Fishing in Beirut

Frank began walking naturally. Unaided by the crutch he would journey around the block, moving at a pace that facilitated correct walking. If he went too fast he regressed to a form of hobbling, but at a slow gait the muscles seemed to work properly. His ankle clicked and protested.
The dogs sometimes accompanied him, in daylight or the evening, and all the houses were festooned and joyful, with Christmas lights, Santas, mistletoe. What they call the holiday season.
In his huge security jacket and his woolly hat and gloves, Frank trudged through the snow tracks delicately. One of the dogs disappeared momentarily, only to re-emerge covered in snow. A car skidded.
In his room Frank warmed himself, rubbing his hands and rolling his neck. He smelt chicken roasting. Rachel and Jack were in the kitchen, Jack banging on a pot, and Frank listened quietly, feeling at ease.
He took the garage route to the basement, entering by the side door, and had a smoke amongst the gloominess. There were mice in the walls.
Their presence had been detected three days previously, when Frank noticed teeth marks in stored Irish chocolate bar wrappers, and had then seen three of them, scurrying across the floor. Dan was out buying poison. Frank looked around carefully, but knew it was unlikely he’d see them again. Their hiding places were infinite.
He stubbed out the joint, but remained seated. He took in the sense of this room. With his eyes closed and his head lolling, he experienced its parameters, sonically, spatially. He heard a dog padding.
“You should go out and get a Yank bird,” said Dan at dinner, and Rachel pretended to scold him with her eyes. “Fly the flag for Ireland.”
Frank smiled in politeness, feeling that this would be a tricky proposition, but unable to deny the fact his body was requesting it. Her nationality would have made no difference. He would have lain her down and turned her around, but his mind was snapped out of this when Dan hit him with a tea towel.
“Finish your chicken or I’m giving it to the dogs.”
Frank washed the dishes with the CD player spinning. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. He saw them in Berlin, nearly saw Tom Waits too. He pushed suds from a Celtic-patterned hotplate.
The kitchen in the evenings had become a special time. He liked washing the dishes with music playing. His mind would drift and float from him, memories, imaginings. Thoughts like slow ponderous beings.
Tonight he was thinking of Dublin, the kebabs and the piss and the puke. Excessive smoking and drinking. Brit-esque slappers in skirts. It was English there, different in token form only. The lager, the aggression, the frantic coupling with strangers in the streets. He’d done that too, like anyone.
He finished the dishes and went to his room, then to the basement to smoke. The bag was certainly diminishing, nearly 300 dollars in his lungs. It was sweet though. It was sweet and chilled and soft melancholic, and slowing. He stretched his arms upward.
“Ah sure now, ceilings are pretty cool.” He sent this remark to the wood beams. He got a can of Old Style from the fridge, and cracked it open with a groan. Then he guzzled from it.

Jack stood up by the fireplace. Terminator 2 was on television, and he rose shakily near the dormant grate. Frank watched him curiously, feeling sure this was the very first time – an unassisted standing being accomplished. Jack waved his arms, shouted, and then folded neatly onto his bottom, like a soft internal implosion, or a tower being felled. “Silence,” ordered Schwarzenegger.
Rachel and Dan were out, and Frank the babysitter was drinking a beer. He smiled at Jack. There was a crash on the screen and Jack’s head swivelled, his eyes as wide as saucers, but not containing fear. It was just instinctive.
“That was a crash,” said Frank solemnly. Jack watched him and listened. “There was a big crash, and Schwarzenegger said ‘affirmative.’” Jack gurgled and coughed.
“This is a remarkable transition the Terminator has made,” opined Frank. “It is akin to Hannibal crossing the Alps.” Jack crawled over closer, whispering utterances to himself.
“If you cast your mind back to the first film,” Frank continued, “he was resolutely, indeed indubitably, an evil character. The truth wasn’t in him. Now however, we can observe a startling transformation, as he hereby battles to save the life of the one he was initially sent to destroy.”
He drank from the beercan.
Jack was well accustomed to this silliness, and, although he didn’t understand any of it, appeared to be enjoying himself immensely. He gripped the edges of the couch. Frank picked him up and they sat together, Jack chewing a toy. Arnie had split for commercials.
“I’m going to be leaving soon,” said Frank. I’m going to be going away.”
Jack went asleep in his arms later, and Frank watched his innocent face, his sighs and his nasal breath-flow. His mind didn’t know of sadness. What would his life hold, what would Frank’s, and if they ever met again, would the sleeping child remember?
Was he dreaming?
Frank turned off the TV set. The walls were painted yellow, but a warm and vivid hue, and he took in the room slowly, deliberately. Jack shifted for an instant. There was pain in Frank’s body, and they had said there would be forever. There was breakage and deformation. He looked at this sleeping boy on his chest, and smiled at the knowledge of his energy. His boundless, shouting glee.
When Dan and Rachel came home the dogs would start barking. Jack would probably wake for a moment, and then sleep again. Would wake without knowing he had done so. One of the dogs ventured over, silent and wagging its tail, and Frank patted the soft dark head, two loving pure eyes regarding him. The deep eyes of dogs.
He closed his mind and relaxed. To his sensations. He was almost holding himself. He almost had his arms around his own sleeping form, protecting it from everything, everywhere. But there are no winners in that game. The barrier of protection can block good as well as ill, and if you aren’t receptive, how can you receive? He felt a pulse throbbing.
The arrival of Dan and Rachel was imminent. It was the future, then the past. Frank sat on the couch with the baby in his arms, the dogs alongside him, and his history like a trail. He had a life to live through.

Frank’s cousin Paul went to heaven. Frank and Danny took a pew. There were great uncles, distant aunts, second cousins, and crying girls. An Irish-American dynasty. Frank had met Paul occasionally, as a child at weddings and births, when Paul had flown to Dublin. He’d been kind and simple and strange.
Frank felt some pain in his ankle. He gripped the crutch. He was morphined for the morning, gazing serenely at the rituals and robes. Dan dropped his keys and they clattered.
Afterwards, groups gathered and whispered, intoning gravely in a hush. Efforts were made to ignore the inappropriate comments of children. Frank met his relatives randomly, some known, others not, the rest half-recognised from pictures. One of them mentioned his sideburns.
Driving home, they stopped off for fast food, the burger and the wrapper indistinguishable and one. Dan outlined the family tree. The history of the bloodline on Frank’s mother’s side was long in Chicago and New York. Ancient ancestors. Frank listened with interest, conjuring up images of the dust bowl and before, uncaring of whether this was relevant or not. The harshness was romantic.
There were alcoholic layabouts and eyes filled with tears. Journeys across country in the snow. There were marriages that were scorned and religions renounced, and Frank thought of uncles in sharp pinstripe suits. Were they driving the Ford Model-T?
Back on the road the highway was clear, and Frank found a station for the religious right. They listened momentarily to the brimstone and bile, until suddenly it wasn’t funny anymore. The silence was better.
“So why did you come here?” Frank asked.
“For the change.”
They drove on, and Dan continued.
“I was fed up in London, with the people and my job, and when I finally got my green card, that was it. There was no hesitation.”
Frank rotated his ankle.
“And did you sort out a flat?”
“I stayed with my cousin, Maire. She was at the funeral too.”
“For long?”
”Yeah, for a while. My first flat, I shared it with Rachel.”
The American landscape flashed by as they went, all concrete and build-up, with spaces between. Big cars and restaurants. The El passed alongside, as they came up towards home, and Frank heard the rattle, though his window was closed. The track shaking.
They told Rachel what happened, in the living room of the house, and Jack sat on her knee, listening. His eyes moved from one to the other. He dropped his spoon and peered down at it curiously. It was gone and that was fine. One of the dogs shuffled over to inspect it, wondering if it was food and leaving when it wasn’t. It sneezed as it left.
They drank in the basement in the cool afternoon, and Dan told a story of when Paul took him out. Some dive-bar on the southside. It had been winter time, snowing, and Paul had been drunk. All the world drunk on nothing – that’s what Chicago felt like sometimes. Dan finished the story.
At night Frank walked the dogs. He limped around with the crutch and a can of Old Style, and they padded ahead in the moonlight. The streets were a dream then, in the darkness and peace, and the trees in front gardens were lonely and strong. There was magic.
The evenings were still grand, but they’d soon grow much colder. Then freezing. He had hats and gloves in his wardrobe. He’d been warned before coming, pack plenty that’s warm, and he’d done so obediently.
All of the houses were fronted with wood. Porches. Hanging in these was a lantern or light, and some held a wicker chair or similar. It was old-fashioned. Frank moved by slowly, stopping if needed, and studied them. He was happy here in this winter world.
As he eased round the block, he came to the bridge, and stood solitary upon it. The El passed underneath. He made out a large group of young people within, students no doubt, on their way downtown for drinking. He finished his can, dropping it in a bin.
The dogs breathed beside him, and the train sound diminished till the silence returned. It was gorgeous. Frank on the bridge was the lord of the nightworld, the sentry of silence and of being alone.
“Come on,” he whispered. “We’re going back to the house.” They bounded ahead into stillness. He followed in wonder, alive to it, a man with his dogs and with sweet nothing else. This was God-given. The morphine in his bloodstream was slow and at rest, like a spirit level.
The lights on that bridge were like nothing on earth. From the Sears tower, and the Hancock. Massive, looming skyscrapers, street lights in unending rows. A helicopter. Back in the house, Frank went to the basement, and with nobody down there he rolled up a joint. At the bar counter.
He drank Ten High Kentucky bourbon before sleeping. The ice melted into the glass. The lamp by his bedside could be brightened by degrees, touches on the stem adding wattage if required. It brightened, brightened further, then turned off.
He was reading a story about memory. He was melancholic from the subject and the drink. He thought of Berlin, of his life and his leaving, and put down the glass on the locker to his right.
With the room dark once more, the world totally emptied. It was sealed off and separate. Frank closed his eyes and rotated his ankle, and a sharp line of pain shot right up through his knee. He felt tingling, then nothing further.

Frank was holding the baby. His name was Jack and he was seven months old. He waved his arms and shouted with joy. His smile showed a tooth in the gum base.
“Ah sure go on outta that now,” said Frank, amusing them both with the spiel. “What would you be talkin’ about at all at all?”
Jack bounced and tried to look at several things at once, and then Frank put him down, and he sat there eyeing a soft ball. Frank procured it for him. The sun was coming in and stretching on the wooden floor, the American street half visible through the blinds. A pick-up truck trundled by, going the wrong way down a one-way street. Frank laughed.
“When are you going to start walking around?” asked Frank. Jack smiled, and handed him the ball. One of the dogs arrived and sniffed randomly, or perhaps not randomly at all. Frank picked Jack up and took him outside, and they admired berries in the front garden while a squirrel scampered up a tree. Jack turned his head toward the movement.
“Ga,” he said. Frank nodded solemnly. “Ga, ga, ga, gaaaa!”
There was a church a few doors down, ‘the opposition’ his uncle joked. Anglican or Methodist or some form of Protestant worship. The wine just stayed wine for them there. Frank and Jack watched a woman enter, Jack’s fingers catching on Frank’s shirt. Frank felt a stab in his ankle.
The crutch was not needed to walk in the house. It was for downtown, or the shop. If there was no tobacco, no papers, and he was gonna have to eat the grass or do without. If the dogs needed walking in the evening.
Jack wriggled and struggled, and Frank placed him on the ground. He picked at a daisy with interest, muttering some sound to himself. Frank stepped onto the pavement. The street was dead straight in each direction, tree-lined, peaceful. The houses were pretty and low. It was funny to be here, to be in America in daylight, a natural clearness in the October sun. It was funny and benevolently strange.
He felt the morphine buzz, a sealing warmness, and looked up at the sky as a plane flew overhead. The house was right under the flightpath, and this was exciting and nice. The flat in Berlin had been too.
Jack shouted something, and Frank turned around to observe him. Jack was holding the daisy. Frank picked up a leaf and threw it at him, and Jack watched it float toward his face, making no attempt to intercept. His eyes studied.
“That was a leaf,” said Frank. Jack laughed, gurgling.
“That was a leaf that I threw at you.”
Frank wandered over to a bush in the garden, and Jack watched him walk as he did so. A man on a bike cycled past. There was a wrapper or packaging entangled in the branches, a green and navy emblem torn and frayed. A fly crawled along it.
“Did you put that wrapper in the bush there?” said Frank. He had walked back to where Jack was. “Did you put that wrapper in the bush?”
Jack looked at him sweetly, aware that these questions were playful. He understood tone and mock-tone.
“Did you put that wrapper in the bush there?” asked Frank again, bending down and tickling Jack’s ribcage. “Cause if you didn’t, who did?”
He picked him up then, and they went inside.

In the evening, Frank and his uncle had a beer in the basement. This was the set routine. They sat at the old bar on barstools, studying the chessboard by lamplight. Frank’s days were numbered.
His queen was gone, a bishop too, and all of his enemy’s pieces had cordoned off routes of attack. He moved forlornly.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” said Danny. “I reckon I might have you if you do.”
Frank placed it back.
“I think you’ve probably got me anyway.”
“I suppose that it’s lookin’ that way.”
They played on for a while, and Dan won. He cracked his knuckles in victory.
“ I better go upstairs for a bit.” He finished his can and left.
Frank looked around, at the couch and the exercise clutter. A stationary bike and a treadmill. He stepped up on the treadmill and started walking at a low setting, loosening his ankle and making it warm. He liked the sensation at this pace.
There was a mirror over the far side. He watched himself, walking, and he thought he looked so thin. His forehead was creased into a frown. Consciously relaxing it, he realised how it was always like this now; furrowed, tight. He loosened his elbows and shoulders.
A dog padded on the floorboards overhead. He heard the scratch of its nails. Then the other one followed, more a scamper or a run, and Frank stretched out his arms, feeling tension ease.
In bed he lay with his discman. The comfort of low Leonard Cohen. Show me slowly what I only know the limits of, dance me to the end of love. He touched a sweet tear on his cheek.
The room was bathed in Chicago blue. His crutch held the wall. `He sat up and turned off the sound, and there was perfect, perfect silence. He put the headphones on the quilt. The streetlight in the laneway flickered outside, leaning over the chain link fence of the garden. The spirits could pass unobserved.
Frank watched all this stillness, this Hopper tableau brought to life. What joy in a pure lack of motion. The light died, went out, extinguished. It ceased. Frank and the world did not move. He yawned suddenly, and a delivery van pulled up. Brown. UPS. The driver got out with a package, and briefly entered a building. Then he drove off again.
The night had become early morning. Frank felt some pain in his leg. He leaned over for two codeine tablets, and swallowed them with water. The taste of the water was stale.
He lay back down and pulled the covers. The discman was next to his head. The headphone wire touched his neck, but he pushed it away with his eyes closed. A bird broke the silence with song.
Soon his uncle would let the dogs out. They would chase down the steps out the back. Frank was partitioned from the back door by curtain, and he heard it open every morning, and felt air. When the dogs went to piss it made him have to.