I read in those same color supplements where I learned about the Epsilon Eridani Ambassadors that micro-culturism is the logical end point of twenty-first-century post-industrialism. The fracturing of the human race into a billion interest groups will be complete when the nano-assembler experiments become a workable technology and every individual will have complete material self-sufficiency.
Amazing, what you can learn from the Sunday color supplements.
Around the turn of the century, Temple Bar, between Dame Street and Dame Anna Livia Pluribelle, had been the fashionable quarter of Dublin, the epitome of the mail-order eclectic that is post-modern Bohemianism. Long before the tribes began their migrations along the ley-lines to the Land of Youth in search of tolerance and freedom, Temple Bar had enjoyed a thriving sub-culture scene. Now its narrow streets and warehouses were the tribe capital of Europe. I passed transvestite and transsexual clubs, techno-Christian love-ups, tattoo dens, death-metal temples, rubber bars, New Revelation Buddhist urban monasteries, cyber-dweeb web-domes, White Rastafarian missionaries, neo-Celts, chilly-looking topless women in Native American feathers and leathers, gender-benders, androgynes, Seventies Revivalists, New Model mods, Star Trekkers, neo-Edwardians, New Age Samurai, manganauts on custom motorbikes, New Futurists, barbarian babes and boys. I saw Ambassadors, walking-in from Epsilon Eridani to sit in a doorway and roll a joint.
I tried to see them as Clionadh did—as Kerry might: facets of human experience, a plethora of possible alternative social selves. As I made my way through the crowds on Essex Street to the accompaniment of the primal heartbeat of warehouse Bass Addicts, I understood a second meaning to Clionadh’s comment. Everyone is an interior tribe. We are all squabbles of aspects of ourselves that stand forward when life’s changing situations call them. The difference between banker/poet/detective/emotional cripple Stephen O’Neill and Clionadh/Tarroweep/Epsilon Eridani avian intelligence is the distance between facets. Mine are close, they reflect each other’s light. Hers are far apart, and shine on their own. I am large, I contain multitudes, Walt Whitman yawped over the roofs of the world in his “Song of Myself.” Yes, great singer of the ego, but the truth from the new millennium is that there is no Self any more, only a raucous flock of selves, flapping in every direction to world’s end.
Daley’s was the kind of bar where James Joyce could have drunk, or had been made to look like the kind of bar where James Joyce could have drunk. The latter, I thought, though the Edwardian pitch-pine booths, the encaustic tiles, the gas lights, and the faded back-bar mirrors advertising long-defunct whiskey distilleries were very convincing.
The clientele was more varied than I expected in a Temple Bar pub. But I suppose that’s how a multi bar must be; everyone something different. Those someones who weren’t temporarily part of some other sub-culture. Multi. I hated the taste of the word on my tongue. Multi. Kerry. It made her a thing, a condition.
Clionadh was defending a corner booth against four young males with pints in their hands. She waved. I squeezed in. A harassed bar boy took my order.
“Feargal says he’ll be along about half nine,” Clionadh said.
“Feargal. Is he a…”
“You have trouble with the word, don’t you? Feargal? No. Maybe once. I can’t tell. No one can. You’ll see.”
I contemplated the rising nebula of head in my freshly arrived Guinness.
“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” I had to shout over the booth-less boys, who were singing “Fairytale of New York” in the mandatory raucous style. Early with the Christmas music this year. “I’m not sure how to ask this, but which is the real you: you here, or the other one, Tarroweep?”
Clionadh shouted with high-pitched laughter.
“Hey, Stevie, don’t you know it’s not etiquette to ask about others in front of the current? Currents never know alternates, that’s the way the thing is. Onlys always want to know which is real. Answer, both. Clionadh is real, Tarroweep’s real. What you really mean is, which is the original? Which came out of which?”
“Well, if it’s not unforgivably rude…”
“Neither. Not as we are now. I can remember vaguely having been something like Tarroweep. Alternates develop their own independent memories. I suspect that Clionadh emerged out of the pre-Tarroweep’s channeling exercises. You don’t become an Ambassador unless you’re part way multi.”
“And this pre-Tarroweep, is she the original?”
“She was, I think. She may still be around; it’s possible she’s accessible from Tarroweep but not from me. I wouldn’t know, you see. Separate memories. But what I remember of her, I don’t think she was a very happy person. I wouldn’t want to be her again.”
I shivered in Daley’s suffocating heat.
“And Kerry?”
“She moved in three years back. The place is well known in the scene as a multi house. Maybe the landlord is, or something. She moved into the flat across the landing. I liked her. Got to know her pretty well. She was on the edge of the scene, an emergent. Still had linkage between personas. Some can never fully make the break. Too much gravity in the black stuff down there in the memory.”
Some never even begin, I thought. Broken goods. Smashed by the gravity of black stuff.
“Did she tell you how it, ah, started?”
“About your family? Her mother—your mother? Jeez, yes. She was seeing a therapist.”
“I called in on him.”
“The admirable Dr. Collins.”
“He thinks the therapy may have been responsible for Kerry’s break up.” “The word’s ‘emergence.’ No, he might have hurried it along, but Kerry was a latent multi long before. She told me that when she was a kid and lay in bed at night and listened to your Ma raving away downstairs about what a martyr she was, what foul kids she had, how everyone was out to make her life miserable and no one loved her; she would lie there in the dark and imagine she’d been born someone else, in another house, with different parents, where everything was good and she could be what she wanted. When she had the big fight, when she left you all, she had the space to live that other life she should have had, be that other person she should have been.”
I closed my eyes. It was not the smoke in the bar that had made them water.
“Mas dead. That’s what I came to tell her. Ma’s gone.”
“Good,” Clionadh said fiercely. “Hey! He’s here!” She jumped up, waving furiously. “Feargal! Over here!”
I thought about Tarroweep, the other, incommunicado side of this young woman beside me, and how she had not known Kerry when I had spoken to her on the doorstep of Number Twenty. Clionadh could not tell me why that was; I knew more of her alter ego than she did. Perhaps Tarroweep and Kerry never met under those identities. Tarroweep only knew the Kerry that should have been, whatever her name and nature.
Feargal was as Feargals should be; slightly out of date. Shaved head, tuft of chin beard from the Seattle look of over a decade ago. Unless what goes round had come round, down in Temple Bar. He had a Cork accent. He drank Beamish, as a good Cork man should. I watched him as he talked and could not dislodge the idea from my head that he had had sex with my sister.