whorled contours of his fingertips. He stares at his thumb for a while. Strictly speaking, he might have been a little depressed last winter; the short days, the long nights, with only Ellen, his aunt who lives nearby, his regular company. But everything passes, and one evening in February he looked up from his book and saw the sun come through a gap in the trees and he sat in the same place the next evening and again the sun came through, and gradually the days lengthened and before he knew it, it was Easter.
He places two eggcups on a plate, pops the eggs in and pours a little salt on the side of the plate. Josie used to lick the salt off her plate. Her presence still throngs the house. He had to sell her hens at the market in Cork after she died; he couldn’t bear the sight of them mooching around the yard, pining. Dirty auld things, his mother said, shitting all over the place.
At the table he pushes away some books to make room for the plate, then tops the eggs. Dadda used to top his and Lucy’s eggs every morning. Something as trivial as topping an egg, no greater love. The yolk spills over and dribbles onto the plate. He adds a pinch of salt to each egg. With the edge of the spoon he shears albumen off the inside of the eggshell and mixes it with the soft yolk. In his mouth his tongue seeks out the solid texture of the albumen, suddenly repulsed by the thought of biting into the embryonic speckle in the yolk. He swallows hard, fearing queasiness. He rinses his palate with a mouthful of coffee and picks a book from the pile at the end of the table. With Borges. Borges’s photo is on the front cover: a beautiful old man with tossed white hair gazing skywards. You’d never guess he was blind. Luke reads a few pages. Every night of his life Borges put on his long wool nightshirt and knelt down and recited the Our Father in English. He had ten names for the sky. He wrote something about angels too. Luke flicks through some pages. Not in this book.
He closes the book. There are books all over the house. He buys them in charity shops, second-hand bookshops, at auctions. Three for a euro, five for two euros. He collects magazines too – New Scientist, Scientific American, Nature – tempted by a headline: The Ultimate Quantum Paradox, Touching the Multiverse, Cosmic Coincidences, Four Radical Routes to a Theory of Everything, The Maths of Democracy, How Your Mind Warps Time, Why Darwin Was Wrong About the Tree of Life, Why Einstein Was Wrong About Relativity, The Strangest Liquid. Water, the multiverse, the Higgs Boson, the SpaceX project, fast radio bursts, the strangeness and charm of a quark – late at night he feasts on these articles, enthralled by every new finding, the moment amplified by the silence and the lateness of the hour and the intensity of his concentration, feeling alive to the multitudinous possibilities inherent in everything, feeling himself capable of understanding everything. In the small hours of the morning he often feels on the brink of a revelation or an illumination, close to the secret that unlocks some mystery of science and, if he fully attends, he will decipher it – if he focuses his whole being he will feel the vibrations of infinitesimal strings or come within a hair’s breadth of deducing the quantum structure of time-space itself. And then the moment passes and the dawn arrives and he stands in his kitchen, flattened by the ludicrousness of these aspirations, these hallucinations.
The bookshelves are all full. There are books stacked in alcoves and recesses, on windowsills and side tables, on the return landing, in boxes under the back stairs. He has not read a quarter of them. He used to devour books, but these days, after reading just a few lines or a single page, he gets a kind of mental image of the whole book. Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written. He remembers coming upon that line, the feeling of recognition it evoked. In his life there have been a few books that have left a lasting impression and on which he still sometimes dwells. Novels whose narrators experience certain moods and states of mind that he identifies with, and which are so subtle and delicate as to be almost impossible to describe. In those novels he found images and moods that he felt surprisingly connected to, and it is these connections that he hankers after. He can remember his exact surroundings and his state of mind when he read those novels, and those surroundings and those states of mind now seem inseparable from the characters and contents of the novels; there was no separation of worlds and the characters were as real and as stirring as if he and they were one, and they never afterwards left him.
Like Bloom, he thinks. No, Bloom is more. He is always close. As close as his own jugular vein. A second self. They are substrates of each other. Out of the same egg … Castor and Pollux. Divided natures too. Two dreamers, schemers, sinners. Space travellers. Transposers of souls. Transitioners of realms.
Moments like this he longs to be back in Belvedere. That morning walk, pigeons on the footpath, raucous gulls overhead. Buses pulling out from the kerb spluttering exhaust fumes on passing cyclists. All the lives parallel to his own, all the moments in which different things are simultaneously happening. Horizontal time. Thoughts and musings that seem to go on for hours, but take only minutes. No one understands time. Impossible to measure too. If it weren’t for death, we might not count time at all … Under the arch at Christchurch, his watch reading 8.35, 8.36, 8.37 a.m. Vertical time. Downhill then and a whiff of the Liffey and a blast of wind, bracing on his face. More gulls screeching overhead on the north quays, the world their oyster. The world was his oyster then too. He had his life all mapped out – a few more years in the city, then he’d come back here with Maeve, work the land, fill the house with kids. Mammy, Josie, Ellen, the whole happy racket, like in the old days. Up Jervis Street, around Parnell Square and into Denmark Street as the Mercs and Beamers and Range Rovers pulled up, dropping off the uniformed sons of doctors, lawyers, judges. He was always moved by the way the big boys took their little brothers’ hands and led them inside. He gets a lump in his throat thinking of them. Everything about the place … He felt close to Joyce there too. And Stephen. Thinking he was Stephen, leaning down to help some weak, misty-eyed boy. Moments when he felt himself simultaneously and symbiotically fused with the sweet boys before him and the image-memory of the young innocent Stephen Dedalus in those very rooms a hundred years before. Regularly going off script, off curriculum, spending weeks teaching nothing but Ulysses. Certain scenes: Stephen in class, Bloom with the cat and the kidney, the men in Hades going to bury the dead. Such mirth Luke had with his class, such wordplay and punning, the boys decoding, mapping it out, acting it out. Sir, sir, Leo Burke just ate with relish the inner organs of Beatty and Fowler. Shut your obstropolos, Carney! Sir, there’s a tang of faintly scented urine off me sandwich. Oh ineluctable modality, oh jumping Jupiter! If he ever has a son he will send him to Belvedere or Clongowes. For all their faults, the Jesuits’ ethos of care and service still prevails. Like Dadda, always setting example. No need to have any truck with the old boys’ network.
He raises another spoonful of egg to his lips but feels the bile rising. He pushes his chair back, nerves jumping to attention in his thighs, and carries the plate to the front door. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am, I do not like green eggs and ham. A pack of half-feral cats swarm and pounce on the eggs. Greedy scuts. Lily, sleek-black and imperious, sits inside on the carpet. Haughty little madam, he thinks, and she from the same gene pool as this riff-raff. Generations of inbreds, Lily herself probably sired by her own father or brother. You wouldn’t know it though, with her emerald eyes and shiny coat and perfectly proportioned body. Almost four now. He won’t feel the years passing. I might have you stuffed, Lily, he says, put you up on the mantelpiece. He shudders. The eyes of the resurrected staring down at him.
His thoughts slip back to Belvedere again. He took a career break four years ago with the intention of doing something – writing a book perhaps – on Joyce or even Bloom. It was more than a whim, more than a money-making enterprise, though that too. It was an itch, a longing – a necessity even – to stay close to Bloom, to inhabit him day and night. But there was little he could add to the Joycean canon already in print and the endless supply of online material on Joyce. If he could draw or paint he might have attempted an illustrated guide to Ulysses. He thought about writing ‘A Student Guide to Joyce’ or ‘100 Factoids about Leopold Bloom’ or ‘100 Fun Facts About James Joyce’. All too trivial. He wanted to do something of worth, something with heft. He tried to find some central organising principle. In the first year off work he read and re-read large sections of Ulysses, compiled lists of idioms, phrases and
