Absolute Fiction

Through days of hard biking, Mark, the man he had met on the Aran Islands, stayed on his mind. One night, after sixty cold, rainy miles, he found a B and B in an old stone farmhouse outside Sligo. After dropping his gear and a quick wash-up, he biked into the city. As he bumped down a dirt road lined with box hedges, full darkness fell. For a moment, a clear swath of sky opened above him, yellow stars wheeling against cobalt. He slowed his pace, trying to freeze the image in his memory, but after another mile, the city greeted him dirty and raucous. He had planned his trip so he would reach Sligo for the first night of a local arts festival, but now he wondered why. No lover of fairs and circuses as a child, his adult aversion to carnival glitter had a new, sharper focus.

On an impulse, he had left the states without his klonopin, the orange pills that held his attacks in a state of armed truce. A measly .5 milligrams a day. A friendly little benzodiazepine, not a psychotropic. Such a drug, he told himself, barely registers on the radar screen of a drug-dependent world. But reliance of any type grated against his autonomy, made him resentful, perverse. He had agreed to start the drug only after months of horrific trips to the grocery store made him admit to the inadequacy of sheer will power. With his hands numb from steering his cart white-knuckled down the aisles, waiting in the check-out line became unbearable. Before he finally resigned himself to drug dependency, he began writing his checks in the car, feeling like some outcast or thief. Inside the store, after his latest ordeal in the harsh fluorescent aisles, he would fill in the price with one stroke. Idling in place, watching the line like a hungry animal for every sign of forward movement, he felt the skin would snap off his bones.

So he had parsed anxiety’s grammar, identified its morphemes, formalized the transformational rules. A new language mapped itself across his neural transmitters, a knowledge innate and unwanted. But in Ireland, he had told himself, he would break the panic cycle through exercise and self-discipline. His fatigue would be bone-deep, honest, not his typical job-induced enervation. And being alone would help, too. But, like a disease transmuting to a more virulent form, the attacks in Ireland peaked in new patterns, lingered for hours like a tequila hangover. Jet-lagged on his first day, he biked north from Shannon Airport through the Burren’s lunar landscape, where Cromwell had cursed the scarcity of trees for hanging Irish renegades. Stopping for a drink at a small shop in Lisdoonvarna, he felt the familiar symptoms crawl through him. As he began biking north, a fabric of panic wove itself into his trip. The awaiting attack was like something tangible, intelligent. An enemy sometimes holding its distance, but always keeping its prey in sight.

In Sligo, he found every restaurant crowded. He chose a place at random, was soon wedged between a wall and a table full of soccer players drinking Guiness straight from pitchers. He wrote in his travel journal, forcing himself to look up every few minutes, take long panning sweeps of the interior. But electric twitches caught him unaware, hard jerks on fish-hooks buried in his flesh. After each snap, he would skulk a look around his table, wondering if anyone had noticed.

Outside again, free, the cold night air restored him enough so that he joined the throng walking down Kennedy Parade toward the Garavogue River. But as he stepped onto a stone bridge, a fresh wave of fear swept through him. He gulped at the damp air, glancing at the black water to his right, measuring the distance to the end of the bridge. Everything melded into a landscape of entrapment, but stepping off the bridge onto packed dirt brought some relief. He exhaled hard, then maneuvered himself to the edge of the crowd. A large crane was parked where the crowd had collected for the fireworks. He leaned against a rear tire, breathing heavily. The crane’s cable reached into the black river, making him wonder what was at the end of it. But when he tried to look closer, screams and howls broke his concentration. Turning, he saw an old crone with flowing white hair hobbling down a path, a black cat with glowing orange eyes arched on her shoulder. He gripped the tire tread for support, then blurted out a harsh laugh. Puppets he said to himself, shaking his head. They’re just giant puppets, fool.

The witch was followed by a spherical Irish constable, then by a Celtic princess with butterfly wings and towering head-dress. He tried to analyze the puppets, to figure out where the operators were hidden within the constructions. But taking his mind off the panic always backfired on him, because the symptoms always returned with greater force. He ground his teeth, determined to enjoy the puppet spectacle. But when the first fireworks exploded across the river, everyone rushed toward the bank, whistling and shouting. Pulled along, he looked up at a ragged burst of pink and blue streamers. Sweat beading his face, he stared down at the ground. Turn it off he shouted at himself. This doesn’t happen to you when you’re outside.

A young girl screamed, pointing at the crane. The crowd’s focus shifted, pushing him closer to the hanging cable. A flash and sizzle from the water as a huge trout alive with phosphorescent fire ascended from the river. He backed away, pushing against the cheering wall of people behind him. The fire began at the fish’s mouth and spiraled down the hollow metal frame, sputtering thick orange bursts that sent a film of black greasy smoke over the crowd. He twisted away from the sight, surveying the crush of people for the easiest way out, prepared to surrender, to run. Despite everything, he had never truly yielded before. If he failed to control himself this time, how long before failure became the rule?

“Whoa!” A deep voice spoke directly into his face. “Hey, it’s you! Remember me, Mark? On the island? You’re Randall, right?”

The man held him by both shoulders, blocking his lunge through the crowd. He looked up at the face. In the dark blue eyes, an image burned, the metal trout suspended above the river in full flame. Was this really the same man? The last cluster of fireworks exploded overhead, transforming the black clouds into a roiling blend of festival colors. Where had he come from?

“Yes,” he shouted above the noise. “I remember you, but I’m leaving.” A woman shoved past him and he whirled around as though assaulted, fists clenched at his sides.

“Is something wrong?” the man asked, stepping back and peering hard at his face. “You’re green, man. Let me help you get out of this crowd.” Mark pulled at his left arm.

“I don’t need any help,” he said, jerking his arm away. “I’m just tired. And I have a few miles left to bike tonight.” He stepped backward as he talked. Spectators still hungry for visual delight pressed into the opening between the two men. Why does he just stare at me? Randall thought. Do I look that crazy? Finally, he turned his back on Mark and the river, broke into a fast walk.

“Hey!” The voice called after him. “Why the hell won’t you talk to me?”

But Randall already was disappearing in the dark.

He had seen the man first on Inishmore, largest of the Aran Islands. At the island’s highest point, the ruins of Dún Aenghus sprawl in three concentric circles. A few meters beyond the outer ring, granite cliffs drop three hundred feet into the Atlantic. Groggy after a long hike from the ferry terminal in Killeany, the largest village, Randall had watched other sightseers milling near the edge. He envied their viewpoint, but held himself back. During college, he had worked as a roofer, climbing ladders with pleasure, knowing that his own strength could keep him from falling. But now even a drop of fifteen feet made him clammy, dry-mouthed. The line between the cliff’s edge and the airy gulf beyond seemed fluid, capricious.

One man stood so near the edge he could lean over it. As Randall watched from the top of a low wall, the man straightened up from the brink, turned around to speak to a woman behind him. Shirtless, a few days’ growth of beard, baggy camouflage trousers and dusty hiking boots. About Randall’s age. When the woman wrapped her fingers around his upper arm, he suddenly plucked her up by the waist. Two jagged stones in the rampart’s chevaux-de-frise framed the man’s torso for Randall’s vision in a slanted angle. He twirled the woman about, her legs sailing into the chasm of sky, her arms flailing above his head.

“Let me down, Mark!” she shouted. “Please put me down!”

He glided her to a gentle stop a yard or so from the edge. Faces dazed, they stared at each other with delight and surprise, as though a bright light suddenly had been thrown upon them. Then she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pushed her face against his chest. When they began to kiss, Randall jumped off his rampart. Walking back to town, he surveyed the green fields divided neatly by stone drywall. For generations, islanders had climbed the sheer granite cliffs with baskets of seaweed strapped to their backs, had packed kelp and barnacles, anything organic, into crevices in the rock shelves, forcing the barren limestone into life. Randall thought of their long, solitary climbs up from the sea, their endless labor. He wondered if the man at the cliff knew about it, if he would care if he did know.

In Killeany that night, he showered, ate dinner, then bicycled through dark twisting roads to the American Café, the island’s only pub. At a corner table, he drank a pint of lager, updating his daily mileage log. But remembering the man and woman at the cliff distracted him. They’re gone, he told himself. Forget them. Sagging with exhausted day-trippers, two ferries had sailed at dusk, leaving the island to its natives and a handful of malingering tourists. But he imagined the couple in a cheap B and B somewhere nearby, their passion charged with the sunlight showering down the stark cliffs below Dún Aenghus like a volley of javelins. He thought of fifty women, the Nereids, daughters of Titans, rising from the sea. Sisters lovely in icy gowns, they entered the bed of a mortal man. He was beautiful to the gods, but bound to the land, waiting. Their bodies would ache and release in confident rhythms, like the tide’s returning swell.

Before dawn the next day, he was biking at full speed away from Killeany. Morning sifted through the dark sky in layers of wan yellow, the ocean a vast, dark plain. Swinging around a long curve, he found the disc of rising sun straight ahead, the bottom crescent bleeding into a red pool circled by cold green ocean. Ancient ruins cleaved to spines of stone, like charred sticks backlit with flame. When he found the cemetery, he dismounted, began trudging through rows of broken grave markers, shivering from the cold dew seeping through his biking shoes. Behind a hedgerow blue with Irish gentians, he found St. Enda’s church hidden at the bottom of a dirt-walled pit. Only the stone walls and floor still remained, the wooden roof long ago rotted to dust. He vaulted the trench surrounding the church, hitting the stone floor on all fours. At one end of the small church, he found the marker above Enda’s grave. He kneeled to read the inscription, but time had left only a ghost of the Latin words.

They came from England and Gaul and Rome to study here with you, across that huge ocean to this church no bigger than a tomb. What made them seek you out? What did you teach them? Tell me why I’m here now in your deserted church, blessed St. Enda. Tell me what you told your brothers about your hermit life on this heap of rock in the Atlantic, before the fields became green.

Like hushed voices, fresh winds bent the high weeds above his head. Rain suddenly began pounding at the stone floor. Shuddering beneath his heavy sweater and windbreaker, he rose to his feet, took a last look at Enda’s grave, then climbed a low side wall and made a lunge to the outer ridge. But the slick dirt made him slide back into the gorge between the church and the earthwork. He leaned against the stone wall, panting, blinking rain from his eyes. A white-blue bolt of lightning ripped across his vision, jagged splinters ending in a barbed yellow fork. He caught his breath, flattened by the wind against the ancient wall.

“You okay down there?”

Through hard pellets of rain, he saw the face of the man at Dún Aenghus. He was leaning into the trench, one knee planted in the wet dirt. The hand he extended was dirt-smeared, heavy. Randall scanned the wall, then side-stepped, away from the man, stopping at a place where the opposite bank was higher but seemed more solid. Reaching up, he dug both hands into the wet earth, then pulled hard from his shoulders. Grunting, he hooked one knee over the edge. But he lost his purchase, dirt crumbling into clods. He slid backward again, swearing, another rip of lightning thrusting the sky into his face. Then a hand grabbed him beneath his armpit. A long, rough hoist, and he was safe above the rim. Wiping mud from his arms and legs, Randall looked at the man uncertainly,

“Gee, you’re welcome,” the man said. He stood tall above Randall, his boots planted firmly in the soft ground.

Randall got to his feet, said thanks. But his only clear thought was to curse the luck that made him look so ridiculous in front of this stranger. How long had he been watching? Had he seen him on his knees before Enda’s marker? Did he think he had been praying?

“I’m Mark,” he said, holding out his hand. “You were out at the fortress yesterday, right?”

Randall told him his name, then held up his right hand, making them both laugh at the muddy palm.

“Hell,” Mark said, “a little mud.” He clasped Randall’s hand, shook it firmly. “Wild weather, eh?” he asked, looking up. “You know what the Brits say about Ireland, don’t you? ‘Oh, yes, Ireland,’ they say. ‘The rain gets a bit warmer there in the summer, doesn’t it?’ Shit, I should have gone to Italy.”

They walked together back across the field to Randall’s bike. Mark told him that he was going back to the mainland that morning, then hitching his way north. Where was Randall headed?

“Thanks for the help,” Randall said. “I’d walk back to Killeany with you, but I better go ahead and get cleaned up before the ferry leaves.”

“There’s still four hours, you know,” Mark answered. “Plenty of time.” His blue eyes regarded Randall with a question.

Randall said thanks, but no. He had other things to do before leaving. They shook hands again, then Randall mounted his bike and began to pedal away. He looked back once, raising a hand in good-bye. In his camouflage pants and a black jacket, Mark was already fading. Through the grey air, Randall saw his small white teeth. The day before, they had glittered in the sunlight at the edge of the high drop into the Atlantic. The perfect teeth of a demi-god sought by the Nereids. Nymphs of the oceans and lakes, their love would shower upon him like torrents of cold water flowing down a towering cataract.

On Inishbofin, Cromwell’s fort clutches a mountain crest with star-figured talons, four broken towers jammed into the bare rock. Three days after the Sligo festival, Randall had sailed from Cleggan into the harbor on a mail boat that bullied its way through high whitecaps. While the crew unloaded cargo, he asked the captain about a road to the fort. The man laughed hoarsely, then yelled something in Irish Gaelic to his mate, who grunted back.

“No road ya’ll take that lovely bike on, if ‘na good God give you a brain.” He settled a massive hand on Randall’s shoulder, drove it into a grip that seemed right to him, then pointed at the shore with his other arm. “You be careful, lad,” he said, squeezing hard on Randall’s shoulder. “That path there only be open when the tide is out. See where it curves behind the village? Best you go when the tide be just low enough, then back you come, no more than two hour.”

At dawn the next day, Randall criss-crossed the fog-covered island. Biking fast through a small tunnel of visibility, he might have been at sea, buffeted by northern winds. When the tide ebbed, he hid his bike behind a collapsed toolshed and struck out for the fortress. Through lush green fields, past eyeless carcasses of dead sheep, the narrow trail brought him to a strip of pebbled beach. He jumped a rivulet that flowed inland from the ocean, then climbed a spit of rock that disappeared at one end into the crashing surf. Grey and silent, fog-wreathed, the ruined fortress stared at him across the bleak seascape. But as he watched, a man emerged from a dark space between two stone columns. Someone in camouflage pants and a dark sweater.

I’ll be damned, he thought. Then he wondered if he should retreat. But Mark had seen him. Why would you want to turn back, anyway? he asked himself.

“Where don’t you turn up?” Randall yelled to him, jumping from the stone onto a soft patch of grass. “How did you get out here?”

“I paid someone to bring me over!” Mark shouted back.

Randall was breathing heavily when he reached Mark, blinking beads of moisture from his eyelashes. Mark looked him up and down, from his bare, mud-splattered legs to his wet face. “But you seem to enjoy doing things the hard way. You’re soaked.” Then he gave Randall a shove. “Come on. Let’s see what there is to see.”

Together, they tramped around the perimeter of the fort, stuck their heads through narrow casements, whistled at the view. They talked casually, as though long acquainted. Mark said he had come over yesterday on the early boat.

“What about your girlfriend?” Randall asked. “Is she with you?”

“Girlfriend?” Mark looked up from a fallen lintel piece with scrolled edges.

“You know, the woman who was with you on Inishmore. Up on the cliffs at Dún Aenghus.”

Mark shrugged. “I just met her the day before, in Galway. She left the island with some friends that afternoon.”

They climbed over a heap of blocks fallen into the inner courtyard, discovered a rampart running to the top of a tower’s battlement. The wall’s seaward side fell straight to a narrow curve of ground that separated the fort from a cliff plunging to the sea. “Can you believe even Cromwell would bother building a fort on such a God-forsaken island?” Mark asked. “How much can one man hate Catholics?”

“Apparently a great deal. He filled this place with Catholics that were later shipped off to the West Indies. It was called a barracks, in his day.”“

“By God, though, what a view.” Mark threw his arms wide and revolved in a full circle. “Makes you want to go flying out there, you know? Just once, right into the heart of that black freezing ocean.” As Randall stared down, the fog parted to reveal the water’s surface. Like snakes with heads at both ends, the sea coiled endlessly around moss-covered boulders.

“So is that why you wouldn’t talk to me on Inishmore and in Sligo? Because you thought I was with a woman? Or was it that you really didn’t want to talk with me?”

Randall sat down on a flat stone in the tower’s ruined crenellation, swung his legs over the edge. Gripping the stone, he felt no fear of the long drop beneath him. Was it Mark’s presence?

“It wasn’t for either reason, really,” he began slowly. “When you’re on your own, traveling, it’s hard to know…” he paused, thinking. “Hard to know when someone really wants your company.” He turned to look at Mark. “Know what I mean?”

“Do I know?” Mark straddled the wall like it was a horse, facing Randall. “Hell, ain’t I here alone, too? It’s the same for everyone.”

“Sure it is, to an extent. But that night in Sligo, I was … well, self-absorbed.” He laughed and shook his head, still looking down at the sea. “I guess you could say I’ve been self-absorbed for a couple of years.”

“Absorbed in what was bothering you in Sligo?” Randall opened his mouth to stop him, but Mark waved his hand. “Don’t be so touchy. Crowds don’t agree with me, either. But, man, you looked like you were ready to shake your skin right off your bones that night. I thought that—”

“Don’t!” Randall shouted. He wanted to say Don’t make fun of me, but he realized how absurd the words would sound. For a moment he looked into Mark’s upturned face, then he turned to jump to the floor of the passage. But as he leaped, the slab of stone shifted beneath him. He bent his knees, trying to push forward, but gravity pulled him back, toward the sea. He threw up one arm, saw the sky arching high above, felt caught by blue.

“Careful there, partner.” Mark put one arm around Randall’s shoulders and pulled at the front of his shirt with his free hand. “You’ve got to be careful stomping around these damn old castles.”

They jumped off the wall and went back to the center court. In an open place clear of rubble, they sat down and shared their food. Mark had brought a thermos of tea, Randall some apples and bread. The fog evaporated as they ate, leaving the sea blinking up in green mirrors at a blinding sun. They took off their sweaters and shirts and laid them out to dry, finished the tea as they complained about carrying damp clothes in their packs.

“Seems that you don’t get many moments like this in Ireland,” Mark mused. He arched his back, lifting his chest toward the heat. He talked about hitchhiking and his job in Ohio, but eventually fell silent. Randall saw that his eyes were closed, his face tilted up, absorbing the heat. “I’ve been wishing I’d gone some place warmer,” Mark murmured, his eyes still closed. “But this seems like a moment worth waiting for.”

By the time they had their gear packed up, the tide was rising. When they reached the short crescent of beach, they found that the stream dividing it had broadened into a channel several feet across. “We basked together like lizards for too long,” Mark said absently. They hopped from one boulder to another, weighing their options. “Look there. We can jump over the channel at the narrowest part of this damn flume.” Mark pointed to where the spar of rock nearly joined the opposite side. Water churned in white foam through the aperture.

Randall followed him onto a flat rock shelf, water splashing around his legs. “I can’t jump that far,” he said, backing away from the edge. “You go ahead. I’ll go back to the shallowest part and just crash through it.”

“Hell you will,” Mark snorted. “It’s ten feet deep back there and that current’s like a train. It’ll drive you right into these rocks. You can make the jump. I’ll go first and give you a hand if you need it.” Without another word, Mark took three steps back, then lunged for the gap. Randall knew at once it was no good. Mark stretched his arms forward to compensate for the bad launch, but gravity defeated him all at once. The toe of his left boot came down on the far ledge, but the other one missed by several inches. He went down into the swirling water, then bobbed up a second later, both hands groping at the stone’s smooth edge.

Slowly, Randall backed away from the edge, stopping only when his back pressed against a high boulder. He heard Mark calling out, watched him clawing for a solid hold. Space enough for three long strides before reaching the edge, he thought. And the next step would take him out into the spray. When he leapt from the rock, he spread his legs into a wide triangle, extending one arm before him across the rift, the other behind. His forward foot landed squarely on the far shelf, his second one just barely on the edge. In another second he was belly-down on the rock, reaching with both arms toward the rushing current.

“Need any help down there?” he yelled.

“I’m drowning, pal!” Mark choked back, hanging by one hand from a knob of stone. “Get me out! These blasted stones are too smooth for me to climb up.”

Randall caught Mark’s free arm and clamped both his hands around the wrist. He pulled, but the dead weight barely moved. Cursing, he let go of Mark’s wrist with one hand to reach farther down, groping for a handhold on the cold skin of Mark’s back.

“Let go of the rock, Mark,” he gasped. “Pull yourself up my arm with both your hands. I can’t get ahold of you to lift you any higher.”

When Mark obeyed, the burden of his full weight nearly brought Randall over the edge. But as he slid forward, the toe of one shoe hooked into a hole in the rock and held him secure. Mark climbed hand-over-hand, using Randall’s arm like a rope, until Randall got his fingers around his belt and heaved upward. With one long final pull from Randall, Mark began inching forward along the rock like a great seal.

“Damn!” he laughed, rolling over on his back. He shook his head, spitting water from his mouth. “I thought I was one dumb drowned tourist. Thanks.”

“You would have made it without me,” Randall said, shaking through his whole body.

“Maybe,” Mark answered. Lifting himself to his knees, he doubled over and coughed up more water. “Maybe not.” On all fours, he shook his body like a dog, water flying from his beard and the mat of hair on his chest. Then they climbed down the rocks and walked across the disappearing beach to the first field.

“Ever think of losing a pound or two?” Randall asked, poking Mark in the stomach. “Might make you easier to pull out of the drink next time, if you plan on making a habit of it.”

“Hey,” sucking in his gut, putting his hand flat against his abdomen. “That’s all muscle, pal. Besides, who wants to look like they spend their life in a gym?”

“You seem to be in small danger of that,” Randall said, slapping him on the back. “Let’s get back before the afternoon rain starts. Come on.” He broke into a slow jog.

“Sounds good,” Mark said. “I do believe I’m thirsty for an early Guiness.”

Randall nodded, then thought about sitting in a crowded pub. Would his enemy be there, too? The one that had shadowed him through Ireland? After the last two perfect hours, did he want Mark to see him overtaken by neurosis? His heart beat faster as he picked up speed crossing the field. He looked up, saw that Ireland was nearing the end of its daily ration of sun. Clear sky was losing its struggle against rain-bearing clouds. But the interval of sunshine had dried out the long grass in the fields, filled the air with the odor of flowers and manure and grass. He stopped to look behind for Mark, saw the rift they had vaulted overflowing with water, coursing away from the sea to an inland lake.

Don’t worry so damn much, he told himself. Are you going to wait until this is all over before you have a beer with a new friend again? Could be a long wait.

“Hurry it up,” Mark yelled. “My guess is the next downpour’s about five minutes away.”

Randall eyes followed Mark’s form as he ran past him.

Could I be the mortal man desired by fifty sisters from the ocean’s depths? he wondered. If I stood alone on the half-deck of a one-masted ship, oars lying idle, would they rise from the sea to find me? Floating coral anemones, their heads would break above the waves. Groping fifty paths past the shields lining the bulwarks, they would pull themselves up the sides with long-fingered hands. Over the wooden decks they would pour, their sea-crystal robes floating up the rigging like swaying bells. As the ship’s prow slipped beneath the waves, taking the loved man forever to their caves and grottos, their kisses would run down his chest and legs like streams of icy water.

As Randall broke into a trot again, the rift they had vaulted overflowed with water, Beyond the spur of rock, far from the two running men, Cromwell’s fortress stood barren, a spent black star keeping watch against armies that would never arrive.