by Darby Harn
“You’re calling for Gavin?”
“I’m his mother,” she says.
I shoo Saidbh away from the station, and sit down in her chair. “Is he not home?”
She sighs. “No. He’s not there?”
The receiver is heavy in my hand. Fat with a battery to keep its charge. I rest it on my shoulder. “He… he left.”
“Last time I talked to him, he said he might never leave.”
“We both thought… I thought it was best for him to be back home with his family.”
“You must be her,” she says. “When was this?”
“A few days ago. You’ve not talked to him at all?”
“He’s not answering his cell phone. I don’t know if there’s any service. I barely get any here. He said there was a meteor.”
“That was weeks ago. Loads of broken windows, mostly. There was just enough wood to board them up. Gavin helped,” I say, not sure what I’m saying. “I’m sorry you can’t get hold of him. I’m sure he’s fine. He could be stuck at the airport in Dublin or New York, trying to get a flight. I’m sure.”
“He helped at the nursing home?”
“He did.”
He’d wake in morning, loose. Easy. Never tired. I was a nervous coil in his arms. Heavy against him. Heavier with every moment, the weight of the universe in a body barely scratching a hundred pounds. My ribs like the wrinkled, eroded beach rock but he didn’t mind. He didn’t want the heat, the press, the distortion of himself. He didn’t want to be himself anymore. Adrift. He became part of the island, helping to board up the windows and fix the doors jammed in their frames. He became part of the island with me. He said so. I’d drawn him there. Captured him. And then I released him, ejected out of my orbit like the lucky planets and moons.
Newspaper crinkles on her end as much as the static. “Did you see this? Russia invaded Iran. Took the oil fields.”
“I haven’t seen the news.”
“There might have been a bomb.”
“A bomb?”
“Nuclear. Someone set off a nuclear bomb.”
Residents shuffle past the station, slow and weak with pain. Hunger. A need for some resolution. “I’m sure he’s fine.”
“Maybe there aren’t any more flights.”
“He’s rented a car. Something.”
“Gas is seventeen dollars a gallon here. If they have it.”
“He’ll get there,” I say. “He’s persistent, like.”
She sniffs. “You sound young.”
“I’m in my old age, as it happens.”
“Yeah, I can see the interest,” she says. Dogs bark somewhere behind her. “When he was a kid, he loved space. All those movies. He wanted to be an astronaut. When the space shuttle blew up, he became obsessed with finding out why. He read everything. Cut out articles. Made photocopies at the library. Kept them in this shoebox. I couldn’t understand it. It happened. What could he do about it? When they first found this black hole thing, he was so calm. He told me all of this, all of this happening now in the sky, down to the letter. He knew what would happen.”
I picture him, a boy, sitting at the library reading a congressional report on the destruction of this flying thing that to him had been a cathedral of wonder, but in an instant was reduced to dust. There is no worse betrayal than realizing the world is not designed for you.
The only design is failure.
There is no understanding the black hole. And yet the end of the world has been plotted to the precise second, confirmed with quiet assuredness as the black hole first started to tug on the earth, creating tidal waves and earthquakes to the ballistic shredding induced from the comets, asteroids, moons and planetary debris. There is something reassuring in the autopsy of disaster. Reverse engineering tragedies gives some kind of power over them, as if they can be undone, by just pulling on this or that string. If I had just done that. If I had just done this. Simple.
Easy.
“I’ve been going through all my old photo albums,” she says. “Things you keep. You know. The shoes. The stuffed little things. I kept the napkins from the baby shower. I don’t know why. Pink. Faded now. Like a wine stain. I’ve been making my peace with him being there and now I don’t know where he is.”
I grip the phone cord. “He’s fine.”
“I lost a baby,” his mother says. “Miscarriage.”
“Oh.”
Her voice becomes more distant. “It was after him. Yeah. If you had time, you'd probably learn how to make it work. You read about these things. After 9/11. People meet, and share in their grief. They fall in love. It happens. It’s happening to you. You just don’t have any time. And I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry for you both.”
I set the receiver down on the desk. Her phone whispers out of it. You probably just want to disappear. We don’t have the luxury, do we? Men can just disappear. And they won’t let us.
Are you there?
I pick up the phone. “I’m here.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” she says. “You’ve got to look at the big picture. That’s what I always tell him. Maybe he was supposed to be there. And maybe he’s done his bit.”
The receiver is slick in my hand. “He’s fine.”
“We all think we’re the symphony, but really, we’re just the instruments. Some of us get a solo. Some of us never get used.”
I choke back my tears. “I’m sure he’s fine.”
“I’m sure,” she said turning the page. “What’s your name?”
“Mairead.”
“Mairead. I’m glad I got to talk to you.”
“And you…”
Static breaks up the line. Voices ghost over each other. The line drops. I set the phone heavy back on its base. My fingers brush the plastic, like they might a cup holding a beer. A cocktail. Your hand, warm in mine. Day comes. Aoife to replace me. Mist hangs over the bay. The island scratching with sleet.
Fear.
A blinding flash goes off over the sea.
So bright I think the sun has come up early. Or another meteor. Much, much higher this one. I think about Gavin flying over the ocean home through the flak of asteroids and meteors. Best not to think of him. What is there to think about now.
The tide is fierce. The cold worse still. I trudge back home through the rabbit field. None of the lights are on across the harbor in Kilbanna. Who would be down there now he’s gone, anyways. The street lamps are out. Normally the bowl of the island is constellated in stars. There’s no glitter across the bay. No lights at the house.
Ma sits in front of the telly in the dark, murmuring to herself. She doesn’t even know. I click on the remote. Nothing. There’s nothing in the house working at all. The storm is passed; I don’t understand.
Aoife bursts in through the front door, out of breath and drenched in sweat. “The backup is shite!”
Alarms ring inside the home as life-support monitors and ventilators burn off their battery reserves. Moira Kavanaugh lies on the floor of the lobby, cold and still.
Aoife shakes her head. “She just dropped over. Right when the lights out… she must have had a heart attack.”
“She has a pacemaker,” I say, as more screams erupt in the home. I grab a flashlight from the nurses’ station. I take over bagging Roisin Ni Shealbhaigh from Saidbh. She clutches her sore arm and goes to the corner, crying. The fuck was I doing at sixteen. Saidbh has been pumping oxygen for half an hour. The fuel filters on the generator clogged. There are no spares. The bag crumples, Roisin’s chest swells and unless we get power back she’s got as long as our arms hold out.
I hear the jangle of all Colm’s tools coming down the hall. That box he carries them around in old as he is.
“I thought you’d seen to the generator,” I say.
“I’ll look again,” he says.
He goes off down the way and ten minutes later he’s back saying maybe there might be some spare fuel lines around. He doesn’t look at me as he says this, so I put n
o stock in it.
My arm throbs. My hand shriveled in righteous pain. Hours we’ve been at this. I wish Colm would just say there’s no fixing the generator instead of shuffling the same parts around.
“I don’t understand,” Saidbh says. “The storm’s over.”
“It’s something to do with that meteor,” I say. “Nothing landed, though. I don’t think. They’ll fix it. No worries.”
Saidbh strains her hand back to its original shape. “I can take over now.” I hand the bag back to her. “Will it be soon?”
Colm shows up in the door, head down, wiping the grease off his hands with a dirty rag. Lord God.
“Have you any juice left in your mobile?” I say.
He hands it to me. 72% battery. I tap in the number for the office of the county manager in Galway. I go through the count in the medicine cabinet as the phone rings and rings. We’re down to bones here. Cobwebs. I try again. The island darkens outside.
I punch in Gavin’s number. Starts to ring. There’s this click on the other end, like he’s picking up. Please pick up.
“Gavin?”
The line goes dead. No bars now. Lord God.
I hand the mobile back to Colm. He puts his hand on my shoulder. “We’ve got to find a land line that works.”
“There’s no power anywhere on the island,” he says, pocketing the mobile. “None of the phones work.”
“They’ll get power back on.”
“The last time the islands lost power was years ago, and it was days before they got it back on. That was some trawler hitting the cable by accident. This is something else.”
“It was a meteor, like.”
He scratches his chin. “There was no explosion.”
“It was high.”
“Meteors don’t generate any kind of electrical interference, so far as I know. I don’t know. You see this light, and the power goes out right after. It’s like an EMP.”
“What you mean, EMP?”
“Electromagnetic pulse,” he says. “Off a nuke, like.”
“Nuke?”
The batteries die on the monitor. The alarm fails. The only sound now the soft crunch of the bag as Saidbh squeezes it, the soft whine wheezing in and out of Roisin.
“Can we get the plane over?” Saidbh says.
“There’s no calling him.”
Even if there was, what would be the point? Roisin likely wouldn’t survive the trip and if she did, then what? She rots on a gurney in the overcrowded corridor of a powerless hospital in Galway? The car park? And then what of the lucky one of us nurses who gets drafted to squeeze that bag on her across the bay for the next few days or weeks until we get power back?
I call out to Aoife. She comes in, red nosed and bleary eyed. “She’s no other relations here?”
Aoife shakes her head. “They’ve all left or passed.”
“You’ve got to get the generator back,” I say to Colm.
“Mairead… I’m telling you, even if I replaced the fuel lines, the circuits will all be fried from the blast.”
“What are you talking about a blast for?”
“I don’t think this is a meteor.”
“You’ll be figuring out the generator, Colm. You’ll be coming back in here in an hour telling me so.”
Aoife massages my sore hand. My fingers. I look off at nothing as she does. Saidbh gets this hangdog look in her eyes. We switch off again. How many times now. Saidbh’s eyes deadlock on Aoife’s thumbs as they spread across her palm.
“They keep getting younger on you,” I say.
Aoife’s hands glide up Saidbh’s arm. “It’s my burden. What was he saying? About nukes?”
“He’s daft,” I say.
Saidbh nods, comforted. “Why would you set off a nuke in the air, anyways?”
“A test, like,” Aoife says. “A warning.”
“It was a meteor,” I say.
“The news said there was a bomb in Iran, though.”
“Aren’t you finished?”
She releases her grip on Saidbh. “Finished, yeah.”
Aoife leaves the room. The door to the loo slams shut. I keep pumping the bag, trying to become the repetition of it. The mindlessness. Forget everything else. Nukes. Generators. The failure of power on the island. In my own heart.
“I wish I could do for her,” Saidbh says.
“Give it another hour.”
“Sorry?”
“Nothing,” I say.
I close my eyes. I forget everything but the crunch of the bag and sigh of Roisin’s breath, the world collapsing and expanding in the darkness again and again and again.
He works all through the night, Colm. By torchlight. By candle. After dawn, he comes into the room and I know. He leaves without saying a word. Aoife’s awake, still.
“She’s been months on the machine,” she says.
Saidbh sits up in her chair. “The lights will come back.”
“I don’t think they will,” I say.
Saidbh stands up, in tears already. “And if they do, they’ll charge the lot of us with murder.”
“As if there’ll ever be any inquiry,” Aoife says.
Saidbh flees the room, sobbing.
“Go after her, will you? And close the door behind you.”
“I’ll stay with you,” Aoife says.
“I’ll be doing this on my own.”
The door whimpers shut. I brush Roisin’s hair. 84 years, this woman. Three boys and a girl. The boys all lost to the sea. The girl lost to a boy in Limerick. A grandchild. A boy, I think. Your age. A bit older, could be. Months on the machine. I take the bag from her mouth. She sighs, Roisin. Long, and full.
A disciplined set of men with the only dependable work on the island shoulders the casket through the cemetery. A boat, adrift in fog. All the islanders follow, tethered in black back down the road. Ma weaves in and out of the headstones. She pulls at the ends of the fluttering beach grass. Her hands fill. Ma looks hard at Da’s stone. The memory of him, that he’s gone, crosses her face like the shadow of a cloud. Her hair comes away in her hands, as if her memory lies in the white strands, in the grooves of her sunken cheeks, the blood that wells beneath the raked dry skin on the back of her hand.
“You should plant me,” she says. “Before it gets too cold. Bury me, while there’s still men.”
“I should have them dig us both a spot while they’re here.”
“Not you,” she says. “This isn’t your place.”
“What?”
“I heard this scratching. Do you know? I thought that bloody dog was at the door again.”
“Ma… what?”
“He always comes round. The dog. Do you know, he’s been in the house. I’ve seen him, I know I have.”
Ma looks at me with a hapless smile. The woman never smiles. She pats my raw cheeks, like she did when I was a girl, and then on her tippy-toes slobbers a kiss on me.
“I want you to go,” she says.
She trundles down the road home. My eyes follow the rim of the island enclosing Kilbanna, the cemetery and everything I have ever known. A crater the island is, flooding with the sea. Mounds of dried seaweed cake the inside of the stile. The cemetery unrecognizable, paved in fallen stones. Ancient graves turned sinkholes near the dunes. The sea is hungry. Impatient.
Where will my grave be?
Some on the island shrug at the absence of electricity, their memory elastic enough to remember a time without it. At the home, memory is as scarce as power. Drugs. Comfort. We cluster the residents between the sitting room and the dining room, and the only fireplaces. Coal burns fast. We’re poor in wood on the island. Trees go from rare to extinct. Down in Kilbanna the men form teams that break down the damaged homes and buildings. In a couple weeks, the harbor is as sparse as it was a century ago. It’s a bit communist how they dole out everyone’s share, but for the most part everyone is peaceable about it. There’s no money for anyone to buy or barter with, anyhow. If we had money, we’d b
urn it. Aoife surveys the home, determining which sections we can cbreak down for kindle and in what order so at the end we’re left in the dining room, whoever’s left. We’ll burn through our morphine before we burn down this building.
My only duty now is managing suffering.
Everyone on the island comes to the home for their ills. Malnutrition. Anxiety. Alcohol poisoning. How is it there’s still drink left. My stomach growls. I excuse myself but the girls act like it’s no bother. Hunger is just another sound here like the sigh of forced breath. Unforced moans. Dying alarms.
I’m starving.
The door handle of the staff loo strains against the lock.
I’m not asleep, but not awake. The handle is furious. Aoife calls for me from the other side and I know it’s bad. She’s hyperventilating. Eoin Mac Cába got in a fit over not having his arthritis pills. His hands curled up into nautilus shells. She could do nothing but warm them, try and massage them. He cried about the pain until his heart gave out. This look in his old eyes like it was a surprise. The son comes for the body. The next morning, smoke falls across the hills like fog. Men form a line down to the shore and pass old kegs filled with seawater up the high road. I expect to see Gavin among them.
I am reliably disappointed.
Michael Burke gurgles loud in the dining room. I turn his head every fifteen minutes to drain the saliva building in his throat, but there’s nothing else for him. His body shuts down now without the dialysis machine. This frost collects on his skin from the uremia. I dab his skin and hold his hand and turn his head and that’s all I can do. I wait. Days this goes on. I expect him to pass quiet and easy but nothing goes easy now.
“Are we just going to wait?” Aoife says, voice a hush though no one can hear. “Until they’re half in the box?”
“It’d be murder besides.”
“It’s murder listening to them. I don’t know what’s worse, listening to their bellies rumbling, or mine.”