Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

this was the wettest city in Ireland, a coastal city with a mean annual rainfall twenty percent above the national average and

listening to all this on the nine o’clock news it seemed to me wholly beyond belief now that after all this time on one or no cause had been identified as the source of the crisis, no one to point to and say

this person and their actions

are the reason my wife is in bed with her strength leaking from every pore of her body, sour dreams of revenge coming to torment me which seemed reasonable and justified but, with no proper focus for my wrath, I proved to be a poor hand at revenge fantasies so my resentment turned towards

sitting at this table and

thinking these thoughts or

being thought by them

that sense of

myself filling out the space of their being, being taken up with the idea or

being the idea that

my entire existence is these same thoughts, that each rolling idea, as it occurs now is wholly responsible for my

being here

like

something lost, a revenant who has returned to his house at some grey hour to find the place boarded up and abandoned, becalmed in a sea of weeds and dandelion clocks, a line of grey crows along the ridge-tile, a child’s construct around which time itself has taken a detour leaving it to weather and deteriorate in some way other than it should so that now, drifting through it while

sitting at this table

conscious of something stagnant in the house itself, as if all its pulses and rhythms have been swept from it so that time itself is legless here with all things, myself included, suspended in a kind of stalled duration, an infinitely extended moment spinning like an unmeshed gear, a stillness within which no knife will blunt, no mirror will tarnish, no paint will peel, no hunger will grasp my belly nor will I ever have to shave as

time itself could decay here, lapse completely in such a way as to leave this place like some stagnant inverse realm, the countervailing force of the whole world

the source of all opposites

where all things are stood on their head, some realm in which bread is poured and water is cut and our shadows have tired of us and got to their feet before walking away with their stick-men comrades, striding away over fields and commonage, barbed wire fences and dry stone walls, falling into step with each other as they pick up that steady stride which enables them to leave this world altogether and head off towards some other jurisdiction beyond the horizon where they and their kind thrive and god knows who they answer to so

stop

for the love of Jesus

stop talking

getting carried away like this on

tidal waves of nonsense, swept so far away from myself that it’s easy to forget, the aching towards my own end which draws me on while alive to this moment, sitting here at this table, so improbably here, the

cosmic odds so hopelessly stacked against me

being here as

this electric interval held within its circumference of flesh and bone, the full sense of myself to myself as a kind of bounded harmonic, a bouquet of rhythms meshing into one over-emergent melody which homes me within the wider rhythms of the world, the horizonal melody of the cosmos, the celestial harmonic which inscribes me against the biggest magnitudes, the furthest edge of the universe and

stop

Jesus

because

one two buckle my shoe

three four knock at the door

five six pick-up sticks

seven eight

seven eight

seven

as the crisis stretched on, the number of patients rose above four hundred and began putting a serious strain on the city’s health services, a number that cloaked what many observers believed to be a massive under-swell of sufferers who were not recorded in hospital wards but who did have an inverse presence in the rising tide of public and private sector absenteeism across all industries, the hospitality industry and the civil service in particular, a degree of absenteeism whose real numbers tallied towards three thousand, the figures supported by anecdotal evidence which the city’s authorities refused to acknowledge, or did so only to disparage as gross exaggeration and when pressed merely pointed to the number of hospital beds taken up with registered sufferers as the only true and reliable measure of the outbreak as no amount of anecdotal testimony could be considered accurate evidence of the crisis and while

the caginess of their response might have been understandable in terms of giving assurance to the outside world that the outbreak was indeed being carefully managed and contained, it also angered the populace deeper whose sardonic scepticism of the early days had given way to a kind of heedlessness which had them turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to all those newsletters and advisories which still continued to appear in public places like doctors’ surgeries or on supermarket notice boards, so heedless to it now that

a cloud of weariness enveloped the whole story as it played out over the national airwaves, all coverage coloured with a note of schadenfreude that a city which had made such a lucrative reputation as a cultural mecca with its twelve month calendar of festivals and celebrations should now be struck down with a biblical pestilence — not the wages of sin exactly but surely just recompense for a kind of fecklessness which seemed to afflict a place which had given itself so wholeheartedly to carnevale, no sympathy to spare for

a story that appeared to linger on so that the city itself now seemed becalmed in its own unmoving filth, stagnant as the algae cloud which thickened in the rising temperatures of those days, a toxic bloom under the sun which swarmed through the city’s nervous system and the digestive tracts of its inhabitants, shifting responsibility for the crisis onto the city itself, or more accurately onto

the rapid expansion of the city over the past decade with its large housing developments along the coast road which had radically increased the draw on the city’s supply lake, lowering its levels so that its purity was further compromised by the increased amount of slurry fertiliser that had washed into the lake during those spring weeks of steady rainfall, the flow going through the pipe overwhelming the filtration system and admitting the Cryptosporidium into the water pipes, which then spread through those same wards of a city that had grown at such an uninhibited rate throughout the preceding decade so that when

the civic authorities sought to locate the exact origin of the disaster it found that it could not be pinpointed to one specific cause, human or environmental, but that its primary source was in the convergence of adverse circumstances — decrepit technology and torrential rains, overdevelopment and agricultural slurry — which smudged and spread responsibility for the crisis in such a way as to make the whole idea of accountability a murky realm in which there was little willingness on the part of the authorities to point the finger at farmers or engineers or those planners and developers who had allowed the city to grow beyond its ability to keep itself supplied with potable water so that with

no blame or responsibility gathering anywhere

the story hung through the city’s ambience as a kind of rolling fog which, with each passing day, thickened to a whitewash over the whole crisis in which it became clear that no one would be blamed nor held responsible, the city now so enwrapped in a murk that

it began to inhabit a kind of dreamtime when its past and future unfolded simultaneously, a whole city dreaming itself with all its buildings, young and old, all its tarred and cobbled streets, all its clocks and steeples, all its signs and monuments and statuary, all its horizontal services, water and electricity, every part of it twitched between its real existence and its own dream-life where it morphed through all the changes of itself, its history unfolding in one ongoing delirium, culminating on the night