At my twenty-first birthday party, he asked if I wanted him to stay on the island. The last year had been intense and distracting. I craved unpredictability, the sea, new people and experiences, and I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone’s summer but my own. So he took the ferry off the island and went to Boston. The season unfurled, with its long work days and unexpected flings. One, a Johnny Depp twin, all bleached hair and blue crushed-velvet suit. The island felt ablaze. The heat of youth, the sand burning on South Beach, the rocks big and smooth as blue whales at Great Rock Bight in Chilmark. This was somewhere to be.
As summer ended, I made it to the airless din of Boston to see friends. I sat beside Rob on the steps of their walk-up, the humidity squeezing the breath out of our chests. The traffic on the freeway behind the house buzzed, insects swarmed around the trashcans, and he held my hand. That night we curled up on a mattress on the floor upstairs, listening to the city. The next morning, the heat already rising, I set out with an American friend on a road trip to Graceland. We listened to Elvis and smoked cigarettes non-stop, coasting across various state lines. Rectangular green road signs announced the names of well-known cities.
There is something about being either side of twenty that urges us towards independence. To hold on to a sense of self, being defiantly the person you are hoping to be, but are not quite yet. At some point, everyone feels an invincibility in being alone, of not needing anyone. In my early twenties, I was single by choice, mostly because I didn’t want to fit the routines of someone else’s life into my own. It wasn’t just that, of course. The confidence I had lost in my teens, confidence in myself and my body, slowly returned. I was still self-conscious; worried about having to explain my physical self and all the ways my bones didn’t work. But as the distance between those hospital years increased, I was a little more at ease. That summer was packed with unfamiliar things. Pink hair. Infected sunburn. A tick burrowing into my skin. In Cincinnati, a man obsessed over my accent, asking for Irish words. The following Christmas, he came to Dublin and asked me to marry him. I declined.
Events move into the past so quickly, like an accelerated rear-view mirror, the lights fizzing in the dark until extinguished. The summer was over too fast and suddenly I was back to Dublin’s autumn gloam, to my night job in a cinema, and to college, where I bumped into Rob again. There was distance, an uncertain kind, but not one born out of disinterest. Youth has its own absorptions; a sense of filling life up to the brim, of cleaving to some things, and allowing others to run through our fingers. We moved on different tracks for a while. I’d see his train in the distance, but we both freight-hopped and wandered on, figuring we’d meet again.
Becoming a couple happened accidentally. We circled each other for months. After an evening of conspiratorial chats, we ended up at the cinema. In the dark, I wondered what we were waiting for; why we kept each other at a distance. Afterwards we drank beer and laughed a lot, the hard edges melting away. I threw in my chips and rolled the dice.
College finished, we took the first jobs we could get, and then he moved into the tiny cottage I lived in without much discussion. There was barely space for one person, let alone two, especially one so random and chaotic as he was, so definitively undomestic. His turntables occupied a corner under bookshelves, where he endlessly practised beat-matching and our record collections amalgamated. He could be thoughtful but immature. Acts of kindness were countered with feats of pettiness and laziness. At night, he worked late shifts selling gourmet sausages to drunk people in Temple Bar. Every weekend, he arrived home at dawn and fell instantly asleep in our single bed. His body a tired meniscus. Sleep was the only time he didn’t stoop and his restlessness was at ease. His skin smelled of spices and the metallic tang of meat. For months we were happy. The future was out there, sometimes linear, but always unpredictable. Pockets of air and light, waiting to be stepped into. Alive with the possibilities of what we might do, what we could do, while we figured out which direction to go.
I always thought he’d be a writer. He carried a tattered hardback notebook everywhere. The spine had come away from the binding, but the pages were intact, full of passages and drawings. There were poems too, and he liked to recount how he once got talking to Allen Ginsberg after a reading in Dublin and was flattered when the poet clumsily hit on him. When Rob left Martha’s Vineyard, I had given him my phone number on a scrap of paper, and later found it tucked among that notebook’s pages. Back then – for reasons I don’t remember – it was my habit to sign my name with celestial flourishes. The letters orbited by a moon, stars and a ringed planet.
Before we met, there was a college friend of his who drowned in a freak swimming accident. Whenever he shared this story I could see its weight, how he laboured beneath it. It frightened him, the simplicity of being here one day, young-skinned and heart full – and then gone. At work, he called to tell me another of his friends had gone missing in South America, feared eaten by crocodiles after swimming in a river. Days later, her drowned body was recovered downstream, her intactness no comfort to her family. Around this time, one more funeral: a guy we knew who partied a lot and favoured pills. Somewhere amid all the endless nights and euphoric tunes, he tired of it and took his own life. Three friends, all connected to him, to that group of college pals. People noticed. Some talked about it. Rob brought it up, often late at night, fearful, sad, trying to figure out the why of it.
Few people enter a relationship knowing precisely what they want from it. Some things we have no knowledge of until we open the door on them. Rob was smart and funny and creative, capable of many things, but had yet to figure himself out. There were many brilliant days and nights: of talks, bed, parties, but after we’d passed the year-mark, I knew on some level that this – us – could not last much longer. The arguments increased, I tilted away from him gradually, and the distance widened. We parted after two years, but remained good friends, still swapping records and stories.
His youth felt like a scourge, even to him. The central modes of his life were contradictory: dedication to certain things – music, people, writing – but with a self-righteous sense of apathy. Dublin didn’t fit him. It was too small – not as minute as that summer island – but he craved the horizon. Everything was happening far away, and he wanted to be somewhere – anywhere – else. A few months after we broke up, he went to San Francisco, where he and his friend S shared an apartment. Rob’s birthday was four days before mine, and that year a card arrived, bearing a painting of John Coltrane as a religious saint.
Another autumn rolled around and after they moved back from San Francisco, Rob moved into a flat with S, who composed music, produced bands and had a fondness for old synthesisers. Our friendships overlapped again, and there were nights out and house parties. We were a contented gang. The year felt as if it was moving towards something, for all of us. Rob had a new girlfriend, and was contemplating a return to San Francisco. S and I were mutually intrigued and interested, but wary of the triangulation, of upsetting the intersecting friendships. Testing the water, I confided in Rob about S, about how much I liked him, and that I felt there might be something in it. He had always been capable of grandiose snark, and a rarely displayed mean streak. Now, it resurfaced, almost with glee, and I have never forgotten his response: It would never work. You’re too incompatible.
He was wrong, I knew that then. Felt it with every cell. Yet I was not at all surefooted as I picked my way towards S. There were many almost-times, at night, with others drifting by, when something passed between us, only to pendulum back to a safe place. When the conversation went a certain way, when our heads leaned too close, we inched back into neutral zones, or talked of our mutual friend.
After months of circular complications, S and I finally got together on a Thursday in the summer. We talked all night, all day, unceasingly, unstoppably. Everyone should have one night in their life like that one. The next morning S-and-I were barely a day old but something had changed. I had no ground
s for this, other than the possibility contained in all hours-old things. It starts with vigour and bliss, but then suddenly the world looks different. We parted reluctantly, with him homeward bound to the next county for a family party that weekend.
That Saturday I am working at a music festival. The loose arrangement I have with S is to meet up afterwards, when he returns to the city. I spend the day interviewing bands and wading through crowds. The sun gives up and slips behind the main stage, with music spilling from various tents. All day S is my only thought. I dial the number of his family home, sixty kilometres from where I am, to make a plan. The night spreads out. The last blue of the day turns black. I feel something that hasn’t been around for a while: an electricity, a fizzing in the bones, that longing to see someone. How did this happen? I think. Someone hands me a beer. A colleague heads for the food stalls to pick up something for us. I’m content and it feels like the year has found itself; the weeks ahead are an open road. The phone at his parents’ house rings and a smile turns my face to rubber. I think of what to say, how to be. The festival whirls around me, the lights flicker, and a man who sounds just like S answers the phone. His brother says he has gone back to the city, earlier than expected. I know he doesn’t own a mobile phone so I ask how to reach him, to find him later, alarmed for a moment that because of crossed wires we will miss each other that night.
– He was meant to be here, but he had to go back to Dublin early.
– Ah, OK. It’s just that we’re meant to meet up later, so I said I’d call. Any idea where he’s headed, maybe I can catch h—
– Well, a friend of his had an accident.
– Oh no! What happened?
– I’m not sure, it was all a bit sudden.
– Which friend?
– Do you know a guy called Rob _______?
We ride the oldest roller
coaster in the world.
Its wood rattles so
we cackle to hide our fear
and the bruises that have
yet to appear.
I don’t know why I asked the question about the friend, but I already feel a rising dread. The sentences keep coming, the call continues, my heart rate escalating. Talking from in the middle of a field to a person I’ve never met. Never have I wanted to forget a conversation more than the one that happened, but I remember every single word:
– What? Is he in hospital?
Words come faster now.
– I’m so sorry . . .
I really don’t know what’s coming.
– What happened?
This moment of before.
– I’m sorry. He’s dead.
It can’t be.
How do you line up words and put them in the right order, when you know they will never be adequate? That they are a flimsy version of everything felt in that moment. The world bends backwards, a sinister hallucination. I drop the drink in my hand. In a field full of thousands of strangers, somehow I end the call, howling into the dark. Primitive shrieks. I dial my parents’ number and my mother later said that she thought I was being attacked. It felt that way. Assaulted with terrifying words. I recoil from this information, spiked with shock. Someone drives me back to the city and I eventually locate S, and the friend who was with Rob when he died. I have only fragments of the night, the story of what happened emerging through sobs and long silences. People sitting on the floor, keening and incomprehensible. Details emerge that are horrifying and senseless. A story so full of bad luck that it’s hard to believe it could ever happen.
Rob accompanied a friend who was going to view a new flat. Adjacent was a tarred flat roof, and he climbed out, imagining it as a great stage for positioning turntables, the site of summer parties. It gave way, and he fell into the derelict building below, hitting his head on the way down. The distraught friend tried to climb after him, at her own peril, and knew the moment she saw him that he was dead. Our collective grief is immense, but for her, the visual memory from that moment is terribly cruel, an additional burden.
What art did we see?
Picasso, Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe,
The Temple of Dendur.
I bought a postcard
Nine Jackies, or Marilyn.
Our host has a wife now
Who met Warhol once.
There has never been a night like this in my life. Elliptical and strange, minutes not passing, people offering morsels of comfort when they had little for themselves. At some point I go home and the rooms feel like a place I’ve never been. Exhausted, wired, there is little in the way of sleep. I doze, and wake up in tears. I do this a lot. There are other unexpected bouts of weeping: in the shower, while trying to force myself to eat, on buses. I can sense the rupture in all our lives, the irreparable damage. S was the person who had to contact Rob’s parents and has never got over that phone call.
At Fez, in New York,
the Mingus Big Band
Roll through
Haitian Fight Song.
We accidentally sit in
A booth reserved for
Sue Mingus and
are asked to move.
On the last day of his life Rob didn’t get out of bed until 5 p.m., a detail that has never left me. Would he have done other things if he’d had any sense this was to be his last day on earth? He couldn’t have known, buried in duvet folds, that the clock of his life was counting down.
In Queens, we play house,
Care for a truculent cat,
Drink Sam Adams
With a Maths Teacher
from the Bronx.
My parents, S and I visit Rob’s family. Their grief is enormous and distressing. Everyone is dazed. Screaming silently, making endless cups of tea. Grief is bewilderment. Grief is circling rooms and talking to unnamed relatives. Grief is a permanent headache and knotted stomach. Grief is sluggish time, staring at strangers on the street and thinking how can you act like nothing’s happened? Grief is being angry that the sun is still shimmering away, smiling in the sky. We await his body’s return from the undertakers, which will be laid out in his parents’ house.
In a Boston club, Tricky is playing.
You dance on a podium to impress me.
We smoke in the street afterwards.
Exhaling American night air
That contains the glint of a knife.
For some reason, I expect him to be upstairs. Recuperating like a convalescent, as though just home from hospital or war, laid up with flu, or a bandaged limb. Someone steers me from the hall and with one swift right turn, there he is. (Too soon, I think, wishing I’d had the walk upstairs to prepare.) My legs go from under me, a mini demolition, and my mother holds me up. I notice an awful sound in the room, and everyone trying to stand still, all eyes turned my way. It takes a moment to realise the noise is coming from me; my mother squeezes my hand, urging me to keep it together. I don’t know what else to do, how else to be.
Nightswimming in the bay
Bioluminescence beneath
You cannot swim
But wade in.
The black water
Illuminates.
The undertaker has dressed him in his favourite vintage shirt, one bought during that hot summer bussing tables in San Francisco. Underneath it, a maroon T-shirt I gave him, the top hairpin angles of the letter ‘N’ in VINYL RULES poking out. The ruffled faux silk of the coffin lining borders his bones. There are photos all around the room: the pudgy childhood smile, a teenage version sulking in a family group shot, the summer of bleached hair. A timeline that has now stopped, abrupt as an arrow.
Horizontal, eyes closed. He looks like him, just asleep.
Long legs, boy hips, directional hair.
Rob.
But this is an unheimlich version of the man I knew. And his shoulder . . . That’s what gives it away. I run my fingers over the joint, but the terrain is not the same. I know the swell of that clavicle, the drumlin of bone, which now juts strangely, broken for sure. I
pull my hand away as if scalded. Shocked at this disruption to his body. They have made an effort to make him look symmetrical, composed, but then I notice it: the wad of cotton wool at the back of his neck, a pillow of sorts, too small for his head. Everything about it unnatural.
The room smells of formaldehyde and lilies. The summer heat amplifies their density, the harsh sweetness. That night, surrounded by candles, people wander in and out of the room to sit with him. There is such scrutiny in death. Our faces and bodies are looked at in a way people never regard them in life. Lines or freckles, the shape of nails. Things we don’t notice when someone is still here. There are murmured prayers, chats in corners, lots of whiskey.
Because of the Beastie Boys
We hunt for Paul’s Boutique
Even though we know Ludlow
Has been gentrified. You spend
All your money on records
In the first two days.
As there always is with funerals, there is a lot to organise, decisions to be made. Music was his obsession. His taste was varied and impeccable: Fela Kuti, Zappa, techno, Ninja Tune, Orbital, Funkadelic. He owned the Muppets soundtrack and the recordings of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Ireland. Rows of 7”s, Michael Jackson to Northern Soul. How could we possibly represent him in a handful of songs? A priest arrives to discuss the funeral and I know Rob would hate this. This man who never really knew him, cobbling together crib notes for a eulogy with no meaning, all pious insouciance. Rob’s father leads us into a small room, away from all the mourners in the house. We begin, offering our suggestions, and his father plays a song by Bob Dylan, the singer his son is named after. He is heartbroken and the song amplifies just above the level of his quiet cries. When it ends, we gather ourselves, to offer him some words of thanks for this song . . . but the priest objects to it. This man who knows none of us, or how we feel, has made his decision. Even now, years later, it feels heartless and the reasons he gave escape me. S clutches my hand, a warning flashing on his face not to say anything. It was not the time, or the place, but this policing of grief was too much.
Constellations Page 6