A Country of Eternal Light

by Darby Harn

  Eeeeee-fahhhhh.

  Your name is so strange. I love your name. I love you. Your roundness. Softness. Your salt fluff. I melt into this wetness with you this smell, this taste, this being of the sea the sky the rock.

  Saidbh pools between us. I want some, she says.

  Aoife suits herself in Saidbh. Water. I need water. How do I get out. I need to consult my original plans. Where are my plans. I had all these plans. A way out. It all made sense.

  I’m lost.

  Edna Malloy crawls through a tunnel. I follow her to the armory, the library and the planetarium which being honest is just an open window but I believe in making use of found things. I found all these stars. Stars like old Irish families with too many children. Barren stars. Bereaved stars. Stars living on top of each other with all the weight of the universe on them and so they cave in on themselves, and take down everything with them.

  This is a takedown.

  A coup. They’re trying to kill us. Aoife. Saidbh. They’re trying to kill us, they’re trying to take our fort, they’re trying to take what’s ours but they won’t. There’s no taking this from me.

  Do you know?

  There’s no taking this from me. No breaching these walls. Everything I have is within these walls. I don’t have you. Ma. Gavin. Lord God. Aoife. Had she given all the love she spread around to just one person, they would have built castles for her. We need to extend the walls. Fortify our position. This will all be yours. I’m giving you the world, Aoife. I’m trusting you with the world. You’ve never let me down. You’ve never quit on me. Ever since we were girls you’ve been right there and I left you for the States and I rubbed your nose in my ‘success’ and it was all shite, Aoife. I was a fucking blubbering mess sore for home and I should have come home sooner. I should have had more time with Da and Ma and you and it would have been different. It all would have been different, had I come home even though she nags at me, New York does, like the lover who could have been the one, should have been the one.

  I find Gavin in the catacombs. “You’ve come back?”

  “Is this a pillow fort?”

  “It’s class, yeah.”

  He shrugs. “Is there a password or something?”

  “Password… what’s the password?”

  “How many guesses do I get?”

  “I’m asking you, like.”

  “Um… ‘Don’t start?’”

  Fuck’s sake. “This is all too analog.”

  He takes my hand. He’s strange. A gelatin skeleton. That rhymes. “I heard you screaming.”

  “You did not.”

  “I heard you all the way in America.”

  “I don’t do that. The neighbors.”

  “This seems like a pretty heavy trip.”

  “Tizzzzzzzzz.”

  “Let’s get you some water.”

  “We have to be quick, like. We’ve a planning session in a few minutes. We’re going to extend the walls out around the world. I have concerns about the long term viability of the project, but so long as the girls don’t union up we’ll be tits.”

  “We can make this work,” he says.

  “You’re just like Colm. You think you can fix anything.”

  “I’m not very handy.”

  “You sell yourself short,” I say.

  “You kind of have to pick a lane.”

  I kiss him. “You left your bag.”

  “My bag?”

  “On the tarmac. I brought it home.”

  “I’ll have to come back for it, then.”

  “That would be something now, considering.”

  “If something is easy, I won’t do it.”

  This is very true. “If only I lived down the street, like. You’d have nothing to do with me at all.”

  “My actions are often disproportionate to their aims.”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” I say. “If you came back.”

  “You don’t want to kill yourself?”

  “I want…”

  He takes my hand. I’m so tiny in his hands. Small enough to be inside everything. I feel everything. The satin burn of the sheets. The folding tongue of the outstretched floor. The pull of the waves. The waves lick at me, tongue their want against the frozen stone of my body and I’m stuck. I feel so young. I feel alive.

  A-L-I-V-E.

  Sounds so strange. I feel everything. His kiss. His hands. His fingers. He traces the curve of me down inside my knickers. I fall against him, helpless. He fingers the elastic, round and round, teasing and his hand dives and finds me and God, Lord God his hands are quick with me, slick with me and I feel him, I feel us, I feel so young I feel so alive I’m alive alive ALIVE.

  “I want to live…”

  The fort shudders from my screams. I thrash and pull and I feel him on the other side of the sheet and don’t let go, please come back and the sheet comes off him and it’s Aoife trying to lift me as she always does but I keep screaming. I want to live. Lord God, I want to live. The curtains fall on Aoife.

  I need water.

  The surf rushes in over my ankles. Low tide leaves the beach naked. The salt coarse on my tongue. An ocean of undrinkable water. All we’re left with. Nothing to drink and nowhere to stand. Blood scars the eastern horizon. Stars scattered like buckshot. The cold of the water settles in me. The sober clarity of the air. The dog lingers beside the rumpled rock, his eyes heavy on the shadowed mainland.

  “Let’s go home,” I say.

  Ma sits in front of the telly. Dark as the sky. She pounds her fist against the arm of her chair. She throws the remote.

  It lands at my feet. “You’re making a mess, Iris.”

  She forgot I wasn’t there. “Is that you, Ma?”

  She falls at me in this exhausted embrace. Her clothes need changing. She smells like a car that’s never been cleaned out. How long has she been sitting there, clicking through channels we no longer get. How long has it been since I cared.

  As the water cools in the tub, I peel off her heavy, stained clothes. She giggles like a girl. Her nudity embarrassing. Have I ever seen her naked? A glimpse here. There. For the first time in my life I truly see my mother. Pale. Veined with blue. This tiny, fragile, shivering thing. I get out my clothes and guide her into the tub with me. She squeals at every trickle of water down the back of her neck. She shakes the soap out of her hair like a dog and if I could wish her in the sink. Hold her in my arms and make it all go away with a kiss.

  “Caoimhe,” she says. “Caoimhe, Caoimhe, Caoimhe.”

  “Ma… who was Caoimhe?”

  She goes on repeating her name. A song now. She never mentioned her in the past, so far as I can remember. We’ve no relations by that name. A friend, like. A schoolmate. Maybe Da knew her. I wish Da was here. I wish I could have done this for him. I wish I could have done so much more for you. I wish I could have done so much better. I failed you. I failed all of us and I’m failing us all now wanting to live when there’s no hope. When you’re waiting for me.

  Aren’t you waiting.

  “Stop your crying, girl,” Ma says, and kisses me.

  I kiss her back. This beautiful stranger.

  I wash the grime from her face. Her hands. I pour water over her head and her face rises, like a flower to the sun. For a long time I just hold her. We prune, Iris and I, and I hold her still.

  Chapter Fourteen

  His bag sits at the end of the bed, where it has since the day he left.

  I keep thinking he’ll come through the door and I’ll hand it to him. A yo-yo, you are. Very organized, Gavin. Everything rolled and tucked in place. Economical. I pull on one of his shirts. His sweaters. This smell to them from not being washed in ages now. Sawdust. The sea. Sweat. In the inside pocket, I find a journal. I shouldn’t. Flowers tucked in the pages. Strands of my hair. His passport.

  Lord God.

  He left it. There was no getting on any plane without it. There was no getting home. Gavin. What did you do.

  Do you know.


  “Do you think he could be still on the mainland?”

  This shit eating grin peels off Aoife’s lips. The tension in her releases and she unspools across me in the cot we share in the sitting room at the home. I don’t know why we bother sleeping. We have all of eternity to rest and yet here we are, in our last days, exhausted and spent, trying to get a few minutes of kip. Some warmth. Some distance from the dark.

  “He must be,” she says.

  “What do you think he’s doing?”

  She shrugs. “He’s money.”

  “He’s alone.”

  What did he do when he realized he didn’t have his passport? Try and get back here? Did they lose power in Dublin? What did I do to him. Everyone who touches me. What did I do.

  “Do you think he left it on purpose?”

  She rests her head on my shoulder. “He’ll come back.”

  “Would the plane still work? With the EMP?”

  “You think that’s what it was?”

  There haven’t been planes. There hasn’t been anything since that night. The only business in the sky this demolition.

  “You don’t think Dublin, though?” I say.

  “Why would they nuke Dublin? It’s no place to be on a Saturday night, but a bomb is a bit excessive.”

  Why would they do any of it. Who would. The eejits. All of them. They couldn’t fucking wait. The tides have gone mad. The earth is opening up. The sky is falling. And we’re not to be left out. Never to be out done, us. Off go our missiles, as if to say: Show me your best apocalypse. We’ll do you one better.

  “You don’t think New York?”

  She kisses my cheek. “He’ll come back.You’ll hear that plane coming over and you’ll run down the road to him and it will be just like a fucking movie, it will. And then it will be just the three of us.”

  I pinch her tit. “And Saidbh?”

  Aoife shrugs.

  “You may have unlocked a secret level with her.”

  “She’s sixteen.”

  “Hardly matters now.”

  “I don’t think it will be a viable defense, like.”

  “I see her looking at you.”

  Aoife squirms, uncomfortable. “She’s only beautiful.”

  “Give it a go.”

  She snorts. “You’re telling me, give it a go?”

  “The circumstances aren’t the same.”

  “Aren’t they? Aren’t I wanting for someone else?”

  I pinch her again. “It doesn’t have to be love. It doesn’t have to be anything. But it can be good.”

  “Her parents may object.”

  “I don’t see why. You’re only twice her age. You only gave her ecstasy. And then molested her. Repeatedly.”

  Aoife crosses her arms. “Like you remember.”

  If drinking helped me forget, I’d never have stopped. I remember everything. My mind this clutter I keep turning over searching for what I really want and can never find.

  “It’s been weeks, Aoife.”

  “He’ll come back, Gavin.”

  Do I want him to come back. Didn’t I want him home. Isn’t this why; this speeding downhill now toward our end. A year, they say. We don’t have a year. I don’t think we have months.

  What did I do.

  Apocalypses pile on themselves, all waiting their turn. Unnatural clouds, heavy with the ash of volcanoes or nuclear blasts or both lid what daylight there is. The days endless despite their brevity; day in name only, the day a long plow through darkness to an oasis of a lesser dark only to trudge, helplessly, into a more bountiful one. It’s as if the black hole has already swallowed the sun, and now the earth circles the event horizon, time stretched out thin and far as we spiral around and around into the passionate darkness below.

  I become the stink and the squalor of the house. Ma runs amok through the upstairs and downstairs, the garden out back, the road out front. My energy and will to deal with her gone, along with any sense of time. She is a child. I am old and tired.

  We are all dead, fit for graves yet to be dug.

  Spray rains down in ice pellets on the low road. Birds flit inside a house near the pier, exposed to the elements from a boulder the waves must have spit ashore. The boulder doesn’t seem limestone or shale, or any part of The Burren. Was it some chunk the ocean bit off from Greenland? Iceland? America? Or was it something the sea had swallowed once long, long ago and now finally spit out in its death rattle? I reach for my mobile. Life real only in pictures. Bloody thing doesn’t work anymore.

  I wonder if he’s called me.

  Snow buries the island as never before. You never saw snow. Drifts make the roads and boreens treacherous back and forth between the house and the nursing home. Wind licked curls hide depressions in the ground. Lagoons form from the ocean spray showering on the cliffs. I melt the snow to drink at the home, knowing it could be contaminated with radiation, but if so then we’re all soaking it in every bleeding day. No obvious signs of radiation sickness manifest on the island, but cutoff from the mainland, there is no way of knowing the extent of the war or even its veracity, though no one doubts the sky.

  I burn the remaining coal. Then the old, dirtied newspapers papering the floors of the house. Then books. All my books. Clothes. Whatever will give us warmth in the home. Ma sits in her recliner, curling her hair with her finger and watching the dead telly. No idea where she is. Days without pills now. All her words like gibberish.

  It’s just waiting, now.

  I press towels against the cracks of the doors, and against the porous edges of the windows to try and keep the cold out. My breath clouds the air. Ma goes behind me and puts them all in the hamper. Her arthritis flares unabated in the cold, until finally I find her rickety and crumpled in the yard out back. Aoife helps me get her inside, into her bed. I try to get some water down her. I dab the sides of her mouth with a cold washcloth. She smacks her lips. Blubbers nonsense at me.

  “Baaaa daaaa soooooo.”

  All night long. I sit by the bed, listening to it unfold.

  “Ahhhhh emmmmm ohhhhh.”

  There’s no medicine. No food, really. I know this is happening and I don’t want it to. I should be thankful she will not suffer through the worst ahead of us but I don’t want to lose my ma. I hold her hand. Wipe away drool. Pretend I’m not bleeding terrified. I sit there, staring into the white space of her hand. My mother a blank page to me even now. The words don’t come. Hours. Days. Her story is her story. Most of it will die with her. How she ever allowed Da to share any of it with her, I’ll never know. All I have are questions now. Things I never thought to ask before. Now it’s too late.

  The last sheep go to the knives. The last cows. Some of the farmers have moved on to their horses. Very little of their butcher makes it beyond their own plates. No one has money or anything of value to trade for food, except more and more, room and board. Those in the low-lying houses abandon them, going to family or neighbors higher up the steps of the island. Water creeps up the road. Splashes against the style at high tide. The cemetery is said to be under, most of the day now. I will not be able to bury Ma there, like she asked me to.

  Like I promised.

  The island shrinks but in the space left, island gossip seems thicker. Juicier. Gossip keeps us full, hours each day. Aoife knows all the business. I imagine her going door to door before she comes here, collecting news like honey and then rubbing her legs together, distracting both our fears with the sound of her own voice, her own inexplicable relish.

  “You awake?” she says, sipping on fish soup.

  I open my eyes. “Hmm?”

  “You’re nodding off on me.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’m boring you.”

  Every morning she comes to check on Ma. Every day she has some new dirt. We never did this before. Always it was down the pub at night. I enjoy our mornings. The sunshine of her voice. It delays the pain waiting, lurking, ticking away at the clock until I bed down,
strip down, and the pain goes to work on me again, all through the night into the morning until she comes.

  “I’m not bored,” I say.

  She smiles with relief. “I’ll just go home and sit there in the dark with them, anyways.”

  “How is she, then? Saidbh?”

  “Getting on, I suppose. We’re… sorting it out.” She winces. “I may have woken a beast, Mairead. I’m not proud.”

  I smile. “Let it be her kills you, then.”

  Her lip curls. “It’s not safe out here, for either of you. You should be up at the home.”

  “This is home,” I say.

  Aoife looks down into her soup. “Saidbh asks me. If we’re going to pass out the morphine at the home. If we’re going to be there. She asks me about people dying. All the time.”

  “She’s just… thinking ahead. I’m sure.”

  “Do you? Think ahead?”

  There isn’t that far to think ahead. I can see all that is left in our lives out the window, in the closing distance between the house and the sea, creeping up the island.

  Colm casts out his line from a cliff that had been the ledge of a dale, brooking an old grazing field near the rim of the island. I don’t know how the man managed such a feat, climbing down karst steps calved from the face of the cliffs hundreds of feet over the mad sea, or what possessed him to even try. Hunger, I suppose. Or sheer boredom.

  “Have you got a death wish?” I say.

  He bobbles his rod. “I could ask you the same.”

  I ease down the steps, slick with spray and all of them so big you have to go flat on your belly to get down to the next. Colm reaches up to catch me, his hands on my legs and I come down in his arms. Twenty years go between us.

  “If I had any wishes,” I say. “I wouldn’t spend them on myself.”