Solar Bones

by Mike McCormack

  he’s like a child with that thing, my mother said

  until he was gone from sight as completely as if they had been rubbed from the world and even if the tractor’s successful restoration did not surprise me neither did it do anything to rid me of the gnawing conviction that nothing less than the essential balance and smooth running of the universe’s mechanism had now been tampered with in some way that might eventually prove fatal to us all and it is no exaggeration to say that

  the sight of that engine spread over the floor would stand to me forever as proof of a world which was a lot less stable and unified than my childish imagination had held it to be, the world now a rickety thing of chance components bolted together in the dark, the whole construct humming closer to collapse than I had ever suspected, a child’s fear that sometimes, to this day, takes hold of me and draws me back to that hay barn, just as it did a few years ago when

  I was in the village and standing outside Kenny’s shop with a carton of milk and a newspaper in my hand, standing on the pavement watching

  a huge low-loader pass up the main street, a long, growling beast of a machine hauling itself along in low gear with the driver high up in the cab over the wheels, taking her carefully through the narrow street, making sure she did not strip the wing mirrors off the cars parked on either side of her while the flatbed behind carried something that was dismantled in sections and tied down on both sides with ratchet straps and chains, something that at first sight appeared to be the luminous bones of some massive, extinct creature, now disinterred, with its ribs gathered into a neat bundle around the thick stump of a massive spinal column which time and the elements had polished to such a cool ceramic gloss that if I were to leave my hand on it I would have been surprised if it felt like anything other than glass, and it was only when the whole thing had passed by completely and I saw the back of the trailer hung with caution tape and hazard decals that I recognised the load as a wind turbine which had been completely broken down with the vanes and conical tower separated from the nacelle and stacked lengthwise along the trailer but with enough corrosion around the flanges on the base sections to indicate that this turbine had recently been taken apart as a working project, faulty or redundant or obsolete in some way or other, possibly

  burning oil

  as my father might have said

  so I stood there watching it pass, thinking there was something sorrowful in seeing this felled machine being hauled through our little village out here on the Western Seaboard, something in me recognising this as a clear instance of the world forfeiting one of its better ideas, as if something for which there was once justified hope had proven to be a failure and the world had given up on some precious dream of itself, one of its better destinies, and I was not the only one who’d stood to stare at its passing because three doors up, on Morrison’s corner, an old man had stopped in mid-stride and was standing with both hands planted down on the boss of his stick, looking on as the trailer made its careful way through the village, while across the street a few others stood and stared on in spite of themselves, generating a stillness which held for a long moment as the low-loader rumbled by, crossing the square and down the street before turning out of sight beyond the church and off out the Westport road before people became aware of themselves and were now looking at each other querulously and laughing as if they had succumbed to some childish foolery in the middle of the day while, standing across the street from them I wondered where this fallen turbine might be going to, at the same time thinking it was surely a mistake to believe that such things ever go anywhere at all or, more accurately, that there is a place to where such things could go, as stillness and stasis was the very nature of these constructs, much like myself at that moment, stuck as I was in a renewal of that same old anxiety I had experienced as a nine-year-old in the hayshed looking at that diesel engine, the component parts of the world spread across the floor except that now

  four decades on

  when the idea has come a patient arc through my life I now understood that if I saw the dismantled tractor as the beginning of the world, the chaotic genesis which drew it together and assembled it from disparate parts, then this wind turbine was its end, a destiny it had been forced to give up on, a dream of itself shelved or aborted or miscarried, an old idea which echoed

  a radio programme I listened to a while back in which a panel of experts discussed the future of these wind turbines, weighing their environmental impact against whatever their energy efficiency was, the argument going back and forth between various critics and advocates but making little real headway until the topic was turned over to the listeners who by and large, one after another, echoed what had already been said except for one woman, whose hesitant voice cut across the strident tones of the debate when she phoned in to say that

  she was living under a hill planted with several of these turbines and whatever about their environmental impact or their worth as a source of clean energy she herself had developed something of a spiritual regard for them as she had only to stand at her back door and look up towards them for a few minutes every day and she could easily believe there was something sacred about them because, grouped and silhouetted against the horizon, their blades stark against the sky, were they not vividly evocative of Christ’s end on Calvary, crucified without honour, thieves to the left and right of him and, when turning, weren’t they almost prayerful, the hum of their dynamo and their ceaseless rhythm so freely generated by the breeze which was of course nothing less than God’s breath across the land, their turning so evocative of all those Buddhist prayer wheels she had met during her years of travel in India and Tibet and it was surely the case also that only machines built to so large a scale and of such pristine alloys could bridge the span between heaven and earth with their song on our account and

  was she alone in these thoughts she wondered or

  did anyone else have similar feelings about these machines, this technology

  which of course they didn’t, or if they did they chose that moment to keep it to themselves so that after a few garbled comments with which the radio host laboured hopelessly to place some practical or common sense on her remarks, her contribution to the debate was excused as a quasi-artistic outburst, more in the nature of mystical reverie than reasoned argument, definitely idiosyncratic in a way which allowed it to be harmlessly set aside after a few more words of praise were levied on its heartfelt eloquence and the obvious depth of the woman’s feelings

  something similar to what I felt that day in the middle of Louisburgh, standing on the sidewalk watching the dismantled turbine being hauled through the main street on its bier without fanfare or procession, the whole thing so lonely and monumental it might well have been God himself or some essential aspect of him being hauled through our little village on the edge of the world, death or some massive redundancy finally caught up with him so that now he was being carted off to some final interment or breakers yard beyond our jurisdiction, some place where the gods were dismantled and broken down for parts or disposed of completely, possibly loaded onto a barge and towed offshore by a salvage tug, out beyond the continental shelf to be weighed down and sunk in some mid-Atlantic abyssal, down between tectonic plates, all these redundant gods lying crushed and frozen in the blackest depths with no surface marker to show where they lie, out of sight and out of mind, among those things in the world that are

  burning oil

  in some way or other

  all of which

  reminds me, should I ever forget, that my childhood ability to get ahead of myself and reason to apocalyptic ends has remained intact over four decades and needs only the smallest prompt for it to renew itself once more and for me to get swept away in such yawing deliriums of collapse that I might lose my footing on the ground entirely and spin off into some dark orbit which takes me further and further away from home and into the deepest realms of space, a strange mindset for an engineer whose natural incline is towards the stable con
struct and not

  this circular dreamtime of chaos which

  gives such warp and drift to this day so that

  it is clear from these stories in the papers that the idea of collapse

  needs some expanding beyond the image of things toppling and falling down – plunging masonry, timber, metal, glass – the engineer’s concept of collapse, buildings and bridges staggered before crumbling to the ground and raising up clouds of dust because, from what’s written here about the global economic catastrophe, all this talk of virus and contagion, it is now clear to me that there are other types of chaos beyond the material satisfactions of things falling down since, it appears, out there in the ideal realm of finance and currency, economic constructs come apart in a different way or at least

  in ways specific to the things they are, abstract structures succumbing to intensely rarefied viruses which attack worth and values and the confidence which underpin them, swelling them beyond their optimal range to the point where they overbalance and eventually topple the whole thing during the still hours of the night so that we wake the following morning to a world remade in some new way unlikely to be to our benefit and of course

  all this is only clear in hindsight

  as if every toppled edifice creates both the light and lens through which the disaster itself can properly be seen, the ashes and vacated space becoming the imaginative standpoint from which the whole thing is now clearly visible for those with eyes to see because up to the moment the whole thing came down it was never clear to me

  or anyone else

  what was happening

  same as when

  that story started drifting towards us in mid-March, coming out of the middle distance with its unlikely news of viral infection and contamination, a whole city puking its guts up, the stuff of a B-movie apocalypse seventy miles up the road with

  GP clinics and hospital wards across the city reporting a sudden spike in the number of people presenting with stomach ailments, complaining of cramps and vomiting with severe diarrhoea, a rise in numbers so wholly out of proportion with what might be expected for the time of year that initially an outbreak of food poisoning was suspected, an outbreak spread through the city from some large public event or gathering, but when an immediate investigation showed that the cases were evenly spread and did not appear to cluster in any geographic or demographic area it was clear that the source of the illness had to lie in something that was present without discrimination in all parts of the city, a conclusion which

  prompted an immediate analysis of the city’s water supply and which quickly revealed that it was severely contaminated with the coliform Cryptosporidium, a viral parasite which originates in human faecal matter so that

  I can’t understand it, what the hell were the city engineers doing

  Darragh wanted to know from the other side of the world, his unshaven face filling the screen when he Skyped me that evening, his voice coming with that slight delay as it crossed the distance between us, since

  I’ve been reading about it online – it looks like it could get very serious

  it’s serious now

  and it will all be on the heads of those engineers who fell asleep on the job, how could they have missed it and

  Darragh’s voice had that note of hysteria to which it is prone whenever he has to grapple with the human slobberiness of the world, a gifted academic mind, or so Mairead tells me, but one that sometimes leaves him with little real notion of how the world actually works so that too often you have to listen to him in this mode, ranting on, sometimes in a language that’s difficult to grasp, so I said

  yes, those engineers have a case to answer, there should be continual monitoring of the supply but obviously someone slipped up, no doubt there will be an investigation and an analysis of the whole water system but the politicians

  let me guess, the politicians will make sure the engineers take the blame for this

  blame, responsibility, it’s all the same in a case like this, the important thing now is to find the cause and fix it before the whole thing escalates, there’s already over a hundred chronic cases and

  I’m sorry to have missed it, five years living there and nothing this interesting ever happened so

  it was obviously timed for your absence – how is the fruit picking going

  not bad, shaking snakes out of trees and filling bags, long hours but the money is ok and there’s only a few more weeks of it left before we hit the road

  so there’s a plan

  it might be going too far to call it a plan but there’s talk of buying a second-hand van and taking it across country, Ayers Rock the whole lot, then leave it in Perth and fly back home so

  how long will that take

  we reckon we have enough funds to carry us for four to five months so I should be home in early August, just in time for the business end of the Championship

  you won’t be missing much if you don’t make it, we will be well out of the running by then

  Jesus, Dad, don’t put a hex on us this early in the year, the Championship doesn’t start for nearly two months yet

  ahhh

  you have to have faith, Dad, that’s what we Mayo people do, we journey in hope, true believers

  martyrs more like, and your faith hasn’t taken as many blows as mine down the years

  speaking of martyrs, Mam tells me that you’re hobbling a bit, some sort of a limp

  it’s nothing to worry about, it’s just a side effect of the Lipitor, it weakens the tendons in the heel

  that’s very mythic altogether

  it’s very painful whatever about mythic, I’ll probably have to get the dose changed or recalibrated or something like that

  so long as it brings down the cholesterol

  yes, that’s down to manageable levels now, three point two or something

  and you’re staying away from chips and cake and all that sort of shit

  yes, I’ve cut out all the dashboard dining

  good, we want you around for another few years, by the way, and on another topic, did you make any headway with Kid A

  I listened to it all right, I liked it – I think – it sounded a lot like unleaded King Crimson though, the same

  Jesus, King Crimson, music for engineers, all those dissonant chords laid down at right angles to each other

  exactly, my generation demanded more from our music than soft emoting and

  you’re welcome to it – how is Mam, I haven’t spoken to her in a couple of days

  Mam’s good, she’s gone to bed, it’s been a long week at school, she’s tired

  ok so, give her my love

  I will, take care of yourself, and one last thing

  yeah

  don’t be afraid to take out a razor and a comb once in a while

  will do, bye

  mind yourself

  bye

  and then he was gone, his hand reaching towards me, fingers extended from the other side of the globe as if to touch my face before he shut down the laptop in the flat he shared with five other lads somewhere on the outskirts of Brisbane, the connection broken now and that sense of immense distance closed down in an instant, the world nothing more than the four walls of the room within this house so that it took a moment to get used to the collapse of scale before I got up and walked out to the kitchen to find

  something different about moving through the house today

  a feeling of dislocation as if some imp had got in during the night and shifted things around just enough to disorientate me, tables, chairs and other stuff just marginally out of place by a centimetre or two, enough to throw me so that now, trying to make a cup of tea for myself, the last two minutes spent searching for the tea bags because the green canister in which they are usually kept is not where it normally sits on the worktop, tucked into the corner beside the boxes of herbal teas Mairead uses for her infusions, but

  here it is, finally

  stacked away on top o
f these plates in the cupboard over the sink, god knows why she put it there, why would she want to shift it, she knows full well how these small changes throw me, sending me rushing about the place, pulling stuff apart, never remembering where things are anyway – keys, wallet, phone, everything – can never leave a thing out of my hand without having to look for it, the same panic every morning – the hunt for my keys before leaving for work – turning out pockets and opening drawers, never remembering to put them where they can be found, just throwing them aside without a thought and then searching for them the following morning, a full ten or fifteen minutes wasted lifting newspapers and cushions and jackets until they turn up somewhere obvious, like on the hook over the holy-water font inside the front door, or the bowl on the hall table – who the hell put them there, why can’t people leave things alone – every morning this shambolic search through the house, that frustration which is very different to

  the anxious feeling running through me now as

  some twitchy voltage cutting across me so that it’s hard to focus properly on anything, my mind flocked with ideas as if it is filled with electric birds, always in flight, blue shivers which probably caused me to miss the fact that Mairead has laid out some food for me on the table and

  looking at it now

  looking at it now

  a sandwich on a side plate, covered with a napkin and a glass of milk beside it, the whole thing standing there so complete in its own detailed neatness, so perfectly evocative of Mairead herself with all the attentiveness she brings to these little tasks, her capacity for joy in the proper completion of these small considerations so evident in the way it’s put together that it feels right to stand over it for a moment just to savour its appearance before lifting the napkin to see that the sandwich is good and simple – cheese with relish between slices of brown bread – a staple carried over from my childhood and which Mairead makes me from time to time as a small kindness, a gesture which touches me deeply at this moment, so much care and attention gathered to the separate parts of it but something inexplicably intense in me reaching towards it, my hand monumental and belated as if it had to pass across a cosmic realm, eons wide, glass and plate absolutely unreachable in a way that cannot be fathomed with all the time in the world to