A Country of Eternal Light

by Darby Harn

  “It’s a long swim.”

  “I’ve been working out,” he says. He glances me, sideways like. He’s joking. He’s testing me.

  “Do you want to scatter the ashes here? Is that why you come back? You’re more than welcome.”

  He sits on a rock. “I was going to bring you some coffee, but apparently there aren’t any lids left.”

  “There are no lids?”

  “They ran out. Boat didn’t come. Do you want to go get some coffee? It’s terrible, but it’s warm.”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “Are you hungry? Would you like to get some lunch?”

  “I’ve been chewing on grass,” I say.

  “Colm is still serving food. Fish, mostly.”

  “I don’t want to do with any people.”

  “Maybe we could go for a walk, then.”

  “You should leave.”

  Up he goes from the rock. “I’m sorry.”

  Waves atomize around us. “Don’t get stuck.”

  The American just stands there. Paralyzed. The words pound on the doors of his lips until they force them open.

  “I am stuck. I have been, for… I just stand there, in the apartment. I’ve got my coat on. My shoes. I’m ready to go, out here or some other beach. And I just stand there and…”

  He smiles a bit, like he’s telling a joke.

  “I stood there at the door, waiting for him. He got the weekends. Friday after school, I’d get my bag together and stand there staring at the door handle. Waiting for it to turn,” he says and I see him there, that little boy, waiting. “I saw him. My Dad. In a gas station, a few weeks before he died. I hadn’t seen him in years. I didn’t say anything.”

  I picture him in one of those sprawling truck stop gas stations they have in the States. Those temples of petrol built on every interchange. His father in line ahead of him. And he doesn’t say anything.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. That’s not true. He wasn’t part of my life forever and… I ignored him. And then when he died…” He winces. “I was angry. Why was I angry? Why now? The next thing you know it’s two years later and you’re thinking you need to make it right. As if doing something will make any difference.”

  “Two years?”

  “That’s me and my Dad,” he says, the shame of it naked on his face. “Long periods of pretending the other doesn’t exist interrupted by fierce attempts to prove that they do.”

  On the ferry back from the OB-GYN in Galway, I wept the whole way. In the span of three months, I had lost both my parents. I learned the world would end. I was pregnant.

  I was twenty-five.

  Ma held tight to the armrest, flinching with every heave in the sea. There are stones on this island more travelled than my mother. She only first set foot off Inishèan to bear me, and that was at forty-two and with fierce reluctance. My primal image of her is of a woman worn and battered, like an old ship. Bothered with life. Youth.

  “You punished him,” I say. “And now you’re punishing yourself.”

  “I don’t want to anymore,” he says. “I don’t want this.”

  I shake my head. “What else is there?”

  “Take a walk with me.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  I have to laugh. “You’ve convinced me.”

  “Of which part?”

  What would I do? Go for a walk with him? Go for a tea? And then what? Go back to the home? Go to the market? What would I put in the cart? It was all for him. Go back to saying hello? How are you? I’m grand, thanks. Did you hear?

  Do you know?

  I crumple back to the lump of fleece I had been and The American stands there, stricken, hands wanting to reach out, take hold of me and pry me back into a shape more human. There’s instructions, for the funeral. A style guide, for the obituary. But not for this.

  Not for after.

  One foot in front of the other, they say. One day at a time. What do you do when you have no more days? When there are no more years? Just this empty, lonely fall.

  I take Gavin’s hand. “Just a short walk.”

  Chapter Three

  Colm stands next to his car in the drive, holding a catch of fish. Men like shadows on this island. You’ve got two if you’ve got one. He scratches that beard of his. Longer every time I see it. More white now than red. A winter fox.

  He tips his cap. “Slan,” he says.

  I walk past him to the door. “We’ve fish yet.”

  “I’m going around, checking the furnaces. I know it’s been a spell since yours has had any maintenance.”

  “You put it in, didn’t you?”

  “I did.”

  “Half the reason you’re always fixing things on this island is because it was you installed it in the first place.”

  Hard to tell if I’ve wounded him. He has the one expression. A sort of permanent scowl. I’ve hurt myself. This anger bruises me. Dislocates me. All my bones and organs are displaced for all my hurt trying to get out and all it takes is a person showing up at my door.

  “I tried coming by before, Mairead. I thought I’d wait, and then… I thought about going out there. Talking to you. I didn’t want to disturb you. I didn’t want to interfere.”

  “You’re kind.”

  He shuffles back to his car, defeated. What does he drive the car for. We don’t have the petrol to spare to be wasting it driving the few miles up and down this road.

  “Weren’t you always going to off to Ibiza or somewhere, Colm? Why haven’t you?”

  “Nepal.” He scratches the gray scruff on his chin. His sleeve sinks down his arm, uncovering the simple lines of dulled tattoos. “You want to die at home, I suppose. Some of us do. Others… well. You’ve met Gavin, I hear.”

  Of course he’s heard. “You’re friends, then?”

  “I rented the apartment to him once. This was years back. He was here on a weekend from Dublin. I got to know him a little. I know him. He’s been wanting to come back, ever since. He’s been wanting to stay. Picked a time for it.”

  “He’s not staying.”

  “Keeps a man busy,” he says. “Going after himself.”

  “I’ve noticed. You never told me why Nepal.”

  “I went hiking there, about twenty years back. I had seen this shirt in a store in Galway. Katmandu, it said on the front. Just like that, I wanted to go to Katmandu. So I went.”

  “Maybe you can go when the plane comes back.”

  He smiles, a little. “Or you could.”

  “You’re shite for jokes, Colm.”

  “I’m shite for a lot of things, it turns out.”

  “Never seems to stop you.”

  “You have to keep trying.”

  I open the door. “Slan.”

  “You come to places,” he says. “You come to places and you think, the wonder. The beauty. You see the sights, the shops, the buildings, whatever it is. You don’t see the life. The living. Not unless you really spend time there. You can’t know. People tell you, Oh, you can’t go there. The fighting, or the disease, or what have you. But I could die tomorrow. Any of us, you know. Just crossing the road.”

  He drifts off, somewhere.

  “One day there in Katmandu, I went into this store for some bottled water. I headed down the road and the clerk came running after me. I’d dropped twenty cents. This is more than they make in an hour. A day. Three hundred Euros a year they make. Here a Euro goes on the ground and someone’s foot goes over it. And here your man was, giving me my twenty cents. Of course, I let him keep it. They had given me so much. There in Katmandu, the Hindus burned their dead on the river. They let me watch. The smell, you know. The pop of the skin as it melts. I was a total stranger. But they let me into their grief.”

  I slam the door behind me. Ma wakes up from some dream in the recliner. She’s forgotten it already. If you could forget life.

  If you could wa
ke up, brand new.

  Dead of night.

  Must be. Pins and needles. Soaked to the bone. Why don’t I stay. Why don’t I just walk out to sea after you. I’m in the bedroom now. How did I get here. The hours like flies. I swat them way.

  The door creaks open. Keep your voice down, Ma says.

  How could I be saying anything, hoarse as I am. I don’t remember my own voice, to say nothing of yours.

  Lord God.

  Why couldn’t it be you I’m forgetting, Ma? You forgot him and I trusted you. I trusted you to focus on the only thing that mattered to me and you left him alone to go mop up the drool and the piss and the shit of a dozen people shriveling like old fruit and why didn’t you just top up their morphine and be done with it and fill the earth if the earth is so wanting and I’m right here waiting in the dark and the cold and the waves waiting for you please here I am I’ve been waiting Declan won’t you come here I am and The neighbors, Ma says.

  Black-headed gulls flounder overhead like torn shingles in a summer storm. Gavin and I walk the long, curling sandy beach to its end and then back through the cemetery, as we do most days. Along the way, I peer into the fluttering grass, behind every hillock and into every sunken depression in the soft, wanting sand.

  I’m always looking.

  “Da would come out here and fish,” I say.

  “Your dad was the doctor here?”

  “Did I tell you?”

  “Colm told me.”

  I claw at the beach grass. Stalks bend and twist in my wake. “What else did he tell you?”

  “Colm doesn’t say much,” Gavin says.

  “What do youse talk about, if you don’t drink?”

  “How do you know I don’t?”

  I shrug. “Aoife might be a bit of a talker.”

  He takes a breath. “I’d say so.”

  “Is she not your type?”

  I don’t need to ask. If all he wanted out of the island was a shag, he could have got it from her in the pub loo. He wants more. I feel it, strong as I do the pull of the sea.

  What more is there?

  Stones older than America lie broken. They make a pavement in the thicket to the open grave of a tiny church sunk into the ground. Rusted coins scab the floor inside. He holds my hand as we navigate pools of water the tides left in the cemetery. The church a shipwreck. Stone carved into pinwheels and eroded figures that walked across centuries. The broken remains of an ancient high cross. A horseman cut into its face, engraved there at the last millennium, when people thought the world was ending.

  “A good spot,” I say.

  Gavin nods. That pill bottle like a rock in his pocket.

  The curtain of grass fringing the dunes flutters with promise. “He’d be proud of you, your Da.”

  The gulls heckle the futility of the gale. He hardens, Gavin. Shrinks like an old, dried out paintbrush. He seems old now. A deep, wide silence grows between us.

  Gavin looks up the cliff climbing behind us, to the monastery. “I haven’t been up there yet.”

  The island becomes steps, none even and none linear. In the shops and cafes and pubs the tourists would all ask the same question. Why did the monks build their monastery in such a difficult place? The answer seemed obvious, even to me as a girl. Any journey to God is meant to be difficult. How the round tower must have loomed, when she stood tall and full. A silhouette against the rising sun, a crack in a door you could just see yourself getting through.

  Today, the round tower is no summit and no refuge. The husk of the thing perches on the precipice overlooking the sea, alongside the remains of stone beehives. All of them birdhouses now. Gulls. Puffins. Refugees from other worlds.

  Patches of sunlight glitter on the gravel gray sea, marking a path to some distant west. Some say the monastery is much older than is thought and was not founded by Christian monks but the same pagans that erected Dun Aonghasa on Inishmore three thousand years ago or more. Some say Inishèan is in fact Hy-Brasil, or was once Tír na nÓg, the lost Land of the Young, forgotten as the people turned to the new faith. Some say the island is an arrow pointing the way to the land where flowers are always in bloom, forests drip honey and little boys never grow up. One must cross a great stretch of water, and then travel beneath the waves a great distance to find this place.

  Cracked and crumbling pavement gives way to untended weeds, as if I’m in the car park of an abandoned shopping mall back in the States. They just build things there and let them go to rot. As if to give themselves history. A slow, steady pounding grows in the distance. Spray rains down in icy pellets, the ejecta of geyser-like eruptions rocketing into the air. I come to the edge of the puffing hole. The ocean moils at the bottom of a cavernous abyss a hundred feet below, thrashing against chiseled limestone walls, spinning around a furious center. Runoff from the constant deluge drains back down into the maw, channeling under scabs of rock, lifting, pulling, coaxing them away into oblivion. I teeter. I waver.

  He takes my hand.

  Gavin sits on a seat of rock the sea provided, just for him. Us. The dog lies down at his feet.

  “This dog,” he says. “Follows me everywhere.”

  I sit with him. “Must be annoying, like.”

  He smiles, kind of. “Does he belong to anybody?”

  “People die, and animals go to wander.”

  “I wonder if I could take him back with me.”

  “He’d be better off. He stays here and we’ll turn the knife on him once the sheep have gone.”

  His face shrinks. “Jesus.”

  “You need to go home, Gavin. You’ve seen the news?”

  He rubs the back of his neck. His eyes red and sore. He doesn’t sleep. “I’m trying to avoid it.”

  Ma turns on the radio and I can’t. “This oil thing. With China and Russia. What does it mean, ‘tactical nuclear war?’”

  “It’s slang for ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Terrified me as a kid. Nuclear war.”

  “Was this during the Cuban Missile Crisis?”

  He reaches for me like he means to grab me. A game. I don’t know if it’s me reeling him in, or him me and I don’t care.

  We’re caught.

  His thumb brushes my ribs. Guitar string. His heart this mad drum. This music we make. This anxious rhythm.

  “I don’t feel old,” he says.

  I clear my throat. “This black hole. It’s like getting all our apocalypses together at once.”

  “Greatest hits. Farewell tour or something.”

  “I don’t know why now.”

  “Well. The Cubs won the Series, so.”

  “Inconsiderate of them,” I say.

  “When I left Chicago… there were all these people. “ His chin lists against my shoulder. “Jumping off the buildings. Lighting themselves on fire. There were all these scorch marks on the street.”

  “Do you think we’ll do ourselves in first?”

  “I think there’s some part of us that wants it to be over,” he says. “And there’s another part that never quits.”

  The puffing hole gurgles like an old man coughing up spit, routine and we are routine. We are creatures inhabiting the spaces of our lives unable to press the borders. I think Gavin is a fool to stay here for one day, let alone one hour and yet he’s living. He’s dying. He’s caught somewhere between. He’s caught me up in his string, the yo-yo and I look back over my shoulder to the crest of the island. Ireland beyond. Inishmore at war with the sea. You’re here. Somewhere. I know you are. I know someday you’ll come out the grass.

  Here I am.

  Rabbits scatter back to their burrows, paralyzing the dog with choice. The house glows like a paper lantern beyond the field. No rain to drive Gavin back to the pier tonight. No excuse. No reason to be here at all. What will he do. Sit there, alone at the bar. Thinking of me.

  “There’s a party here soon,” he says. “Colm was telling me. For Halloween or something.”
<
br />   “Samhain,” I say. “That’s weeks away.”

  “I’ve got time.”

  “Are you the only one?”

  He winces. “I’ve got time I want to make good on. Let’s put it that way. Come with me to the party.”

  I’m never going to the party. He’ll be gone by then. But it doesn’t sting, the idea of it. Us. He tastes like a cigarette, Gavin. A hard drink. He burns. He makes me hurt in ways I’ve forgotten, better pangs than those I live with now.

  “You’ll be asking me to marry you next,” I say.

  That shrug is just barely an act. “Everybody is going to Vegas.”

  “You came here.”

  He smiles. “I did. Let’s go to the party.”

  “But you’re ancient.”

  “I’m only forty.”

  “Ancient, yeah.”

  “Seems like I can keep up with you.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  My head shakes. “Gavin…”

  “Or maybe we can just go for another walk tomorrow.”

  Wave after wave explodes against the dunes. Ghosts of rainbows in the spray.

  “Walk with me for this bit,” I say and we turn back through the grass. I stumble in a crumbling burrow; he grabs my hand.

  I keep it to the road.

  Chapter Four

  The bedroom door creaks open. Aoife leans against the frame, this shit eating grin on her face.

  “Dear Penthouse… I never thought this could happen to me…”

  “What are you on about?” I say.

  Aoife stretches out on the bed. Hair snarled. There’s no comb in creation to tackle all that.

  “Your gentleman caller. The American.”

  “What’s he been saying?”

  “Doesn’t say a word. Just sits at the end of the bar and sips his whiskey. Every night. He’s a man of routine, Gavs. Goes for long walks, so I’m told. Down the shore.”

  “He’s leaving,” I say, as I pull on my coats.

  “He’s been leaving for a week now.”

  He has, so. Every day I think he’s leaving the next and then there he is, with that bleeding dog.