laughed at me.
“It’s not like that, Anthony. It’ll only be for a few hours a day, and besides, all those other kids there, it’ll only be good for him.”
I knew what she was saying but I still wasn’t convinced. She must have read my mind because she told me then that she was thinking of sending Owen off for a few hours in the morning and afternoon just to get him out from under her feet.
That settled it. JJ and Owen were packed off to the crèche till two in the afternoon when Maureen and I took turns picking them up and bringing them home. It worked out well enough. We’d get our day sorted out before they came home in the afternoon and put everything up in a heap and, as Maureen said, it was only for a few months, before they were packed off to school proper in September.
JJ and Owen were solid buddies by then. They went to school together in the morning and came home together in the evening and sometimes it was as much as I could do to keep JJ here of an evening and spend a few hours with him. But he needed so little. As long as he was fed and foddered and had Owen, his right-hand man beside him, he didn’t want for another thing. Often, just so that I could spend some more time with him, I’d have Owen over for the dinner in the evening and the two of them would sit there at the table, laughing and talking and planning away together like two old men. Sometimes, looking back, I think it was Owen who reared JJ, not me. There was a brightness about him whenever he was with him, a glow, as if the happiness in his soul was coming out in his skin. Now with all that’s happened since I sometimes find it hard to find that happy JJ. All I seem to remember are the arguments and the heartbreak and the confusion we had later on. But for those few years he was happy and whatever part I had in it, if I never do another thing with my life, I will always be proud of that.
________________
1 A child’s geography book will tell you that the Killary is the only proper fjord on the Irish coastline. Running six kilometres west–east through Ordovician sandstone and Silurian quartzite it forms part of the Mayo–Galway border. At one time its steep sides and sheltered waters called out for mineral prospecting, cheap holiday accommodation, mussel farming and marine leisure activities. Now hemmed in by protective legislation, it is the focal feature of an extensive national park and is marked down in tourist guides for sightseers travelling in this part of the world.
What no tourist bumf will tell you is that this inlet is suffused with an atmosphere of ineffable sadness. Partly a trick of the light and climatic factors, partly also the lingering residue of an historical tragedy which still resonates through rock and water down seven generations of fretful commemorative attempts and dissonant historical hermeneutics. Now think of grey shading towards gunmetal across an achromatic spectrum; think also of turbid cumulus clouds pouring down five centimetres of rainfall above the national average and you have some idea of the light reflected within the walls of this inlet. This is the type of light which lends itself to vitamin D deficiency, baseline serotonin levels, spluttering neurotransmitters and mild but by no means notional depression. It is the type of light wherein ghosts go their rounds at all hours of the day.
2 In December of the previous year the Conducator stood on the balcony of the Central Committee building in Palace Square and addressed the crowd below. His voice, carrying in the sub-zero temperature to the back of the square, assured the crowd that the great collective experiment of the last three decades was in no way compromised by recent political developments in neighbouring countries.
As always on such occasions his wife stood shoulder to shoulder with him. Through four decades this has been her place—it has indeed been a great love affair. They have drawn strength from each other and they have needed every bit of it; together they have destroyed an entire country. Bearing in mind that the country was one of God’s masterpieces to begin with this is no small feat . . .
Eight minutes into the rally the crowd gets restless, a definite low-level hum begins to undercut the autarch’s speech. At first nothing more than a rustle but already it is the authentic sound of dissent, a sound without precedent in the annals of such occasions. It builds slowly, now clearly audible, strengthening under its own strength, three decades of shame and privation surfacing. The Conducator’s face twitches in disbelief, a fleeting shadow crossing the blankness of his cheekbones. His wife leans into him and quite audibly says, “Promise them something. Talk to them.” This is the precise moment when history fractures, the point at which a specific time has run its course. This moment separates before from after. A new epoch has begun, a new calendar starts from this moment.
Four days from this, on Christmas Day, the Conducator and his wife will sit in a child’s school desk in a military barracks arraigned before a hastily convened court. The charges against them will range from corruption and impoverishment of a nation to mass murder. Recording proceedings against God knows what sort of reprisals the video footage will show that as the charges are being read out the Conducator gazes at his watch like a man concerned with missing an important engagement elsewhere. It will be a moment of studied, elegant contempt. Refusing a plea of mental instability he will hold his nerve and say that he refuses to recognise the court and will answer only to the Grand National Assembly; an old hand at this sort of thing himself he will recognise a show trial when he sees one. When the death sentence is read out and as he is being led from the room we will hear him humming “The Internationale.” His wife, however, in a last outburst will brush aside a young soldier who reaches to assist her. Her last recorded words will be, “Take your hands off me, motherfucker.”
3 Registered to Interskan Shipping out of Antwerp, Le Soleil Noir, an eighty-metre cargo coaster, had for ten years plied its trade ferrying alumina trihydrate to the municipal water systems of coastal cities in the North Sea and Baltic. Detained by Dutch immigration authorities when a backload of pig iron from the Russian Federation was found to be bulked out with twenty refugees from Kaliningrad, the vessel had lain in Antwerp pending the trial of its owner, Hans Luyxx. Fifteen months later the liquidation of Interskan Shipping brought the vessel to the attention of the European Penal Commission. Its three-thousand-metre hold met the specifications of those architects on secondment to the EPC. Purchased at scrap value, renamed and registered, the Somnos spent the autumn of that year in Odense being refitted as a high-security neuro-intensive-care unit. On the twenty-fifth of May, after a three-week voyage, the Somnos was piloted into Killary fjord and dropped anchor in twelve fathoms of water. In line with naval protocol, captaincy of the ship was handed over to Norris Whelan, vice-governor of the Irish prison system. Three weeks of system checks followed, during which trial telemetry was relayed over the Astra satellite to Beaumont Hospital.
4 Too narrowly conceived as a notional boundary beyond which it is impossible to speak or relay information, the Event Horizon is more fully understood as a structure determined within and without the nature of the Somnos project itself, a structure which functions as an endo- and exoskeletal support which upholds and inscribes the project as a site within which identities as ongoing processes morph and shift through spatio-temporal planes. And while it is itself both speculative and conjectural and its arrhythmic moods are ever likely to falter and decay, it is an interweaving of shards and fragments linked by suggestive coherences we are compelled to reason with.
While the Event Horizon lies beyond an appeal to scholarship, evidentiary texts, archival research, the historical record, etc.—marginalia as a buttressing authority—as an attempt to describe a definitive circumference around any singularity it will always fall short as a final statement of containment. Any site wherein identities are stressed and deliquesced beyond their stand-alone sovereignty, any site which facilitates the neither-here-nor-there ontologies of imaging and information technologies, will always resist such delimitative attempts.
5 Footnoted beneath the Twin Towers collapse the Somnos takes its place amid the gathering iconography of twenty-first-century anxiety. Through reproductions on album covers and as a generative image in cultural studies it
