Michael’s mind had always been prone to wander—a cause for rebuke from his priestly schoolmasters. His mental rambles were slow and leisurely; he could spend an afternoon pondering the way the light played on the surface of a stream, or devising a more scripturally illuminating homily about the woman who meets Our Lord on the road to Emmaus, or imagining a host of scenarios in which he and Eileen Casey were caught in a rainstorm and forced to take refuge in the Cooneys’ barn. He could work through all the possible directions that such an episode could lead, even though thoughts of Eileen were constant reminders of the weakness of the flesh and made up a sizable percentage of his weekly confessions. Often it was only the cane across the back of his neck that called a stop to such voracious flights of fancy.
But he could no longer sustain such efforts. His mind had become like a hummingbird that bobbed from this bloom to that; he sipped but never drank too deeply. It was another by-product of whatever had befallen him, one that he hoped would fade in the days or weeks or months ahead. But this ongoing visitation had him worried that rather than ascending into better health he was spiraling into the abyss.
He marked time this way: Before the Noise and After the Noise. The line between the two epochs of his life was a ragged gash in his memory. The Noise had obliterated his sense of time on either side of the event. On the border of the Before side, he was in a church, he remembered that much, with his brother Francis (he had awoken one morning on board the ship with a full and sudden knowledge that the Ginger-Haired Man was his brother). At the back of the church stood a man in dark blue serge—a uniform, it seemed—and throughout the Mass, Francis would look over his shoulder at the man, who never once sat or knelt. Incense rose from the altar. There was a boy in a cassock and surplice, and an old priest with a purple stole. The After period began in fragments: Francis’s face streaked in black; the ceiling of an automobile with the blue sky edging through the windows; the smell of brackish harbor water momentarily swept aside by a gust of sharp, sweet salt air. These events raced by in a whoosh that filled his ears, like the tail end of a comet that had smashed his life in two. He wasn’t so much deaf as deafened, as if he were subjected to the endless hollow moan of a conch shell the size of a castle. He had tried to speak but could not tell what sounds, if any, came out of him. He tried to read but the letters refused to make sense. He could see them just fine, but felt like he was stuck in the moment right before the symbols could be deciphered, each word forever on the tip of his tongue. Writing posed a similar hurdle. As he moved the pen, the ink flowed onto the page and never stopped moving. It was animated, restless, and he hadn’t yet found a way to fix the letters—letters he could not read—in place.
Michael was snapped from his reverie by a sound. The old man cleared his throat and before Michael could react—the Noise was coming, he was sure of it—the old man spoke. “Are you going to stay in bed all day?” The man’s voice was scratchy, as if from disuse. He cleared his throat again.
“Are you going to scream at me?” Michael said.
“Do you want me to?”
“No. But that’s what you do.”
“I hardly think so.”
“But—on the boat.”
“I was speaking then, just as I am now. Perhaps you weren’t ready to hear me.”
Michael considered this. He rapped his knuckles against the headboard. No sound. “So why are you the only one I can hear?”
“I don’t know,” the old man said. “But you are apparently the only one who is aware of my presence. Here and on the ship, I pass unseen and unheard.”
Michael sat up fully in the bed. Someone had dressed him in pajamas. He didn’t remember dressing himself before bed, and now that he thought about it, he didn’t remember arriving at this new place. There was the boat, then the car, the city streets, the light glancing off the windows on the tall buildings, the lurching stop-and-start of the car in traffic—more cars than Michael had ever seen—and then here he was.
“May I ask a question?” Michael said.
The old man raised his eyebrows. He was open to questions.
“Are you a ghost?”
The old man looked startled, as if the thought had never occurred to him. He held up his hands, examining his palms and the liver-spotted skin that lay creased along his knuckles. He stood and crossed the room to where the morning sun backlit the drapes. Through a gap where the drapes parted was visible a broad swath of green, the tops of trees, and an expanse of lawn that stretched into the distance. The old man gazed out the window for a moment before turning to face Michael. “I’m not comfortable with that term,” he said. “But I think that’s the simplest answer.”
Something about the way sunlight hit the man’s face connected the pieces in Michael’s jigsaw memory. He had seen this man before—not in person, but somewhere. It had been a photograph in a newspaper. A large picture, black-bordered and surrounded by type.
“Hold on, now,” Michael said. “Are you Mr. Yeats, the poet?” William Butler Yeats—Nobel laureate, spiritualist, and one-term senator of the Irish Free State—had died in France in January. His picture had been in all of the papers.
The old man seemed to consider this question with great seriousness. He looked out the window at the riot of green and the brick-and-stone towers that picketed each side of the park. “I was,” he said as if astonished by this news. “And now I am again. Or perhaps I have always been—it’s a difficult question.”
“One more,” Michael said. “If you don’t mind.”
Yeats shrugged.
“What are you doing here?”
“That,” Yeats said, “is a question I cannot answer.”
FRANCIS KEPT PROMISING Martin a big surprise, but already, every step on the way was like something out of a dream: His brother shows up out of nowhere and tells him that his father is dead, and suddenly they are in a taxi bound for the Plaza Hotel, all while Martin in his exhaustion was teetering between drunkenness and incipient hangover. With each city block, the soft hands of gin and vermouth loosened their tender hold on his head and surrendered him into the rough grip of a vindictive headache.
A white-gloved hand, a sleeve swaddled in gold braid—this is what Martin saw when they came to a halt under the Plaza’s dark blue awning. He stepped out onto the sidewalk and peered up at the stairs leading to the front doors, each flanked by a man in the hotel’s gold-and-blue livery. He wished he’d had a few more hours of sleep, wished he’d shaved before they left the Bronx, because he must look like a man who’d been through the wringer. But here at least he could be grateful for the quality of his clothes; these were not doors that a man entered without a high gloss on his shoes and a knife-edged pocket square. He gave his hat a rakish tilt, hoping to make himself appear less like riffraff and more like some dissolute playboy returning to his bed after a night in one of the city’s private casinos.
As Martin prepared himself for this masquerade, Francis gave him a shove. “Step to it,” he said. “And for Christ’s sake, mind your manners. They all think I’m a feckin’ peer.” All that time in jail and Francis still said feckin’—a child’s curse, the thing you said when you feared your granny might be in earshot.