Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

everything in this room might suddenly rise up through the ceiling to some proper place in the sky above, chairs and tables and cupboards and worktops, everything rising up into the air, while drawing with them all those connections which have now made me so hyper-aware and awash with a giddy fit of enraged irrationality, sitting here, grinding with frustration, something peevish in me upset at having my expectations confused by this tablecloth or the chair at the other end of the table for Christ’s sake, standing with its back to the wall when normally it should be pushed into the table, that type of thing twisting me up into such sudden rage that makes me want to rise from the table

seeing myself rise

and take it by the two legs to smash it against the wall, the desire so strong I can feel its collapsing impact, the give in its legs and frame as it disintegrates, the shock of it through my arms as it splinters apart with every nerve and sinew of my body on edge, this anxiety cutting through me like referred pain or interference, the source of which is elsewhere, possibly outside myself at arm’s length but still close enough to be inside my circumference, something which will not allow me to rest in the here-and-now on

this day

this fucking day

that has done nothing but drive me deeper into a grating dread which seems so determined to conceal its proper cause and which is all the more worrying since there is no doubt whatsoever of its reality or that it is underwritten in some imminent catastrophe

for me

or upon me

or through me

this fear which is

the whole mood of my vigil at this table for however long it’s been since the Angelus bell struck so that even

while sitting here with my milk and sandwich, gusted to the core of my bones with the conviction that my wife and children will never come this way again, never return, this dread singing through me from the headlines of the foreign news page of the newspaper — all news feels foreign today — telling me that an outbreak of cholera in West Africa has endangered thousands of lives and threatens to cover a large section of the western part of the sub-Saharan continent, reaching into Chad and Cameroon, while somewhere in South Korea an outbreak of avian flu has crossed the species barrier, diagnosed in a twenty-two-year-old medical student who is currently in quarantine, God’s creatures bound together in a common suffering, our aches and pains one and the same as those of the duck and the turkey and the chicken and

stop

mother of Jesus stop

this is how the mind unravels in nonsense and rubbish

if given its head

the mind in repose, unspooling to infinity, slackening to these ridiculous musings which are too easily passed off as thought, these glib associations, mental echoes which reverb with our anxiety to stay wake and wise to the world or at least attentive to as much of its circumstances as we can grasp while

come to think of it

thinking of it now

now being thought

it must have been this same sort of unspooling coupled with the same fatal aptness for fantasy that consumed my father and unravelled his mind in that last year of his life, especially during those last months when he lost his grip on the world completely and withdrew to the old house where there was only himself and the dog to keep each other company in those days after Onnie’s death, the long winter nights when the full weight of her absence must have come upon him with so much fear and loneliness that his grief was eclipsed completely in disbelief at the fact that his wife of over forty years could ever leave him for any reason whatsoever — death included — leave him all alone now, a fate he had never envisioned nor prepared himself for so that when it did come the raw shock of it scrambled his sense of the world so thoroughly it was as if something essential to the proper balance of the universe itself had been casually set aside and replaced with some new but shoddier circumstance which so keenly insulted something delicate within him that

in no time at all his strength and resolve was undone, he slackened and lost interest in the world before withdrawing completely to the house with the dog where, in the half-light of those narrow rooms, behind drawn curtains, his confusion and grief deepened to that fatal awkwardness with which there is no talking to so that very suddenly he grew angry and rancorous and fell out with myself and Eithne, took against us with such sudden vehemence in those weeks after Onnie’s funeral that we had no time to fathom its proper cause but were nevertheless left in no doubt by his rage that some shameful blame had accrued to both of us for some reason or other because when we went to see him he dismissed us from behind the closed front door, telling us to leave and not come back and calling us a

a shower of cunts and nothing but

his curse upon us that day with both of us standing there looking at each other in disbelief, not knowing what to do and when I took a walk around the house I saw that he had the curtains drawn in every window and the back door locked with no way in so there was nothing for it but to leave, we’d come back and try again in a couple of days but then

he sold off all his livestock and hens leaving just himself and Rex alone in the house now with the two gates coming into the yard barred also, secured with two balks of timber tied from pillar to pillar so that the postman had to climb up over the sod fence and walk down the path to shove the letters and mass cards under the door which was bolted also and

all this happened before Onnie’s month’s mind mass

by which time also he had begun to show the first signs of letting himself go, growing a beard that bristled out from his jaws in a way that threatened to engulf his whole head — a genuinely shocking sight on a man who had been clean-shaven his whole life but who now would not hear a word against it saying that his father had had a beard and his father before him had had one and so too had our Lord — a better man than either of them — and if a beard was good enough for those men then it was good enough for him also and that was an end to it just as it most certainly

marked the point at which he really began to neglect himself, not eating right and no wash or shave either, with the same clothes on him day in, day out while he grew thinner and thinner inside them, the shirt slack over his narrow chest and the trousers barely hanging on his hips — but the hair and beard still growing, thickening like a furze bush around his head — and no fire or heat on in the house anymore so that it got damp and filthy with black mould growing down the walls and nothing but the smell of piss meeting me at the door those few times he let me in to see him with a few bits and pieces to find him sitting there in the dark, all alone in the glare of the television screen looking at Bosco or some other kid’s programme and a can of fly spray on the table when

one evening he fell asleep in front of the open fire, sods burning and coals falling onto the hearth and he woke up to find his wellingtons soldered to his feet, melted in the heat around his ankles and he would have been in serious trouble only he had good wool socks on under them and he managed to hobble to the kitchen table where he got out the bread knife to cut them away, socks and trousers and wellingtons lying in a heap in the middle of the floor, the smell of burnt rubber thick in the air as

I stood appalled in the murk of that room and said

you can’t live like this

like what

like this, the state of the place

and you’d know how I should live

I know that there has to be something better than this and

a look came over his face which stopped me