After Kerry

Ian McDonald

Asimov’s Science Fiction

March, 1997

British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, New Worlds, Zenith, Other Edens, Amazing, and elsewhere. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award in J 985, and in 1989 he won the Locus “Best First Novel” Award for his novel Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out on Blue Six, Hearts, Hands and Voices, and the acclaimed Evolution’s Shore, and two collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams and Speaking in Tongues. Other books include the novels Terminal Café, Sacrifice of Fools and Kirinya. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland and lives and works in Belfast.

In the haunting story that follows, he takes us on a melancholy voyage of discovery through a troubled future Ireland, a place where you can’t be certain of anything, even who you are—or who you were.

November is the dying season in our family. The light fades out of us, we grow pale and cold and fall like leaves. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins accidentally killed; all the dead of November. Now, my mother. It’s a good month for burying, November. The low between-light of autumn-going-winter shows the bones and struts of things; the land, the things growing from it, the people standing on it. Ireland is a country that looks best by winter light, stripped bare of leaves and greenery, spare and strong and good. We buried Ma beneath an intense blue sky, the golden light casting long shadows on the grave grass from the marble Jesuses and alabaster angels and our overcoated figures around the hole. Family, the few living relatives, Father Horan. No friends. My mother had never had a friend she had not alienated in the end.

The dying had been painful and long and inevitable. Ironic, mostly. Every time one of us had tried to break away from that dark little house full of the smell of frying food, she had found a lump, or noticed a mole had grown larger, or had pains in her stomach, or passed blood. And she would reel us in from wherever we hoped to escape to. Dangerous, to invoke the name of the angel of carcinoma. He flies in tandem with the angel of poetic justice. November is his favorite month.

Kerry had broken the tether. She flew free.

Father Horan sprinkled the box with water, and they put Ma down into the black pit and shoveled the earth over her, and I did not feel a thing. Da stood, shoulders slumped, watching the Father roll up his stole, and I knew he felt as I did. It was like God had died and left us all to our own wills and consciences, but we could not believe the infinity of the universe we had been let play in.

Louise was crying; shuddering heaves and sighs. She was doing it for those of us who would not. She probably blamed herself for the cancer, somehow.

A small flock of starlings dashed over the cemetery. Symbol of a soul in flight, to the ancient Greeks. Metempsychosis. She’d always hated it when she thought I was showing off. Mr. Too-Big-For-His-Boots. Knows everything, but knows nothing. Ma had never allowed us to enjoy anything she lacked. Including education. We learned to temper our ambitions to her jealousy. The soul of Aeschylus, Ovid, Whitman, Heaney, at the batch desk in the Allied Irish bank.

“Metempsychosis,” I whispered, because I was free to.

“What?” Da grunted.

“Transmigration of the soul. The spirit moving from one body to another.”

The birds turned with a flash of wings over the brick chimney of the crematorium and swooped away, calling to each other.

In the car park, Father Horan shook our hands with pleasing firmness. Another surprise, he drove away in a red Toyota sports model.

“I thought Kerry might have made it,” Da said.

“How?”

“Seen the notice, maybe.”

“We don’t even know she’s still in this country. It’s been three years.”

Three years of something more than silence. By gesture and expression and mood and sigh, Ma taught us that Kerry was dead, to her, and so to us. But you talk about the dead, you remember them, fondly or not; their spirits haunt you. Kerry was an exorcised ghost. A never-existed. An unconceived child.

I had called at her flat a few days after the night of the argument, to convince her that it was unnatural for a daughter to swear never to see her mother again. “Kerry doesn’t live here anymore,” Michaela her flatmate had said. She was as surprised as I. No warning, no preparations, no forwarding address. Gone.

I can still see Kerry’s room. October sunlight through a leaded window; dusty sneaker-prints on the boards; closets and drawers open, bed stripped down to the stained, candy-striped mattress. Rectangular pink nipples of sticky fixers where pictures had been taken down; the patches of unfaded wall color beneath. The light struck a glint from the far baseboard. A brooch: a tiny, silver, winged bird in flight. Overlooked, or a parting message?

I still have that brooch.

I called her job. She had quit her job. Her boss talked to me as if, being blood of her blood, I was complicit in her disappearance. No notice, no explanation, no excuses, no point of contact. Gone.

We could have found her. We could have contacted friends, lovers, work mates; asked at other studios if Kerry had approached them. We could have posted her missing with the police and watched for her face to appear on the side of the morning milk carton. We could have searched for her through the information net that weaves our lives so tightly that none drop through it. We didn’t. On a brilliant November morning in the car park of the cemetery in which the mother I hated lay stuffed under wet soil, I understood. We were afraid to find her. That would have meant talking, and questions, and answers to those questions that might upset the miserable equilibrium of our family. Better to let one go than risk the unacceptable truth.

Louise was sniffling again. Little hankie job. Declan was holding her to him but he knew the smell of political tears. Sean and Liam stood in their weddings-and-funerals suits, wanting Daddy to tell them they could get into the car. To them, Nan had been a horror of their noise, a list of Do-Not-Disturb injunctions, dreadful chicken dinners they had to eat every last fragment of, and the oily, post-menopausal smell of old woman. They wouldn’t miss her.

No one would.

“She should know,” Da said. “Kerry. She should know.”

“About Ma?”

He shook his head.

“That she can come back. That we want her back; that it’s all right now, she’s gone; maybe now we can be the family we should have been. Only…”

“Only what?”

“I can’t do it. I can’t face her. I wouldn’t know what to do. Stephen, would you?”

My family role had always been the burier of dead animals, the shoveler of shit, the cleaner of vomit. In latter days, the mediator, the ambassador. Another role now: the releaser of exiles.

I have several other lives that orbit at varying distances around this one that is my day-to-day experience. The Poet is closest; more a moon than another world. I can look at it, study its features, imagine how I might reach it some day. I am some way toward it, building a tower of file-block sheets and Post-it notes up which I might climb, if the vertigo does not overcome me. The Great Detective Story Writer is more remote, little more than Friday afternoon imaginings, when the clock drags and I try to think of a more satisfying Monday than the one in which I return to this desk and terminal. I could never reach that world: if I had failed to be the accountant I was expected to be, I could not possibly be a success at anything else. But the sun of this private pre-Copernican universe was gone, the gravitations rearranged, and I found I had become my own detective hero. I set out in search of Kerry in the way I knew best: feeling the vibrations of her passage through the web of digital transactions that is twenty-first-century banking. The transition between our old, screen-based system and the new “virtual interactive consensus transactional financial interface” (high managementese fringes on perversely beautiful poetry) was a good time to conduct illicit searches through the system. The managers smile beatifically beneath their blank plastic virtuality visors as they wave their manipulator-gloved hands, conducting the waltz of the billions. Ludicrous. But it’s computers, and therefore beyond criticism, and the consultants are taking twelve million off us, so it’s higher even than papal infallibility. This old Luddite moved his stylus across the mat and hunted for his sister. Windmill Animations, Kerry’s erstwhile studio, was a customer of our Bellfield branch. It was not even morally dubious to tap through into its records and access the payroll accounts. The guilt started when I used bank authorizations to locate Kerry’s account in the Rathmines branch of the Bank of Ireland. The blank virtuality visors were one-way mirror shades, watching me, unseen. I’ve spent all my life feeling guilty about one triviality or another. A higher level of authorization accessed the Rathmines account. Kerry had closed it almost nine months ago. Two more weeks and the inactive file record would have been automatically deleted. No outstanding debts, no credit arrangements, no explanation. But an address. A flat, in Rathmines. Belgrave Road. Five minutes’ walk from this desk. Left at the Chinese take-away. Past the bun shop that did the ecstatic éclairs. Past the over-priced mini-mart that had kept the same packet of oatmeal in the window so long the Scotsman on the front had faded into something by Andy Warhol. Across Palmerstown Road at the stop where I waited for the bus five nights a week. Ten houses down on the left, up the steps, ring the top button.

My sister.

I imagined all the pupils in the watching, knowing eyes behind the visors dilating in astonishment.

When I left that afternoon, I did not stop at the bus shelter. I crossed Palmerstown Road. I went up into the terra incognita on the other side of the street. I did not expect to find Kerry still there, but I hoped, and because I hoped, I was afraid. I rehearsed it past the Chinese take-away, and re-rehearsed it by Mrs. Ecstatic Éclairs, threw it all out by the Andy Warhol Scots Porage Oats man, drafted new opening lines as I dodged the traffic on Palmerstown Road, and was up the steps at the white Georgian door of number 20, pressing the button for Flat Five, suddenly sick at heart because I did not know how to greet my sister after three years of banishment.

Feet clattered down the stairs. The inner door opened, then the outer.

“Ya?”

The hair had to be a wig, or grafted extensions. Crow black, it hung to mid-thigh. The face inside it was a pixie’s; features flattened, widened by make-up. All slants and slits and smears. Elf-thing. The kid wore a half-disintegrated lace body-stocking, more hole than whole, stretch spiderweb. A nipple protruded through the mesh, erect in the cold November air. Rosebud in winter. The fingernails were chromed.

It was not her.

“Wa?”

Their title escapes me, but their theology made an impression on my memory. On a planet orbiting the star Epsilon Eridani live an immeasurably wise and ancient avian race of great beneficence who tour the cosmos by astral projection. Channeling themselves into the bodies of Earthly hosts, they do good and work wonders and bestow the graces of their limitless wisdom and slowly uplift humanity to cosmic consciousness. Alien ambassadors. Walkins.

Post-Catholic Ireland’s cultural diversity policy has made it a haven for sub-cultures. From across Europe, and beyond, they come to build their communities and live their alternative life-styles and explore different ways of being human. We are becoming a nation of tribes. So said the Sunday color supplement article in which I read about the Epsilon Eridani walkins, and some of the other, more bizarre, societies.

“I’m looking for my sister,” I said.

“Tarroweep.”

My turn to grunt the monosyllabic response.

“This is Tarroweep,” the kid said. “Whatever you want, you say to her.”

“My sister. Kerry O’Neill.”

“Wa?”

The ancient wisdoms of Epsilon Eridani were not manifesting much of their cosmic consciousness this evening.

“Kerry. My sister. She lives here.”

“Tarroweep does not recognize this entity.”

“Well, she may have lived here. About nine months ago?”

“Tarroweep does not recognize this entity. Tarroweep has occupied this nest for four years.”

“Her address is here.” Perhaps she thought I was a debt collector, or a persistent ex-boyfriend, or a Jehovah’s Witness, and this was an original anti-door-stepping tactic. “Listen, I’m her brother. I’d just like to see her, that’s all. I’ve got some news for her.” I thought about my news. “Good news.”

“Tarroweep does not recognize this entity. Tarroweep has occupied this nest for four years.”

“Maybe you don’t know her as Kerry.” The great detective had forgotten to bring a photograph with him. “She looks like me.”

The space-pixie that called herself Tarroweep frowned as she studied my face. Her nostrils flared, she seemed to be scenting me.

“There is no Kerry,” she said flatly.

I saw a figure move across the top of the stairs.

“Kerry?” I shouted. “Hello! It’s me! Stephen.”

The figure moved back to the top of the stairs and descended halfway. It wore the same mane of black hair but was dressed in leather pants and jacket. The jacket was open. The chest was bare. It was not Kerry.

“You are disturbing the ambassador,” the boy said. “She should not be disturbed when channeling. It’s dangerous.”

The pixie-thing at the door half-smiled, half-grimaced.

“Ya,” the ambassador to Sol Three said. The door closed.

Birds of ill omen flew over me as I walked to the bus stop. Black birds. I felt lied to; mocked. I wanted to go back and shake that silly space-pixie girl until the cosmic intellect from Epsilon Eridani was shaken out of her and I could tell her that the computer said that Kerry O’Neill had lived in the top flat for the past two and a bit years, and the computers always spoke the truth. I raged inwardly and clenched my fists and shook as the bus lurched through the dark avenues of south Dublin. It was not silly Tarroweep in her ridiculous costume with her flatline answers that I was angry at. It was too much anger for her. I raged for the two and something years that Kerry had lived one minute beyond the boundary of my world, and that the courage to cross it had come too late.

I lose days to an anger attack. The anger itself, then the guilt at having been angry, then the depression after the guilt. And after the depression, the realization that the search was not over. Kerry’s account had shown a regular weekly payment of fifty pounds to a consistent account number. A few minutes of dread and digits under the eyeless gaze of the Allied Irish’s virtuality visors gave me that account number and name. Dr. Matthew Collins, working out of an address on Fitzwilliam Square. I cross checked with the Golden Pages. Not an MD. A psychotherapist.

I hesitated days over arranging the meeting with Dr. Collins. You do not like to think of one of your family seeing a psychotherapist. It feels unclean, unnatural. Polluted with a rainbow oil-film of madness. Ma had always dreaded madness in the family, twining its roots around our DNA. Whispered-of relatives had been institutionalized. Auntie Mary had been taken away for eating a pair of curtains. We’d laughed; once and only once. You didn’t laugh about mental illness in our family. You didn’t talk about it at all; while Ma twitched and shrieked about her nerves, her nerves, and took to her bed because a dog was barking in the street or we were shouting while she was trying to watch Fair City.

Pity the carcinoma angel took her before the angel of paranoia.

Fitzwilliam Square is the handsomest of Dublin’s many handsome squares, but the November light lends a particular radiance to the Georgian townhouses. The red brick releases a generous, sun-warmed aura. The white window frames glow. The palings and iron balconies cast long, military shadows.

Dr. Collins’s office was on the top floor. His consulting room overlooked the railed-off key park in the center of the square. A couple of valiant residents were making the most of the rare sun by playing out-of-season tennis in the little gravel court. I could hear the pop and thwock of the ball, and the players’ laughing voices.

Dr. Matthew Collins was a fat, middle-aged northerner with watching eyes as black and buried as coals in snow. I didn’t like his watching. I didn’t like him. I didn’t like my sister having confided all the wounding things of her life to this fat Ulsterman. I didn’t like that some of those wounds were done by me, as brothers must, and that he knew much more of me than I of him. I didn’t like that his watching eyes saw another damaged O’Neill.

“So, you’re looking for your sister.” He leaned forward in his non-confrontationally arranged chair.

“Yes.”

“How do you know she was coming here?” He took a cigarette from a pack of Silk Cut. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Well, actually…”

He lit up. “So?”

“I work in a bank. I did financial checks.”

“Impressive. For someone from your family background, it would have taken some doing. Why do you need to find her so urgently?”

“To tell her Ma’s dead.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“In the words of the immortal Louis B. Mayer, ‘If you want to send a message, use Western Union.’ There’s more to it than a death notice. What do you really want to tell her?”

There was a single cheer from the tennis match in the square: a key point taken.

“That she can come home. That it’s all right, Ma’s gone; now we can be the family we should have been.”

“What makes you think you can start now? Have you the emotional resources to be a family? The only thing that held you together was your common fear and hatred of your mother. Now she’s gone, what have you got?”

I said nothing for a long time. Collins watched me with his anthracite eyes. The sun came around, shining through the latticed window, illuminating the rows of battered paperback psychology texts on their dusty shelves. Cigarette smoke coiled upward like a spirit.

“You know, I’ve been working with Kerry for almost nine months.” Collins said.

“I just thought you might have an idea where she went.”

“You’ve been to Belgrave Road?”

“I have.”

“Ah. I should tell you that Kerry didn’t complete the therapy.”

Another long silence listening to the cries of the tennis players. Collins lit another cigarette. I said, “Dr. Collins, what were you treating Kerry for?”

He took a long drag on his smoke.

“You’ve been to the house. You’d find out eventually. Your sister came to me in 2003, presenting early symptoms of type-four dissociative reaction.”

“What is that, Dr. Collins?”

“A person divides his or her personality into sections, and begins to use different sections in different social contexts. In the advanced condition, alternative personalities can form.”

“Are you telling me that Kerry was suffering from multiple personalities?”

“Could have suffered. It’s a latent trait in about 7 percent of the population, usually the most creative and self-fulfilled.”

“You’re telling me you were treating Kerry for multiple personalities.”

“Not initially, no. She presented with symptoms of depressive illness. It wasn’t until therapy was well advanced that I began to notice discrepancies in her reactions in sessions.”

“Discrepancies?”

“Body language, non-verbal cues, emotional reactions, the way she’d dress, do her hair, her makeup, her mode of talking, the type of answer she’d give, shifting emphases on childhood experiences.”

“These would change from session to session?”

“Yes. The discrepancies widened as therapy progressed.”

“I thought you were supposed to be making her better.”

“Therapy digs deep. Old wounds bleed. It can be a threatening experience. I’m not one of these happy-clappy Dr. Loves handing out Prozac like candy. I’m just an old-fashioned talk-it-out, one-day-at-a-time-Sweet-Jesus cognitive grunt. It works. It changes things. It lasts.”

“But not for Kerry.”

“No.”

“Would you tell me if you knew where she had gone?”

“I would tell you. You could try the flat again. They won’t talk to me, they don’t trust my profession. Emphatic onlys are the enemy. They might talk to you, especially as you share your sister’s genes.”

“I tried the flat. I told you.”

“Try the flat again, I said. Things change. And if you do find her, let me know. I’d like to know how she’s doing. If she’s whole. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a paying customer in five minutes, and I need to get ready.”

The sun shone through the fanlight above the front door, casting a half wheel of light onto the stairs. I passed the tennis players in the street, two women in sweats and ponytails, their game finished. I beeped my car alarm, and starlings rose in a clatter of wings from the branches of the trees in locked Fitzwilliam Park; a sudden autumn, a denuding of leaves.

Lights were lit in the top flat of 20 Belgrave Road. I could hear the music from the street. Duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duhduh duh. A girl with shoulder-length bobbed blonde hair, wearing a shift dress over tartan tights, finally heard my ring over the bass.

“Hello. Could I speak to…” I hesitated. “Tarroweep?”

“Who?”

“Tarroweep.”

“No one here by that name.”

“I talked to her three days ago, here, on this doorstep.”

The girl studied my face, frowned, and the creases in her features revealed her.

“You,” I breathed. “It was you! Tarroweep. I suppose the walk-in walked out again?”

The girl looked blankly at me.

“I’m Clionadh. Tarroweep is…it’s kind of hard to explain. Just that, if she met you, only she is going to remember you. Things she remembers, I don’t. Things I remember, she don’t.”

Another self. A partitioned personality. Alternative lives. Type-four dissociative reaction, Dr. Collins had called it.

“I’m trying to find my sister. She lived here.”

Clionadh/Tarroweep examined my face again. The Clionadh self spoke differently, carried herself differently, used different body language. Different person. Her eyes widened.

“Kerry.”

“You remember her?”

“You’re so like her. You could be twins. Sundered selves, twins. Oh God, yes! You’re Stephen. She talked about you.”

“Do you know where I can find her?”

“Find Kerry? No one can find Kerry. Kerry’s gone.”

I felt my heart kick, like a worm of ice and iron heaving inside its ventricles. Seeing my look of dread, Clionadh hurried to add,

“Jeez, everything’s so linear with onlys! It’s complicated. I really don’t know where she is now, your sister, but there’s a guy who might. Feargal. Kerry knew him; he’s sort of on the edge of multi society. There’s a pub down in Temple Bar; Daley’s?” I didn’t know it. Clionadh gave me directions. “I’ll get in touch with Feargal. I’ll meet you there about nine.”

“Will I know you?”

“You mean, will I know you? Will I be Clionadh, who remembers you and Kerry? I’ll know you. The cycles last about four, five days. I’m at the mid-point now, so you don’t have to worry, I’ll be Clionadh for a while yet.”

“Clionadh.” The girl had been closing the door. “Kerry. Is she; was she, like you? A…”

“Multi. It’s just a word, like gay, or lesbian. Hey, don’t you know, everyone’s a tribe these days? Everyone’s a minority. Kerry: was she? I suppose. Is she? Not anymore. I’m sure of that.”

I tried to wear Clionadh’s worldview like a pair of tinted glasses as I went down into Temple Bar. Not what she had told me about Kerry: I couldn’t let that close to me yet, it was too sharp, too sudden, too penetrating. It would have killed me with its icy implications. I tried to see the nation behind her throwaway line that everyone was a tribe now. No mainstream. No society. No city, no state, no holy Mother Ireland for which the patriots died. No ultimate truth, no unifying vision. No racial destiny. But a thousand doors to God, a thousand paths to community, to expression, to family and belonging. A thousand ways of being human. Bankers. Scared poets. All types. All tribes.

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 boothless 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 partway 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 breakup.”

“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.

“Ma’s 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.

“Kerry. Yeah. Came to us eight, nine months back.”

“Us?”

“Everyone’s an ‘us’ these days, friend. We’re a group, a project, over in Mountjoy Square.”

The old tenement terraces of the ten-to-a-room people, the bread-and-tay people who had birthed Sean O’Casey and Brendan Behan, had new tenants now. A race beyond their ancestors’ conception, come creeping up the tenement steps and staircases, through the derelict high-ceilinged rooms, looking for a place to strike roots.

“A multi community?”

“Beyond the multi scene,” Feargal said. “For multis who don’t want to be multi anymore.”

“She never really was, Stevie,” Clionadh said. “She hated going back. Couldn’t bear it that she would have to go back to it in the end. To what she was. The black.”

“Found us,” Feargal said. “They do. Don’t advertise, keep ourselves to ourselves. Word passes. We could do this thing she wanted. Not cheap, but price okay to her.”

“Her bank account was closed. That was you?”

“Standard practice.”

“What did she buy from you?”

“Complete new life. Identity, history, memories, emotions, personality. Everything.”

I thought they were fictions of films, those moments when the camera zooms in on the face of the hero while the background pulls out to infinity. They aren’t. Art imitates life. The camera in my skull shrank the noisy, pushing bodies in Daley’s bar to distant, buzzing insects.

Clionadh touched my hand. It felt like mist. Her face swam before me, at once remote and enormous, like a face painted on the side of a blimp. She was speaking.

“Okay? You okay Stevie? Feargal, is he all right?”

Daley’s resumed its proper dimensions of sight and sound and smell.

“God,” I whispered.

“Feargal,” Clionadh said urgently.

“Lot to explain,” Feargal agreed. “This isn’t the place. Easier to show. She’s all right, your sister. Believe me. She isn’t hurt; we wouldn’t hurt anyone, anything. But you should see. Then you’ll understand, maybe.”

The electric cab left us at the tenement in Mountjoy Square. The driver charged us wrong-end-of-town prices. Long long since I was north of the river. Tribal banners bearing a dozen different crests swung from broken street lights or flapped against the fronts of the old townhouses. Traveler campervans and trailers were nose-to-tail around the central grassed square: clusters of tents, bashes and refuse sack yurts had been erected on the small green. Goats grazed, skinny dogs scavenged, heedless of traffic. Campfires sent wreaths of sparks into the cold, clear night. There was music; many musics; overlapping tribes of sound.

It had begun with these traveling people, when Britain decided it could no longer tolerate a nomadic population. They came to Ireland, they found peace, they stayed, they spread the word. For most of its history, Ireland has exported its young, scattering its brightest and boldest and best like seed across the planet. Now the brightest and boldest and best were being gathered in from across the planet, and Ireland was a country of the young again.

The steps to the tenement stank of urine. I think it’s compulsory.

As we climbed the spiral of worn stone stairs, Feargal explained that his project owned the whole apartment block. They’d needed somewhere big and cheap. The equipment. He paused on the first landing to call five names. Kerry’s was not one of them. His voice echoed in the big, cold stairwell. Tracks of condensation ran down the glossy, institutional paint. A door opened on the next floor, a head appeared over the bannisters: a girl, shaggy blonde hair, age indeterminate, terrifyingly thin.

“Feargal! Feargal! I remembered! Bray beach! And they were there! All of them! But they never existed!” She giggled and disappeared. The door closed loudly.

“Trina’s a transient.” The name was not one of those Feargal had shouted out. “We’re mostly transients. Nature of the community; you pass through on your way from somewhere to someplace better.”

“And you?” I asked.

“Permanent. Eternal. Day-oner. Invented this place. Least, that’s what I remember.” I didn’t understand why he smiled.

“And Kerry?” I asked.

He nodded up the stairs.

Feargal took us to the door at the top of the stairs, under the glass cupola. We entered the room beyond. It was dark but the acoustic and the chill of the air suggested immense size. The lights clanked on, battery by battery; heavy duty industrial floods. White light, white room: the old tenement attic, the length of the whole building.

The thing in the middle of the floor was white too. Feargal’s footsteps echoed in the big white space as he crossed the floor to the machine. A faint pulse beat of street rhythm transmitted through the row of skylights. Feargal’s expression as he stood before the device was a combination of pride and awe; Clionadh’s, as she ran her hand over the white scanning ring, bewilderment and disgust.

The sheet on the padded vinyl surface was white, and neatly folded down at the top.

“Most of the work was already done by the end of the century. Complete map of the human brain. Scanned in sections by one of these things. Axon by axon wiring diagram. What fires in response to what stimulus. Took us to make the concept jump: what can read can be taught to write.”

“You use that thing—scanner—to rewrite memories?”

“What are we but what we remember we are? We came up with a new model of the brain; as an imaging system. Memories move through the brain along established paths of neural activity.”

“We?” I said.

“Six neuroscience researchers. With a vision. And some money. Imagination, my friend. That’s all it takes. Imagination is the sister of memory. Imagine that other life, that other friend, those other relatives, parents, and the scanner identifies the activated neurons, and imprints the image into memory. Single neuron e/m induction. Like making photographs from negatives. The long darkroom of the soul.” Feargal fished a translucent plastic pharmaceutical tub out of his pocket. Such was the power of his metaphor, I thought for a moment it was a film can. He popped the lid, scattered white pills on the white sheet. The pills were stamped with the image of a flying dove.

“Acetylcholine activators. Play a double function in the process. Reinforces imprinted memory while depressing the existing engram on that site cluster so there is no conflict of memories. Beautiful. Remembering and forgetting. After a couple of months the memories become independent of the imagination; like Trina, down there in thirty-three. Works best on those with fugue state tendencies. Got a complete alternative personality with ready established memory routings, so much the better. Takes about four months for new memories and personality to become permanent; about six before the old memories and personality are supplanted and erased. One thing we can’t erase; what we call the cognitive discontinuity: they remember the process of imprinting, but not why they came here.”

“Kerry?” I asked.

“She’s gone, man. Not here anymore.”

He was smiling. He was proud of what he did. He was a savior; Jesus of the ganglia. Believe in me, be born again. A Jesus that stank of Beamish and cigarettes, with a fistful of pills. Suddenly I wanted very, very much to plant my own fist in the middle of that loop of beard around his mouth. I wanted to grab him by his sticking-out ears and smash his stubbly head against the scanning ring of his hideous machine, smash and smash and smash until his memories flowed from the cracks like grey juice. It was seething black bile, rising up my gullet, choking me. Anger.

Clionadh saw my clenched fist trembling. She did not speak. I did nothing. Again. Again. Ma was waxy and swollen with gas and rot, a week deep in the dark November soil, and still she would not allow me to be angry.

“I just want to find her,” I said. “Tell her Mother’s dead.”

“I know,” Feargal said. “I killed her. Here. In this. Down in the molecules.”

“Just tell me where she’s gone. That’s all I want to know.”

“She won’t know you. She won’t remember you.”

More than Mother had been killed in that memory-imprinter. Louise died. Little Sean and Liam died. Da died. I died. Her sister, her nephews, her father, her brother. Everyone she had ever known. Pixie-faced Clionadh in her girlie dress and tartan tights; Tarroweep channeling in yet another persona: dead. Then my understanding inverted in that big, cold attic. It was Kerry who had died. The flesh moved on, the skin and the senses, but Kerry O’Neill was buried in the soft folds of her cerebral cortex. Inverse metempsychosis. You don’t come back as someone else. Someone else comes back as you.

I had lost her.

I was out of the attic and half a flight of stairs down before I was aware of Clionadh’s heels clattering after me. I heard them stop and her shout out.

“Why don’t you just tell him?”

I turned and looked up the stairs. Feargal was in the open attic door.

“What good would it do?”

“What hurt would it do?”

Feargal’s laugh was coldly resonant in the stairwell.

“You ask me that, Clionadh/Tarroweep? A multi asks me where the hurt is in something coming back from your former life?”

The black anger inside me was just cold, hard sickness now. Gone.

“What former life?” Clionadh shouted defiantly. “There is no former life! You took it away. There’s nothing to hurt her. But even for the chance to just see her, why hurt him?”

Feargal closed his eyes, rubbed the palm of his hand across his beard. He sighed. His breath steamed.

“We got principles here, you know. Hell, she’s at Twelve Willows Community. Up north. Place called Ballydrain. County Down. On the big lough. Dara. She’s called Dara. Dara McGann. She won’t know you. Understand that. Be gentle. You hurt her, I’ll find you, friend.”

“I wouldn’t hurt her,” I said. “I’m her brother. Her family.”

“Family hurts hardest and deepest. Brother.”

A new wind had come down from the northeast, born in the great Siberian taiga, spreading unexpected cold and frost over Ireland. Winter always takes us by surprise in this country. The road north out of Dublin was a grind of nervy drivers and gritting trucks spraying salty shrapnel. Hitchers with cardboard signs for points north huddled on the verges in their inadequate clothes, disconsolate as winter crows. My car was too full of doubts and justifications for any other passengers.

Time. Time. Time. And excuses. Ten days lost. Too busy at work. Couldn’t get time off. Pre-Christmas rush starting. Ma’s estate to settle. Excuses. Ten days while I debated the rights and wrongs, and listed the pros and the cons, and decided for and against a dozen times each day, and made my mind up one way, and then the other, and then changed it again; about going to see Kerry. Dara.

Then the calendar told me this morning—Saturday morning—that it was December come Monday, and in a surge of dread, anticipation, and adrenaline, I found myself past the airport halfway down a tail-back behind a gritter truck, heading north. If December came and I did not see Kerry—Dara—I never would. It was a November thing. The dying month.

Beyond Drogheda, the traffic cleared and the road opened. Low mist carpeted the plain of Louth, ankle deep, golden in the clear light. Forty kilometers across Dundalk Bay, the Cooley Hills were dusted with slight snow. North. We are a northern people, we Ui Neill. Appropriate that Kerry should return to the ancestral lands. I passed lay-bys and picnic areas crowded with the brightly painted transports of the traveling people. Smoke rose from their cooking fires. Children in colorful knitwear played with untrustworthy-looking dogs; dreadlocked, bearded men saluted gravely. I raised my hand to them in return. The women all looked cold. A nomadic nation. Rootless.

I began to explore what Kerry had done to herself in terms of a colossal act of self-definition. I am what I choose myself to be. I reject the self that is chosen for me. The Ma-made self. The uncertain, fearful, malleable self. I annihilate it. Down among the neurochemicals, I erase it with precise pulses of electricity and build in its place the self that I invent.

We are a tribe of putter-uppers, we Ui Neill. All we ever had was a choice of hells; so better to endure the lesser than risk the possibility of a greater. Put up. Shut up. Kids don’t know that this is not normality. That this is not what family life should be. We can’t be unusual, it must be the same for everyone else and they don’t complain. Put up, shut up. Such conditioning can only be undone as deeply and painstakingly as it was done. Molecule by molecule. Cell by cell. Memory by memory. It’s true, what the women who do it say: it takes more courage to leave than to stay.

I came up through Ravensdale, the old gap of the North. Snow lay in the lee of the hedgerows up by the old border. Down into Newry, then east of northeast, by B-roads along the northern flanks of the Mourne Mountains, through the neo-villages and techno-hamlets of the new tribes.

Kerry’s—Dara’s: I must not think of her by that other name—motivations were clear and honest. My own were obscure. I had realized when Feargal showed me the machine in the tenement attic that my role as bearer of news and repealer of exile was meaningless. I had no reason to find her. She had no reason to be found. Except that the detective-self could not walk away from an incomplete case. Except that my appearance out of an erased past, bearing dubious gifts, was no more selfish than Kerry’s valuing me so little that she could blithely un-create me. I wanted to see her. I wanted to know that my sister’s flesh still walked, and might talk to me. Once might be enough. To have not found her, to have left it open: how Ma would have loved that! Failed again, Stephen! That last fence would always be too high. Kerry’s courage was to transform; mine was to find what she had transformed into. In November.

Up into the drumlin country of Down; those strange rounded glacial hillocks, clustered like eggs in a basket. Mist clung in the hollows between them. By the waterside communities of Strangford Lough; the boats reefed down for winter, the flocks of migrant Greenland geese working across the mud-flats. Through a speaking son, a deaf mussel-farming community directed me to Ballydrain and Twelve Willows.

The name was appropriate. The community cultured genetweak willow for the biomass power station up at the head of the lough. Accelerated growth and intensive coppicing gave two crops a year. The road wound a kilometer and a half between low drumlins studded with the twiggy crowns of willow before the turn-off to the community. I drove another kilometer and a half down a muddy lane rutted by cutters and timber transporters before a shield of woven willow twigs on the farm gate welcomed me to Twelve Willows. The community was a collection of sheds, silos, and portable buildings surrounding a much-extended Victorian farmhouse. Two large articulated timber transporters with trailers were being loaded in the yard by forklift. A lot of people were standing around, drinking coffee from a big vacuum flask. They looked very young. Tribe people do. There were lots of dogs and children. The men favored facial hair. The place smelled of wood chips, mud, and cold salt from the lough shore behind the farmhouse.

“Hello, I’m Stephen O’Neill,” I said to the first person I met, a black-bearded man with a Bolivian-style knitted helmet. “I’m looking for”—careful—”Dara McGann. I heard she lives here.”

“Dara. Yes.” It was the woman operating the coffee flagon who answered. She was looking at me quizzically. “You are?”

Careful.

“A relative.”

The coffee woman nodded.

“Close relative? You’re the spit of her.”

“We’re all like peas in a pod, us O’Neills-McGanns.”

“I can see that. Coffee?” I was offered a foam styrene cup. I accepted it gratefully. “I’m afraid Dara’s not down at the house at the moment; she’s cutting up on the back fifty. I can’t say how long she might be; if you like, I’ll take you up there on the quad; you’ll never find it on your own.”

Another offer gratefully accepted. The coffee woman—Maura; her real identity? was every Twelve Willower formerly someone else?—took me on the back of a smoky all-terrain buggy up between the rows of tall willow wands. The wind from off the lough drew odd sighs and laments from the thin branches. A cutting machine was working the third hillside over, an oily yellow insect with voracious mandibles that bit the willow off at ground level and packed the rods into a metal basket on its back.

“Dara! Someone to see you!”

The machine turned at the end of a row and stopped. The driver stepped down. I climbed off the quad and walked toward the cutting machine. Maura turned her vehicle and drove away.

She was dressed in work boots, skinny jeans gone green at the knees, a grubby Aran sweater under a padded Puffa jacket. She had grown her hair, dyed it a deeper, glossier black, wrapped braids in colored thread. She had lost weight. Her skin seemed darker. She stood with her feet apart, head slightly to one side as she studied me. She was frowning gently. I had never seen that frown before; I could not read it. I could not read her stance, her body language, her face, her hair, her clothes, anything about her.

I spoke a name. I was not certain which one.

The frown deepened.

“Who are you?” The voice was softer, lower.

“A relative. I’m…”

“I don’t remember any cousins like you. What’s your name?”

“Stephen. Stephen O’Neill.”

Her face was suspicious now, her stance aggressive.

“Just who the hell are you? I don’t know you.”

“Don’t you recognize me?”

“I see your face. You look like me. But I don’t know you. I don’t remember you. Who are you, Mr. Stephen O’Neill?”

I could walk or I could speak. There was another fence, right at the finish. The highest fence of all. It was not enough for me just to see. Things only ended properly with an act.

My breath hung in the frosty air in the field of cut willow.

“I’m your brother.”

Dara lived in one of the mobile huts outlying the farmhouse. It smelled of fresh paint, new, cheap carpet, old incense, and garlic. It was drafty, and I could feel it shift on its blocks as the wind eddied underneath it. The one redeeming feature—and a considerable one—was the panoramic window overlooking the shore, the lough, and beyond it the sudden, startling lone hill of Scrabo, surmounted by a tower. I watched the Brent geese move across the sands before the incoming tide, searching for eel grass. Dara made herb tea.

Kerry had despised herb tea.

There were not many things in the chilly cabin. Few of the accumulated impedimenta of a life.

“You’ve got a bloody nerve.”

I clutched my herb tea and struggled with the quiet inner strangling of guilt.

“This is my life, you know? My life. I say when what happens in it, and I don’t want people barging into it telling me they’re my long-lost brothers, or whatever the hell else relations are out there. If I’d wanted a brother, I’d remember a brother. But all I remember is cousins. I’m an only.”

I winced.

“You don’t remember me at all?”

“I remember the discontinuity. I remember Feargal and the others, and the Mountjoy project.”

“The scanner.” The memory-damping pills, with doves stamped on them.

“You’ve been there?”

“Yes. How else could I have found you?”

“Jesus Christ, man! Did you ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe, the reason I did all this was because I didn’t want to be found? I see your face. I see the similarities and I know, intellectually, that there was another life that I can’t remember. I believe you are my brother from that life, but I don’t know you. For all I know, you could be the reason I don’t remember you. You could have raped me six times a night. I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

“Or you could have raped your sister,” I said, careful not to spill any of the anger within.

“Yes.”

“Or murdered her. Or murdered your mother.”

“Yes.”

“You could have done anything; there could be any number of reasons for you to have done what you did.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t know. You can’t know. You have to trust me. You see, the truth is, that you did murder someone, Dara. You murdered my sister.” For an instant, I thought that she would smash me across the face with her mug of herb tea, or at least throw me out. I had never seen such darkness in Kerry’s eyes. But I held her gaze, and the moment passed. I held the gaze for a long time.

“Do you want to know?” I asked. “So that you will have no doubts? It can’t hurt you. It’s only a story. Do you want to hear it?”

“Can I believe you?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

I told her. It was a long time telling. It was not a tale where a few spectacular scenes would summarize and explain all. It was a slow dripping tale of a thousand, ten thousand tiny things, hour in, hour out, year in, year out, that wore away any sense of worth or individuality or hope or dream. Ten thousand stupid things. Ma’s tantrums, her packing her bags and storming out to her sister’s every time we would not eat our cabbage. Food control: only giving us things we hated to eat. Screaming fits in our teenages, when we would unexpectedly not come home for dinner. Being made to sit until the grease coagulated on the plate because we would not finish our Sunday dinners. Her inability to perform any domestic chore. Clothes unwashed, or never ready when you needed them; house un-vacuumed and un-dusted; dishes unwashed. But if you tried to help, you were bloody bitches and bastards, trying to show her up. Personal hygiene. She stank. She would only wash if she was going out. She begrudged us hot water. Shampoo, a luxury. Toothpaste, outrageous. Yet she told us our teeth were black and rotting in our heads and threatened us with the dentist, who would rip them all out and give us agonizingly painful dentures. I remember—I will never forget—the day I saw her in the bedroom reaching down into her pants to remove a sanitary napkin. But when Louise and Kerry started their periods, she refused to buy them feminine hygiene products, but gave them cut-up ironing board covers to slip into their gussets.

Always always someone else’s fault. Da’s for being a feckless husband and not earning as much as Mrs. Downey next-door’s husband. For having to be married to him, and not Mr. Donnelly the chiropodist, who would have amounted to something. Ours, for being bad, ungrateful, bloody bitches and bastards. For being Da’s, and not Mr. Donnelly the chiropodist’s. For living in Finglass—many stations lower than she expected of herself—where the neighbors did nothing but talk about her: that Mrs. O’Neill, thinks herself too good for the likes of us, the bloody bitch. Never never content. Everything you did was wrong. Right things were wrong, or she made them go wrong. Never a trip out or a holiday she didn’t ruin. Never a friend of ours she didn’t disapprove of, or whose mother she did not envy. Never never proud of us. I, the underachiever. Expected to be an accountant. Big house, big family, big future. Reality: a job in the bank, a flat in Dartry, single at thirty-two, a dream of poetry. Louise: to be a spinster primary school teacher. Coffee shop in Tallaght; husband and sons I was supposed to engender. Kerry: nothing. Imagination ran out at the inconvenient third child. Maybe a job in a shop. Maybe married. Certainly not college education. Certainly not five years in Dublin’s top animation studio, producing award-winning pieces for ads and title sequences. Certainly not Dr. Collins’s Fitzwilliam Square office, or the flat across the landing from Clionadh/Tarroweep in the house of multiple personalities, or the brain scanner in the big dark Mountjoy tenement attic. Or a winter hillside of green willow.

The light ebbed from the sky. The tide grew full and the geese moved ashore to roost among the tussocks of salt grass. Dara moved about the room, lighting candles. I sat in the center of a constellation of tiny flames, shaking with emotion.

“Jesus, Steve.”

“Stephen. I’m a Stephen. Always was.”

“Stephen, I don’t know what to feel. What you told me, no kid should have to go through that. It shouldn’t happen. It’s not right. It’s against everything that’s right. But I can’t feel it. I can feel it for you, but not for me. She wasn’t my mother. She’s not what I remember.”

“What do you remember?”

She took a deep breath.

“I remember a white house with black paint. Gravel drive. Trees around it. A garden with hidden places where I played. No sisters, no brothers. Lots of friends, though. Lots of cousins. I remember a dog called Barney and a cat called Cat who slept on my bed though I wasn’t supposed to let him. The sun shone a lot. Summers were hot, winters were ice and snow. You could hear trains in the house, and if you opened the windows, the sea. The kitchen smelled of coffee and baking and something I realize now is garlic. There was a big rotting Victorian wrought-iron conservatory on the sunny side of the house. Full of ferns. Mum would work there in all seasons. She was a writer. I was scared of her computer when she got it. I thought it would pull me in through the screen into the grey nothingness behind. Dad was in money, somehow. I’m still not sure exactly what. They were big, my parents. Not physically. Emotionally. Big happiness. Big laughter. Big joy. Big anger. Big love. Big hate. They sent me to dancing lessons, and drawing. They came to my school nativity play. They stuck my paintings up on the fridge, they listened to me read my school stories, they watched me dance in the conservatory. They gathered shells with me on the beach when we walked Barney. They gave me driving lessons. They were okay about lending me the car. They tried to get me to call them by their Christian names. They tried not to dislike my boyfriends on principle. They were glad when I went to study art and video. They came to my degree show. They bought me champagne at my graduation, and again when I began my first job, and again when I moved out into my first flat.

“They died in a car crash in Wexford when I was twenty-two.”

The candle flames flickered; a draft, stolen in from the dark lough. “Stephen, you all right?”

I realized that my cheeks were wet. Silent tears, for the deaths of parents that never lived. For the childhoods we should have lived. The childhoods of encouragement and approval and attention and devotion, where the pain was sharp and cut cleanly, not gnawing and gangrenous. Who was Stephen O’Neill to say it was not real? Dara McGann was building the rest of her life around what was inside her skull, and what more can any of us know than what that inner cinema projects onto the bone screen?

A good life. Maybe a better life.

“Stephen? You okay?” She poured me a whiskey. Kerry had been a clear spirits drinker. I nodded. My breath shuddered. “Stephen. Do you really have to go back to Dublin tonight?”

Dara’s sofa was hard, her bed-throw thin and her cabin chilly but I slept like a god resting after creation. We had made it late over to the Big House the night before—eating was communal at Twelve Willows. A couple of vanloads had already gone into nearby Newtownards in search of nightlife, but enough stayed behind to scrape us together two platefuls of leftovers and a couple of bottles from the community cellars. The food was vegetarian, and very good even to an unreconstructed carnivore. After much Guinness, instruments were broken out, and we played and sang our way through the hoariest numbers in the Old-Folkies-in-Aran-Sweaters songbook. They’d do it at the drop of a hat when there were sojourners in, Dara told me. Picking my way over the frost back to her cabin, I realized a strange thing. I was happy. Food, company, music. The ancient tradition of hospitality of the Culdee mystics, whose ruined monasteries ringed this lough, was reborn in the new orders and communities. Simple gifts. Direct living. Being, without necessarily becoming. Becoming, in its own time, like the shoots of green willow. I envied Dara her new life and family.

Sundays in Twelve Willows were only worked if you wanted to. Dara didn’t. She took me out along the lough shore. The frost had settled hard in the night. Mist clung to the lough, glowing in the November sun, blurring the boundary between land and water. I shivered in my borrowed parka and Wellington boots and followed Dara’s footprints out across the sand.

“What was she like?” she asked when I caught up with her. “What did she do? Who was she?”

“Bitter. Compassionate. Wild. Then again, always afraid. Contradictory. Tremendous, terrifying mood swings. From incredible, devouring energy to absolute desolation.”

“Manic depressive?”

“No. I don’t think it was clinical like that. She had to stop herself. She couldn’t allow herself to go too far, achieve too much, be too free. Something had to pull her back to what she had been told all her life she was. Useless. Worthless. A waste of womb-space.”

“Happy?”

“What does that mean?”

“What did she do?”

“She was an animator. She was brilliant; these freaky, scratchy, creaky collages out of old toys and dolls and bits of bone and wire. Won awards. Only she was so brilliant she kept her job, when the depressions hit her. You kept that bit of her.”

“I was never brilliant. I would never have done anything like she did. Afraid to pay the price of brilliance. Stephen, what was her name?”

“Kerry.”

She did not repeat it, not even shape her lips silently around it. Dara walked on over the tide-rippled sand. In the distance a flock of geese grazed, black atoms in the bright mist.

“What about you, Stephen?”

“What about me?”

“Happy?”

“I have a job I hate; no friends, can’t get a woman, bursting for a shag, don’t get out, going nowhere. And I find my sister has changed into another person and does not even know who I am.”

“Who are you?”

“In here?” I touched my hand to the parka quilting. “I don’t know.”

“What would you like to be?”

The words came in a rush, like many wings.

“A poet.” I blushed instantly. Dara saw it and smiled.

“What’s stopping you?”

I knew the answer to that, but I was not brave enough to speak it. Dara continued.

“There are a thousand places like this where you’re allowed to be whatever you want to be. A thousand ways to be Stephen O’Neill.”

I stopped walking. Water oozed from the sandy impress of my borrowed boots.

“Dara. There’s something I’d like you to have. Something that was Kerry’s, that she left behind.”

I fumbled out the silver bird brooch. Dara looked at the tiny, exquisite thing in the palm of her hand.

“Transmigration of the soul,” I said. Curlews called, unseen in the mist.

“I could put you back,” Dara said. “Go to Feargal, put you back into my childhood. The white house with the black paint and the trees around it. The Victorian conservatory. Barney the dog. Cat the cat. Make you my brother.”

“Why?”

“I like you. You’re…you. My brother. I need you, I think.”

“Dara, I wouldn’t fit into your childhood. Stephen O’Neill comes from that other childhood. What you remember could never produce me.”

Dara winced. Her hand closed on Kerry’s silver bird.

“Consider us separated at birth,” I said. “Orphans, adopted into different families. Separate lives. Intimate strangers. Learning about each other. Because you aren’t Kerry. You are the sister I should have had, that I never knew.”

“Yeah,” Dara said. She opened her hand and looked at the brooch. Then, suddenly, stunningly, she drew back her arms and threw it out over the sands. I saw it glitter in the sun, but I did not mark where it fell. We walked back across the tide flats toward the low willow-covered hills, following our water-filled footprints. Behind us, the feeding geese rose up and passed over us in a long straggling skein, calling to each other as they flew north.

MNQ/2009.10.04

11,100 Words

From The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Fifteenth Annual Collection

Gardner Dozois, Editor