Somebody piped up – Rude, the Dutchman: ‘How much is a billion these days?’
Someone else answered, ‘Just the thousand million.’
‘Oh,’ said Rude. ‘Still.’
A sherry glass fell to the floor, smashing.
‘I propose,’ said Lancelot, ‘that we all retire to the saloon for whiskey and wine and gin, and to consider this offer for all of one billionth of a second.’
Six of the men rose from their chairs, doubled over, hobbled- and hocused-seeming. They found their balance, and the room emptied. The sound of whooping was heard from the direction of the stair hall, and then the heavy oak door creaked closed of its own accord.
***
Rickard Velily started out through the back end of Murray Hill, unusually alert to its sights. He took in every mud-brown detail in this mundane section of town, every machine-brick new-build. He let the smut linger in his eye. He took it all in for he knew that these would be among his last glimpses of the city. His mind was made up: he would leave New York – soon, tomorrow, whenever he could arrange it. It was not sentiment or a creeping nostalgia that made him so keen to the details, but an urgency to record, to make an imprint of the place on his senses, so that he could tell the story of the bright city on the hill and the particular unstable quality of light within it. Maybe later would come the time for sentiment – regret, for sure. Regret, for he had come here with dreams: the dream of the Chrysler Building, of Tin Pan Alley, and of The Severe Dalliance; the dream of the city of his and of others’ imaginations; the dream to ‘make it big’. He hoped not to have to go back to Dublin, for he still had dreams of going west.
If he were to go back to Dublin he would tell Fondler that their little bit of tomfoolery had been the highlight of his time here and was just the tonic, but that it had to come to an end. No – he would not use the word tomfoolery. He would say to her that their affair had meant the world to him.
And if he were not to go back to Dublin he would take Fondler with him on his adventure west. No – he would not go west. He would go north.
He was certain that the Q in Fondler’s surname (which he still could not recall) had been part of a French name. He felt that she was in denial of this element of herself, and the very element of her Canadianness. He would go north with Fondler and they would become fur trappers. They would bludgeon seals and shoot moose, and start a fur-trading company. He believed that the Canadian Shield and Hudson Bay area was the forgotten wild frontier. He became convinced that if the French had been the dominant European influence in the early centuries of new-world colonisation, then the Canadian fur trapper rather than the cowboy would be the great hero of North American folklore.
The travel agency was closed, and appeared to have been for a long time; its windows were streaked with furrows of paint and its inner windowsills thick with dust.
A few doors up from the travel agency was a shop selling fishing and hunting equipment. Along one wall was a glass display case packed with rifles, pistols and machine guns. In the centre of the floor was a horizontal display case containing antique weapons – flintlocks, swords and a variety of spiked paraphernalia. He asked the man in the shop about trying out a machine gun. He was asked for his licence, told the man he had left it at home, and then was asked which machine gun he’d like to try. ‘Something for about three hundred dollars,’ he said. The man laughed in his face, needing to suck back a string of brown phlegm that had escaped from his mouth. ‘Only weapon you’re going to get for three hundred dollars is an air rifle,’ he said. ‘What’s the most powerful air rifle you have?’ he asked the man. ‘The most powerful one we have,’ said the man, ‘doesn’t fire on air, it fires on super-compressed gas canisters.’ Rickard asked if it could kill, or slow, a bear. ‘Sure,’ said the man. Rickard offered him five hundred dollars, plus the morning star that belonged to the clubhouse that he had recently taken to carrying around with him for self-defence purposes. ‘Deal,’ said the man, after some hesitation, examining the antique.
Back in his room, Rickard went about assembling the weapon. Six pieces locked together, quite beautifully, to make a long, heavy rifle. He loaded a gas canister into a compartment near the butt, and clicked a magazine of pellets into place. He had never had anything like it in his hands before. He patted his left hand to the grip underneath the barrel, and was overcome with the urge to experience immediately the awesome destructive power coiled and packed into this satisfyingly solid hunk of metal and plastic.
He flipped open his porthole window and rested the end of the gun in the window frame. The terrace across the street had a huge gap in it, as if the building that once stood there had been blasted to atoms. He squinted through the gun-sight and turned the weapon back and forth through an arc of a hundred degrees, making explosion noises with his mouth. Several moments elapsed before he realised that his gun-sight was not in focus. Twisting the milled dial, he watched a hazy grey image sharpen until the grain and twinkling mica of the masonry of the building the other side of the gap came brightly into view. He thought of taking a pot shot at a hanging basket, but resisted. He slowly panned the gun to his right again, across a window.
A man was standing at the window, smoking a cigar. Rickard knew this man, had spoken to him: a near-bald pudgy man, with a collar of sandy hair round his head. It was the strange, crazed, north-of-Ireland man, the man who had followed him to Bryant Square.
The man had the window open, and every so often turned his head from his fat cigar to talk to someone in the room, someone lower than himself, seated, or very small. So sharp was the focus of his gun-sight that Rickard was able to observe, in the crosshairs, the droplets of sweat nestled in the pores of the man’s scalp. How very strange and bizarre that he should be looking at this man again, thought Rickard, the butt of the rifle thumping into his shoulder, as almost instantaneously a red hole opened in the man’s forehead. How very strange. Image and sensation were disconnected for a second, in which Rickard pondered: What is he doing? What’s happening now? Then the chill realisation broke, and in disbelief he peeled his eye from the rubber socket of the gun-sight and looked at his finger squeezed on the trigger.
He pressed his eye back to the gun-sight and watched, as his horror increased, the man stagger backwards, deeper into the room, his entire head a ball of rippling, glistening red, like a peeled tomato.
Now he shrank from the porthole on jellied legs, throwing out his hand to steady himself. He dropped the gun with a clunk, and fell against the bed, sinking to the floor, and hugged his knees to his chest. For a long time he remained like this, numb.
Numbly he thought of the weeks ahead. Of what he would do, of the duties and tasks to be taken on. He thought of his parents. His poor mother and father. His responsibilities to them – yes, he could be a sort of herald, of a sort of danger. Inside his head a broken flap of magnetic tape spun furiously on a reel, slapping and slapping the same processes of his skull through each rotation.
#ne7äž¾çq9ù±†ËÛÚ[yä8Æõãn:à`s·=³ž¿y©5p4m.neÕ$žçOòÃc…ÝÞ¸ÛÀÎqœzàrpÉRY£ŽÃÍuá[,‰‡ryÀŒŽ8ëÐ ’Êò@š´e- ™ÆçÎðÜŒp PÄíeËì爒-d¶-
All he had to show his parents for seven months in New York was a gift. All he had bought for his parents was a plastic slide-show machine, a sort of blind-ending binoculars in which could be viewed touristic images of New York – the ‘Lipstick’ Building, the Ulysses Grant Memorial, and others. His mother would find many hours of distraction in this toy. He should have bought more for his mother, but he had thought he would have more time. He would buy more for her now, but he was afraid to leave the clubhouse. Would he try to win back Toni? Yes he would. Yes he would. He would try to win back Toni. How? With a cock-and-bull story about his time in New York. He would fill it with romance and heroism. Perhaps he would tell her about Fondler, and draw out her inner alley cat. And for money? He would approach Robert again about getting back his old job at Verbiage, for the short term anyhow. Yes he had unl
earned everything, but he would learn it all again. It would come back to him. He would expose himself once more to the information.
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Damn, he thought. Damn! Damn!
He was staring at a spent dark-green cartridge on the floor, the remains of a pellet. And beyond the cartridge was the gun. Yes, he said, collecting himself, slinking towards the weapon. His only responsibility now was to himself. He had a duty to make it safely to an airport. He would bring the gun with him, dump it in a bush as close as possible to the airport, and make it to an aeroplane.
He stood up, over the gun, bent down to pick it up, and then – BOOM!
He spun around. Two pistols were pointed at him, easing into the room, and behind them two police officers. Between the police officers was the face of Club President Paulus.
‘This is the room that corresponds with the window, all right,’ said Paulus, who then retreated.
‘Okay, kiddywinkles, hands in the air!’ said one of the officers, a tiny man. ‘Where is it?’
‘We’ve had reports of a firearm discharging from the window of this room,’ said the other officer, who was barely bigger than his partner.
Both policemen were limescale-furred, rhubarb-coloured, typical Irish cops, though diminutive versions. Their badges said ‘Donnelly’ (the tiny one) and ‘McBrearty’ (the small one). And both were Irish, properly so: each had a marked brogue.
‘Ah,’ said the bigger one, spotting the gun on the floor. Inspecting it, he said, ‘It’s only some class of air rifle, Marky.’
‘Oh?’ said Marky, disappointment in his voice. With pistol and manic eyes still trained on Rickard, he said, ‘Are you sure, Rory? Looks like the real deal from where I’m standing.’
‘Nah, it’s an air rifle. Nothing illegal about that.’ To Rickard, Rory said, ‘Sorry about all the fuss then, sir.’
‘Wait! Wait!’ said Marky, waggling his pistol. To Rickard: ‘Let me see your ID card. And keep your hands up!’
‘I … ID card?’ said Rickard. ‘I’m not an American, officer.’
Marky’s face suddenly divested itself of tension and his arms relaxed, bringing down his pistol. ‘You’re from the old country?’ He looked to his partner. ‘He’s from the old country, Rory!’
‘I can hear it, Marky, I can hear it! Whereabouts in the old country are you from, sir? The midlands?’
‘I’m from Dublin,’ said Rickard.
‘Dublin!’ said Marky.
‘And where in Dublin? Drumcondra?’ said Rory.
‘No, I’m from the coast.’
‘I had an aunt owned a guesthouse in Drumcondra. The both of us are Donegal men,’ said Rory.
The officers slid their guns back in their holsters.
‘Well who’d have thought it?’ said Marky.
‘Well isn’t it a great place to be Irish all the same, New York, haven’t you found?’ said Rory.
‘Listen,’ said Marky, ‘I’ll have to ask you for identification of some description. Federal law, you understand. Have you got a passport?’
Rickard fetched his passport from the drawer in his bedside locker, which he had not disturbed since he put it there all those months before.
‘Ah yes, “Éire”,’ said Rory, taking the document. Then, holding it sideways, and after bringing it to the light of the porthole, a vexed expression crossed his face. ‘Do you realise you were only on a three-month holiday visa? And that it’s expired nearly four months?’
Rickard was bewildered. ‘Eh … “holiday” visa? Um …’
‘Oh-oh,’ said Marky, taking the passport from his partner. ‘Do you know what this means, now?’
Rickard didn’t answer.
‘Deportation,’ said Rory.
‘Deportation?’ said Rickard.
‘We’re afraid so. Next flight home,’ said Marky. ‘But …’ He looked to Rory, pursing his lips.
‘But …’ said Rory.
‘Yes,’ said Marky.
‘If you don’t say anything –’ said Rory.
‘We won’t either,’ said Marky.
They stood side by side now, both of them with their eyebrows – which in Marky’s case were drawn on in brown-red pencil – held to their highest extent in a gesture of encouragement and self-congratulation.
‘We’re very involved, the two of us,’ said Rory, finally, ‘in the campaign to improve the status of the undocumented Irish in New York.’
‘So you have our full, if clandestine, support,’ said Marky.
‘And now,’ said Rory, as the men gathered themselves, ‘we must be on our way. But if you’re not doing anything tonight, there’s a session on in the Donegal and Derry County Club in Flatbush. Always a great evening.’
They left the room. Rickard remained unmoving for several moments, unsure of how he should have responded to what had just taken place.
Eventually he stirred himself to chase the men down the corridor.
‘Excuse me now! Excuse me! I will say something about this! You officers are turning a blind eye to a breach in federal law! You must deport me! You’ll escort me to an airport immediately!’
Rory and Marky stopped, looked at each other, and turned around, waiting for Rickard to catch up.
‘Do you not know what’s good for you?’ said Marky.
‘If you don’t pipe down we will have you deported,’ said Rory.
‘You’ll be four days in a container in Jamaica Bay without –’
Marky cut himself off, cocking an ear to a sound that came rushing up the corridor like a phantom. A sound – like somebody singing, doing vocal exercises. The tone was sweet, true, rich, thick – taking up all of the air. And the singer was skilled, gliding among notes with birdlike ease.
The three men, captivated by the music, turned slowly about to face in the direction of the apparent source. Towards it they were pulled, heads forward, mouths agape, feet plodding. They were led to a balcony that looked down upon the grand stair hall.
All occupants of the building had been lured to the hall, or were still gathering, collecting on the floor below and on the other balconies. Their attention was absorbed by the figure on the walkway that vaulted the space. Its arms were awhirl, and it squirted about on its feet by means of a tremulous leg motion, rapt in its own performance, but it was not singing, as it had no mouth. Rather, the sound emanated from its head – which was white, smooth, shiny and featureless, save for an intimation of bone structure – travelling in all directions, evenly, as if pulsating from the peak of a radio transmitter.
But the sound was no longer just a fountain-fall of single notes: now it came as a polyphony, not-human, yet beautiful.
And then a song, only too human:
‘The head of my love bobs atop the blue waves.
(Come down to us now on the dark ocean floor!)
The closer I’m carried, the further away.
(Feel the salt of the sea in all of your sores!)
I pinch my legs round a white spuming steed.
(Throw him off west of Ushant, untameable mare!)
It expresses me to my hom
eland of green.
(Wash up on the rocks half a mile below Clare!)
I look for you now in sunshine and rain.
(She was stretched out in white on the dolmen’s cold slab!)
I ask an old woman who knows you by name.
(We are the familiars of such wicked hags!)
She tells me, my love, that you are quite dead.
(Tooty toot-toot toot-toot, tooty toot-toot toot-toot!)
And over your grave I unscrew my head.
(Poopy poop-poop poop-poop, poopy poop-poop poop-poop!)’
The final note reverberated in the great chamber of limestone and marble and bone, joined only by the sound of scattered outbreaks of weeping. Rory and Marky, on either side of Rickard, were inconsolable.
Bent backwards at the knees, face towards the sky, one hand pressed to breast, the other held out and open in supplication to some god of love, the figure held the pose of an operatic tenor until the last harmonic.
And then it stiffened to an upright stance, causing all to gasp, and many men to faint. ‘Gentlemen!’ it called out. ‘Or should I say, after a fashion, fellow Kunians! For it is I, Denny Logan!’
The assembled swayed as one organ, rippling inwards and outwards like the walls of an upset stomach. Mob sounds began to swell. President Paulus, on the next balcony down from Rickard, spoke for everyone: ‘How could it be? Denny Kennedy-Logan was buried in a Long Island cemetery last week!’
The figure swiped the air with a flattened hand and brought immediate silence and order.
‘I was not buried in Long Island, or anywhere. What was put in the ground last week was a bag of mince and tallow. A substitute for a dead man. What you see now before you standing is that dead man. I have been brought back to some kind of, what you might understand as, life. Not the life that you all know, ratcheted to rhythms regular and irregular, limited by the outlines of your physical beings, and the rest of it only guessed at. I am boundless and I am free. But I am certain. I am at one with the universal quiddity, I am at one with the truthful immanence. What it is I am.’
Green Glowing Skull Page 24