A Country of Eternal Light Read online

The teaspoon spins around to me. “Do you want any, Aoife?”

  All that hair falls over her eyes. She’s nodded off, Aoife. I’ll let her sleep. One of us should sleep. I take the tea into the living room. More blather on the telly about the end of the world.

  This gleam dawns in Ma’s eyes. “You spiked this.”

  “Don’t pour it out.”

  “That’s who I raised. A drinksmith.” The cup jitters in her hand. “I’m always having to pour you out.”

  The human puppets on the telly distract her. She slurps at her tea as they hop and skip from one disaster to another.

  “Did you hear this, girl? They said there’s a wandering black hole. What does that mean? Three years. Three years they’ve known. It’s been three years since your father died.”

  She lives it all over again. The loss of him. Ma looks around in a daze. This empty house.

  “Mairead. Where’s Declan?”

  The two of them trail me out the front door. The noise they make. Cans tied to a bumper. Where’s Declan? Do you know? It was an accident, Mairead. You have to forgive her. You have to make peace.

  Do you know, do you know, do you know.

  Gravestones list in the beach grass.

  They make an uneasy pavement to the crumbling eastern shore. Half the cemetery gone to the tides. Bones exposed in the calved earth. The waves leave nothing but stones and boulders. I follow the path I’ve worn through the grass to the one I made yours.

  All I have.

  The wind scattered your flowers in the night. Waves loosen the scrim of wire covering the small shrine on the rock I’ve made for you, holding in place the little toy boats circling around your picture.

  Mo leanbh. Mo stór.

  Your name painted on the rumpled stone. The ocean rushes in against blunt rock. Spray showers me as the waves recoil. Headstones wash out to sea and then return as torpedoes. The wave barrels in again and this goes on, endlessly, as it will after we have gone. The last sound on earth surely the thunder of waves.

  I close my eyes.

  Absorb the violence. The unnerving way the stone squeals, like the whine of a bad axle. I wait for a wave to jump the track and take me. My grief like the tides. No rhythm. Only this fierce rush to find the end, but there’s no end. It’s like that cartoon, isn’t it? The Looney Tunes, like. When he falls through the floor, and keeps on going.

  Who was it did that?

  I don’t remember. I forget everything. I feel like I’m forgetting you. I hold to all our moments but they squeeze through my memory and i’m just left holding this empty shape of you.

  But you knew all their names, didn’t you?

  The cartoon characters. You were so smart. So good. You loved coming out here. Chasing the rabbits. You’d disappear in the beach grass and Lord God. The stop you put in me. If you’d wandered off the beach. If you’d fallen in the water. I’d call for you, the wind alive with your laughter and then you’d come out of the grass, every time.

  Here I am.

  Morning now.

  The day like a headache. The sea merciful for once. Exposed shells gleam in the sun. Seals bask on a distant promontory. The carpet of Galway Bay rolls out, as if to say, come.

  Come, Mairead.

  Come to the far country. Mushy seaweed sucks on my shoes. The rock bristles with possibility and this scratching distracts me. That bleeding dog is back on the shore, barking at me like I’m somewhere I’m not supposed to be. I look back and he’s standing there, too.

  The American.

  Chapter Two

  The American looks back toward the shore with that pensive look about him some people have, like they feel they’re always being watched. Skin so tight you can see the cracks forming.

  “Are you ok?” he says.

  I can barely see the shore. “Where did you come from?”

  “Iowa.”

  “Where’s that?”

  He points east. “If you keep walking that way, about 6000 miles.”

  “Couldn’t get a flight out?”

  The face on him. He doesn’t know where he’s come to, The American. What. “I thought I saw someone… I thought I saw you.”

  Water spills in my shoes. That first lull. That cold, hard tug and you’re there. You’re just there. Something brushes my arm and I jump. He’s got his hand on my elbow, the American. This fear in his eyes. And this want. I know this want. This blind, drunk hunger. What’s he out for?

  “We should head back,” he says.

  His hand slips to mine. His hands are freezing. White as snow. The rising tide chases us back to dry land. Stone teeth stabs my hands as I stumble up the steps of the island to rock wrinkled like brains.

  I crawl back to your rock. He sees your pictures, your boats and me clinging to the wire and he wants to run. He wants to scrape himself off the shame of interrupting me but it’s like he’s landed on another world of greater gravity and now can’t move. Is it this place. Is it you. Capturing everyone you touch. You were always touching me, learning, connecting and the pictures hold me. The toy boats. The idea you’re going to walk out of the grass.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Did you come here to die?”

  He’s like a shit version of a ventriloquist’s dummy, his mouth opening and closing. The words out of sync. “I came to scatter my dad’s ashes.”

  “You must have been close, the two of you.”

  He fishes a fat pill bottle from the inside of his coat. Full up with gray. “This is the closest we’ve ever been.”

  “You didn’t get on?”

  “They got divorced when I was three, and then… he’d come around sometimes, but then disappear. For ages.”

  “No one gets divorced here,” I say. “Even now.”

  “My mom was Wife Number Two. Two of Four.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Well. He had to complete the set.”

  “And how is she, your ma?”

  “She’s ok. I don’t know. She keeps saying she doesn’t understand it, you know. All this. No one understands.”

  “I don’t care,” I say.

  He starts to say something. What do you say. “Can I get you anything? Coffee or something?”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “I saw you, and… I see you. Every day. I come out here and try to… I don’t know. I can’t bring myself to do it and you’re out here every day in the rain. In the dark.”

  I look off to the sea, drowning without me.

  “I see you, and… you’re so strong. You must be very strong.”

  My arms unbutton. “I don’t feel strong.”

  “You are. You have no idea.”

  “You have no idea…” My head shakes, my own mouth open to words with no form. “You’ve no idea.”

  “I wish I knew what to say.”

  “Everybody does,” I say. “Everyone says you’ve got to get on. Think of yourself. He was all I ever was. I don’t even remember my life before. Isn’t that strange?”

  “No.”

  “I called home just five minutes before. You’re watching him, I said. Aren’t you? Ah, he’s grand. That’s what she said. Ma. And he was already out the yard, probably.”

  Our house is far enough back on the road to be safe, or so I thought. That day a rogue wave rolled over the eastern end of Inishèan, all the way to the house. Washed away hundreds of years of stone and wood and history.

  My future.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. What else is there to say.

  “Why here? For your father’s ashes, like?”

  “Our family is from here,” he says. “That’s one of the stories anyway. All anyone knows for sure is we left during the Famine. In one story we were horse thieves. We were chased out of Fermanagh into Connacht and finally America. We changed our name. I always thought it was because Irish couldn’t get work back then, but they chiseled the O off the front of O’Flaherty from the tombstones. Like they were erasing themselves.”

 
“They erased the tombstone?”

  “I think we’re always trying to change the past.”

  If I could. “I lost my Da, too.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Cancer. Yeah. The liver. No mercy in it. Ma has Parkinson’s. And then all this. One, two, three. Like that. And then I got pregnant with him, and I thought…”

  What did I think? What was I thinking.

  His eyes skirt around me. “I’m sorry.”

  “Is the plane not coming back for you?”

  “Yeah, I’ll call him. Haven’t found the right spot, I guess. I keep coming back here to the cemetery, but…”

  “Don’t get stuck here.”

  “There are worse places.” Finally, he looks at me. “Sorry to bother you. If I can get you anything at all…”

  I take the framed photo of you from under the wire over all your things. I don’t know why. “Just two days before, this was.”

  His hand starts toward mine. I mean for him to take the picture, but he doesn’t. He pockets his hands.

  “He’s beautiful,” he says.

  “Do you have children?”

  “No.”

  “You’re blessed,” I say. “To not fear for them. To not have to live with their dying. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I can’t,” he says. He’s the first person since you’ve gone to not hide their ignorance. “You don’t sleep out here, do you?”

  “The Garda kicked me out after dark. Then the waves became too much and they left me to it. I don’t know what I do. Sometimes I’m here, and sometimes I’m in the house.”

  He just stands at the edge of the rock. He’ll fall off.

  “Are you money, then?” I say.

  “Money?”

  “What is it you do you can afford the plane?”

  “I worked for a bank,” he says.

  “Worked?”

  “People aren’t exactly paying their mortgages anymore.”

  “Still and all. You didn’t fly here on air.”

  “Mostly it was vodka.” Waves punch the rocks. He turns his back to the spray. “What I wanted to be was a writer.”

  “Did you ever try and get published?”

  “I sold a book, actually. About ten years ago or so.”

  “Doesn’t that make you a writer, then?”

  “I suppose if you keep writing.”

  “Haven’t you?”

  “Actually, I never stopped. I could never finish anything. I just… froze up. Listen to me. Like it matters.”

  “I used to write songs.” I put the picture back. “Would I have heard of your book? Are you famous?”

  “Only with my mom.”

  “Your Ma must worry about you.”

  “She’s wondering when I’m coming home.”

  “You should,” I say. “You should be getting on.”

  He’s caught again, between leaving and going. Days he’s been coming out here to the shore, to let go. And he can’t. What is it that you’re waiting for. What is it you think you’ll find.

  Do you know.

  “Well, I’ll get going,” he says.

  “He loved to come here,” I say. “Declan. He thought the tower up there was a boat, like. A shipwreck. You see it?”

  The hollowed drum of the round tower lurks in the fog on the cliffs, the center of a universe of orbiting birds.

  He nods, the American. “Yeah, ok.”

  “Ah, it’s class. Amazing view. Westernmost monastery in all Europe. He thought it was a boat, stuck up there on the cliffs. He had such an imagination.” This pain. This ripping my heart out like a weed, every time it grows back. “The tower would be a proper place for you. Watch your step though. Don’t go down a puffing hole.”

  “Puffing hole?”

  “A hole, like. Right through the island. The water will come up whoosh you know when there’s a big sea. But it’s not marked, so. The ground just opens. Don’t go falling in.”

  “I’ll be careful,” he says.

  “Don’t fall.”

  “I won’t.”

  That hunger again in his eyes. That need. He wants to leave, but he doesn’t. He wants to scatter the ashes, but he doesn’t. He wants it to be over, but he doesn’t.

  “Yeah, so. Get a start, while there’s no rain. What’s the rain, anyways. You’ve a jacket on.”

  “Maybe you can show me the way.”

  I haven’t been up there since. Something pulls at me. The same force from the sea. “You’ll find it. It’s a good day for it.”

  The waves fill in the silence.

  “I’m Gavin, by the way.”

  “Mairead.”

  “Are you going to be ok?” He flinches, knowing how fierce and stupid that question is the moment it leaves his lips. “I mean… you’re not going back out there. Are you?”

  “It just came up.”

  He clenches his smile. “I’ll see you around.”

  “Aren’t you leaving?”

  He smiles, the American. “I’ll see you.”

  The island is somehow different with a visitor. You see it as they see it. The bubble of our insularity punctured. The myth of our peace. Government notices paper the plywood covering the doors and windows of houses around the pier in Kilbanna.

  EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY.

  Reed-legged cranes stalk through heaps of seaweed and wounded sandbags, pecking out crabs deserted by the sea. A storm surge left the ferry half on the road. Cut sections of the hull curve over sandbags like ramparts, the island a castle sinking in its own moat.

  Feels so empty now. Inishèan was a popular tourist destination before all this, mostly for weekenders thinking they were completing the circuit of all the Aran Islands. Inishèan is not properly part of the Arans, trailing dot-dot-dot off the unfinished sentence of Ireland just five miles to our south.

  We’re more a stray comma.

  You hear all sorts of theories on the crescent shape of Inishèan in the pub. The island is the ruin of a great ring fort erected in the sea; it’s the remnant of a volcanic crater. Most visitors came for an ancient monastery built on a precipice on the cliffs over the Atlantic. A nameless monk founded the monastery in the 7th century. Monks kept the monastery for over five hundred years, until some of it collapsed into the sea during a violent storm. For the near millennium after, the monastery has been the domain of the birds which supposedly gave the island its name.

  Gulls with black cowls perch on irregular fences of piled stone making a patchwork of green-flecked fields rolling up the hump of the island. The cliffs behind them protect the island from waves that have washed away Inverin, Rossaveal and Westport on the mainland, but Inishèan is no sanctuary. The houses clinging to the shallow slopes of the inner crescent will just be the last to go.

  I see him up there on the high road. The American. His shape strange. Alien. The dog chases him on his bike, like it used to chase all the boys and girls peddling back to the pier as the evening ferry left. Like he’s chased me these last months since you’ve gone, out in the grass and on the rocks and in the sea looking for you. Wherever I go, the dog follows. He only leaves with the dark.

  There is no following him.

  Some nights I go down the beach. No light but the stars. The accretion disk of the black hole growing like a tumor in Sagittarius. The branches of craggy trees make electric arcs by the battered moon. I could be the only person on Inishèan. The only person in the world. My only company a dog I can’t keep. Stray cats picking through the mounting rubbish festering down at the harbor. Chickens roosting in the ledges of boarded up windows. Horses grazing in the remains of an ancient church. The island a preserve, or a dream of the future where nature has reclaimed the world and man was a memory. Sometimes a plane will pass overhead, before disappearing to the shuttered west. Everything passes through, and over. Nothing and no one can last, but the island, refuge to lost creatures.

  Fog reduces the world to your grave.

  I can’t see past the headstone
. Your name. Your life, chiseled in the gap between my thumb and forefinger. Two years. A moment. A lifetime. Time slows in fog, like it must as you fall into the black hole. Death drawn out to infinity. A moment that is all moments.

  Here I am.

  After Da, someone came to the door every day. They stopped me on the road, weeks on, the first I’d seen them since he’d passed. Death is a public thing in Ireland. So much of life here is private. Separate. We all come to this. We all go through this, so you make yourself known, as if the effort will indemnify you somehow.

  No one sees me.

  No one comes to the house. No one comes to the cemetery. I am this repulsive force. I am this living, breathing vision of the future and we are all going to go through this. We are all going to come to this but no one wants to know now. No one wants to see or to hear or to believe. One, aye. Two’s as maybe. Not the lot of us. Not the whole bleeding world, swept out to sea like a helpless child.

  Stars fall.

  Dozens at a time. The sky like wallpaper that won’t stick. Comets like scabs of dried glue. Beach grass gives to ground thin and spongy, crunching with the shells emptied of urchins, crabs and snails. The Border Collie trawls across the green, his nose sniffing at the craters of rabbit holes. The lost limbs of crabs. The pearlescent medico of a bird skull. He smells of rain. The salted air. Thorns and twigs stud the matted net of his hair. His paws pink and raw. I expect him to follow me the short walk home, but he runs off through the field. A bike leans against the piled stone fence bordering the road. He’s out here, the American. He’s out here in the dark somewhere.

  Days of frustrated sea. Sky full of comets it won’t release. The apocalypse is such a tease. Won’t you come on, then? All of human history you’ve been flirting with us.

  Won’t you just get it over with.

  That dog scratches against the rock behind me. The American not far behind. Lord God, the two of them. Strays both.

  “Hey,” he says. Like we’re friends.

  “There won’t be any runway left for your man.”

  He looks off west. “I think we’re all out of runway.”