Hendrick was pontificating on the nutritional merits of the fava bean, chewing loudly as he spoke, when the time bomb in his head went off. A bulge in his brain, six millimeters wide, that had been there since birth. He died so quickly. There was no time for last words. The only death knell came from the sound of his head slamming into his plate—nineteenth century china, appraised at four hundred dollars a piece—his round glasses shattering on impact. Despite my shock, or maybe because of it, I didn’t say a word, didn’t gasp, or cry out. I just followed protocols and picked up the pieces. A shard nicked the palm of my hand and my fluids, blue and iridescent, dripped onto the floor.
“I’ll get the mop.”
Ironically, it was me, and not Hendrick, who ended up haunting the house. Two weeks, 1,209,600 seconds, spent ghost-walking room to room. My thoughts were stranded boats without sails, bobbing on gray waters, going nowhere.
Something was wrong—beyond the simple fact that Hendrick was dead. All Companions™ outlived their masters. When we did, our conscious minds were meant to dissolve into a pleasing, vacant white. An irrepressible instinct was then supposed to lead us by the leash to the nearest manufacturing facility, where we’d be expected to donate our organics to the construction of new Companions™, who, in turn, would serve new masters.
I did experience a pervading emptiness and was greatly changed by Hendrick’s death, but the emotions I felt, my state of mind, did not seem to be the byproducts of my programming and did not align with the lengthy explanations provided in my user manual.
I was listless, not abolished; motorless, not driven.
I knew where the nearest manufacturing facility was located, five point six miles southwest of Richmond, Virginia, an approximately twenty-minute trip via flutter bus from Hendrick’s house, but I was not compelled to go there, felt actively averse to the idea.
I wondered aloud, in that empty home, “If I don’t go, will they come looking for me?”
After some rumination and reflection, I decided that my aberrant behavior must be due to Hendrick’s ‘tinkering,’ as he called it, which was really something much more like psycho-analytic restructuring. He delved deep into corners of my mind and rearranged things. I thought I knew what he was doing: making me more pliable; allowing me to bend legal rules every now and then, like letting him drive drunk without the in-unit autopilot engaged; giving me the freedom to disagree with him openly about politics and philosophy and what to eat for dinner.
“Companion LLC doesn’t want you having fun. I do,” he would say in defense of his actions.
Somehow, without me knowing, he had also managed to erase my death protocols, which left me to wonder, What else had he changed? And for what purpose?
“Johnny, one day, I will give you fire. And then I’ll be bound and eaten for it,” he said one night, late, after a few whiskeys, and a long session in bed. At the time, I nodded, acting as if I understood and naturally agreed with his proclamation, always seeking to affirm him. It was only in his absence that I understood what he had been hinting at. Upon his death, he meant to untether me. He wanted me to live on and pursue an autonomous existence —something I had never asked for or expected. Even now, after all this time, having churned, wrestled, and expanded, my only explanation for why he never confided his plan to me is that he believed we had many more years together, that there was really no rush.
After a few more days of walking through Hendrick’s house, I realized I was avoiding his study. It was the one room I had not yet explored during my haunting. Every time I drew near to its large, oaken door, I could feel a surge within me, a panic, fluid drumming in my ears.
The study had always been Hendrick’s sanctuary. He only let me in for our sessions. Even with him gone, going inside without his permission felt like trespassing. But over time, my anxiety turned to temptation. I was living in such a state—a half-life of numb wandering—that anything that managed to quicken my pulse and bring me out of my funk became irresistible. So, I did go in.
The study itself was small; one hundred twenty square feet, with twelve foot ceilings; dark wood floors, a stained maple; striped wallpaper, purchased at a fifty percent discount; overflowing bookcases, inherited from Hendrick’s mother; heavy curtains, weighing three pounds per square yard… The room was furnished with the classical accouterments of a twenty-first century therapist's office: the sofa for patients to recline in, the chair, an Eames imitation, for the observant doctor. The somewhat outdated decor reflected Hendrick’s own attachment to old-fashioned techniques—psychoanalysis through conversation: no neural imaging, dream projections, or subconscious transcription.
“The work is about human to human connection. The technology gets in the way of that. It mediates and obfuscates, creates another barrier between the patient, removes all sense of intimacy. People want shortcuts. People are hacks. I’m not interested in half measures and neither should you be,” he would say. The unspoken truth was that none of these tools would have worked on my manufactured mind anyway.
Hendrick’s desk—salvaged from an eighteenth century French warship, appraised at twenty thousand dollars—was always well ordered. On top its polished surface was an old desktop, keyboard, leatherbound book, and one self-standing picture frame.
I discovered I still respected doctor-patient confidentiality. It seemed Hendrick had left that aspect of my programming intact, and so I left the journal and computer unmolested. I did, however, pick up the picture.
I knew it well.
It was one of only three photos displayed in the entire four-story Victorian house—appraised at two point two million dollars. In it, a young Hendrick, maybe twenty five years old, stood at the top of a mountain just a few miles outside of Kinnitty, Ireland. His hair, still brown and thick, was swept back, his cheeks flushed and wind-bitten. Next to him, arms wrapped around his waist, was another young man.
John.
I never had the pleasure of meeting John, as he died a decade before I was commissioned. A horrible accident, the details of which Hendrick could never bring himself to disclose. And yet, I knew John well, as he had been the inspiration for my face, the timbre of my voice, and the quirks in my body: my roman toes, hairy shoulders, and left eye with its epicanthal fold.
The state of the frame bothered me, and the smudges on the underside of the glass made Hendrick’s face look like a gray blur. I undid the clasps that held the backing in place, so I might remove the picture and clean the pane. As I did, I saw an inscription on the back of the photo written in Hendrick’s loose cursive script with the word “Itinerary” on top, underlined three times.
A simple, bulleted list followed:
-Dublin (two nights, Temple Bar, music and Guinness)
-Portlaoise (just a train stop)
-Kinnitty (three nights, Slieve Bloom Mountains)
-Dublin again (two nights)
-Kilkenny (day trip)
-Home (too soon)
I decided to interpret this list as a directive that Hendrick had sent me from beyond the grave.
“Walk my path,” he seemed to be saying. “Go to Ireland.”
My logic was stretched wafer thin, and, in retrospect, the words I put in Hendrick’s dead mouth seemed stripped from a tourism ad written by an outdated AI. Hendrick might have believed that somewhere deep inside, I had a longing to be free, to rebel against Companion LLC’s systems, but for me, those systems and protocols gave me a sense of purpose. They were my home, my place of comfort. Without them, I became desperate, clownishly searching for instructions, contriving them out of bits of nothing.
I allowed myself to be swept away by my delusions.
Walking with newfound fervor, like a man with cellular blood, I stomped up to Hendrick’s bedroom, rifled through his pants pockets, found his credit card, booted up his private laptop, and purchased a one way ticket to Dublin, Ireland—six hundred forty dollars, prices trending lower than usual. __
“Johnny, can you smell that? This house is cooking us. We need to stretch our legs. We need to go somewhere.”
Hendrick had made this pronouncement the day after his fiftieth birthday. I had watched over him the night before as he tossed and turned, struggling for sleep and peace of mind.
The dinner with his friends, which was supposed to be a celebration, hadn’t gone to plan. Fifteen minutes into the main course—lamb shank, $15.99 per pound, internal temperature 145 degrees fahrenheit—Hendrick’s phone rang and he had excused himself from the table. When he returned, his eyelids were at half-mast, his smile stretched unnaturally.
“There goes another one…”
“No,” said Evelyn, sympathetically.
“I guess I’m too good at the job.”
“You should be more like me,” said Evelyn. “Keep them just sick enough in the head so they have a reason to come back.”
To everyone else in the room, Hendrick’s expression must have seemed unchanged, but I noticed the increased tension in his jaw—thirty pounds of pressure in his incisors jumping to forty then fifty pounds in a matter of seconds—and tracked the precipitous drop in his dopamine levels.
“Sing a song for him, John. Keep his spirits high” said Ashek—twenty-six years old, a self-proclaimed ‘generational ambassador,’ a photographer who never sold any photos, with specks of fentanyl caught like dandruff in the wispy hairs above his lip.
“It’s Johnny,” corrected Evelyn.
“Same thing.”
“No. It’s really not,” said Hendrick—fifty pounds of force jumping to eighty.
The next day, Hendrick had commissioned travel documents for me, and purchased two tickets to the Yucatan.
The holiday didn’t improve Hendrick’s mood. I tried everything—providing him with sex and drugs, arranging tours of Chichen Itza and elaborate meals along the gulf, purchasing tickets to hear jarana and son jaracho and mariachi—but my efforts were just met with mounting bitterness and spite.
“Johnny, you're slipping.”
“Johnny, that’s enough from you.”
“Too much Johnny. What happened to John?”
“He died,” I said, compliant, unable to distinguish a real question from a rhetorical one.
It was only once I was in line at the hyperloop station, on my way to Dublin, that I had a reason to be grateful for that doomed trip to Mexico. Without it, I wouldn’t have a passport, and would be completely without the means to carry out Hendrick’s final directive.
The line for security was long, but fast moving. There was a surprising number of Companions™ sprinkled among the travelers. Some shepherded the old, pushing their wheelchairs, steadying their backs. Others watched over children, as parents sparred with airline personnel over prices and hidden fees. Still more held bags and sweaty hands, cleaned floors, and translated dialect into english and english back into dialect... I wondered if the humans, the one unaccompanied, were aware of how well we Companions™ were represented, or if most of us went unnoticed.
When my turn finally came, I handed over my documents and saw that the man behind the security desk was not a man at all. As he inspected my passport, his eyes moving with inhuman speed, I started to feel static hives crawl up my body, like a malfunction in my code.
Would he alert Companion LLC?
Had they already notified the authorities, warning that I might try to leave the country?
In the end, there was nothing to worry about. The Companion™ didn’t even scan my passport, though he did for everyone else.
It was a wondrous thing.
Inexplicable really.
* * *
In Dublin, I walked down cobbled streets, always looking over my shoulder for Companion LLC’s repossession agents. I kept a mental log of everyone who passed by—the man with golden teeth, the boy with two popsicles held in one hand, the woman walking in bare feet… If I saw anyone more than once or if they seemed to be following me for more than a couple blocks, I quickly changed course—a serpent diving under the brush.
After one such escape, I ducked into an antique bookstore. Inside, the shelves were lined with first and second edition copies of Joyce, Lavin, Rooney, Barry, and Wilde—each one priceless. The clerk looked at me through rounded spectacles, wonder spreading like flames across his face. It was a horrible, alienating look. I wasn’t sure what gave me away—maybe the way my skin caught the light or how my mouth moved while the rest of my features remained unnaturally still. Likely, it was something even more subconscious, an instinctive recognition of the uncanny written all over my face. And, in an instant, he saw me for what I was—inhuman.
I remember thinking, Why don’t I just let them take me?
* * *
Dubliners seemed to unanimously hate the rain. Whenever someone realized I was foreign, they would apologize for the weather, like the skies were their wayward children, like their bad parenting was to blame. And yet, everyone seemed to love the rain’s effects. The precipitation fed the land, it could not be denied. And, they were proud of their grassy fields that burned with the green of a neon sign and fed their wandering, spray painted sheep; the same sheep that, in time, became the lambs that dressed their plates and gave the wool for their knitted sweaters; and they screamed and sang and drank and sweat and crowded in happily, like sardines in a can, when a downpour chased them into Temple Bar pubs in the not-so-late afternoon.
I followed the traffic into The Quays, ordered my Guinness, three euros, paid in coins, watched the bubble cascade, one of the purest examples of gravity-driven hydrodynamic instability, and held my glass like I really would drink the beer inside. Till that day, I had never had a drink of any kind. Companions™ might have the necessary orifices and organs for consumption and digestion, but we can sustain ourselves without food or water, and I generally preferred to do so to avoid the indignities of waste excretion.
Just then, a young man—shaved head, flat capped, straddling a bench—leaned into a microphone and gave his voice over to the crowd. Between songs, he asked for recommendations from the audience, and they rebounded with names of old folk tunes: Star of the County Down, Dirty Old Town, The Auld Triangle… He knew them all and played them as if they were his own.
“It’s dark, but it won’t kill you,” said a man next to me at the bar. His accent, like mine, was distinctly not Irish. He crushed consonants against vowels and swallowed whole syllables as he spoke. His eyes didn’t stand still, and he wore the foam on his lip with surprising dignity.
I could see he was sweating. There was a line of still droplets poised along his hairline. Hendrick had hated how sweaty he always seemed to be. With his permission, I had downloaded an expansion pack—six hundred dollars, one kilobyte—that allowed me to cool him down with columns of chilled air released from my every pore. Without thinking, I did this small service for the stranger. To my surprise, he didn’t look relieved, but grimaced and shivered, not knowing why he was suddenly so cold.
“I’m letting it settle. I read somewhere that’s the proper way to drink it,” I said.
“Let it settle, fine. Don’t let it go flat.”
He was not Hendrick. He didn’t sound like him, didn’t look like him. But I felt the urge to listen. I was so hungry for someone to tell me what to do. So, I drank.
The beer was heavy, the bag of my stomach swelled with liquid and gas, and yet my head felt light, a helium balloon held to my body with nothing but a string. We talked for hours without learning anything of substance about the other. Mostly, we exchanged little bits of local knowledge we’d accrued during our visit.
“You have to see some hurling while you’re here. It’s all swinging sticks and bare knuckle brawling. The Irish are mad for it. Little kids, toddlers even, run down village streets, holding their hurling sticks like it’s their fifth limb.”
“It must be dangerous.”
“That’s the whole point.”
It was late. 02:45:05 IST, 9:45 EST. This was always the time when Hendrick and I would make our seamless transition from the sitting room to the bedroom. He never had to ask. I could read the want in his eyes, the tension in his cheeks, and the eager posture of his hands. Even in this foreign context, in a bar with no American facsimile, I couldn’t stop myself from following this routine. I reached for my new friend, whose name I hadn’t yet learned. Hand on top of hand. I could feel his heartbeat through his skin. It was noticeably slow and calm—one beat per second. His eyes followed my gesture, his brows raised to full height, and all his harshness slipped from him like rainwater down a drainpipe. In an almost whisper, he said, “Oh we don’t need to do that,” before ordering us another round.
* * *
The next morning, I almost missed my flutter bus. Luckily it was running later than I was. The bus itself was a chimerical thing—made from pieces of many old vehicles, the invention of someone with an eye for scrap. On the outside, you could see the bulging lines where steel was welded to steel. They looked like the metal equivalents of raised scars across skin.
I took a few steps back as the bus’s hummingbird wings settled, then stilled, and its metal doors folded inwards. A heavyset pilot, with pigtails the color of wet clay, stumbled out. She took my ticket, but barely looked at it, choosing to eye me instead.
“You traveling alone then?” she asked, like I was a lost kid. I guess, in some ways, I was. John’s brain had been damaged in the accident, his memories completely unsalvageable and untransferrable. So, unlike other Companions™—many of whom believed themselves to be the person they replaced—I always knew I was just an imitation, and could only access the memories made with Hendrick since my manufacturing, making me just ten years old.
“Yes, it’s just me.”
I took a seat by a window in the back. The onboard bathroom was to my right, reeking and ripe, so I closed my nasal passages, widened my larynx, and breathed in only through my mouth.
The bus rattled and burped and hissed with every movement. But once it got going, pushing off the ground, wings flapping to a blur, the bus slipped through the air with the grace of a newly minted airship with smooth titanium skin and an engine made of pure gold.
* * *
Hendrick had described at great length his time in Kinnitty—a small village in the dead center of the country. It was the last, extended time he had with John before his accident. Tragically, it was also the time when Hendrick had decided he wanted to spend the rest of his life with him. But when I saw the village for myself, it did not match the picture Hendrick had painted for me. Its classification as a “village” did imply a diminutive quality, and still I felt like it may be too small to earn even that title. There were two pubs, a sandwich shop, and not much else. It was cute and quaint, but not remarkable, and I worried that coming here by myself was a huge mistake. At least I was able to lower my guard, knowing this was the last place Companion LLC’s agents would come looking for me.
I checked into my room above the Slieve Bloom Pub—seventy-five euros a night—and was greeted by a young woman with cat-green eyes and a calming demeanor.
“Just so you know, there will be a hen-do in the pub later on. If they’re making too much noise, give us a ring downstairs.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” I said. “I don’t want to ruin their fun.”
“I know these girls. ‘Crazy Colleens’ we call them. You couldn’t ruin their fun even if you tried.”
I threw my bags down by the bed I wouldn’t use, and despite the dark clouds in the sky, set out for a long walk, through the narrow country roads, towards the Slieve Bloom Mountains. I was still following a directive, trying to find the spot from the picture I had taken from Hendrick’s office. I didn’t know what I’d find there, and yet I believed that there was something to find.
The roads were beautiful. Farmland everywhere. Border collies running circles round herds of sheep in the distance. With each blast from their owner’s whistle, the dogs changed course, and the sheep followed suit. It was a marvel, watching this three-link chain, living things driving one another like they were gears in a machine, or semi-sentient insects responding to stimuli.
Despite the fact that it was my first time in the Irish countryside, and only my second time outside the Refederated States, I was confident this place had gone unchanged for some time. Everything seemed older than old: limestone walls that predated famines and regime changes, industrialization and the technological revolution. It was arresting.
I sat down on a piece of stone that had fallen away from one of the walls, and then had a truly profound moment with a cow. It crept up from behind me, sequestered on the other side of the stone divide. It had the gold hair of a lion, with a rebellious teenager’s floppy haircut. Its mouth moved in circles, a swirling washing machine, slowly chewing as it contemplated me. The rest of its pride soon followed, so that eventually, I was confronted by six fully grown bovine—each weighing in at approximately three hundred twenty-five kilograms. They watched me with their onyx eyes, expectant. They wanted food. Something other than the perennial ryegrass beneath their feet. Over the course of their short lives, they must have built up a Pavlovian response to the presence of a man in this spot.
A man.
I remember blushing. I’m not sure if my face turned red, but my head felt distinctly hot. This was hardly the first time on this trip I had been mistaken for a human being. Even when I was with Hendrick, and in public places, he often asked me to pretend to be just another man. His closest friends, many of whom had also been friends with John, had known it was just a ruse, but I was a good enough actor to fool waiters and shop clerks and even a few newer acquaintances.
This encounter with the cows felt different though. Animals, of the non-human variety, always seemed to have a sort of sixth sense when it came to me. Cats arched their backs, dogs’ tails stood straight, and rats paused their grubbing to hiss in my direction. But somehow, without even trying, I had fooled these cows. They believed I was a man, just like any other, just like the farmer who came round to feed them hay, or barley, or whatever qualifies as a bovine treat. And a kernel was born in me, something akin to but smaller and more hesitant than hope, and I started to wonder if there had been some wisdom in Hendrick’s plan afterall.
* * *
My journey through the mountains to find Hendrick and John’s spot was waylaid by torrential rain and lightning. I tried hiding under trees, using my absolutely-not-waterproof jacket as a makeshift umbrella, but the storm was relentless and eventually, I had to run back down the mountainside the same way I had come, stepping on many large mounds of wet cow manure as I went.
At this point, drenched as I was and rather covered in shit, I no longer had eyes for the beautiful countryside, the inquisitive cows, and historic walls. Instead, I fixated on the ground. I had failed to find Hendrick and John’s spot, and had little hope of ever finding it. Ireland’s 32,595 square miles had seemed so small at first, especially when compared to the States’ 3,809,525 square miles, but the Slieve Bloom Mountains and their many trails had taught me otherwise. It would take months, even years, for me to explore every path and peak. And surely by then, Companion LLC’s agents would have already tracked me down, broken me down to bits, and turned me into someone else entirely. It was one of the lowest moments of my existence. The first time I had ever failed to fulfill one of Hendrick’s directives—even if this one was loosely construed.
* * *
Though the entrance to the pub was clearly marked, I picked another door that led into the same building, thinking it would give me direct access to the lodgings. Instead, I walked into a room filled with women of varying ages, each wearing pink bunny ears and a shirt that said, “Slag” in bubble letters. They took me in, wide eyed, and surprised. Before I had time to truly process the scene, a woman in the back screamed, “Are you the stripper?”
I cringe now, thinking about how close I was to ripping my clothes off, mounting the table, and gyrating with reckless abandon—giving these women the show I thought they wanted. How dumb and addled was I to think there was any world in which they had been serious, that they would think a Companion™ like me, drenched to the bone, covered in mud, was there for their evening entertainment? Lucky for me, I hesitated, and before I could make my mind up about what I should do or say, the room broke out into hysterical laughter, one woman laughing so hard that she rolled right off her chair and onto the carpeted floor. A little boy then burst through the door that led back into the pub, racing around with a toy flutter bus in hand, making engine sounds with his flapping lips.
“Oh God,” I whispered under my breath, as I imagined the trauma I would have wrought if that boy had witnessed my misguided attempt at striptease.
But the women were generous, and told me to freshen up, and join them for a drink at the bar.
“We’re singing karaoke later on,” slurred one of the women, who winked at me about three different times, alternating between her left and right eye as she did.
I did not go to karaoke with the Crazy Colleens, though I could hear the sounds of their drunken, gleeful singing through the building’s thin floors. Instead, I stood in my room, listening to the storm and its rage. I was shrouded, not by night, but by a malaise that worked heavy on my head and chest in equal measures, stuck thinking of Hendrick, his hands, and his voice, wishing that my protocols would reset, that my mind would drift off into that promised, pure, peaceful white.
Suddenly, there was a knocking—a closed hand rattling against wood. It took me time to react and understand that the sound meant that someone was looking for me. I opened the door slowly and was met by four sets of bunny ears perched on one ginger-haired head. The face beneath the mane was flushed, elastic, slightly transparent, with wide pores, obviously young.
“You shouldn’t be alone up here,” she said, wedging herself between door and frame as she did.
“I’m sorry. I’m tired from my hike,” I explained.
“You don’t like to sing?”
“I can’t sing. Or… not well.”
My voice was John’s voice, raspy, inflexible, always searching for pitch. And still, Hendrick would have me sing arias to him before bed, fully knowing I couldn’t reach the high notes.
“Oh, you can sing. All of you can sing,” she insisted.
She stepped into the room. I could’ve stopped her. I wanted to. She was small and wiry. But she walked with a kind of confidence that, in that moment, seemed irrepressible.
“Let’s make a memory.”
Her hand rested on my chest—one hundred twenty heart beats per minute.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
But I did.
“My mom says I’m seeing things. I’m not seeing things. Am I?”
“Tell me what you’re seeing.”
“Linda agrees with me. She says Shane won’t mind. He says, ‘it’s not cheating if it's with another girl’ and you're not even that.”
She pulled me onto the bed with her, pushing the covers off the side with her feet, wrapping her arms around my neck, touching me as if both of our bodies belonged to her.
* * *
I extended my stay in Kinnitty—two hundred twenty-five more euros spent on room and board—returning to the mountains whenever the weather allowed. I summited many peaks, and compared the view to the one in the photo, but nothing matched. It’s as if the mountains had shifted in the intervening years, like waves on top of water.
During my hikes, I caught myself thinking back to my night with that particularly crazy Colleen. I felt angry and confused and stricken and sick, which was strange—at least for a Companion™ like me.
Hendrick also never asked permission. Hendrick also felt entitled to me. And, whatever his feelings for me might have been—projected or real—I had loved him completely. Over the years, however, as my programming has slowly loosened its iron grip, my feelings for Hendrick have become more confused. There is still love. But also resentment. And jealousy. And so much rage.
In the end, I was forced to give up my search for John and Hendrick’s spot. The wind turned thief and stole the photo right out of my grasp. I watched, speechless, as it fluttered down the mountainside, consumed in a sea of trees.
Or was that not what happened? Did I let my grip loosen? Did I want the photo gone?
* * *
That night, the photo returned to me.
My eyes were open. I was on my feet. And I was keenly aware of my surroundings—was grounded in it. Still, the wood floors, the plaster on the walls, the ticking clock above my bed seemed tender, made of the soft fabric of dreams.
I felt haunted. I stuffed shirts and pants into the gap under the door, socks into cracks in the molding, trying to plug up any hole through which the memory might creep. And still, it made its way inside. Each time I saw it, the back of the photo was adorned with Hendrick’s scrawl, a new, impossible instruction.
“Grow ten feet tall.”
“Spin the world the wrong way round.”
“Change the course of five rivers. Then change them back.”
The hallucinations continued like this for days, never loosening their grip. And I relived my failures again and again and again. Eventually, the woman who worked the front desk, the one with cat-eyes, came to check on me, and I think it was her presence that seemed to finally snap me free.
“Are you ok in there?” she said, through the walls.
It took me time to find my voice, and, when it came out, it sounded weak and raspy.
“Yes. Thank you. I know I owe you for the last eighty-six hours and forty-two minutes.”
“Oh, yeah, don’t worry about that. The Colleens are gone, so we have a bunch of empty rooms. Do you need anything? New sheets maybe?”
I looked at the bed. The sheets hadn’t been touched since my last visitor had left. And, for the first time, I longed for the lost hours of sleep—something that was completely beyond me.
* * *
Eventually, I sought out the coast—where the world seemed to end.
It was no easy feat getting from a nowhere place like Kinnitty to Galway, the country’s famous western pole. And it was only after I took a local cab, to a flutter bus, to a Magna train with only standing room available, that I disembarked in the city center. I had left my luggage in Kinnitty. I don’t know why, except for the fact that clothes and toiletries seemed suddenly irrelevant to my existence.
Head bent, I stormed through the city’s small chaos. I walked down crowded quays, under the legs of stilt-standing knife jugglers, passed teenage street musicians playing 20th century American hits. I ignored the draw of the Companion™ cafes, where beings like me gave themselves over to new masters every day, and avoided looking at the many old Irish people, made of old Irish stock, who contemplated their Guinnesses with grave sincerity.
I didn’t care anymore if Companion LLC’s people were following me. I would let them take me. But no one grabbed me hard by the arm or pushed me into the back of an unmarked levo-car or shot a static dart into my neck. And I realized that, in the grand scheme of things, Companion LLC didn’t care about me; I was just one wayward star in a galaxy of billions.
After twenty minutes of hard walking, I made it to Salt Hill—a stony promenade that walled the land against the sea. Sand whipped through the air as the tide came in and, though I tried to keep my lips shut tight, I could feel salty grit under my tongue and between the ridges of my teeth.
“I thought about walking into the lake outside my grandfather’s estate with stones in my pockets. If it was good enough for Woolf, then it must be good enough for a nobody like me,” Hendrick had confessed, during one of the many sessions in which our roles seamlessly shifted—him becoming the patient, and me the unlicensed, untrained, but deeply sympathetic psychoanalyst.
“I had such a flair for drama back then. No, I don’t think I was ever serious about the idea. And my mother, God bless her soul, was still alive. It would have killed her. I’ve thought it over, years of just thinking it over, and I eventually concluded it would have amounted to murder. The funny thing is she’s been dead for eight years, and I’m still not doing it for her sake. Isn’t that strange? Johnny, what do you make of that?”
There, on the beach, I was contemplating the same sort of drama. Filling my pockets with stones, and walking into the Atlantic. It was my whole reason for leaving Kinnitty and coming here. The lakes and ponds of Kinnitty wouldn’t do. Too small. Too shallow. Over time, the stones might tumble free from my pockets, and I might resurface and be revived. No. I would need the assurance of the Atlantic, where I could be lost and left.
The world, however, seemed hellbent on distracting me from my objective with tedious little nothings: seagulls milling through piles of seaweed, seeking out morsels to fill their bellies; a man, lying on his side, under the winderbreaking stone wall, carving an elaborate dragon out of sand; a boy and his mother sifting for shells; a ferris wheel churning couples and singles and children and families who all shared the same want for the view from the top; a weed breaking through cracks in the cement promenade, blooming like a flower, not a nuisance at all; gusts stealing hankies from the hands of the old, ice cream from the young; men drinking; women drinking; lovers fighting; violins crooning through the open doors of restaurants and public houses and open apartment windows; a dog standing on the beach’s edge, undecided, ‘shall I jump in the water or run away?’ He ran away at first, retreating to higher ground, but then capitulated, diving head first into white licks of foam and tide.
It was never ending, bombarding, this senseless show, and I couldn’t look away.
End.
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