The curved glass window of a jewelry store on Wicklow Street throws back forms and countenances and in them, diamond rings and necklaces, heavy metallic wristwatches with their crystal faces, taunts to those, such as I, who might hover a body away, hoping not to be bumped, or collided with, to be talked to or passed through.
There are countless pasts here: living, half-living, dead. Worlds that are unattended in the present, unselected for words, straining for sounds that never quite rise into utterance, or become a lasting sign as a mark on paper, or a sense that can, with a touch, be called back to light from digital darkness. For all, there are names but for many, no voices to speak them. This is my home. I can go anywhere. See anything, as long as it is that which lies on the surface. Who else is here and where?
Kenneth worked the buses in St Helens and did evil by night. Marie was a contract cleaner in Hounslow with her sister Chrissie. They needed to think they were free and to believe in hope. Mick was laid off from the ball-bearing factory in Letchworth and took to driving a taxi, but he didn’t have a cabbie’s temperament. Conor worked for a large reprographics company in Bonn. His spectacles were always too small for his face. Liam tended bar at Cloagh’s Tavern on East Tenth Street in New York City. Eggs Benzedrine was the perfect start to his day. Catherine was an undermatron at the Melbourne Orphan Asylum. She enjoyed a long and happy life. They were here at different times, in the street and on the glass, and now they are not here.
Those who are gone do not know what they want, except, perhaps, because they do not exist, that they desire to be. Their animation into shadows from nothingness is my failed attempt to reach for a story. There is nothing human here. I am bloated with words. I am seizing with the unthinkable. I am not on the street but I am there, warped on the window’s surface, where, if you are passing, you can wave to me and say hello before I move along to become another reflection.
Lives and nonlives accumulate in the glass. There is a dirty pane a few feet down from the entrance to a bar on Exchequer Street that has captured glances for decades. The dark rectangle is crowded with us. Peer in. But not too close. Kevin has what he needs hidden in every room in the house—behind the cistern, on the top shelf of the hot press, in the bits-and-pieces drawer in the kitchen. He has what he needs in the glove compartment of his work’s piano van. What he needs killed him, which was what he needed. Vad and Kez are pressed together, smiling, turning slowly around in their world of smoke. Florrie stands still, leaning on a blackthorn stick. He’s still got the moves. They’re behind his eyes. You’re a lovely dancer, mister. Ella chugs her lemonade and blinks the white sunlight out of her eyes. She can feel the kebab grease on her fingers, the streaks of chili sauce. There’s a big smile coming, she knows it. Dani’s string bag is bulging with half a dozen cauliflowers. It nearly has the socket out of her shoulder. And where’ll the gratitude be? Where? Nowhere.
The Jervis Centre is empty, the lights are down and somewhere Yonas, the security guard, is stretching his legs. Faintly on the glass of the first-floor atrium barrier, in the long-gone hospital, Annie checks the fob watch that hangs over the left breast pocket of her uniform and settles back in a black vinyl chair. There’s time to finish her tea, time for a second fig roll before the 3:00 a.m. ward tour. The hum is continuous and comforting. Nights are good that way.
On the surface of an oily puddle that comes and goes on Capel Street there are shimmering images of purple Doc Martens; of regulation Garda lightweight operational safety boots; of high-polished Tutty’s brogues; of raggedy old runners; of white sandals decorated on the straps with plastic daisies; of thigh-high, high-heeled scarlet PVC boots; blue, round-toed Start-Rite shoes; immaculate Altra Lone Peaks; and a pair of feet, cracked and yellow, bruised and cut, the left big toenail missing.
Andy’s bit of a face, no more than a smudge on the tough Perspex, and behind this, the mute energy of the artist’s studio: pink, orange, scarlet, and tan dabs; a rusty radiator; a withered copy of Viz magazine; pots of dried-up brushes; a stack of books, titles obscured. Andy was poor and fearful and so treated like a prick wherever he went, but in the Hugh Lane it was generally quiet on a weekday and the security guards seemed to understand the necessities attendant on having nowhere to go, no one to be. Or maybe not that last one.
We are where we are but only, and always, approximately. The vastness of insignificance is all around and within. The eye has no corners, but there in the fuzz and blur is where the deep mind seeks patterns; the nothing doing, the entwisted fibers of what is felt, the scale of time and its materiality. We are where we are, again. Test the eye on what is found there. The image confined. The inapprehensible. The entanglement of selves. That which denies the line; the plot; the parsable, clear retrospection; the story. Come here while I tell you. Nothing.
A fringe and eyes—Anna’s—on the streaky monitor, and underneath a scatter of open windows, files, and emails, and through a glass wall the Grand Canal Dock with the failing light all around and people headed all ways. On the surface of her eye, Anna catches a recursion of self and office and world and presses her eyes closed, trying to crush out all that there is and was and might be. “Good night.” Melanie has spoken. “Good night?” she says. “Oh, yes. Yes,” says Anna. “Good night.”
Pressing his body against the low stone wall, Mike stares into the Dodder with no expectation of seeing himself, and indeed there he is not, and there—there—is the river’s thick flow and gently corrugated surface, with a warped piece of blue-and-white sky, a margin of shimmering green, and no discernible end. Mike’s better self is at the summit of Hungry Hill on a summer’s day with a packet of beef sandwiches, a thermos of tea, and his boy Darragh. Darragh smiles and Mike smiles and Darragh smiles back, the same smile but different, and so does Mike. There is no discernible end.
In the midafternoon sunshine, there is no one waiting at the bus stop in Coolock but dimly on the scratched white surface of the shelter’s plastic are the shapes of two sisters.
“They emptied me out.”
“They butchered her.”
“They emptied me out entirely.”
“They butchered me entirely.”
“They butchered her.”
“What was pain to them?”
“What is pain?”
“My life was saved.”
“What life was saved?”
“The life for nothing.”
“Didn’t I love you?”
The shades pull together and a bus goes by without stopping.
A painting takes up most of the wall in the enormous new kitchen on the second floor of the house on Leinster Road. There are heavily palette-knifed ridges and waves of black oil paint mixed, in places, with horsehair; shivers of faces made out in quick, sure dabs and lines of metallic white; irregular swirls of black make a night sky or a dome of thoughts or other sublunary presences. The canvas is covered with a heavy sheet of reflection-resistant glass, held in a neutral gray, metal frame, but, nonetheless, if Cara was to look up from her midmorning poached egg on toast, she would see some soft surface of herself and, to the side, in a much smaller kitchen from an earlier time, Eileen. Eileen mashing a banana, spreading it on slices of buttered bread and carefully scattering a little sugar over the top. For the kids’ tea. They’ll want a glass of milk but they can’t have one, ’cause there’ll be ructions if there’s none left for the old fella’s cuppa.
Cara does not look up. She turns over the page of a magazine that she has not really read, to another page that she will not really read. The egg is good but she will not finish eating it. She puts the fork down. There is work to be done before the children come home.
Two bodies drift together on St Andrew’s Street and pass in front of a small frame at throat height. They follow a line of custom: the steps of others not known, for whom there are no maps, or memories, maybe. Behind the glass is a menu for a Lebanese restaurant. Each night, every few minutes, Dáithí and Lara move across this surface, not touching each other. The words they might have spoken are permanently separated from this repeating moment. All there is to be known about them is here, if it could be read.
Minutes past the commencement of a summer dawn, on the drive opposite Brickfield Park, Amy leans over the bonnet of a bottle-green Merc and checks her fringe in the windscreen. Ray is asleep upright, but tilted back slightly, in the front passenger seat, his good suit on, with the gold silk tie he got for Christmas from his brother JJ, done tight up to the top button. Amy is happy with what she sees and walks on to the bus stop. The mobile on the driver’s seat rings and keeps on ringing, until it stops. Ray does not move. A moment passes and the phone rings and Ray startles awake. He glares ahead into the sunlight and a green blur and the hovering face of a woman he does not know, who is touching her cheek very gently. He blinks her away. The job is on.
The slick, hard surface of the vitrine shows Lisa to herself: in her smart suit; in a hospital gown; in her blue overalls, streaked, smeared, blobbed, and ragged with paint; in a tight white T-shirt of the kind she would have taken pleasure in wearing on a summer’s day back when she had two breasts. The lights are low in the gallery. Lisa watches Bahram Gur, dressed in gold, head swathed in blue cloth, on horseback, kill a dragon with a single arrow. She feels the point go into the heart of malice. The bad flesh would have sunk into the earth but a dragon might grow back from a single seed. The hero might vanish, or she might triumph, on a single day, in a solitary reflection, with the test results in her handbag that read “All clear.”
Down the Coombe, there is a group on the pavement, four particles standing before the yellow-framed window of a bookshop. Books that each has abandoned through life or death are behind the glass, joining them together in reflection. The green morocco binding of a pocket edition of Carleton’s Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, that was Carmel’s, and before that, her grandmother’s. The soft green cloth of Patrick’s copy of James Stephens’s The Crock of Gold, withdrawn from the library of Holyoke Community College. Annie’s paperback of Night, by Edna O’Brien, the paper crumbling orange. Neasa’s Left Book Club edition of The Irish Republic by Dorothy Macardle, with the maps still intact.
The readers draw closer to the glass, but they do not touch.
Pictured on the glass of the tearooms, between the hazy late summer, late afternoon light behind and, outside, in the Phoenix Park, shifting arboreal greens and browns, in a moment of permanent radiance and joy, is the face of Orla. Standing, naughtily, on a chair, god bless her, in her raspberry matinee coat knitted by her grandma, the left arm slightly longer than the right, with an ice cream cone heaped high with a great immensity of cold, creamy happiness. Across a cluster of dimmer, higher panels is her daddy with his cappuccino, the possessor of the sudden knowledge that there is nothing better and the hope that, if he tries hard enough, this perfection will never end.
I could be anywhere but I am standing opposite the house on Griffith Avenue where I lived for two summers with the good, close friends who no longer know each other. I look down. The lights go out in my hand. I stare into the flat black surface and see no one.
Ibrahim’s gaze passes from the spire of Findlater’s Church to the pool of the Garden of Remembrance upon which he sees all his many faces from infancy to now. He smiles and says, apparently aloud, “Who has placed me here? I am a composite apparition. The blue, the green, the white waves in their tesserate tide. What do they recall to the people who visit this garden? I remember my mother. Not a particular time or place, but the whole of her, the whole of our love.”
The net curtain is down in the front room of the house in Oaklands Terrace and I stand still, as a much younger man, with long curly hair and a full goatee. The sun shifts behind a cloud and I disappear, and in a mirror over the mantelpiece a man’s arm is raised, in the hard knot of his fist, a belt. I don’t turn away and the hours pass, and the arm, the belt, the fist hold there until the dusk comes on and the night draws in and I can no longer see into the past.
Most of my life was spent in other territories. Imagined versions of this city were told to me in childhood as home, and I grew and wandered, and, wherever I was, this birthplace rose up under the present one, shaping and shadowing, impressing on my eye with pictures out of time, imposing on my ear the tones and echoes of the voices of a more real place. When I returned to this habitation, as often I did, I found much there I had been told of, a world of familiarity that was at once strange to me, and I to it, and for this I was thought plastic, instead of what I was to myself; a not-dead ghost of light and dust.
I stand where there is all the time and, in the fullness of time, no time at all. The shapes of the hours, the days, the years, are thrown back to sight or no sight. The lives of cities, of countries, of continents, of islands, can be thought of as proceeding in lines, in nets and weaves, in deep continuities and discontinuities, of well-worn narratives, some of them true, and of immensities of the forgotten. Who we were—the someones, the no ones, the anyones—fold back onto themselves in the reflected moment. I am here to catch the image, the motion, the stillness, the gatherings. I am here for the return, for the depthless flavor of loss, for the return and nothing else.
This is my home. I can go anywhere and come back to myself on these many surfaces. We can return home in our reflections, even when the city we knew, the city we were, has gone forever.
