Gone (21 page)

I came across this today: That for which we find words is something dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking. Nietzsche.

The first time I heard a woodpecker. He was inside a small trunk that was no fatter than a wrist. I climbed over the small fence and listened. Like a timid but insistent child he was, tapping. I tapped back and he stopped. Then tap tap tap. All the genius of creation stored in such a small and simple bird. There was a time I thought I would do anything for love. Thought that it was possible. That there would be a divine coupling. Someone who would see the world as I see the world. Such an atrocious assumption. I've kept the old rotary phone and got it hooked up yesterday. I sat there looking at it like it was the enemy for half an hour. Haven't called anyone yet. The options they give: I didn't know what half of them were, call waiting, call blocking, Jesus, she went on and on and all I knew is I didn't want any of them. You have to pay to have people leave you alone.

*   *   *

The presents I bought my mother as a child. Dishcloths, delft, cutlery. Perfume with all the subtlety of disinfectant. Earrings that looked like toys hanging from her ears. Rigor mortis is setting into the tulips. Brilliance happens by accident. One day, sitting there and it happens. The woodpecker deep in the bowl of a tree. Pecking. Staring at it and listening and its mate lands on a branch and sings a warning and out it flies, a fluttering flash of feathers gone and nothing but silence left.

One day Holfy was not there and I wanted her to be. I was angry at her for forgetting but as I sat there and as I waited and waited for her something in me closed. It is unnameable whatever it is that closed. I danced that night in the apartment. For the first time in my life I danced on my own.

I felt the cold edge on our love when I didn't run out after her in the morning when I knew she had forgotten to take the film out of the fridge. I felt it in the note I didn't leave tucked in her bag to wish her luck on the job that morning in the Puck Building. I felt the coldness in the things I didn't do for her, in the things that she had no idea I wanted to do for her. Love became not doing but loving her still. The curious thing is that she didn't notice and then I learned something: people don't miss what they don't want.

*   *   *

Mr. Parizeh comes to visit with his son. He asks if I'd be interested in a couple of pups he needs rid of, looks out the window towards his truck away from any hint of kindness. I walk out to the truck and look in at the pups scurrying around the back of the truck, two sets of paws up on the tailgate. I lift them out and set them on the dirt. They run about yelping with happiness.

*   *   *

I go to the supermarket every day. I walk around the store the same way: carrots, potatoes, milk and butter at the end of the aisle, meat, bread, beer if it's a Friday. Not that Friday exists in America. There are no patterns except the patterns we make. I fool myself into thinking I'm in Dublin sometimes. I have stopped exchanging the currency rate in my mind. I think in dollars. I am no longer surprised at how expensive it is to buy a deliciously red and tasteless tomato. I have learned to live in America through its supermarkets. No one told me what the stores were: Walmart, Econofoods, Quiktrip, Sams. There was no identity in their names. Their identity reveals itself through the people who shop in these stores. Even before I go inside I can tell by the cars in the lot who will be there and what they will be buying to create their dream futures, making worlds that will never exist. Paper or plastic, they say at the checkout. Do you want a paper or plastic sack to take your dreams home. Life is about finding ways to control. Shopping is control. I am a consumer now and I love it. It is as reassuring as a cigarette. It tells me who I am. This, more than anything, is what I need.

*   *   *

It happens slowly. One day you hear a name yelled on a street, called out in a film, the eye catches sight of it on an envelope in some office, and it causes no pain. There is nothing but a memory, faded like the sounds of childhood. There is nothing left. Her name is drained of meaning. At first, I thought it meant an emptiness akin to death, but I was wrong. The emptiness is something precious. It is the wisdom of finally knowing myself. The layer of need under it. Most men have it, a wordless, unadmitted need. I must sound cynical. I am, a little. For a long time I thought something was wrong with me. I wanted a woman that—I laugh at my stupidity—would be everything I wanted in a woman. How utterly ridiculous an idea I had. I couldn't get a word processor that would do everything I wanted—how could I ever get it from a woman. How little good it does the soul.

I go about my business, smile at people, keep myself tidy, go to bed at the same hour, get up at the same hour. I maintain a surface of normality. I tell the pups when I feed them and they wag their tails. I have wasted so many years. The pups bark. They want to go out. Go out, I say, opening the door. They shoulder each other and rush through the door out into the forest as if the day will bring them something that it did not bring them yesterday. Pearl jostles Boogie and she barks viciously, and they go their separate ways. They stop and sniff the air, waiting. Then they run back to the screen door I have already closed. They sit and wait at it. The same tedious routine every morning. Every morning I wake up and know Ruth is dead. The loss of her grows every day. Him too. Life is tiring, just with trying not to hate the past for being here. I hang soap bars on the trees to stop the deer eating the leaves.

I go for days without talking. I don't shoo the dogs out of the way. I am learning my place in the world. At night there are the cicadas. They deafen the night with their mating calls. There is an owl somewhere and her call is calming. The only sound in the house is the electric drone of the fridge coming on and off. Sometimes, when the silence builds, when it becomes loaded like a gun, I cough and the cough is enough to dispel the loneliness. It is a strange loneliness that has soaked into me because I am not lonely for people. For a long time I thought it was loneliness for Ruth and my life with Ursula. But that is not true. I am lonely for myself. I have gone away a long time ago and I have only just noticed. I have deserted myself.

I read in the paper that a fourteen-year-old swam out into Hoover Lake and tempted a swan out of the reeds with muffins. Then he beheaded the swan. The swan's mate has not moved for six days. She stays by the murder spot.

The cicadas are screeching greedily in the night. I get so drunk I wet my trousers. I lift the telephone and listen to the tone. Vulgar hum. I list everyone I know. Imagine a conversation with them. Talking on it with Holfy. With deaddeaddaddy. With deaddeadRuth. With Ursula. With the fuck of a mother I once had. That time when the balloon burst and she lifted me off the counter and hugged me. There is no number to dial. Can't think of a single person I can talk to without apology or disgust swallowing my words.

Everything is nonsense. It is the greatest nonsense of all believing I had to be alone, that I enjoyed the solitude. The phone rings one day and my heart races. I don't care who it is, I am happy to hear a sound not of my own making. Then it stops before I pick it up.

Who knows what is true, what is accurate. It seems I have never been happy but I must have been. Is it that my mind is drawn only to the saddest moments? My parents arguing in the hall and asking us to decide which one we wanted to go with. The abject terror I felt. Where were we going to go? It was nighttime. We couldn't go out in the bad night. We would disappear if we left the flat and went out into the night. I looked up at my mother and father and at Ruth. Who would pick who? I picked Franko, the man who used to come into the shop every night, because I couldn't decide between them. I don't know how it got resolved in the end. All I remember is that fear that I would not be with my parents. I don't remember thinking about not seeing my sister again. Just the terror of the cold, black night and not seeing one or other of my parents again. I don't remember if I had school the next day. I remember I had a coat on and I remember staring up at the door handle of the flat and wanting to reach up to it and have us all go in and go to bed.

The balloon. I was sitting on the counter watching everyone come in and out and buy their sweets and books. I was watching my mother and father take back the books and thumb through them rapidly with their fingers. The edge of their thumbs would tell them if a page was missing. Sitting up on the counter I could see how exciting the world was. You had to be as tall as a grownup to understand what was going on. Up on the counter I could see and understand everything. It was coming up to Christmas and I had a blue balloon in my hands. Sometimes I would rub my finger on its squelchy belly and my mother would tell me to stop. A man came in and bought a couple of books. He was smoking a dirty cigarette. He looked as wise as God must look, and as if he must know everything there was to know. He bought chocolate and packed up his books. Then he held the cigarette to the blue balloon and there a bang and the air snapped in my face. It was like a bad miracle. This is all I remember. Sometimes I think I remember the wrong things. I remember the plastic curtains that separated our shop from the flat we lived in. They were black and yellow and red strips of plastic that swooshed back and forth all day long and whichever side of them I was on I always imagined there was a magic cave on the other side that was full of riches and deep mysteries.

I would discover the pleasure and the laughter of being with a woman. There would be books and films and washing dishes and taking clothes to the launderette and our jobs to pay the rent but they would be the things we had to do until next we could be in bed together. This was the only reality. Nothing mattered more than the pleasure of our nakedness and the simple happiness of our warm bodies that surprised us with unceasing pleasures.

There is a hypnotic sense in this, as if I am leading towards some greater understanding, as if there is some inevitable truth that will reveal itself. There is not. Except perhaps the danger of nostalgia. Because it didn't last with Ursula. We had six years together. An awful lot of time to arrive at nothing but a nut of bitterness and guilt. It is the insipid and insidious edge of niceness that cut into the truth and buried a lie. I did not want to complain about the sex with her. So I lied, and so did she. But desire ran inside me and flooded me in bed with her every night and I prayed for the desire to go away but it didn't. I tried not to touch her. I tried not to bother her and slowly, when I began to realise that it was not getting better, that she might never get better, that I might not get better, I began to hate my desire. And the hours passed, and the days, and the weeks, and the months, and the years, and still nothing was different. I no longer blamed the desire. I blamed her.

*   *   *

Turn thoughts off. Turn them off. They're no use. It's done. That's all there is to it. The drink is taking hold of me. I'm thirsty for it even as I drink it. I want to send my little Ursula a postcard, tell her everything. But no. The other way. Walk away. Get up and work on the barn, even with the heat. Work the only solace.

*   *   *

Lightning in the bright summer evening. It starts to thunder a little before nine and it goes on into the early morning. The electricity goes off. The sudden crash of wind lashing through trees in darkness. I stay up all night watching the earth showing itself its splendour. The sound of wood ripping, lightning strobes flashing on the fields. Rain. Rain so heavy I turn the radio off and listen to its thunderous assault. Loneliness gnaws at the deadness in me. It wrings my guts with a plea for company. Ursula. Holfy. Anyone. I could talk to anyone. The sky flashes, threatening me.

*   *   *

The end of marriage was a quiet, tree-lined street, waiting for spring. Trees are courageous without leaves. We were going about our lives talking intensely about everything except the end of it all. And then one night I say it as we are driving home.

We are stopped at a light in Blackrock, talking about her article. I look up at the large Santa Claus over the shopping centre and say I love you and you love me but it's over and I don't want it to be so but it is the truth and the light turns green and she says yes it is true and we drive home. It was tiny lies that lodged between us. Bindweed tightening around a tree. I am drinking a bottle of vodka a day now.

*   *   *

Winter comes bitterly. I go to the local flower shop to buy a potted green plant to celebrate. When the florist hears my Irish accents she perks up.

—It closes up at night, says the woman, joining her hands.

She smiles at my disbelief.

—It's a prayer plant. That's its name.

Then she mentions the Irish wedding and I make the mistake of feigning interest. When she invites me she sees my reluctance.

—I divorced two years ago. Being a florist makes a girl realistic. I've sold a lot of wedding bouquets in those two years and I'm sure glad none of them were mine. Name's Moira.

She sticks her hand out just as a hefty woman comes into the shop, wide with a sweaty smile.

—Morning, Justine.

—I'll phone you Moira the Realist.

I take her business card off the counter. Justine smiles at me, oozing suspicion.

—Whatever.

—Thanks for the prayer plant.

—You betcha.

She is already chatting with Obesity.

*   *   *

There's an oil spill on the highway and the traffic is backed up for fifteen miles. We sit there, stuck in her pickup. Elijah is skating around in the back, barking. We are already too late for the church so we go straight to the hotel. White crooked letters on a blackboard spell O'Hara and Flaherty reception. Queuing at the buffet, a man nudges in front of me. I am shocked by his rudeness in this country where staying in line is a commandment. I turn, see he is a priest and am about to say something when he smiles at me and says in a thick Irish accent: