Greg Baxter - A Preparation for Death

Later that night I took my computer out to work on edits to my story. David put on some music, something called Celtic Woman . He’d seen the ad on television and called the phone number. I tried to force it out of my consciousness. My mother picked up the magazine with my essay in it, scanning it again.

Do you mean everything you say in it? she asked.

I suppose, I said.

She frowned. She told me I was, as a child, always badly hurt by the insults of other children, that I was predisposed to long sulks and grudges. And it made her sad to see so many heads in the pillories of my unhappy onslaughts. It seemed too much like revenge to her. I felt it was the opposite of revenge — or that if revenge it was, the actors had enacted it upon themselves. My wrath was not directed at them but at myself for idolizing kings and princes of a corrupt world. I had, at last, and for good, cast myself into exile.

She remained suspicious. After all, I was rewriting, right in front of her, a story for publication in the US. I had explained to her, earlier, that I disagreed with the edits — I’d been asked to transform a story only I could write into a story anybody could’ve written. I was adding motivation, explanation, blatancy, all to confirm the editor’s presumptions.

But I am finished fighting. To commit an act of violence on art or abandon it: it is the same thing. I want to eliminate art from my concerns, so that I rid myself of small thoughts. I will live and create wholly. A man who does this — and perhaps I will never be this man — re-emerges from the fraudulence and carnage asymmetrical, ugly, and contradictory, and lives as a totality, himself. I love the disfigured, the monstrous. All the books I admire are ogres — flawed, imbalanced, savage. They enhance me. Everything else reduces me.

My last six hours in America were spent at a bar in Terminal A, right next to the gate for San José, Costa Rica, as though I needed a reminder of the world’s cyclical nature. I waited hopefully for Jake, but he never showed. My flight was at eight, so I’d miss the New Year. I suspected, for no reason whatsoever, that there’d be a party on the plane. But in case there was none, I was having my party at the bar. Midnight in Dublin was seven o’clock in Atlanta. I convinced the bartender and a few of the people beside me — two were Irish, on their way to Costa Rica — to count down to seven o’clock. The bartender was beautifully flirtatious about everything. She told me she liked working in airport bars better than bars in the city. She loved to see the people go by. We had no champagne, so she poured soda water into cheap white wine, as I suggested.

The hours passed rapidly. People surfaced and sank. A girl my age from Canada sat beside me for a while. She read my palm. She was drunk, and spoke with her face very close to mine. A Costa Rican man gave me his card, and told me to come visit him. A businessman returning from Germany told a story that nearly put me to sleep. At seven, we, whatever congregation of travellers we were, counted down loudly from ten. Nobody had the same time, so we picked a moment out of thin air. The people in the gates around us, waiting, stopped what they were doing to observe.

It was the end of April, not suddenly, not gradually: a taxi, some night, and the air was full of raindrops — tiny magnifications of city light calcifying over Dame Street, and they did not even seem to be falling. I was rolling past the Central Bank. Along the footpath pedestrians hailed the emptiness, all drunk, some standing in the middle of the street. It was three a.m. I cracked the window and the mist spat in — either that or get sick. I moved in and out of consciousness. It was entirely true that I was the dream of somebody no longer alive.

The driver, who said nothing, went out of his way to stop at yellow lights. A few times he braked so violently I had to catch my food from sliding off the seat. The radio played country, and this seemed to utterly dissociate the car from the night, as though we were not at all on the road but a maid on a pig flying over the moon — and just like that I was the dream of Bulgakov, whom I had been reading. The sensation was over before I knew it. We slowed at a roundabout, and the car was on the road again.

I am many dreams. The new year is one. The city is another. My office. A room in the Irish Writers’ Centre. Some days I am my gargling Vespa, floating past traffic down Capel Street. Other days I am the 128 bus — jammed on Amiens Street like a crooked headstone in an old, overcrowded cemetery. I am the days that elongate at their edges, heading for summer. I am the dream of a thousand wretched little houses, my cramped and hideous estate. I am the books I teach, and the stories of my students. I am not separate from these things, nor within them. I am not above or behind myself. I am what I sense.

I’ve been taking the bus more often. My scooter was stolen, wrecked, and recovered, and is in and out of the shop — the mechanics and I are arguing over the definition of a wobble. I live beside the terminus — a yellow pole stuck in some gravel by a cul-de-sac, surrounded by cranes, an empty, half-finished office installation, temporary walls, rubbish, and other construction — so I get my pick of seats. I bury myself in reading for an hour — I am gone — and when I see the Custom House I pack everything into my bag, turn on some music, and wait for my stop.

In the park beside St Patrick’s Cathedral, where junkies and the homeless assemble among bright manicured flowers and green lawns, and parents bring children to play beside the fountains, I met Clare and we drank a few bottles of beer out of a paper bag. I’d come straight from work — all week I’d done nothing but watch little tasks go by — and found her on a bench, legs crossed, reading a short story, looking like she was born for such distractions. It was Friday, and she wore a yellow coat and large, black, square sunglasses. I sat down and put my hand between her thighs. This was the first time we had met like this, but there wasn’t much point taking it slowly, since it wasn’t going to last long. She hoped to enjoy some of the cool sunshine, but by the time I arrived it was cloudy and windy. There was a ladder in her black, translucent stockings. Oh well, she said, opening one of the beers. She is blonde and small — five foot two or three, yet somehow terribly formidable — and though she is beyond the petty obsessions of her own happiness and unhappiness, she has very pretty green-blue eyes that turn downward, and this gives her a constant expression of suffering someone else’s loss. She has a PhD in economics and a crooked front tooth.

By the time the beer was finished, the cloudy light had cast a dullness over everything. The cool months had become exasperating — not winter, not spring, not anything. We went to a pub across the road and sat on stools because all the tables were taken. Clare wore a green-and-white dress that was tight around her waist. We had known each other for many months, but I’d only just discovered her attraction to me — she did not seem like the kind of woman who’d be interested. I remember nothing of the conversation except my surprise that it was taking place. Later we kissed inside a lifeless, unadorned pizza-slice kiosk with a Polish man in a white hat behind the counter, talking on his mobile phone.

It takes forever to get anywhere now. The city is overrun — tourist season has begun. The streets you hardly notice are suddenly worth a million photographs.