If there is one thing I have learned over these past few weeks, it is that there is no substance to time. None. One minute I am thirty four years old, doing all the things that people of my age do, all the things that we can get away with, and then the next I’m fourteen again, huddled beneath the sheets and wishing that the whole world really was nothing more than a fetid dream. To the vast majority of us, time travel seems utterly ridiculous until we actually experience its turmoil. My wife says that everyone has their own particular way of dealing with grief.
We’re born, we live, we die. Those are the facts, and good or bad doesn’t enter the equation. People have been challenging this born/die theory forever, for millions upon millions of years, and the cycle has yet to be beaten. Knowing that, though, doesn’t stop us from trying. Ally was born, lived, died, and I would have confidently bet all the money in all the banks that if it were at all possible to trick the game then she’d have been the one to find the way. For six years she ruled Martha and I, always, it seems now, with a smile, always happy, but always in control. Six years, a span of time that felt enormous and eternal during its passing but which feels trifling in its brevity now that it has spun itself out. I’ve begun to think of time as an actual clock, and whenever I consider it now I tend to focus on its internal workings, the carefully weighted springs, the gently greased cogs, everything working in minute perfection with everything else but everything an accident waiting to happen, too. When you think about it, and I mean really think, there is just so much that can go wrong. All it takes is any single one of those tiny workings to crack, to split apart, to come up with even a vaguely acceptable reason for malfunction, and that is it, as fast as a finger-snap the whole thing comes grinding to a halt. One small break, and all of time stops.
We know that it can happen, that it will happen, in fact, the same as everything will if you have patience enough to wait, but until the actual moment of impact we somehow never quite allow ourselves to really believe it. I didn’t, anyway. Terrible things loom constantly all around us, stacked head-high and waiting, just waiting, to topple. If it’s not the seemingly always-imminent danger of a nuclear war then it is the six-mile wide meteor hurtling its way towards us with every intention of doing to us what its illustrious cousin did to the dinosaurs. These and a million billion other worries hang above us like the freshly honed blade of a guillotine, and yet we wade along, content in our gloriously purposeful oblivion even when we hear the dreadful whistle of the steel finally slash open the day, even when we feel the initial pinch of a cold and hungry edge against our exposed napes. We know what’s coming, but the inevitable lies somewhere beyond our scope of acceptance. It’s how we are able to go on, I suppose, and it is how we careen, in a stunned, wide-eyed stupor, from one disaster to the next. If we were to allow ourselves to believe that everything totters on such a never-ending brink then what would be the point of even pretending to struggle for balance? No, we control nothing, not our own lives, not the lives of others. Nothing.
A doctor told me once that reality is just a concept. He smiled when he said it, so I smiled too, though I didn’t feel much like smiling, either then or since. He was serious, though. In a way, he said. And the example he offered up to prove his point was a coma victim. Our concept of their reality is that they are locked into a bed, those poor bastards fresh from a car wreck or a collapsed building. As far as we are concerned, they are wired up to God knows what, and that is it for them, until they either wake up or die. But studies have shown that there are other things going on beneath the surface of their placid sleep. More than lily scents and cool white light, more than bebop-scatting machines and laser shows. Not always, of course, but in certain cases. Dreams, for want of a better word. The subconscious remains unfathomable to scientists; it operates in the same realm of mystery as the notion of an infinite space or the age and design of God. To these misfortunate creatures, the coma cases, it is possible, more than possible, that the dreams have become reality. All a matter of concept, the doctor said. What their minds see is what is real. He was a psychiatrist, of course, and our business during those sessions was to discuss other things, but he did say it. All a matter of concept.
I thought about it for a while, slumped there in a large tanned leather bucket chair and staring out at the rainy white sky that lay beyond the latticed bars of the Venetian blinds, and I found that the words didn’t fit quite right. I wanted the situation clarified. If reality was really as fragile as all of that, how then could the tangible be explained away? If dreams are real to the mind then what about all the things that are genuinely real. I mean, if I can touch something, can actually lay my hand on its physical surface and feel its textures, then doesn’t that make it real? Physical things are not dreams, are they?
The doctor’s initial reply was to stare at me, his mouth bending new shapes out of that smile. Arcs, a wavy line, and then something that was just about triangular. By that stage in our sessions, I had begun to understand the rules of the game, so I wasn’t really all that surprised at his reticence, but just when I was about to accept that I had gotten out of him all I was going to get, that this was just another example of how he suggested rather than explained, he tapped his left temple and asked what did I really think touch was except a sensual reaction, some surge of endorphins in the tender nerve endings, not so different really from how sight worked, or sound, smell or taste. Different only in their execution but, to all intents and purposes, the same. His long white finger crooked into a shape not far at all really from the curved upper hook of a question-mark, and suddenly a light went on somewhere and I knew what he meant. Not understood, exactly, not in the medical meaning of the term, but I knew, just the same. The brain, he was saying. It’s all the brain. Flushes of adrenalin, chemical discharges, neurons sparking awake like live wires to spit out some notion before slumping back down into the mire of rest again. Our entire lives are played out in three pounds of lipids, protein and water, and with just a pinch of salt thrown in. It is all some ridiculously complicated and alchemic concoction that somehow conspires against nearly impossible odds to produce seventy thousand thoughts a day worth of action, and a number almost uncountable when added up over an average lifetime of some seventy or seventy-five or eighty years. Our bodies are the very least of it, all that bone and muscle and fleshy fat not a whole lot more really than a convenient vehicular pulp. The wrapping paper on a precious Christmas present. As the doctor said, it is the brain that runs the show, and that certainly is food for thought.
So, what is real? My head is swollen with six years worth of memories, and new ones, it seems, are brought to light with every passing day. I will be staring at the page of some book, or shaving, or kneeling in the second to last pew of the church across town, or eating soup, or just holding Martha’s hand the way I sometimes do when words or anything else feel like too great a challenge, and in those moments I close my eyes to find some recollection blossoming wildly in my mind, having risen unbidden to the surface. How I cradled Ally in my arms when tears rather than sleep were the order of the night. How I walked with her to school, or to the shop, or walked with her just for the sheer beautiful invigoration of our tandem movement, I slowing my step to keep in line with her, she skipping along at a half-run in order to meet up with me somewhere along the way. Her tiny hand had a heartbeat, and it tickled and squeezed its marathon pulse into mine even as her concerned face studied the passing cars and we looked for a safe part of the road at which to cross.
I sleepwalk my way through life now. Occasionally, I wake and register some small detail of the day, or I’ll catch the demand of some question asked and try, if I can, to answer, but the greater part of my life, these days and nights, is confined to my memories. You might say I am working on a concept, or that my subconscious is and that the rest of me is just going along for the ride. The truth, I suppose, if there really is such a thing, is that Ally’s death has made two of me. One part is the true me, the part willingly lost heart and soul to the past, back when colours still held their hue, back before the sky had fallen in, and the other is the husk that is left to drift along, tugged into one direction or another by whatever wind happens to be blowing, and doing all the things that need doing but not a single ounce more. Everyone assures me that this is a natural way to feel, given all that I have been through, but I know that they can’t even begin to understand, not really. Their lives still pitch along on an even keel, they still believe in thinking the best of a situation. Their guillotine is still poised.
Martha doesn’t say much. She looks the same as always. More or less, anyway. The grey around her eyes feels like a duty, and she wears it as such, but it is not offensive. She is still a beautiful woman, and I suppose, in time, she will learn to sleep again. I don’t know, maybe she is better off without sleep. Her hair has grown out of its bob-cut and she is no longer careful about combing it, but that is only one of the things that has ceased to matter. We speak in whispers, mostly, even when we are alone together. To an outsider, it must seem as if we are keeping secrets that we don’t want overheard but that’s not the reason. Our usual voices feel too loud, somehow. We have both sensed it. And what we do say tends to trail off half-finished. Not worth the effort. There are times, when I take her hand, that I wish she’d smile, for her own sake more than for mine, but I understand why she doesn’t. We have a difficult time ahead. Time. It seems impossible that there can be any, after all that has gone, but there it is, ticking away. The clock has been cracked, but now the seconds beat with greater vigour. And every one of them feels wasteful.
That evening, we had been just sitting around. Doing nothing. Waiting, it seems like, when I look back on it now, but I know that’s not right because how could it be? How could we have known? I was on the couch, halfway into my second beer. There was a game on, though for some reason I can’t for the life of me recall who was playing. In my mind, I can see the screen, but the details of that game continue to elude me. I know it shouldn’t matter, but for some reason it does. Three weeks now, and it seems like hardly ten minutes and also a hundred lifetimes ago. Martha was in the kitchen, making meatballs for a Bolognese. She’s a great cook with food she knows. She does a mean stir fry too, and very passable tortillas. She has her specialties, like everyone does. Anyway, the phone began to ring and kept on ringing. I think we each thought that the other would pick up. Seven, eight rings, the bell-chime possessed of an ugliness that I had never noticed, or acknowledged, until just then. Too metallic, too demanding. Shrill, I guess the word is. The sort of noise perfectly conceived to bear bad news. Then it died in mid-ring and I knew that Martha had it, and I slumped back in the couch and let the game flood over me again, the baying of the crowd and the singsong clucking of the commentator. Layers of white noise. The beer frothed in my mouth, the way it does if you don’t swallow right away. Ten minutes later we were at the hospital. My hands were clenched into trembling fists and the air tasted rancid in the high back of my throat. Martha was crying, even though we had none of the details yet. The white noise was everywhere, in the car, running through the corridors, in the waiting room packed with people. Faces bobbed into view, stretched, pallid lumps that kept trying to speak but couldn’t, because there were no words to say what needed saying.
There had been an accident. Ally had spent the day since school over at a friend’s house, the Hennessy’s. On a play-date. We knew the family, in that way of next-block neighbours knowing one another. A name, a face, a wave, a smile. Strangers, really, but acceptable ones. George and Cynthia Hennessy, and their lovely daughter Helen. The Troy connection, Cynthia had said once, at a friend-of-a-friend’s fundraising barbecue — in aid of Alzheimer’s, I think, though it could have been Parkinson’s too — and she and George had both laughed at that, soft condescending chirps of laughter. I just settled for a smile, to let them know that I got it, that I wasn’t stupid, even if I didn’t wear an Ivy League tie. But that laugh didn’t define them, and actually they were a sweet enough couple. Good-hearted, you know. Difficult not to like. And most importantly of all, Ally liked Helen; hence, the play-date. There is an organisational term for everything, these days. On this particular play-date, they were playing hide and seek, just as they always did whenever they got together, and, as near as anyone could tell, Ally had taken herself off and hidden in a neighbour’s driveway. Being too clever by half, someone said, either George or Cynthia, and while that was probably not the most stupid remark of that interminably long and terrible evening and night, it was surely right up there with the pick of them. Too clever by half. Not meaning anything by it, but saying it. We all have guilt, and we allay it how and when we can, I suppose. Ally had broken the rules of the game too, stepping outside of the boundaries. From her crouched position behind the Lexis, she could see clear through the property’s dividing hedge to where Helen stood, hands over her eyes, trying with some difficulty to count backwards down from twenty-five. I wasn’t there, of course, but I had witnessed this when play-dates rendezvoused in our front yard, and so I can picture it with a gruesome clarity. That gasped drone pummeling the first syllable of each uttered number. “Twenty, nineteen,” and then a pause as, eyes still clenched shut, the hands were freed and the fingers put to work. “Seventeen, fourteen, eighteen.” On, and on, and close enough.
We followed a male nurse down myriad corridors and through set after set of double-winged doors that whispered open and shushed shut. Some of the doors had ‘no entry’ or ‘authorised personnel only’ signs pinned to them but those signs didn’t appear to apply to us. It was just like a dream. Endless corridors, strained breath, a hurried, clipped pace, and no one speaking, no one daring to speak. After twenty steps, Martha and I were lost, disorientated. After a hundred, it felt as if we were on another planet. The nurse was either Indian or Pakistani. He was tall and very thin, malnourished-looking, with small round wire-framed glasses pushed right up against his eyes and a finger-smear of a moustache across his upper lip. He wore green scrubs, and I noticed as we walked that the hems of his trousers were bloodstained. Then, finally, we reached a small, utterly empty room. “Wait here, please,” he told us. “A doctor will see you soon.” While I was thinking of a question to ask, he turned and was gone, leaving us alone, afraid and confused, with nowhere to sit. For some time, Martha stood beside me and slightly to the front, her body half-turned into mine, her shoulder pressed into the channel between by body and my right arm. Her mouth was shifting, but even when I lowered my head to catch her words I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I think she was praying. If she was, then God owes her for the wasted breath. The floor was immaculately clean. Cream tiles polished to such a glossy sheen that they were almost reflective.
Soon, the nurse had said, but that proved to be an exaggeration that bordered on the criminal. Hour stacked on hour. The room was somewhere deep in the bowels of the hospital and there were no windows. And yet, I could actually feel the day draining away and night coming on. I had a watch, of course, so I was able to monitor the passing of time, but the sensation of real time felt genuine, in a way that I had never known before. Maybe, when we work ourselves fully back to the instinctual level, we are not so far removed from the shifting of nature, from the moon cycles and the tides and the waning of the sun. The problem is that we are not hard, like rock, or strong like the trees. We can’t always cope with being pulled this way and that. We might not look it, but we are fragile, and we break easily. I could feel night coming on, I could feel it sifting away as a new day waited to break, and I could feel that time, the great healer, was about to become our great tormentor. And when a doctor did finally appear, I knew what he was going to say before he said it. He explained how severe Alice’s injuries had been, not just the ruptured spleen and the punctured lung but also the crushed upper vertebrae and the extensive brain trauma. The medical staff had done everything that it was possible to do, wanting to give her every chance. She had fought hard too, through nine hours worth of surgery, but the bleeding in both the Parietal and Occipital lobes could not be stanched, and the damage, unfortunately, was just too great.
“Not Alice,” I whispered, because something had changed deep down inside and my voice could not work any better than a whisper. “Her name is Alison. Ally, really.” He looked at me, then nodded and looked away. He did something with his mouth, as if there was something more to add, but either he thought better of it or decided that it didn’t matter, at least for now, because he nodded again and left the room. My watch said that it was just after six o’clock, but my body already knew that.
Within the hour, we were taken on another long march. This time there was not so much urgency. I don’t remember any doors, or anything about the floor or the walls, or even who it was that brought us on this second traipse, though I do seem to recall the steady clatter of our combined footsteps because it seemed like a sound too much for a dawn that I had always been given to assume was all about birdsong and the stirrings of hope. Mostly, thought, what I was remembering was that male nurse from earlier in the night and how the blood had stained the low legs of his trousers. Life and death ought to know more dignity than that.
The lights in hospitals make everything look severe. Too heightened, they separate the whole world into one thing or the other, pallid glare or pitted shadow. There is no room for collusion, and nowhere to hide. Martha held my hand and cried, great heaving gags of tears. I knew that she needed to be held but couldn’t bring myself to do it. Nothing could have made this moment better, and nothing should have. All they needed from me, the attendant nurse said, was a nod. Just pull the blanket back, just for a second, and nod. She was middle-aged and still playing the fame of pretty, stone-washed blonde bangs spilling out from the rim of her cap and a lipstick leer of a smile. I could see the exhaustion in everything she said and did, in the way she held the clipboard over her small left breast, over her heart, and in the way her made-up eyes dragged themselves from scene to scene, always without flinching. She had seen this business done a thousand times, maybe even a thousand times a day, and she was beyond tears, beyond everything but the procedural paperwork and the cold hard flesh-and-bone details. Not hardness, exactly, but disconnection. Just do it, she said, so I did.
Martha gasped, then laughed. No one was expecting that, least of all Martha herself. But she did, she laughed. The child on the trolley was pale as soap, with a sparse, ropey stubble of colourless hair and a face that looked too small for the oversized head. Beneath, there was the butternut squash of a body, yellow and almost shoulder-less, but grotesquely swollen around the midriff. “That’s not her,” she gasped, and then, stunned, half turned away and announced to all who could hear, the nurse and the other staff members who were lingering in the office just beyond. “That’s not Ally. There’s been a mistake.” I could feel the seconds piling up, and the concept of reality falling away in clumps. I swallowed hard, and took my wife by the shoulders. “Yes, it is,” I said softly, the words splinters of glass in my throat, choking me. “Look again.”
How can you pick up the pieces after something like that? The answer, if there is one, is that I don’t think you can. All you can do is to try and move on. It’s like my father used to say: you put one foot in front of the other, and you try your damnedest to stay upright. As words, those are easy enough to say. Maybe they are the best that we can hope for, people like Martha and I, people who have been through so much and who, either by bad luck or ill-judgement, have survived. We live our lives now around the edge of a gaping hole, but we have to live. I’m just not sure why.
Whatever works. For Martha, I think it is prayer. It may be something else, too. For me, it’s that psychiatrist’s comment, about reality being just a concept. Reality is everything, isn’t it? The whole world and all the things in it. Possessions, people, love, pain. Reality is what you feel, what your brain can countenance. For me, the world around me has become the dream. Nothing seems real, nothing tastes or smells of anything anymore, the busy details of work and life lack clarity now, and all sound exists for me in whispers and muted throbbing. Nothing about my surround can approach the vivid brilliance, the certainty, of my memories.
When I lay down now and close my eyes, I don’t see darkness, and I don’t feel fear. When my head hit’s the pillow I find myself back in some countryside field, exactly where I want to be, with Ally beside me in a crouch that keeps the lacy hem of her yellow cotton dress to just above her perpetually blue-scabbed knees. My job is to pluck the small daisies for her, one by one by one; hers is to hold out her hands in a cradling cup so as to horde our collected treasure, and to keep her pretty face locked into the kind of gap-toothed grin that can move entire worlds out of their orbits and that can turn nuggets of coal into glittering diamond prizes. Down there, bent in that contrite and contented position, I can smell the acrid musk of the baked dirt and the cloying tang of the grass, but more than anything else I can wallow in the sweetness of my child’s shampoo scent, the aroma of apples and something else, honey or something more newfangled and exotic-sounding. Echinacea, perhaps, the sort of thing that Martha would buy, and as much for the funny, musical sound of its name as for its soothing, therapeutic qualities. Beside us, the remnants of a devoured picnic lay spread out across a red and white check-patterned square of woolen blanket, an array of half- or three-quarters eaten treats. A small transistor radio has been tuned to an oldies station and offers up Beach Boys and Creedence and Beatles hits, those voices the very sound of summer. And, in the grass just beyond, Martha lies stretched out and stripped down to the skimpy beneath the baking afternoon sun, and ‘memory’ feels like nowhere near big or grand enough a word for something as deeply-etched and crystalline as all of this. In my remembered field I can see and feel and breathe and touch and taste a world that I know can never be as good as this again. This was a real day, one that we lived and smiled through, never even guessing at its perfection, but that is what it was and what it still remains, perfection, and anything outside of this will have too many pieces missing to ever properly work as well for me again. I know that I have responsibilities, and that I can’t turn my back on the other world, the one that everybody considers real, the be-all of everything, but there is an astonishing depth of comfort in knowing that at a certain hour of night I can come to bed, close my eyes and make it back here, to where I truly want to be. Here in a field that might just as well be any field anywhere, down on my knees like this in the burnt summer grass, I have everything I want, and I am happy. Actually happy.
A doctor’s duty is to heal the sick. Now I know, we all know, that there are some injuries and diseases just too deep-seated to be properly cured, but in most cases they can at least be managed. And if a pill or an injection helps to make the world a little more bearable then who is anyone to speak out against that? Well, my pains and my problems are deep-seated. I know what has happened and I understand that there is no cure, not really, because time that has been laid down can’t really be undone. It can, however, be finessed, perhaps plastered over with layers of better pasts. When something makes sense it makes sense all the way down to the bone. Reality really is a concept, a state of mind. Those few simple words don’t seem like very much, but they are everything there is, and that psychiatrist’s one simple suggestion has turned out to be my salvation. Through it, I have learned to slip beneath the pain, to close my eyes, shuck my skins of suffering and make a quest of searching out other better realities. If something was all the way real once then why can’t it be so again? It is detail that makes the difference. And the reality I choose, time and again, is my favourite reality of all, the one where I am in this field, kneeling down, where mere inches away is the solid and still unscarred shape of my little girl’s skull, the clammy silkiness of her yet-perfect skin, and the corkscrew wisps of her floating yellow hair that greets my nose and cheeks whenever I lean across to plant a kiss in the high dead centre of her forehead. In this world, our taste buds still buzz from the joys of the egg salad and cheese and cucumber sandwiches, and the ice cold cans, beer for me, ginger ale for Martha and lashings of root beer for Ally, and best of all the dissected remnants of the fresh-baked cherry pie, cherry being our very favourite apart from my own occasional craving for pecan and banana. We are all here, Martha, Ally and I, all within an arm’s reach of one another. We are a family, perfect and untouched. Everything else has become a lie, or a fantasy, when measured against this world. Because this feels real. God, this feels the way it was always surely meant to feel. Here, there is no pain, no grief, only happiness and smiles, only the smell of a late July day in all its full-blown glory. This, I think, is heaven. And we get there any way we can.
—
Billy O’Callaghan, from Cork, Ireland, is the author of two short story collections, In Exile (2008) and In Too Deep (2009), both published by Mercier Press, Ireland’s oldest independent publishing house. His fiction has appeared in various magazines and journals around the world.
