don’t mean to pry,” she says.

  “Apparently, I’ve left the door open.”

  She offers me the last puff. “Your son, I think.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Not my Ma?”

  “I don’t hear everything, Mairead.”

  I finish the fag off and flick it into the snow. My cheeks burn. The list Tilly always seems to be in carries her into
me. She rests her head against my shoulder, her hands shaking. Her entire body. I put my arm around her. She’s cold to the touch.

  “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” she says.

  “Time to confess?”

  “’Maintain always a blameless conscience both before God and before men.’ Or words to that effect.”

  “I ignored people when I shouldn’t have,” I say. “And I wouldn’t leave them alone when I should.”

  She coughs through a laugh. “Off with her head.”

  “What about you?”

  “Same here. I wouldn’t leave well enough alone.”

  “Why did you leave Sydney?”

  Snow falls like ash in the courtyard. The moon somewhere behind a blanket of gray that never lifts.

  Her breath rattles. “Do you think we’re forgiven?”

  “We’re going to get out of here, Tilly.”

  “We’re all dead here. This is the world of the dead now.”

  We go through town to find things to burn.

  Magazines. Mail. Furniture. Doesn’t matter. If it burns, we take it. We strip Castlebar clean and what we don’t burn we leave in the streets, on the floors, the city a landfill behind us. Weeks of this. The soldiers loot the tent city as well. I treat cuts and bruises the soldiers dole out as they take whatever will burn.

  One ash morning, my throat becomes sore. My neck. I start to cough. Sweat. Shake. I’m shit for collecting any thing more, so the soldiers throw me in the back of the cart with the rest of the kindle. The refugees brought everything they could carry with them to Castlebar. Books. Photo albums.

  Pneumonia.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The damp and cold of the barracks settles in my clothes. My chest. An endless, restless cough rattles through me. I lose days in fever. I don’t know. I never leave my cot but I walk the eastern shore of the island, through the beach grass out to the rock. The mainland stretches out before me like the painted backdrop of a school play and I look out from backstage, Aoife in the wings, always in the wings and I make my entrance. The gelled sun glints off foam rocks. Cardboard waves bob at the edge of the stage. Faces I can’t see in the crowd. Everyone waiting for me. You’re all waiting for me to come out.

  Here I am.

  I hear this scratching. Something’s at the door. Do you hear that. Hello. Is anyone there. Declan. Are you come for me. Am I to go now. I meant to be home. I meant to be so much more.

  Gavin comes up through the floor of the stage. “Hi.”

  “Like a yo-yo, you are.”

  “Will you help me?”

  He uncaps the pill bottle. We kneel at the edge of the stage and the ashes make a mushroom cloud in the air above the band pit. There is no release in him. Just an emptiness. A void, empty as the pill bottle and he lets that go, too.

  “I wish I could help you,” he says.

  “I wish I could help you, Gavin.”

  He takes my hand. Don’t let go. The scene behind us winds to another and the mainland materializes across the bay, a stranger country than it had ever been before. Ireland disappears with my fever. The dog sleeps on the end of my cot.

  He does not leave me.

  I wake up in a different room in the barracks. Swimming in my clothes. Mouth the inside of empty, dried out can of paint. The dog gone. Gavin gone. Half the prisoners gone.

  “Where’s Tilly?” I say.

  I make a marker for her from a round, heavy rock I find down at the river. Tilly, Forgiven.

  As soon as I have enough strength, they put me back on grave detail. Why go through the effort. There won’t be enough of us left to dig soon. Pneumonia cut through the refugees and soldiers alike. Castlebar stinks with death. The odor of the dead and dying has this mass. Texture. I think about the maps weathermen stood in front of. They’d point to a big H or L. Pressure systems. That’s what the smell is. A municipal decay. I should be lucky I can lift a shovel at all. Hundreds fall over into their graves and I am unfelled. I inspire as much fear as hope among the dying. How. How do you do it.

  How do you go on.

  I’ll be going on, I say. I’ll be going on home.

  No effort is put into any more markers. I remember the names of every person whose grave I dig. Holness. Lowe. Barry. Ayoade. Some illegals make a run for it. Distant gunshots find their way back to the barracks. The runners never do. Bodies pile like the debris of stripped houses. Trash everywhere.

  The days lose their rhythm. The sun its track in the sky. It might be December. I don’t know.

  There aren’t enough soldiers left to keep any kind of cap on Castlebar, let alone their makeshift prison. Reinforcements never come. Orders never come. Some desert.

  I could run.

  I could just keep walking on one of my searches through the town for food and medicine. There’d be no one to stop me. How far would I get. My cough sends tremors through me still. The pallor of my skin like a zombie from one of those interminable movies. I could leave, sure enough and I could drop dead not a mile down the road.

  I make the shape of laughter, but not the sound.

  The want to die sweeps like an unseen current through the city. I don’t know how many suicides I bury. The further we go into Maybe December, the stronger the current becomes, sweeping along the weakest to quick deaths. Those who resist are brutalized, day in and day out, both by being a piece of debris speeding along the surface of a torrent barreling toward a cliff and by our own confusion for life.

  I run into this strangeness every day, in people who have found an understanding not just in their own private grief but the collective grief over the fate of humanity. An acceptance. An alien peace, like. They seem alien to me. Replaced. I want to be replaced. I want to be put back, without this pain. This suffering. I want to scream. To run through the empty streets of emptying Ireland, screaming the truth.

  I want to give in to giving in.

  Down a quiet lane of small cottages across the river, I find a walnut tree growing in someone’s backyard. The ground littered with rotted and pilfered husks. I stuff my pockets with what’s left. Gray squirrels flick their tails in the branches above. The squirrels go off like a car alarm and come out of the tree at me. I’m running. From squirrels. Nutshells fall from my pockets and roll across the pavement as they chase me out of their kingdom, down the lane back to the road.

  Thunder wakes me in the night.

  Lord God. More bombs. Gavin talked about Iowa thunderstorms. I’d never seen a proper one. Thunder in New York always seemed to be confused with other sounds. I crawl out of my cot to see meteors shred the sky. Thousands, like. A dozen or more go off like the one over Tralee and whatever windows were left in Ireland go to these terrorist rocks. I scramble under the cot and I pray for dawn.

  The bombardment leaves the dawn nickel. The sun a bloody smudge. I go down to the courtyard. No one. I go to the triage. No one. I can’t find the soldiers. The barracks are deserted.

  Northern lights try to catch the meteors in a gossamer jade web as I scavenge for food. I’ve never seen aurora in broad daylight. The sky feels strange. Off balance. The moon unrecognizable after the meteor storm. Even the sunlight seems skewed, but there’s so much dust and haze in the air the days have become diffuse. I cross the bridge back to the east side of the river, having pillaged the west. The high street long since looted. I might be the last person left in Castlebar. Even the squirrels have abdicated their kingdom. Lord God.

  I’m alone.

  I know from previous searches the hospital yields nothing in medicine or supplies, but I decide to scout it again on the off chance some refugees took up there. Maybe somebody is here yet. Maybe they have food. I need food if I’m going to walk out of here back home. It’s miles to Galway. Days on foot. I can barely stand as it is.

  An oxygen fire erupted in the aftermath of the loss of power, destroying much of the emergency room. I find nothing but charred twists of patients in beds burned down to their frames. Flowers left on some
of the bodies. Over a month of rain and snow and wind had left the first floor mildewed and rank. The upper floors I’d been through before; there’s only below.

  The basement drips like the inside of a dark, wet cave. Pipes vein the walls of a long, concrete corridor running under the hospital. The smell of death thick. I cover my mouth as I inch toward a door at the end of the corridor. The handle turns, but the door is jammed.

  I put all my vanishing weight into pushing it open. The body of a nurse blocks the door. Her skin hard and brown like some dog chew. Five others slump over a conference table set up in front of a blackboard at the back of the room. Carbon dioxide. Had to have been. A small generator rests behind a blackboard.

  They probably thought they were safe.

  I break out the few windows in the basement to let the air clear. I think it had been a supply room. They turned it into some kind of command post, I suppose, to manage the disaster that unfolded in the wake of the EMP. There’s papers and dossiers and charts and graphs. One of the dossiers is labeled DISASTER PLAN.

  Some nice theories about an orderly evacuation. The rationing of food and conservation of water. A brief bit about the state commandeering of salvageable farms for the greater good. Reference to a NATO command post to be set up at Shannon Airport, assuming it’s not destroyed. At the end, there’s a dangling bit about marshaling able-bodied men for an army that ‘given the necessary conditions’ would be under the command of NATO, most likely direct command of Britain. Must not have gotten the memo here.