Fishing in Beirut

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.

The leaf is the tree, and the tree is the earth. But still they are separate. Frank is in Grant Park, with his crutch beside him. Skyscrapers lunge upward in the downtown city hub. Clouds scurry to avoid them. Frank is in a morphine haze, the medicine supplied by doctors to combat dreadful pain.
To his left is Lake Michigan, to his right the Windy City. Around him trees and grass. It’s morning. He walks for as long as he is able these days, and has taken to sitting in this park. It’s near water. Homeless men drift about, and sometimes they talk to him or wave. If only the pretty girls would do the same.
The previous Tuesday down on Washington, he’d given five dollars to some woman. A beggar, a bum, whatever the term. She could have been forty or eighty. God bless you son she’d said to him, his eyes moistening from a draft. His ankle throbbed with pain.
He has memorised a number of intersections, battling to get to grips with the sprawling city grid. Street names are useless, it’s intersections that give bearings.
His body feels light and tingling; he has more drugs for when it doesn’t. Morphine, codeine, whiskey. The prescriptions for the first two are legal and correct, but the dosage for the third is one he wrote himself. The sweet Kentucky cure.
A leaf blows directly in front of him, skipping. It settles, then takes off again. He follows it with his eyes, his gaze resting on his discarded shoes and socks, placed on the grass in the sunshine. He slowly moves his ankle.
He is plagued by ideas of a perfect alternative life. He gets lost in constructions and conceits. Other places, perfect people. Things hidden. Maybe it’s just the injury, the morphine and being alone. Maybe it’s just today. He feels that in his life he can never say goodbye, can never leave to drift what is meant to float away. His fingertip rubs his forehead.
A group of school children walk past. Boys and girls, laughing pushing, perhaps five or six years old. That was Frankie one time. He clicks his tongue in disgust at this mawkish sentimentality, drugs and pain or not. He puts his shoes and socks on.
Walking back across Madison Avenue and into the city, he feels a shudder at the corner of Monroe and State. His right leg buckles for an instant. His arm grips his crutch, his entire torso leaning, shaking against it. Somebody stares in alarm.
Frank stands still, recovering from the shock and relaxing his muscles. It’s cooler here, with skyscrapers blocking the light. He sees a man get off a bus, his left leg severed at the knee. It makes him feel pathetic, and snaps away his self-pity.
He hobbles down the steps of the subway station, passing through the ticket barrier. The blue line will take him to Jefferson Park. There are crowds on the platform, and he’s self-conscious and totally alone. He feels that his jacket is ridiculous.
The train comes and they shuffle aboard. No vacant seats of course, and he hopes he won’t fall and embarrass himself. Somebody would get up if he asked them, but he wants this even less.
It rattles and shakes through the tunnels, leaving the Downtown area and emerging overground. It’s northwest all the way. Soon he will be home, in tree-lined squirrel suburbia. His aunt and uncle’s house. A deaf man passes out key rings, as the train lets off at Belmont. Four more stops to go.