Rob Doyle - Here Are the Young Men

Section 146: Forgetting Considered as Metaphysical Annihilation

Consider the infinitely and profoundly troubling nature of our fundamental existential plight. No matter how intense, unique, beautiful or interesting your experience, it will be wiped away so fully that there will be no evidence it ever existed at all. This is a fundamental truth. I never forget it for a moment. It’s like when you go to a party and say something funny and clever. You feel good — but as the night wears on and people get stoned and wasted, your clever remark gets lost, sort of muddied out. People forget who said it, or what exactly was said. By the following morning, no one can remember it, except maybe one or two, but even their memories are already fading; and anyway you can’t even be sure they remembered at all, unless you call them up and ask. But that would be too embarrassing — you would be considered a weirdo .

All humans are profoundly shocked to realize that everything vanishes: their loves, hates, passions, thoughts. Also how good they looked, and how unique their personalities were (or seemed to be — that in itself is a major question). Imagine if The Clash had played all that music but there was no way to record it. People would whisper about how amazing it had been but no one else would really get it and the ones who’d heard it would even begin to doubt their own memories — was it really as great as it seemed? Until all memories are washed away, like sandcastles in the tide .

Yes, such is our human condition .

When the wine was almost finished we left the Iveagh Gardens and walked through the early-morning streets. It wasn’t cold, but there was a freshness in the air, a coolness that made us feel purer than we would have done, coated as we were in mingled smoke and sweat, reeking of drink.

All was quiet as we passed Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre. We walked down Grafton Street where only a drunken tramp stirred outside HMV, lying on the paving stones. I wondered if it were possible for me to ever end up like that. I had to look away or the sight of him would have brought me down.

Jen suggested we go into Bewley’s for cups of sugary tea. It seemed a good idea but then Cocker said, ‘Why don’t we go to an early house?’ and it was settled.

The pub was on the quays. The four of us stepped from the bright morning into the wilful gloom of surly old-Dublin workers and resolute alcoholics. We felt self-conscious. There were maybe six people drinking there, all of them male, all greyed and dusty with life. We ordered pints of Guinness and sat down quietly in a corner, our movements jittery and our faces bright with ecstasy-wonder.

We drank our pints, smoking cigarettes and talking in low voices; disjointed, keen conversations that bubbled over now and then into affectionate laughter. The feeling of being there together was so good it was almost painful — I wanted things to stay exactly that way, that one moment forever, but everything was always slipping away, nothing was fixed. I beamed at my friends, love and affection for them pulsing out of me. I wanted to express it and tried a few times, but settled for simply smiling, laughing, watching them.

The old men and other drinkers didn’t bother us, bar the odd funny look. Mostly they played darts and left us alone, and when one white-haired old man was passing our table on the way back from the toilets, he leaned in and made a friendly joke in a gruff, heavily accented voice. We laughed and nodded to him.

On the third pint the plunge came; the sudden, shattering emotional drop following the high that was so perfect you sometimes forgot you were high at all. It was like being pushed into icy water on a bitter-cold day, a horrible shock, all the grief and betrayals of a lifetime condensed into one instant — a feeling of sheer, desolating loneliness. It was as if the visible world vanished and you found yourself stranded on some cold dead moon, lashed by winds and darkness.

Anguish breaking out on my face, my hand reached over for Jen’s. She turned to me slowly, gazing at me from across a gulf, locked into her own incommunicable grief. I smiled weakly at her and she tried to do the same; hers was a frail and frightened smile. I saw that we were both utterly alone and could never be otherwise. Rez had gone quiet, retreating from the front of his face into some sunless, barren place deep within himself. I realized it was beyond me to imagine how bad things got for him, but now I had some sense of it, the depth of his loneliness.

It lasted maybe a minute or two — this exile on a faraway moon — and then it passed. The feeling level readjusted; I was no longer ecstatic, and no longer buried in anguish. I was somewhere in-between.

We drank another pint and went outside. It was well after midday. We were drunk, and none of us wanted to go home or to be alone. Its primary effects worn off, the ecstasy continued to work on us, providing a moderate but constant bassline of enthusiasm and pleasure.

‘I wish we had more pills, just one more each,’ said Cocker. But I thought it was better that we didn’t; to take more now would be only to fuck ourselves up and it would mean that the crash, when it came, would be unbearable. Better to slow-drink our way through the day, listening to music if we could, and gradually come down together all the way, easing ourselves back to something like normality.

Jen had told us that her house would be free for the afternoon. Her da was going away for a couple of days and her brothers would be at their girlfriends’ houses, or out on the lash.

‘What about drink?’ asked Rez.

‘We can get some at the offo near my house,’ she said.

We took a bus along the coast. It was a lucid-dream kind of day; the people we saw on the streets, or walking along the strand, seemed hardly to be there at all, like pencil sketches. The sea out past Lansdowne Road was a thick blue, without lustre, drinkable-looking. We sat upstairs on the bus, wary of making eye contact with two crewcut lads in tracksuits in the last row, rolling joints and broadcasting their scorn in abrasive whines. The whiff of their hash filled our nostrils, queasy-making.

We bought sixteen cans of Dutch Gold and drank them throughout the rest of the day, smoking joints from Jen’s ounce of hash, listening to Mogwai and Leonard Cohen and Radiohead. We were quiet whenever Padraig, Jen’s older brother, was in the room, and he ignored us but for a few surly grunts as he made sorties into the kitchen. When he left to go to his girlfriend’s we felt more relaxed.

The light faded outside, sped-up like in a film, until eventually we turned on the lamp in the corner of the sitting room. Our conversations got more jangled and fragmentary, our outbursts of laughter more frayed and weird-sounding. Strange voices gabbled in my mind in the quiet between songs, and my eyes darted randomly, all fucked up and playing tricks on me. I remembered how I’d felt last night, all the grand thoughts I’d had about the universe, about how everything was ultimately alright, redeemed by some immense mystery. Now, frazzled in the gloom, it was hard to connect with those ideas and emotions. A dead girl was just a dead girl, there was no grand solace to be found. My mind was clogging up with dark, confused thoughts and I started to nod off. Just as I was about to sleep I gasped: from the corner of my eye I saw that Kearney was in the room, dressed in black and silently watching me from the couch. I jolted upright, but now I could see that it was only the shape of Cocker’s jacket that had confused me.

Sad, reflective music filled the room. Our talk gradually petered out, then Cocker stretched out on the couch and fell asleep. Rez was sitting up on an armchair, head resting in his hand, an image of desolation.