The ground grows still. The roaring is silenced. The rage beneath the earth recedes.
He stays where he is, flattened against the wall, his hands splayed on either side of him. The building he has been watching settles.
His whole body is paralyzed by fear, and it takes a few moments for him to calm himself. His muscles unclench; movement returns to his joints.
“That was a bad one,” Cozimo says, his face ashen, his eyes still wide with fear.
Harry is about to say something, but does not.
What?
Cozimo wants to ask, but his throat is parched and Harry is already gone.
* * *
He
runs past the bar, where the neon sign has fallen onto the road. It fizzes and spurts with bursts of electricity before going dead. All along the street, the lights cut out. There is silence now, a veil of uneasy calm, but it does not last.
The fragile peace is broken as people begin to stream past him. Down the hill they go, fleeing their homes, propelled by fear: fear of the aftershocks that will come, fear of the imminent collapse of these flimsy buildings.
He alone seems to be charging uphill, his breath caught in his chest, his heart beating like a madman’s.
As he runs, Harry hears the shrieking and the crying begin. Doors open and people emerge from their homes, some dazed and confused, others driven by panic. A man rushes past him, carrying three children in his arms. A woman stumbles onto her doorstep, crying and bloodied, a crimson gash above one eye.
On the corner, a man calls out over and over again, “Allah sent it, Allah.”
Harry stops to catch his breath. A woman throws her arms about his neck. He pushes her away and flees.
All around him, buildings are rocking and flames shooting up. People on all sides are crying, praying, and calling for help. Animals too, fowls and beasts, are crying out.
He runs on frantically. And then at the Hotel Mediterranean, there are three men on the roof. Rather than see the crazed men fall in with the roof and be roasted alive in the blazing building, a military officer on the scene directs his men to shoot them, which they do, quickly and accurately, before a dumbfounded crowd of spectators.
It feels like the end of the world.
* * *
Everywhere
there is dust.
He inhales it, coughing and spluttering, his eyes streaming, his mouth dry. Smoke invades his nostrils. He sees buildings alight, flames licking at windows and doors.
In the distance, there is the whine of sirens. Other sounds too: sudden crashes as buildings collapse in on themselves, the thump of bricks toppling onto the street, the snapping of wood as eaves buckle and crack.
Still he runs. A building slumps against its neighbor, as if tiredness and old age had weakened it and it could simply bear up no longer.
From cracks in the pavement, water bubbles up—water and sand. A foul sludge fills the alleyway and sucks at his feet.
At the corner to his street, the bakery’s façade has fallen away, revealing rooms with their furniture still standing.
He sees a bed and a sofa, curtains fluttering in the open air.
As he reaches the street he lives on, the dust in the air thickens. A great cloud of it rises to meet him.
He stands still.
About his feet, there is a shuffle and flutter. He looks down and sees hundreds of books strewn about the road.
In the clearing, the sky is flat and dark. The buildings that have remained standing look yellow and barren.
He scans the wreckage. An image from earlier in the evening returns: he is standing in the narrow passageway, holding his sleeping son in his arms—he can almost feel again the softness of his flesh, the warmth of his body.
And yet another astonishing reality confronts him. The building where once he worked, slept, loved, fathered, painted, put his son to sleep, where he lived and called his home, is simply and irrevocably no more; it is sunken into the earth, swallowed, gone.
DUBLIN
2010
CHAPTER ONE
HARRY
Robin
was still asleep when I left the house. I wanted to wake her, to tell her about the fresh arrival of snow. But when I turned from the window and saw her lying there, her hair spread over the pillow, the gentle rise and fall of her breathing, eyes closed and her face at peace, I decided against it. She had been tired lately; at least, that is how it had seemed to me. She had complained of headaches and of not sleeping well. And so I let her be, closing the bedroom door softly behind me. I walked downstairs, took the empty wine bottles from the kitchen table, placed them outside, and went out without breakfast or coffee. There was no need to leave a note. She would know where I was.
The cold air was refreshing. I had the same regret having drunk so much the night before that I’ve had on many other occasions, but in the crisp, cold air, I experienced a renewed sense of well-being. I was full of good intentions. I was going to turn over a new leaf, get healthy, live my life more fully and honestly. It wasn’t just the morning air. Hadn’t I said as much to Robin the night before?
“You’re a man with good intentions.”
“The best of.”
Robin smiled when I said this. Hers was a generous smile, a smile that recognized the weakness within me and forgave it all the same. After Dillon, her gentleness had not dissipated, when it easily could have. I would not have blamed her. She had not become hardened. She had mostly remained herself, despite everything we had been through.
Though there were times when something she said or did came as such a surprise that it gave me pause and made me consider my wife anew.
“That’s what you call being married,” my friend Spencer once told me. As a single man, or
bachelor,
as he liked to insist, he often had insights into married life. To the complaint one day that my wedding band was too tight, his pithy reply was: “It’s supposed to be.”
Robin and I still talked the way we used to, still opened up to each other, but like with any couple who has been together for a long time, there comes a point, sometimes, in a night’s conversation when you anticipate what the other person is going to say and you stop listening and you go to bed. And that night—last night—well, that was exactly what happened. I was mid-flow when Robin stood up abruptly, leaned over, and silenced me with a kiss before saying, simply and blankly, “Good night.” I shouldn’t have let it bother me. I had been gabbling, talking nonsense most probably, and her sudden departure from the kitchen turned me to another bottle of wine and another late night.
Today, however, was different. Today was to be a day of new beginnings. The snow was there to announce it, to wake and remind me of our fresh start. I was closing up shop and locking the doors to my central Dublin studio. “The end of an era,” Spencer had joked. From now on, I was going to work from the garage at home. It would save us the much-needed cash to renovate the house we had recently moved into. It had once been Robin’s grandparents’ house, and now it was ours. For Robin, the house held memories. And though the suburbs of Monkstown were a far cry from our time in Tangier or even the times we had spent in Dublin together, I was not ungrateful. It’s a big old house. And Robin had plans. She wanted to get her hands dirty. Her excitement was infectious. What could I say but yes, yes, let’s get our hands dirty.
The crunching sound as I walked through the snow put a smile on my face. There must have been two or three inches of it, and by the looks of it, I was the first to venture out on our street. When I got to the van, the old Volkswagen’s door wouldn’t open. I tugged at it, finally wrenched it open, started the engine, and went back for a kettle of water to pour over the windscreen. I loved the old orange van. Robin had pleaded with me not to buy it. Had it broken down once? Had it stalled, stuttered, or wavered in its time? No. It had been fail-safe and hardy. We had even slept in it. I won’t pretend that it was comfortable, but it could have been. I put the key in the ignition and turned the engine over a couple of times before backing out of the driveway slowly, cautiously, feeling the snow compacting under the tires.
I got into town that cold, beautiful morning with little bother. The roads were deserted and I made good time, parked outside the studio on Fenian Street, and walked down to the basement for what would be, I imagined, the last time.
The studio had at one time been a basement flat, but Spencer had gutted it. The walls were bare, the floor concrete. The toilet cistern gurgled all day and all night too, whenever I slept over. I had an old mattress, a couch, a kettle, and a camping stove. I liked the place to be this bare, and I stretched my canvases and stuck them on the floor to work on them. I didn’t use an easel. I didn’t use a palette. Sometimes I didn’t use brushes. I used sticks and knives or broken glass to create the paintings. The sparseness of the place let my imagination do its work, and I’d sketched, drafted, and completed canvas after canvas here. And now it was all over.
I didn’t have a system as such, but I spent the morning packing the van with canvases, frames, paints in pots and tubes, brushes, sticks, catalogs, and finished and unfinished paintings. I don’t consider myself sentimental, but I did feel a tinge. The studio had served me well since we had moved back from Tangier. I’d produced all my new work there. It had added up to two solo shows and a bunch of group efforts. Spencer, who had made some shrewd business decisions in the past, owned the building and lived on the top floor. He’d rented the studio to me for a song. He also liked to remind me that he was my landlord and that I was his tenant. By eleven
A.M.
, I had been there for over two hours. That was when he rang.
“This is your landlord speaking. Eviction orders are in motion.”
“You’re a funny man,” I said.
“I don’t need you to tell me that.”
He arrived ten minutes later to help, wearing a black silk dressing gown and a pair of old leather slippers, a cigarette dangling from his lips. I say he arrived to help: he brought a snare drum and a crate of beer. “I’m the boy who bangs the drum,” he said.
“Start lifting.”
“I could have been a wealthy man if I had charged you what I should have for this place.”
“You
were
a wealthy man.”
“I worked it out last night. I could have had quite the stash put away.”
“I’m afraid renting one small basement to a friend was not your downfall.”
“Here we go—now you’re going to tell me … you, the lowly tenant.”
My phone rang.
It was Diane, the manager of the gallery I show at. “You won’t reconsider?”
“I’m packed.”
“You know I think it’s a mistake.”
“So you told me.”
“And not only because I won’t be able to stop by … but business-wise.”
“It’s done.”
Diane wanted all manner of things then. I told her I had to go.
“Who was that?” Spencer asked.
I wasn’t inclined to hear the tirade he would inevitably deliver about Diane if I told him it was her, so I lied. “Just Robin,” I said.
“The lovely.”
When Spencer had lifted his last box and chosen a painting he liked the look of—“I’ll either sell it for you or take it as a Christmas present”—I stopped what I was doing and made us a pot of coffee.
“The strongest coffee this side of the Liffey,” Spencer said. He took a silver flask from his pocket and poured.
“Whatever that means.”
“This is what it means.” He held the flask out to me, but I covered my cup.
“Driving,” I said.
“Why anyone would want to drive on a day like today is beyond me.”
“Have you forgotten? I’m moving out.”
“Now, listen to me. I have a question for you.”
“Go on,” I said, wrapping a number of brushes in a rag.
“You’ll please tell her ladyship, queen of the damned, that you have vacated the crucible of creativity and forsworn my great generosity.”
“Has anybody ever told you that you are a verbose fucker?”
“Don’t insult me.”
“I don’t mean to. Are you talking about Diane?”
“If that’s what you want to call her. I like—”
“She knows well I’m moving out,” I said, reaching for Spencer’s flask and splashing a dash into my cup. I felt, in that moment, in need of something to steady the sudden and unexpected quiver of nerves.
“But you know what I’m afraid of? Late at night, she’ll come round here looking for you. She’ll find me instead, and then what? She’ll try to sink her teeth into me as well. She will try to suck the blood out of me.”
“The way I see it, someone’s already beaten her to it. Have you looked in the mirror?”
“You cruel fucker.”
“I tell the truth.”
Spencer shook his head. I watched as he lit another cigarette, then stood up and sauntered around the empty space. A hollow feeling had come over the room; and I felt lonely. The whiskey burned a hole in the coldness of my stomach, and I watched as Spencer stopped and peered into one of the few boxes still waiting to be loaded into the van. Plucking the cigarette from his lips, he reached down and began rifling through the sheaf of drawings held there, and I felt my insides contract with grief and rage. They were my drawings of Dillon. He picked one out and held it up in front of him, examining it through narrowed eyes. Before he had a chance to comment, before he could say anything at all, I was on my feet and crossing the room, snatching the drawing from his hands. “Those aren’t for you,” I said sharply, turning away so that he couldn’t see the burning in my cheeks or the tremble of my hands. I placed the drawing back with the others, my fingers lingering briefly.
I felt his silence and figured that he was considering whether to say anything. He knew me well enough to understand when to back off. Then I heard the slow shuffle of his slippers, the scraping of a cup against the table as he reached for his coffee and downed what was left of it. “Does this have a name?” he asked, and I looked and saw him holding aloft the canvas he had chosen.
It was one of my Tangier paintings: indistinct figures, a market square, the sun’s light beating weakly in the background. In the distance, the sea.