A Country of Eternal Light

by Darby Harn

  Lord God.

  I’m drowning. I’m drowning I can’t swim I can’t swim I can’t breathe the water is dark and cold like sucking on me like mud dead sheep down here carcasses like cobwebs hung on trees caught with mud and shit and death I’m drowning get back get back get back GET BACK the ground I feel the ground that’s the ground up up UP God damn you GET UP you crossed Galway Bay in a tray for fucking chips you’re not dying in five feet of water in a fucking field God knows where you’re not dying here.

  You’re not dying.

  The air stabs a thousand daggers in my lungs. A good, clean pain. I claw my way back to the grass. Stupid. What were you thinking. The dead sheep floats away on my wake.

  There’s no getting him now.

  I cut some branches from pine trees and build a little fire under their thrush, off the road far enough hopefully someone won’t see. The fire is nice and my pride in making it warms but I can’t get this cold out of me. I wrap up tight in his shirt. The smell of him still in its fiber.

  Where are you, Gavin. Are you home. Be home. Be safe.

  I won’t get as far tomorrow. I’ll be lucky to get back to Athenry. I’ll put up there. Find some food. There has to be some food somewhere. Don’t go out in the country again without any plan or energy. Two days. Two days I will have been at this and all the farther I will have gotten is fucking Athenry.

  I have to get on.

  I have to get to Shannon fast as I can and get a helicopter or plane to get me back to the island. I’ll tell them about the Russians. Go and defend your country. Charge of the light brigade and so. So hungry. I’ll be home. I’ll be home for Christmas, I know. It’s not Christmas yet. Is it? I’ve no idea.

  We’ll be together for Christmas.

  Night drowns with its muddy dark. I’m so tired. This is no country of rest. So much restlessness. So much yearning to leave and spread wings we haven’t got feathers for. And then this pull. This tide sweeping us back home. All that leaves returns. An tús. I’m so scared. This fear. This cold. What is there beyond numbness? Nothing. I can’t feel my fingers and toes. I can’t feel anything but the cold.

  I wake up covered in snow.

  Lord God. An inch of it at least. Get up. This pain. It hurts so much. Get up. I can’t even see the road. Where’s the road. I follow the line of the pine trees heavy with snow and shrugging off their burden but I can’t see the way to the road. I don’t know the way to the road. I walked up here a good ways from where I left the bike. Where did I leave the bike? That dog of his drove me mad, but if he was here. He’d see me out. I’m so alone. I want to go home. I want to go home. What am I doing? What the fuck am I doing out here in the snow in a fucking field I’m going the wrong way. God.

  I want to go home.

  The snow slushes. I dip into a puddle. Christ. Water again. I back up so fast I fall down. The cold of the snow so deep it burns. I can’t see the water. The sheep complain somewhere close but I can’t see them. The world a white out. I walk from the sound of the sheep. Back toward the trees. I find the trees. I follow them to their end, and the fence along the side of the road. A foot of snow in the ditch. Ice cubes in my shoes. The snow slithers around my socks and mashes to cubes and melts slow against my coldness and I’m walking barefoot in an icebox down the road, an inch at a time looking for my bike along the fence, hand over my face in a blizzard.

  I can’t find the bike.

  This feels too far. I’ve walked too far. Where is it? Where the fuck is it? Did someone take it? Why didn’t I take it over the fence with me? Lord God. Calm down.

  Breathe.

  The snow drifts. The accumulation breaks like ice around my ankles. Up and down the road I go, in and out of ditches keeping water like a secret. Every few minutes I think I see the outline of the bike under some snow and I scratch off a fence post. Up and down I go. The same stretch a hundred times. The snow never quits. The wind screams at me, walking back and forth in the shite like a fucking chicken. Up and down I go and finally I keep on down, back up the road toward Athenry.

  I have to get on.

  The feeling in my feet gone.

  The snow impassable. Somewhere I come on a roundabout. A few cars and trucks left there as if to block the ways on and through. All the doors on automatic locks. I break a window out of a coach van with my elbow and climb in the back. I’ve no blanket or any way to warm myself so I just huddle up in the aisle between the seats in my coldness and I think of myself walking out on the tarmac at the airport in Galway. The plane taxiing out.

  Wait.

  I chase after it and this time, I’m quick. I open the door and it’s Gavin at the controls. He flies us back to the island and I’m in front of the coal fire back home, sitting in his lap. Happy and sweet in his arms. He loves me and he warms me and I’m warm and he never left. I never lost my place. I stayed home safe and warm.

  I can’t get warm.

  Dull light illuminates the coach. My breath frosts to my lips. A morgue van, like. My bones crack like ice as I crawl to the window. Lord God. Drifts over the hoods. Three feet of it or more. There’s no biking in this. I lost the bike. There’s no walking. I can’t walk. I’m so cold. Sleet scratches against the glass. I’m so hungry. I’m so lost.

  Mo leanbh. Mo stór.

  You have to forgive Ma. She tried. She tried so hard. I’ll find you. No matter what I’ll find you. Stay safe with Da and don’t worry about me. Don’t worry. It’s not where you die. Not how. This is just a body. I am just a body. I will find you in spirit. Nothing can destroy the spirit. Not the black hole. Our spirit is beyond gravity and consciousness and the limits of the world. It can’t get us. It can’t get us where we’re going. The wheel broken. We’re going to live forever and ever together you and me and Da and Ma and Gavin and the bleeding dog we’re going to be a family I promise. I promise.

  Declan.

  I’m with you. I’m with you now. I’m in the cold and the dark and I won’t leave this time. This time I’m staying. Here I am. This is the same cold. The same dark as yours. Snow buries the windshield. Scratching against the glass. The coach. This is my burial. The whole earth the same grave. The world is a grave.

  All this way.

  All this way to die in a coach in a roundabout in the country in the snow, in the cold so cold in the dark I’m in the dark the cold the sound of the world breaking I am the sound I am inside the breaking this is the breaking now baby I

  am

  the

  light

  within the coach the snow glinting diamonds swirling inside the door is open someone opens the door someone is inside the coach. A cut of dark. Not this. Go away. Please. Dark. They climb in the back with me. A Russian doll of coats and scarves. No face. Dusted in snow. I try to speak. I don’t have anything. Go away. Don’t hurt me. They start to unbutton my coat.

  Don’t.

  They’re opening the coat on me. My shirt. It’s all I have of him left don’t take it and they unzip their coat as well and the one underneath and the fleece underneath that all the way down to the shock of dark hair within a baby sling.

  Lord God. It’s a baby. She has a baby.

  Her scarf unravels a little as she hovers over me. Asian, like. She lies down next to me on the floor with her back to me like we’re spooning. Doesn’t say a word. She peels the gloves off my fingers. My fingers are purple. Almost black at their tips. She massages them in hers for a little bit and then puts me in her gloves.

  She pulls a blanket out of her backpack and unfolds it over us. This warmth grows between us and slowly it flints to my chest my arms my thighs my legs and I burn with pain but she’s warm and I’m warm and I hold her close. I hold her very close.

  I can’t make out the words. My lips glued shut. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you thank you

  thank

  you

  Wind shakes the coach. She’s facing me. She cradles my head in her hands and puts my lips to her naked breast. Drink, she say
s, her accent very heavy. You must drink. She’s swollen with milk. Blue with veins. Instinct strips me of all pretense. I wet my lips and put them soft to her. Milk dribbles out. I lick it away from her skin. So hungry. A little sweet. This soft cinnamon aftertaste. I tasted my own milk when I was nursing you. You get curious. I don’t know. Mine was a bit nutty. I take her full in my mouth and settle in under her arm. The pressure in her breast eases. The pressure in her.

  I float on her warmth. Her sweetness. The baby thrashes inside her sling. Jealous, like. I touch the baby’s cheek. The color back in my hands now. The baby grips my finger so hard it hurts but I don’t mind. Such a tiny pink wonder. All gummy grimaces and drool. I brush her cheek and she sucks on my finger.

  Lord God.

  I fall asleep to her taste in my mouth. To a dream of a milk bubble I float in with you, laughing, kissing, being children both of us like we’re in some chamber of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, if he had built it inside a womb.

  “We cannot stay here,” Sumi says, her every word measured, as if she poured them out in cups. Such calm. Poise. If I had you out here in the snow and the shit I’d be right out my fucking mind. She seems catatonic. Medicated, like.

  A line of houses marks out another road off the roundabout going north. “We can wait for the snow to melt in one of those,” I say, hoping the people inside are as hospitable as Sumi. Somehow I think I’ve exhausted my luck in this world. “With the weather here, it won’t be long before it does.”

  “There will be more water after.”

  “I think water is all we can look forward to.”

  Sumi situates the baby inside her sling, and then begins the process of pulling on all her layers of coats.

  “She’s beautiful,” I say. “What’s her name?”

  “I have not given her a name.”

  She can’t be more than a few weeks old. “Still debating?”

  “I will not name her.”

  “Why?”

  “I do not want to get attached.”

  “I’d say you’re attached.”

  “I could not leave her. I tried.”

  “What you mean, you tried?”

  She stares off into nothing. “I was confused. I was in an alley. A kind of door, between doors. I was screaming.”

  Her eyes glaze over with memory. I’m looking at myself, in the worst of it after you died. She says her husband was a doctor at St. James in Dublin. He studied abroad a year in Osaka and after he came home they kept up on email. Finally he wore her down – a shock, this – and she packed her entire life into a suitcase and moved to Dublin. The day it all went to pieces he put her in a car with some clothes and money and told her to go to where they holidayed near Salthill, in Galway. He needed to oversee the cardiac ward got to its safety point and then he was going to meet up with her.

  I’ll be right behind you, he told her.

  The car died with every other on the N4 at the exact same moment. There was a flash in the sky, she said, out over the Irish Sea. She followed people back into the city but by the time she got to Maynooth, smoke shrouded Dublin and she thought the city might have been bombed as well. The roads became veins surging with panic and fear. Not knowing what else to do she went back to the car. She got her things and eight months pregnant Sumi started walking west, toward Galway, toward where he would meet her.

  A couple weeks back, in a town somewhere on the M6, she delivered the baby in that alley. Alone.

  “The alley was like an echo chamber,” she says. “I heard myself screaming, and I could not tell if it was from the moment before or the moment to come. And then my screams became her screams and I knew I was in the future. But the future was the same as the past. Time has become confused. We live in fear of comets and waves but these are minor compared to the ruination of time. A dog came along. It ate the afterbirth. I watched. I felt like he was eating me and but I was not eaten. I was dead but not dead. I had become someone else and I was a baby again.”

  What do you say. I take her hand. “It will be ok.”

  She looks at me, her eyes wide in surprise, as if to say: you stupid, stupid girl. Nothing will ever be ok again. It must have been the same look I gave Gavin when he told me the same.

  “Soldiers came. A man helped me. I left.”

  Poor woman. She was alone here except for her husband. She’s been through hell. “I’m sorry.”

  “I think this must be what eternity is like,” she says. “Where time does not exist, because it exists in every state. I think we are dead.”

  “We’re alive,” I say.

  “There is no one here. Everyone has left.”

  “There were loads in Castlebar.”

  “Where are they now?”

  I sigh. “We’re alive, Sumi. We’re going to live.”

  “We are not meant for eternity. We cannot stay here.”

  “I’m going to Shannon. You’re coming with me. You and the baby. I’m going to get us home. All of us.”

  Her face is infinitely stoic, but something changes in her eyes as I tell her my plan. This distance grows behind them. I thought the prospect of a safe, warm place out of the cold would lift her spirit, but she sinks into this sallow.

  “It is not realistic they would do this for you.”

  “They’ll be defending their country.”

  “The country is lost. Everything is lost.”

  “Nothing’s lost. We can make it together. You and me and the baby. They’ll help us. They will.”

  She nods as I go through the plan again, making it real in words, her eyes settling out the window at the falling snow.

  Chapter Twenty

  The snow is light today but there’s so much.

  A field of feathers up to your knees. You could lie down and go to sleep in it but don’t you dare. Don’t you dare. Don’t die here. After ten minutes I’m wiped. A trail of sick dotting back to the coach. The houses are farther away than I thought. Miles. So quiet. Not a sound except for the wind speeding against the countryside. Black birds perch on dead electrical lines toggling above and watch as we trudge through the snow. Waiting. I hold their gaze as we pass, as the birds tick to the sides to keep us in view.

  Waiting.

  The first house we come to, an older man meets us at the gate with a pair of cutting shears, like.

  “Move on,” he says.

  “We’re freezing,” I say. “We’re starving.”

  “So is everyone else.”

  “She’s got a baby.”

  “I don’t care what she’s got. We wouldn’t be in this mess if not for these Chinese people. Get out of here. Don’t try any of the houses here. I see you stop I’ll come running.”

  We go on. I don’t know how far. Until I can no longer see the smoke from that man’s chimney. We are deep in the country. The sun shy behind clouds that move and curl swift as cigarette smoke. We are headed north this road. I think it’s north. Aren’t we going back to the M6? To Athenry? I don’t know. We come along to another cluster of farms, across a rail line. Smoke puffs out the chimneys of some houses. Out in the fields I see the blurry silhouettes of men shoveling and dredging the ground for peat. We keep walking. Night comes. We sleep in a car off the side of the road, our warmth all that sustains us.

  “I am not Chinese,” she says.

  “Never mind that old git.”

  “He thinks China is responsible for the war.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  The baby cries. Sumi seems not to hear.

  “In China they used to set baby girls out in the cold to die. Perhaps they still do. Girls were unwanted. I used to think this horrific, but now I see the practicality in it.”

  Lord God. She’s cracked, like. “How?”

  “We talk of life as if it is something singular and precious, but it is not. Life is like grass. It grows everywhere and sometimes you must trim it, or it will overrun you.”

  “Sumi…”

  “Perhaps this is why t
he black hole has come.”

  “What are you…”

  “There is too much life here. I read once it is possible the universe formed from a black hole. The death of a star, in another universe. It is possible there are many universes, infinite universes, created from the plunge of gravity through space and time. The process repeats itself, endlessly, light and darkness never able to defeat the other because darkness begets light and light darkness. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone. Hundreds of billions of black holes, potentially. Hundreds of billions of universes. Death begets life. Life begets death. There must be balance. Weight.”

  “There’s this theory,” I say. “Information can’t be destroyed, like. Anything that goes in, it has to come out.”

  “We reach for theory as we once reached for God.”

  “This Hawking bloke. He said this thing… Gavin told me this thing Hawking said, about if you end up in a black hole, don’t give up. You can get out. We can get out of this, Sumi.”

  “You have a great yearning in you. I hear it in your voice. I felt it on your lips. You are still hungry for life.”

  “I just want to get home to my family.”

  We’re going to find a place out of the cold. The snow will melt. I’ll get to Shannon and get back home.

  “There is too much life here,” she says, as the baby cries.

  Around midday we come to a house with no smoke. I knock on the doors. The windows. I wait for an answer and then sure no one’s home, I bust out the glass of the back door.