Ben Willets
Ireland
I.
"Hey, Fatso!" the boy shouted. I’d gotten myself lost looking for a bus station in a rough part of Dublin when I’d walked down a dead-end street by mistake. Everything was gray under the Irish sun: the sky, the road, the red-brick homes. A boy and girl were sitting facing each other on a Big Wheel in the middle of the road. "Fatso!" he brayed again, and the girl heaved with laughter. I tried to pretend I hadn't noticed them as I curved back toward the outlet, but I could feel my ears flush and caught myself tugging at my sweatshirt to hide my body. I forced myself not to walk faster, the children calling after me, chanting ‘Fatso’ like it was the name of their missing dog. Just before I ducked around the corner of a church, the boy started screaming wildly, but I couldn't understand what he was saying, his fury at my fatness made his English unintelligible.
I pulled out a city map to see where I was, my hands shaking. It was useless. I was nowhere, and even large streets in Dublin are poorly signed. I started walking, and a few minutes later I was standing at the only landmark I recognized: the Liffey, the mute river running through the middle of the city. I kicked the guard rail and a few flakes of black paint went flying. "Shit, shit, shit." I hurt my toe.
No one had called me fat in so long that I'd forgotten people might still see me that way. In family pictures of the beach at Lake Erie, my belly is swollen like a Somalian in a Christian Children's Fund commercial, only it wasn't edema from malnutrition. Whenever my parents weren't home, I raided the pantry, kicking and whooping, dancing through the kitchen with crumbs of Strawberry Newtons flying out of my mouth. I was anxious kid, a worrywart, my mother called me. Apart from watching television, eating was my only hobby, the only thing that soothed my nerves when I stumbled home from school exhausted.
I grew sedentary and fat. At dinner my older brother would sneer across the table, asking me if I wanted some bread with all that butter, as I gouged a thin white slice with a wad of margarine and a knife. My mother would place her hand on my wrist and ask me if I was sure I didn't want to scrape some of that off. My brother kept working on me until I cracked and ran upstairs, pounding the walls and screaming. Making fun of my weight was just one of the ways my brother got a rise out of me, but Junior High gave it special meaning. At a seventh grade choir concert in front of Drug Mart, the Northwood tenor section whispered insults between the songs. They made sure I knew how fat I was, how huge my breasts were for a boy, even for one as big as me. Titty-boy. "Smile!" Mrs. Boaz mouthed as she pressed play on the tape recorder, her fingers at the corners of her lips.
I began losing weight when I was a senior in High School. At first I thought it might be something serious, a tumor or some wasting disease, since I wasn't on a diet. I hadn't realized that I'd simply been eating less. There was no great revelation of personal truth that gave me the will to lose weight, like so many things in my life it seemed to pick up momentum and happen on its own. When I left for Ireland, I was one-hundred pounds lighter than I'd been at my heaviest, but the damage had been done. Seventh grade had left me shell-shocked, self-conscious and socially dysfunctional. I'd always thought that losing weight would at least give me more confidence, but it didn't. A decade of overeating had left my torso ribbed with stretch marks and now my body sagged with flabby skin. Under heavy clothing, my shrunken breasts were barely noticeable, but I could never relax at the beach, or even feel comfortable wearing a T-shirt in public. I lifted my deflated gut and let it flop: somehow this was worse than being fat. My mother said I should focus on the health benefits.
I wanted to rip that Irish boy's pitted little teeth out. I wanted to shake him until he told me I wasn't fat, and convinced me of it too. No one had called me fat in so long that I'd forgotten what it was like, how disarming it was to be openly insulted by a stranger. Now I remembered perfectly. I kicked the railing and swore again, watched as a man walked by and flicked his cigarette into the brown of the water. He leaned over and kissed the woman he was with, grinning; I grabbed my stomach with one hand: soft like risen bread dough. I sighed and propped my elbows on the rail, my sweatshirt bunching up beneath my book bag, hot and itchy, covered with sweat. Looking out across the water, I suddenly felt like being sick: On the prow of the antique sailing ship docked in the river upstream there was a mermaid. She had gigantic tits.
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"So, Ireland, huh?" my dad asked.
"That's right," I said.
It was raining in January two weeks before my trip, and my parents had lured me out of my room with dinner at the New Chinatown Buffet so they could grill me for the details. We squeezed into a booth under a string of rainbow colored Christmas lights the restaurant keeps up all year. I'd never traveled alone before, and I'd never been overseas; my parents wanted to know everything, and they knew I'd be more pliable over a steaming plate of wontons.
"What are you planning on seeing while you're over there?" mom asked.
"Uh, castles, ruins—that kind of thing." I said.
"How long do you think you'll be gone?"
"I'm not sure yet, the ticket is only one way. I want to backpack around Europe too while I'm over there."
My dad set down the bamboo skewer of barbecue beef he'd picked clean.
"And how are you going to paying for all this?" he asked.
"Well, I have the savings bonds that grandma gave me, I figure that'll be enough."
He picked up another skewer and eyed it pensively.
"Ben, how much thought have you really put into planning this?" he asked.
I stuffed half an egg roll into my mouth and grinned at what I'd done to avoid the question. The truth was I hadn't planned any of my time in Ireland. Whenever I thought about anything trip-related, I started to worry about all the things that could go wrong. I'd been trying not to think about Ireland at all because I knew the anxiety would keep me from going, and I had to start moving again.
It had been a year since I dropped out of Mount Union College, two weeks into the spring semester, hauling my TV down the Shields dorm stairwell to my mother's van. The Russian kid, Jascha, was outside smoking a cigarette in the snow. He propped the door open with a foot and gave me a puzzled look—I hadn't told him I was leaving, and if he'd asked, I wouldn't have told him the truth. He wasn't my friend, no one at that school was. I'd spent most of the last semester alone in the library listening to music to avoid my roommate. The loneliness overwhelmed me, I struggled to finish research papers, I had a nervous breakdown and I left.
The night I came back to Elyria, I stayed awake painting the mint-colored walls of my bedroom dark green so it wouldn't feel like coming home—like failure. I stood at the window for hours that night, leaning with my arms crossed on the sill. I imagined I was a tired old black woman from Chicago in the 20's waiting up all the hot summer night for her no-good jazz-sax husband to saunter home from the club so she could stop worrying. I tried to convince myself that I was OK to bide my time until I felt better, but now that I was on no clear path, I felt like I had to start moving right away or I'd never amount to anything.
I paralyzed myself with the pressure of deciding the course of my life, and spent the next three months holed up in my room, pinned under the weight of my own expectations. The empty days creaked forward as I sat slumped over reading doomsday websites: Global Warming, Peak Oil, Armageddon. From my window, I watched 747's circling Cleveland-Hopkins through the power lines, patting my head at the thought of coming anarchy. No point in doing something with my life if the world is going to end before I'm thirty. I lay stretched out on my bed, sadly picking at the wall until a swath of sickly mint shone through all the brighter, and I fell deeper.
My parents took me to see a Psychiatrist. He told me Attention Deficit Disorder was a major factor in my depression. ADD was responsible for the doldrums I fought through to start my schoolwork, the perpetual loop of negative thoughts that fueled my anxiety. With it out of the way, I could go back to school and mature into the career-oriented man everyone expected me to be.
Nothing he prescribed or said helped though, I wouldn't let it. Medication couldn't fix my problems for me, and I didn't want to spend the next ten years in therapy, cobbling together the scraps of this threadbare life—I wanted a new life altogether. I stopped going to my appointments, flushed my medication, and for one day that summer I nearly lost my mind to rage. I punched the dresser until my knuckles bled, kicked holes in the walls, and broke my television with a hammer. At sunset, I carried a samurai sword to the back of the house, and as the neighbors watched from their patio, I chopped down the morning glories climbing strings up to the gutters. The brittle dying vines bloomed for weeks after I'd cut them from the ground; their frothy juice rusted the steel.
It's night: I'm pacing in the yard behind the shed. I kneel next to gladiolas in the flower garden, crickets thrumming in the heat, and the cheap bamboo wakizashi singing on the grass beside me. Instead of hara-kiri, I hack through rows of blooming sunflowers until I nearly cut my hand, and throw down the knife tried to betray me.
Everything fell back into place that Thursday when the garbage men hauled away the things I'd broken. I took up my post at the window again, rubbing my forehead and marveling at how desolate the Post Modern world is, but somehow everything was different. I started walking places I'd never been before, stumbling through rough parts of town at two in the morning. I'd been too afraid of failing to even practice for my driver's license, so I walked. A few weeks later, I'd been every place in walking distance, and I retreated to my room despairing, but in it all I had the sense to realize that I was clay: a shapeless lump of clay waiting for the hands of the world to mold it, and I knew that nothing could reach me inside my room because the lonely isolation turned my spirit septic. I was too weak willed to change at home. I had to throw myself into a situation where I'd be completely on my own, where giving up wasn't an option. I had to go; further than I could walk.
My father set down his fork. "I don't think you should go if you haven't thought this through," he said, rubbing his fingers on a crumpled napkin.
Mom reached over and set her hand on mine: "We're just worried you'll get all the way over there and get stuck again, like you did at college."
I looked up from my plate and stared at my reflection in her glasses, my stomach sinking as my mind honed in on all the ways I wasn't ready—Shit, I didn't even have a suitcase.
"So, is this something that can wait, or what?" dad asked.
I bit my cheek to shake off the anxiety, and shook my head. No, no it couldn't wait.
"Well, why not?"
I poked at my pork fried rice with a pair of chopsticks. There'd been moments in my life when I felt balanced on the cusp of a revelation. That January had the feeling of one of those moments, and I was finally desperate enough not to let fear hold me back. I bought a ticket on an impulse to fly to Ireland in February, non-refundable so I couldn't back out. As the month waned, my anxiety over the trip grew, but with it, so did my conviction. It had been one year to the day since I'd dropped out of college, and now it felt like the pendulum was swinging back in my direction. I couldn't shake the feeling that this was Fate. I convinced myself that traveling overseas alone would force me to become a man: confident and self-reliant. It was going to fix my problems, transform me. From the crucible I would emerge rail-thin and dreadful, my notebook bristling with dangerous poetry and the sick, sad soul of Jack Kerouac in my blazing eyes—cast back into the world like an omen from a cup of bones, riding to Ohio on an avalanche wearing nothing but an Aran sweater and a tangled beard, a dark ascetic draped in modern flesh, smoking blackthorn shillelagh in my hand, white hair like Moses fresh from Sinai.
Sitting in that Chinese restaurant, I was utterly confident that traveling to Ireland was my destiny; that it didn't matter if I was ready or not because it was going to change my life in great and terrible ways. I decided I shouldn't tell my parents though, in case I was wrong. As they watched expectantly from across the booth, I started working at the sushi rolls piled on the plate in front of me, another before I'd finished the last, loading them into my mouth like shotgun shells, faster and faster, approaching the speed of light.
I coughed and a grain of rice landed on the table. My eyes watered. I reached for my glass.
"Too much wasabi."
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It’s two weeks later, and I'm on a rickety commuter flight from Cleveland to New York City, cramped on the left side of the plane. Two guys a few rows up got seated together by chance and now they're laughing and telling stories like old friends. Fuck them. The stewardess jabs at an oxygen mask with one of her press-on nails as a pre-recorded woman on the intercom describes what to do in case of a water landing, but I'm not listening. It's my first time flying, and I'm trying not to panic. In the nest of brochures on the seatback in front of me, there's a pamphlet warning about the dangers of Deep Vein Thrombosis. I spend the rest of the flight flexing my calves.
JFK International—I unzip my windbreaker for the first time in hours, and realize that I left home that morning without putting on deodorant. I've been sweating non-stop from nerves and the smell is ridiculous. I dig through my carry-on bag but all I have is a package of fresh-wipes my mother bought me—I think they're for your hands, or maybe your ass. I use a couple on my armpits in the bathroom, but now I stink like rank sweat and Aloe Vera. I try to call home to tell my parents that I'm alive, but the pay phone keeps eating my quarters, half-connecting us.
"I think it's Ben?" I hear my mother say like I'm at the bottom of a lake.
It's dark outside, an hour until my plane leaves, something about tsunamis on a TV by the gate.
I sleep for forty-five minutes of the six-hour flight from New York to Dublin, and they're the forty-five minutes the flight staff is serving dinner. I wake up hungry with a Charlie horse, want to walk it off, but an over-perfumed Irish stewardess is collecting trash and passing out sealed plastic cups of fruit juice in the aisle. I suffer in silence. The teenage girl sitting next to me is watching the in-flight movie, some new adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, and she has the headphones turned up so loud that I can clearly hear what's happening even though I’m trying to sleep. She doesn't know how easily I could wilt her; I fight the urge to lift my arms. Two hours later, four hours left. Three hours later, three hours left. She's asleep, everyone's asleep. Turbulence—seat-backs upright, everyone's buckling their safety belts. The horse-faced stewardess looks terrified. Oh well, I wasn't sleeping anyway.
10 a.m. in Dublin Airport—over thirty hours without sleep and nothing to eat but a couple of mealy cereal bars that stuck in my teeth. I 'queue up' to walk through Customs, my hands sweating, getting my passport damp. I want to lay down right there on the floor. My turn. The salt-and-pepper customs agent asks me brusquely how long I'm staying.
"Well, I'm not sure, probably a month,” I say, and clench up, immediately realizing my mistake. Twenty or thirty minutes later, everyone else has passed through customs, and the man lets me into Ireland.
"I'll give you two weeks, but I really shouldn't. If I'd come to your country without a return ticket, and only five-hundred euro in my pocket, and told them I wasn't sure when I was leaving"—he grimaces behind his moustache and doesn't finish his thought.
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I watched my traveler's backpack spin around the conveyor belt a few times before I picked it up, the only thing left on the line. I dragged it to a bench in the corner of the warehouse luggage pickup room, my legs wobbly and trembling. I forced them to shake harder. I wanted to start an earthquake in the airport so a falling beam would crush the customs agent's head, or a live wire would catch his sleeve and send him to the ground in fits, his moustache smoking. I wanted to sit there forever. I patted my forehead in distress like an old Korean washing woman who found a hidden pile of dirty dresses, and gave myself ten minutes before I absolutely had to get down to business.
At the Aer Lingus counter in the terminal upstairs, I wanted to take the next flight out, but my mother had told everyone she knew about my trip, and now I was trapped. The slick-haired employee in a turquoise blazer waited patiently as I considered my options: Weighing the stress of staying against the shame of having everyone in Ohio know I'd never made it past the airport, I bought a ticket to fly back twelve days later. Leaving now was what my parents expected, and even if I was miserable in Ireland it would be better than running home again with my tail between my legs.
A half an hour later, I was on the road, wedged between stacks of other people’s luggage on the double-decker Airlink bus. The gray morning traffic passed on the right as we stuttered down the left-hand lane through a major street construction area on the outskirts of Dublin. Someone had half-finished planting grass and rows of shrubbery on the mud embankments, straw and gravel cluttering the roadway. We approached a turnaround: the swarthy men standing on the other side of the bus clutched the overhead bar, and the driver slammed hard to the right and spun us through three-quarters of the circle, barely slowing until we shot out the other side. The obese man in front of me bounced in his seat and sputtered something in French about "the road," popping out monotone syllables like his cheeks were too fat for the words to flow properly. His wife didn't seem to be listening. I thought he might be talking to me.
Dublin—Baile Átha Cliath. O'Connell Street, the City Centre. I stumbled out into a crowd of city people waiting for their busses on a Saturday morning. I had reservations at a hostel called The Frederick. Twenty minutes later, the clerk checked me in on a primitive computer in the foyer. My bed was in a mixed-sex dorm up a flight of stairs, through a door, down a hall, up another flight of stairs and to the right; the disaffected clerk wasn't interested in showing me where it was, but he sighed and led me up anyway.
I stumbled twice on the way to my section; untacked orange carpeting bubbled up all over the floor. I stashed my luggage under my bunk and took a quick shower in a bathroom without a toilet; the door wouldn't shut all the way. Their website said towels were provided, but they weren't. I half-dried off with a hand towel I'd brought, parted my wet lump of thinning brown hair and grabbed my book bag as I walked out of the hostel into the streets of Dublin.
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Most young people come to Dublin to tour the Guinness Brewery, take whacky photos of their friends by the James Joyce statue and drink at pubs in Temple Bar until they're stupid. All I did was walk. I hadn't slept for a day and a half, but I couldn't stay in my hostel, waiting for my suitemates to stumble in on me at any moment. Besides, it was morning and if I slept then I'd be awake all night. So I walked. I walked to kill time because there's nothing else to do in a city when you're afraid to talk to people, with two weeks left before you can go home. I walked because it deprived me of the energy to regret the mistake I'd made in coming to Ireland.
I drifted through the city that Saturday in a new pair of sneakers, gray suede with two-inch soles, extra-wide for my box-shaped feet. They looked like moonboots, but the overeager salesman had said they'd make walking easier on my joints. My feet cramped up after ten minutes, and my heels slid around, raising blisters the size of sausage links. I kept walking. I didn't love anything I was seeing, I didn't even like it, but it didn't matter. I was buried in a fugue that Saturday in Dublin, my jet-lagged mind so flooded with sounds and images that anxiety had no room to grow. Without food, without sleep, my soul detached from my body and spilled halfway out into the gray afternoon, dragging along the pavement behind my moonboots as I walked. Hours drifted by, my senses dull and painfully acute, whole blocks of time missing, fragmented memories filed away that day in February by my starving brain:
A team of college boys are rowing under bridges in the Liffey, but the one with the bullhorn is silent; they’re rowing in perfect unison anyway. I marvel at a flowering cherry tree at Dublin castle, and nearly step in orange vomit on the parapet. In the Viking District, there's a full Guinness glass on a concrete bulwark, I consider taking it but decide the yellow-brown fluid might not be beer.
By a boarded-up warehouse in a broken-window part of town, a kid's blue plastic Jeep is stuck high on top of a wall, its pedal snared in a coil of barbed wire. Wondering how to get it down, I notice a grizzled woman nearby, smoking a cigarette on a rooftop balcony and hanging underwear out to dry. I want to take a photo, but I tell myself, "She's not an animal in a zoo" and walk away feeling proud of my humanity.
In a supermarket, I don't know what a fair price for kiwifruit is, but I can't stop laughing at Tony the Tiger on a box of "Frosties.” Ladies buying tampons give me sideways looks as I imitate Tony under my breath with an Irish accent, then German, French and Japanese, and buy a box of “Alpen” brand cereal instead.
Cutting through the shopping district at dusk, a Chinese girl materializes in the alleyway ahead of me, stepping from the wall into the gathering night like a specter in a crisp white apron. She turns and walks back through the wall—reappears. When I'm closer I see the blank, brown doorway, watch her lifting boxes of desiccated noodles, shouting something to her father—baba.
Back at the hostel, I can't sleep. My dorm mates appear: two females and a male, Australians. They greet me kindly but ignore me. I don't feeling like talking anyway. From my bottom bunk, I listen to them go on about life back home, some bloke is nailing some Sheila these days, with koala bear Queensland vegemite shrimp-on-the-barbie. It takes them forty-five minutes to tidy up before they go pub hopping at Temple Bar; they invite me along but don't want me to come. They leave, and I squeeze into an unlit wooden booth at the phone center across the street—I try to call my parents but it won't connect. I buy an overpriced sandwich at a 24-hour food mart and sit on a bench by the Liffey to eat it. A group of drunken twenty-something’s stop and sit nearby and now I'm too self-conscious, so I pretend I’m resting my feet. The thin-faced girl standing with her back to the river opens a bottle of soda and it foams all over her hand. The black-haired guy sitting next to me gestures towards her and says something through a toothy smile, but I'm not sure he's even speaking English. I shake my head knowingly and laugh.
Back at the hostel, I can't sleep. I'm too hot and I can't wash off the stink of rank sweat and aloe. The street outside is busier now at one in the morning than it was at noon: diesel engines roaring, shifting gears. The Australians come back sometime after two a.m. and make a lot of noise—sorry mate, we have to pack. Five guys who say they're soldiers in the French Army are in the section next to ours. They stumble in ten minutes later like shit-faced frat brothers, putting each other in headlocks and running into walls. They'd gone drinking with the Australians, but they'd invited themselves along and the Australians 'accidentally' got separated. Two of them walk over, feigning dejection. The short one won't stop talking to the blonde Australian girl; it's obvious what he wants. His thin-eyed buddy is too drunk to care; he's sprawled out on the floor in a sepia patch of streetlight, laughing or gagging, I can't tell which. I'm silent in my bed, the dead-ache of overworked muscles dropping back as my body tenses. The short one won't leave, he says, why can't he stay in her bed tonight? The Australian boy tries to end the confrontation politely—they have to get up early so please could he leave? Five minutes later, a toilet struggles to flush, gurgles, flushes again. The other soldiers sound like they've discovered something of great interest, and the thin-eyed one drags the short one back to find out what it was.
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When I sat up the next morning, I slammed my forehead on the metal frame of the bunk above me. It was nine a.m. The Australians were gone and so were the soldiers, and downstairs the apathetic desk clerk was wearing the same damn sweater he'd worn the day before. I only had reservations in Dublin for the weekend, so I'd have to catch a bus on Monday morning. I went calling at the station on O'Connell Street, but the woman behind the counter told me they only sold passes for city busses. She gave me detailed directions to the proper station, the Busáras which had departures to the whole of Ireland. I checked my city map after the automatic glass doors sealed behind me with a hiss: I only half-remembered her directions but I could tell they were wrong. I decided to follow them anyway.
After twenty minutes of walking downhill through a phalanx of red brick B&Bs, I was certain she'd sent me in the wrong direction, but I kept walking. I've always taken a great deal of satisfaction in making people feel like shit for giving me bad advice when they should know better. I let myself get lost or into all sorts of trouble by doing what they've said, only in hyperbolic proportions, going well beyond the point where reason or fear tell normal people to stop. Later on, when I confront that person, I act betrayed, then fall over prostrate and plead ignorance when they tell me I should have used some common sense. Of course, I know from the start that their advice is flawed, that's why I follow it, pushing on in righteous indignation to underscore for them just how wrong they were. Calling people on their mistakes is a hobby of mine because I want everyone else to feel as inadequate as I do.
I squinted my eyes, thinking of the trouble I was going to cause for that woman at the O’Connell Street station. I'd demand to see the manager at the Busáras when I finally got there, take off my fat shoes and sweaty socks right there in the lobby and show him the blisters on my feet "all because that woman sent me in the wrong direction!" I was still getting myself deeply lost, rehearsing what I’d say, when I passed a gray stone school, a gray stone church, and followed a freshly-paved cul-de-sac to the end where a boy and a girl lay in wait, their thin-lips bristling with fat jokes, Scylla and Charibdis on a plastic tricycle eager to devour my illusions.
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II.
Flipping through my travel guide in January, I whispered to myself in wonder, "I'm going to be like Bashō, aren't I?" Matsuo Bashō, the haiku master of Edo Japan who traveled west along the Narrow Road on a pilgrimage, waylaid by flaring hemorrhoids and writing poems about pissing horses. I was going to cross the Irish countryside on foot, writing haiku as I went, obtaining signatures in hostels like stamps at Buddhist temples in Shikoku, praying at the free-food shelf and contemplating the Zen significance of dirty limericks scrawled on bedposts by other travelers. I scoffed at the distance between villages on the map, "36km? Well, I can do that; a kilometer is what? half a mile?" If I was too tired to make it to the next town, I could spend the night outside: adrift on a fog bank in the moor; on a bed of wildflowers in the Connemara; curled up in a sea birds nest on chalky cliffs. I'd even packed a roll of toilet paper in case I couldn't find a bathroom. I was going to devour the Irish countryside, poet-pilgrim of standing stones, backpack grinding against my shoulder blades as I treaded forsaken back-roads West a thousand miles across Ireland.
I pinched the fat on my stomach hard enough to make me wince. It was my second day in Dublin, and I was standing by the Liffey brooding over the boy who'd called me fat. I replayed the scene in my head, scourging myself for being so easily hurt; for being so deluded that I’d really believed coming to Ireland could fix my problems. I kicked the rail again remembering Bashō and the roll of toilet paper I’d brought, crushed flat by luggage in the belly of the plane. I hadn’t even unpacked my travel journal, to say nothing of writing in it. After just two days in Ireland, I was ready to collapse—my mind spinning downward as my knees creaked under the weight of my fat like it was wet snow. Nevermind a journey along the lonely western road, I wasn’t sure I could’ve made it back to my hostel.
I spat into the water, red-faced with shame and anger: I hated this place for defeating me so easily. I wanted to raze Dublin to the ground, climb over the railing and crash down on the river with a thunderclap, casting a net of lightning across the city, coruscating through pothole alleys and setting all the Irish booze on fire, pubs in Temple Bar exploding like popcorn kernels until the streets swelled with broken glass.
I let go of the railing and forced myself to walk away to keep from jumping in. Saturday, I'd waded through the city in my moonboots like Neil Armstrong in an opium den, but I landed hard now as I walked, like I had no shoes, no feet, nothing but wobbly bone stumps dripping blood as I ground them on rough concrete. I lurched blindly South through the streets of Dublin, vaguely searching for that boy who'd clipped my wings, knowing that I'd never find him, and if I did he'd howl at my fatness again, and I would flee. I had forgotten about finding the bus station, I couldn’t think of anything but the cruelty of children and the city in flames. Suddenly, I noticed that the cityscape had changed: the buildings were modern, tall and claustrophobic, with little of the brick and stone of old Dublin. I slowed to a stop as it began to mist. There was no one else on the street, the first time I'd felt alone in days. A dark metal structure loomed to my left, with a sign in front, and at the end of a line of words I saw but didn't read: University College, Dublin.
Sean LaSalle told me he'd tried to kill himself during his first year at the University College, over Christmas Holiday at his parent's house in bumfuck County Mayo. An overdose of antidepressants, he’d said—I wasn't sure I believed him. Sean and I had been internet buddies for a couple of years, messaging each other in the dead hours of night to share music and complain about the pointlessness of life. When I told him I was planning a trip to Europe, he said he had two extra tickets to a Belle & Sebastian concert in February, and that I should come then. It was decided that he and I were going to become the best of friends, haunting the quays and back alleys of Dublin, conning beer-addled tourists out of their hard-earned euros, making snarky comments about other passengers on the bus, listening to albums as we headed west like Sal and Dean in On the Road. In the end though, Sean burned more like a birthday candle than a roman candle—he wasn’t mad, or clever, or even very interesting; he was just a nihilist, tarnished by cynicism, and he was too afraid to meet me.
Sean stopped returning my emails a few weeks before my flight, but I'd been too preoccupied with anxiety to give his disappearance a second thought. Standing by that sign in Dublin though, I couldn't think of anything else. I told myself it didn’t matter, that I shouldn’t care because I’d never really even liked Sean—I’d only been friends with him because I was lonely—but after the past two days I was too weary to fight my perverse imagination. The surface of my mind churned, picking through the last few conversations I’d had with Sean, trying to dissect the remains of our failed friendship. I couldn't shake the feeling that he was avoiding me on purpose, that this was rejection. My mind honed in on that suspicion until I was certain Sean hated me. Now that he was back on his medication, he must have realized how pathetic I was. Maybe he'd never liked me in the first place.
I had to know for sure what happened, I had to track down Sean and make him tell me. I leered at the sleek metal sign, mesmerized. This was the right part of the city to be Sean's school, but I didn't think I'd traveled so far south, and none of the nearby buildings looked like they belonged to a university. As the last of my control sloughed off into the Irish mist, I tried to force myself to walk away, but I was far too focused on those words, University College, Dublin, and once my untamed mind starts running through scenarios, it keeps going until it wears itself out, bucking with nostrils flared as it gallops through some imagined future.
I pitched and swayed in the middle of the street, my arms crossed and my eyes unfocused. I had to stay in Dublin for the next two weeks; stay there until my money ran out. I'd grow my beard and become a pan-handler shambling filthy through the college streets, shaking wildly with DTs and my off-beat tambourine. Three months later, I'd see a kid who looked like a care-worn Harry Potter pushing through the door to a university apartments, and my knees would creak as I leapt in the air, hooting and hollering, "By golly, if it ain't Sean LaSalle!" clicking my feet mid-air like a gold prospector, and he'd turn red and rush off as students crowded around to marvel at my tears of joy and the stench of urine on my burlap clothes.
I'd stay in Dublin until Sean and I crossed paths by chance, so he'd know I never cared enough about our friendship to look him up. I'd become king of all the low-life hipsters, take up tea smoking and join in the lazy pub crawl every Friday night so I might run into him. I’d pick up the mandolin in my free time, record creepy low-fi folk songs in an abandoned warehouse and become a cult-celebrity in the Dublin underground—Sean would hear about my music and know what a great life I'd made in Ireland.
One night a year later, on a bus coming back from a hookah bar, explaining the dark truth of "Ring around the Rosie" to a few of my devoted friends, I'd see Sean sitting by himself, walk over and slap him on the back, roaring, "Sean, buddy! What are the odds?!"
I heard laughter in the distance. In the corner of my eye, two middle-aged women turned onto the street a block away, speed-walking in jogging suits. They smiled as they approached, greeted me in pleasant tones. I tried to say something back, but I could only stare through them sadly as they passed, Bohemian-hobo-loser that I was, neck-deep in my future life.