by Darby Harn
Some people sit on the curbside. Lost, like me. Where do you go. What for. The dog sits in the road, right beside them, as if he belongs to them. I step back, ready to run and the dog takes off into the fog again. A few of the people on the curb go after him. One man stays behind. A lump on the pavement, like breached bags of trash pilfered all up and down the street. I dawdle there in the street, torn between following the dog and racing back to the church. The man pushes up off the curb. I back away. Fingers squeezing the knife.
He resolves out of the fog, half the man he was. “Mairead?”
His clothes hang off him. Torn and dirty with grease and blood. Hands black with grime. But that’s Gavin, under all that hell. He stares at me, like I must do him, each of us convinced the other is a phantom. After a moment, he reaches out and touches my hand. I flinch and so does he.
He nods, like he’s mulling something over. “Am I dead now?”
If I am. I’m dead. Delirious. “Is the dog with you?”
He shakes his head. “Dog?”
“Gavin… is it you?”
He reaches inside his coat pocket. The pill bottle comes out in his hand, still full of his father’s ashes. It’s him. He’s here. Alive. He falls to his knees. Tears streak through the grime on his cheeks. His head droops and he sinks to the ground, sobbing, a mound of defeated humanity again. The knife falls out of my hand. I kneel beside him, my arms open and I don’t believe it. I don’t accept it until they close around him. Until his heart competes with mine. His breath.
His relief.
His story after Inishèan comes in dribs and drabs, like the sunlight peeking through the fog days. All his words are heavy. Always so much to say. He doesn’t have to say. I don’t want to break the spell or chase away his ghost. Days go in Limerick without a word between us. Sometimes he thrashes in his sleep and I know his journey back to the island was as terrible as mine.
His journey back to me.
Inishèan was home to him. I knew that, and that’s half the reason I sent him away. He had this peace there. This comfort. This sense of place that had been ripped from me and I was angry. I was sore. I wanted him to live, but not in peace. Not if I didn’t have it. Lord God. He could have died with his mother, under a rain of bombs in Iowa. Gavin could have had his peace, but he left the airport in Dublin without boarding the plane.
He speaks slow, his head shaking sometimes like he can’t believe what he’s saying. He got in a taxi. There was a flash over the sea, like Sumi had said. The taxi died on the road. I was pumping life into Rosin’s lungs and Gavin was walking, into the city. Fires breaking out. People running like mad. Planes falling out of the sky.
I don’t tell him about the Russians.
Electrical fires had broken out all over Dublin after the bomb shorted the grid. The whole city burning, he says. Roads jammed. The only way west was the route he’d taken before. Airport, Heuston Station, a train, if there was one. The 90 bus to Heuston Station had been abandoned at the north foot of the O’Connell Bridge. An inflatable dam lay across the Liffey like a spent condom. Miles of defeated sandbags top the quays all the way down to the harbor. Bodies of suicides. People jumped from the tops of construction cranes. From the bridges, into the river.
Until Dublin, his father had been the only person he’d seen die. He’s more ready to talk about this. The paramedics got him back after the heart attack, but Gavin says he had been without oxygen for over fifteen minutes. There was no brain activity. A ventilator kept him alive another three days as family gathered. I’ve been through this at the home a few times. The tears. The hanging on to hope. The final relinquishment, sudden as a parachute deploying. His family decided the machine wasn’t what his father wanted, even though none of them truly had any idea what he wanted.
A few minutes, the nurse said. It should only take a few minutes.
His father kept breathing for four hours. His children sat around his bed, waiting. Encouraging him. You can let go now. And he wouldn’t. His dad quit on a lot of things, but those four hours in the hospital room, his last breaths bubbling out of his lips, he wouldn’t. Gavin sat with him the entire time, desperate to talk to him, to unload everything he had carried his entire life unsaid. The weight and the volume of it prevented that. He had kept his silence, swaying in the chair with the tide of labored breaths, winding down and then finding energy again.
“You don’t have to say, Gavin.”
He takes a breath. “I just kept walking.”
Along the Liffey, he came on across one of the stations for rented bikes. Some still in their docks. The station terminal was dead. No way of unlocking a bike. Gavin spent an hour trying to dislodge one without damaging it. He got on the bike and pedaled down the road to Heuston Station. Buses and cabs left empty out front. Shouts echoed out of the building. Gunfire.
He biked on.
He kept going, past the War Memorial Gardens, onto the N4 and out past the Liffey Valley Centre. Fires on the Wicklow Mountains in the south. He came on the interchange for the M4. An lár. City Centre. An Tuaisceart. The North. An tlarthar. The West. Miles and miles of abandoned cars stretched into Ireland quiet. His only way west the bike. A few days. A week, tops.
“And then what happened?” I say.
Gavin stares off into the shadows of the crowded church. Months of strife in his eyes. Of hell.
I kiss his dry, broken lips. “You don’t have to say.”
He touches my cheek, like he still can’t believe it. “I take it you didn’t come here looking for me.”
The words are as heavy for me. My story as terrible. His fingers brush my lips. I don’t have to say.
His hand hovers over his heart. His fingers claw at his soiled shirt. “Do you think we’re dead? Maybe I am.”
“Gavin…”
Gavin looks down at his hands, scarred and callused. “I came to the island to scatter his ashes… I went up to the cliffs. I was going to do it. Who would know?”
“About the ashes?”
“I thought I would come to Inishèan and… something would open in me. Something would lift off, but… nothing happened. There was nothing. I felt empty and void. Everything was void. I was just going to step off the edge, you know. ”
What do you say.
“But I didn’t do it. I went back down to the village, to the pub and drank alone. Ate alone. Watched TV alone. Got up the next day, like always, did it all over again… and then I saw you, out in the cemetery. I saw you everyday. This fixture. Everything was slipping away from me. Falling apart. But you… I was lost. I found someone who was lost and I thought… I don’t know what I thought.”
“You thought of me,” I say.
“I was so selfish…”
I take his hand. “We’re here now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We’re here.”
He grips my hand. “We are.”
We don’t deserve our fortune right now, finding each other again. We don’t deserve this hell we’ve been cast into. We don’t deserve our good or bad, we just receive it and I don’t know why. I don’t know why any of this has happened. God help me.
God help me receive it.
I slump against him. I don’t have the strength to cry anymore. To stop him from speaking his heart. He doesn’t have to say. He needs to say, somehow, and in speaking free himself.
He holds me close. “We’ll get home. We’ll find a way.”
I look west into the church, toward the island. I look into gray, impenetrable stone. “There is no way.”
“We didn’t walk all this way to stop now.”
I shush him with my fingers. “Walk with me for this bit.”
With him, I feel safer wandering beyond the church.
We leave King’s Island into Lower Park, looking for food. Medicine. Water. All the houses picked over. A fair few of them torched. We go on, energized with each other to the Shannon Fields. No one here in the green marsh along the riverside. Exercise stations rust
ing along the bike path, overgrown with weeds. The water seems calm. Clean, as far as rivers go these days. We take our clothes off and wade out to our waists. It’s bleeding freezing. I squeal and splash and he laughs. It’s the first laughter I’ve heard in longer than I can remember. He pulls me close. Cups water in his hand. Pours it over my hair. I don’t care if we’re dead. I don’t care if it’s a hallucination.
I like hallucinating us.
“I talked to your Ma,” I say.
He drapes his shirt over the bars of an exercise station to dry in what little sun there. “You what?”
“Right before,” I say, and choke back this sob. Everything hangs on those words. His mother’s voice. The ruffle of her newspaper on the other side of the world. Ma, sitting in front of the dark telly, not knowing I’m gone or not.
Gavin sinks to the bench. “I don’t understand.”
Fog clings to the riverbank, hiding us from others. My shame. “She called for you… she was thinking of you.”
His head goes into his hands. All those thoughts trying to get out. If he’d been there, to talk to her one last time. If I hadn’t sent him away. If none of this had ever happened.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“What did she say?”
I barely remember. I don’t know why I brought this up. Better to have not said anything. He sits there, all the lightness we found this afternoon gone. All the joy.
“She said… we all think we’re the symphony. But we’re just the instruments. We have a part to play. That’s all.”
He smiles. “Sounds like her.”
I kneel before him. I peel his hands away and rest his head on my shoulder. “She sounded like a strong woman.”
“She is,” he says.
Gavin lets go of me. He goes to the exercise station, and reaches inside his jacket. The label is near worn off the pill bottle. The white of the cap long faded. The ashes this dark mass inside, solid and heavy in his hand, even now.
He looks toward the river.
I feel it, too. The gravity pulling us all back to the earth.
I go with him, down the path, through the grass. Branches silhouettes against the fog. The haze clearing with the day. The sun glints off moss covered rocks. A skinny tree splits the path. A burm of island sprouts in the river beyond. Tall grass. Trees. Gavin stops. He drifts off the path to the shore, into the water. His hand slips from mine as he unscrews the lid from the bottle. There’s no hesitation now. No indecision. The ashes become a cloud of mud in the water. A cloud of fog. His father sinks into the bed of our country, to his rest.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The sky changes.
The sun no longer rises in the east, but to the north. Weeks pass without a moon. The clouds flicker with aurora borealis or the war in the sky. Ash falls with rain. Snow. The tides lose the plot completely. The rhythm of high and low tide disintegrates into a hyper-furious march of battering rams of waves which swell the river.
Earth breaks with every hour.
People push deeper into the mainland. Many stay. Where else is there to go. Gavin and I talk about leaving for Galway. The plane is gone from the airport. He might have come back, the pilot, but I know he didn’t. There’s no way over to the island.
I don’t think we could make a walk back to Galway. We’re shreds of who we were. Our clothes a tattered flag hung from a rickety old pole. If there’s food out there on the road, it’s in someone’s belly or deep in their bunker. Any boat we’d try and use to cross those tides is expelled from its moors, pushed up with the rest of the coast inland and we’re here.
We’re here now.
I am no longer sure of the days.
The sky never clears. The sun a memory. Days like suggestions. Hunger becomes a daily pain, like the numbing cold. Dogs prowl the church, unimpeded. Gavin and I sit with our backs to the wall, his arm locked across my chest like those safety bars in amusement park rides. What do you call it? The Tilt-A-Whirl. Except we’re not moving. Nothing moves here, but death. Fear. Hope, out of every person, swift ahead of the knowledge this is it. This is it now.
One by one the homes of Limerick became pyres. The city twinkling with the stars of ancient nights, when people first came. When the smoke clears, when the sky breathes for a moment, the stars are all confused. Brushed aside with comet tails broad and white as sails. Mo leanbh. Mo stór. I’m coming to you.
Ma is coming, soon.
A shudder goes through the earth.
I come out the church with Gavin. The sky in the east shimmers. The light builds into a long pearlescent sheen across the sky, expanding and rising, rising, my eyes drawn up and up until my neck hurts, until the crest of the wave eclipses the sun.
Lord God.
The wave crests, and plunges toward us. The earth shakes again. A drop of water flecks my cheek. Another and it’s raining and this wave will have breached the walls of Moher. The cliffs of the island. This is it. All of us, together.
I walk into the street.
Gavin grabs my hand. My feet don’t touch the ground. I am flying through the street, back into the church. Flying like a ghost. The stained glass windows shatter and the stone of the castle groans and screams build like a wave outside on the street, pilot to the water flooding the west and I hear crying. Screams.
My heart, pounding so hard it hurts.
We run up the winding stairs of the bell tower, past the slow and the damned. I don’t have the breath. I crawl into the organ chamber. Water spits through the burnished pipes of the organ, the wave made music through the flues and Higher, Gavin says. Get higher.
I keep on up into the bell tower. He keeps pushing me forward, his hand on my hip, past those crawling on their hands and knees. He pushes me forward, over others and my hand grips his. I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go on and this wallop goes through the church. The building shifts. Dust spits out of cracked stone. I look down, God help me, at dark, foul water rising up the stairs.
Water pushes Gavin into me. He shoves me ahead. His fingers slip from mine. The water crests at my heels, gurgling with all it has swallowed and as it recedes it leaves nothing. No one. He’s gone. Gavin.
No.
I chase the water back down the stairs. Everything and everyone recedes with it. Another wave surges toward me and I scramble the rest of the way into the belfry. I close my eyes and hold against the screaming below, the people swept up and smashed against the stone and the columns and the bars of the organ and flushed out through the broken doors into the sea rising around us. This is it.
And then.
The floor soaked and mopped with the heaving, manic bodies of the people who made it up the stairs. Through the window, I watch the wave careen over the island, into the country beyond. All of Ireland west of us drifts past.
The light of fires reflect off the bellies of low, dark clouds of smoke. The skin of Limerick melting off into a glob of flaming flesh floating on the dark sea. Houses clump together in a kind of sculpture garden accessorized with useless cars, playground equipment and signs of buildings long shuttered.
I expect him to come back.
Like a God damned yo-yo, him. Comes and goes. Comes and goes. I don’t know if I sleep. If I dream. If I do, it’s of him coming up the stairs. Him lifting me off my feet and the both of us flying home. I soar through the smoke and fog and ash of the end and we glide over the sea back to the island. We touch down on the pier. Everyone is waiting for us. Colm. Aoife. Ma.
Where did you go? Ma says.
I’m after walking, I say. We’ve just been walking, Gavin and I. Do you know we’ve walked so far, Ma.
Do you know, do you know, do you know.
The water never recedes.
Eight of us up here in the tower. No room. No food. No heat. No hope. The pipes of the organ below hum like tuning forks, struck every so often with floating debris. Bodies. Knocks go through the church from the impact of drifting cars and scalped roofs. My lips bleed with his name.
Gavin. I don’t know how long I can wait. Strange sounds roll across the city, through the church, behind the door in odd harmony with tears. A clawing. Scraping. Scratching. The world scurrying with the flood of rats. Days of it.
Days of Hell.
Finally, a man goes out the parapet of the tower. He jumps. And then another. Another. They go one by one into the water like rocks, plunking the surface, and then.
I am the last.
The scratching never stops.
Like someone’s at the door and they’re not leaving until they’re received. The room groans heavy as the church settles and sinks and crumbles insidiously into the sea. I go to the parapet. Fog shields the ruin of Ireland from sight. A last mercy.
Knock, knock, knock.
Just below, a fishing boat bobs against the stone. Empty but for a broken paddle. There’s no point.
Is there?
Where could I get to? Not home. Not now. I climb the ledge, ignoring the steady drum of bodies. The knock, knock, knock of that little boat, slim as a casket below. The scratching at the door. The call of death familiar, like you’re in a crowd and you think you’ve heard your name on the voice of someone you know.
But it’s not you.
Not yet. You keep on going, uncalled. You go back to your living. You must always go back to living.
About the Author
DARBY HARN studied at Trinity College, in Dublin, Ireland, as part of the Irish Writing Program. He is the author of the sci-fi superhero novel EVER THE HERO. His short fiction appears in Strange Horizons, Interzone, Shimmer, The Coffin Bell and other venues.
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