All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  I didn’t say anything, I watched the old man’s eyes, and I guess it looked like I was wondering whether I could trust him, but it wasn’t that – I was wondering if he trusted me on first meeting, so I said, to relieve him of any idea that he was going to end up under obligation to me, “I’ve got no story to tell you or for you to look at to read. I was just hoping to hear something from you.”

  He leaned forward, smiling in a confiding kind of way, and said, “You just sit still, because I always thought the best storytelling, in case you were going to ask, is still as still water.”

  I looked him in the eye, pondering, and wondering if I should get myself a soda from one of the vending machines, but instead I said, “I don’t know any stories like that,” and I reached for his whisky flask.

  “Trust me,” he said as I took a swallow of whisky.

  A moment or two passed, and then, as if he had been testing the silence, and he had decided that it had become our silence, he said, “This is a story I’m going to tell you that’s about a real death, and how anything that’s really real in the past – like a death – keeps coming at you out of the future, and this story happened at the racetrack where there was this young trainer who was wanting to ingratiate himself with an old trainer, and the young fellow said – because he knew that there’d been a death in the family – ‘I hear your brother died,’ and the old trainer says, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ The young trainer asks him, ‘And how long has he been dead?’ So the old trainer says, close up to his ear, ‘If he’d lived till Saturday he’d be dead a year.’”

  He looked me in the eye and I looked him in his eye.

  “Is that a story?” I asked.

  “Sure, it is.”

  “If that’s a story then I really am between trains.”

  “We’re all between trains,” the old man said, “but if that won’t do, then I’ll tell you what another writer once told me in Paris when I was about your age. He told me how he was talking to a small group of schoolgirls and he told those girls that any good story, when you get right down to it, is all about brevity, religion, mystery, sex, aristocracy, and plain language. And so, sure enough, one of those girls wrote him a story for when they met the next day, and the story she wrote went, ‘My God,’ said the Duchess, ‘I’m pregnant. I wonder who did it?’”

  He held up his hands as if he were under arrest. This stopped me from either laughing or complaining. He closed his eyes and sat back in his station house chair. I took another drink of whisky. The storyteller and I sat as still as still waters could be.

  DREAMBOOK FOR A SNIPER

  I was his priest.

  That’s what he said, standing in front of my church, St. Peter’s Church: “You are my priest.”

  I was not sure by the sound and feel of him that he had ever prayed. He certainly was not seeking forgiveness.

  The chill composure in his pale hooded eyes was not the look of a man wanting absolution. Yet he insisted he needed a priest.

  “A walk might do us good,” I said.

  “Stretch the mind,” he said.

  We went for a stroll along Bloor Street, a clutter of shops on both sides of the street.

  When he saw himself in a storefront window, he said, “I have eyes like ghosts.”

  He had large bony hands, he cracked his knuckles as we walked, and he wore a black leather finger-glove on his index finger.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “A glove.”

  “I can see that. What’s it for?”

  “To keep the finger warm. Safe. My trigger finger.”

  He touched the glove to his nose.

  He had a crooked nose.

  Women, he said, liked his nose. “Lonely women, the kind of women who like to look after things they think are broken,” but soon it was clear, when I asked about who his friends were, that there were no women in his life.

  Sitting in the Whistling Oyster café, he sang to me:

  momma cooked a chicken

  she thought he was a duck

  she set him on the table

  with his legs cocked up

  He wore, even while eating in the café, a black borsalino hat.

  “A sensible man wears a hat in this country,” he said, “and here you are, hatless?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s strange for a priest. They always wear hats in the movies.”

  “They’re old B-movies.”

  “My father died under his hat, hit by a car. His hat rode on his coffin to the grave. I, too, am to be found under my hat.”

  As a soldier, he’d worn the blue helmet of the Princess Pats in Bosnia, and in the Medack Pocket on the Croatian border. He’d come home as a hardened master sergeant who appeared to be modest as a hangman might be modest. After a thirteen-month tour of duty, he had decided to set up his own eponymously named, one-man company – Earlie Fires, Animal & Pest Control – telling me in his unhurried drawl, “I keep down the vermin.”

  He also told me, as if he wanted me to understand that he had moments of dark uncertainty, that he sometimes woke in the morning in his bedroom, naked, in a cold sweat, staring at a porcelain cat’s face on the wall, the face a clock.

  He said the cat had “an evil smile” and a pendulum tail. He could hear the wag of the cat’s tail: te-duh te-duh te-duh… “You know, like the beating of my heart.”

  I told him he didn’t have an evil smile so his heart could not beat like that.

  “Believe me, nothing’s what you think it is. My heart beats like that.”

  It was the way he talked that caught my ear, the way he closely articulated each word, with not a slur, not a mumble, and the way he sounded – the tone, a kind of sandpaper dryness. I kept telling myself, That’s the sound of dried blood, though I wouldn’t exactly know what that means, but it’s what I kept telling myself, dried blood being sandpapered.

  We sat on the back porch of his house of an early summer evening.

  Shad flies clotted the window screens. Hundreds of little silver shrouds. He pointed to two old elms towering over the porch, boastful, like they might be old relatives: “They survived the blight, the Dutch elm disease.”

  Crows were nested in the high branches, he said, and rats at the roots. He took me by the elbow, about to give me a warning. “Rats don’t just run in the slums and on the waterfront but in the fine parts of town, too, fat rats because of good people doing good works,” and he chuckled, tweaking my arm, the fatness of the rats a joke on me, on God in His good works, and especially on “people of civic goodwill composting garbage heaps in their backyards. Compost, it’s fast food, takeout,” he laughed. “The heaps are honey pots. Adam rat and his Eve in the Park.” There was no compost heap in his yard. But several neighbours had theirs, he said. One was an old man who had apparently survived the death camps. And the heaps had their rats. To get rid of the rats under his elm trees, Earlie had baited the nest holes with THRAX and then he’d waited, cradling his shotgun. As the rats came up for air in twos and threes, he’d sat in a canvas summer deck chair – and he showed me the deck chair that was still out on the lawn – BLAM…by five in the afternoon…BLAM…sixteen rats were dead, the bright red casings of fine-bird shotgun shells scattered in the grass amid their bodies.

  “I raked up the dead rats, raked them into their own heap, drenching them with gas, and lit them on fire.”

  He had fed and stoked a slow-burning fire for more than an hour.

  His next-door neighbour, and I’ve seen him since, is a dour old man who had been propping up the white heads of peonies in his back garden, and Earlie said, “He’s an old man who has lived alone beside me for years in his squat little house. He’s always out there, puttering around, looking bent and half-bewildered, a mumbler. On that afternoon he had been standing with the wind blowing smoke from my fire across our fence into his garden, into his face, and he stood there, the wind thick with the rancid sweet smell of burning flesh, with ash, until he began turning in circl
es, beating his breast and pulling his hair, stricken-looking, and he started in on this nasal chant: Yiskaddal veyiskaddash… And I’m screaming at him, because I can see he’s caught up in some kind of chant for the dead, ‘You crazy old man, you’re crazy. Can’t you tell the difference?’”

  The next day as we sat in the Whistling Oyster he said his right eye, what he called his crosshair’s eye, hurt. It hurt so much that he put his hand over the eye to hold it in darkness. He wanted me to know he worried about his eyes. “I trust my eyes,” he said. “For me, seeing is believing. Whatever it is. It is. Real, more than real, if it is in my mind’s eye. I am the sniper.”

  “You’re a sniper?”

  “So they say.”

  “You picked off men?”

  He drew little moon circles on his paper napkin,

  humming to himself, momma cooked a chicken…

  When I said I didn’t understand what he meant by momma cooked a chicken with his legs cocked up, he shrugged, not looking up, and replied, “How come she thought he was a duck?” as he drew the + of the crosshairs of his telescopic sight into each circle. Then he told me it was more important for me to know that sometimes, when the pain in his eyes was too much, he played the flute. Then, with a kind of staccato intensity, he told me how he’d come to learn about harmonious musical intervals, how they could be expressed by what he called perfect numerical ratios. And how all phenomena, he said, tapping the table with his leather trigger finger, like I should know that his leather finger was his lethal finger, all the things around us follow the patterns of number, showing me what he meant by drawing it on a napkin, showing me that the sphere, the circle, was of course perfect, but no circle was more completely human (he smiled a wry, surprisingly satisfied smile) than a circle with a crosshair in it. But most beautiful of all – and he took off his hat – was a tetraktys of crosshairs (which I had never heard of),

  an image, he said, of eternal harmony. And, just as I decided for sure that he hadn’t called on me to own up to some terrible crime, but, astonishingly enough, he was outlining for me his idea of what perfection was, he said, “Look, you’re a priest, you understand these kind of things,” and though I told him right away that nothing is more overrated than the understanding of priests, he carried on breaking it all down for me, telling me how the monad (primordial unity), the dyad (the energy of opposites), the triad (introducing potential), and 4 – the four seasons, the four essential musical intervals – all completed a progression: 1+2+3+4=10, what he called the tetraktys. It was, he said with a big wide sweep of his arms, the actual numerical model for the kosmos, “the whole damned kosmos” and then he wagged his leather trigger finger at me again. He was now having a very good time with himself, let alone me. It was also, he said, the symbol of the human psyche, “that enraging, frightening, exhilarating space where men have gone in head-first to create some kind of harmony out of the most horrific pain, like the craftsmen for the coliseum in Rome. Did I know about them? Artisans, artists who sculpted brass cows big enough to hold a man in their bellies, giving the cows a hinged lid that they opened. And then the man, tied in a fetal position, they put him in the belly, the lid was closed, and a fire was built below the brass cow’s belly, a fire so they could slowly roast the man inside alive. But what’s fascinating,” he said, holding me by the wrist, “is that the craftsmen had shaped the mouths of the cows into six small flutes, so that the roaring screams of the dozens of roasting men in the stadium were turned into harmonious song – bursts of light-hearted flute music, pure notes from pure pain, harmonies that filled the air until there was a last drawn-out dying note, a long B-flat.”

  As I put his napkin of crosshaired circles in my pocket I thought, What in the world is going on? Where does this man want me to go with him in his mind, and why?

  Then he said: “Ten is the tetraktys. Ten is complete fruition. And the question is – can ten killings be a fruition?”

  We were walking along Bloor Street, a crowded downtown shopping street that was all in sunlight, the men wearing linen jackets, seersucker and white suits, and the women summer floral dresses. I had decided in the morning to not wear my Roman collar. He had said immediately as we’d met: “You’re not wearing your dog collar.”

  I said, “No. No because as far as I can figure out you’re not wanting me to hear your confession.”

  “Confession,” he snorted, “of course not. The yellow dog’s got nothing to confess. I’m a virtuous man.”

  The yellow dog was new to me but I let it pass as we crossed an intersection against the stoplight. He said he’d been having a hard time with the light, with his eyes, “a lot of pain, ordinary little things, light bulbs going on and off, light stinging off the chrome hubcaps of parked cars. The same kind of sting of light my father showed me one afternoon when I was a child, showing me how to burn ants alive, burn them with a magnifying glass, frying them like he did one by one until he got bored and poked the nozzle of a can of 2-in-1 lighter fluid into their nest hole, pumping the fluid down, and then he lit it with his Zippo lighter and kept injecting fuel into the fire hole. The mound burning to black sand, burning the bodies to black nubbles.” Then he took me completely by surprise, plunking his borsalino on my head as if we had become secret sharers of his head and all that was in it – “and so you keep this under your hat, now,” he said, with mischief in his tone and a menace I’d not yet seen in his eye. “You keep it strictly between us. That’s how my father kept me company in the hills, hills that were called the Medak Pocket, when I was crawling in the tunnels – the wormholes – tracking the scent of human fear. I’d always gone into the tunnels calmly, my lieutenant saying, ‘Sometimes I think someone freeze-dried your nerves,’ going deeper, trying to ‘hear’ the terror of the killer hiding in there. And I’d always pick a time when I knew I was close to the man, a time to laugh, to snicker, so that the man would know a devil was coming after him, and some started screaming before I ever got to them, boys gone half-mad, and, it was a long time before my own fears at last took me tight by the throat, when I was suddenly dead sure that I was being buried alive. It just heaped up like someone shovelling dirt in my brain that I was being betrayed, maybe by my lieutenant, maybe by some hill country militia thug who was waiting for me to come up out of my hole, waiting for me with his 2-in-1 flame-thrower to burn me alive, to sting me, so that now when I wake up I sometimes wake up with my body sopping wet…” and he reached across and snatched his borsalino from me and jammed it on his head – “and I stand in the corner of my bedroom, naked, wearing only my hat, freezing in a night sweat although it’s already noon and I’m trying to calm myself, calm down because I’ve been awake all night, not falling asleep until dawn, the Glock under my pillow, death close to my ear. It’s like having crabs on my bones. A clutch. Not panic. A desolation. Something nameless. I empty my mind into a stillness. It’s a stillness where singing helps. I found that out while I was crouching down in the stench of a sewage ditch stacked with naked bodies, Oh death, please sting me, and take me out of my misery, listening to myself – listening since I can’t seem to shut myself down, singing and mumbling in my mind, a running, loping, barking dog. That’s my mind, running low to the ground, nosing under a log, a gangly yellow dog between the bushes, sniffing at the legs of a little girl who’s got freckles and her mother, two refugees straggling along the edge of the road, looking at me, looking at my blue helmet that looks to them like a piece of the blue sky had fallen down between them as they carried on trying to find some small flat stones. Wanting the stones to throw at birds, to kill the birds for food. All the fields scorched to stubble, and the trees blackened, the branches settled by small white butterflies, clustered. Shanks of blackened rope. Skull bones tied into the branches of the trees, a bit of blue sky in the bones. Butterflies in the skulls. Each a stillness. Like an empty thought. So empty I needed a priest, I needed a sane priest,” and he eased up very close to me, almost cheek by my cheek, whispering, “Make no mistak
e. In the Pocket we weren’t peace keeping, we were fighting. For our lives. The whole place was overrun by crazy true believers, priests and mullahs and tribal wackos. Children flensed to the bone by flame-throwers. Pray for us. Buckets of men’s testicles marinated in kerosene – set up as fire pots at night, as landing lights for airplanes. Pray for us. Water poured from a tin cup, a final blessing over a bald but heavily bearded old priest propped up on the steps of a monastery. Pray for us. His severed hands, severed feet, crossed in his lap. Pray for us.

  “And all the time I was trying, I was trying as hard as I could to step into the skins of those farmers, to get into the skins of those shopkeepers, those tribal priests, trying to step into their shoes like you’re trying to step into mine. That’s what I hoped then and I hope now. Trying to make what I’m saying fit. Into something. Any kind of shoe. Anything other than the ineffectual moral arrogance of trying to keep, by the barrel of an empty gun, another man’s peace! Which is exactly how I dropped into the line of sight of this warlord who was in charge of the local airstrip. I was out on the tarmac, and there he was, a completely drunk fool crying fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck while I stared at his shoulder insignia. Serbs? Who were they? Drunk on malignancy. One saying over and over, ‘Flowers, flowers thanks to God, are in bloom, no clouds.’ Saying that they thought they were going to have to shoot me, a Blue Beret, me with no permission papers where there were no permission papers for anything, so they said they were going to have to shoot me or else someone would shoot them. It was necessary since what was necessary is necessary and what is not necessary is not and the crazy warlord nodded. And there I was, pointing at my blue helmet, and I kept pointing until I worried they might think I was telling them to shoot me in my head. The drunk militia captain, whose fly was open, told me, ‘Mister, please, your helmet, you take it off, yes!’ I took it off. ‘Put on helmet.’ I put it on. Without waiting for his orders, making mock, I took it off, I put it on. ‘You go play your game,’ the furious captain said, ‘and you wake up dead.’ Leaving me with nothing to do but to shrug and say, ‘Your fly is open.’