A Country of Eternal Light

by Darby Harn

  “No need for this to get violent,” he says.

  “I’ll just tell you. I’ve had guns pointed at me. And I know a man’s nerve. You’ve none. If you wanted me dead, you’d have done it instead of playing at whatever scene you saw in one of your disaster films. Are there even bullets in that gun?”

  He snorts. “I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

  I drop the knife. “We’ve an understanding, then.”

  This look of anxiety shimmers across his face. “What do you think you’re going to do with that?”

  “Hurt your woman’s feelings.”

  “You think you’re smart, don’t you?”

  “I know where your carotid artery is.”

  “Go,” the woman says. “Just go.”

  A smile burns like an ember on his lips. “Yeah. Go.”

  “Slan,” I say, and get moving.

  “You should put that baby out,” he says. Like she’s a cigarette. “There’s no place in this world for babies now.”

  I keep on. Always keep going. Every minute or so, I look back to see if any one follows. I walk into the night, nearly backwards. Hand on the grip. I don’t make any camp I can’t pick up in a hurry. I don’t build a fire. I don’t sleep. Don’t worry. No one’s taking you from me.

  I’m never letting you go.

  “Don’t say it,” Ma says.

  I haven’t slept. I haven’t eaten. I’m hallucinating, I am. A fire sprouts virgin from the ground and she’s right here with me in the trees off the road. The lines of her face washed away in the soft, lunic glow of the flames. She’s so young. Look at her. She’s a beautiful young woman, my mother. Strong.

  “What’s happening?” I say.

  “Another baby? Oh, you don’t listen. I may as well be talking to the rocks. So I told your father.”

  “They’ll see,” I say, and look toward the road.

  “That woman he’s with has some sense. Leave sense to the women, I say. A man can only be trusted to follow his blood. Though to be a man. Flush with blood. I would have liked to have been a man. Sex shouldn’t be skin. It should be like clothes. Something you can take on and off. Don’t you think?”

  “Who are you?”

  “That Japanese woman was lovely,” Ma says. “Broken, but lovely. You’re always bringing home birds.”

  “Birds, Ma?”

  “You were always quick. I suppose you had to be. You didn’t get all the time your father and I did.”

  “I’m fucking mental, like…”

  Ma sighs. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Shannon.”

  “For what?”

  “To get home.”

  “I told you,” she says. “I don’t want you here.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Go where the road takes you. But let me go. Let us go.”

  “Ma…”

  “We’re all hung with the stones of the dead but we’re not tombstones, girl. We’re not epitaphs. We’re that bit between the dates. Most of us forget that, but you’re one of your birds, aren’t you? Free. You’re free, Mairead. Do you hear me? There’s nothing or no one here needs looking after now.”

  “Don’t…”

  She touches my face. My mother. “You’re free.”

  “Everything I’m doing is to come home…”

  Ma peels back the layers of my coats a bit, so she can get a proper look at you. She smiles, the woman who couldn’t be bothered with children. She smiles big and bright.

  “Not everything,” she says. “A girl. I knew you were a girl. It’s not that I didn’t want you. I didn’t love you. I feared for you. Your joy. But you had such courage. You wouldn’t be told… you found joy in your life. You found hope.”

  In the blink of an eye, she becomes the woman I left weeks ago. Old. Tired. Confused.

  “I’ll never forgive myself… sometimes I sat there and wondered did I envy your joy so much I… you showed him so much love. Where? Where did you find the courage to show…”

  “Ma.”

  She kisses me. “Don’t cry. Girls cry.”

  “It’s ok to be a girl, Ma.”

  “You were my girl.”

  “Stay with me.”

  “Don’t worry for us. And don’t look back.”

  “I want to come home. Please.”

  The light of her goes out. We’re alone again in the dark. No telling how long until morning. Until the day that isn’t the day, and the dark that’s only a lesser dark than this.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Here I am.

  Alone at the end with a baby. As I was. I hold out my arms for you and my arms fill. All this love. All this life, again and again. It just won’t end. There’s no end to this drifting. Like the snow, I am. I dig at every strange mound. I throw back the lids of the trash bins uncollected since before the war. Dead cats cool in their morgues, trapped inside trying to get some food. Diamond flakes glint in the sunrise as I let them thaw. We’ve not had any more accumulation in days. I think the worst of the snow is over.

  Let the worst be over.

  Voices wake me.

  A dozen or more people headed south on the M18. Men, women and children. They draw knives and clubs when I come out of the trees. I’m no trouble for them. They’re headed to this same sliver of hope I am in Shannon. You’ll be safe with us. At some point I ask the woman beside me if she’s trying to get home. She laughs.

  There’s no home for us to get to, she says.

  Growing up on an island, you know when the sea is close. Before we are properly in Shannon, I know she has gone to the tides. The airport. The city they built around it. There is no command post. No helicopters. No planes. No getting back. I don’t know if I accept this, or like the sea, reality just imposes its will on me.

  For some, this is as far as they go.

  There is nowhere else and nothing left in them, besides. A man strips off his clothes and walks out to sea. The brutality of a wave denies him his grace. He is simply run over and dragged back to shore, unwanted. The sea will not take us on our terms.

  Ireland erodes before me. So does my hope. I am a fool to come here. I am a fool to think I was ever getting home. Seven miles away, I was. I could see the island.

  Almost.

  What did I do so wrong to be punished like this. Who did I hurt. What crack did I step on and where to break all our backs like this so we are fucking moaning and paralyzed as the end washes over us. You are cursed to have found me, baby. You are quick now to your end.

  We all are.

  Some say there are people in Limerick. A relief mission or maybe the NATO has relocated there. I know this can’t be. Shannon is the airport and if there’s nowhere to land, then there’s nowhere to land. Where would anyone go now, anyways. What isn’t drowning is burning. What isn’t burning is freezing.

  What else can I do.

  I chase hope. On I go, following the river toward Limerick. The opposite direction. Lord God. If someone had told me before I’d die in Limerick, I would have thought I’d be nineteen and pissed so I choked on my own vomit. I should be so lucky now.

  We reach Limerick with a glimmer of light left in the day.

  The river laps against the gray stone walls of the castle on King’s Island. Torch fires burn in the courtyard, illuminating the turrets as they must have done on medieval nights. Fires flicker behind buildings climbing the drumlin of the island. I turn off the bridge to the castle. All of Ireland pools in this one wounded place. Thousands of haggard faces line the street. Strangers huddle together under blankets, shelters made of shopping carts, each of them hung with an address or advertisement of who resided within.

  EMMETT ROURKE, BANGOR. EVA and SIOBHAN MAGUIRE, ARMAGH. JAMES O’HAGAN, FATHER of MARY AND KATHLEEN, DROMORE, EVER HOPEFUL.

  The smell of gangrene and infection curls my nose. Mounds of people torn and unspooled like overburdened trash bags set out for collection. Shops and storefronts have become mural
s depicting an apocalypse and exodus in blood and shit and anything that could be made paint. Mushroom clouds of orange and blue. Skeletons marching through the evaporated Falls Road. The living drifting across the horror of the north, breaking against a peace line rent as a wave curling over their heads right before it drowns them all.

  THERE IS ONLY PEACE IN DEATH. PEACE IS COME.

  Some gibberish. Ónen i-estel amar, ú-chebin estel anim. As many hold their hands out to me as offer me the petrified crust of bread, or a tiny mandarin orange from a tin, cupped in their hands like a little baby fish. Not for me.

  For you.

  You suckle on the orange piece and I gush in my thanks. I have nothing to give in return. Nothing but you. Mo leanbh.

  All I have.

  Headstones prickle the surging river. Light glows within the windows of a large church. This sound emanates from inside. A relentless, piercing hum. Numbing in its pulsation. Hundreds line the floors. No speck of marble visible. The majesty of the pipe organ swells within, filling the white walls, the wooden canopy stretching high and far above like a forested night, its cubbies of hushed prayer, its gathered suffering, its wafting and sickening despair.

  “Is NATO here?” I say, deep in the bent grass of lost humanity. “Is there a relief mission?”

  As I walk through the pews, stepping around and over the people laid out under cardboard signs naming them to lovers and family and friends or blind hope, I realize everyone has come here with the same question. Everyone has found the same answer.

  I sink to an open spot on the floor. I sit there with you, with nowhere else to go. An old man holds a radio to his ear. He motions me closer. A voice crackles from the speaker. Hope flushes through me. Batteries. Voices. It’s the government. NATO. They’re still broadcasting, still communicating, still there. I put the radio to my ear, the voice low and difficult to hear with the organ. It’s a woman. Irish. She sniffs, like she’s crying. Paper ruffles in her hands. I think she has small hands.

  “And now for today’s death notices,” she says, and my heart plummets. “Once again we will relay any notice reported from anywhere. To anyone within the sound of my voice, please report if you can. There are a great number of us on the road this new year, and we here at this location will make every effort to announce all Irish who have made their way home. Christopher, if you’re listening… I hope you can hear me and I hope you can let me know. I hope you all can hear me, in Dublin, in Galway, in Cork and Limerick, in Belfast… wherever life lives still.”

  Lord God. I take the man’s hand.

  “This broadcast is transmitted on radio waves radiating into space. They will carry a long way, and a long time. Our voices will be heard, even after… I read now the known dead, as reported to this location. I pray this message either brings you hope or peace.”

  Sobs quake through me. I’m undone, the same as all the others here in the church, seeking salvation and hope and finding only the cliff’s edge of reality. You find the curl of my finger. Squeeze with your little hand. So strong. So much heart. Such spirit. Such life. You had such life, Declan. I sat there at the shore, waiting. Searching. I couldn’t feel you. You were just gone. I wanted to come home. I wanted us together. The same earth. The same cold. The same dark.

  But you’re not there.

  You’re not dust. You’re the ache in my legs sore from walking to you. The blood on my dry lips. The scars you left on me. The milk that beads on my nipples, even now. My body flush yet with the kiss of your life. Mo leanbh. Mo stór. Declan. I feel you. You’re here. You’re with me.

  Here I am.

  I help the wounded as I can. There is little I can do but soothe fear and hold hands. The city the nursing home. This wounded country. Aoife. Are you there yet. Did you hold on, or did you do as I told you and empty the cupboards of the morphine we’d been holding on to.

  I can’t think of it.

  I didn’t think I could bear watching all my love die, but I can’t bear this. I can’t bear this not being there with them now at the end. This exile. This not knowing what becomes of them. This immunity to death. I cannot drown. I cannot be swept away down the river out to sea and back to home, not for all my tears.

  Gavin.

  The both of us wanting for a home. The both of us pulling each other out of our orbits. The heart has its own gravity. Weak or strong. Right or wrong. If I could have held it all. If I could have been strong enough for us all.

  I wasn’t.

  That song. The Sundays. What did she say. I used to sing it in bars in the city as the people were talking on their cells. Drinking their drinks. Dreaming their dreams.

  If he’d lived. If he’d lived, and Gavin had come to the island. But would we have met. We were never going to meet any other way. This was the only way for us.

  At least we walked it together for a bit.

  A girl blinded in the death of Belfast asks me where she is. Limerick, I tell her, but she doesn’t know; she’s English. Nottingham. I ask her about the forest and she laughs. There’s no forest. I describe the town to her, the island, the river. Sionann. Granddaughter of Lir. A goddess. She came to Connla’s Well for wisdom but life being what it is, the well burst and she drowned. The girl wrinkles her nose. Such are Irish stories. If you’re a goddess, expect to drown.

  Church bells wake me.

  Everyone trickling outside. I gather you up and follow the crowd out on the street. This flutter in the air. The sound gets louder and louder. This drumming echoes off the buildings, off the street, off us and then a helicopter lowers out of the sky over the swelling banks of the Shannon, down into the courtyard of the castle.

  Lord God.

  A thousand people surge down the narrow street toward the castle. An apocalyptic Pamplona. I fight just to get back in the church to avoid getting trampled. Some aren’t so lucky. I hold you close as I rush through the emptied church out the side. Not as many people have come this way. The way open and clear for us. I dash through the car park for the castle. The helicopter blades like machine gun fire. I fight my way through the crowd to the castle gates, where a vicious bottleneck forms. The kindness and generosity that has marked my time here evaporates in seconds.

  Through bars of people and iron, I see the helicopter. Huge, like. Two rotors, on either end. The back opens and lowers into this loading ramp. Men inside. They’ve come for us. Lord God. I’m here. Please. We’re here. Don’t go without us.

  I’m pushing and people are pushing on me and the iron gives and we flood into the courtyard. Soldiers come down the ramp with machine guns. They fire into the air and most everybody drops to the ground. I keep running. Another soldier throws out boxes of food on the cement. Bundles of blankets. Litres of bottled water. The helicopter starts to lift off.

  Please.

  The soldiers signal for the pilot to get going.

  Wait.

  I fight my way through the crowd, on their feet again. Boxes of food shred in people’s hands. Flaps of cardboard become weapons. They punch and kick and claw over bags of flour. Army issue rations. They won’t let go. Some die for their hunger.

  Wait.

  People swamp the ramp. The soldiers fire more warning shots. Wait. The helicopter sags back to the ground. I push and claw and fight through and the soldiers fire right over our heads. The crowd parts. The helicopter rises. I take you from the sling. I don’t know. A plea for mercy. The baby.

  Don’t leave the baby.

  A crewman is on the edge of the ramp, his hands out, imploring the people rushing at him to stay back.

  I lunge to the ramp. The edge hits me in the stomach and you pass from my hands to his. He cradles you in surprise as the helicopter climbs away. I stand there with my arms to the sky as you rise. You rise away. And then you’re gone.

  You’re gone.

  Mo leanbh. Mo stór. All I have. My arms go slack, strung out and thin from holding on so long.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Days pass without any
telling.

  The sky off kilter. Speckled with comets collided across the night. There are no more helicopters. No more food. No more possibilities of escape. The streets rivers of suffering and misery. Death hangs over the city like a pungent fog. My own stink. I don’t dare go in the river to wash. Bodies float through it like driftwood. Dogs pick at the beached dead. People kill the dogs for food. All night this scratching and gnashing and I keep to the church.

  I think I will die here.

  Dogs sniff through the church. Struggle echoes off the marble. Desperation. I move up the altar, my back to the organ, where I can get a look at the church in front of me. My hand on the knife under my cuff. And then I see him.

  The dog.

  The Border Collie. Looks just like him, anyways. I stand up out of the sleeping and the dying massed in the church and I call for him. He scurries out the doors, spooked.

  I run after him.

  I don’t know why. Can’t be him. I left him on the island. I’m seeing things now. Days without food. Proper water. Rest. I have legs in me yet. The dog scampers into a thick, low fog masking the street. I haven’t dared leave the grounds of the church since the food drop. What passes for civility ends at the walls of the old church, at least among people. The dogs and rats don’t observe any rules there. Glass shatters in the distance. Screams shatter the stillness. This isn’t the dog. I’m just acting the maggot.

  I’m just so desperate I think it’s him.

  The dog lingers in the fog beyond. A shade of gray. Waiting. Wait. I drift after him. He scampers down the street. Always leading me on. People. Bodies, at least. I clutch the handle of my knife. They line sidewalks and stoops, under blankets and slats of cardboard. Voices. Whispers. Everything close and everything a million miles away. The island. Nine miles away. Another world. Another life. What if I got back? What would be left of me? What use would there be in digging a grave for so little a scrap of humanity?