He had left the hotel looking like an uptown swell, but now, with his clothes in disarray and blood trickling down his shin, he was beginning to look like a downtown tramp. One pant leg was ripped at the knee. His collar was torn and his shirt was plastered to his sides like papier-maché. His face was slicked with sweat and his hair roostered off his head.
He figured the best course was to return to the hotel. Let Yeats find his own way back. But when he checked his pockets for the card that had been his ticket home on Monday morning, he found only a few green-inked American dollars. His jacket—that’s where the business card was stowed. The only way he would see the jacket again would be to retrace his steps, make a silent apology to the grocer, and offer whatever was in his pockets as payment for the squashed oranges and bruised apples.
“Are you ready to continue our search?”
Michael flinched in surprise, then looked up from dusting off his clothes. “Why didn’t you warn me that I was about to run into that ape?”
“You didn’t want to be disturbed.”
“And you picked that moment to listen to me? We need to work on your omniscience.”
The two resumed walking, and although Michael’s vision of the seminary had brought him to the brink of so many lost memories, he could not find his way back to that spot. He trailed behind Yeats, growing more certain with each step that this mad errand had been a grave mistake. He wondered, too, where Francis had gone, and when he would see him again. This was without a doubt the longest day of his life—or the longest that he could remember, and it troubled him that the two were not necessarily the same.
The steady, silent march with Yeats wasn’t making the time pass any faster. Michael jogged to pull even with the poet. “I have another theory, you know. One that explains your presence, too: Virgil and Dante. A dead poet, a man who has lost his way.”
“Don’t you find that a bit presumptuous?”
“Casting you as Virgil? I think you’ve earned it.”
“No. Casting yourself as Dante.” Yeats walked a few paces in silence, then cleared his throat. “Tell me, Mr. Demp—”
“Michael. It’s just Michael.”
“When you could speak, Michael, did you talk quite this much? And in this manner? What I mean to ask is: Did you drive your friends absolutely mad? Or were you simply without friends?”
Michael stopped. Yeats did not seem to notice and continued walking.
“You can be very cruel, Mr. Yeats,” Michael called after him. “Especially to those who you think are lesser than you.”
Yeats turned, a sour expression puckering his face. He, too, seemed wearied by all of this walking, and now this unpleasant turn in the conversation. He sucked at the inside of his cheek and gave Michael a slow, top-to-bottom inspection, then resumed walking.
Michael stifled a curse. Whatever he was feeling—anger, sadness, despair—had come on quickly and boiled behind his eyes. Was this another effect of Whatever Happened? He didn’t remember himself being so moody, so mutable.
Varium et mutabile semper femina flashed through his head. His father sitting in the chair beside Michael’s bed in Ballyrath, reading from a leather-bound Aeneid before Michael drifted off to sleep. Varium et mutabile semper femina. Hermes says this of Dido—Woman is fickle, always changing—when he urges Aeneas to desert her to fulfill his destiny, before she, in anguish, throws herself on the pyre. There was an oil lamp burning beside the bed and his father was hunched low, close to the flame and close to Michael. He read in a steady cadence, first in Latin and then in English. Michael must have been young—not yet ten—because there came a time when his father would read to him only in Latin. But in this moment the house was quiet except for his father’s voice chanting dactyls and spondees and the buffeting of the wind against the panes. Outside, the darkness had claimed the house, but inside, Michael was warm beneath his eiderdown and safe in the boats of the Trojan exiles. Da rarely directed conversation his way, and this was why Michael loved to hear his father read: for the uninterrupted presence of his calm voice, untainted by anger.
“Michael,” he said. Then again. Then louder, but hoarse, not like his father’s voice. “Michael.”
Michael shook himself: It was Yeats. Not his father at all.
The details of the memory lingered—his father, the Aeneid, the cottage—but he was no longer inside the moment. Did Da know what had happened to Michael? Had Francis notified him? Did his father know that he was the only one in the family still on Irish soil?
Yeats cleared his throat, a habit Michael had grown tired of enduring. “Perhaps I spoke too harshly,” Yeats said, “but you must admit—”
“Admit?” Michael said, and here the edge in his voice grew sharper. “I admit that I have tried to introduce some levity, to make our time together more bearable, and perhaps even pleasant. But you, however, are determined to increase our measure of misery and isolation by acting at all times like a hoary old bollocks.”
“Now listen here—”
“Why should I listen when you’ve not heard a word I’ve said in all this time?” Michael wanted his voice to boom, but he was too frail. He was shrill, his eyes wild. He did not care. “I am lost, Mr. Yeats. I don’t know where I am or why I was brought here. I don’t know where my brothers are, or how to find them. Until very recently, I didn’t even know who I was. My past has been lost to me, and I do not know how I came to be the way I am. If you can help me get—get found, then by all means, help. But if you’re going to sneer down your nose and ahem at me, and interrupt every moment that brings my past into view, then please—please—pop off back to whatever celestial sphere you came from. And when you get there, ask them to send Virgil or Keats or Lord Byron in your place. Someone with a trace of human feeling left in them.”
Yeats blinked behind the frames of his spectacles. With his beak of a nose, he had seemed birdish, an eagle. But there wasn’t anything aquiline about that blink. Owlish, that was the word for it. “Do you suppose,” Yeats said, and here his voice came out smoothly, slowly, “that you are the only one troubled by our situation? Some months ago I bade farewell to this world. I had come to the end of my earthly journey and believed that a new journey was about to begin, one which would allow for the decoding of mysteries I had contemplated all of my life. And now I find myself not in some celestial sphere, as you call it, but in a cesspit of a city where my only companion confuses cracking wise with wisdom. And so I too am struggling to maintain my sense of bonhomie, which I will admit was in short supply even when I lived among my dearest friends.”
The two stood in front of a weather-beaten brownstone. A pitted terra-cotta balustrade led up to double doors coated in flaked green paint. Beneath the stoop, an iron gate barred entrance to the apartment below. In the front window, lace curtains parted and an old woman peered into the street. When Michael met her gaze, she closed the curtains and withdrew.