The People from Wedding to the North

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 Don’t let his demeanor fool you. Harry was ready for the racket, whatever it might be. He might even be ready for a wedding. Still, after any tragedy, he needed to reconsider his stories to figure out what might come next.

* * * 

He wore sweaters and autumn coloured chords and had a position in London where his staff admired and feared him as a leader who decided financial and professional fates. He drove a silver sports car and lived in a flat overlooking the Thames decorated with expensive artwork from Costa Rica, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, and Micronesia. He flew to beaches over long weekends--Porto Cervo his favourite--windsurfing with other executives, spending time over oysters and white wine to discuss business, making calls to his staff, concerned about their projects, meeting different women for dinner, dancing late and tumbling back with them to a room with a balcony facing the sea. He was happy and his close friends--people he talked to often--liked him, eager to share stories over meals at familiar bistros.

On the downside, he smoked way to many cigarettes and lied too much. The description recited above was from his lips and completely false.

He was actually a failed painter in New York, lonely, living in a small apartment on a bleak downtown street, neighbours brawling echoes moving through his open windows, murderers and thieves, like him, whose primary habits were drink and smoke. He sat alone in bars, sketching skinny women hanging from men who held them by the shoulders, and, once the drink settled, watched these men yank these women into the chaos of New York’s streets for bawls and beats, where Harry would follow, wondering what happened, and if he could find out, he just might depict something worthwhile.

Or, this was where he was headed if he didn’t make some changes. He was struggling to find out which was closer to his truth, or at least his predicament. 

Harry did, from time to time, tinker with business, as he painted from time to time, and he had thought about doing so much that the thoughts became their own stepping-stones even if he never knew toward what. He was always convinced that his life was not traditional, or normal, and that eventually he’d find the right path, his path. He didn’t know how else to explain it. So instead he shared his dreams. He talked about all the fantastic things he’d do. He’d paint paintings whose colours and lines made people blush from the love they felt for themselves and others. He’d invent a machine that made products that everyone cherished and that everyone could afford. He’d explore deserts on camels and the darkest seas in submarines. Everyone told him he was a dreamer. He agreed.

Of course, all his business schemes and artistic romances had collided with time, obliterating any chance for one or the other. It was fine when he was young. He had gone to a good university and done well there and no one thought a few years spent trying out different careers was misguided, until the few years turned into more. He remembered his thirtieth birthday. His friends had moved into solid New York careers—banking and law of most of them. Most of them were married and a few had kids. He kept up with their stories via e-mail but he didn’t see them much. So, he spent his thirtieth with his family. His mother was so sad at the party. She told him the stories he’d heard so often, about her father’s move to America, leaving a place where women were left praying in sunlit churches, and the cinema he started on First Avenue. She told her son that even greatness can sometimes seem very small to the rest of the world. A few days later, she and his father were killed in a horrendous car accident on their way home from a party. 

Harry left for London a few weeks after the accident. He needed to get away from all the people who continued to call him, to see how he was doing and if he needed anything. He needed his parents was all he ever wanted to say in response. That’s all he needed. His mother and father had met in London and fell in love there. “Against all of England’s greys, your mother and I bloomed like a rose,” his father always said. Harry figured it was the right place to go to figure out where his imagination, with his parents’ memories, would lead him next.

* * *

Of course, once there, his imagination left him depressed and lonely.

“Have you ever though of finding yourself a nice lass? Every man needs a bride, I’d say.”

Harry lit her cigarette and looked up at the television in the pub. There was a cricket match on the television and its peculiarities distracted him. It was an odd game, these men in their white suits and a ball bounced against the ground before the bat. As an American, he thought he should talk to people about their sports as a way to deflect the usual complaints of American arrogance and ignorance. Really, he thought it might be a way to strike up a conversation with someone. He thought that’s what these pubs were for but he had never really succeeded. People came with friends and left with friends and there didn’t seem to be much chit-chat between them. The pubs were happy places, not like American bars were men hunted women or shared their loneliness with the barman and his thin liquors.

Harry settled his gaze on Elisabeth out of courtesy. He was imagining himself playing cricket, rather than talking to someone about it. He was imagining that he discovered some preordained skills for the game during a pick-up match in Battersea Park. He’d bat like a pro, he thought, if that’s what they called it, and the English lads would be impressed, Then he wondered if the concept of a pick-up match existed in England or if it was like the pub where friends came in together and left together, according to pre-existing plans. He saw himself standing on the pitch, watching the men in their crisp uniforms play out the match, waiting for them to take notice, one of the more athletic men, a kind looking man, would come over and ask him if he wanted to join the game, and Harry would throw off his big jacket to reveal his own crisp uniform—red, white and blue. They’d laugh and he’d point out that their nations shared these colours. They’d laugh some more and pat him on the back and then he’d use his baseball skills to teach the boys a lesson. Or, Harry thought, he’d be left on the sidelines where his feet would get cold against the grass and a light drizzle would force him to move on.

“You know, I almost married a man. Johnny McCormack. Ah, he was a fine looking bloke. Of course, I was horrible to him. I drank too much and smoked too much. He wanted someone prettier, I guess. We did talk about marriage but then we talked about all kinds of things. Ah, we were young so. You know how it is. Jesus, you’ve been through worse.”

Harry looked across at Elisabeth, her sandy hair and freckled skin, the way she kept her arms bent up around her face as she spoke, and he started thinking about the wedding they were going to together.  Elisabeth was the daughter of a friend of Harry’s family. He’d met her years before but was pleased that she agreed to pick him up at Heathrow and take him to the flat his father to use during business trips to London. She brought some milk and sausages with her to the airport, putting them in the refrigerator as Harry inspected his corporate digs. She offered to show him around London and he was grateful for the offer. They watched the buskers at Convent Garden, rode the London Eye, and spent occasional hours at the Tate Modern. Harry liked London’s sites but preferred the pubs, which seemed to suit Elisabeth fine.

Her family was from a small town on Ireland’s west coast and she was always comparing her home with London’s vastness, a vastness that swallowed up anything she might say about her home. Still, Harry enjoyed her company most when she talked about County Clare, how it was less famous than County Kerry, but more beautiful, she said, with its ragged sea cliffs and the Burren’s limestone wilderness, a place she said that had more types of wildflower than any other place in the world except that most of them grew between the stones, away from the peering eyes of the people who’d only venture a few steps onto the lunar-like landscape. She even told him there were fairies there—not leprechauns, she corrected, but fairies, good and bad, who lived in vast underground caverns, massive places that could hold all the people of Ireland, if they so needed. Harry laughed at her stories and she admitted that she liked the myths as much as anything else about her nation, a nation that seemed to her to be forgetting all of that wonderful folklore with its attention to the Celtic Tiger’s mighty economic roar and all the software companies that road along its tail. “They’re all perched on those fairy caves, as well. They ought not to forget it,” she joked. 

When she invited him to join her for a wedding, Harry grew, if not excited, at least pleased about the chance to see the home from all her stories. He asked her about it often. He asked about the bride and groom, the priest, the ceremony, what people would do, what they might talk about? He admitted he was a bit anxious to be at wedding, a joyous occasion, when he was dealing with so much misery.  How could he talk to people about himself when all he could think about was how his mother and father, people he cherished, people he talked to every day of his life, were now gone, killed in an instant. Harry could see the black sedan, crumpled like a raisin, and his mother’s white gown spit between the broken windshield. He could recite every moment of the funeral, the things people said to him as they walked away from the two coffins laid down below dirty stained-glass windows. How could he go to a wedding?

She pestered him still; telling him it would be fine. That he’d be fine. He agreed in the end. He didn’t have much else to do with himself and he had grown fond of their evenings together. They flew out to Shannon and stayed with her parents in a small village outside Ennis, the largest in town in the county.

Plan

Fionn opened and carefully piled the raised letter responses that arrived each day. Sarah watched television as he did.

I’ll be damned if I let this woman complicate my plans.

His plans fit. Fionn spent days in his father’s company, sharing Dominican jokes with the lads while they prodded production’s boom-boom-boom--twenty-seven machines dutifully spitting out copper fixes that were assembled into arrays of electronic connectors, plugs for a wired world, mass produced in Ireland where American multinationals used it as a gate to the rest of the EU. He was suited for the responsibility, bestowed by his father, a man who always took such work seriously. Fionn arrived at half past seven and was content to make the drive to Shannon at eight, to be with the woman he chose to be his bride. Sarah, beautiful Sarah, would take his plans to place. 

Weekends were erratic. Ireland, even with the roar of a booming economy deafening its impoverished history, even with a ban on smoking in the pubs—Egad, can you imagine?--still had a way with drink. Fridays, he met Sarah at a pub, staying till closing and snagging cans on the way out. Saturdays, after a lie in, they shopped and took rides up to Ennis for tea, ended in one or another pub by dusk, and tucked cans in bags at closing, again, for the rest of the night. This was routine enough. It was the talk that came with drink that contributed to Fionn’s frustrations.

“I understand how hard it is. Think about my pa. He’s put all the money into the church and the Dromoland. How am I going to explain?”

“This isn’t about money, Fionn.”

“It is in some respects. Sarah, you know how I feel. You know I’ll take care of you.”

“That’s not the point either, pet. I can’t explain why I feel this way.”

“What way?”

“That I’m not sure.”

“What can you ever be sure about?”

* * *

Fionn went to New York at nineteen. The town he left, a young man’s constraints, convinced him penance was served elsewhere. It was an old decision. A relic. An antique with sharp metal fixtures slammed into solid oak. He’d go to New York. He didn’t have much choice.

“What on God’s earth are you going on about? You know you have a job with me anytime you like? New York? There is no need, Fionn. We can sort . . .For Christ’s sake; we don’t know a soul there. If you’d go to Boston, you could at least stay with one of your cousins.”

“It’s fine, pa. I need to go. I’m going.”

“Jesus. Consider Boston? New York. Your ma’s cousins are in Boston. They’d find you work. They’d help you get the right permits. You know it’s not the easiest prospect in the world to get work in that country. You’re just a lad.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. You’re nineteen. And, you can sort things here. We can sort out everything.”

“What pa? What?”

“Jesus. Why don’t you come work with me? I’m planning on retiring in a few years time. You can take over the place.”

“I can’t do that now, pa. Maybe someday. Now, I have to leave.”

“Ah, feck it. Just look out for yourself, son of mine.”

“I will.”

Conversations with his father went this way to avoid what they both knew, not about reprisal but about what men do when action, in a small town, on the west coast of Ireland, where stories have a way of making their way in pubs crowded with men and smoke, requires departure.

Fionn stood with his father in Shannon’s hanger of an airport, mostly Americans coming and going, fat and happy, getting cash and renting cars, buying trinkets and popping bubble gum. His father gave him a credit card and told him to use it sparingly. Fionn would have appreciated an envelope packed with bills.

In New York, Fionn read newspapers, catching glimpses of what might happen, and found work in a Bronx butchery, burnt bones, blood and ammonia enough to keep him focused, and a salary paid in cash. He took a flat and spent summers and winters sweating it out, drenching or freezing on his thin mattress.

Images from Fionn’s visit with Billy in Dublin repeated their course in the streets of the tallest of tall cities, in a nation that cursed those seeking refuge on its shores, shaking fists in kebab shops, spitting between exhaust, acrid smells invisible but noticeable, plying their course, and leaving him alone to think about what he had done. American sermons, confined to New York’s clatter, were visceral enough to remind him why he left. 

A year in, he took a severe beating by a kid who showed him a better place to get cash from his father’s credit card. Fionn lie on the street as the kid kicked him in the head, ribs, arms, legs, kicking and beating him while Fionn groaned and pulled himself away from the street. He healed, slowly, and during the nights he had black and white hallucinations, films he never shunned, recording each image for playback, and finding each time that the images had warped slightly, unable to fit previous frames, until, slowly, they became a mixture of celluloid detritus with mewling soundtracks. Styled tattoos rubbed green with time. It was enough.

When he left his flat, to buy groceries, to discover he could still work in the butchery after his absence, he was stronger. He had lost a few kilos and he found he could carve the sides of beef more swiftly than before. He started to look after his flat, cleaning his sheets every few days, mopping the floor, walls, keeping everything tidy, scrubbing the sinks and the toilet every other day. He spent most evenings reading, picking up paperbacks from a used bookstore on his street. His boss gave him more responsibilities and more cash although Fionn spent little over his years there.

When his father called to tell him that his mother had died in a car accident, he set the receiver down and prayed for the first time in years. His mother had prayed every day and he wished he had prayed for her more. He went to church and was pleased to find a priest who would take his confession. The priest told him it was probably time for him to go home. Fionn agreed.

His father picked him up, standing there like he had never left the airport. They hugged, cried and talked about his mother while they drove to town.  Fionn could hardly believe the construction—every road a menagerie of light stones and earthmovers, rows of ticky-tacky houses. “We’ll be like America yet,” his father said.

“This place has changed.”

“Everything always does, Fionn.”

“I miss ma.”

“So do I my son. I miss a lot.”

Fionn took his own place, a newly renovated flat overlooking the River Fergus where swans glided past the Anglican Church and where he could see the roof of his father’s factory. His father gave him the promised job and he settled into the position. He made lists of what he could do. He’d buy a car. He’d buy a house. He’d put money in accounts. He’d meet someone and get married. He’d make contact with his brother. He tacked these lists against the clean wall in the bedroom and was pleased enough to know he was making his way toward each.

Need

Jeremiah kept talking. Each syllable was almost in reverb, moving around the conference room. Echoes. Motion. Sound hitting glossy painted walls, a polished table and slick telephone monitor, bouncing against double-plane glass windows, zipping across the room, past the twelve men, their laptops and porcelain pens, returning to Jeremiah where he batted them back out. Loops. No feedback.

Jeremiah honed his skills on the breadth and width of rhythm, uncommon to men, like his countrymen and their fiddles, but instead the rhythm of infinite logic, chaotic patterns, the breadth and width of mathematics and code. He could figure, without grid or processor, how long it took sound to bounce. He could draw invisible arcs. He could determine mollification. He could chart competing waves. More than these geometries, Jeremiah designed software systems to do this—of course, applied as they were for corporate customers with commercial targets.

His physicality was nearly transparent. Eyebrows as thin as a line of sugar. Hair as stiff as wheat. Tall, a surprising altitude, maintained by teetering back and forth while he spoke. His body tilted its way around shoddy constructions, his words, scraping hard against them, creating sparks from his mind’s lucent constructions only to slide to the garbled meaningless of what spilled between his slender lips, while the people around him, the investors, only recognized his awkwardness, his guffaws, his misplaced Irish witticisms, his bumpkiness, messy, around such polished and professional young men. Christ!—Thank God for Phillip, Jeremiah thought. He came from poor beginnings and made good at Cambridge and snuffed these English poofters by going straight to America. Good man, Phillip.

Jeremiah stayed on the same slide for twenty minutes. The slide had a color graph, four bullet points and a crowning statement, Jeremiah observed, that had not achieved the best impression. He looked nervously toward Phillip.

The blaring obvious predicament that consumers may find themselves, when presented with the objective curiosity of household items, blaring little kitties, believe me, that can cause even the thickest man-woman to think twice. Well, gentlemen, the whole proposition becomes obvious, now doesn’t it.

These words, of course, were not those Jeremiah let loose inside the room but he heard himself say little else.  

Jeremiah chopped the air around him, slapping each idea, whapping it like a hurly on the pitch. He knew the maths behind these words. He knew the technology was unique, tied to unique codes, codes he manufactured, and about which he had scientific clarity. He had to make it so.

The meeting continued. Men hit keys behind hidden flip-top monitors. 

Jeremiah knew if he kept slamming words, a series, a string, even a sentence, would come together and impress the men, would move precisely across their reservations, their prejudice, Christ, their boredom, and, like a sliotar sailing toward a goal, a beautiful glide through empty space, his sentence would find its mark. It would bring these men to their feet, mates rushing towards him and smothering him in the glorious pitch, the victory leading everyone to clap and grin. They would take their pens and write the checks he needed. Jeremiah would hold the checks above his head as they closed their laptops and gathered around him. He just needed to slap one through the posts. That’s all.

Jeremiah had made Phillip’s firm money. Phillip, who led these twelve men, ordering them to listen, ordering them to follow his judgment, could pat Jeremiah on the back and take him to a fine London restaurant where they could drink and talk and listen to the sounds they made together. 

But, Phillip was no longer his investor. Jeremiah stood in this room alone. He needed to keep talking.

“Gentlemen, if you can see the implications of this unique selling point, then you will surely agree time is adequately confined to our side and we will be able to top-face our profits without the timidity left to lesser men.”

He continued to talk but his thoughts returned home. He caught sight of County Clare’s orange sun, rising above him, rising as he lay on the ground, heat and pain shooting up from his leg. He could not see the posts. He could see his injury, the results from the lad’s menacing hurly swipe into Jeremiah’s shin, the sold crack and his scream, and the ambulance lights as he was taken to hospital. He saw white curtains. He remembered his mother and father were there. His mates from school were there. The bone was there, jagged and white with skin peeled back. The nurse asked them to leave and pulled the curtains. He remembered looking at the light bulb and crying while the nurse prepared the wound’s dressing.

“Your hurling days are behind you, I’m sorry to say. You won’t be out on the pitch for at least the rest of the season. I’ve seen hurly gashes before, but this is serious. Did your ma talk to the lad’s parents? Did she? Oh, stop crying. You’ll be fine. I’d just be staying away from the pitch and that lad for a spell.”

This memory, as it always did, led to images of his father, a County Solicitor and town drunk, ranting in pubs after his wife was taken from him with a sudden disease. Jeremiah’s mother, his father’s dear wife, died shortly after Jeremiah rang the bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, heralding in unprecedented wealth, for a time. He cried for her during subsequent meetings with shareholders, so many surprised to see such a rich man burst into unexpected tears.

A tear’s nakedness would not suffice for Phillip, or the others, or for any other that might be awaiting this investment committee’s verdict.

The sixth man to Jeremiah’s left reached down to fiddle with a power point. When he resurfaced, he looked at Jeremiah, casting him a furious look, as if Jeremiah was a homeless drug addict, someone pleading for a few pounds for his fix. Just give him a shot--a prick in the arm, a prick in the leg.

“Jeremiah, could you perhaps move on to the next slide? We will need to be closing this meeting in the next ten minutes.”

“Of course so, Phillip. Yes. I was just about to. Yes. Gentlemen, on to the next slide.”

Work

Few knew the real sound of urban explosions. Movies were poor substitutes. The sequence was quicker and slower than film allowed. It always got the pace screwed-up.

Billy figured it was closer to comic book “ka-booms.” The ‘ka’ was cracking-snapping concrete, stone yanked from moorings. The boom echoed, usually, for a moment or two, like a sonar warning, followed by broken glass, falling from twisted frames, the sonar moving between other muffled sounds, people becoming aware, screaming, injured. After a few more moments, there were sirens and more muffled sounds. Billy was well gone by then.

Billy escaped the Lisbon police after killing the Direcção Central de Combate au Banditismo—“A cop”—that smuggling operations from Algeria needed to loosen. Billy zipped through the Lisboan airport. He didn’t recognize increased security or the Portuguese secret police. From there he flew to Paris, then Dublin, and now, to London.

It was so much easier since al-Qaida. A nice Irish lad had no problems while his bearded Arab brethren, with their rancorous children and praying wives, watched customs agents rifle through bags of honeyed pastries and fresh fruit, horrified they might find something there. They would have found more on Billy. Good business, this time. God bless al-Qaida.

Billy’s hair was short enough to keep messy and he hid his eyes behind shades. He wore a loose Zegna button-up, Biagini cords, and thick leather cowboy boots he bought in America. He thought the boots were the best thing he owned. He was like George W.

The train from Stansted was filled with businessmen talking about telecommunications and software and other bullshit. Billy sat between them, carrying more cash than they would ever see. The cash made him nervous, especially as he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it. He’d been a good delivery boy but this was different.

Damon told Billy to take the cash to London and stash it for a while until he settled matters. Damon was acting as the interlocutor between Billy and Mediterranean buyers.

Billy didn’t like Damon. The first time they met, Damon bragged about killing someone with a steel pipe. He described a thick water pipe, about an inch in diameter, that he shoved in the fucker’s mouth, whapping the other end with a hammer, a 5-pound sledge, that ripped the pipe out the back of the man’s head, “popping like a champagne cork,” Damon claimed.

Damon’s work had been curtailed since the Americans started whipping around in their Hum-Vees and airplanes. It wasn’t the wars that made Billy’s and Damon’s work difficult. “The wars are creating a boom for our business.” Damon told Billy “If you are willing and stupid enough to sneak into Iraq, Syria, Iran, or the Koreas, and make a hit, the dollars flow and they won’t give a shit where you came from.”

Unfortunately for Damon, he hit one of the red faced little boys the CIA was recruiting and sending into the field.

Damon said, “Billy, you can just walk up to one of those strawberry blonde lads sitting alone at a café and you have your deal. The world’s capitals are swarming with these Midwestern cow paddies.”

Damon, of course, didn’t do it that way. When a deal didn’t go his way, he sliced one of these apple-pie kids open on a Paris street. Since then, he’d been commissioned out. The equivalent of sitting at a desk. Relaying messages from operations out to people like Billy.

Billy didn’t care. He’d take Damon’s messages and his shit. Things were getting better. Billy had gone back and forth from London and Dublin, mainly, taking crap from idiot IRA people, and once in awhile participating in expensive violence. Now he was being hired to blow shit up, on foreign soil. He was doing all right. His new role was James Bond-ish, or so Billy thought. Over-the-top, am I.

He wasn’t going to complain to the likes of Damon and, as he learned long ago, if he complained he’d become a threat and his business had little room for threats. Threat, frustration, anger, suspicion, revenge—none were fruitful. It is a noble profession, he joked.

He walked through the cavernous customs hall in Stansted, showed the customs agent his ticket stub and walked past the baggage claims and right out into legal London. Everything breezed. It was illogical how easy his work was given the scattered warnings he saw on airport lounge televisions, on papers tucked under travelers’ arms. He wandered amidst a thousand signs he’d get caught and he never was. He took the train, content the journey was nearly complete, checked into the Metropolitan Hotel on Park Lane, secured his bag of cash in the in-room safe and ordered shiatsu and reiki massages for the first and second nights.

I’m living a grand life.

He took out his papers. Fionn’s wedding invitation was among them. He received it at his London flat before he went to Lisbon and was surprised it reached him when it did. He read it again. He could have been anywhere. He thought about the opportunity it presented, a sign to keep him aware. Other people paid attention to salaries and mortgages. He paid attention to people bumping him on the Underground, or his immediate surroundings when his watch stopped ticking. He’d make his way back home. He couldn’t ignore his brother’s wedding.

Lift

Ophelia recognized imaginary crowns as men described their actions as noble and dignified. There stands a mockery, she thought. Whatever happened to sorority, the stronger sibling? Did we fight for nothing, just to get out kitchens? What happened! Her thoughts screamed.

She thought about her husband, the way he claimed his opinions as facts, supported merely by his authority, his position, and his ability to aggressively trade stories with his peers, all men, strutting around Dublin to the purring Celtic Tiger—they all want some pussy!

Rory strutted as if he, along with Ireland’s other enterprising men, were finally being rewarded for their years of lost pride. Ireland deserves to be proud, what with us producing more software than any other country on earth, he claimed, as he toddled from one pub to the next.

Bunch of locker room shite, she thought.

Rory talked about business and sports and politics and even religion but not the emotions underpinning each, not the original aspirations that drive conquests but simply the boasts thereafter, swinging pricks around where they wished, peeing across their nation’s gift for stories, their nations songs, their nation’s reputation for good graces, opting for the predatory sexualities of business conquest. They reserve feelings for women, their wives and girlfriends who listen without interruption after sex, and who provide them comfort, stroking their poor egos, telling them, of course you are a good man, of course I love you, of course, my dear, my man, my prince. Bullshit! I did all that and he still reserves his bona fides for his chums, all these other men in their fine suits and fancy clubs. They are all beasts and will remain so. Sexual revolutions! Ha! What happened?

In America, which her nation looked to so often, women were accorded more fundamental rights than in Ireland, and certainly more than a place like Saudi Arabia, and yet had women moved beyond similar fraternal statures in America, Ophelia wondered. Weren’t they proving the agility to play men’s games and gaining men’s respect for their play, wearing business suits and slamming facts around as fiercely as did men? Had it changed, when she saw Condoleeza Rice, an academic, palling it up with the good old boys in the Bush Administration who trampled history with their facts in order to play a football game, with high stake claims, in Afghanistan, Iraq and the rest of the world? And what of the American women who were trumpeting the call to return to their homes to raise their children? It was all cyclical bullshit, Ophelia knew, as the sixties and seventies in which she grew up receded into the cannon of episodic history. Family, church, and politics were pulling women back to place, despite a person’s reading of history. And how long before this same gendered liberalism receded in Europe where women had never moved far to begin with? Ophelia watched women dragging themselves from pub to pub in plastic breasts and long haired-wigs during hen parties, and knew there wasn’t much room for change in Ireland.

Ophelia knew history, and culture, and was settled with the notion that people were ignorant of these trends and that the strong mantles of childbirth and motherhood, as well as men’s simpleton crowns, were the chains yanking everything around.

So what of Rory, she thought. What of me?

Rory was typical, sharing stories of his Irish success with the lads and mentioning the value of going to church on Sunday, neglecting his wife’s refused comforts, and so brining his wayward Italian as a substitute, giving him suitable fodder to discuss the differences between faith in Rome and faith in Ireland, a topic with frothy guile among his chosen fraternal  mates as they discussed the demise of the church, pedophile nuns and priests, the place of religion in modern society. She never heard him discuss what it meant for him to have faith, how he bowed as God’s servant, taking communion as another business credential. He said, look at America? They do the same. Look at Clinton. Look at Bush. They have their faith, misguided as it may be at times. And that was always the crucible, in her city of Dublin, a city that always made her feel defeated. She failed. Rory did as he did because of his dignity, his pride, his place in Dublin society, and the errors that surfaced were dismissed as simple foibles of men’s accomplishments. He said it was his faith that gave him the strength to continue despite the errors in his way.  Faith in what? On what grounds? Hypocrites, and poorly informed, she thought.

And marriage? The rites bestowed in every culture between a man and women? Another mockery. She secretly figured the institution, as educated northern peoples liked to term it, was stronger between Muslims where women were given a contractual right to continued support if their men deserted them. Divorce, as Rory reminded her, was a man’s prerogative there, and Ophelia agreed, safe in her realization that it was also exceptionally rare because of this contractual promise. Divorce in Ireland, a tortuously long affair, still included the fight over material rights, for houses or children, and men succeeded in these courts, with their facts, more often than did women. She wondered about places like California, with their fifty-fifty splits and custodial rights bestowed consistently to women. There too, she thought, stands a mockery. The woman gets the children, and all the troubles of raising them alone, with slip-shod checks posted to child services from the father who gains girlfriends and increased income levels while she remains mired in the exhaustion of raising children alone.

Ophelia looked toward the sundial, stuck as it was on an hour that never passed, and recognized she was married to a man who fit these descriptions, and that there were no children to worry about, and that she couldn’t figure Rory’s other actions at all. And Sarah, her sister, facing a second marriage that seemed as foolhardy as the first, her little sister, searching for the prince to treat her as the queen she always believed she was. Another mockery.

Men and women getting married. Men and women dancing and swaying.

Ophelia wondered if she could determine a new way across this dichotomy. Ophelia wondered this as she went to the kitchen to pour another drink, pausing by the television she kept tuned and mute, a habit from her father’s house. The skies above Baghdad were alight, triumphantly, at least to the technical subtlety of delivered gunpowder. They were at it again on CNN, Ophelia observed, the blasts of cars and soldiers continuing apace as these men forced their facts on a foreign people. What more proof do I need?

Imagine the hollow thud of a thousand elephants trained to break stone, steel and glass.

Ophelia read Prophet Muhammad’s story. She read about the elephant storm sent against Mecca and their bowed trunks before the hail of stones, thrown from sparrows’ fabled beaks. She thought about the Haj rights immortalizing these early stories and how, after birth, the Prophet’s heart was removed and cleansed in a gold basin filled with snow. Those people never worry about the fact—they simply know. Muslims were now being pelted with the curved ironstones of star-bangled armies but their histories informed them in ways that a young America could never understand. Sarah seemed as intent on marriage as others on creaming Muslims. The religions that underpinned each were left with solemn preachers.

Christian armies killed Muslims.

Ophelia’s sister would marry.

These were not crowns. These were facts that even she would call such.

Ophelia drew upon her readings of history, current and otherwise, to augment her work at the university. She was a professor now, and proud to be so. She couldn’t mention these--the secret toiling with Islam, the release of stones that liberated her. Rory puffed and snorted and said Muslims were crazed and that they would never find their way in the modern world. He had Iraq and al-Qaida as the most recent backdrops to his position. He wouldn’t allow her to drench these televised proclamations with the hard course of history that was far bleaker than what could be depicted by Sky.  She knew she was thinking beyond their big house, beyond her husband’s dandies, beyond her sister’s second marriage.

Ophelia considered herself a good-looking woman. She had grown into her looks with casual designer clothes that allowed her to forget her adolescent homeliness.  She thought she looked best after a long day of research, usually in the sun, wiping her face of the dig’s dirt, clearing away the debris to reveal a face she saw glow in the mirror, her hair gently tangled and falling naturally around a body that remained firm, graceful curves she gained from working digs and hiking historic plains.

Her move to Dublin, she thought, was predictable. The position at the university proved perfect. It had done her well and it perhaps provided more opportunity than she could maintain in London. That city’s prospects echoed among too many people’s hustled intentions and she wasn’t up for those type of fights. She had had a small flat in Bloomsbury, spending her hours in the British Museum, her research mixing with her profession like acid on the glass above the library. Her Japanese boss wore hand tailored suits and boiler hats and talked about his company’s keiretsu and recited analogies of the British Empire, to which he referred to Ophelia as one of the Empire’s commoners, “Like the Koreans, yes, Ophelia? Yes?”

Her work, assuring archeological crossings for burly property developers--“Make damned sure there isn’t anything down there, ay.”—allowed her to buy books from favorite Bloomsbury shops and to invite friends for dinner on occasion. It never settled. She saw too many people come and go to make London home.

I was simply naïve.

She met Rory at a new office tower’s opening ceremonies. He cut the ribbons and soon she was sharing picnics with him in Hyde Park, him regaling her to return to teach in Dublin, where her work could uncover Irish land titles, stuffing it to the English, who had left their island in the mud. He told her it was noble work, a way to become part of the changing nation, to provide the proofs that Ireland was always ready to be a global leader, not a poor country touting long dead writers or fanciful pop showings on Eurovision. He was persuasive, and attentive, and she quickly started moving her boxes of books to his big home, with his encouragement, filling it with what she never bothered to unpack in London.

Rory praised her position at the university although she couldn’t make much of it herself. The collapse of Clifford Geertz’s cultural relativism on Rory’s eighteenth century dinning room table, crowding the interpretation of cultures with Foucault, Habermas, Giddens, content the confused intellectual bearing of books on tables was enough to justify her digs through poor farmer’s refuse, remains that proved the opposite of Rory’s original proclamations. She took to astrology—a kept joke none of her Dublin peers understood. She took to buying smelly cheeses from Sheridans. She took to sunbathing in Howth. She took to wearing Asian dresses in the rain—anything to add to the confusion she felt in those first few years back in Dublin.

She married Rory and soon discovered that husbands were not always what they claimed to be, and, a few weeks after this added confusion, Sarah arrived with a suitcase on a late winter night, dressed in a tight blouse and a FCUK shirt revealing her pierced belly. She announced she had left Donagh and needed a place to stay, asking Ophelia if Rory would mind.  Ophelia told her it was none of Rory’s business. “Of course you can stay, if you don’t mind doing something first,” Ophelia’s words spit forth as her hen-dressed sister, shivering in the rain, making an adolescent woman’s mistake, stood waiting for her sister’s invitation, “Sure, but I need something, honey. Could you go down to the docks and buy some heroin from one of the nice men down there?”

Sarah stood gawking at her older sister, smirking in the doorway, saying she was serious; it wasn’t a joke, she needed it now.

“What are you going on about Ophelia? You can’t be serious. You don’t do that stuff,” she puffed as Ophelia kept stand at the door.

“It isn’t for me you silly cow. It isn’t for me. It is for you, you little girl.”

“Fuck off, you. What are you saying? Are you going to let me in? I’m freezing out here.”

“Some heroin will help that as well.”

“Fuck off.”

“No. You fuck off.”

And with that, Ophelia turned and closed the door on her sister.

Sarah found another flop and called Ophelia. “I’m glad you found another place, sweetie. I’m doing my own search for smack, cocaine, hash, opium—do they have opium in Dublin—that would be a hoot. I need to get you something, little girl.”

Ophelia laughed the rest of the night and was pleased with her sister’s handling, even if she didn’t speak to Sarah for some time thereafter. It was a break, from her sister’s poor choices, from the treachery of the small town where she was born, miserable, looking for ways to leave without paying attention to the strong Irish roots that kept her there in the first place. Her sister’s choice, to leave her husband and come to Dublin, was pitiful when compared to the Irish who left on ships, making a clean break with a history that made little room for them.

Ophelia thought about that night as she situated herself back on the couch in the sunroom. She’d need something to keep such thoughts at bay. She took up a magazine and read a story of a financier who started a firm dedicated to buying failing manufacturing companies. She thought of Richard, her husband’s new mate, and continued to read to find out what she could about the man.

The author described countless business theories. He was well primed to achieve continuous improvement, change management, material throughput, business process re-engineering, lean manufacturing, with men who grunted from hauling engine parts from plastic bins to racks that were dragged by overhead conveyors through electromagnetic rooms where millimeters of plastic flakes collected, through massive furnaces where the flakes were baked and hardened, and out again where more men pulled off the parts for immediate shipping to Detroit assembly lines. Just in time.

The author described an old man who tended other furnaces that burned accumulated plastic residue from the racks. It wasn’t an essential process—simply a way to keep the racks clean and ready. It was also an expensive process that kept room-size furnaces burning twenty-four seven. The author wrote that utilities cut fifteen percent from profit.

He described explaining to the old man that they should put more racks through the furnace. He told him this would improve efficiency and cut costs. He took time to explain material throughput. The old man stared at him blankly. The author started putting racks on the line at about a foot apart, illustrating his point. The old man watched him. The author said they could do even better. Let’s pile these racks on. Let’s pile racks on racks. Let’s get as many of these racks through the furnace as absolutely possible and you can go home early.

The old man looked at the smiling author and started hanging rack on rack, keeping less than an inch between them. The racks started through the furnace and the flames engulfed the piled racks, burning and spewing the black plastic into cinder. They walked to the other side of the furnace and the racks came out clean as nickel and the author put on gloves to help the old man unhinge them and place them on pallets for the shuttering forklifts to bring back to the lines. The author was pleased. He couldn’t calculate the efficiency he created but he figured they’d be able to fire-down the furnace for at least a third of the day. This was a substantive improvement, he thought, as he walked out of the factory.

In the parking lot, the author saw a group of men pointing behind him, toward the factory’s chimney. He turned and saw a violently ascending plume of black silt smoke against the blue Ohio sky. From the top of the bloom, alighted chunks of black plastic circulated slowly downward, landing one by one onto the cars, onto neighboring homes, onto the men in the parking lot who were slapping at the plastic melting into their shirts.

The author described the lawsuits, the hearing before the city council, the investigations by the EPA, the ensuing legal bills, and the resultant closure of the factory because of a failure to meet the bank covenants that allowed them to buy the factory in the first place. He described these inevitable steps in detail, describing how he admitted his mistake before each tribunal and never blamed the old man, which, he said, he surely could. Mistakes happen, the author continued, and successful men understand it is how they respond to these that prove their character, and character is a much more potent business tool than any process dreamed-up in business schools. A lesson learned, Ophelia jokingly thought.

Ophelia tossed the magazine onto the fire and cursed Richard and these men with their business and principles. They trampled over everyone, be they factory workers or devotional wives. She went back to the living room and flipped the channel from CNN to Big Brother.

The trapped housemates allowed Ophelia to think more clearly about Rory. Bumping men in the middle of the night. What is he like?

When she met Rory, she didn’t think he was particularly handsome but he was well educated, wealthy, and he told her she was attractive, he even said beautiful, usually, and he couldn’t keep away from her. He couldn’t. They’d come back to his house and he would lead her to the bedroom where he immediately undressed, unbuttoning his shirt and carefully placing it over the chair, removing his pants and placing them on the same, coming to her and attentively unhooking the buttons on whatever she was wearing, kissing her breasts slowly, moving closer until he could slide into her, without ever taking his mouth away.

They never had a long conversation, the type that would naturally come from such a confession, a confession of other sexual predilections. She hadn’t found him in any seedy condition. It was casual, so much so she almost forgot when it first came up. She needed to close her eyes, searching for the precise time, the pub, a time when they still took booths alone, and how he sort-of said it. He said, and she remembered it clearly now, he wouldn’t mind getting his kit off with a man, and she remembered this quite clearly, she remembered the way he was holding his glass of wine and how his belly seemed bloated for that early in the evening and how she had her arms around his shoulder, how they had been commenting on all the other punters, sharing observations and desires, and how, when she spotted a particularly handsome man, with soft features and blond hair, he smiled and said he wouldn’t mind getting his kit off with a man, that in fact he had done so, and then he winked--she saw it clearly--and he said he’d go for a few rounds again, God permitting.

Miss

Rory, who had lived long enough in Dublin to make it a habit, was openly proud of his success. He had an MBA from University of Dublin and went into business when few thought it prudent and watched his country rise from its impoverished moors and into a respected place in Europe. He founded Birchwood Property, a property investment fund he built to ten associates and three junior partners. Birchwood had done well betting on developments around the M50 where multinationals were establishing their European call centers. Rory took the proceeds and spent fruitfully on property in England and France and invested smaller capital in other local ventures. He was meandering toward rich, at times well up and at times well down, and people knew him as one of the best property speculators in Ireland.

He stood over two meters and while his shoulders remained strong and broad his waist had grown thick, rounded like a keg, and his head, the size of a Gaelic football, spun around fitfully on top. He had wildly overgrown red curls and large green eyes capped by bushy eyebrows. When he walked, his arms and legs swung awkwardly from side to side, pulled back by his late middle-aged bulk. He wore tailored suits and drove a black sedan with tinted windows.

Above everything else, Rory was proud of the company he kept. He knew so many people and they knew him, always willing to share stories, laughing together about the past and about the stories still half told. 

“Do you see that man over there,” Rory would say, pointing his swollen fingers across the room. “Well there’s a good story there. I went to school with his brother, a rather horrible man who went off to New York to work for Lehman. You might know him. Oh, in any case, his older brother, one of six, God bless their mother, worked for Glanbia back in the early days and he successfully embezzled over three million pounds from their coffers. I say successfully, of course, because he was never caught. He bought property all over Dublin, back when a three story Georgian was under €50,000. He’s now been selling those properties one by one and spending money all over town. I really must speak with him. Will you excuse me?”

Off Rory went, pushing his way across the wedge of punters, putting out his hand, smiling broadly and thumping other red faced blobs on the shoulders.

Rory chaired a Dublin investor club where he ushered his peers together, prompting them to exchange crisp business cards, to exchange business plans, and to launch deal after deal. Until the market crash, these deals were plentiful and Rory was pleased to act as their chaperone. After the crash, he lamented the poor decisions made by others and bragged about his faith in property. “If it isn’t shiny and gold, I’ll leave it to mold in other men’s hands, my friend. Besides, there’s nothing more handsome and sturdy than a multi-floored office complex, now is there? I’ll make my money from that even if the poor souls won’t fill its cubicles.”

Rory was prone to look at other investors, pioneers starting companies with hordes of eager computer science graduates, as exceptionally lucky rather than exceptionally smart. He was probably right. He certainly didn’t give them the kudos Americans would for merely making a few million.  In this, Rory looked to a closer influence, the British, who found quick cash-based scores uncouth--not something to brag about in the financial papers or national press. “Property is a gentleman’s occupation and, as a gentleman, I’ll keep my success to myself.”

Rory liked to quote American writers and politicians and was as savvy about the players on Wall Street, the deals and meals, as any first-year investment banker. He read the international business press voraciously, challenging Richard, his new American friend, in his knowledge of events, names and places. He laughed when he caught Richard out, a friendly pat on his back to soften the one-upmanship.

People, especially his colleagues at Birchwood, adored Rory. He paid them far more than was necessary, financing a new home for his PA out of his own money. Richard once pushed him about Birchwood’s spending and Rory said he was aware he was running his business differently from how they might on Wall Street but that it was one of the reasons he had gone into business himself anyway. He wanted to work with people he liked, make deals with people he respected, and if he made a few bob from his efforts, he would be happy but happier still that he did it his way. Richard took the mick to this and sang Sid Vicious’ version of My Way whenever he greeted Rory.

Rory met Richard at one of his investor club meetings and they quickly settled into many debaucheries having little to do with business. They’d get langers, starting out at Nesbitt & Burns where Rory explained politics and history, shifting from erudite businessman to Kerry farmer with panache and charm. They’d go to Brown’s or Shanahan’s for steaks and bottles of wine, out to one club or another where they’d shift to mixed drinks, rolling back to Rory’s Blackrock home where they broke into his stash of rare wines and sat around drinking till morning. There were good stories to be had, they said.

One such story was the famous GUBU utterance made by Taoiseach Charles Haughey. The story was set during the bad times for Ireland’s economy. Everything that could go wrong was going wrong and Fianna Fail, the ruling party, was wrestling with one scandal after another. At the height, it was discovered that one of Ireland’s first notable serial killers was found living in the Secretary General’s basement flat. Haughy gave a speech signaling out this latest embarrassment and concluding, in his sputtering, confused way that events had spun out of control, that these events were “grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented.” GUBU. GUBU became the moniker for all those searching for ridiculous gain in preposterous settings—a common feature of Irish politics and business. Rory repeated this story often to Richard, who always laughed at its implications.

Richard and Rory spent many evenings at the Beggars Bush, a craggily pub across from Richard’s D4 Georgian, tending well poured pints and letting conversations settle like warm water in an alabaster basin. Gray wood and red wallpaper cupped around them and as each pint was ordered conversations about Arsenal’s lead and Johnny’s failed operation fell into the background as they discussed business and Dublin, a city that fascinated them both.

* * *

Dublin welcomed guests like a brothel owner hiding products with dim red lights and makeup. The grungy underside, a past’s discreet ugliness and a present that still knew more thieves and heroin addicts than poets and preachers, had only recently been covered up with glass plates and towers along the Liffey.

“What would Joyce make of the International Financial Services Centre? Hey, Rory?”

 “There are many lessons to be made from our poor past and the fortunes we always knew lay under our rainbows It took us longer, that’s all. We’ve gotten away from it. And, my friend, if you forced me to reckon about it for too long, I’d be prone to quote Wilde rather than an obtuse Jackanee.”

Dublin traffic crawled leaving people focused on the turn of the century buildings that still occupied more than shiny glass and aluminum, although the sparkles these provided were much more exciting than their past. This was a new capital. This was a Celtic Tiger.

“Our past is scattered all over this city. You came for the business, sure, but we know business is always going to live next door to our traditions.”

Dublin never manufactured cars, or washing machines, the mechanized apparatus that lay in the hearts of homes. It manufactured potato-eating mongrels sitting in clover patches for tourists. It manufactured pubs. It manufactured pop songs, U2 and Sinead O’Connor matching a nation’s rebellion with teenagers broken curfews, or Atomic Kitten playing to sixteen year old throbs. It manufactured places like Temple Bar and tacked plaques on stonewalls tracing histories back to bloated novels no longer of much importance except to a few relics at Trinity. “Ah, come on Rory. You guys are making more software than any other place on earth. That’s what brought me here. Shit, Dublin has changed.”

“I don’t know. I see far more American names around than M50 than Irish. I know some have done well. We’ll see how long it lasts. My country doesn’t change. That’s why I buy property. I’ll buy this land and keep the titles. No one can take those away, not our history, not Americans like yourself, not even the English. I’ll keep hold of my land. That’s for sure. All you need to do is look at our pubs and you’ll understand.”

Pubs had not changed much--dark wood, stone floors, old-fashioned signs for Guinness and pictures of hurling champions. The manufactured looked like the original, except it was paint and grease in the cracks rather than decades of dust and dirt. There were still men’s swollen faces, faces coming in for years. “We’ll make room for new punters, such as yourself. But, believe me, we’ll never change.”

Guests are shuttled in from Clonskeagh by talkative North Dubs in battered taxis (not a yellow or black among them). These guests need not go to pubs. They eat at L’Ecrevian and go to old churches converted into rave clubs with DJs flown in from London or Ibiza where people dance frantically under the drone of ecstasy and sound. It is lights, action, technology, money and a real European capital, these claim.

Richard told Rory he liked Dublin because people like him were pioneers, forcing commerce upward, working with their hosts to keep Dublin rich, to use all its history to entice more tourists, to use its history as another way to build more comfortable homes, more comfortable lives. “I didn’t come her for nothing, Rory. Fine. Americans may be making the real money now, but in a few years time, all of Dublin will prosper.”

“Keep your hats tucked up, boys. No spring lasts forever,” Rory said.

Newer pubs with house music’s thump-thump echoing against steel doors were doomed to fall under the strain of pubs like Grogin's where it was still more fashionable to be penniless and grungy than trendy and rich. For every tech-lo-million-half-ear there were a hundred old men with wrinkles, curled and deep, more sad than dignified, who always sought pints in real pubs and left trendy bars to college students and young professionals who spent wages on nights out while these men passed a few quid to get well pissed. These old men brought the nation to a halt over a proposed tax increase for a pint. 

Poetry was long and languid like the Liffey and could never make room for the sound and fury of New York. “Just give it time, Rory. This place is booming now. I haven’t come as an Irish American. I’ve come as an American businessman. There’s gotta be something in that.”

 “You’ll leave soon enough. Look at Michael Dell, a good Irish American and American businessman. He came here, setting up his warehouses in Limerick, and now it looks like even he will move to Poland once my country’s tax breaks subside. Our best and brightest always leave. It is not from disloyalty. We’ve taken our Irish pubs to every city on the planet. We’ve had presidents in your dear country. But, those of us who remain, the proud 3 million, less than all the Irish in New York, stay here for other reasons. We can’t escape those. But, Richard, a man like myself has made a good way in Dublin. I’ve made my money, and a name for myself, a name as good as any. I’ll keep hold of my name in Dublin and people will respect me for it. I don’t need to prove myself. That’s a tad different from America, now isn’t it? Americans always have to prove themselves, one way or another, because they have no history gluing them in place.”

“I suppose so.”

Dublin could not level its wrinkles, scrunched together as they were by the crooked streets thrown down around the Liffey whose putrid smells wafted through their tracks, narrowed by the traffic, taxis chasing busses in bumpy commuter lanes, rusty bicycles weaving in and out like drunken seamstresses, each wrinkle pushed deeper, shaking loose stones on every street, reminding people the impoverished past was right under their feet. Anyone could see them, on actresses coming home from the light glare of the old Olympia Theatre, on policemen standing on the Ha’penny Bridge turned away from lorry drivers selling contraband from the continent, on Eamon Dunphy’s face as he ranted on RTE, on Eastern European strippers along Leeson Street, on merchants drinking Bells till it took their legs away, on solicitors groveling for bribes, on mechanics soiled faces,  faces that always had time for “just one more,” all the same, and even on the wads of cash pushed deep in plucky entrepreneur’s pockets as they bought drinks for high priced hookers at Renards.

Dublin was a circuitry of wrinkles, each person marching in worn cracks, contentedly helpless to let luck pave their way. Some were vivid and bright, spinning like ambulatory gold fish. Some clogged the works with their woolen jackets and dirty caps, moving from place to place glad to take a rest in their tight homes with their passive wives and ten kids. They were all Dubs and would remain so, despite the flashy upstarts invading their city. They knew their wrinkles were testament to those not strong enough to fall off the island years before, who stayed and made it, no matter what it might be, even if it was merely the stories they knew. Americans used manure and fog stained photographs of dirty-faced blond kids from the turn of the century, Tammany Hall to Kennedy, Joyce’s Bloom to green rivers in Chicago, Irish and Italians blocking the four corners of cities destined to forget them soon enough. Dublin still held these in smoke stained teeth, scrunching their faces to remind themselves of the lack of choices their island presented.

“I’ll wear my city’s wrinkles with pride, my friend,” Rory said while he watched a man with a stained apron pull him a perfect pint. “Let me tell you a story.”

“Fergus works as a foreman in a canning factory. He was raised on the Northside where a man is lucky to have a leaky roof and a way to salvage cash trafficking guns and drugs. I gave him money to make a trip to the States—he’s a close friend and he always talks about America, wanting to know if it is as grand as he thinks. He’s making his way from Boston to Minnesota, where he has relatives, and then out to California to see San Francisco before heading off to the Nevada desert for the Burning Man event. Do you know it? He said it will be good craic.

“This is the tragic part of the story, Richard, of which there should always be some. Fergus is a visual artist—painting, sculpture, the like. Now, he is not the type to have gone to the Dublin Academy, like our man Blaine. No. He is not the type to sell canvases at galleries. No. He is the type to plop himself on a street corner and hope passer-bys will drop a few coppers into his basket. That’s where I met him, you know, chatting up people the way I do. I noticed he couldn’t see the other side of the street. You, see my man Fergus, God bless him, is going blind. He paid no heed at the time, but, well, I set him up and the tests came back petty dire. He will be completely blind in a few years. I feel horrible for him. What a shame for any man, but an artist, even a poor one. Well, the money for his trip was the least I could do.

“So, I was taking him out for a few pints before his big trip and we started talking about our dirty city and how much it’s changed. Oh, Fergus has a wit. We were falling about the place. He told me he knew, as every good Dub did, Dublin had changed, sure, but it would return to the way it was as well, a dirty port city where people don’t care about what they have because they have so little. This, he said, wasn’t necessarily a pity. He thought it made people pay closer attention to who they were. He said, how in the world does a mobile, a computer, and a sports car make us better able for it? He said, even a blind man can see that. You know, he’s right. Do you see what I mean, Richard?”

“Ah, shit man. I don’t know about your friend but it seems you helped him change his life.”

“I did nothing of the sort. I simply gave him what I thought he deserved. Some people deserve much better than their lot, you know.”

“I guess. Still, you are always surprising me with these stories of your generosity. How did such a successful property tycoon get such a big heart? Donald trump better never hear about you. He’ll swoop into this town and buy you out from spite.”

They continued to share stories about Dublin, their business and what drove men to change, despite all signs to the contrary.

“You’re fooling yourself. I’ve told you. This city will never change.”

“You keep talking about the States, how we ignore history. That may be so but that’s because we believe in change. We believe we can strive for something better. We change all the time. Thing is, we work hard to change. We work damn hard for what we want. Manifest destiny, and all that crap. We see what we want and take it. I’m doing the same here and, my hard work will change this place.”

“Ah, you are an optimist. I’ll drink to that.”

Richard would not take the bus or shake fists with cabbies at Paddy Power, throwing useless tickets down on horses. He would walk along Grafton Street and claim there should be more there for him to buy. He would have regular dinners at Shanahan’s and say it deserved a Michelin Star. He was especially adept at churning out business in Dublin. Rory watched in amazement as his American friend unfurled his business ideas across dinner tables and tumblers filled with scotch, not whiskey, describing robust markets, product viability, investment criteria. He’d turn to any ambitious Irish businessman and tell him his plan seemed feasible, given the right management team, and what proprietary measures was he building into the software to increase barriers of entry? And, by the way, isn’t this a great wine? Yes indeed, they have one of Dublin’s best wine lists here, and the steak is perfectly cooked. But, if you want me to come on board I’ll need to be assured the cash flow is steady. How much money are you prepared to invest, Padraig, Kevin, Niall, Cavan, etc? How many investors have you lined up? What’s their profile? Good. Good. Let’s talk about this more but first another glass, shall we?

Rory sorted out the language and watched as others strung it together with their own cultural syllables. How lucky. How cursed. American visions were the most acutely visible from abroad and the most confused up close. Rory would keep to his property.

“But this American dream is still a riddle to me, my brash American friend.”

“I’m not brash.”

“Well, you are American.”

“Listen, I know people can change. Remember, I was married and divorced. Shit, that stuff is enough to force any man to change.”

“So you’ve said. What happened there?”

 “I was accelerated.”

Richard described his daughter, a beautiful girl they named after a Persian princess, and the big Victorian duplex in Cambridge where Richard held parties where his wife got drunk and hit on his professors.

“It was a mess. I was young and she wanted a life I wasn’t ready to provide.”

Richard’s wife, he said, rung-up a lot of credit card debt. She was sure his “big-shot” degree would give them enough money to get them out of this early “deficit spending,” as she called it when he started worrying. She told him not to and he decided to believe her. He believed her further when she supported his decision to leave the PhD program and join a brokerage firm where he found himself making two hundred and fifty cold calls a day. Richard found it cruel luck that his window looked across the Charles River where he could make out the campus he left.

He quit the job in a December flurry after he made his last phone call to pensioners who lost their savings on stocks dumped by the bank. He turned in his notice, leaving the sealed envelope on his boss’s desk, and walked through the snow on the long way home.

His wife left him when he told her life needed to be different, mainly her spending, and that he needed to do something else besides selling shity stock to the naive. She didn’t want different. She left him promptly, taking his daughter with her back to Connecticut where she lived in father’s big house. Richard’s money dried up and so did she. He didn’t have the money, stamina or stomach to fight her in court. He received the divorce papers via priority post. He was resigned, and then angry. He joined a group conducting leverage buy-outs in the Midwest. Big, oiled companies with heavy machinery and enough people to sack quickly, getting that early spike in the bottom line. It was a ride, launching into the depths of manufacturing and uncovering the mechanics and fluids that made money, that wrung profit in and out of processes. The work brought him to Switzerland where he started putting those skills to work for easier endeavors. The wife re-married and got his daughter to call the new man dad. Richard still sent her birthday gifts, which, he learned later, she never received. Richard’s wife left him because he didn’t have money and then he had plenty. The money paved over the past nicely.

“Do you see her at all, Richard?”

“Who?

“Your daughter, man.”

“Rory, I wish I did. It is just one of those things. I could give you all the gory details but I’ve probably already given you too much already.”

Rory sipped the brown foam from the bottom of his pint, looked at his friend closely, recognizing how men live with such contradictions. 

Richard said people have to lie with the bed they make, matching contours with the right opportunities for the day to day. “If you work hard at these, you can change them into anything you like. That’s the beauty of being American. I can be anything I want. My great grandparents were Italian immigrants—now, do I seem particularly Italian to you? Shit, I mean, it’s cool getting to know Isabella because there are some traces there, but, fuck, I mean, Americans reinvent themselves all the time. I didn’t know I was going to lose my wife and kid. I didn’t think I was going to go into business. Believe it or not, I thought I’d be a fucking history professor. Imagine. Opportunities presented themselves and I took advantage. I changed my life.

“That’s the American dream, if anything. Anybody in the States can fight to be an individual who uses religion, class, money, ethnicity—whatever—as a tool for identification and betterment. Look at the Irish. We got waves of your countryman who either massed around Irish totems—remember, St. Patrick’s day is huge over there--as a way to gain strength against the majority or they shrugged their old world totems off as quickly as was possible, buying homes in the suburbs with gleaming new cars in two-car garages, neat green lawns, boys playing baseball and girls collecting dolls. Culture and history are tools of opportunity in the land of the free, for most people. This is as rich a cultural tapestry as anything else. So what if even this idealism is sometimes smashed, like it was and is for African Americans, or by America’s global belligerence. It is getting harder; I’ll give you that. Today, immigrants are barred easy entrance to the land of the free and barely free once they start wearing scarves around their heads or have streams of river water running off their backs. The pattern is still the same. Guard what you’ve got, fight against the rest, and make sure you have enough for weekends and barbeques up on the lake, microwave meals, thousands of television programs, and a broadband connection for every pot. It is still the same, land of opportunity, land of the opportunist. It is the American way. So don’t tell me you all can’t change, that you’re stuck in some imaginary wrinkles from the past. Fuckin’, get to work, is all.”

“I suppose you’re right. America is different. But, we’re in Ireland here. You shouldn’t think every place is like the States.”

“Whatever, man. Look at what I’ve done already in this city. Anybody could do the same.”

“Ah, feck it. What are we up to anyway? Talking around ourselves and up and around this pub. Even the mice are getting bored.”

Rory went to the bar to get the next round, stopping to think about the way these conversations seemed to go, and wondering if he could say something else to Richard. He was proudly jealous of the man and thought he should tell him so.

“Richard, you are a good man.”

“I know.”

“No. Richard you are a good man. Don’t forget it. It is men like me who will always envy men like you.”

“What are you talking about? You’re the one always bragging about your name in this city.”

“Ah, indeed. I have property and a name. Some men need more.”

With that, they left the pub. Richard invited himself to Rory’s for some of his wine but Rory ushered him home instead.

“I have another man to meet.”

“At this time at night? What are you talking about?”

“I know you, my friend. I like you. I like our pub talk. Some things aren’t meant to be said out loud. Take your America and go to sleep.”

Kill

Idle time was hard on Billy’s health. Six days had past and he hadn’t heard from Damon. He got massages and sweated for hours in the sauna during his first two days in the Metropolitan Hotel. He enjoyed the luxury. He got the parcel of drugs on the third. Now, three days later, he was wreck.

“Do you know what its like taking pill after pill alone in a high price hotel room? You spend a lot of time looking at yourself in the mirror and masturbating to twenty-four hour porno. Beautiful thing that, in room cinema, except porno loses all effect pretty soon, as does masturbating. Something to do with your eyes and hands—MDMA twitches. Twitch twitch.”

Billy tugged at the telephone line and looked at Fionn’s wedding invitation. He pulled at a corner, tearing it, as he told his brother about the massages and the drugs. 

“What a crock it all is,” Billy said, laughing, “You’d never have made it. Take comfort, little brother, I’ve found a grand life while your piddling away, back in Ireland. You should’ve stayed in New York, you prat. Getting married. Jesus.”

“Why don’t you go to a club? Get out of the hotel.”

“Ah, feck it. I can’t afford to get caught up with girls. It’s best I stay put”

Billy was trolling through web sites as he spoke. “Listen, now Fionn, I’ll get back to you about all that. Alright, ya?”

Line dropped dead. No more twitches.

Billy pulled himself up and his bones tingled, burned and sent him back down again. Useless oblivion.

There were a dozen burns in the carpet from cigarettes and hash, the largest from a dropped pipe made from an empty beer can. There were eight ecstasy pills wrapped like Pez candies Billy saw children pester mothers for in America. He still had a half bottle of tequila and some good scotch left. The tequila was hideous stuff. Billy opted for it. He rolled on the carpet, stalling to count the burns, stalling between the bottles, and pulled himself upright with the tequila. He was lucky. He was upright when he heard the beep-beep. The text had finally arrived.

Tk undgrnd 2 flhmbrdwy, irsh pb Guinness ld Mnster shrt

Guinness! Fucking Guinness they want me to drink Guinness! After my three days? Fucking IRA. Vowels in Guinness. Guinness. Feckers. Bunch of wankers. What the fuck does Damon want me to do now? Decommissioning. Fuck. I can’t shake the ideas of these cherry kids. Fecking CIA. I don’t want . . .Feck. Global shit storm—that’s what it is. Feck. Feck.

Billy pulled an Underground map from under the bed. He had tried memorizing all the routes in day four of this particular binge but kept laughing at the “Mind the Gap” pun and falling back to masturbate to Pamela Lee Anderson look alike lesbians who furiously fingered each other and said stupid things only Pamela Lee Anderson wannabees could say during sex.

“Shit, Anderson and Tommy Lee really screwed things up with their home movie.”

The Internet was the only place Billy could get cute French Audrey Hepburn look-alikes fingering each other slowly, with long broad strokes, rather than the pummelling available on in-room movie channels.

He looked over at the computer, thought about doing a quick search for “small tit lesbian brunette” and decided instead to check e-mail.  He pulled himself up, the closest to together, and logged on. He had different accounts with fictitious personal data entered for each and he checked each in turn. Damon had done his job.

First account: joelinner345@hotmail.com

Message: Hey Joe: Did the research you wanted on the equity issues regarding the Irish. Will forward portfolio via the post.

Second Account: lindadevinshire34564@hotmail.com

Message: I’ve been trying to eliminate all these bugs on the software system but Mr. Mohammad isn’t even going to send me the original code! Can you imagine the gall of this guy? He’s trying to act like a Jedi knight, or something.

Third account: marcusevansIII23432@hotmail.com

Message: I sold them a bunch of shit. They even had the nerve to think they were the ones who supplied the guys in New York. This is a big mess for them. Please send me the presentations from last Friday’s meeting with the company and I’ll see if there isn’t something I can do at my end.

Forth account: rickyvicente293757940@hotmail.com

Message:  As per our last meeting, please follow-up with John and his friend Qurayshi Mustar. This guy is in Paris. By the way, how was the trip to London? Did you stay at the Savoy as usual? You lucky bastard!

Fifth account: miked@worldnet.com

Message: Please refer to my latest work. It can be found under the name John Sebastian at the Louisville main library. Lastly, you may also wish to consult the poetry of Jabril. It is tough in translation but beautiful all the same. Thanks.

Sixth account: sallygrimbaldi@freeserve.net

Message: Ciao Bella! I’m already trying to get out of London and visit you in Genoa. If you want to sell your paintings, I’ll let him go over to you and maybe get the whole artsy-fartsy aspect going. This other guy, the big-man out of Soho, could fuck up their whole new campaign if they are not careful. It could be a real big-ticket item.

Billy cut and paste the italicised text into a separate document:

Irish trying to eliminate Mr. Mohammad Jedi supplied the guys in New York big mess for them Qurayshi Mustar guy is in London at the Savoy under the name Jabril CIA trying to get out of London him could fuck up their whole new campaign big ticket item

“The Irish are trying to eliminate a Mr. Mohammed ibn Qurayshi ibn Mustar ibn Jabril from Jeddah who sold them a bunch of shit and who also supplies the guys who hit New York. Big mess for them. This guy is in London, staying at the Savoy under the name Jabril Mustar. The CIA is already trying to get London to turn him over. This guy could fuck-up their whole new campaign. Big-ticket item.”

More work for a wary soul. He should have sold his years ago when he had the chance. Maybe he did. Billy couldn’t remember and couldn’t care.

He needed to make sure the bill was paid up. He called down to reception and an Oxbridge accent answered. He hated London. “Good evening Mr. Branson, how may we help you?”

“Yeah, just want to pay-up and pay for another six nights in advance. Can you pull my bill up?”

“Of course, sir.”

Billy logged onto his Fidelio Ramp-Wind program, used the Passwords+ freeware to tap the hotel’s server, blipped around and found the Oxbridge fucker at the front desk with whom he was on the phone. Billy pulled up the sys-op table and configured it for the hotel’s server to see the desk registrar’s application, and pulled in as a concurrent user.

“Yes, Mr. Bronson, Room 1363? Yes sir. That will be £3,120. Would you like me to add this to your credit card?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

Billy entered a blind reference showing the actual charge for his room to be £0.00, with no additional taxes or surcharges. When the credit payment system linked with the hotel registry application, it wired Visa an intended charge of 0.00 and the Visa mainframe checked this against its records, found the charge to be acceptable, and sent a payment reference back to the hotel’s finance software. Presto. I am a fecking James Bond.

Billy knew he’d have until the end of the month before the accounting department started closing their books and found a customer who had stayed for twelve nights for no charge. After checking with the hotel manager that this man wasn’t comped and confirming the room rate, the charge problem would be sent to accounts receivable. The man in AR would re-bill it with the correct charge only to find the Visa mainframe decline for insufficient credit. This would prompt the AR man to call Mr. Branson directly finding the number he gave the hotel, a pay-as-you go mobile number, rang without answer. Billy had thrown the SIM into a Soho bin. When the AR man contacted the credit card company, they told him the card belonged to one Mark S. Branson of Branson Professional Services, Ltd. with registered offices in the Isle of Man. The phone number that Visa had for him didn’t work either. In fact, Visa informed the hotel that the limit on the card was £500 and that it had been inactive for months. Billy knew these were the steps the hotel would take and he knew it would eventually dawn on the AR man that the hotel had been conned and it would probably be better for them to mark it off as a bad debt expense. This is exactly what they did.

Billy got ready to go, throwing his laptop, cords and IAI M-1911 into the bag with the money. He needed to keep everything with him, always. A hotel maid was as dangerous as the police. The pistol was heavy in the bag. It was Billy’s favourite and he was grateful Damon set up the drop with the drugs. He looked to see if he needed anything else. He grabbed the invitation. He’d go. He’d have to tell the grunt at the pub that the deal needed to be wrapped-up quickly.

Billy crossed Hyde Park and decided he had time to walk to Fulham Broadway. It was in moments like this, with his body and mind whirling, before taking the next step, that he took time to think about his past. He was flooded with memories with distinct beginnings, middles and ends. They weren’t amorphous, melting together with feelings and penlights focusing on sounds, smells and images perfectly distinct but whose context was undecipherable. For Billy, his memories were all story like. Someone entered, something happened, someone reacted, someone ended, characters moved off stage. His memories were weaved together with predictable arcs and meanings—right, wrong, life, death.

“All I knew at that particular moment, crumbling anecdotes whose original pugnacity now lacked punch, or, as one comrade in arms put it, they all seemed in-credible, was I had to keep running, trying not to trip over trash bags, strewn bottles, and drunk punters. I had to run and yet, once again, my mind would not leave me alone. I needed to focus. I was moving. I was on fire. I was being chased and my life was hanging by the hinge. This IRA scum-bastard could and probably would stick a blade in my chest and leave me.

“That was what I said to his brother, a slimy little grunt of a kid, skinny with a stained white GAA shirt and deplorable runners. A real punk. What was I thinking? Why did I jump in when he threw the pint, the refrigerator door, dark Guinness, most of the punters more stunned by the waste of drink than the burst of violence, the beer, dripping down the refrigerator walls, green, brown and clear glass scattering across the floor, a whirlwind as Mick rounded the bar, showing agility he gained on the pitch. Mick, throwing his big arms around the kid and chucking him into the alley. Me, following after, pulling Mick off the punk-kid, telling him to go back to the bar, to tend his business, a new one, one where we were enjoying his recent opening by sitting by the fire and watching Munster beat Castres, on their own pitch. Me, grabbing the kid by the neck and shoving him against the wall, slamming his head against the bricks, peels of old white paint falling to the bags under his feet, where he was trying to gain footing and where I wouldn’t let him. Lifting my hand to pound him square in the face, as hard as I could, bringing my shoulder into it, feeling the bulge of my bicep as my fist hit the hard bones of his face, wanting to break his nose and smother his eyes with a quick explosion of his own blood. Trying, in that instance, to mess him up. Succeeding quickly, especially given he was barely a slight of a boy, sixteen, maybe seventeen, like it made a difference.

“When he pulled a knife, it had a dull tin-looking blade and the tip curled gently around, like a butter knife, that, for a moment, I thought it was. My hand, splattered with drops of blood from his nose that now hung from his dirty forehead like a peanut sack, shot down, grabbed his arm above the wrist and slammed his arm against the wall behind him, holding it there for a moment, his grip relatively tight on the knife. Me, dragging his arm across the rough bricks, the dimples of mortar cutting into his raw knuckles, tearing the flesh of his fingers. He dropped the knife. I hit him in the face again, this time with more force, my force pulled out from the anger of this cunt who had insulted me by pulling such a pathetic metal quip.

“That’s when he started babbling, saying I didn’t know who he was, I was going to get killed, I fucked with the wrong guy. I didn’t give a damn who he was and he didn’t know who I was and I hit him again, and again, and again. He dropped. I kicked him as he hunched over and fell into the alley’s black tar, blood dripping through the crevices of his skin. I kicked him again, and again, and again, each blow as clear to me now as it was then.

“The punk managed to get up. I was ready to hit him again but he turned and ran down the alley, telling me to piss off even though, by now, his voice was quivering, mixed with blood and fear.

“His brother tracked me down, out on the street, with his shit-head brother in tow, and ran toward me, and all my energy drained away. I knew his brother.

“I leapt over a bag and cut out onto the street next to the river. I ran and ran, crossing the bridge and looking across my shoulder. I outran the bastard.”

Billy crossed Fulham Road at the Bibendum and was proud of that first event, the event that led to others whose structures he determined. I’m ready for the racket. He had the confidence to meet the fucking IRA—the man probably would not give a shit that Billy was ratty, worn and drugged.

* * *

“Time to go. Time to go. Time to go.”

Movies made it sound complicated, with various scenarios to disguise faces, whereabouts, guns. They made it all a farce, making the average killer have to be as smart and well trained as a Royal Marine or Green Beret. Billy never saw it that way. The task was simple. Find the guy. Kill him, make sure he is dead. Get out.

Billy didn’t have to worry about police tracing or detectives figuring. He wasn’t screwing a wife or stealing money. He didn’t even know the hit, never met him, may not even know what he looked like until he had him squared behind his gun. No, the actual task wasn’t difficult, not even a bit.

The difficulty was getting his mind around extinguishing life. Boom. Boom. Dead. Dead. No more life there.

If he started to think about this guy as a bloke, some poor sucker crossing the street, or, worse, sitting in a pub, he’d start thinking about why someone would want to kill such a person, what they had done to deserve this kind of end, and, as the answer to this type of question wasn’t part of the deal, he’d start to imagine all kinds of scenarios, mostly concerning money and women, but then he’d recognize he’d done similarly his whole life and so, was this enough to snub some fucker? When was someone going to snub him?

Billy raged with music in soiled hotel rooms, the brownest and thinnest drink, the smallest of fucking pills. When the time came to go to work, he pulled himself together, wrecked but functioning nonetheless, not exactly a Rambo but it doesn’t take much to pull the trigger of a gun.

Billy stared at the Savoy. The hit was inside. He put on his shades and had made sure to put on soft loafers so he’d breeze by the doorman--Billy, the rock star, staying at the Savoy.

“Good Evening, Sir;”

‘Yeah, whatever.”

Billy walked to the front desk and asked for Mr. Qurashi’s room. They told him the room number and directed him to the bank of in-room phones. He dialed. A man’s voice answered, a voice with a Middle Eastern accent.

“Mr. Qurayshi?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

Billy rushed to the elevators. He figured Qurayshi was alone but it didn’t matter. He pressed the eighth floor. He ignored the securi-cams, as he always did. He never looked up.

He reached the floor. He raced down the hallway, took out his M-1911, slammed the silencer in place, and with a small axe head he thumped the door jam and easily plied the door open.

Qurayshi was lying on the bed in a white bathrobe with his hand wrapped around his measly cock, his own in-room cinema showing the same film Billy had now seen a dozen times. Billy did not notice anyone else. He raised his gun and fired six shots, three in his head (one missed and disappeared in the pillows behind him), and three in his chest. The silencer muffled little. It still sounded like six sharp pops Billy associated only with a gun. He scanned the room. No one emerged. He looked crossways down the hall, avoiding the secure-cams. No one was there.

He took another clip out of his jacket and repeated. Three bullets into his head (all three hit this time!) and another three in his chest.

Qurayshi’s face was a maul of flesh and blood was seeping through the bathrobe, sponging life out of him.

Billy repeated the sideway scan down the hall. Nothing was moving, not even a mouse.

He looked back at Qurayshi, and decided to empty one more clip for good measure. He walked into the room, took out the extinguished clip and put in a new one, fired three shots into Qurayshi’s head and three shots into his body.

Billy’s work was finished.

Qurayshi had not moved, screamed, or gurgled. The bastard was, literally, caught with his pants down. Qurayshi watched his door crash open and a man with a gun rush in.  He sat there dumbstruck, waiting for what was going to happen next as if it were a movie. When the first bullet hit his face, he was shocked but not dead and too confused to yell, and after a few more shots the organism fights to stay alive but the soul is gone.

Dorian LaGuardia. Excerpt from Wedding to the North, from 2004. Contact me for the full manuscript.