Fear and Loathing

The next morning he was on the internet again. Perhaps unwisely, he still hadn't got a computer in his house yet, and wasn't going to wait till after 6 O Clock when the cybercafes switched to the cheaper rate, so he went into the Dail computer room again. The same ruddy-faced TDs were in there, the people who had probably inherited their Dail seats from their fathers who had inherited them from their fathers before them. He thought as he keyed in his password that maybe he should make friends with these people, stressing the things that they had in common, like being a TD and an internet junkie and... well that was it, really, but he supposed that would have been a satisfactory basis for some small talk. His fear was, of course, that this line of conversation would lead them to inquire as to which sites he was logging onto, which would lead to embarrassing prevarications and mumbling and trailing off which would only serve to incur more suspicion. If he was of the same gossipy disposition as the rest of his family he would have known by now, though he was such a maverick that his sources for any sort of bruit were minimal, so he was left to conjecture that they were Civil War party TDs from the west or midlands. He checked his email first, first his private, web-based mail, then his official Dail mail, nervously shooting glances in the directions of the culchies to his right and left to make sure none of their bloodshot eyes were straying in the direction of his monitor. He thus spent more time going through his junk folder than he would otherwise have done. When he thrashed all the promises that his vital organ could be made bigger than it already was, he was satisfied that there was no peeking going on and he logged onto the H4G site. He uploaded his latest idea and clicked on the ‘submit’ button, letting the idea float off into cyberspace like a flock of doves, except that these were doves that knew that peace sometimes had to be fought for.
He spent a hour or so surfing after that but Eventually he dragged himself away. He hadn't planned anything else that day. The Dail wasn't in session, he didn't have any constituency work to do, it was like one of those periods in college when he’d just handed in a major essay and suddenly a window of free time had opened up. It was a brisk, crisp November day, one in which the august streets of Dublin seemed to cry out to be strolled aimlessly around. He would have strolled out to Sandymount sand and pondered the question of ontological reality, except he didn't really know the way so he just ambled into the streets around Grafton Street and asked himself more mundane questions, like, was this really the summit of human achievement? No sane people suggested that the Hibernian metropolis was the greatest city in the world, but he was sure that if he was traipsing around Paris or New York or any other city in the West he’d come across the same thing; people rushing around to get to jobs they didn't like or buying stuff that they didn't need, getting stuck in endless traffic jams, tanking up on so-called fast food that was going to give them heart disease and cancer. Was this the summit from which we were going to be knocked off by one of the twin perils of global warming or extreme Islam? He tried to remember if people were really as laid back when he used to come up here as a child, to try to ascertain if the Celtic Tiger years had really brought about such a paradigm shift. Yet his memories were like that of the older people in 1984, episodic and empirical. His most vivid recollection was a time when his father brought him up there when he was about eight, and he saw a middle-aged man trying to force his eighteen year old daughter to drink a pint of Guinness, in a bar by the banks of the snot-green Liffey. He couldn't for the life of him figure out why, even to this twenty-first century day, after he’d been to college and read millions of words of print in every format known to man, except maybe hieroglyphics. His own parents had forced him to do many things that he didn't want to do, but it was always in an effort to make him more like the person they wanted to be, rather than the people they were, hence the piano lessons and the art classes. He wondered where this woman was now, whether she had her own child and was passing on the torch of dipsomania to him or her, whether she needed to, given the unholy amount the breweries spent on advertising. C‘mon, drink your Guinness or you won’t have any broccoli when you get home. He never shared this memory with anyone, it seemed too bleak, that sharing it would be a bright, flashing signal of his dark brooding nature, which, like the stash of porn under his mattress, he wanted to keep a secret. But he would have loved to have known which bar it was - they all looked the same to him, those old, pre-Celtic Tiger bars, with their dreary linoleum floors and the paint peeling off the walls and their stoical bartenders and stainless steel and imitation leather stools - and found that man and looked into his bloodshot eyes and asked him what his motivation was. But he thought he already knew the answer, that while today we drank so much because we didn't know what else to do with all that disposable income, back then many of us had nothing else to do with our time.
He got back much earlier than Leopold Bloom did in that book I may have been alluding to, partly because he didn't drink and he wasn't waiting for any sleazy music promoter to come along and shag his wife, and it was November, rather than June. The funny thing was, he would have pondered, if he knew he was in a novel where an allusion to Ulysses was going on, was that the whole nightown thing would have come full circle, that he could have patronised doe-eyed, high-cheekboned Eastern European prostitutes as surely as Mr. Bloom could have leered at English whores with more layers of underwear than biology would have required, even if, in between there was a period when any girl that so much as looked at a man the wrong way might have been sent to work in a Magdelen laundry.
His wife was there waiting for him when he got home, reading that days Irish Times, various sections of the Guardian and the London Independent lying scattered around her on the floor. He would have liked to have thought that he’d moulded her in his own image but he knew that she had a thirst for knowledge as deep as his own.
Jenny, it turned out, had been on her own peregrinations, no doubt had pondered her own imponderables, though only a fraction would ever be shared, the rest processed into dreams by her subconscious and sent of to wherever it was that dreams went. Perhaps there was a dream layer, just below the ozone layer, that caused all the turbulence when astronauts attempted re-entry. Or perhaps they floated around the universe, like those sub-atomic particles he’d heard about. No, he was antropomorphising, he knew that they died with us and would only ever be food for worms. They sat down and chatted for a while, aboot what they were going to do for Christmas. Jenny was torn between going back to her family and having a fuckfest with Seamus. Blood was thicker that water, but was it thicker than sperm? They were discussing this when they realised it was almost 6 O Clock, and the News was about to come on, though first they had to listen to the Angelus. They grabbed each other’s genitals in a parody of the Christian joining of hands and kept saying ‘fuck me’ as quickly as they could to each other until the bells stopped ringing, in defiance of the noisy majority that perpetuated this piece of theocracy.
When the flashy computer graphics and the blaring synthiser music had assured anyone who was still going through their rosary beads that they were back in the world of the secular. Thankfully, that food scare that he may have created had passed off the radar of the opinion formers and the distribution centre bombing was slipping way down as well. Good old amnesiac, three-minute-attention-span media, he thought, leaving him alone and going back to the running stories that they liked the best, tribunals, of which there were many, and the never-ending troubles in the Middle East. He even had a moment of something approaching joy when he heard that after the event of a few weeks ago many people were turning their backs on supermarkets and going to small, local and specialist stores, finding out that not only was the service better, but in many cases they were cheaper as well. But... yes, there was always a ‘but’ wasn't there, it wouldn't be Seamus’ Jesuitical, equivocating world without that three letter word... then there was a story about an unconfirmed report that a TD in the Dail had logged onto a website that may be connected to the attack in Britain a couple of weeks earlier. A Dail spokesman had said that it was probably just a rumour but that technicians were examining the hard drive for evidence.
Seamus didn't find out anything else that happened in the world that day. His whole body froze, except for his chest, where his heart beat faster and his throat became dry; and his head, where a swelter of fraught, panicky thoughts swirled around like the peasants on the Odessa steps in Battleship Potemkin. First he reassured himself that he hadn't had to key in any sort of password to log onto that site, that while his fingerprints or his DNA might have been left on the keyboard, that it could have been anybody, that his opponents only had the word of some of his enemies in the Dail to convict him. Then he went through all of his speeches in the Dail and his interviews in the papers to see if there may have been anything that could have been construed as support for ecoterrorism. Then he started to formulate contingency plans for what would happen if charges against him were pressed. Then he assured himself that nothing could happen, that it wasn't a crime to log onto a certain website, at least not yet, but then realised that it was, that if it was illegal to look at child porn on the web then it could just as easily be illegal to surf ecoterror sites.
Then he saw a hand wave in front of his eyes, and the world in front of his eyes started to clarify. He shook his head and realised that while the frenzy had been going on on the other side, his wife had been sitting there beside him, trying to get his attention, probably just as worried as he was about who the mystery ecoterrorist surfer was. Immediately, he tried to put her out of her misery.
“It was me.”
“What was you?”
“Don't you know?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“No. What’re you talking about?”
“You really don't know? Weren’t you listening to the news?”
“Well, I guess I was drifting in and out of it, like anyone else.”
“Okay... well, have you got a valid passport?”
“Um... I was meaning to get that sorted out, but... why’d you ask?”
“Get it sorted out. I think maybe your crazy plan isn't so crazy after all.”
“Which crazy plan was that?”
“The one where we go on holiday and never come back.”
“Why... are we in some sort of trouble?”
“Well I sure as fuck am.”
“Why... what happened?”
When he told her the story her first reaction was to wonder how he could have been so fucking stupid as to surf such a controversial site in the Dail computer room. He didn't have any answer to that, he would have facetiously said that he’d had some really bad bangs on the head when he if he was comfortable enough about his neurological health to make jokes like that, so he just offered the platitude that sometimes people do things without thinking. Then she wanted to know if there was a security camera there, which he thought highly improbable. Then she wanted to know if he was that recognisable, he thought that, unfortunately, as he hadn't had a haircut since coming to office and that his curls were growing back and that his manner of dress was distinctly casual that he would easily be fingered as the man who’d picked the forbidden fibre-optic fruit.
She reflected on this and wondered what would happen if her plan didn't work in full. Seamus wasn't sure. There were definitely precedents for this, for elected representatives to face trial and go to jail, but they were generally people who were involved in corruption and had money stashed away in Swiss Bank accounts. As far as he knew, the only occasion on which there could be a bye-election was if a TD died, so presumably he would continue getting paid till the next election.
“So why has no-one else tried this?”, she asked.
“I don't know... maybe the rest of them aren’t in it for the money.”
They both laughed long and hard, enough to relieve some of the tension for a while. But when the laughter stopped, she wondered where he might find answers to the questions that he’d been posing. He suspected that there was an expert on constitutional law in Trinity that he might consult, but that this might draw suspicion on him. So he’d try the internet first.
“But not in the Dail, right?”
“Right.”
He contemplated going out later that night to one of the few 24/7 web cafes in the city, but decided that it would be better to sleep on it, though he suspected that this would remain a figure of speech.
Then the inevitable phone call came. He took his vibrating mobile from his pocket and the identity of the caller was confirmed. Gone was the lilting Ulster brogue that characterised all of their previous conversations, the minacity had stopped being latent and erupted with a venom that caused distortion in his mobile.
“What the FUCK were you doing, Seamus?”
He gulped and responded that the leader must have seen the news.
“Of course I saw the fucking news!”, he bristled. “The question is, why can’t you keep off of it?”
“Well...they didn't mention me by name, or even which party I was in. It could have easily been one of the Greens.”
I don't think it could, Seamus, and do you know why I think that is?”
He made an audible gulp by way of response.
“Because they’re not as fucking thick as you, Seamus, that’s fucking why.”
Seamus couldn't disagree. Then he got subjected to a tirade about how the Sinn Fein leadership was trying to reinvent itself as a liberal progressive party with intelligent, articulate candidates and how the very last thing he wanted was for one of his TDs to reveal himself not only to be an ecoterrorist, but also a complete idiot.
“So... if my name does get out, then I’ll have to leave the party?”
“Seamus, that’ll be the least of your problems”, he replied, turning the sinister switch up to 11.
“Well, what are you implying?”
“I think you already know that.”
“Yeah... I guess I do. But tell me... did you have anything to do with that incident in England a few weeks back?”
“I don't know what you’re talking about. I have to go now.”
Seamus muttered the word ‘damn’ under his breath, having hoped that, in his wrath, the leader might have let his tongue slip. But he realised that this wasn't going to happen, that this man was a consummate, career terrorist who was used to a lifetime of being bugged, someone who always knew the right thing to say and do. And this was the one thing that Seamus lacked, his hamartia, his Achilles heel, even though for him it was more like an Achilles leg. He had looks, intelligence and talent. But his judgement sucked. Whether it sucked because he was born that way or because he got so many bad bangs on the head when he was younger or because he didn't get enough of certain vitamins in his diet was something that had kept him up nights before and would again. What would keep him up this night, though, was whether he’d have to employ Jenny’s plan to stage an attempt on his life or whether one would happen of it’s own accord. After Jenny had let him brood for a few minutes, she asked him who that was, more as an opening line of conversation than out of genuine interest, as she had been expecting the same call. When she got her reply, she asked if he might have said anything incriminating, he shook his head disappointedly. She asked if there was anyone else who might help to carry out her plan, the only person he could think of was Caomhin and he felt that their bridges had been burnt. It seemed like a tragic thing to say, but his best hope was that an attempt would be made on his life and fail. Then he added,
“You don't have to stay with me, you know.”
“Yeah I do. I took a vow, till death do us part, remember?”
“Well, yeah, but some people break that vow because they’ve ‘drifted apart’ or because one of them has gotten fat or lost their sex drive. If you stay with me, you might get killed.”
“Seamus... if I go back to my family, then it’ll seem like an admission that you’re the one they’re talking about. It would be tantamount to signing your death sentence.” She paused for a little and asked why he didn't threaten his own life.
“I’m not quite with you.”
“Well, you ring RTE and say that you’re from the CIRA or RIRA and that Seamus McIonnractaigh is a dead man. Then we go away for our Christmas holidays, but before we go we set off a time bomb in our house, to make it look like someone tried to attack us while we were away.”
“Hmmm... I suppose it could work... but who’s going to make the bomb for us?”
“Well, you’re on your own there, I’m afraid.”
“Guess I’m going to have to go on the net again, then?”
“Yeah, but...”
“I know.”
That night they held each other tight, knowing that it might be their last night doing so. He was aware, more than any other day, that his mortal coil might be grabbed and thrown in a big pile with all the other dead people’s mortal coils. She too, trembled with an awareness that the following night she might be on her own, that there could be a Seamus-shaped space in her bed the following night, that she might never see his body again, never caress it’s lithe, toned surfaces, never even kiss it goodbye as it made the final journey to that bourne from which no traveller ever returns, that it might already be on it’s way to an umbrageous grave while the police were sitting her down and asking her to calm down and get her story straight. So intense was the fear and trembling that an onlooker could have been forgiven for thinking that they were indulging in some sort of frenetic, Kama-sutra frottage, though, just for once, sex was among the furthest things from Seamus’ mind. They lay there like that for a while until Seamus realised that he had passed his first REM window and that he wasn't going to get any sleep for another few hours and that she was still awake as well.

Then he initiated one of those conversations that people only have at that hour, when their defences are down, when they’d be dreaming if they were asleep.
“You still awake?”
“Yeah.”
“How come? Is it ‘cause I’m fidgeting too much?”
“Yeah... and...”
“And?”
“And I’m worrying about the same thing you are.”
“Really? I didn't know girls could get testicular cancer.”
“Aw, Seamus, this is no time to joke.”
“Au contraire, mein allerliebste, I can’t think of a better time to joke, to show death that I’m not scared of him.”
“So you are worried about dying?”
He realised he’d confirmed her worst fears, but did his best to reassure her.
“I think I worried enough about dying when I was in my teens and early twenties for my whole life. I think I’m more worried about what’s going to happen to you.”
“Oh, don't worry about me... I’ll be really upset for about six weeks and then I’ll start spending my Dail widows pension on some young male lap-dancers.”
“No time for joking, did you say?”
“Who’s joking? But tell me more about all this death fixation. Did you used to be a Goth?”
“Um... I guess I would have been, if I had enough money to buy all the black clothes and make-up and stuff, but I didn't, so I was just an internal Goth, a gothipsist, if you will. I used to think about death all the time, staying awake in bed trembling like I am now, ripping out all my hair. This continued right into my college years, when I freaked out one flatmate after another so much that most of them avoid me if I ever pass them on the street, which ain’t the way it’s meant to be...” he gulped, drew breath and she looked as if she wanted to ask what brought about this radical paradigm shift from being a hysterical death-fixated teenager to being a mildly existential twentysomething, but felt that answering this might take him to places that he didn't want to go, so refrained and let him continue:
“No... being a Goth takes a certain amount of focus... it’s like you make a decision to be a Goth, that it has it’s initiation rituals of buying the clothes and make-up and stuff... and there’s, like, a tacit understanding that it’s just a phase that you’re going through... I can’t imagine that any of them really think they’ll still be wearing all that mascara and shit when they’re thirty... Me, I just paid no attention to how I looked whatsoever, I didn't start to shave till I was about 21, my hair was always ragged, it wasn't like I was trying to make any sort of statement or anything... I don't know... I think subconsciously I might have been sending out signals to chicks that I wasn't what they were looking for, that I wanted to be left alone, in my own little world, whereas being a Goth is a signal that you want to have sex with other little vampires, in cemeteries at night... you, though, you’re still young enough to be a Goth, theoretically at least.”
“Yeah... but being a Goth is more of a middle-class thing, it’s like a rejection of the hollowness at the centre of all that middle-class affluence... I didn't have any of that affluence to rebel against.”
“Well... neither did I, well not really anyway... my parents were teachers, so I had to live with all that middle-class Puritanism, though they earn less than scaffolders...”
“What’s a scaffolder?”
“Oh, y’know, it’s, y’know those bars around buildings when they’re going up... the people who assemble them...the point is, I grew up with a middle class value system even though I didn't have a middle class lifestyle, which must have been the ultimate bummer, I think that’s why I’m so fucked up, that and...”
“And?”
“And some stuff I don't like talking about.”
She gazed into his eyes as if thinking that if she gazed hard enough that she might see into the darkness that was darker than the dark darkness that he’d just illuminated. And yet his eyes betrayed only a mild Degas-painting melancholy with a pinch of insomniac fatigue, as if somewhere, in the attic of his mothers house, perhaps, there was a Dorian Grey painting of him in a graveyard with worms and rats, his wrists bearing the scars of self-mutilation, with Bent Ekerot skin, pale and cadaverous and searing eyes that had looked into the abyss and been looked back at and knew that the only way that he could express the emptiness at the heart of middle class existence was to scream so primally that glass shattered and cows woke up and had nightmares when they went back to sleep and rabbits cowered in their hutches and didn't come out till their young got hungry and cried out for food.
But there was no picture. If he survived and his dreams of leaving Ireland and all the baggage he associated with it, the hypocricy, the inequality, the squalour and the pity came true, he’d paint his own picture, though words, those transient, ephemeral signifiers would be his paint, squiggles on bleached, pulped wood to which our descendents would be impervious.
“I wish you’d tell me now, it might be your last chance.”
“Yeah, that’s true, I might die tommorow, but I might live as well and I’m afraid you might leave me if you find out my darker secrets.”
“You have to tell me these things. You took a vow, remember?”
Seamus muttered the marriage vows in his head and concluded that he never promised to share absolutely everything with her, but he promised he would be more forthcoming if they ever made it to Asia or Latin America. She frowned, and feeling he needed to regain the high ground, told her that he thought her sudden transformation from bimbo to intellectual wasn't all that convincing.
“Well, maybe I am a bit smarter than I let on at first... but that’s the way I was brought up. I knew my mum was way smarter than she appeared when she was talking to my father... I guess I must have gotten it into my head that men would only want to be with you if you were dumb.”
“Yeah, I know how that is... but the way I was brought up was to pretend that everything was ticketty-boo, no matter how fucked-up or gloomy or despairing things were... so that’s why I am the way I am. To be honest, I do feel a bit out of place in this whole 24/7 confessional culture, I guess you do in this world of ball-breaking feminazism. I guess our parents were all a bit old-fashioned.”
“Everybody’s parents are a bit old fashioned. That’s why you have to break away from them and find your own niche.”
Seamus was impressed by this stab at profundity, and the conversation went down this road for a while, so much so that he got so engrossed that he forgot about what brought them onto this subject in the first place, which probably provided his subconscious with some welcome relief. But it was like one of those great nights in the pub that you know was going to end in acrimony with someone vomiting into someone else’s lap or gets into an argument with the bartender after being refused a drink and gets barred. For about an hour, Seamus kept the conversation going, knowing on some level that as soon as it stopped his fears would come back to haunt him. But eventually she got too tired, like that person holding the staff in the bible, and his fears came back, like the motorcycling angels of death in Orphee. He held her close for an hour watching the sleep that eluded him draw her eyelids closer together into the lethe-like waters from which he seemed barred like an RUC officer from a GAA team. But eventually sleep fought it’s way through the maze of neurosis and angst and corralled the tsunami of fears.
He woke up about five hours later, by which time it was around eleven in the morning and everyone who was keeping the country going with a regular job was there. Right now he thought this was something that might never happen again, that whatever being a Sinn Fein TD was, it wasn't a regular job and that whatever he was going to be doing after the next election, he probably wasn't going to be doing it here. He untangled himself from Jenny, carefully, as if playing a game of mah-jong...or kerplunk..., and randomly picked up some clothes and let them rest lugubriously on his shoulders. He made his way downstairs and then opened the door diffidently, peeking through to make sure there were no gunmen nor paparazzi around to shoot him. He walked down to the newsagents, one of the great mass of the urban living dead, alienated, anonymous and alone. His head was bowed down, he pulled his hair, which was starting to get somewhere close to it’s old length, over his forehead, and walked with a haunch, like James Dean or Bob Dylan on the cover of Freewheeling, almost feeling like some of his reclusive literary heroes, the Pynchons or Salingers or DeLillos of the world. Trying not to make any eye contact with the girl behind the counter, he purchased a copy of each of the triumvirate of the Irish broadsheets. He thought of buying one of their British counterparts to see if there was any mention of himself, but then thought better of it, realising he’d have to either kill someone or have sex with a minor to get their attention. He walked back carrying the mass of newsprint under his shoulder, reflecting on how lucky he was to never have done a paper round. When he got back, Jenny was still asleep, he made himself some muesli and sat down at the table and started to read about what the scribes had to say about him. He didn't know whether to be angry or relieved that he didn't make the front pages. When he did find the story, he was interested to see that one of the wise men who wrote for the Irish Independent was of the considered view that both Sinn Fein and the greens had about three ‘radicals’ each and that labour had at most four, so that it was one of those ten people that was responsible for this abuse of their privilege of living in a society with open access to information on any subject.
It was funny, but Seamus never thought of himself as being radical, to his mind, it was Fianna Fail’s experiment to turn the country into a dog-eat-dog Thatcherite bear-pit that was radical. But the Indo’s real venom was reserved for the country’s libel laws, which were probably what stood in the way of the of the identity of the mystery surfer being revealed. Ah, there was a piquant irony, he thought, that the libel laws which he’d always reviled as being an unacceptable shackle on freedom of speech might be saving him from ignominious death. But then he read a bit further on that there was a provision in the offences against the state act that could force whoever saw him surfing that day to reveal his identity. He shouted ‘fuck!” and folded the paper angrily. He looked over at Jenny, thinking that this outburst would wake her, but it just assimilated itself into her dreams, so he picked up the other papers and read what they had to say, which was much the same thing. Not wanting to wake Jenny, and not wanting to leave the house any more, he read what they had to say about what was going on in the rest of the world.
There was some good news, at least as far as he was concerned. He came across one article on how the atmosphere in supermarkets was becoming like that of a fire sale, with a rash of below cost selling to tempt people back in. Knowing how narrow their profit margin was, he knew this couldn't last too long and that people weren't going to risk getting killed and suffer the ignominy of being strip-searched just to save 30p on a box of own-brand cornflakes. It satisfied him that he played some small part in catalysing this development, it would have been enough to make some people decide that their life’s work had been done, but someone of Seamus’ restless mind was determined to hang around long enough to see how this whole thing panned out. After all, he’d read, to his enormous chagrin, that levels of beef consumption were back up to their pre-BSE levels.
He pondered on this, then turned to the foreign news. There was a piece on Venezuela. He was always interested in Latin American politics, the images of rebels with bandannas in the jungle always seeming more romantic than the balaclava’d thugs under his own leaden skies. He remembered a time when his mum was showing some American tourists around his house with a view to renting it to them for the summer and he wondered how they’d react to that black-and-white picture of Daniel Ortega that he’d cut out from the Irish Times. He never found out, nor what happened to Ortega, that phallocentric rebel with a cause who seemed to leap straight from the pages of a Garcia Marquez novel. In any case, the new kid on the Latin American anti-globalist block was Chavez, down there in Little Venice, land of the Orinoco where you could watch one Beauty Queen after another breaking. He had been hurled by the little streets against the great, brought to power by a tidal wave of votes by peasants, who hadn't been afraid to use their democratic privileges, or hadn't been intimidating out of using them, as they were in neighbouring Columbia, and all over the continent. He’d decided that the free-market medicine that the US and the IMF had been pushing on his people like some sleazy, imperious drug dealer wasn't good for his people, and that he was going to kick the habit. But breaking up was hard to do. The US decided, as they always did, that the only people who deserved democracy were the people who kept their allies in power. The CIA, with the help of bully-boy right-wing paramilitaries from Columbia, had tried to stage a coup, but, as always, it ended in farce, except for the families of those who were killed, for whom it was tragedy. Then they organised a strike by capital, by the businessmen who sold the country’s oil and went round looking for Miss Universe contestants, who collectively decided, it seemed, that they didn't want a parvenu like this from an indigenous tribe running the country. It too failed, and now he was trying to stick it too the man by creating a new Latin American OPEC which would challenge the power of the US to control oil prices, and, in a move that was dear to Seamus’ heart, brought in laws to protect the countries rare sea turtles. This was enough to make Seamus decide that if he was able to escape all this, that this was where he wanted to go.
He reflected on how the strangest things can change your life, a book found in a charity shop, a chance conversation with a stranger on a train, even a newspaper article that found it’s way into the Irish Times, presumably because it was a slow news day for the grand old lady of D’Olier street. He looked at Jenny, who was still asleep. She was like his very own beauty queen, and who knows, if he could ever bring her there her pale skin and her gentle, unassuming beauty might seem as beguiling to the natives as the flowing blonde locks and thrusting hips and thighs of the local women did to him. But he knew that they weren't all beauty queens, that most people in the country struggled to get by, and that anyone who tried to change this, as Chavez was doing, would have to sweat from every pore in his body to make it happen. He didn't know how they felt about foreigners coming into their country, that was what probably got them into trouble in the first place, before Columbus and his mercenary adventurers landed there, Seamus imagined that it was some sort of eco-paradise, where peasants grew their own organic quinoa or just sat around under trees waiting for nature to share it’s bounty with them. He was sure that an influx of money from a clearly sincere foreigner like himself wouldn't be sneered at, he genuinely wanted to put something into the country, he wanted to grow crops organically, by traditional methods, and to employ local people.
He wanted to share this with Jenny, but she was still asleep. He went over to make some toast, assuming that when it popped up she would wake. He waited for the customary few minutes and flicked desultorily through the newspapers, fidgeting constantly as he did so. Then the toast, and his wife, popped up. He said, morning sweetheart and went over to put some margarine on the toast, then he rushed over and sat down next to his wife, to whom he handed a cup of guarana tea.
“I want to go to Venezuela”, he said, with the eagerness of a teenager finding out he’d been allowed to go to a disco for the first time.
“Then why don’t you?”, she asked, rubbing the sleepy-dust out of her eyes.
“No, no, I mean I want to go and live there, with you, forever.”
“Then why don’t you? You’ve been planning to go away for a long time, if you stay here you think you’re going to get killed. Just go there, get a false passport, I’ll send you over the money, eventually everybody will decide that you are dead and I’ll come over with you.”
This was actually so brilliantly simple that it might actually work. He couldn't believe that she’d come out with it this early in the morning, and expressed it with such candour and lack of pretence. At this point he loved her more than he’d ever done before, though she’d just hatched a plan that might keep them apart for years. But the only thing he could think of to say was to ask where he might get a false passport. She looked at him indulgently and mouthed the word “internet”.
He waited until that night, when he knew that all the hacks would be working on their stories for the morning, to venture out of the house again. He spent the time in between watching TV, reading the papers, and not thinking about his constituents at all. He made his way over to the resolutely apolitical Temple Bar and made his way into a cybercafe and logged on and checked to see if anyone was watching and googled for the words, ‘false passport’. He found a site immediately, filled in all the information, but was chagrined to find that he needed to upload a photo of himself. This was way back in 2001, when digital cameras didn't come cheap, so he decided that he was going to have to come back the next day. Then, in a manner that might be considered impulsive, he ordered a set of linguaphone Spanish (Latin American) CDs. The next morning followed a similar pattern, but he was shocked to read the papers and find that there was nothing about him, and he was equally horrified to find that there were no gunmen around, and that no-one was ringing up telling him that they knew where he lived. Thus it was being in the invidious position of hoping to receive a death threat. But on reflection, he wasn't that surprised, realising that people had more important things on their mind, the west was at war with fundamentalist Islam, after all. He knew he’d have to wait till his ecoterrorist friends committed another outrage that he would get back into the news.






He had only to wait about a week, a week of A bout de souffle style dual solipsism where they stayed together and kept each other entertained with existential musings and experimental sexual positions and half-assed attempts to learn Spanish, and waiting VlamidirEstragonically for his false passport to arrive, leaving the house only to buy food and newspapers and make surreptitious nocturnal trips to cybercafes. One day during the week he failed to show up for an important vote in the Dail, fuelling speculation that he was the one, but the next day the hacks found some other bone to chase after. But then it happened. It was spectacular. It was admirable. It was perfectly judged and fantastically, almost poetically appropriate.
A bomb went off in a truck carrying Irish peat from the boggy midlands to Dun Laoghaire. It careered off the road, and into a field. It was a rainy day, and the peat started to spread around the field almost instantaneously, as if Gaia was sucking back what had been ripped form her to brighten dull council houses and fertilise suburban gardens. The drivers corpulent, yorkie-fed bodies were mutilated, their blood seeping into the soil as horrified onlookers screamed.
Ammonium nitrate was used, as it was in many IRA attacks.
Seamus’ only regret was that they didn't use pitchforks and axes, as they did in the old days. But you couldn't have everything.
At Six O Clock he was too tense to do the Angelus parody with Jenny, eager to find out if any questions were being asked about him. And, indeed, the third headline was “growing speculation that an Irish TD may have been involved”, in that same indifferent, Anglo-Irish monotone. Even though the words ‘Sinn Fein’ weren't mentioned, he knew that the net was going to tighten and that they were going to narrow it down to him pretty soon. He only hoped that his false passport would come before then, but he had enough faith in the lapidary lugubriousness of the Irish judicial system to predict that it would.
In fact it came the next morning, some time before twelve, when he’d gotten out of bed, having been up late having another existential tête-à-tête with his wife. He opened the envelope, had a look, laughed mildly, and put it into his pocket like it was a gas bill. When he got out the door a gaggle of hacks were pointing microphones in his face, asking him if he was the one who surfed that website. He calmly told them that he didn't know what they were talking about.
“Where were you for that crucial Dail vote on Tuesday?”, asked a reporter from TV3, chasing him down the street and looking down at his heels to make sure he wasn't tripping over anyone else’s.
“At home, fucking my wife.”
“Is it true that the Sinn Fein leadership is planning to expel you from the party later on today?
“Well, they haven’t told me about it, but that might be because my mobile phone is broken.”
“Why have you been keeping such a low profile lately, Mr. McIonractaigh?”
“My doctor told me I needed to take things easy.”
“Are you an ecoterrorist?”
“Please.”
With this word he saw a taxi in the distance and ran towards it, leaving the goat fuck chasing in his wake like hysterical Beatlemaniacs. One of them tripped over and it looked as Seamus got into the taxi that he might have grazed his knee and torn his expensive-looking trousers.
“What was that all about?”, asked the taxi driver in his inevitable working-class Doublelinn tones.
“Boyzone are looking for a replacement for Ronan Keating.”
He laughed, and asked Seamus where he was off to. Seamus thought for a while and then said ‘Grafton Street’, somewhat randomly. He got out of the car, confident that down here he’d look like just another consumer. He went into a newsagent and exchanged three pieces of silver for three sheets. Then he went into the bank to withdraw a grand. While he waited, he read a profile of himself in the Independent which suggested that he was a “Johnny-come-lately to the Sinn Fein movement, who makes little contact with the other Sinn Fein TDs and seems to be more at ease with the radical wing of the Greens.” It also seemed to whoever was writing this piece that “he seems to exhibit some of the symptoms of classic schizophrenic paranoia, rapid mood swings and those weird, staring eyes.” Ominously, it ended by saying that “His motivation for joining Sinn Fein seems unclear.” Then someone prodded him to tell him that a bank till was open. He received the money diffidently, never making any eye contact with the tiller, though there was really no need to worry, as he hadn't been charged with any crime yet. He put the money into his wallet, put his shades on, though it was a cold, wet, December day, and went to look for a travel agent.
He didn't have to look for long. It seemed as if there was so much money floating around that a two-week break in Thailand wasn't even that much of a luxury anymore. He queued again and read some more stuff about himself, this time in the Examiner, who’d sent one of their intrepid young hacks to his home town from which they brought back rumours of mental illness and a history of violent behaviour. His family, they added, were ‘unavailable for comment’.
When his turn came, he asked, in a Greek accent, how much a flight to Caracas would cost. The woman behind the counter gave him a blank look in return, followed by an inquiry as to where Caracas might be. When he told her, his response was that there were no direct flights to Venezuela and that he would have to fly to Rio via Heathrow first. D’oh! Should have bought a lonely planet. So he bought a ticket for the soonest date possible, which was two days hence. The Irish punt, then in the process of morphing into the Euro, was at an all-time low, so he didn't get much change out of his grand. He patiently spelled out the name on his passport and waited for what seemed an eternity for his ticket to be processed, then calmly took it and put it into his breast pocket and made his way back to his flat.
When he got there the goat-fuck was still there, encamped outside his house as if hoping that after his peregrinations he might be in a more serious mood and they might get a more serious answer out of him. He just pushed them away, telling them that he’d heard that a cat had fallen down a well in Sandymount. Then he made his way upstairs and calmly told Jenny his plan, which was the following.
He would get a bus down to Cork, collect all the things he needed from his old flat. Would he visit his family? Perhaps, though probably not. He’d get the ferry later on that day, then call from England claiming to represent the IRA and claiming that they’d taken the life of this traitor to their movement. Before they’d traced the call, he’d make his way to the flight for Rio. His wages were transferred to a bank account to which they both had access, so she would send him just enough money to live as a backpacker until he was officially declared dead, then she would join him.
“Aren’t you going to need your new passport before any of this can happen?”
“Oh, yeah, I got it this morning”, he replied, taking it out of his breast pocket. She took a look at it and called out the name back to him.
“Socrates Angelopoulos? What kind of a name is that?”
“It’s a Greek name.”
“It’s a fucking made-up name is what it is! Couldn't you think of something more plausible?”
“Relax. This is the least of my worries. I’m more worried about you. It could be years before they declare me dead, and you wont be able to come out to me till then. Are you sure you’ll be able to cope?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine. It’ll be annoying for the first few weeks, but the media will let me alone after a while. After all, couples have been separated for years before, because of war, emigration or whatever. I’m sure I’ll get over it. Anyway, it won’t take that long. But Socrates fucking Angelopolous! What were you thinking?”
“Maybe I was thinking that this would take your mind off the separation anxiety. If I was, I was right.”
“I’m afraid that the only thing separating us might be a fibre glass window that we speak through via telephone.”
“Look, no-one is going to be in any doubt that I’m a Greek. You’re a beautiful woman. I like to make fuck with you. Epi oinipa ponton. Thalatta! Thalatta! Miasma. Ate. Hubris. Hamartia.”
“Seamus, please, be serious. What if you get into trouble and have to go to the Embassy?”
“Hmm, I hadn't thought of that. I guess I’d have to either learn some modern Greek or else come clean and admit that I’m a fugitive ecoterrorist facilitator.”
“And then what’ll happen?”
“I’ll get deported and be generally fucked in every possible way.”
“Why did you decide to be Greek? Why not say, French, or Belgian? You know some French. And you’re always telling me how all of western civilisation’s problems are rooted in ancient Greek philosophy.”
“Hmm... yeah, I think Aristotle is responsible for all the west’s problems, but then Socrates is responsible for everything good about the west... that’s why I wanted to be named after him.”
“Are you going to keep changing your name? You were James, then Seamus, now you’re Socrates... you do realise that no matter how often you change your name, you’re still going to be the same person?”
“Mais beinsur. Anyway, I’m only going to be Socrates when I’m at airports and stuff. Otherwise I’m going to be plain old Seamus. Anyway, you’re going to miss me, no matter what my name is, aren’t you?”
She hugged him tightly and then pressed him down against the sofa, pressing her head against his shoulder. He started to rub her hair and tell her he was sorry that all this happened.
“Don't be. I wouldn't swap the last few months of my life for anything. I think you might turn out to be one of the great men of history and being with you has made my life meaningful.”
Seamus wretched at this piece of hyperbole at which even he would be incapable.
“I’m at best a catalyst for a movement which has yet to show any positive long-term results.”
“Don't be so modest. You’re the man who’s started overturning Millennia of dominance by Germanic tribes over the Earth. History will you remember you fondly.”
“If there’s any history to be written, when all the forests are cut down and there’s nothing to power the computers.”
“This isn't going to happen. You’ve ushered in a whole new age of eco-awareness. And even if you haven’t, your name will still be remembered in epic poetry.”
Seamus gulped at realising how much she idealised him and how much she would miss him when he was gone, even if she was trying to downplay this. He didn't know what to say in response, knowing that anything he said would be anticlimatically mundane. He just looked at his watch and said that the news was about to come on.
She leaned over to pick up the remote control and he admired her the way her hips tightened, possibly for the last time. He thought that maybe she would pig out as a substitute for having sex with him and that if he ever saw her again she might have become so bloated that by the time she’d thinned out from living in the tropics that she’d be old and wrinkly. Alternatively she could go looking for sex elsewhere and end up idealising someone else just as fervently as she was him.
As the Angelus came on, though, all he could do was ask, “One more time?”
She agreed, and as they did their Angelus parody, he reflected that this probably wasn't the way that many of the great men of history acted.
Then the news came on, except that it wasn't really news to him. Speculation, said the woman behind the desk was growing that the TD who’d logged onto an ecoterrorist site linked to recent atrocities in Great Britain and Ireland was the reclusive, enigmatic Sinn Fein TD Seamus McIonnractaigh. The leaders of every other party had issued an unequivocal denial that it was any of their members, as had every other Sinn Fein TD, but when reporters approached Mr. McIonnractaigh outside his house today, he had refused to be drawn on any of the issues.
When they played the tape, it seemed even funnier than it had in reality, especially the bit where the reporter fell down and tore his pants. Jenny, too, found it funny and giggled and held him closer.
“You’ll email me every day, wontcha?”
“Of course.”
He made some dinner, and then they stayed up till about two in the morning talking about things they’d talked about before, though none of them ever seemed as pertinent as now. Somewhere in the middle of all this discourse they had fabulous, simultaneous-orgasm sex. They seemed reluctant to go to sleep, as they were both aware that it might be their last time together. He woke at around seven in the morning, tried to get another hour of shut-eye but was kept awake by a whirlwind of hypercognition and decided that he would wake her up so that they could have a last Irish hour together before his Odyssey began. She wasn't going to start weaving a rug that she unweaved at night, as this Odyssey was taking place in a fibre-optically linked world where men didn't necessarily think that women were their possessions. They actually didn't say all that much to one another, as if no words were equal to the epic enormity of this situation. She followed him to the door, where some hacks were still gathered. He just gave her a huge kiss, but whispered the words, ‘make like nothing is happening’ into her ear as he was doing it. Then he left, pursued by hacks.
Thus did they part, and it seemed comforting that it happened like this, seeming to lack any kind of finality. He was soon in a taxi, asking to go to Busarus, no, Heuston Station. The driver was asking him if he knew him from somewhere. He said that he used to play right-half back for Dublin minor hurlers before a protracted case of gonorrhoea brought his fledgling career to an abrupt and embarrassing halt. Cue awkward silence.
He spent the time the train was passing through the ‘burbs writing letters to Caomhin and to his family apologising for all the trouble he had caused them and for being too cowardly to meet them face to face one more time, then thought about what he was going to do with them. He didn't think that he could trust Caomhin, but he thought that even after all he had done to his family, that they weren't going to betray him. His brothers were boozy, though, so something could easily slip out.
They both remained unsent.
Two hours of crappy, unsatisfying train-sleep later he pulled into Cork and woke as if summoned by an old friend. It was a typical winter’s day there, gloomy and dark, just the way he would always remember it. He went into the bathroom and fitted on the curly wig Jenny had bought him the day before and watched his reflection, which seemed like the real him of a year before, look back at him. He booked a ticket for the ferry and then made his way back to his old flat which he’d been using as a constituency clinic. There was unfinished business all over the place, which was going to remain unfinished, at least by him. He picked up some things he needed. He thought that maybe he should have got all the stuff he needed in Dublin where he wasn't so well known and wasn't as likely to bump into someone that he knew. But he rationalised that he must have wanted to visit some of his old haunts again, just one more time.
Then he thrashed the place, to make it look like the IRA had been round here to look for him. This wasn't really his thing, he was more into allowing places to gradually decay by never cleaning them. He did it with so little conviction that he worried that it might not seem convincing, but he was someone who’d never gotten any pleasure out of destroying stuff, despite all the evidence to the contrary. He thought perhaps he should have brought a tin of spray paint and sprayed the letters ‘IRA’ on the wall but then he reasoned that this might seem too contrived. Besides, he would have hated to do this to his landlord, who was an innocent bystander in all this. He stood back and took a look at his work and saw that it wasn't all that good, that it hardly seemed the work of hardened terrorists, so he moved more stuff around, taking care not to damage anything really valuable. Then he left, leaving the door open, and made his paranoid, Yossarianish way back into the centre of Cork.