He retired then, ready to pursue his own route, practice law, breathe easy, leave the flashbulbs behind. Even turned down the Supreme Court. But then the President phoned again. Clinton’s casual charm. The ambitious ease. A favor, George, he said. Two weeks in Northern Ireland. It’s just a trade convention. That’s all. An escape across the water. The Senator was drawn in. He would go for a fortnight, that was all. Before he knew it, it was a year, then two, then three. The shadows of Harland and Wolff falling over Belfast. Where the Titanic had once been built. The vague hope of helping to turn the long blue iceberg, the deep underwater of Irish history.
He glances out the window now at the rows of planes, the moving carts, the men on the runway waving their neon sticks. All the world, always going somewhere. Everyone in a rush. The fatal laws of our own importance. How many aloft at this very moment? Looking down on ourselves in the hazy and confused landscape below. How odd to glimpse the reflection of himself in the window, as if he is both inside and outside at the same time. The young boy looking in at the man in his late years, a father again, surprised to be here at all. The manner in which life deals the unexpected. So constantly unfinished.
He has been asked many times by reporters if he can explain Northern Ireland. As if he could whisk a phrase out of the air, a sound bite for the ages. He is fond of Heaney. Two buckets were easier carried than one. Whatever you say, say nothing. Brief breakthroughs. Intermittent calm. Large ruptures in the landscape. He has never even been able to get all the political parties together in the same room, let alone the whole situation in a single phrase. It is one of their beauties, the Irish, the way they crush and expand the language all at once. How they mangle it and revere it. How they color even their silences. He has sat in a room for hours on end listening to men talk about words and yet never mention the one word they want. The maniacal meanderings. The swerves and sways. And then, all of a sudden, he has heard them say, No, no, no, as if the language only ever had one word that made any sense at all.
Paisley. Adams. Trimble. McGuinness. Throw a word in their midst and watch them light the fuse. Ahern. Blair. Clinton. Mowlam. Hume. Robinson. Ervine. Major. Kennedy. McMichael. A fine cast. Shakespearean almost. And he sits in the wings, with de Chastelain and Holkeri, waiting for the moment for the cast to bring out their spears. Or not.
There has been, he must admit, a thrill to his days in the North. An edge. A recklessness he enjoys. Another boyhood. Under the stairs. Ready to emerge, in suit and tie, with hands raised high in false surrender. Strand One, Strand Two, Strand Three. He dislikes the praise, the glad-handing, the false backslaps, the gestures to his patience, his control. It’s the tenacity of the fanatic that he wants to pitch himself against. There is, he knows, something akin to his own form of violence in the way he wants to hang on and fight. The way the terrorist might hide himself in a wet ditch all night. Cold and the damp seeping down into the gunman’s boots, right up into the small of his back, along his spine, through his cranium, out his pores, so cold, so very cold, watching, waiting, until the stars are gone, and the morning chatters with a bit of light. He would like to outlast that man in the ditch, outwait the cold and the rain and the filth, and the opportunity for a bullet, remain down in the reeds, underwater, in the dark, breathing through a hollow piece of grass. To stay until the cold no longer matters. Fatigue conquering tedium. Match him breath for breath. Let the gunman grow so cold that he cannot pull the trigger and then allow the silhouette to trudge dejected over the hill. To filibuster the son of a bitch, and then watch him climb out the ditch and to thank him and shake his hand and escort him down the high-brambled laneway with the senatorial knife in his back.
— Your tea, sir.
He touches his palms together in grateful thanks. She is carrying a silver tray: small neat sandwiches, biscuits, cashews.
— Some nuts, Senator?
— Ah, yes.
He tries hard to hold back the blatant grin, if not outright laughter. He would like to tell her that he’s had too many of them in recent times, but she might misunderstand, or take it rudely, so he simply smiles and takes the tea, allows her to place the cashews on the table. Indeed, they have been many and legion, the nuts. The paramilitaries, the politicians, the diplomats, the civil servants, too. The polygon of Northern Ireland. He can see six, seven, eight sides to it all, even more. A firefly flashing forward at regular intervals. Context crossing context. There is nothing to gain from the North: no oil, no territory, no DeLoreans anymore. He is not even paid for the work: just his expenses, that’s all. No salary. Some political traction, of course, for him, for the President, and for posterity, maybe even history itself, but there are easier ways to get that, simpler vanities, more approachable conceits.
He is well aware that there are some out there who think they have him on an endless looping string. The judicial puppet. Peace and Judy. But it doesn’t bother him one bit, even when they draw him, glum and dangling, in one of their crude newspaper cartoons. Or their backhanded jibes. There is something fierce about him: he has earned the right to part the darkness slightly, to go with them into the corners.
What the Irish themselves worry about is that they will somehow keep on delaying, but he will not allow it, the endless riverrun, riverrun, riverrun. He will be over eighty when Andrew goes to college. The father mistaken for the grandfather. The distant ancestry. All those ancient ghosts. There were sixty-one children born in Northern Ireland the day Andrew was born. Sixty-one ways for a life to unfold. The thought slides a sharp blade of regret down the core of his spine. His son is just five months old now, and he can count on just four hands the amount of days he has spent with him. How many hours has he sat in the stark chambers listening to men argue about a single comma, or the placement of a period, when all he wanted was to return to the surprise of his very young child? Sometimes he would watch them as they talked, saying very little or nothing at all. Kites of language. Clouds of logic. Drifting in and out. Caught on the moving wave of their own voices. He heard certain phrases and allowed them to take him out over the treetops, into what the Northern Irish called the yonder. Immersed in the words. Sitting at the plenaries, waiting. The brittleness in the room. The cramped maleness. A relentless solicitude about them, they would hold up a hand and tell people they did not deserve the reverence, but it was plain to see that they needed it.
Some days he wishes that he could empty the chambers of the men, fill the halls instead with women: the short sharp shock of three thousand two hundred mothers. The ones who picked through the supermarket debris for pieces of their dead husbands. The ones who still laundered their gone son’s bed sheets by hand. The ones who kept an extra teacup at the end of the table, in case of miracles. The elegant ones, the angry ones, the clever ones, the ones in hairnets, the ones exhausted by all the dying. They carried their sorrow — not with photos under their arms, or with public wailing, or by beating their chests, but with a weariness around the eyes. Mothers and daughters and children and grandmothers, too. They never fought the wars, but they suffered them, blood and bone. How many times has he heard it? How often were there two ways to say the one thing? My son died. His name was Seamus. My son died. His name was James. My son died. His name was Peader. My son died. His name was Pete. My son died. His name was Billy. My son died. His name was Liam. My son died. His name was Charles. My son died. His name was Cathal. My son’s name is Andrew.