The Innocent Sleep (16 page)

For a time, Spencer said nothing. He looked about himself as if he were consulting invisible presences, waiting for their approval. They gave it, apparently. Because the next moment, he was smiling and asking me, “I’m your man?” I didn’t think he was mocking me.

“You are.”

“Harry, we need to talk. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’ve found my son, Spencer, that’s all.”

Spencer peered at me seriously. The lopsided sneer erased itself from his face. A look of concern came over it, and then a sudden exhaustion.

“Listen,” he said, his voice low, his eyes liquid and staring. “You’ve been going through some kind of a rough patch—I can see that. You’ve been under strain. The house, Robin’s work being cut back. Shit, I didn’t realize how tough things were till you told me you were closing up the studio. Don’t you think there’s a chance that this, this … sighting,” he said, alighting on the word, “might have something to do with that? You wouldn’t be the first man who thinks he sees things that aren’t there. Christ, think of all the fuckers who spot ghosts or UFOs or moving statues of the Virgin Mary. Paranoid delusions. The thing is to recognize them for what they are—a sign. A wake-up call that you need to destress, sort your head out, slow down.”

“A wake-up call to destress? Can you even hear yourself? You sound like a self-help book. Do me a favor and spare me the amateur psychobabble, will you?”

He nodded his head slowly, looked down at the glass in his hand, and seemed to consider what I’d said. We had been good friends over the years. He was loyal. One of the few visitors when I was in the hospital. One of the few who was not scared off by my monologues or dismissals, my lack of insight, my psychosis. It felt like we had known each other all our lives. But then sometimes, I felt like my life had started only when I began art college and met Robin and Spencer, and took the apartment Spencer offered me to rent.

I waited a long moment for him to speak. Then he looked up at me, one eyebrow raised, a grin starting out of the corner of his mouth. “I don’t suppose you’ve told your wife any of this?” he said.

“Nope.”

“Nope?”

“Just you.”

“I’m fucking privileged.”

“So, are you going to help me, or what?”

He sighed heavily, considering the question, then put his glass down. Reaching into his jacket, he took a cigarette packet from the pocket and ripped the back off it.

“Write the number down on the back of that. I’ll get on to Fealty.”

I cast a look of gratitude across the table, then scribbled down the digits I had memorized.

He picked up the card and squinted at it. “This’ll cost you, by the way.”

“Sure.”

“I’ll want payback. It’s not something for nothing.”

“Whatever you say.”

He could have asked me for anything right then and I would gladly have given it. Anything to get Dillon back. Nothing was too high a price.

We sat in silence then. In the corner of the room, a TV was on, tuned to a news report. A man was driving a cherry picker into the gates of the Irish parliament as a protest against the government. The high-reaching crane had all sorts of slogans on it. I couldn’t make them all out. But one of them read,
ANGLO TOXIC BANK
, and another had something to say about Bertie Ahern’s pension plan. One more I caught out of the corner of my eye:
ALL POLITICIANS SHOULD BE SACKED
.

“Apparently,” Spencer said to me, nodding his head at the cherry picker, “he was a property developer.”

We parted company then. I stood on the slushy sidewalk, watching Spencer’s hulking form as he ambled down Pearse Street, his overcoat pulled tight against the cutting wind coming in off the quays. I had done what I had intended to. Tapped Spencer for his contacts in the Guards. Set in motion my plan to track the license plate of that car. I should have been filled with a sense of accomplishment, but instead I just felt deflated. Some remnants of nervous energy still whisked around inside me. I knew I should go home, try to patch things up with Robin. I wasn’t exactly sure how I would explain it—my willful refusal to take her calls or reply to her messages. How could I justify that? This strange urge to focus all of my being on this one slippery goal, finding my son—this urge demanded that I turn my back on my other responsibilities, so afraid was I that I would become distracted and lose my nerve. So I didn’t call her. I didn’t return home. Instead, I went to Mary Street to see Javier.

Javier is a fortune-teller. He runs his operation out of a basement beneath a hair salon. He’s well known. He reads tarot cards and palms and does charts and all that kind of thing. He’s nothing like a crystal-ball reader in a tent. He is one of the few people to have given me hope over the years. I rang, and his assistant said he could fit me in for a half-hour reading.

The steps down to his place always give me goose bumps. A woman sat in his waiting room, ahead of me. She had traveled from County Clare, she told me. “He’s the best.” She looked distraught, and I wondered what she was hoping to learn in this basement, what supernatural knowledge was about to be imparted to her and whether it would change her life.

I had promised Robin I wouldn’t waste money on Javier again, after our last wedding anniversary. She was sensible like that. But that was before I had seen Dillon.

Javier welcomed me into the back room. It was dimly lit, with a table and two chairs, the table draped with a red velvet cloth. I could smell the odor of a rich, dark tobacco. Javier had a calming presence. His hair was graying, and he spoke with a heavy Spanish accent. He asked me what sort of reading I would like. Years ago, I had become fearful of the tarot cards. As well as a sizable occult section in the bookstore, Cozimo had kept a deck of tarot cards in our apartment above it; he sometimes dabbled. But whenever I went near them, they scared me. I’m not sure why. I remember him playing with them on our kitchen table one morning. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I am not going to tell you your future. I don’t need the cards to do that.”

When was it he said that to me? Our first year? Robin was pregnant, and our futures lay ahead of us. “These beautiful cards were given to me by a wise old man in the old quarter,” Cozimo said. “We were playing poker and he ran out of money, so he gave me these. Said they’re hundreds of years old. From up where the Taro river runs in northern Italy. ‘Pathways’ is what he said the word ‘tarot’ meant in Arabic. Pathways.”

But Cozimo did try some form of divination with them in the months to come, and he taught me to use them, too, though I always resisted. That morning, he held my hands in his and said, “They are not a toy; it is not a game.”

I looked at him, a little surprised. His earnestness seemed sincere. “I would gift you this pack, but I’d be afraid what you would see.”

I asked him to explain.

“They are a special and peculiarly honest and insightful deck.”

I laughed and reached for the cards.

“They will tell you things you do not want to know. They have told me things I did not want to know.”

My hand retreated. “Like what?” I whispered.

“Can you ever imagine me back in London?”

We both laughed then, but in Cozimo’s laughter there was a knowingness. I could see it in his eyes, too. He kept on smiling and picked up the cards and slipped them quickly into his breast pocket, as if to say,
Safer here.

Somehow, in Javier’s hands the tarot looked more trustworthy, less severe, and so I succumbed to something inside me, some need, some indefinable pull, and asked for a card reading, and without any small talk, Javier took the cards into his hands and shuffled them languorously. Now, there are several readings you can get with a tarot pack: a twelve-card spread, a horseshoe spread, a full spread, and so on. But this time, Javier said, “It will be a one-card reading.”

He held the deck out to me. I hesitated, then chose. I had picked the Sun card, one of the Major Arcana. On it was an image of an infant riding a white horse under the sun, with sunflowers in the background. In the child’s hand was a red flag. The sun looked down with a human face.

I caught my breath and nearly told Javier everything—about Dillon, about the child mummy, about Tangier. It seemed as if images of children were all around me, as if they were trying to tell me something, to help me. But I held my tongue, and Javier started his forecast.

“The Sun card,” he said, “is considered by many to be the best card in the tarot. It is associated with attained knowledge. The conscious mind prevails over the fears and illusions of the unconscious. Innocence is renewed through discovery, bringing hope for the future.”

Javier didn’t so much tell you your future; he interpreted the cards for you. He had insight, a sense of things. Ultimately, he left it up to you to make out of the reading what you would. But he gave you clues and indicators to suggest ways of interpreting decisions that had to be made. Some things were more specific. He told me there was a strong pull from a foreign land. He said I was still working something out. That it remained unresolved. That it would come to a head soon. But that I must have an open heart. He said the sun was a positive symbol. I don’t recall what else he said. He didn’t say, You’re going to find your son. But he did say, “There is a child, and it is no longer yours.” That hurt. I think he saw that. I was sweating, trying to stop my hands from shaking. Jesus, I don’t know what was happening to me right then.

Before I left, Javier gave me a green amulet. “For luck,” he said. I nearly hugged him, I was so far gone. He saw me blinking at a copy of a book on his table. It was
The Book of the Dead
. “Take it,” he said, and I did, thanking him. I walked through Dublin in a daze, my fingers worrying the stone. All these people out? How did they get here? How did they make it through the snow? I stopped to listen to a man sing “On Raglan Road.” When the fellow sang, “I loved too much and by such, by such is happiness thrown away,” I felt a lump in my throat. Fuck, I felt like I was falling to pieces. Had anybody touched me right then, I would have disintegrated.

I don’t know why, but I didn’t think I could go home right away. Even though I knew Robin wanted me to. In a quiet basement bar off Grafton Street I ordered a drink, took the postcard of the child mummy out of my pocket, and looked for information about it online on my phone. What I came across was something about how green magic protected a child mummy: the discovery of a rare mummified child with a bright green amulet stone, once thought to hold magical powers, had led archaeologists to believe that the ancient Egyptians thought that the color green would protect children from unwanted influence and ensure their health in the afterlife.

Was that, I wondered, why Javier gave me the amulet? Maybe it was a gesture; it was to protect me, to protect Dillon because he was still alive. That was how I saw it. That was how it made sense to me. You know, I’d never believed Dillon had died in the earthquake, though Robin had tried for months, for years to persuade me that he had. Eventually I had to pretend that I accepted that he had in fact died, but not before I had filed missing persons reports both in Tangier and in Ireland. I made calls, wrote letters and e-mails, contacted my local politicians, joined survivors’ and victims’ support groups online, and listened to and read whatever news I could in the months that followed the earthquake, seeking survivors’ stories and information about bodies found, alive or dead.

I contacted Interpol, the Moroccan police force, the Guards. The best I got, the only thing I got, was “Your son died tragically in an earthquake. The building was destroyed. It was swallowed by the earth. It was an act of God.”

Robin left Tangier three weeks after the earthquake. I don’t think I ever forgave her for that. I stayed for another few weeks. “He could have survived,” I said.

Robin shook her head. “Harry, don’t.”

“I’m not leaving him,” I said.

But Robin was having none of it. She said, “It’s the grief, Harry. The grief is unbalancing you.” The grief had ravaged me, I’ll admit that. But her protestations were not enough to assuage my doubts. How could she know he had not, by some strange circumstance, survived the earthquake?

“Hundreds died,” she said, as if statistics were somehow the answer.

Then she told me she wanted to have a service for Dillon when I got back to Ireland.

“What kind of service?” I asked.

“A service,” she said.

“A funeral?”

She said nothing.

“Because we can’t have a funeral if he is not dead.”

“Harry.”

“Or if we do not know…”

I was ordering another drink when my phone lit up. It was a message from Diane. She must have rung right through to my voice mail. “I know you were in London. Word travels. Harry, call me. I miss you.” I ignored the message and turned my phone off. I watched the snow start to fall again. The Met Office’s forecasting skills were weak. It fell heavier that day than they had predicted. It fell and fell, heavy, luxurious, and effacing snow. Their equipment was unsound or their interpretations too narrow. I knew Javier’s readings of what was to come had a vagueness about them. I’m not a fool. But they suggested rather than dictated; they imagined rather than declaimed. And that postman from Donegal had as much accuracy, if not more, in his predictions of the snow. I remember him saying that when the sun shines onto the Blue Stack Mountains and down to the lowlands and it turns a reddish-brown color, that’s a sign of snow. He’d said something about the sheep and the cattle going mad too, shaking themselves, coming down from the mountains. That, too, was a sign.

The signs were there. What mattered was how you interpreted them. Suddenly, involuntarily, a memory came back to me as I sat there watching the snow: We are in Tangier. I am lying in bed with Dillon. We have the television on. It is a newscast. “Is she speaking to us?” says Dillon about the newscaster. I tell him she is talking about a political party. “They can come to my party,” he says. He will be three next week. “That’s very good of you,” I say. He strokes my face. From one cheek to the other. Intimately, lovingly. He says, “Daddy, I love your beard.” He says, “Daddy, I love you.”