4th
Ireland
Prologue
I am going to describe to you a town. It is mostly silent except when you’re walking outside and you hear the woosh of a car passing far out down the road (accompanied by the gleam of its headlights, which flash and then fade out of the corners of your eye, tinging the streetsides pink). Then, when you’re inside, all you hear at night is the soft howl of wind against the walls, and, perhaps from a second-story bedroom, the occasional crunch of gravel which are the footsteps of a stranger going home. The town is beautifully sad and secretly magnificent. When you walk through it, you see the washed out colors of the flat and empty road, the buildings around it, and the bog that stretches endlessly into the distance. The bog is tinged with gray and purple heather, with hiccups of yellow buttercup, but mostly that smoky ineffable color that belongs to swamps and silence. It is a town in interminable twilight, with the streetlamps always on and the sky pale and dim and streaked with the inky tendrils of clouds. Every building and expanse has that flat, unreal look that only this twilight’s luminescence can bring on, where there are no shadows and no highlights, just the cool even tone that is like seeing through the filter of a camera. It is that place that is silent in the very center of the storm; a town that seems in perfect upkeep but oddly empty of the upkeepers themselves. Then you are proven wrong when you see two girls riding after one another on bicycles, wearing plastic clips in their hairs that come in the packages stapled onto magazines and sold in every bustling news agency around the world. You wonder how they are at all connected to what is real and what is moving, because it seems that the town has neither entrance nor exit, and is just an endless hiatus—I don’t know what I mean by hiatus—just that sometimes you wish the rest of the world were at such a standstill, an uncritical standstill where stagnancy is the norm and nothing is expected. And you wish that for at least a time you could be one of these unseen people in these houses that go on and on down the hill. The world looks two dimensional without shadows. It is a town that looks like it was placed by aliens in the middle of nowhere—a gray slate with dollhouses plopped down in an inescapable heath that seems to tease you—it is neither obscured nor labyrinthine, just flat endlessness, yet everyone knows it is impossible to get out. There is no beginning nor end to the twilight town, and nothing has ever happened here, but a million things could. It seems pregnant with enigmas, because if you walk on the road that skirts about the town, you will end up amongst rivers and waterfalls, thorns that could stick you through like daggers, and the scent of smoke from an entire forest that burned down and kept burning until the trees were clumps of ash. But no one in the town ever sees these parts (which are just a jump and a hop away and utterly enchanted)—they never see the wonder and clearness of the air, and the colors that seem dusted with the colors of a storm. The flowers are neither contrived nor gaudily vibrant—they are not the artificial roses or tulips, but rather the wild beauty, that are blinks and stutters of violet, blue, mauve. Instead, everyone sits in the bar in the center of town; in wood paneled walls and high bar stools and glasses that are misted over with head and frost. In there (instead of the crystalline silence of the bog), there is the hum of a refrigerator, the sound of a TV mumbling in the background, and overheads lamps that transform the place into a cave. There, we find a girl who is twenty-one and proclaims that she would do something in her life—only the thing is, she knows she never will. So then she stays in the bar because she couldn’t bother having the will power to change, and the reason she doesn’t have the will power is because she knows it isn’t in her anyway. Even if you tell her not to think like that, she says she’s heard it all before but knows herself and knows what she is (or rather isn’t) capable of.
