“I don’t understand. Why are you here?”
“I shouldn’t be.”
“Why didn’t the bomb go off?”
“Irps. That’s how you can tell an IRSP device, my dear: it doesn’t work.”
“What did you do when it didn’t blow?”
He smiled. “I looked up.”
Clear winter skies are rare in Ireland. This one, innocent, earnest, suggested the shoe box he’d constructed as a boy, with an eye hole on one end and pinpricks on the other—held up to the light, it had made a child-size firmament, and true to form, Farrell hadn’t settled for random dots but had carefully poked out accurate constellations. Funny how you were never satisfied with anything until you made it yourself, when there was a real sky out there and all you had to do was lean from the window. Why draw mountains like saw’s teeth when you could hike through the Mournes? Farrell wiped the last traces of vomit on his sleeve. He didn’t care if this observation was succinct, for he was luxuriating in the lushness of his own mind; memory, on the edge of extinction a moment before; having been a boy—in this lifetime of unnecessary perceptions, they had always been his greatest joys, tiny searing moments of mental incision like the pinpricks overhead. It’s true the sky was more lovely than usual, more blue, and the air, while cold, at least had temperature at all, and it was temperature itself he relished—but most of all it was thinking, he loved thinking, so when he thought, You prat! he was euphoric to have ideas about himself at all. Greedily he thought, My mother feels guilty over my childhood and doesn’t know how to apologize; he thought, And I will never let her; he thought, My sisters have been cruelly underestimated; he thought, yes, right next to this, You can give the Protestants everything they want in fact, but if at the same time they lose in theory they will keep fighting. He seized at any illumination however small, rolling in his own head like somersaults in heather, like burying his face in a young girl’s hair. Farrell watched the gradual shifting of stars with the much faster turns of the way he looked at them, the dizzying spin of explanations for why they were there, smoothing the contours of his own ideas, shivering across his intellect, running suppositions like scales, showing off for himself, reciting chess gambits and trying whole new daring attacks; setting up the puzzle of Irish politics, not quite sure how to move, treasuring the fact he was not sure, since so much of thinking, good thinking, is being stymied. It was voluptuous, autoerotic; he could feel the luscious bumps and quivers of his naked brain, sweet, moist, and veiny, full of unexpected leaps from left to right, until he came to the single insight as though emerging from a copse to a clearing, I do not need the bomb. I am the bomb.
Yet later he would return to the hotel, as he had this evening, once more weary of himself, impatient with Estrin’s intrusions, with the ceaseless chatter in pubs and chip shops across this island, but really because his own patter was just as circular, just as stale, stultified by the same unmoving board the North set before him, the lumps of his head gone dry. But I did need the bomb. I needed the bomb to know I didn’t need it. I still need the bomb. He missed bombs but was sure he’d only lost the nerve for them, and in this way had only taken a giant step backward.
“So that was the last disposal,” he concluded. “And I didn’t even finish that. I went back to the lobby. Ordinarily I would have dismantled the thing, pocketed the switch if it deserved further study, neutralized the explosive. Instead, I called the army. They used Wheelbarrow. Weren’t about to take my word for it the bomb was duff. Took forever, of course, and how I recognized the pretentious officiousness of the bomb squad. They could have it, I decided. I stayed across the way, at Kelly’s Bar. They had to carry me back to Whitewells. It takes real application for me to get a hangover, but I’d applied.”
“You stopped because you got careless, or because you got scared?”
“I quit because I’d never been scared. I wasn’t courageous, but naïve. Everyone else in Belfast knew what a bomb was but me, who opened them up like Christmas crackers. I didn’t want to die; I thought I was immortal. But not anymore.
“So the next day I changed everything. I stopped drinking anything but wine, after eight. I gave up red meat, sweets, cholesterol. I took regular exercise. For a while I even slept. I instituted security at Whitewells that stopped just shy of the rectal mirror search. And I retired utterly from bomb disposal. I regard myself as a reformed suicide.”
Estrin struggled up in bed, resisting fatigue she couldn’t justify; she’d only unloaded the kegs of Smithwick’s that afternoon, run ten miles, had dinner. Farrell did this to people. How little sleep had Farrell gotten, and for what exalted cause? Somehow his tale left her both entranced and disquieted. It was a good story, wasn’t it? And he wouldn’t lie?
Her uneasiness was with hue: the story was colorized. He couldn’t leave it alone. He wasn’t lying except in the way he lied all the time.
“Dostoevsky,” said Estrin.
“Alyosha, Dmitri, or Ivan?”
“Moral nit-picking of Alyosha; dopey romanticism of Dmitri; intellectual impudence of Ivan. And you left out Smerdyakov: a bit of a bastard.” (Farrell swelled like a tick.) “But I was thinking of his real life. When he was condemned to death and marched out to the square blindfolded. The firing squad cocked their rifles. Then the tsar commuted the sentence. Dostoevsky was obsessed with it, that moment.”
Estrin’s voice trailed off, passingly envious of his misadventure, wishing she could prop Farrell on her pillows and tell tales of Frangex; but she caught herself in time, realizing, though the stories didn’t tell as well, there were plenty enough times careening a motorcycle down the coast road in the Philippines, between checkpoints on the Gaza Strip, when she’d banked a little low and felt the machine begin to slide, when she’d miscalculated an angle at 120 k and been forced into the oncoming lane, a breath from an Arab bus. He’d been talking, simply, of almost getting killed, and hadn’t everyone felt that? Didn’t we all walk the world immortal and get reminded? Get reminded one last time, too late? For Farrell had a tendency to absorb all the drama in the room, a sponge in a puddle. It was greedy, but it was also Estrin’s fault for imagining there was a limited quantity of anguish in the world that he could steal.
For all his fractiousness, there was a side to Farrell that was irrepressibly kind. The pale, dilute blue pupils always glistened on the verge of tears; even at his most irate, they tinted with pity. True, the pity extended to himself, and he wouldn’t like to hear that; but he must have suspected in moments of genuine self-scrutiny that it extended only to himself, and the way he looked back at Estrin now belied that. They were eyes that wanted most to protect you from themselves, and they would fail.
“So many countries, all on your own,” he whispered, taking her to his lap. “Do you not get lonely now?”
“Get? Stay. But you, I wonder if you don’t top me. You’re about the loneliest person I’ve ever met.”
Estrin searched the runny pools overhead, eyes that kept the same constant chemistry in bars or in bed: one part humor, two parts pain. He was hard to find in them. The amusement masked their surface, while the sadness blackened the centers to wallow in its own secret abyss, like a swimming hole whose location he refused to share. As you pursued him across the iris, he flecked from spear to spear, tripping creek stones, always a step ahead. To dive in that serous blue and aim for the deep part was reliably to hit rock. The amusement mocked you. The sadness denied you. This is impossible, they said. I miss you, they said. Why can’t you look into my eyes? He would run from you, only to turn impatiently and blame you for not catching up.
Estrin retracted on her side. “Being by yourself beats bad company. Most company. It’s underrated.”
Farrell uncurled her. “It’s easier.”
He rose to slide out of his shoes and strip off the red tie. Farrell had his shirts commercially laundered, so when he raised his collar it stood stiffly starched to his chin. He paused and, on some whim for which Estrin would always be grateful, leaned down and kissed her, with that gravity so particular to the man. Why the picture of Farrell with the white collar raised would burn so lustrous in her memory she would never know, or why it was nice that he was in his socks. Maybe the raised collar gave him a touch of the priestly or pastoral, to remind Estrin of her father. Maybe a little synapse in her brain illuminated the moment like a flashbulb for no better reason than that his shirt was so startlingly clean. Maybe it was just a mental accident, like taking a picture of your thumb, but Estrin didn’t think so. There was a purity to the image, even as he stood back up and wrangled briefly with the top button, in one of those quintessentially masculine gestures, like slipping a checkbook from an inside pocket. The light in the room was warm but bright; his cuff links gleamed; the shirt was radiant. He did not seem much older; Ireland and the United States did not seem far apart.
Surely she should have remembered making love to him with this same clarity, but in Estrin’s experience it was hard to recall particular couplings. They seemed so distinctive at the time, but maybe they were pretty much the same after all; or possibly recollection blurred from interior shyness, censorship even, and her memories were pasted with bits of black tape, porn rags for sale in a decent neighborhood.
That said, tonight’s episode would impress itself more than most. Before, like the Technicolors of his tales, Farrell had laid it on too thick. In fact, she found his most drastic moments his most pathetic. Both his thrashing at her hips and the extravagance of his bedtime stories were rooted in a sad little fear: that he could not feel. Farrell’s compulsion to magnify implied the meager; and it was when he cried most loudly inside her that she was certain he felt numb.
However, this evening they measured out their pleasure in tiny, cautious doses. Private, Farrell pulled the spread to her neck. While only frenetic bounding had brought him to climax before, it was readily apparent he was in danger of coming too fast. Then he had whipped to such a rapid frenzy that he’d been gasping less from rapture than from exertion; now he moved more gradually as they progressed. The first time, too, he’d been half drunk and a little slack; this time, hours without a drink, he was fully hard and so a larger man than she’d realized—a pleasant surprise.
From the outside the couple must have looked boring: a lump under chenille, a rustle, a murmur. But no one was watching; that was the point. For in their weaker moments, Estrin performed for men, Farrell performed for himself. Relieved of audience, they did not try athletic positions but remained on their sides; it felt good that way, there was no reason to try something new. Farrell, rather than caterwaul, only sighed. Estrin kept two fingers on his shoulder, and these absorbed the majority of her expression—a light pressing, or a lifting until the whorls barely skimmed the summits of his gooseflesh.
For Farrell, too, the less they experimented, the more each sensation distinguished itself from every other, like that astounding variation among three white pebbles when you looked at them hard. Just as the grind of his shoes and the clunk of the panic bar had segmented as he approached the Brown Thomas bag, so the sough of Estrin’s breath broke down, and he followed each inhalation’s shutter from larynx to trachea to bronchia and back again. He breathed with her; as air branched to both their lungs, his head went light. Listening, he found she drew each breath a different pitch, with a characteristic flutter all its own. Sometimes she sucked in suddenly, then leaked back out, her mouth a patient puncture in a tube. Others she said, “Sh-sh,” though neither had spoken, or whistled lightly through her tongue. On occasion she held a lungful so long that Farrell, too, stopped breathing to hear better, in irrational fear she would suffocate.
They didn’t kiss, they’d not have been able to bear it. This was already far too much, until they slowed so completely an observer would have claimed they were sleeping. Farrell was caught in a single stroke, inchmeal; each fraction he pushed toward her, the pressure of those two fingers increased. He could not remember when it had been like this or whether it had ever been like this, though admittedly he wasn’t remembering very hard—he didn’t want the distraction. He would fuck this exquisite, tiny creature as long and as gently as he could and save memory for more disappointing nights—this memory.
Estrin’s forehead rippled down over her eyebrows, and she turned her head a few degrees away. She could no longer withstand seeing his face straight on. She shifted her thighs so he no longer touched her so directly. Even as she organized Farrell’s presence as more glancing, it grew only more unendurable, like days so bright that not only could you not look toward the sun, you couldn’t stand its glare on the wall. Her tongue rose to form “No,” but did not. Her back arched, but not very much. She touched her forehead to Farrell’s arm. She didn’t want to come yet, but it was hopeless. In return, quiet, low, doleful, a felt mallet pounded on her kettledrum. While Estrin thought she came again, she wasn’t sure, for though she could now distinguish one hair from another on his shoulder, the pinkish brown around the edges of his nipples from the bluer brown of their tips, sighs of pure pleasure from their identical twins tinged with regret, she could no longer distinguish between Farrell’s sensations and her own. Estrin saw water—wide pale-blue water, still. Farrell drew her closer and stayed inside, his erection dying as slowly as it had come.
Before he lapsed out, there was a second explosion, quite nearby. It resembled their own, for bombs detonate within the body. They blossom in the lower intestine and open to the ear, where the pressure changes as the air in your very brain tries to escape, like a sudden inspiration. Just as Bach had enlarged her in Chartres, deep C minor from down the street expanded Estrin’s slight figure until she filled the room, inhaled Whitewells, and grew enormous with the city, round. All her pictures were dark and furred. The windows rattled. One pane splintered and pinged; a shard spat against the drapes and dropped to the carpet. The sound lay down slowly. A cold whistle trailed through the broken window, like breath on Estrin’s tongue.
Farrell’s renewed erection embarrassed him. Though too late to hide his revival from Estrin, he sucked from her anyway, to tuck away the evidence ineffectually between their hipbones. She didn’t mention it. But it’s physiological, he wanted to explain. Buses, you know. Buses do the same thing. That was no bus, he heard back. He was relieved to skip the conversation.
“Just down the road,” he whispered, stroking her head as if she needed comforting. “Probably the courts. Didn’t sound so massive. I’ll get the window replaced in the morning. Bloody hell, if I’d known in ’68, I’d have thrown every shilling into pane glass and flowers—orange, green, and white carnations, red, white, and blue. I’d be a rich man.”
She didn’t need comforting, or jokes. When the bomb went off, she had only seemed alert. If she was disturbed, it was not by the explosion. Her eyes were open, vacantly wondrous. “Flowers?” she asked.
“Funerals.”
Her head limp on her neck, it rolled away from him, her hand now dead on his shoulder, where two tiny bruises were just beginning to bloom.
Farrell was constantly having the experience of realizing he hadn’t noticed people before. In fact, he rarely paid enough attention to most people to realize he was ignoring them. Waking that morning to find Estrin Lancaster rising from his bed for the loo, he found that though he’d spent two long nights with her, he had yet to notice her, really notice-notice.
Och, he’d listened to her, more or less, and filed away her vital statistics, though with much the same caginess of any politician who will remember the name of your baby for his next campaign. And sure he wanted her; just watching her grope from the sheets he was already rising to the occasion. So what did he mean, not notice?
Well, for example, he’d never even looked at her, look-looked. (Farrell kept two meanings for every word; with himself he identified the emphatic from the facile by using it twice. These amounted to two different languages, the second of which he never used, for if he were ever to speak in total sincerity—imagine—he would have to stutter, I-I am-am sorry-sorry, like awkward tribal languages whose plurals are formed by repetition. However, to speak this language would instantly devalue it, and then to himself, he supposed, he would have to say everything three times.) Now, Farrell had slept with a fair number of lovelies, each with her charms. What selected this one had something to do with light. The groggy winter gray sifting through the drapes did not fall evenly over her shoulders or paint a simple highlight down her spine; rather, each ray suppled in fluctuating shades, as if poppling the surface of water more than flesh—was he awake? No, really, that light was not normal, it was not lapping a smooth surface, and as she stood and stretched and walked around the bed, the grays churned and eddied over her back, swirled in her buttocks, and streamed in parallel shafts down her thighs: why, her entire backside silvered like a school of fish. He sat up a little and rubbed his eyes. Because this was not the ordinary sleek of a small young woman in decent trim. Either she was diseased, he was still sleeping, or that was muscle.
Which explained the other difference, the eerie spring of her skin. Estrin’s shoulders were small round melons, underripe; they would not take the press of his thumb. Her thighs had the taut shine of aubergines, that same resonance, her forearms the wood and stalk of overgrown leeks—in all a body more vegetable than fruit, hard and green and indigestible, with a smack to her skin that inspired him to spank her.
On return she glared down at his erection as if it were butting into her business. “You know, for all this liberated lip service, most men are still oblivious to contraception.”
“And most women still make broad, slanderous statements about half the population of the world. I’d think you were better traveled than that, my dear.”
Seven a.m. on three hours’ sleep and the my dears were already hackling. Traditionally they would wake fucking or fighting—or both.
“Don’t you care if I get pregnant?”
“I expect you’ll take care of yourself.”
“Everyone expects that.” She glowered. “And I always do.”
“My relationship to sex is apocalyptic.”
“Most people don’t think of children as the end of the world.”
“My, my. We are thirty-two.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Tick, tick, tick.”
Estrin flung the blankets on Farrell’s flagging enthusiasm and sat half off the bed. “Fuck you.”
“Soft spot.”
She reeled toward him. “Yes, but not the way you think.”
“You want children?”
“No, I do not. Nor have I ever. And I’m sick to death of this secretly, secretly you do, wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Every year I get older it gets worse. Come on, admit it, all you really want is to be a mommy, right? And this gadding about on airplanes, you’re looking for a man! Confess, that whole time in Jerusalem you were pining for a split-level outside Philly with 2.2, a cocker spaniel, and a remote-control garage.” Estrin rose to gaze through the broken window, assuming a stance that would have entailed thrusting her hands in her pockets had she been wearing any clothes. “You have kids?”
“No,” he said. “Though I had one child, shall we say, canceled.”
“Catholic girl?”
“It wasn’t easy.”
“No, for her I imagine it wasn’t.”
Though unsure how he’d kindled her fury, he found this an interesting performance. “I meant for me.”
“But you brought yourself to it. Didn’t marry the buttercup, now, did you?”
“Not Germaine. I married another time, however. She wasn’t pregnant. It was a mistake. I’m not likely to marry again. You should be forewarned.”
The turret swiveled. “Right. Two nights of fucking and she’ll be out this morning looking at rings.” She advanced on the bed. “You don’t want to marry again because you’re so exceptional, isn’t that right? Everyone else needs a hand to hold but Farrell O’Phelan?”
“I cannot lead an ordinary life. But I do find the odd hand to hold—even yours, my swallow.”
“And the no kids, the abortee, you don’t want, same reason? That you’re better than the average bear?”
“With my work I cannot have children.”
“You can, you’ve proved that once, maybe twice, for all the precautions you insisted on last night. Okay, but I could have predicted you didn’t want a family ten minutes after we met. My point is this: when I say I don’t want to marry, do you believe me?”
“No.”
“And when I say I don’t want kids?”
“Not for a moment.”
It dismantled her a little that he was so direct. “Right,” she faltered. “Spinsters have missed the boat; bachelors have jumped ship. Farrell remains dashingly unattached; Estrin protesteth too much.”
She ranged the room, picking up splinters of glass and tossing them in the bin, moving with unnerving ease for a naked woman. Farrell had never met a female who wasn’t dissatisfied with some part of her body, which she would go to extraordinary lengths to hide. But barring a flag to her small breasts, Estrin’s frame was impeccable—and that she seemed to know this was not altogether attractive. He missed the crossed arms, the clutched thighs, the panicked robing and dive for towels, the humanizing shelter of shame.
She unfolded the chamois from the shoeshine kit on the portmanteau, smoothing and refolding it like a baby blanket. “Why am I so proud of not wanting kids, though? God, what’s wrong with us?”
She turned and studied Farrell and caught him looking at his watch. “I can see you, though. Sixty-five or seventy. With a much younger woman; suddenly fervid to have an heir. Going to doctors, taking her temperature. Then children wouldn’t seem ordinary anymore, would they? So you’d wildly overdo it, and croak in bed.” She laughed.
Farrell reached for her hand. “Kill me.”
She bounced amicably back beside him, her mood swings quick and queer. “I could, you know.”
“With just that broken window and hyperventilation. I have weak lungs.” Even joking, he couldn’t bring himself to say asthma.
“No, really. We should be so lucky in 1988 to get plain old pregnant. But I am astounded you didn’t ask this foreign flotsam about disease.”
“I have assumed if you weren’t forthcoming about your health in the first place, if I did inquire, you would lie. So why be unpleasant?”
She paused. “Why is it when you talk like that I get the creeps?”
“Haven’t a clue. Just solving an equation.”
“Would you”—she curled on his chest—“lie about that?”
“If I hadn’t told you at the start? Of course. Brilliantly, and to the bitter end. Seventy pounds and bedpanned in rubber gloves, I’d still be gasping the diagnosis was a grotesque mistake. Never back down. Because as long as I stuck to my story, blood test or no, there’s a very good chance you would believe me.”
She turned over and mused. “Ten years ago, know how hard it was to get a guy to slip on a rubber? When it was only to protect the girl? Now it’s to protect their pricks, the sons of bitches arrive in bed swathed from head to toe in cling film.”
“Are you staging this whole scene to get me to wear a prophylactic?”
“God, no, that’s like indulging yourself in a Tootsie Roll and forgetting to take off the wrapper. Me, what with Dieter shooting up again, I got tested last month.” She slowed, deferent, unraveling a pill of chenille. “Which was hard,” she admitted. “I’d waited three months, celibate, for the untoward to show itself. At the Royal, they were nice, but suspicious. An American. Whose last boyfriend was a heroin addict. That went over terrif. I was scared. And I went through the test all by myself, like everything else. Waiting two weeks for the results. Confiding to nobody. That is lonely. But I was clean. Boring, but diseases are afraid of me.”
“Are you of me?”
“Better believe it.”
“So you want me to wear—?”
“No, I doubt you’ve copped enough international ass to be dangerous. And as for Junior, I lift weights.”
Only when they’d finished did he ask her to explain.
“I exercise like a lunatic and eat fish. I don’t have enough fat to ovulate. I’m infertile, long as I lay off the cream buns.”
“How convenient.”
“And extreme. I thought you’d find it appealing.”
Farrell phoned while she showered. He could have waited, less risky all around; he worried the water was audible through the receiver. But a naked weightlifting motorcyclist in his bath made the call much more fun.
As a result, at breakfast downstairs he was still feeling self-satisfied, so he wasn’t prepared. The moment was infinitely small, but the bombs that go off in an emotional life are so often this tiny interior poof no outsider can hear, a dog whistle of an experience—sun on brick, a raised collar. He happened to turn back around on his way from the dining room to get his papers, to tell Estrin to order steamed milk. She was sitting. She did absolutely nothing. Except her face changed. It—sank to itself. It cohered. He would hate to have to explain this to anyone else, except that the subtle settling altered the way he saw her forever more. He had witnessed the miracle of self-return, and from now on he would treasure most in her that she existed when he left the room.
Soon it would become a sport: he would deliberately arrive late, to find her leaning on the seat of that crazy motorcycle chuckling at the Grand Opera House and a moment later not telling him the joke. It was a joke to herself, and he loved that. From now on he would leave for the bog and lurk around the corner to watch the muscles at her mouth, so tight from smiling to please him, collapse down, her hands rising to embrace her cheeks. That was the return: a meeting of parts, a family reunion. She reached for and held her own hand. That was what made her so portable, wasn’t it? For all the starving and lifting and forcing herself up airplane ramps, there was a caretaking in her he envied. She cupped herself. Of course, this was not always so, but at least she knew moments when she was beloved to herself. Beloved. He was surprised to be able to perceive this, since it was entirely unfamiliar in his own life.
Maybe he occasionally paid attention after all. For suddenly Farrell saw not only the similarities she kept insisting on but differences she did not. Estrin may have known self-loathing, thick as treacle and that dark, but she was far less acquainted with a simpler and in fact far more disturbing self-dislike—the same inconsequential distaste you felt for strangers in dental surgeries with whom you avoided conversation. And she did not understand him, for she did not know the vacancy of a man who has let go of his own hand, or has never truly held it, because sometime long ago someone else had never reached down to it when it was tiny and damp and hadn’t yet learned to gesture aggressively in pubs, slip out a credit card, snip detonator wires—or that was the way he explained it to himself, something about his mother. But he was beginning to realize that the mother he missed was his mother—a semantically difficult distinction—his mother, but not some namable woman with a reprimand of a face and overdone Brussels sprouts, for even Medbh O’Phelan’s rare redemptive affections could not soak in. You could never hear what you were not somewhere in yourself already saying; Medbh O’Phelan was irrelevant. He had lost his mother inside. That was why Estrin shrank when he shrieked over her upstairs and his eyes filled with thick tears that would not quite drop and later absorbed back, unshared. She could not imagine years like fields, scrub grass, worse, carparks, gray tarmac, without hatred, just emotional nausea, long borderless days given structure only by the orderly demise of a liter, nights that never precisely ended but slumped upright in a chair. There had never been an arm around him; he’d struck no partnership; avoiding alliances, he had refused affiliation with himself.
Then this whole banjax was missing a pinion, wasn’t that the score? There was bloody well only one of you, wasn’t there? So how can you have a relationship with yourself of any description? You are your frigging self! There should be no such thing as self-love or self-loathing. Except this wasn’t Farrell O’Phelan’s private dementia, was it, since there are such words, coined long ago by other poor bisected bastards who died in twos. Or had they? Was death alluring partly because in being nothing there was only one nothing, you could not count nothings, you couldn’t help but die whole? For in the worst of Talisker Farrell had looked in the mirror and seen halves of his face like shoes from different pairs; in fact, when he only saw two soles, the day was easy.
That was what Genesis was all about—you could find this in the journals of Farrell’s early twenties at Queen’s, recording for posterity he’d been a boring old sod then—expulsion from the garden was the exile of the self from the self. Good Christ, it was as if God had planted a bloody nail bomb in the human psyche, because this very thinking should not exist, those passages from twenty years ago should not exist, gangling Farrell O’Phelan sorting out the rabble between his ears while his city went up in flames. Self-respect, subconscious, superego, parent and child—whichever jargon you found more clever, they were all just names for bits when the while kit didn’t add up. There was only one of you; it should speak with one voice, and it was insane that this orator should ever address itself; it already knew what it was saying.
Gritting down Royal Avenue with his papers, Farrell glanced at the headlines while surveying the damage: a car bomb, Provo maintenance work. They were obligated to x number of routine bombings, y number of assassinations, and at least one high-profile, all-out Incident a year, just to keep up appearances. He sometimes pictured the Army Council mapping out the year’s campaign much like any advertising firm with a job to do, having another coffee, letting the conversation wander; bearing down again, the foolscap black with crossed-out ideas: Anderson-McAulcy Primark; Crown Court three judges (in rapid succession?); drumming their fingers, trying to think of a new angle, combing the map for an RUC station they hadn’t hit in a while, racking their brains for a catchy gimmick to sell the Struggle like any other product whose billboards had gone stale.
It was a common Belfast fillip, checking out your street and the photo on the front page and they being the same view. Farrell reviewed the blackened brick, two floors of windows out—it looked worse in the pictures. Here, not so impressive, tarted up in a day or two. Belfast worked fast with plate glass, from practice. Already the stationery had erected a sign over its demolished storefront, BUSINESS AS USUAL.
Now, didn’t that put it in a nutshell. For even when he searched for the traditional twinge of Didn’t-I-hear-that-blow-last-night, Aren’t-I-where-it’s-happening, he could only dredge up the sour savvy of Aye, weren’t we due. It didn’t even pique him that the journalists knew fuck-all, while Farrell had the contacts to worm out the real story down to who twisted the wires, where the det was from; he wouldn’t bother. It was harder and harder to get goosed by these productions. Why, with his own local headlines in the Herald Tribune, the coverage had come to have the opposite effect. This was where everything was happening according to the rest of the world, and Farrell knew very well nothing was happening here, so where was the real news, or was there any? For Farrell often experienced the conflict as trumped up; when Newsweek bought it, the whole world seemed a cod.
Then, flimflam was just one phase, and there were so many others; later some detail, ironic, idiotic, would start him thinking. For while the Province had eerily stabilized, his mind had not, and ceaselessly turned and consumed this town, constructing models that explained it. As more glass and mangled car parts skittered at his feet, today’s theory had to do with bits.
If your whole self was shattered, one piece chatting to other pieces, hiding from some pieces, wrestling with others, is it surprising the streets were in shambles, continents were drifting, the planet chunked part from part? You make the world in your own image. As you are in pieces, so shall your cities fragment. As your bits are at war, so shall you fight each other. Peace on earth would come only when people made one piece of themselves. And this was different from loving themselves or repressing their bad selves or facing up to their bad selves . . . Nope, the whole tinkling crumple was no-go. And so a united Ireland, unionism aspired to the same paradise, where you thought one clear thought without compulsively thinking the opposite at the same time, where your feelings about your father did not bifurcate like putting on someone else’s glasses, with one picture vitriolic, the other groveling, gooey-eyed, little wonder you could never remember his face; where your decisions were not bicameral, whole bloody sessions of Parliament, but a slice like cutting cake, simple and over and unregretted, taking up no more time than a line space; where no one made cartoons with angels on one shoulder and devils on the other, no novelist invented Jekyll and Hyde. Both Nationalists and Loyalists were yearning for the same cohesion, why the solution to the Northern Irish problem was to line up the locals one by one, tilt their heads to the side, and pour Super Glue in each ear.
As far as Farrell could tell, however, the world was entirely peopled with heads in parts; he could hear them rattle as he walked by, those cauliflower clumps of the brain segmented every which way—lying from truthful, shallow from deep, waking from dream. As a result, though Farrell may have lived in a city whose inhabitants shot each other and magneted gelignite to cars, he remained struck less by their lunacy than by their integrity, for while Farrell mocked himself for being tortured, he did find living very hard and could not understand why more lives around him weren’t utterly disassembled. He was impressed, for example, that on the whole the population managed to feed itself, sleep, and look both ways before crossing the street. He was mystified why you did not pass more people standing on the corner screaming. Others found the rate of alcoholism in the Province astounding; so did Farrell, but he didn’t find it nearly high enough. He was in awe of rough sanity. While the international press questioned why so many murders, Farrell wondered, Why so few? And with their heads full of gravel, Farrell was most astounded by widespread self-affection, the way scads of people chose shirts they thought they looked best in mornings and ate breakfasts they liked, happily skipping articles in the Irish Times they did not find interesting. Farrell wasn’t interested in a single article, and he read every one.
“So, was that your first bomb?”
“I’ve been here six months!”
“How do they make you feel?”
“Odd.”
“Odd? That’s all?”
“Awed,” she repeated. “Full of awe. Grim . . . Happy,” she announced. “Wildly happy, and that’s the way most people feel here, too, perfectly, gleefully happy, and they never admit it. They wring their hands and moan, but inside they are eating it up. I’ve seen it on their faces as well as on mine. The smallest little child knows how delicious an explosion is, and I’m sick to death of old ladies not admitting they feel the same way.”
Farrell had a strong sense of having had this conversation before. There was little to be observed of bombs he had not said or heard already. Though he’d raised the subject, he didn’t want to talk about them now or ever again. He wanted to talk about bits. He wanted to ask Estrin whether she talked to herself, and especially, didn’t that strike her as peculiar. But he suspected such an exchange in ready danger of going stupid. You had to watch the conversations you involved yourself in, because they implicated you—and Farrell despised thinking something precious to him and having it come out taradiddle. As a result, his most intimate convictions he never expressed. He’d been able to tell a woman he loved her, for example, only when he didn’t mean it.
For Farrell didn’t believe in language. Not like this one here. Look at her, scraping for those adjectives, when what was the difference between awed and odd in the end? Words had let him down enough times he had resorted to their more perverse pleasures, that shiny red apple you pluck when you say, “I went to the cinema,” when really you went to the tobacconist. Sometimes Farrell would change trivial elements of a story just for the sensation.
“Next time,” Estrin was saying, “we go to Clonard. Or to your place. Just not always here. It’s artificial. Protected and tidy and tells me nothing about you.”
“We never, but never go to my bungalow.”
She looked stunned.
“Sometimes I forget where it is,” he amended.
“I have to leave,” she mumbled, her brow all piled up like an accident on the Ml. “I’m supposed to meet Kieran this morning to fiddle with the books. Convince both the British and the Provos he’s not making any money. Shouldn’t be hard. He’s not.” Estrin screeched her chair out. Scouring her hands on the linen napkin, she could have been a mechanic degreasing with an oily rag. She pulled her leather jacket over her dress.
“Clonard!” he conceded after her, unconcerned by Estrin’s huff. She was already hooked. The story of Farrell’s Farewell always worked a treat on women.
He leaned back for a second cup of coffee. Now, that parting was typical. Not just “I have to leave,” but “to meet whomever to whatever—” American. Farrell had appointments, full stop.
But Farrell was already turgid with the day’s agenda. Midcup, he withdrew to look at himself, look-look. His mouth quirked; he heard an inward clucking. How’d you land in this muck, me boyo? He wondered did he feel bad? No, he checked, feeling his mind up and down as he might run his hands over his body after a fall. No, he didn’t feel bad at all.
Farrell dabbed his mouth with his own napkin like a civilized man in a restaurant. Funnily enough, that boyo voice he heard—it wasn’t his. It was Angus MacBride’s.