Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

The rain quickened like a pulse beating against the window. The night thrashed about with the growing storm, taking the salt from the sea, until even in the thickly curtained bedrooms and kitchens of Miltown Malbay the air tasted of bitterness and disappointment. It was such a night. The stars had withdrawn behind the many layers of the gusting clouds, and there was no moon. Only wind and rain. Moses Mooney nodded his head and patted the cats to reassure them as the window in his bathroom flew open and he felt the breath of the sea coming in about him. “Ha ha, smell that,” he said, and raised the eyebrows of his blind eyes to catch what he knew was the scent of a storm in Brazil moments after he thought he had drowned for the third time. Here it is, he thought. Here is the shaking up of the world.

“Go on. Go on,” he said.

Then the lights went out.

Moses Mooney knew it, though he could not see it. He heard them going off in the town and thought that the darkness of all his neighbours was a symbolic blindness and a token of God’s sympathy for him. They were all to share his vision, he realized, and lay back against the pillows, which were wet now like tears. It’s black for miles around, he told the cats with mixed comfort and awe, catching a glimpse at the same instant of that elsewhere which he alone saw, where Stephen Griffin had crashed the yellow car into the black bog water of the ditch on the road outside Inagh. And in that dreamlike and vivid moment of clairvoyance, Moses Mooney saw the collapsed figure of Stephen Griffin, and he clapped his hands together in the bed, relishing the wild improbability of all plots before reaching out and patting the cats in the darkness.

Moira Fitzgibbon was late. She had already been to the Old Ground Hotel twice that day to make arrangements and meet the quartet when they arrived from Limerick. She had learned a few phrases in Italian in honour of the visit and listened to the music of Scarlatti and Vivaldi for two weeks. When she stood in the lobby of the hotel to meet the musicians, she felt her head spinning. They shook her hand and stood, smiling with the strange complicity of those brought together over music. Any fear or dread Moira had felt passed like a grey bird and left her feeling she herself had wings. When the musicians went to their rooms, she drove back to Miltown Malbay to cook dinner for Tom and her two children, but afterwards watched through the back window above the sink as clouds advanced in across the Atlantic. She washed the dishes and prayed. She prayed first that the storm would not come; then, when the first black bullets started falling, prayed that it would not be a real storm, that it would pass over.

By the time she had collected Aoife Taafe, the babysitter, and set the two girls in their pyjamas in the sitting room and said good night to Tom, who was heading down to the pub, Moira Fitzgibbon was half an hour behind herself. A week earlier, planning the evening, she was already back in Ennis by now and Tom was minding the children and it was not raining. Now she hurried out of the house into the gale, and when she sat into the car she let out a cry at the ferocity of the world outside and the mad bouffant of her hairstyle. Then, as her car was moving out into the street, the lights in Miltown Malbay went out. She knew her children would be crying and Aoife running for the candles, but Moira Fitzgibbon drove away anyway, drove out of the darkened town with the tight fervour of a pilgrim, and rocked herself slightly forward, as if her own momentum might aid the car or the wind carry it onward like a sailboat.

A mile outside Miltown Malbay the darkness was thickly fallen. The fields were the fields of childhood nightmares, whose cows and sheep blew off the edge of the world in hurricane and tornado. Wisps of barbed wire had come undone from the fenceposts and whipped across the road in the wind. Plastic bags, drink cans, stuff blew from nowhere and danced. Then the rain thickened and beat faster than the wipers. Why? Why is it like this? Moira Fitzgibbon asked. On the one night, the one night. Who would go out on a night like this? There’d be nobody there. God, Why?

There was no answer from the heavens, but there were red smears on the windscreen, and when the wipers cleared the rain she saw the red backlights of the crashed car in the ditch ahead of her.

Stephen did not realize rescue was at hand. He was at the bridge of his life without knowing it and sat stunned in the rainy night, unable to move. His head hurt, but not badly, yet he could not free himself from the fierce grip of the dream of dying. He imagined he was his mother and his sister. He was in the car they drove that afternoon so many years ago, and this was the crash, the suspended moment when their lives had stopped and dreams perished. This was the instant the world had become immobile and deaf and mute, and the darkness had fallen in like earth on a coffin. He imagined with terrible clarity the anguish of it, the sheer and merciless shattering as the other car came crashing in on them, the jerking backward of his mother and Mary, and the cries; if there was time for cries. Stephen imagined it as he sat there in the crashed car, and he could not move. He felt the steering wheel, but it seemed unreal, and the pallor of his hands upon it was the lone white thing in the darkness.

I cannot move, he thought. I cannot move from here.

And if the car had blown up and burned there on the side of the road, Stephen Griffin would have burned with it and not regretted it, surrendering to the ceaseless prompting of his life that grief triumphs on earth and that all our plots unravel in the end.

But then Moira Fitzgibbon arrived. When she pulled open the car door, the rain lashing down on her head made freakish streaks of her hairdo and the taste of her makeup washed into her mouth. She spat and called out, but Stephen did not move. He was like a deep-water swimmer uncertain whether to kick for the surface and kept his eyes looking at the long-gone world where the spirits of his mother and sister were so close it made him ache.

“Mr. Griffin, is that you? Do you hear me? Mr. Griffin?”

There were mudspatters on Moira’s stockings, the heel of her left shoe was loosened, and the navy-blue outfit she had bought for the evening of Venetian music was soaked against her back. She had no idea why the sky had fallen in or why hers had to be the car to first come upon the crash, knowing that she could not drive past it although everything in her had wanted to. She understood nothing yet, but cursed God and cursed the weather and cursed Tom and the west of Ireland and the godforsaken roads like this that were full of holes and went on for miles and made this man crash in front of her.

“Feck it. Feck it. Oh God, forgive me, feck it. Mr. Griffin! Mr. Griffin!”

She cried out his name, as if he could help her understand. She looked out the back window to see if help might be coming, but saw only the emptiness of the dark fields unrelieved by light or hope in the harsh, starless wind. She said Stephen’s name loudly again, and then, as she reached in to shake him by the shoulder, her knee touched something on the passenger seat, and she discovered a fragment of meaning and held up close to her face in the darkness the tickets for the concert.

Gabriella Castoldi, Paolo Mistra, Piero and Maria Motte were already sitting at the front of the concert room in the Old Ground Hotel by the time Stephen Griffin arrived there with Moira Fitzgibbon. He was still in a daze and passed up the red carpeted stairs of the hotel unsure in which world he was walking. When he had felt the woman’s hand on his shoulder in the car, he had imagined at first it was the buffeting of the storm. Then she smacked his face and turned him towards her. He remembered her: the woman from the staff room, the woman they said afterwards was the dimmest pupil the school had ever had. He remembered her. Moira shook him from himself. They had gotten out of his car together and were blown along the road to hers. When they sat into it, Moira turned the heat full on and they drove towards Ennis in a gusting tropical balminess that dried their clothes and hair stiffly and made the rain-run places of Moira’s makeup look like the tracks of ancient tears. She was taking him to the hospital, she told him, even though she would be late for the concert.