Dead I Well May Be (26 page)

It’s the hurricane and rain is unceasing. Aye, it’s obvious now. Apparent in the signs and portents. The rain is a baptism and a cleansing agent. There is transparency in its coldness. The wind, too, speaks. It casts up euphonies of the dead. They have promises and they make you swear. Their talk is easy and reposed, but such are the words of phantoms, for they have time on their hands and are removed from the pressures of the Earth. They haunt you and urge you on. Pressure you, hint. It isn’t the banshee, there’s no death, at least not yet. Just voices. Their talk is Spanish and Mayan and Olmec and languages that have died here long ago but whose parallel exists somewhere in Kamchatka or Mongolia or the Aleutians. They murmur softly and tug your beard and trip your feet.

Paddy fields, a river valley, a collapsed stone wall for shelter. A cough and an adjourned heartbeat. Your eyes close and reopen again slowly, with sleep in them. The grass makes a hole for you.

The rivers rise and the rain and wind come so loud you lose yourself.
The trees are less (or more) than dead now, they are stone: fossils, and around them the smell of sage becomes overwhelming. It’s almost enough to make you long for the jungle. But it’ll come again. You’ll see.

One foot in front of another. Pain that is no longer there. It has ceased to exist, for how can there be pain when there cannot be that intensity of feeling. It is possible to move to a plane beyond pain and beyond hunger. It is possible to exist just barely above the level of the realm about us. To coast on a slender splinter of consciousness. That’s how a shadow moves. A ghost.

How many days?

Half a week?

A skeleton, a specter, sliding across the land.

A hill, a river, and now a place where humans have been—evidence in the dead wood of telegraph poles. Ancient pines that have been blackened and grooved by weathering and that have numbers on them and strange symbols and the cracks of heat and cold.

But no birds on the wire or the uprights, for the animal realm entire is disappeared; indeed, only the simpler forms of plants survive: sage and small grasses and shrubs and blue lichen and black mosses that coat themselves thinly over a hard, dark soil and bare rock.

Where are compassionate stars, where the sequences of people, the friendly cows and horses? It’s the hurricane, and they have all abandoned ship, deserted and left behind only their music and their trace.

Inclines, rolling valleys.

Scrub that eventually gives way to high grasses.

Fields flooded and everywhere the tracks of creatures making for higher ground. A corn crop ruined. Maize. A commonplace field of potatoes. You dig them up, those livid white tubers.

It’s still night, it’s always night. You can’t see the moon, or Orion, you can’t see where anything is. At least is this still the Earth? Or is it some new place conceived and brought forth by the ocean? These are answers to impossible questions.

A day of this and the contour lines are narrowing and there are palms, and before it is even announced, the forest is there again like a wall. Dense and vine-covered and resistant a little to the gale and rain. The trees whisper to themselves in a vocabulary that no human will
understand. They are talking about water and the brown volcanic earth between their toes and the wind that tears through the upper branches and kills the young and very old.

You can’t follow it but you are enough now of a jungle creature to get the gist. The trepidation. The excitement. The waxy creatures with a thousand eyes and ears. The forest thickens and darkens and there is some cover from the weather. Unlit, and there are demons here. Black, coiled snakes. Jaguars, panthers, monkeys, and the beasts of childhood dreams. Great
el tigre
above you and fantastic beings: griffin and hawkman and things from the last book of Gulliver.

Run-off golden water, wild fruits, bananas. Half of them are poison. Crouch down on one knee and vomit them up, vomit them and drink off a leaf and get up and go on.

You’re walking through the submerged and almost disappeared crater, two hundred miles wide, from a cometary impact sixty-five million years ago, a comet that struck the Yucatán with many times the force of every nuclear weapon currently on the planet, a comet that threw millions of tons of dirt and rock into the atmosphere and blackened the sun for months and changed the climate forever. That wiped out the dinosaurs and two thirds of all other living things on the planet. That made space for a little lemurlike creature that evolved through sixty-five million years into you.

You walk through the crater and you are weak and your wounds are not healing and animals inhabit spaces beneath your pale skin. You limp and the nails have fallen off your toes. You walk and you hallucinate and it occurs to you that perhaps you are already dead. That you are dead and this is hell. That this and all that follows is a rite of passage and a fantasy and you are dead on the wire or mad and in your cell.

You try and penetrate the veil to a higher form of existence, but at present you cannot. This reality appears to be the only one given to you. So it will have to serve.

Your skin is hanging from you and your hair is falling out, you are in rags caked with blood and filth. But you are a holy fool. Enthused. The Lord is in you. You are St. Anthony in the demon-filled desert. You are Diogenes mired in grime. You are the Buddha at Bodhgaya. You are a Jain priest, naked, with a broom before you to sweep away any living
being that you might inadvertently step upon. You are holy because you are possessed by a vision of a future time. It is a bright vision and a tight one, compact. Simple. The truth of it has made you pure. It is you. You are healed and strong and patient. You have bided your time and you have slept alone in the city. No one knows you are there, you have been waiting. Watching. And now you are ready. You have acquired a firearm and you are taking the subway train. You are in a house and you have silenced bodyguards and opposition. You are in a study with a man explaining, pleading, he didn’t know there would be deaths. You don’t want explanations, you just want to pull the trigger and turn and leave. Which you do. You leave and that is all. What happens next, if anything, is irrelevant. The circle is complete, the future event comes back to the now. It is the clarity of this vision that makes your legs move and your lungs breathe. That drives every tendon and nerve within you. Yes, you are beyond pain and beyond hunger. Your mind is cast and your will is subservient to this pact with tomorrow.

What kind of an emotion is revenge? Oh, it is much derided. And observers to an execution will often say that they feel repulsed and unsatiated. That it made no difference. The Hebrew God knows this and reserves the right to vengeance for Himself. It’s an eejit’s game. The cycle of violence that spreads itself out from West Belfast and the Bogside and South Armagh. Tit for tat and eye for eye; didn’t someone say that these rules leave us all blind? And yet what if it’s all you have? There are other motivations for a narrative of your life. Love, ambition, greed. But you have erased them all and there is only one thing left. It’s either that or absorb yourself further into the wraith’s world, disappear completely. No. It isn’t noble, but it’ll do. It is good, good enough.

Not that your thoughts have coalesced into a plan, or even that they make sense at all. It’s rather more that in the cold and the unfeeling extremities of your mind there is one glowing coal that helps you to move, put one foot in front of another.

The vines trip you and the trees talk, but they let you pass. The jaguar sleeps and does not stir. The snake rests. You are a fellow being. You cannot see any of them, but they are there and they recognize you. You are part of this now. The forest. Deep into the bush. The swamp comes up to your knees and the hurricane pauses while the eye crosses.
It is only a respite, but in fact, as you’ll see, the worst is done. The peninsula has broken it. The wind and the rain come again, but they are halfhearted. They have exhausted themselves. It’s a harsh autumn in Rathlin for a day and you sleep in a forest clearing that in County Antrim they would say had been enchanted by the wee people. And when you wake, the sky is gray and the rain is less and the dream within you is fast and clear.

The hurricane had moved northeast and died to a warm drizzle. I slept under a highway bridge, and as the river rose, tiny crabs came out of the water and sidled up the bank. I killed one with a rock and tried to eat the flesh, but it was rancid and not fit for human consumption. The river continued to flood, and it became dangerous under there. I saw that I could be swept away or trapped under the overhang and drowned; but even so, I needed a break from the downpour. The crabs were coming out of the little holes in the mud and soon the concrete slopes were full of them. They crawled over one another and came up to investigate if I was still alive or not. I wondered where we were and tasted the river water and saw that it was fresh. I hadn’t known then that there were such things as freshwater crabs, and for a while I’d assumed I was near the sea. I’d been walking directionless for a long time and, for all I knew, I might have circled back and been close to where I’d started, wherever that was.

I scooted the wee shites away, but they kept coming back and eventually the crabs were too much and I climbed up out of the overhang and went along the road. A road that in good times must be an impressive two-lane affair, cutting through the jungle and the plains, but now, quite frankly, was a fucking mess. Mud and branches and landslides had made it impassable. There was no hitching here, and it was actually easier to walk at a steadier pace going through the jungle.

I was feeling better. I hadn’t eaten and I was sick with fever and I was concerned that the gash on my foot from the razor wire was turning gangrenous, but for some reason I was feeling better.

As the rain eased, the jungle soundtrack picked up again and I began to see the creatures. The ants were the first out, clearing up the
mess like the global janitors they are. Then there were flies and mosquitoes and lizards and then from nowhere came the birds. Blue ones and a crimson one and a parrot or two. It cheered me. I ate some fruit off the trees. By trial and error I’d found which ones didn’t make me throw up. The green prickly ones were ok and the red ones that looked like oranges weren’t bad either. I chewed bark, too, as I walked, and all this time I wasn’t really ever very hungry, which I took as a bit of a bad sign.

Night came, and I climbed a few feet off the ground onto a wide, splayed-out branch and tried to sleep a little. Songs were a great comfort; I didn’t sing but just played them in my head.

Girls. Bridget. Rachel. Cousin Leslie, whose brother-in-law was big-time in the building trade. A foreman. Yeah, don’t worry, Michael, Mr. White doesn’t need muscle. He’s looking for lads from the Old Country who’ll work hard and come on time and take minimum wage. Yeah. Sure. And that’s why I’m here. The jungle.

Noisy. My mind drifted and would not sleep.

What did you say? Revenge. Is that what you said? Is that enough to get you through, can that drive an engine like you? Shouldn’t it be hot, won’t it dampen? No. It’ll do. It isn’t much, but it’s enough and I promise you, it’ll do.

That’s what I was saying. Foolish maybe, but that was it. Thinking too much. Too much. My heart, a snare drum in my ears. And there was a dullness beneath my left knee.

I managed to get off to sleep and woke in the morning, stiff and shivering.

The rain was gone for now. I attempted to climb a tree and get a perspective, but I wasn’t made for climbing yet; walking was hard enough.

I licked dew off a leaf and ate some of the things that looked like pears. During the night, ants had come and made me part of their fraternity, cleaning bits of scabs and exploring unwholesome aspects of my skin. They hadn’t woken me, so I chose to see them as benign beings.

I walked along the springy forest floor, mulch and dead leaves making it an easy path for the weary. The vines were the enemy, though, getting everywhere and trying to trip you. It wasn’t hot, and this at least
was a relief. I walked directionless all day and lay down in the afternoon. My leg was almost numb, and this concerned me more than anything else. I sat down and sniffed it, but I didn’t smell anything. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. I tried to get up but sitting had been a mistake and I was too knackered now. I found another likely-looking branch and curled into the fetal position and slept.

The next day I realized I was having hallucinations. I might have been having them all along, but it took me until then to see that my mind wasn’t completely clear. I woke with vultures tearing at my left leg, tearing huge chunks out of it. I sat up and tried to shoo them away, but they were massive, ugly, bold creatures that paused merely to look at me with contempt and continue their abominable activity. I screamed and thrashed wildly and still the birds hung on. I swung at them with my fists, and I overbalanced and fell off the low branch and onto the forest floor. I stared about and, of course, there were no vultures at all. I cracked up then, sobbed, and sat there for a long time. To have got out of the prison, clean away, and then to have made it through a hurricane only to die of fever in the jungle. It hardly seemed fair.