Sitting up in his bed and grinning as the fierce teeth of the Atlantic bit off the slates above him and flung them a hundred
yards into the fields, Moses Mooney told the cats not to worry. Thomas and Angela were curled in the warm place where his
knees bent in the blankets, and he stroked them blindly as he spoke. The black cat called Angela purred and turned her head
in against him. The important thing, he told them, was to realize that the future was indestructible. That no force could
arrest it, and that it proceeded with the same relentless and undiminished energy as the sea itself.
“You can’t drown if you are born to die in your bed,” he said with a giddy glee, raising the great tangle of his beard to
let out the laughter like birds. “Nothing stops the future. Oh no,” he said, “indeed no.”
The rain quickened like a pulse beating against the window. The night thrashed about with the growing storm, taking the salt
from the sea, until even in the thickly curtained bedrooms and kitchens of Miltown Malbay the air tasted of bitterness and
disappointment. It was such a night. The stars had withdrawn behind the many layers of the gusting clouds, and there was no
moon. Only wind and rain. Moses Mooney nodded his head and patted the cats to reassure them as the window in his bathroom
flew open and he felt the breath of the sea coming in about him. “Ha ha, smell that,” he said, and raised the eyebrows of
his blind eyes to catch what he knew was the scent of a storm in Brazil moments after he thought he had drowned for the third
time. Here it is, he thought. Here is the shaking up of the world.
“Go on. Go on,” he said.
Then the lights went out.
Moses Mooney knew it, though he could not see it. He heard them going off in the town and thought that the darkness of all
his neighbours was a symbolic blindness and a token of God’s sympathy for him. They were all to share his vision, he realized,
and lay back against the pillows, which were wet now like tears. It’s black for miles around, he told the cats with mixed
comfort and awe, catching a glimpse at the same instant of that elsewhere which he alone saw, where Stephen Griffin had crashed
the yellow car into the black bog water of the ditch on the road outside Inagh. And in that dreamlike and vivid moment of
clairvoyance, Moses Mooney saw the collapsed figure of Stephen Griffin, and he clapped his hands together in the bed, relishing
the wild improbability of all plots before reaching out and patting the cats in the darkness.