And so a few months later they’d moved into a house on the outskirts of the suburbs, looking across a shallow valley onto spinneys of wayward, Seussian trees. Though the neighbourhood was not fancy – she doubted anyone around here was sending their kids to Seabrook – the house was well beyond their means. But the sheer profligacy of it became for her part of the point, the quixotic bravado of the two of them actually taking on life, going up to its doors and yelling, ‘Let us in!’ though they had neither invitation nor evening attire; it made her smile to herself as she dried her first dish, in their first evening in the new house. And the absurdity of compounding the debt by some day – not right away of course, but some day – filling the empty bedrooms, this made her smile too. She hadn’t written so much as a word of a story, but for the first time in a long time she felt she was inside a story of her own, and surely that was better yet.
Only a year and a half has passed since then; still it feels like someone else’s life. Through the window the pretty spinneys of trees have been uprooted, and the estate teeters on the brink of a vast tract of mud. Some day, they are promised, it will be a Science Park; right now there are only great weals and gashes, each one pinned with dozens of tiny stakes, as if some kind of acupuncture, or torture maybe, is being performed on the flayed skin of the earth; all day long you can hear the bulldozers claw, the circular saws slice into concrete, the last of the tree roots being wrenched up and dismembered.
‘I guess we should have read the fine print,’ is all Howard will say on the subject: he doesn’t have to spend every day here, listening to it. In recent weeks the racket has been augmented by a nightly apocalypse of fireworks, attended by car alarms and barking dogs, as well as regular power cuts, as the diggers in the nascent Science Park accidentally cut through cables.
She lights a cigarette and stares at the cursor blinking implacably at her from the screen. Then, as if in retaliation, she leans in and hammers:
If memory technology continues to expand at the current rate, data equivalent to the collected experience of an entire human life will soon be storable on a single chip.
Slumping back she gazes at what she’s written, streels of smoke spreading lazily over her shoulder.
What with the phony war going on in Iraq, it’s not a great time to be an American abroad. Hearing her accent, people, strangers, have actually stopped Halley in the street – or the supermarket, or the cinema box-office – to upbraid her on her country’s latest outrage. When it came to looking for a job though, she found that her ethnicity wasn’t a problem. Quite the opposite: to the business and technology community here, an American accent was literally the Voice of Authority, and anything it said treated as dispatches from the mother ship. Another surprise: Irish people are crazy for technology. She’d thought that a country with such a weight of history might be prone to looking backward. In fact, the opposite is true. The past is considered dead weight – at best something to reel in tourists, at worst an embarrassment, an albatross, a raving, incontinent old relative that refuses to die. The Irish are all about the future – had not their own premier even said he lived in the future? – and every new gadget that emerges is written up as further evidence of the country’s vertiginous modernity, seized upon as a stick to beat the past and the yokels of yesteryear barely recognizable as themselves.
There was a time when Halley too had thrilled at the unstoppable march of science. As a cub reporter in New York, seduced away from her ‘real’ stories by the energy of the Internet boom, she’d had the sense of standing right at the heart of a Big Bang – of a new universe exploding into being, transfiguring all that it touched. The things they could do! The great leaps into the unthinkable that were happening every single day! Now in the face of these relentless, self-advertising wonders she feels more and more of an interloper – clumsy, incompatible, obsolete, like a parent whose kids don’t include her in their games any more. And sitting at her desk in her house in the suburbs, it strikes her that in spite of all the changes she has dutifully transcribed there is really very little difference between her life and her mother’s, twenty-five years before – except that her mother spent the day looking after her children, while Halley’s is passed in the company of little silver machines, in the service of an insatiable mortgage. So this anger she finds boiling up in her, the irrational, unfair anger she feels when Howard comes home, for all the hours he spent away from her, is that then the same anger her mother was always so full of?
Her sister tells her she’s depressed. ‘Worrying that you’re turning into Mom is like the textbook definition of depression. The depression textbooks all have pictures of our mom in them. Quit that fucking job, already. I don’t understand why you don’t.’
‘I’ve told you a hundred times, it’s this visa thing. I can’t just quit and find something else. No one’s going to sponsor me for a job I have no experience in. It’s this or wait tables.’
‘Waiting tables isn’t so bad.’
‘It’s bad when you have a mortgage. You’ll see when you’re older. Things get complicated.’
‘Right,’ Zephyr says. There is a combative silence of a kind that keeps breaking into their conversations these days. Zephyr is five years younger, and has just begun studying art in Providence, R.I. Every day over there seems richer with ideas, fun, adventure than the one before; every day Halley seems to have less to tell in response. Pretending to herself that she doesn’t notice costs her no little effort, and often she’ll find herself spinning off mid-conversation into private fugues of jealousy –
‘What?’ realizing Zephyr has asked her a question. ‘Sorry, it’s a bad line.’
‘I just wondered if you’d been writing anything.’
‘Oh… no. Not at the moment.’
‘Oh,’ Zephyr says sympathetically.
‘It’s not a big deal,’ Halley tells her. ‘When something inspires me, then I’ll do it.’
‘Of course you will!’ Zephyr’s voice crackles enthusiastically; Halley winces, hearing echoes of her own past efforts at sisterly bucking-up.
She goes to the window to let the smoke out. Across the street she sees her neighbour’s two golden retrievers bounce anticipatorily about their front garden; a moment later her neighbour’s car pulls up. He unlatches the gate, bends to bury his face in their blond flyaway fur; his wife opens the door to greet him, new baby in her arms, pretty daughter peeping out from behind her. The dogs leap around like this is the greatest thing that’s ever happened. Everyone looks so happy.
Standing there unseen, Halley thinks of the way that Howard braces himself when he comes through the door these days, the cloaked expression of weariness as he asks about her day. He is bored: he is in the grip of some massive boredom. Does it emanate from her? Is she leaking boredom into his life, like a radiating atom, the dull, decaying isotope of a lover? She recalls her parents, how they’d morphed with the decades of recession from the hippie fellow-travellers who’d given her and Zephyr their absurd names into dyspeptic fiftysomethings, walling themselves in with investments as they waited for the sky to fall. She wonders if that’s all that lies ahead, an incremental process of distancing, from the world and from each other. Maybe that was why her parents fought; maybe the fights were misguided attempts to find a way back, to recover the why of things that they had lost.
She waits for the sound of Howard’s car and resolves that tonight she will make herself airy, lightsome, that tonight they will not fight. But already she can feel the anger surge upward through her, bubbling out of her core, because already she can see him coming in, asking her how she is, trying not to be bored as she tells him; trying to keep himself interested, as if this is a project he’s set for his class – trying to be good, trying to make himself love her.