I had a vision of ten million other young lovers across the globe, having the same conversation, each of them feeling beautiful and unique but really just acting out some script, given to them by nature or maybe television. Rez’s theories played out in my head, threatening to spoil the afternoon. But I looked at Jen’s face, the way her eyelashes moved as she watched a plane trailing high up in the sky, and all those doubts seemed frothy, needless. Rez was wound up way too tight — maybe he just needed to relax and look carefully at things, or feel the sun on his face, or lie down beside a girl on the grass in the Phoenix Park.
Later we walked into the city centre. It was still sunny so we wandered into Stephen’s Green and sat on the grass. People had their shirts off and Frisbees flew through the air, everyone laughing and smiling. While we were sitting there my phone beeped in my pocket. It was a message from Rez: ‘alright matthew listen r u around? i really need 2 meet up with u, i can come over r wherever u r.’
I was puzzled by the text. He didn’t say what he wanted: whether it was to get stoned, or drink, or go to a gig, or what. It was the first I’d heard from him since he’d started his security night job. Jen said, ‘Who’s that?’
‘Just Rez. He sounds a bit … I don’t know. He says he wants to meet up.’
Jen watched me and said nothing. I texted Rez back: ‘Hey Rez cant meet up now. Might be around this evening. U around later? Want 2 get stoned r whats up?’
When I’d pressed ‘Send’ Jen said, ‘There’s something going on with him, Matthew.’
‘Yeah, there probably is. He’ll snap out of it. He’ll be grand.’
‘Well, are you sure?’ she said.
‘What do ye mean?’
‘Just that I wonder about him. I emailed him back when I was in Spain, and the reply he sent me, it seemed … I don’t know, it was frantic, it was hard to make sense of. It was kind of disturbing, actually. I mean, you hear so much talk these days about depression. And suicide. Young men especially. I read this article in The Irish Times and, like, more men between eighteen and twenty-five kill themselves in Ireland than in any other country in the world — apart from Norway.’
‘That makes sense. Ireland would do that to ye,’ I said. But my instinctive cynicism was boring even to me. I thought for a moment then said, ‘Maybe they see through things, though. Maybe they do it because they’re aware of the reality of what we’re living in.’
I enjoyed hearing myself pontificating so I continued: ‘I mean, like, maybe the ones from this generation who kill themselves are the ones who would have been, like, priests in earlier times, or, like, shamans in other parts of the world. Ye know? Like maybe they’re kind of, like, diviners for, like, the emptiness all around us, and they kill themselves because while everyone else just rushes out to buy things and smile at the computer and all that, these suicide fellas know that it’s all bollocks, there’s nothing out there. Ye know what I mean? Like, have ye ever seen that film, Logan’s Run? Me and Rez watched it a while ago. It’s mental. There’s this underground society hundreds of years in the future, and every year there’s this ceremony where some of them try to escape to the earth’s surface to find this place called “Sanctuary” — but they always get killed before they reach it by this big laser thing. But then this fella Logan actually manages to escape to the surface but all he finds is, like, desolation. Just total wilderness. So he goes back down and he starts screamin, “There is no Sanctuary! There is no Sanctuary!” But the rest of them have such a need to believe in it that they just hate him. And, like, I think they kill him or something. I can’t remember, we were fairly stoned by that stage. Ye know what I mean, though? Maybe there is no Sanctuary.’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ she said. But her mind wasn’t on my speech or on Logan’s Run — it was still on Rez. ‘You should go and meet him,’ she said in a low voice. ‘In the article in the paper it said that the big reason most of these guys kill themselves is that they feel isolated, they can’t talk to anybody about what’s goin on in their inner lives. Maybe that’s how Rez feels.’
‘But Rez does talk to us. He tells us all his ideas, all this stuff about why the world is so used up and he can’t connect or whatever.’
Jen didn’t reply. She watched a little girl playing on the grassy slope with a rubber dog. The girl reminded me of Becky.
My phone beeped again.
‘never mind its fine just thought maybe u were around c u later.’
I showed Jen and shrugged. ‘He must be alright.’
She made a vague noise, looking into the distance, thoughtful.
A while later she said, ‘I wonder what it was like to live hundreds of years ago.’
‘Why are you thinkin about that?’
‘I don’t know, it just came into my head.’
I pondered for a moment. ‘It wouldn’t have been very good, probably. I mean, ye wouldn’t have been allowed to do anything, just get married and work and be poor.’
‘Yeah, but do ye think they were happier than we are?’
‘I don’t know. It’s possible. I remember talkin about this with Rez once. He reckoned that people were happier in the past, anyone who lived before these times, basically. He reckons it’s impossible to be happy in the modern world, because we’re not human any more. We’re just, like, abortions of technology or something.’
‘Do you agree with him?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t really get what he’s talkin about. Or only sometimes I do. Rez can be kind of pretentious. I mean …’ I hesitated, feeling bashful. ‘I mean, I feel kind of happy at the moment. Like, here with you.’
‘Awww!’ She laughed and jabbed her finger into my side. I grabbed her leg and tipped her over on the grass. She squealed in pleasure as she fell, pulling me down on top of her.
As we lay there I had an urge to tell her what had happened out at Killiney, how I had grinned for Kearney after the horror. But I couldn’t do it. I leaned down and kissed her.
We lay quietly in the grass and put our sunglasses on. An expanse of cloud glided across the sun and in a few minutes we felt chilly. We got up and walked out of the park. We wandered around to George’s Street Arcade and browsed the CDs. Jen bought me a Mercury Rev album that she had heard at a friend’s place.
‘This will get you out of that punk-rock ghetto you’ve been living in,’ she said. She kissed me and added, ‘There’s more to life than only hate and rage, you know.’
When I got home that evening I put on the Mercury Rev CD, and lay down to listen to it. Life was better when Kearney wasn’t around, I decided. Being with Jen was helping me see that. Kearney was a deadener, a nullifier. He talked things into nothingness and you got sucked in by his cynicism, drawn into a void where everything was at the same zero level, pointless and contemptible. Rez had said before that Kearney was a nihilist. I’d replied that we were all nihilists, that was why we were into punk and sabotage and all that stuff. Rez had said yeah, but Kearney was different: he loved death and hated everything else. I hadn’t really seen it at the time, but now I felt stupid for having been so blind.
The music played on, strange and mysterious, as if floating in from some other, more magical realm. Soon I drifted off to sleep, into weird and enchanted dreams.
22 | Rez
The instant before Rez opened the email, a shiver of dread ran through him. What if it was a premonition? Maybe he should just turn it off and never log on here again. But then he clicked the message and it was too late.