Yeats looked at him peevishly, then waved his hand in a Proceed, proceed sort of way.
Michael proceeded: “As far as I can say, I am Michael Dempsey, raised in a small town in the center of Ireland, and until recently a seminarian. However, everything about my current reality—the clothes, the hotel, being in America—argues that I am not Michael Dempsey. Or not that Michael Dempsey. What if I was switched by some act of metaphysical sleight of hand, Prince and the Pauper–like, from one world to another—so that right this moment, there’s a well-born Michael wondering how he ended up typing letters to the Holy See for Brother Joseph Mary at the seminary?”
Yeats tented his fingers over his nose, his deep-in-thought pose. Michael wanted Yeats to know that he was in earnest. That he wasn’t codding. The bus lurched again and came to a halt. The crowd had swollen and from his perch at the front of the bus, Michael could see nothing ahead but the tops of cars frozen in place, even as the traffic lights winked from red to green.
“Oh, it’s hopeless,” Yeats said.
“You don’t think much of my theorizing, then?”
“Not that,” Yeats said. “This omnibus. It will be hours before it can get us ten feet closer to our destination.”
Taking the lead, Michael disembarked directly into the crowd, then wound his way to the sidewalk. Bodies were packed tight: pedestrians, marchers, onlookers. He imagined the air must be resounding with car horns and curses, chanting and cheering, the grinding of gears and the patter of voices in a hundred—no, a thousand—different conversations, just on this one city block. But all of it passed for him in the same cotton-filled bubble. He sometimes wondered if his feet were even touching the ground. Just as it occurred to him that he had lost Yeats, the poet was there at his left elbow. They walked by rows of shoe-repair and fabric stores, delicatessens and taverns, barbershops and a five-and-dime.
As they fell into step, Michael continued: “This is the part where you come in, Mr. Yeats. We’re both in transit from one world to another; from one Michael to another for me, and from life to death for you. We’re like two fellows who meet in a train station, each waiting to catch a different train.”
Yeats smiled—grudgingly, it seemed, but it was the first time Michael had been able to elicit a grin from the old poet. “You are making progress,” Yeats said. “You’re becoming quite the freethinker. And we are making progress, too. Madame Antonia is this way: I can feel her. A genuine psychic is like a beacon visible to travelers on the spiritual plane.”
“We’re back to the spiritus mundi, aren’t we? Well, if you can get us to your Madame Antonia, you’ll make a believer out of me.”
“It’s no wonder you left the seminary,” Yeats said. “You haven’t an ounce of faith in you.”
“I left because—”
The reason, the exact moment, the impetus for all that was to come—it was just out of reach and fogged around the edges. This much he knew: He was in a large room with others dressed like him. Black cassocks, a blackboard, a bald priest, black-bound books open on the desks, black type on white pages. A spring day, one of the first truly warm days of the year, and inside were stone walls and philosophy but outside the sun was blazing and the hills were patterned in green. Another priest, with a paltry spray of red hair, was at the door. He was speaking to the bald priest, who looked directly at Michael and indicated with a curling of his finger that Michael was to rise and—
“I was summoned,” Michael said. “Someone came for me and I was sent out.”
“Expelled?” It was the most interested Yeats had seemed in Michael’s schooling.
“I don’t think so. I was sent for, then sent back. My throat was raw and tight. I could taste salt.”
“Sad tidings?” Yeats said. “Perhaps some bit of bad news?”
Michael waved a hand to ward off any interruption. He was so close. He pressed his hands over his eyes. One moment of stillness. That would be enough to bring it all into focus. His feet moved automatically beneath him, as if each step were taking him closer to the edge of the pit in the center of his memory. He was about to peer into it and see what had been hidden from him all this—
With a rattling crash, Michael collided with a man stacking crates of oranges in front of a grocery store. Michael windmilled his arms and for a moment managed to keep his footing, but then he stepped on one of the oranges and went sprawling into a box of apples. Fruit rolled in every direction: there were apples in the gutter; oranges were juiced under the wheels of passing cars. Michael was laid out on the sidewalk, his palms and knees badly scuffed. Before he could right himself, the grocer, a big man with a boxer’s nose and the arms of a comic-book hero, hoisted him up by the collar. Michael crossed his arms in front of his face to ward off the punch he feared was coming, but the man kept shaking him while his jaw opened and closed in what even Michael could tell was a torrent of curse words. Michael’s collar tore loose from his shirt and when the grocer made a grab for his arm—the final prelude to a punch—Michael wriggled free of his jacket and dashed for the intersection. The traffic was against him but he turned his head right-left-right and plunged forward. He was not hit by a cab or flattened by a lorry, and when he reached the next sidewalk, he pressed on, weaving through men and women caught up in the late-afternoon bustle. Only after he crossed the next street did he pause to look behind him. There was no sign of the grocer. Michael slumped against a streetlight, his lungs burning and his stomach ready to empty itself.
He had outrun the grocer but he had also outrun Yeats. He took another deep breath and tried to compose himself. All around him people and cars and buses jostled and he could hear none of it. He could smell hot asphalt and human sweat, the exhaust of automobiles, the dank rot of rubbish bins, and the moldy stink of the storm drains. The subway rumbled beneath the massed drumbeat of the millions walking this lattice of streets. All he heard in his head was a faint whooshing, like the whisper of a seashell, and his ears registered only the muffled pressure of the deep-sea diver. That it was better than the Noise was his only consolation.