by Declan Burke
‘Jesus, Billy. What’s wrong, man?’
‘She lost it,’ he whispers. ‘It’s gone. Fucking gone.’
•
She went away to nothing before she ever began. Like some particle a-blink in its own future, borrowing too heavily, too improbably, against her fully being. Gone in a wink, as a bloody smear, a slim trickle. No more and no less. No less than enough, at least, to see her a girl. Squinting at the ultrasound, coached by the midwife, we bore witness to the strangest of all true revelations: eyes and a mouth, the tiny bumps that would have become toes.
An inch, she was. Oh, the miles she had come to come so far. The light-years. The thirty thousand billion cells. The trillions of particles, the number of random collisions to create a thinking thing. All lost, wasted, gone.
Did she think, though? Had she even a dim awareness of her floating? Amniotic is such a cold word and yet no colder than space, she her own sun and we revolving in orbits drilled in the void by her gravity’s pull. We gave her a name, blue eyes, a birthday, and decided she would have had Cassie’s heart and my build. Her own sense of humour.
Impolitic, of course, to mourn so hard for one so fragile. Not the done thing in this day and age. Shush your snuffles now, lest the abortionists grow sensitive to whispers of murder. A child-to-be lost is shield and weapon. If you must, if you really must, turn that sword on yourself and fall upon, but fall silent, with honour. Pierce no womb but your own.
Some day the sun will flicker and go out, leaving all cold and still. Some day, and not soon enough, the planets will wobble in their orbits and start their slow decline to the singularity left behind, that miniscule nothing with the power to draw All to itself, and in, and then gone forever.
•
They did the math and decided it must have happened out in Lissadell, stoned immaculate, Antony and the Johnsons for a soundtrack. Curled up on a blanket in a cosy dune, the idea being to wait for sunrise, except they were nicely toasted, and Billy had finally accepted that love was as essential as cruelty.
And now it’s gone.
‘I’m so sorry, Billy. I didn’t know.’
He wolfs down a lungful of spliff, his expression bleak. ‘How could you? We told no one.’
‘How’s Cassie?’
‘Broken.’
‘I know, it’s a tough––’
‘She’s broken,’ he insists. ‘Busted. Snapped in fucking two. No fixing her.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Listen,’ I say, ‘it’s no consolation, but it happened to Debs and me too. I mean, I’ve been where you are. I know how it feels. If you need someone to talk to . . .’
‘You know how you felt,’ he says. ‘That’s just projection.’
‘Sure, but I can empathise with––’
‘Spare me. Listen,’ he says, dropping the spliff, grinding it out with his heel, ‘I have to go.’ He hands across the sheaf of papers. ‘That’s where I’m up to right now,’ he says. ‘But I should warn you, you mightn’t like where it’s going.’
‘It is what it is, Billy.’
‘Isn’t it just?’
I watch him shuffle off, then go inside and downstairs to find a quiet corner in the canteen, sip on a weak coffee.
Despite his heartbreak, Billy has been a busy boy.
In his absence I toast him with the weak coffee. When Debs had her miscarriage, I was hard put to write my own name, let alone do any serious work. Sounds melodramatic, I know, but it felt like a death.
No reason it shouldn’t. The doctors and scientists, the pragmatists, can say what they like about cell bundles, draw time-lines to their hearts’ content. But life is life.
How not to mourn its absence, its potential, its hope?
Pandora, my muse.
•
Good news, people: my supervisor does not die in a car wreck. He does not apply the brakes of his Opel Corsa too sharply as he underestimates a tight bend, and so does not experience the gut-sucking horror of impending Nothingness.
He lives!
O joy, O rapture, etc.
Bear with me, people. Apply logic at all times. What is to be gained from the death of my supervisor? More importantly, what do I lose? I lose anonymity and gain the title of prime suspect.
There’s no percentage in the breaking-in of a new supervisor. Plus, the guy already drives like a chimp with three bananas. It’s only a matter of time before he takes himself out.
Be aware, at all times, that words are only tools. Do not be lulled by apparent patterns. Resist the seductive blandishments of cosily sequential icons. History has its own agenda.
The hospital is an imposing edifice. Technically speaking, it is two imposing edifices, connected to one another by a long glass corridor.
The first building belongs to an era of tuberculosis, vaulted ceilings and Cuban crisis. The second is a more contemporary construction. It boasts an excess of glass coupled with manifold variations on a theme of polished surface, an essential element of the contemporary urban experience.
Shop windows, car mirrors, reflective tiles, buffed floors, aluminium frames, plate glass: it is possible to walk from one end of a modern city to the other without once losing sight of yourself. This may or may not be a sop to the multitudes wracked with doubts as to their very existence. It may or may not be to facilitate the raging narcissism that has colonised society’s soul. I project, therefore I am.
These days we stare into Medusa’s eyes and see only our own reflection. Already bored, our eyes glaze over before we have time to be transfixed.
The hospital was built on a hill overlooking the town. Its domination of its environment presupposes the need for justification. Once upon a time, churches were built on hills too. This may or may not be a coincidence. This may or may not be because it falls to hospitals today to provide hope and consolation, or because people today lack the imagination to diagnose spiritual ailments.
This may or may not be because people refuse to believe that a service provided free can have worth and/or value. It may be time for libraries and churches to start charging admission. Thus people will come to believe they are missing out on an experience of worth and/or value. Pews will overflow. Vestibules will become as clogged as A&E departments. Penitents will throng the book-lined aisles.
I go searching for the architect’s blueprints of the hospital plans. In theory this should be a simple operation, but I am hampered by the fact that I cannot march down to the Town Hall and request a copy of the plans. I am hamstrung by the need for anonymity. Instead I try searching my old friend and inert tool, the internet. This requires time and imagination, but lo and behold, etc.
I download said blueprints, then print, frame and hang them. Said blueprints are art in that they are as aesthetically pleasing as they are functionally effective. They convey specific information that allow the mind to configure a 3-D image. The reverse is also true, reading from the aesthetic to the functional, in that it can be as enjoyable to see how an edifice was constructed as it is to contemplate the finished project.
I while away many pleasant hours staring at the blueprints. I come to know them intimately. Eventually we share our dirty little secrets. I tell the blueprints of my ambition to destroy the building they represent. The blueprints, locked away in a dark and dusty basement below City Hall, denied the glory the building commands, whisper to me of their bunker.
This bunker, they whisper, is an air-tight chamber. It was incorporated into the design of the larger public buildings built during the era of tuberculosis, vaulted ceilings and Cuban crisis. Not a lot of people know that, they whisper. But then, not a lot of people were intended to find shelter when the first mushroom clouds began to darken the horizon.
Survival has never been a right, I tell the blueprints. Survival has always been a matter of hard-earned elitism.
I take the framed blueprints of the hospital down off the wall. I scan said blueprints intently. I find said bunker, an underg
round monument to the hubris that presumed we were worth the waste of a good warhead. It lies to the rear of the hospital, built into the hill beneath the morgue and situated close to a support pillar. A ventilation shaft ascends at a sixty-degree angle to emerge on the hillside behind the hospital.
This is interesting. This is promising.
As I push my cart along the glass corridor that connects the hospital’s buildings, I am reminded that in ancient Corinth two temples stood side-by-side: one to Violence, the other to Necessity.
My line for today is, If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied. (Corinthians 15:19)
If this succeeds, I want to be tried as a war criminal.
•
I’m folding up the sheaf of paper, tucking it into my back pocket, when a matron comes squeak-squeaking to my table. She makes a production number of looking at her watch.
‘Shouldn’t you be in uniform?’ she says. ‘It’s already ten after.’ She tut-tuts. ‘Once you’re properly attired,’ she says, ‘I’d be very grateful if you’d come up to the fifth floor and remove the sharps bags. They’re piling up in there. I don’t think they’ve been cleared out for three days.’
‘But I’m not––’
‘But me no buts,’ she says, a tortured squeak of rubber as she turns on her heel and bustles off.
•
O Holy Fathers, I would have liked to have been innocent of something. I would have liked it had my guilt not been so total, inevitable, pre-ordained and visible. I was fallen before I could breathe, sentenced in the womb lest the non-meaning of my first wails made a mockery of your judgement.
Hear me now: your baptismal rite is a slave’s charter, designed to allow the oppressed to absolve their masters of the burden of applying the shackles.
Hear this: I would scalp your monks had they hair worth taking.
O Holy Fathers, I absolve myself of baptism but accept your Original Sin. I welcome your taint, that melanomic stain, the bubonic darkening of your darling Augustine. I turn the other cheek to accept your gauntlet and die with the poets in each and every one of your misty Russian dawns.
All I ask is that you observe the protocols and honour me with the privilege of allowing you to shoot first, and that you then accept responsibility for the consequent hell to pay.
I ask that you allow me to become the source of your fears, the brunt of your inarticulate rage, the aesthetic flourish to your base functionality. Between us we can be art. Is the duel’s mise en scène not the epitome of those symbiotic parasites, art and death?
Understand this: I have no choice but to pick up your gauntlet. According to your rules, I possess free will and the right to choose, and I choose to take umbrage. It is a matter of honour, and in a pitiless universe dignity is all.
Remember that this is your game we are playing. All I am trying to do is live down to your expectations. I am the dog to which you gave a bad name, the demon seed you planted in the womb. I am the thirty pieces of silver the first simonists paid Judas to take the fall.
Judge not, lest ye be wasting your time.
It would have been too easy to accept your censure and walk away. This way we’re going to have some fun.
Be warned: if hope and decency are your only weapons, I will be the last man standing.
I choose the hospital as an appropriate venue. Shall we say pistols at dawn in the shadows of your bright and shiny temples to hope, miracles and resurrection?
My line for today is: You will ask why did I worry myself with such antics. Answer: because it was very dull to sit with one’s hands folded, and so one began cutting capers. (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground)
I like to think of the bomb as a de-architecturaliser. This nonsense word allows me to tell my conscience that I have a philosophy, although my conscience remains unconvinced.
A conscience is what makes decisions interesting. Everyone needs a conscience, if only for its comic relief.
My conscience is a grizzled, one-eyed leprechaun who realised too late you only get one pot of gold.
So I tell my conscience that his pot of gold is buried in the hospital’s foundations. This keeps my conscience paralysed in a state of conflicted moral relativism. One man’s terrorist is another man’s gold-digging freedom fighter, etc.
Meanwhile I get on with the business in hand. To wit: what is the most practical way of causing a large building to violently shift four or five feet in any direction?
On perusing the great buildings of history, our old friend the internet offers up the following snippet: a narrow shaft extended from the main burial chamber through the body of the later pyramids to point directly at the stars, the idea being to project the recently deceased pharaoh to his rightful resting place with the gods. In the illustration accompanying this juicy morsel, this shaft is uncannily similar to the ventilation shaft emanating from the bunker in the basement of our hospital.
‘Listen,’ I tell my grizzled one-eyed leprechaun, ‘it looks like we might be dealing with a bona fide resurrection machine here.’
‘Begorrah, bollocks and fiddle-dee-dee,’ says he. ‘Where’s me pot of fuckin’ gold?’
Today I drift through the hospital. Today I feel disembodied, wraith-like. Today’s essential duties include:
Unblocking a toilet in the women’s bathrooms on the fifth floor;
Shaving the genital area of two male patients as part of their preparations for minor surgical procedures;
The disposal of seventeen bags of accumulated waste from Female Surgical in a manner designated environmentally sound;
The transport of four tall cylinders of highly flammable gas from their delivery point on the ground floor to the storage area in the basement;
The shredding and incineration of six trolley-loads of paper waste that includes medical case histories and various types of files of a sensitive nature;
Pushing the wheelchair of an obese female patient up to the sixth floor for a physiotherapy session designed to kick-start the circulation in her feet; and
The delivery of a corpse from the Intensive Care Unit on the seventh floor to the morgue in the basement.
All of these tasks can be completed with a minimum of conversation, instruction, eye contact or any other form of communication. The porter – or janitor, handyman, gofer – can move through a busy public building virtually unnoticed. So long as you keep your shirt tucked in, no one will feel it necessary to speak to you. A good gofer can slip from floor to floor like a shovel-nosed snake through sand, constructing a labyrinth of invisible tunnels that provide myriad paths of least resistance. A good gofer will take care to ensure that such a labyrinth does not undermine the edifice to the point where it must collapse, unless such is the plan.
A good gofer is defined by his absence. He should lack drive, ambition and the imagination to fully realise the extent of his squalid condition.
Cassie fails to understand this. In this respect Cassie has yet to evolve. She still insists on confusing ambition with socio-economic viability.
‘The money’s the McGuffin, Cass. Financial security is just the halo that shimmers around the mirage.’ I tell her that the terms of the IMF bailout mean that the banks have cost Ireland five euro per day, every day, since the Big Bang. ‘What matters,’ I say, ‘is making a difference. Two people can still make a difference.’
Cassie is outraged. She thinks I am slighting her profession, and her status within that profession. ‘You’re saying one person can’t make a difference?’
‘Two could make a bigger difference. Call it a difference squared.’
‘Why does it have to be a big difference? What’s wrong with just making a difference?’
‘If you’re going to make a difference, go long. Michelangelo didn’t fuck around painting kennel ceilings. The universe came in with a bang, not a whimper.’
‘We can’t all be Michelangelo, K.’
This to me is a true lack of ambition.
This is a rationalisation that allows success to be confused with contentment. This is the kind of thinking that allows people to consider ongoing failure an aspirational lifestyle. This is confirmation that the bar has been lowered, perhaps fatally. It is the mentality that has facilitated the mutation of hospitals into rooming houses, flop joints and doss-house kips. This validates defeatism and helps create a culture in which a missing box of anti-depressants from a particular storage area every few months is not regarded as noteworthy.
The petty pilfering in an average hospital exists at levels approaching endemic. A box of Band Aids here, a package of antiseptic wipes there. Syringes and needles, pristine scalpels, a pack of latex gloves, rolls of bandage, surgeons’ scrubs. Once in a while, a tall cylinder of flammable gas.
My line for today comes courtesy of the non-violent anarchist French philosopher, Jean-Pierre Proudhon: Property is theft.
Herostratus chose to destroy a temple. We could have picked out a church too, but that would have been too easy. We could have targeted a library but no one would have noticed. We could have decided on a bank but that would have made us heroes. We could have selected a school but that would have been self-sabotage.
We are partisans from the future operating behind the lines of the present. Thus our target must possess the worth and relevance that temples once offered to ancient civilisations. Thus our target must represent the intrinsic values of faith and hope that have sustained civilisations down through the ages.
Somewhere between hope and faith lies the truth of the human condition.
An erect building is a shackled slave. I hear the mutinous grumbling of vertical buildings. I hear the grinding frustration of those compelled against their will to remain standing. A building is energy crucified against space and time.
The latent energy of a building forced to stand against its will is an awesomely potent force. E = MC², etc. In theory, the destructive potential inherent in each and every building on the planet is the envy of nuclear warheads.