WHEN MICHAEL HAD set out with Francis that morning, he had no idea where they were going. Perhaps a return visit to Martin’s apartment? Another amble down the broad street of jewelers and churches? For the life of him, he could not figure out what they were doing in New York City. Had he played any part in planning this voyage? Had they come only to visit their brother? Did Francis have some new occupation that had posted him, in high style, to New York City? That last option seemed the least likely. Francis had been in prison—that much Michael remembered—but had he been released already? Was the pit in his memory so wide and so deep that it contained all of Francis’s prison time within it? As the cab navigated the traffic, the two of them sitting side by side, Michael was struck suddenly with an image of his brother’s profile in another automobile, at another time. Francis was at the wheel and the engine whined with exertion and beyond the open window lay rolling hills quilted in green and bordered on all sides by stacked-stone walls. Francis wore a blue suit and Michael was swathed in a cassock that went from his notched collar to his scuffed black shoes. Wind poured into the car—he felt it stiff against his face, rich with the smell of wet grass—and he was hooting in mad celebration. I’m free, that’s what he’d been thinking. I’m free!
Whatever he was remembering, it was before… before… before the Noise, and the constant silence, and Yeats, and New York City. The moment in the car, racing across Ireland, was on the far side of the lost time. If he could only concentrate and connect this moment to what came before and what came after, he was sure that he could reassemble the shattered jigsaw of his memory.
The taxicab came to a lurching halt in front of a tall building on a boulevard lined with other tall buildings. Francis took Michael’s arm in his and ushered his brother into the lobby, where they were met by the doorman. In his epaulets and high, gold-braided hat, he looked like a general stripped of his medals. Then: elevator, corridor, middle-aged man with wispy blond hair, handshake, library, his feet on an Oriental rug. All of it passed in that echoless silence that made him feel as if he were floating. He had never realized how much he counted on the sound of his own footsteps to make him feel grounded, substantial, alive.
When he looked up from the carpet’s pattern of lotuses and twisted vines, he found Yeats leaning amiably against the wall in the corner of the room. The table next to the poet held all manner of polished medical devices: a stethoscope, a tiny mallet, syringes in four different sizes, a circular mirror attached to a leather strap. The blond-haired man—A doctor, Michael said to Yeats, finally!—peered at Michael from a variety of angles. The doctor’s mouth moved, Francis moved his lips in reply, and so it went.
“What are they saying?” Michael asked.
“They’re talking about people you haven’t met.”
“Shouldn’t they be talking about me?”
Yeats shrugged. Noncommittal.
“Does he know what’s wrong with me?”
Again, Yeats shrugged.
“Worthless,” Michael said.
“Are you referring to me or to the doctor?”
Michael shrugged.
Yeats pursed his lips, a sour-apple expression that Michael had come to know too well. When the poet was displeased, he made no effort to hide his feelings. He removed his glasses and while buffing them with a handkerchief, he wandered out of the room.
“Now where are you going?” Michael said. He followed Yeats out of the library and into the parlor, a musty, tomblike space occupied by brocade furniture tricked out with bronze nail heads and gold cord. The walls were hung with gilt-framed portraits of stern, shaggy-cheeked men, and women bound up in wimples and forbearance. Beneath the portraits, Oriental rugs abounded. The room was equal parts Ali Baba and Oliver Cromwell. The dining room was decorated to a similar standard. Its claw-foot table could seat six, the gloomy breakfront displayed a family fortune in silver platters, and on the walls were more lace collars and blanched faces. But it was a dining room in name only: a man would be hard-pressed to find space among the chessboards for his morning tea and toast.
A typewriter crouched at one end of the table, a neat sheaf of carbons next to it. Michael had little interest in chess, but he was drawn to the typewriter. It was similar to the model he had used at St. Columbanus to compose his coded letters to his brothers. He sat and tapped his fingers against the keys, but so faintly that the levers lay idle. He closed his eyes and in his head, he recited words, then sentences, and let his fingers find the letters. Muscle memory. He could feel it.
Opening his eyes, he saw Yeats with one hand poised above a white queen. “Hey,” he said. “Don’t touch that.”
“It’ll be checkmate,” Yeats said. “Or did you have another move in mind?”
“It’s not your game,” Michael said.
“Go back to your typing.”
Michael again scrutinized the machine with its bristling ranks of keys. Isolated as they were, one letter to each black button, he could make sense of them. The letters seemed to pulse and flex, to come apart at the corners, but then to pull themselves back into shape. Here was an E, there a D, lower down an N. Once combined into words, the letters ceased to make sense—on restaurant menus and shop signs, they slithered and separated, forming new glyphs he could not decipher. But he thought again of that feeling of muscle memory. If he could find the G, then he would array the fingertips of his left hand to one side of it and his right would find its place two keys over. Brother Bartholomew, who had run the office at St. Columbanus, would be proud of how easily Michael fit his hands to the task. He deplored the way that educated men used their fingers to chicken-peck the keys into submission, and would not abide typists who stutter-stepped through their work. Michael drew one sheet from the stack next to the typewriter and wound it into the cylinder. Slowly at first, and then with speed and authority, he began to type.
michal dempsey
michael dempsey
michasel dempsey
Yeats looked up from another chessboard. “How am I supposed to concentrate with that pounding? And the bell is quite distracting.”
“Come over here,” Michael said. “I want you to see this.”
“I know what a typewriter looks like. George had one just like it.” Yeats again reached for a chess piece—a bishop this time—before yanking back his hand.
“You need to tell me what I’ve typed. I might have found a way out.”
“Out of what?”
“Of myself.”
Yeats slowly came around the table, his limp more noticeable than before.
“Now watch this.” Michael was feeling cocky and took a chance with the Shift key.
Willliam butter Yeast
William Butler Yeates
William Butler Yeats is a stodgy old git
“What do you see?”