Gone (20 page)

Perched on the listing porch with the vodka and mug of ice, the ice melting with the night heat before I've reached the end of the drink. There is no forever, only the eternity of our little beginnings and littler endings. I finish the drink with its melted ice giving it a faint taste of wet cardboard. If I hadn't got that call from Gerry. If we hadn't bought that house in Bath Avenue. But I am lying to myself. The hardest lies to get past are my own.
If
does not exist. What happened? Nothing happened. Everything happened. What happened was I fell and didn't see the fall. Ursula's heart was no longer in it. She saw it long before me. I thought we were finding a new beginning. The night we were having the house warming before we sold it. I had called it a house cooling and she hadn't laughed. We told no one we were selling as soon as it was finished in case the word would get out that we were being driven out. I wanted to make it a special evening, to tell people it was a symbol of our commitment to each other. But even then she was long past me. A chipmunk darts out of a crack in the porch. His tail flicks, bobbing in tandem with his fat-cheeked cheeping. He is full of nervous happiness for summer. My mind drifts around Ursula, around Holfy. Holfy never wore T-shirts. And she never let me wear them. The necks are disgusting. The tiniest things bonded us, made us insoluble. The way she glanced at me and her irony flashed off a roomful of people and landed on my lips. Men are such bores men are such bores men are such bores they take so long to realise anything. One could create the world while waiting for them to connect an apparently disparate idea. Men are such bores. Someone just had to say her name and my cock stiffened. She would glance at me across the room—a split second—and she would fuck me in that moment. And she would know. I had made mistakes with all of them. I was too young to know any different with Ursula, too lost to know any different with Holfy … I don't know … too stupid to know Holfy was the one. The good thing. I write to Holfy with my address. Then I write another letter and include some of the bits I wrote in her darkroom.

Doors I had closed are flung open. Terror flies at me, yellow bats in the darkness, surprised by light. All my fears flap about, winged with a thousand cruelties. Desire runs through me faster than blood. I sit up in the bed sweating with the fierceness of a dream still racing through me. I imagine Holfy sleeping on her stomach, her hands tucked under her chest. The memory of her dispelling the nightmare. Her cunt tastes like butter melting on hot toast. When I am in her she squelches with joy. The sound of her lovemaking entrances me like the first time I heard corn crackling in its leaves in a July sun. She walks differently. When she moves, her legs are alive with knowing that I have been between them and will be between them again and again. I get dressed and go out and drive through the darkness. Every night sleep fails and I go out and drive the dirt roads as if it's a job. How strange these back roads are, straight as book edges and cutting across each other like the grid of Manhattan but unpeopled. It is as if they are some grand abandoned scheme.

*   *   *

I am barricaded inside myself, a crazed bird on the floor of its cage, exhausted. I am driving off Howth Head. Ursula Ursula Ursula Ursula. There is no consolation in today's wisdom over yesterday's folly. I know too much now. I failed her and there is nothing. I watch the needle climb to one hundred. The car begins to dip and hurtle towards the sea of corn. Anything to force the sadness away. There is nothing at all happening between us, only the widening of the years. I wake in the bed before the car crashes. I lie down to sleep and in sleep move close to Holfy, smelling her hair, scent of oranges from her shampoo. What am I doing? What am I doing with this child of a woman? I wake and sleep and wake and the days pass and in the peopleless fields I lose sense of time, am no longer sure when I wake up if the dream of driving through the darkness was a dream or if I did get up in the night and am back in bed and waking.

*   *   *

I drive out onto the highway looking for a town. It's impossible to tell from the highway signs what will be a town and what will be nothing. Everything is marked with the same democratic sense of importance. Next exit, wherever it is.

It turns out to be another nowhere. I stop at the first bar on Main Street. All these Midwestern bars are the same, only the hopeless inhabit them. I have stopped drinking. It wasn't the drink I needed, it was the sight of humanity. A television in the corner. It's so long since I have seen one that it has the appearance of a box of magical puppets. I stare at it with incomprehension. My eyes focus on its world. A woman in a smart suit talking into a chunky microphone; some kind of disaster behind her. Her voice, her gestures are inexorably ineluctable. I look down at my root beer and grin at the sound of Ursula quoting
inexorablyineluctable
as fast as she can, mocking constipated poet-words, words stuck on a page to say what does not need to be said, words to make up feelings that you never truly felt. The newswoman must have a number of tones, of looks that present all our tragedies, our follies. A man is standing talking with her. He too is a presenter of news. There is more subtlety in her plucked face. I walk out into the sunlight. Even this nowhere is too much for me. I go back to Lone Tree with its 401 inhabitants. I go back to the barn, to my wisdom. My nerves are much better. There is the tiniest pink hue in the sky, as if creation is approaching pleasure.

I have been running a long time and now I can run no further. The sky spreads out endless blue, denying God. I need a God today. I need someone to shake. I see myself putting a gun in my mouth. Baird put the shotgun against his chest and missed the heart the first time. The police car parked two hundred yards away, waiting, deciding how to approach. He discharged the cartridge and shot himself again. That ended it.

It was not days nor weeks nor months you were leaving—years you were leaving me. What I sensed, feared, for so long, was always happening. I had felt battered by your betrayal (I should say betrayals but there is only ever one) and disgusted by my innocence for so long that I had lost sight of myself. It seems extraordinary I stayed awake nights blaming myself; I fought so hard to keep you. I see the words shaping on your lips—when did I battle to hold on to it all, yes? You could never see it. You would not count the years of listening as loving. Listening to the great silence from you. Taking you in my mouth (yes, I never did like that and I shouldn't have lied when you asked). So much I did in understanding you. Planting flowers. None of this was ever apparent to you. You would have expected it and not gloried in how much I cared for you. I had said words I thought I would say to no man. Do you know what was the worst moment? How sad it is to be so certain you have no idea. Certainty is a kind of death. You had the gall to look at me expecting a reconciliation after being inside another woman; it meant as little as that; you did not see it the way I did: when you were inside me, you were touching my soul—even the times I did not enjoy it, we were touching souls. Even now, although I care nothing for you, I feel like vomiting at the memory you were inside a woman and then came to me and put that part of you in me. How would you have felt if I had done that? It makes me sick to think that you may not have minded at all, that love does not hold such sacredness for you. I thought it was the end of me. It wasn't. It was the beginning. After the steel chill of parting I feel what I had not even begun to consider—I feel freedom.

I drop the letter on the deck. The citronella bucket seems to attract as many mosquitoes as it keeps away. I light another cigarette. I touch the letter off the flame of the matchstick. I go down to the car and turn it on, blast the air conditioner way up. I turn right and head for the highway. The cassette player is broken; I turn on the radio. The world is still there, talking on the radio. The same eager and self-important American voices on each station. I come across a news channel: an explosion somewhere. Dreadful solemnity scarcely containing itself. I am sick of it all. It never changes. I switch channels …
and with the support of listeners like you
 … I switch the radio off and listen to the air-conditioning. I turn onto a back road, dirt billowing into the sky. Fear twists in me; the fear that is always there in the gut. I stop the car and get out. My spectacles steam with the heat. I walk for a long time, pass a man with a dog. Two turtles hanging from each hand. Gun under his arm.

—Evenin', he says.

I return his wary smile. Cornfields stretching for miles. Nothing but the eerie clatter of stalks, dry with the cruel August heat. They must be eight foot tall. Row after row of well-behaved corn. It stops with purposeful abruptness. It has the same effect that coming up out of the subway on Fourteenth and Eighth always has on me; space and light. The cornfields become hog-fields. Dozens of little A-frames. The hogs themselves are nowhere to be seen. At the edge of the field stands a man in a long robe, arms out, fingers spread: beseeching. He looks, for all the world, like an apparition. I look around. I expect to hear a snigger. It's ridiculous to be frightened. I can hear for miles off. I walk closer. A statue. A stone plaque, a foot or so to its left:

JEAN BROUSSARD

A burgher of Calais

Auguste Rodin 1840–1917

I look around again. It makes no sense. A sudden breeze and the gentle rough clack of the corn leaves. Even the breeze carries suspicions. But there is no one to explain. There is no one to listen to questions. Only the sky, the cornfields, and the incongruous statue. I laugh at the stupidity of myself; there is nothing: nothing but a pile of broken images from a past littered with petty dishonesties; nothing left but a tangle of misunderstandings. I turn and run. I run and run, the corn leaves lashing my face, whipping with the fierceness of Holfy's belt, the night my father lashed me for wetting the bed, lashing me in the face with the belt. Ruth screaming. I am running and running, the insanity of running frightening me, forcing me to run faster, to blot out the madness, to run as if I had purpose, and laughing and wet with sweat. Blood is running out of my nose into my mouth and I'm lying on the ground with the taste of blood and dirt in my mouth with the sky over me and I get up from the dizzy blueness and run again. I stumble, fall, pick myself up. Cornstalks whip and creak. I fall, my side sore with exertion. No sound but the sound of my breathing and my heartbeat. The sky is cloudlessly blue, makes me long for the greyness of Dublin. But Dublin is too long ago. Ursula is too long ago; my father loading the car with Ruth's things; my hand lifting the bottle of Jeyes fluid to my lips as a dare with Ruth; the blink of time that was Holfy eating my kisses. There is no space for forgiveness. The corn clatters off itself in rebuke.

The earth, hot and sun-cracked. Alone with no one but myself.
You don't have a self.
Holfy lied about her age. All this
activity
for a me that isn't. A bird steps out in front of me. A pheasant. It could be a Martian for all the difference it makes. It stands stock still, staring into the stalks, has the appearance of some bizarre mirage shimmering in the humidity. Tear tracks burn into my skin. Bronzed feathers. Mottled with black and green. Roadrunner.
Mee Mee.
Its eye, deep in a fleshy red patch, swivels, takes me in, swivels back, and in two graceless strides it flaps into the sky, the breeze of its whirring wings convincing me of its presence, and is gone.
Kok-cack, kok-kack,
it screeches into the silence it leaves behind. There is a room that is empty of everything except regret. I will die some day and Ursula will not have walked in it. She will stand by my grave and think nothing happened: believe I did not know this place.

*   *   *

A thin white trail scratches the blue sky. The plane is so high it's scarcely visible. Coming from somewhere far away, and going somewhere far away. Must make Midwesterners feel the insignificance of life here, of life happening elsewhere. The white line carves through the sky, bisects me. I am looking into myself. The end of the line fades. I was wrong about Agnes Martin. It's everything stripped. It's the opposite of ego. It's finding the thing. I understand nothing. Life is fundamental accuracy of statement—not art.
Life
is. Then—only then—art. Martin
was
religion—that's why she didn't believe in it. One day the heart stops.

*   *   *

A child found me in the field. They were detasseling the corn. Three weeks pass in the hospital. I remember a man I don't recognise come visit and I remember listening to him say the burns from the sun will heal and I will pull through. His name is Parizeh.

Two fat packets are waiting in the mailbox when I get out of hospital, both from New York. Depression is never darkness. Darkness is relief. Sleep is relief. Depression is the brightness of a sunny day, flowers fat in their blooming, two people greeting each other on the street and laughing. Depression is beautiful music that does nothing to the emotions. Depression is seeing this and knowing it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. If there was someone to phone I would but there isn't.

I am left looking at myself. I have always been unhappy. I look up at the sun and doze. The evening sun is as close as I get to content. Cars pass by on the highway in the distance. This is my life. It was my birthday today. Birthdays were such fun as a child. Playing with a Lego set. Red and green and white and blue. Where does life go? Where do the smiles go? Does someone else smile the smiles I've stopped smiling? I open the packets. A postcard spills out. Six words:

You imitate Durrell badly. Forget Durrell.

Then a PS: Still like you.

*   *   *

Life gathers in such phrases.

She's written her comments on the back of my writing.

Let me put it another way: writing is like painting. You do it. Keep doing it. Feel it working through the brush. Writers have the advantage of never running the risk of going too far. There's always the last draft. The stress in painting is one stroke too many. Why I turned to photography. Photography is definable. Not matter how many clicks there are, they are all finite. Then the magic of the darkroom. Processing is Christmas presents.