Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

Stephen did not intend to go to the concert, not because he disapproved or wanted to distance himself from the notion of such music in a place like west Clare, but because there would be people there. Then Moira Fitzgibbon pressed the tickets into his hand. She was a small woman of thirty-three who had, since leaving the school, become a leading member of the Community Development Association; she knew her mind, but not books, she told the other members on the night of the first meeting, asking for all business to be read aloud and excusing herself by explaining without embarrassment that the education system had taught her nothing and she was taking night classes in reading.

Stephen finished school and went home at four o’clock. The wind was blowing and the forecast was for worse. The darkness was already falling into the sea. He sat in the front room and turned on the radio. It was four hours before the concert and he had no intention of attending. With the music on the radio and the muffled company of the dark sea outside, the room was an island in November and he was soon asleep. It was the way he finished every schoolday in winter, drowsing in the corner armchair into a forgetfulness, like slipping through the back door of the world. His dreams were not fretful or anxious but a changing tapestry of recollection and mild invention, which was in fact the history of his heart. His head lay tilted to one side, and his white face looked painted in the deepening shadows. If he had died then, there in the armchair, the world would have moved on without him with little pause or regret, like a winter army leaving the long-suffering wounded to fall behind in the snow. He was a casualty of circumstances, and as he sat slumped in the chair, with the music playing and the sea breaking in the wind outside, he had no idea that rescue was at hand.

Stephen dreamed he was a child on the stairs. He was standing on the small landing where the stairs turned, and his mother was downstairs in the kitchen cooking. It was only when he looked down that he realized he had legs, for he seemed frozen and was unable to move even when Anne Griffin called out his name and his sister, Mary, came running past him with her doll Philomena. He heard his name being called again, and then saw the long, slim figure that was his mother appear at the bottom of the stairs and say to him, “Stephen, are you coming down?” And still he could not move. The wallpaper with its printed flowers in yellow and gold seemed to give way beneath his hand as he reached for something to grasp, and then there was music playing. It sounded like a cello, like the simple cello music Mary made that swam around the house and was soft and easy, and still he could not move his legs, even when his mother said again, “Stephen, are you coming down?” And he wanted to, wanted with all the desperation only dreams can hold, as he saw his mother walk away into the kitchen and heard the music grow louder and louder still, swaying the stairs, the hallway, the house itself, until he had to turn his head and let out a cry and open his eyes to see the darkness of the room about him.

He lowered his head into his hands and felt the filmy sweat of his dream.

Then he heard the music.

It was coming from the radio. It was a Mozart quartet. Whether Stephen had heard a fragment of the music as he was sleeping or whether he had dreamt it, the strange synchronicity of its playing to the tune and tempo of his dreaming was a manifestation of something. He sat up in his armchair and felt strangely that the music was for him. Whatever makes the world move moved the world then for Stephen Griffin. Whatever causes the drear of ordinariness to shake and be dazzled with brilliance, until the illumination changes forever the shape of the thousand moments that follow, it dazzled then. Though Stephen did not quite know it. He listened to the piece until it was over and then heard the announcer on the Clare station say it was the Interpreti Veneziani, who were playing that evening in the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis.

One hour later he was driving past the night fields of Inagh in the ten-year-old yellow Ford that was the only car he had ever owned. He drove with a kind of jerky, quick-slow motion, pressing on the accelerator and letting his foot off again at each bend, until the car slowed and he pumped it again. It was a style of driving that sickened any passenger but had become so habitual to Stephen that he hardly seemed to notice the way his foot pressed the pedal as if it belonged to a piano. Foot on, foot off, the car seemed to row forward like a yellow gondola, pressing and easing against some invisible current that was flowing ceaselessly against him in the darkness.

He drove on with music playing in his head. His face was a white moon pressed forward over the steering wheel. Wind buffeted the car. Bits of hedgerow and black plastic flew through the beams of the headlights. The wipers smeared the spits of rain each time they passed and made the car blind and seeing in turns. The night was breaking up, and Stephen had to grip the wheel hard to keep the car in the centre of the narrow road. He drove until he saw something coming against him; it too motored down the centre of the road, which fell away at a slope into the running murk of the ditch on both sides. When the two cars were close enough to threaten crashing, they veered over and with a mad gaiety swished past each other before retaking the centre once more. Sometimes the drivers managed frantic salutes as they flew past, desperately trying to keep from knocking off the wing mirrors.

The journey was dark. The road wound wildly across bogs that stretched away into the fallen night and soaked in the rain like parts of a vast sea creature. Soon the rain that was blowing across the front of the car was blowing directly at it. And still Stephen pumped the car forward, lurching it towards the destiny he did not know was as simple and momentous as falling in love. He was in a state. His thin lips were dry, but his face was wet. He kept thinking of the music, the music playing like that, and the dreaming and the music becoming one. The car radio had never worked and neither had the fan; so he imagined the music playing, and to its even tempo rubbed at the windscreen with his sleeve. Not that he could see. He was travelling a wet blackness that might have been circling upon itself like a tail, but still he pressed on.

He was unlike himself with the fierceness of his intent. But with the mysterious illogic by which one instant of life becomes charged with passion, he would not surrender or turn back in the rain for anything.

On the passenger seat beside him he had the tickets for the concert. He glanced over at them and in that moment made the car veer sharply to the left. The wheel hit the top of the ditch and he thumped his head against the fabric of the ceiling a half dozen times before he was able to bring the car skidding back into the slick centre of the road.

And across the other side, to crash nosedown into a ditch.

God.

Sitting up in his bed and grinning as the fierce teeth of the Atlantic bit off the slates above him and flung them a hundred yards into the fields, Moses Mooney told the cats not to worry. Thomas and Angela were curled in the warm place where his knees bent in the blankets, and he stroked them blindly as he spoke. The black cat called Angela purred and turned her head in against him. The important thing, he told them, was to realize that the future was indestructible. That no force could arrest it, and that it proceeded with the same relentless and undiminished energy as the sea itself.

“You can’t drown if you are born to die in your bed,” he said with a giddy glee, raising the great tangle of his beard to let out the laughter like birds. “Nothing stops the future. Oh no,” he said, “indeed no.”