Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

And all the time the progression was tumbling on, doubling, trebling in intensity within him as the car moved westward.

The west was a vast and soft wetness as he entered it. It was midday. The towns he drove through arose on the road after miles of greenery, their small clusters of Massgoers hastening along with newspapers over their heads against the drizzle, or standing in against the shop window and watching the strange car pass. There was a soft grey complacency everywhere, as if the people were resolute in being undisturbed and guarded a kind of holy faith in mute sufferance and the continuing ordinariness of their lives. They were towns scheduled for by-pass.

Stephen drove in a semi-trance. He did not turn on the radio but listened instead to the concert that was now inside him. He tried to think of history, of Italy in the time of Vivaldi, of the city-state of Venice and the boats in the lagoon, the long and troubled fable of the Doge, and the fragments he knew of Venetian wars, conspiracies, and betrayal. If he could think of the history, if he could turn the pages of time and find in himself the dust of the past, he could make it home; if he could refind the dry and ash-laden language of the dead, he could refind himself and escape the sweating in his palms on the steering wheel, the throbbing in the left side of his temple, and the ceaseless drying of his lips. He wet them a thousand times between Ballinasloe and Loughrea, and for all the dampness of the grey air outside, the wet face of the day that kept sticking to the windscreen and would not be wiped away, his lips dried in an instant and then stung as if kissed by nettles. He tried desperately to think of the history of Venice. What did he know of it? He shut tight his eyes to concentrate, and opened them to swerve the car back onto the road. Venice, Venice. He couldn’t remember. He slowed the car to thirty and held the wheel with his left hand, licking his lips and fingering with his right hand a place above his right eye, as if looking for the switch that would return the past and free him from thinking of the woman. He was two miles outside Loughrea. The mist was thickening into rain, and the car slowed until it was barely quicker than walking pace. The rain fell in a hush. Stephen let out a small cry and the car stopped altogether in the middle of the road.

There was a tremendous green quietness. When he rolled down the window he could hear the rain falling in the old grass of November. No bird was singing. He opened the window for air, but found none. Then he opened the driver’s door, lowering his head as if to vomit and seeing in the rainwater pattern of the tarred road the squiggled shape of his own journey to understanding. A life cannot go backward forever, and as he raised his head Stephen Griffin knew that he could not escape what had already happened.

“I can’t remember, I can’t remember the books,” he said. He said it without excitement or panic, said it matter-of-factly, as if cataloguing a comical loss that had already happened. He waited and wet his lips again. “What’s the name of the history book for fifth years’?”

A pause; then he answered: “I don’t know, can’t remember. Book for third years’?” he asked, and then began to laugh. He laughed until his shoulders were shaking.

The dimension of his defeat was enormous, as his father might have told him the previous evening studying the chess game. When something of great size moves into the heart, it dislodges all else, in just the same way that the forward movement of the queen reshapes the board. So, with the arrival of Gabriella Castoldi in his heart, Stephen Griffin had lost history, dates, facts and figures that he had built his life around and that now on the wet road to Gort slipped from his mind and vanished in the air. He knew nothing of history now.

It was an hour before he could drive on. Or at least so it seemed, for although no car came or went on the black wet ribbon of the tar, time might have stopped for love. When Stephen drove on into Gort and across into Clare, he carried in the cage of his chest the ease of accepting love, and felt it lightly there like a white bird of promise and hope. It was the most ordinary thing, after all. It was the fulcrum of life, and if the years he had spent studying history had shown him that the world turned not on love but on hatred and greed, then this was the new unwritten history of the marvellous, of which he himself could be the author. The bird fluttered around the car as he drove; he was in love. It was all right. Love exists, he thought, and drove with his head out the window of the car, banishing for the time being the multiple improbabilities of courtship or requital, shaking the lank black strands of his hair in the rain and shouting a single long wavering vocable of hope as he sped on homeward to the sea.

When he arrived, the bird was still flying inside him. He parked the car and walked immediately round the back of the house and down the slope of the black rocks to the small shore. It was late afternoon. The tide was withdrawing towards the failing light on the horizon, and gulls blew up like newspaper over the fields’ edge. Stephen walked on the wet rocks, and for the first time in his life did not study his footsteps but moved with the sure inviolability of the lover, briefly certain that the world would not trip him. With the tide out he could walk all the way around the rocky edge and arrive on the long beach of Spanish Point. The sand when he stepped onto it was clean of footprints. The winter tide had erased the past, and Stephen Griffin, walking in a long coat, his face wet with rain and sea spray, was the first and only of a new tribe. He set off down the extravagant beach, where the roaring of the Atlantic was a ceaseless accompaniment and even the soft plashing of his shoes on the shallow pools raised no sound. The sea was majestic in its tumbling and crashing, the size, the energy of it. Stephen imagined he had never seen it before and walked with his head turned sideways, bursting out laughing at the riotous boisterousness as the white surf was combed and ebbed in the froth of fulfillment. Rain ran down his face. He drank the saltiness on his lips and skipped two steps, not quite dancing, but moving in a growing giddiness along the sand beneath the enormous sky.

“I’m in love,” he said. But the wind took his voice away.

“I’m in love with that woman,” he called out louder, feeling the terrible release of the words like a pain that was part of healing. “I’m in love with her!” he cried again, only then discovering that the emotion was such that it would gather constantly inside him and hurt like an ulcer until he cured it with confessions.

He had reached the far end of the beach when the rain stopped. Evening was drawing swiftly across the sky, and the seabirds had vanished inland. In half an hour it would be darker than ink; already the line of the rocks was smudged into the sea and sky, and Stephen would have to walk home around by the road. But he did not. He felt the bird flying in his chest and the dazzlement of love making him lighter and brighter than nightfall. For the first time in his life he felt the radiance of a pure and visionary faith. He was bright with enlightenment. It felt like a reckless surge of invincibility. He opened his coat and took it off. Then he pushed off his shoes. Soon he was standing in his underpants in the dark on the beach at Spanish Point, with the wind blowing off the sea cold against his skin. He walked forward into the frozen waves.

When the young Dr. Hadja Bannerje sat on the edge of the bed and told Philip Griffin that he had advanced cancer in his left lung and that the disease had spread into his bone marrow, the tailor received the news with no surprise and simply leaned forward to ask how long.