I craved to vanish into the air. This was a man beyond salvage, doomed, but not in any romantic way; he was merely pathetic, shattered. I saw in him a vision of my own future.
I said I had to go.
‘Sure I might see ye around here again,’ he said quickly. ‘I come out here a lot now.’
I muttered that yeah, maybe I would see him. Then I made my way out of the darkening estate, utterly silent now that the workers had left for the day. I walked out to the Long Mile Road and took a bus back home.
After that I didn’t go to Ballymount for several days. Instead I stayed in the house, lying in bed or playing the Xbox, or I walked into town along the canal. On a cold and sunny afternoon I went to see a film in the IFI. The cinema was nearly empty. It was a film about a middle-aged man in the American Midwest whose son is in a coma, having shot himself in the head in a failed suicide attempt. One morning, at breakfast, the man looks at his wife for a long time, silently, not seeming to hear her questions and pleas. He stands up. Then he walks out of the house, and keeps on walking. He reaches the highway and begins to hitch-hike north, crossing state lines, listening to the sad, broken or ecstatic people who pick him up, but saying little. He crosses the Canadian border. He slants across to the east. He walks to the ends of the roads, and keeps walking, out on to the bare and rocky coast, away from all human settlements. He reaches the Atlantic, cold and hissing, foaming over the rocks. He stops. He stands there and gazes out at the ocean, alone for miles around. Then he begins to laugh, a deep, resounding laugh, the first instance of joy he has shown in the film — but when we see his face, it is clear that there is no real joy, only the cold pretence of it. Then the camera slowly retreats, at an angle and into the sky, leaving us with a view of the man standing on the rocky outcropping. As the camera soars away he dwindles into pinprick insignificance, as if whatever meaning his story had is now dissolved in the infinite. The view of the coast and the ocean is hazed by wisping cloud. The screen is filled with white, the film ends.
The day after I had been to the cinema, I went back to the Ballymount estate. It was a cold, dreary afternoon; winter was approaching. Though I walked for more than four hours that day, I didn’t see the man I had spoken with. When I came back again the next day, after wandering for an hour or so, I saw him sitting on the ground with a bag of cans by his side. He looked up as I approached. He didn’t seem surprised; I wondered if this was an affectation. He offered me a can and I sat by him. A lone bird swooped down nearby, squawking before flying off again. It was evening now, a reddish burning sunset hazed with pollution. I knew what was coming: he would tell me his story. I knew he had been thinking of me since we had first met; not in or for myself, but as an instrument of his own self-recognition.
He drank deep from his can.
He told me:
He had been fostered by a widow, a very strict Catholic. He had never known his parents, or why they had put him up for adoption. He had always been the weirdo, the victim, the figure of ridicule at school. He remembered having his head shoved into a toilet full of shit. He had no memory of ever being happy. As a child he hated summer, the outdoors, and the passing of time, which was famished and blank. He went to art college, hoping to be recognised, to shine and be loved. But at a student house party he took two tabs of acid and he saw in a shock of total insight that here, too, he had always been the figure of ridicule, the one they lampooned and despised and jeered at behind his back; he recalled a thousand things they’d said to him, and only now did he see, in awful hindsight, the suppressed sneers and the mockery in their faces, all of them deceiving him, then howling with laughter when he turned away. From that night on, he was broken. The horror of realising, in one blinding instant, the immense gulf between his grandiose perception of himself and how the others really saw him, shattered what was left of his self into fragments. His misery became so convoluted, dense and total as to be incommunicable. He lost his voice; he literally couldn’t speak, because having a voice meant having a self, or a sense of self, some fundamental core of positive self-regard, and he didn’t have that. He became totally impotent, unable even to masturbate. Incapable of functioning, he dropped out of college and retreated from the world, fled further and further into the fogged maze of himself until it had become impossible to find his way back out. For years he thought constantly of killing himself, and now believed that it was only the religious terrors instilled in him by his foster mother that had held him back. He lived on the dole and tried to convince himself that he was a great artist, that this was his season in hell, the terrible suffering that would give birth to the works that would redeem him, and eventually all the world would see what he had always been, and he would forgive them and he would be loved. He met an old schoolmate of his, an electronic-music producer who rented a dilapidated house in a secluded clearing off the Naas Road. He moved in with his old schoolmate and they lived together for several years. Then, one weekend while his friend was away, he burned the house to the ground. He could not say whether he had done this accidentally or on purpose. He stood outside, watching the house go up in flames, terrified and elated. He heard sirens in the distance and he fled. For several weeks he slept rough around Dublin, in parks, in alleys, by the canals, in corners of building sites and waste-grounds. At a school in Drimnagh he slept for a week in the playground, under the slide. One morning he was woken by the rough hands of two policemen under his arms, hauling him to his feet. They took him in and a day later he was admitted to St Patrick’s mental hospital. He was prescribed medication and assigned a counsellor. After several months he was moved to an outpatients’ home and allowed to come and go as he pleased. That was four years ago. He was still living there, receiving a steady welfare income, enough to buy cigarettes, cans and, occasionally, magic mushrooms. He never saw his friend who had taken him in and encouraged his painting. He never saw anyone. He just came to Ballymount to be alone with his thinking. He was thirty-nine years old, he said, and his destiny was to become a saint. My Lord is fire, and the Lord is coming.
His story drew to a close and now he watched me. When I left, he would be nothing but a swirl of visions, pain and memories. For now, I was a mirror in which he could almost convince himself that he was whole.
He rolled a cigarette and puffed hungrily on it. He drained a can and crumpled it in his bony hand. The night was coming on. What if the days keep on getting shorter, I thought, until there is only night?
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I can tell you’re an intelligent fella. There are some other things, different things I want to tell ye. Ye look like you’re able to handle big ideas. Will ye meet me here tomorrow? I’ll show ye some of the weirder places.’
I nodded, wanting only to get away. Then I left him there, smoking and drinking in the wasteland as the night swarmed in to swallow him up. There is no therapy. There is no father. That night I dreamed, and in the dream I was back out there, on the estate. In the dream it went on for ever, the estate was the world and beyond it there was nothing. It was a dull afternoon. I saw him on the horizon, silhouetted and still. I walked towards him. Neither of us looked at the other, our eyes to the ground. ‘Look at my burn marks,’ he called out. ‘And look at the slits. The Gestapo did this. CIA. Mujahedin. God is great. No one leaves the zone.’ I looked up and we looked into each other’s eyes. ‘Beyond the horizon, a row of severed heads on sticks. Wooden chimes clicking in the wind.’ And then there were no longer two of us, but one, we were together, he had come into me and now my fingernails were yellow and caked with dirt, and my clothes as I walked away, towards a lost road, were greyed and faded, my hair was thin and streaked, lifeless. I woke up sobbing, drenching the pillow with tears that streamed out of me like never before or since, pierced with a desolation I knew to be incurable, a condition I would carry with me for ever. I rose from the bed, feeling my way through the dark. I found my way to my mother’s bedroom and turned the handle on the door. I heard her gasp in the dark. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Go back to sleep. I’m sorry. Just let me lie beside your bed. I’m sorry. It’s OK, I just need to lie here on the floor, just like this.’ I could hear her hesitating, wanting to get up and fix this, but it couldn’t be fixed and she lay back down. I knew she was staring upwards into the dark, her face gaunt with worry. After a while she got up and draped some covers over me, then got back into bed. I closed my eyes and tried to hear her breathing.