Niall Williams - The Fall of Light

Then he wheeled the pony about and galloped her down the blind road toward the sea.

Teige rode with the sickness of loneliness like bitter soup turning in his stomach. He rode with reckless abandon into the dark and charged down the way he did not know and could not see. He was a boy escaping from the world of men and did not heed the dangers of the road as it passed down along cliffs and sharp bends. He felt the sea before he could see it. His face was wet with it. The lids of his eyes tingled with the salt and his hair matted. Then, over the noise of his and the horse’s breathing, came the sighing collapse and crash of the waves. He rode down through dunes that gave beneath him and he had to lean backward for balance and his moon shadow was like that of some stiff and proper gentleman descending onto the floor of sand. The Atlantic was full and heavy. It seemed swollen beyond itself and appeared to the boy as though the shore could not contain it. The flatness of the beach was strangely perplexing to him, as though just against it the sea itself could not be so deep nor the country fall away like that into the surging waters. Teige trotted the pony on the edge of Ireland where the white surf was combed out of the darkness like the frills of an elaborate gown. He trotted her the length of the soft sand horseshoe in the splashing waves. Then he drew her in from the shoreline and slid down and stood there on that empty beach. He was at the place his father dreamed, he thought. He was there on the western shore where they were to begin to realize Francis Foley’s vision. But it was in ruins now. His family was lost, he thought. Now there was only Teige and the great emptiness of the watery horizon where flashes of white appeared and disappeared in the far darkness of the sea. Teige stood there. He thought of the river where his father had drowned and which was now in that sea. He thought of the old man’s boast that their country was bigger than the mapmakers had drawn it, and he suddenly saw it so. He saw the vastness of the sea was itself part of that wild country as was its great and million-starred sky, and he dropped to his knees there in the sand and felt the despair of loss. And he put his hands together to pray and turned to the constellations that were cold and impassive and falling through the darkness ages away, and, knowing no God who knew him, he looked to Pegasus in the south and to it prayed the wordless prayers that rose off the bottom of his soul.

Francis Foley woke from the dream of being a swan. He opened his eyes and immediately reached his two hands to pat his chest and feel there for his feathers. Even when he could find none, he was not reassured, for the reality of his dream was more potent than the darkness to which he awoke. It was some time before his mind refound itself and he had left his swanhood behind, wondering if it was possible to dream within dreams. He touched the hard pallet of his bed but did not know where he was. He was in the stone building that was like a boat upside down and in which he seemed to sail in the world of the drowned. The doorway was dark without a door. When his eyes were opened long enough, he could distinguish it and imagine the space that lay beyond. He feared for devils. He feared for the twisted shapes of white wasted bodies cast around outside in a sorry vision of the damned, and was no longer sure whether he had been saved or lingered in some netherworld awaiting judgement. He was not sure his body existed. He had the sense of time not existing as he lay there in the dark. Sometimes he imagined he was inside the stomach of something enormous. He saw in bizarre phantasm the thing that had swallowed him whose scales were stonelike and shone blackly, and he wondered how he might get it to vomit him back into the river. Or else he was in a womb and would be newly born into a distant world with other stars, where the earth itself would be the smallest point of least significance and where all his travails and tarnished hopes would be forgotten and part only of the history of dust. Francis Foley imagined all possibilities and burned with regret at each of them. Why had this happened to him? He stared across the darkness at the doorway that led into the outer darkness. He watched it for sign of anything, but there was only the nothingness of that empty space beyond.

So he sat up.

He held his hand out in front of him and brought it closer until he could see it just before his face. Then he put his hand out and moved it from side to side as though expecting to brush against some resistance. There was none. He moved his legs and stood on the ground, feeling the firmness of it and testing it with small jockeying actions of his knees. The ground did not give beneath him and, coming from the aeons of his airy dreaming, was strangely reassuring. He could stand and walk. But he could not see. Then, as though declaring himself undead, making the shape that had first announced his birth on paper, he moved from there like an ambulant letter f with both arms outward high and low, going slowly forward against the wall of darkness. He made his way toward the door. He did not know if when he stepped through it the world would end, if he would fall headlong, if the place where he had been waiting were the last sanctuary before the wailing and fires of purgatory. Still he went on. He could not stay there while he could still breathe. The image of his sons passed before him, and he imagined them waiting for him.

Then he walked through the doorway of the dark and he cried out.

For there was God.

God’s bald crown flashed like a lesser moon. Then God multiplied Himself and was a trinity of figures on a grassy hillock at the back of which lay a stone chapel. Francis Foley walked with his hands out before him in the f , though now he could see. He looked as though he were feeling the world for a secret opening, or expecting to reach some invisible wall that would be impenetrable and leave him trapped the other side of living. Still he stepped forward barefoot across the wet grass. The stars shone more brightly with each step. His eyes grew accustomed to the light of the night and revealed more clearly the strange trinity of identical bald figures in brown robes that were gathered on the small hill with their backs to him. Francis thought to shout out to them. But he did not want to discover that he might be dead and that his cry might be the soundless empty horror of screams in dreams. So he came forward in that odd manner and was with each step brought a little farther back into life until the truth dawned on him at last: He was not dead, and God was not God but a sinner like us all and He was in fact three monks on an island in the middle of the river Shannon.

He realized this when he saw the telescope. The monks were clustered about it and taking turns to watch the skies for the evidence of heaven.

“Leave that!” He was surprised by the power of his voice. And used it again when he saw how startled were the monks, turning quickly to face him in the night.

“Leave that alone, it’s mine,” he shouted. He waved his arms wide as though measuring his anger, and the monks stepped back. The telescope had been set on a wooden platform. It showed no sign of having drowned, and its long mahogany frame looked as if it had been polished new. Its brass mouldings and fittings gleamed and gave back the scintilla of stars. Francis’s mouth opened when he saw it. It was pointed at the southern sky. As he came forward, the monks stepped away like figures caught and contrite. They said nothing. The old man went over to the instrument and ran his fingers along it as though it were the final proof that he had returned to the world. He touched the telescope and he laughed.