My Coney Island Baby

by Billy O'Callaghan

  Their world became the corridor, and they spent long hours at the glass, leaning in an effort to catch the movements of their little boy, the barely significant rise of the chest with each tiny intake of breath, each sip of sterile, purified air, and the inevitable exhalation’s imagined whisper. Watching for breaths, certain that each would be the last, at least until the void stirred again.

  Michael allowed himself little ground for optimism, and he wondered, in off-moments, if James Matthew would hate him for giving up so easily, or if God would, if his passive conspiracy would be taken as an act of treason against God’s supposedly strictest rule, that of the sanctity of life? By simply standing here, was he effectively surrendering his soul in resignation? Because he knew how to talk. He was a salesman, for Christ’s sake, he had the tools, the weapons. Talking was his business. He hadn’t agreed with what was being done, yet held back from voicing an objection, from insisting that they do something, the doctors, the nurses, that they keep on trying, fuck the theories and scenarios and the projected outcomes, that they continue running the life support, keep on with the drip feed, the attempts at stimulating the lungs, the liver, the kidneys to some manner of workable life. But instead of speaking up, he accepted spectator status, and watched in the same way that spectators have always watched innocents march to a burning or to the gallows or the gas chambers. Or to the lions.

  Where exactly did the line land between mercy and murder? Such a strain of thinking was nothing less nor more than the cracks of a mind in mid- to full-blown breakdown, but when the facts were magnified and distilled to the nth degree, the question screamed with abject insistence. Even as the seconds clocked up and beat by, he understood on a multitude of levels that this was one of his life’s defining moments, one that would still churn for him when his own end wound finally into view.

  The problem, one of the problems, was that the adrenaline had flushed from his system, leaving him with nothing to do but stretch out in the emptiness. While Barb elected to weep and scratch her way through, he dealt with the pain and doubt by boxing it up and burying it all to an unmerciful depth. The question of God, or of God’s hand, in what was going on had to do with belief, and the answer, whether coming down on one side or the other, surprisingly evaded intellectuality, and simply was. In euphemistic terms, faith stood akin to allergy: you either suffered from it or you didn’t. Some, finding themselves in this situation, raged hard against the notion of belief and dismissed such thoughts as worthless, replacing them with a determination to find their own way onwards, for better or worse. Others, by contrast, turned stupidly devout, Indian-burned with terror at the possibility that there might yet be more of this to come, floods more, and that in the grand scheme of things they could never be anything better than cowering specks, there wholly for the entertainment of an Almighty who ran the whole show by whim. And finally, for those few too dulled to face either extreme, there was a third option, the one where you accepted the limits of existing strictly within the current surround, and if you happened to think at all about the big questions, particularly the question of God as myth or reality, then you showed due care not to wade any further than a knee’s worth of depth into that mire. This third choice was the path Michael felt offered the best chance of survival.

  That last day, after some member of staff had adjudged that business was, for now, concluded, Michael and Barbara walked in silence from the hospital. Somehow, they had lost several hours. Morning seeped into afternoon, and the dusk of evening threatened. Details had gotten in the way: the busy work of papers to be signed, forms that had to be collected, filled in, delivered to particular departments, copied, collated, rubber stamped. Certificate of death, autopsy permissions and appointments for grief counselling that, despite their best intentions, they’d give up on after the second or third try, once the space for delusion had sufficiently diminished and it became clear that there was no ready-made cure, no matter what anyone said or did, not for something like this.

  Michael led the way, trying hard to hold himself together, and Barb gripped his arm as they navigated the dim twists of corridor in search of an exit. In her free hand, in a small clear plastic bag that whispered with every pace against the stony denim of her thigh, she carried James Matthew’s bagged effects. A neatly folded blue cotton jumpsuit and a lemon-coloured cardigan, neither of which had ever been worn; birth and death certificates; a single Polaroid snap, the image thick with clarity-denying reflection from the impeding layers of glass, but better than nothing; and a green plastic wristband with a name scrawled in inky blue block capitals. These few morsels of identification were the only physical evidence that their son had ever existed, but the bag’s simple concision made it all somehow worse.

  Outside, the fading day pressed a raw wet easterly wind into their faces, and somewhere between the hospital’s doorway and where they had parked the car she let go and began to weep. A cloying carbolic stench clung to their clothes, hair and skin, enduring even through the wind. Washing would remove that smell, but not one wash, and not the impact of its memory. When Michael opened the car’s passenger door for her she nodded and got in but the tears kept coming. After a minute or two of trying and failing to think of something good to say, some few pathetic words of comfort, he abandoned the cause, sat in behind the wheel and switched on the radio. In the years to come, that will seem like a particularly callous action, but the truth, at that moment, was something far more helpless, and maybe more pathetic. Because her crying was unbearable, the jagged shudders of breath, the whine that came stabbing up out of her in gouts from some deep place. Her soul in haemorrhage.

  She sat with her head hanging and her hands cupped beneath her face to catch the tears, but he resisted the urge to look at her and instead reached out for the radio’s dial and turned it slowly through patches of static and the occasional stuttering flare of noise until eventually a station came in clear and music flooded the car, hard and for a heartbeat or two shapeless without the rumble of the engine to temper at least the edges of its roar. The force of it caused his breath to catch in his throat and all he could do was sit back and watch the first scuds of rain mark and then mutilate the windshield while melody broke over him like tide across the spikes of a low reef. Van Morrison, first, ‘You Make Me Feel So Free’, fresh as the nightly news but already sounding stone-cold and classic, the rich gurgling bass and joyous sax stretching out in bedrock support beneath the expressive honey-soup resonance of vocals building towards ecstasy and then drawing back, sated, on soft, heaving promises.

  It passed, leaving a moment of nothing: empty air and only the sound of his and Barb’s strained breathing and the needle-tap of the rain on the glass, and then again the silence became snarled in the rise of another song, something older this time, something ancient-sounding. ‘Gates of Eden’, a sunken landmass once more breaching the surface, and Bob Dylan in full-throated strum. It was a song he knew well, or thought he did, from the years of nights spent spinning his scratched thrift-store copy of Bringing It All Back Home when he wasn’t listening to Willie Nelson or something with more swamp involved, but he’d never before heard it so uncovered, the acoustic guitar hooked to an almost voodoo frenzy, the occasional harmonica scream and, most of all, the voice, everything, enormous, cleaved from rock, chipped and cracked but with the strength of standing stones and beautiful in the way that hard-wrought things can sometimes be, and as full of gospel truth as the very dirt itself, pushing prophesies or reportage of the most surreal revelation. Words of pure nightmare, too, peeling back the skin in full disclosure and leaving the listener among the end notes just a shy lean from madness.

  He felt drained, blood-let. They both did. Barb found a full box of tissues in the glove compartment but struggled to stem the wash of tears. She sat there, head still bowed, clutching rags of the soft paper in one fist, but the continuing music cloaked what sounds she might have made and seemed instead to speak for her. And not knowing how else to respond, Michael closed
his eyes and listened, as the words of the song came above the hammering guitar, a touch too loud but loud enough to obliterate thought, packing the air the way fog can. The interruptions of harmonica made sense now, crow-screams for everything lost, dense as stone with feeling and fissured with nearly unbearable despair.

  When the song ended he could hardly move. He was trembling inside, vibrating. But his surfaces were numb. He switched off the radio and after a moment started the engine. It turned over once and stalled, then caught on the second try. They left the hospital grounds and drove back through the early-evening traffic, in the direction of home. The silence was worse than words, and it built and fermented between them as the whiteness was drawn like poison from the wounded day. Barb, in between waves of tears, sat half an arm’s length apart, a small frail ruin, her wide eyes gleaming in the yellow glare of the street and tunnel lights. And understanding that talk couldn’t help, he kept his attention fixed on the road ahead, braced in anticipation of some inevitable impact, certain that there was more to come, that there had to be. Not moving even to breathe, trying to be strong and not making it.

  III

  In the White Room

  The room is small but immediately becomes theirs. Caitlin enters first, and glances round, feeding on detail. The nape of her neck is shown, just for a moment, as a white slope before she turns her head again and the loose curtain of her casual ponytail falls back into place.

  Michael leans the weight of his body to the door until the lock clicks shut. He delights in watching her, a habit shaped by time, armour against the day she finally slips or is torn from his life.

  She moves into space towards the bed, absorbing everything of this surround. Her expression rouses a sense of faded youthfulness, her eyes wide and almost scared, her mouth clenched but not her jaw, her body a straight, slender vessel full of so much past. She skirts the bed, drifts to the far side of the room, her coat, forgotten, inconsequential, dragging behind her in whispers across the cheap nylon carpet. When she moves into the frame of the window, the pale, smoky noontime light transfigures her. The effect is startling. Her skin turns the glassy frail of a porcelain screed, slightly translucent, hinting at the branches of bone beneath, and the memory of a dream stirs in Michael’s mind, years old and long forgotten but suddenly real and clear again and soaked in precisely this same light, one that captured her beside a window much like this one, naked to the waist but with her hair still with all its young length and fullness cascading in dark flumes down over her shoulders and small breasts. Standing in profile, head down, she was counting coins, brown pennies, from one hand to the other. And she was weeping.

  ‘Not too bad, is it?’ She doesn’t turn to look at him yet, and he knows why.

  ‘No,’ he says, lying out of duty. ‘Not too bad at all. We’ve known worse.’

  The room is clean and plain but determinedly sterile, with all trace of romance having been surgically removed, the sort of room suited to women on the run, and travelling salesmen, and those who wish to hide a while without being found, those who need time alone to think of good or even bad reasons why they shouldn’t hang themselves in the closet or pull a razor blade across their wrists. But the cold strain of afternoon had added something more. It flushes through the tall, narrow sash window, a blanched, bulky light that thickens the air, melts surfaces and slows the very turning of the world. And against that, every past and possible future collide with a clap and fuse together.

  They are held apart by more than distance. Her eyes find him as they find the corners, and the smile too is rubbed and faraway. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I like it. I don’t know what it is, but the place speaks to me. I could write here. That’s a thought I’ve not had in a long time. But this air is heavy with stories.’

  Her stillness softens reality. To Michael’s eyes, in the moment, she could pass for twenty-five again, young, pretty, still slim as gathered sticks, the woman of his dreams, for better or worse, smiling but with the sadness that never quite departs her and which always turns him ten kinds of soft. The room, he decides, will be sufficient for their needs, but only because they have carried love in here with them, in them. That, and perhaps the peculiar quality of the gifted light.

  He settles on the bed’s nearest corner. The mattress beneath him, understandable given the sort of traffic it must experience, has the firmness of blanketed steel. Standards here set their mark at perfunctory, the full scope of their ambition. Signs of tiredness and age catch and hold as small boasts to survival, like the licks of fur that can be found dappling the briary ditches of home on wet October mornings. Paint on the walls a watery buttermilk; a gauze of curtain boiled down to the grim shade and texture of dust; starched, papery bed sheets and a woollen throw, heavy as plywood, the pinkish tan of a pig’s hide. At the foot of the bed, breaking the wall’s barren monotony, a medium-sized mirror, oval and unframed, hangs full of his slightly magnified reflection, his thick bowed shoulders, his sallow face rutted with terminal dread. Bubbles rash the surface of the glass, the oxidised metal like brackish acne seeping through the silvering, but these flaws only enhance the accuracy of his depiction.

  Instead of resisting the sight of himself, he sits and cultivates a state of calm, tries hard to make the pieces of who he really is fit inside the pieces of what he is finding in the glass. But he is too aware of the time. They have an afternoon, and the hours and minutes are finite. Still with his coat on, and in an awkward fashion that has become quite typical of him, he begins to undo the laces of his shoes. Recent years have seen him fall a long way out of shape, and the hunched posture reveals too much of his dishevelled self. A bluster of heat builds behind his face, reddening his skin, and his breathing turns strained and then splits open.

  He slips off his shoes and sets them precisely together at the foot of the bed. When he looks up, Caitlin is studying him, his shoulders rounded and gone to fat, the pinkness of his scalp blushing through the tightly cropped salt-and-pepper hair, the first marked suggestion of a bald spot. That a shift in life stages has taken place can come as no sudden revelation; he has cleared the borders of middle age, and only the dead and the obscenely fortunate get to stay boyish for ever. But perhaps it is this light, white and cold, the soft strange ocean or graveyard fog of Irish ghost stories, that offers some fresh perspective, or even some hint of her own first subtle crumbling, because there is a visible stiffening inside her smile. She averts her gaze but only gets as far as the mirror, and in not wanting to see any more she succeeds in seeing it all.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s not the Ritz,’ he says, to the side of her face. He knows that her reflection is watching him, that they’ve made a triangle of the moment, but the angles don’t spare them. ‘You deserve the Ritz. You deserve better than I can give.’

  ‘I don’t need the Ritz,’ she tells him, and all at once the hardness is gone, and the smile is hers again, the shape made for her mouth and eyes. ‘I’ve never been that kind of girl. You must have me confused with someone else.’

  ‘On the plus side, at least there are no cockroaches.’

  ‘No roaches,’ she agrees, glancing at the floor, just in case. ‘Probably too cold for them.’

  He laughs, because this is right, and then she laughs, too. When she moves to him, he leans back so that she can perch on his knee. She puts her arms around his neck, lacing her fingers together behind his head, and drawing close considers every aspect of his face. Then, like the punchline of a promise, she brings her mouth to his. This kiss differs from those that have gone before. The privacy of the room has set them free. She shifts for better purchase and he feels her body relax on one level and lift itself on another. He takes her lower lip very gently between his teeth and explores the feel of it with his tongue.

  ‘Well,’ she asks. ‘Are you going to say it, or not?’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘How you feel about me. How precious I am to you. That you’ve never loved anyone else the way you love me, and that you never w
ill. That you’d stand in front of a lion for me. That if I needed a new heart you’d gladly give me the better half of yours.’

  ‘My heart? You’d have to give it back to me first.’

  She kisses him again, and with growing hunger leans into him and twists the fingers of one hand through his hair, running them against the grain. A trembling stirs in her. He can feel the beat of it through her body. Its reawakening gladdens him. His hand strays from her hip and traces a slow line up her side. She turns, slightly but with intent, manipulating herself against his touch so that it settles where she wants it to be.

  ‘I love you,’ he tells her, breathing the promise into her skin. He often delays giving her these words, toying with her in that way she likes, as if today will be the day that lust or passion causes him to forget. But he never has forgotten, not in all their years together. And he does not forget now.