I started to take the bus out to Ballymount almost every day, in the late morning or early afternoon. My mother was tentatively hopeful that the increased vitality evidenced by my leaving the house was a sign of recovery. I never told her where I was going; I thought it more prudent to say I was heading into the city centre, where (I suggested) it would do me good to merge with the crowds, or sit in cafés, or browse in bookshops. On some days I took my Discman out to the estate, listening as I wandered to formless ambient soundscapes that deepened my sense of being in a place that was beyond the world, and which now outlived it, a timeless zone of litter and intermittent wind. Other days I would borrow pop CDs dating from my younger sister’s teenage years. It gave me a peculiar feeling to stand alone in the windswept emptiness of Ballymount and experience, with Michael Jackson or Destiny’s Child pulsing in my ears, the gulf between the exuberant commotion of civilisation and the vast ruination that had swept over it — for there in Ballymount industrial estate, it took little imagination to believe that the catastrophe had already happened.
I spent three, four, five hours there each day, and for weeks I avoided all human contact; I kept to the blank stretches between zones of activity, the overgrown margins that were silent but for the odd car streaking across the unseen distance. Whenever I saw far-off figures mutely conducting business outside warehouses or unloading trucks, I turned away, straying deeper into the emptiness of the estate.
One dull midweek afternoon, walking while lost as ever in convoluted and intractable worry, I looked up and saw an unexpected form in the distance. It was a man, standing alone on the dull-brown, stony wasteland far ahead of me, out beyond a cluster of run-down buildings. I had been walking randomly, as usual, following no trail but that dictated by my whims. Now I stopped and peered across the empty stretch. The man was facing away from me, gazing at the horizon. As I walked a little closer, I saw that his hair was wildly unkempt, thinning and scraggly, blown by the wind in wayward streaks across his protuberant forehead and bone-angled face. It is difficult to say whether the following is a genuine memory, or if my subsequent encounters with the man retroactively tainted my recollections, but when I think of it now, I feel strongly that my first sight of him provoked in me a deep chill — a sense of total abjection and an urge to flee. Whatever I really did feel, I diverted my walk, that first day, to keep me well away from the solitary figure on the Ballymount estate.
Two days later, he was there again. I was wandering in a different area of the estate, deeper into it, where it becomes harder to tell where you are. The man was walking on his own. He had his hands in his pockets and I could see that he was muttering to himself. When I was about twenty metres away he looked up and saw me. After I had passed him by I heard a call, muffled by a wind that had just then started up. I turned back and he was watching me. His gaze seemed hungry, desperate, as if he craved to take something from me. The man gestured for me to approach him and I did. He was a lot older than me, perhaps in his late thirties. His clothes were faded, as if they’d been worn for so long that all the colours had bled into the same indefinite non-colour as the man who wore them. He took out a pouch of tobacco and started to roll a smoke. ‘Do ye want one?’ he said. His voice seemed hollow, as if there was no one behind it. I wanted to walk away, but I nodded and muttered, ‘Yeah, please,’ even though I’d stopped smoking. He gave me the cigarette, then rolled another for himself. It took him only a couple of seconds to roll them. His fingertips were stained a thick yellow and his nails were caked with dirt. He lit my smoke, then his own. He sat down on his hunkers, facing across the wasteland towards the murk where the sun was sinking, heavy and lifeless, jaded with the world.
‘What’s your name?’ said the man. The question sounded unnatural, as though the speaker were trying to replicate the conversational patterns of a species among whom he was exiled, and whose experience was inscrutable to him.
I told him my name. He asked me why I was walking around Ballymount. I shrugged and mumbled that I just took walks, I needed to clear my head.
‘I know what ye mean,’ he said. ‘It’s the same way for me.’
He opened the tattered schoolbag he had on his back and took out a can of Dutch Gold. He handed it to me and opened another for himself. I stood there with the can, sipping from it, looking at the ground. ‘I come out here and listen to the place,’ he said. ‘The humming of it. And the spirits from the old Ireland underneath. Ye can still hear them, just about.’ He looked sideways at me, gauging my reaction. Though I had just met him, I felt that I could either crush or elate him by whatever I did next.
I nodded my head.
He smoked hard on his roll-up, turning away from me towards a cluster of deserted-looking buildings. He finished his can and opened a new one (I was still on my first couple of sips).
‘What do ye know about Nietzsche?’ he said.
I didn’t know what to answer. I mumbled that I knew a bit, not much, God is dead.
‘Nietzsche didn’t see this coming,’ he said, ignoring my response. ‘Or he did, but he didn’t know how bad it would get. He thought this was a transition, he still held out the hope for some kind of breakthrough. The laughter that would ring out across the planet. As if we could find a home again. But we can’t. There’s nothing to hope for now. That’s why this place around here is a real and honest place. Do ye get me?’
I nodded.
‘There’s no plan any more. This is unprecedented. There is no father. There is no appeal. And hell, hell assumes its true fuckin significance. We’re already there. I saw all this so fuckin clearly, durin a mushroom trip out here, one of the first times I came to this place. The mushrooms are like a technology, they let ye see what’s happened to the world. Death is in everything now. I sat there cryin and screamin for hours. The entire sky was crushin me, all of outer space was pressin down on me, I was buried and I’ve never come back. I’m still buried. There is no surface, nowhere to claw back to. You’re buried too, and ye know it, I can see it in ye. There is no father. There is no therapy. Do ye know how that feels?’
He watched me again, studying the effect of his words. He desperately wanted me to be awed. Despising myself, I pursed my lips and nodded, as if to say it was a profound insight he had just shared. I didn’t know what else to do.
Maybe I had failed to mask my insincerity. ‘What’s your story?’ he asked, guardedly, the portentous tone gone from his voice. Again I had the sense that the question was only a mimicking of curiosity. I said I was a college student but I’d dropped out, I was living at home now, I used to work as a security guard. I didn’t mention the other stuff, the counsellors and psychiatrists.
‘I used to be a security guard as well. Out here.’ He gestured across the expanse. ‘In a warehouse for computer parts. It was like guardin a new race. That was the last job I had. Fifteen years ago, it was. They fired me because I was useless and weak.’
I drank my can and we lingered in silence. I wondered what he had done in the fifteen years since losing his job. The light and warmth were seeping out of the day. Even in the quiet I could feel the intensity of the man’s sidelong focus on me, the restless calculations as to how he could render himself fascinating and enigmatic in my eyes. I felt even lonelier, more famished and dejected in his presence than I felt on my own.
‘This is where ye can be near to death,’ he said. ‘That’s why I come here, to get the feel of me own death, to be waitin for it.’