Prelude to a Prologue
Let it be known to the audience, before we begin, that I don’t know the first thing about Killarney. I don’t pretend to know the first thing about it, either. Though it might be true I am at least aware that the name is attached to a small town in Ireland, near some lovely lakes and pristine parks…that’s about the extent of my awareness. To presume further would be pretentious and just plain duplicitous on my part.
So, for the sake of you, the audience, and for the sake of your pal, your friend, your unsuspecting writer who has chosen to write about something he knows nothing about for your own sake – heck, for all our sakes – I am telling you this indisputable truth. And make no mistake: this truth is not my truth. Opposing subjective “facts” have no solace in this story. No, you’ll find this a true truth, like how the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, how moths are attracted to flame, or how most carry-on bags exceed the acceptable size limit, and no flight crewmember does anything about it. Such is the level of truth I impart to you today, in telling you that most of what I will say about Killarney (the place) from here on out is fictional.
I can tell you are put off by my words… And why shouldn’t you be? We just met, and I am about to weave you a story that takes place in a completely unrealistic version of a very real town. But that doesn’t mean the story itself is untrue; if anything, knowing this only makes the story truer. So, to help you understand my position, and yours by association, I’m going to begin with a fable about the real truth – a pre-story story, if you will, like the delightful cartoon you’re forced to sit through before one of the great M. Mouse’s animated feature films. Think of my first tale as an award-winning short, if you will.
Here goes:
Two weeks before Christmas, a middle-aged fellow was on his way home to spend the holidays with his family. But “family” is such a loose definition in the modern era; to him, “family” referred to a posse of ne’er do well friends that had shared too much sin together to make their own family, and so settled with each other as the closest they could ever get to one. Same goes for “home.” Here, “home” refers to the RV the man would probably pack up and drive inland once the winter season had passed.
Our middle-aged fellow was in the midst of the mid-life crisis of a middling life. Said crisis begins with the realization of how unfulfilling this state of the modern household truly was, for nothing shed light on that limbo more than Christmas. Christmas is a time which glorifies traditional definitions of “family” and “home, and was therefore a time of unrest and deep-rooted unhappiness for him. He could not wait for the anticipation to be over and done with.
The Chicago International Airport was crowded, as always – another indisputable truth, but we’ll be here all year if we continue tallying those. The man had made arrangements to meet up with an old friend of his in Boston for dinner, drinks, and a side of hanky-panky (purely to relieve stress). Thus was the understood nature of their estranged friendship; waiting for it was irritating, ending it left him dissatisfied, but he could count on finding comfort in those twenty minutes of being hankedy-panked somewhat competently.
When his time came to check in, a chance-skewed glance alerted him to the fact that his second bag was much bigger than expected. In fact, it had been engorged with all of the worthless baubles and souvenir shirts accumulated in his travels. He wondered, how many glares were judging him, he who dared to bring that overstuffed duffel and take up precious space in the limited overhead compartments?
Looking about, he was overcome with the loneliness of registering no glares around him. On the contrary, everyone seemed occupied with their phones or their families. It was as if their glances were magnetically repulsed by him.
Reading their thoughts infuriated the middle-aged man. Behold, this cowardly new face of judgment: refusing the affirmation desperately needed by a fellow citizen of the world! Yes, they judged him…and they did so by daring to not look at him, The man almost would have preferred they sneer at him, rolled their eyes, anything at all. But, no, it’s so much more comfortable to keep one’s complaints to oneself.
The middle-aged man offered all these silent critics a very visible sneer, and dragged his two overstuffed bags onboard. No personnel stopped him, so he felt all the more justified and even pleased by his restraint in front of such a judgmental lot. They were probably the same breed of self-righteous narcissists who believe that the nuclear family is a truth, as much as they believe that the bag size limit on planes ought to be enforced. Let my sneer annoy them if my bags don’t, he thought – they deserve that much, at least.
The man took his seat near the window, exhausted at the hard work he put into getting his bag in the overhead several rows ahead of him. Now he could finally relax, drink some coffee, watch a movie…well, he couldn’t do that, thanks to the new pandemic regulations – touch-screens and all that. Cursing his decision not to bring a book for fear of packing too much, one of many regrets he had in his life that suddenly became front and foremost, the man’s eyes wandered out the window. Clouds promising snow, streets promising blood…it was all, all so very-
“Lovely, isn’t it?”
The middle-aged man jolted with surprise. He had expressly chosen this row because no people booked the seats beside him. And yet, and yet! Here was an audacious young man in priestly vestments, grinning mildly at him while simultaneously entranced by the city outside, sitting comfortably in the middle seat. Never mind he hadn’t even heard him sit down; could he not have the courtesy to sit nearer the aisle?
“No, not really” muttered the middle-aged fellow, hoping his tone exposed just how unwilling to converse he was.
“Hah!” exclaimed the Mysterious Stranger, clearly not getting the message. “You don’t even pretend to be agreeable. Can a city really be that revolting to you?”
“What are you asking for, Father, a confession?” was the mocking reply.
“Not at all. I’d rather hear your judgment.”
That word only proved the middle-aged man’s disdain. He rolled his eyes and looked back out at the city, a city raised from its famous fire to heights even more impressive than it reached before. All those glimmering windows, all those towering skyscrapers, all those bustling disparate lives…They prompted little more than a shrug from him.
“I hate cities. They’re ugly and flawed because they’re made by ugly and flawed creatures. Only human beings could build such nasty places to live.”
The middle-aged man was proud of his existential reasoning, retained from some long-ago liberal arts course at university. But the Mysterious Stranger seemed unmoved by his reasoning. Odd, considering how he was a young man, and young men of his generation were commonly prone to self-loathing. Odder still, he was a priest, according to his clothes, which typically crowned one with disgust for the sins and earthly ambitions of the human race.
Instead, the judgment crossed a secret thought of the Mysterious Stranger’s, which in turn gave him cause to chuckle – a cheerful chuckle, not one of irony or hopelessness. It might have been some inflection of the faint Christmas music above that made it sound that way, but the middle-aged man could not decipher why, of all things, his statement made this lad cheerful.
With the twinkle of calculation in his eye, the Mysterious Stranger leaned forward with a lurid grin unbefitting a man of the cloth. He was clearly a well-versed orator, despite his appearance, talking enthusiastically, but with a restraint and delicacy extending beyond his years. The middle-aged man suddenly felt he had become party to an intimate secret.
The Mysterious Stranger spoke thus:
“Consider a rose. A single, fragile, crimson rose. We notice its beauty, its fragrance, its danger, but do these things have any effect on how it grows? Does that plant climb upwards towards the sun because it knows that to do so would make it the epitome of roses in man’s esteem? Is it out of an instinct, to survive or hang on to the truth that it is, in fact, a rose worth beholding? Does the rose even know what a rose is, and what a rose should want beyond a single instant? No. It does none of these things, for roses cannot think. Yet, upwards it grows towards the light all the same, amassing fragrance and beauty and wielding its exceptional thorns. Why? Simply because that’s all it can do. Is that not why we have made cities – to continue to grow as a species towards the light? We embrace the full possibility of human ingenuity, and, by doing so, fully realize the epitome of ‘fellowship.’ That is, the city. All we can do is continue growing towards that truth, the truth of shared ideals, so that we may individually reach the same conclusion: to realize. By faith, and realization, we shall blossom into a rose more precious and exquisite than any other flower in any other garden. Or, forsaking symbols, into a human being more realized than any other in any city. All because we strive towards the light, the truth…the virtue of realization.”
As the Mysterious Stranger spoke, he became more and more animated, wrapping his one-man audience so tightly in his passion that the middle-aged man had a hard time wrapping his head around the Mysterious Stranger’s analogy. But it did strike him odd, that, “You know, Father, you didn’t mention much of God in your little love-letter to humanity.”
“Just because I wear a priestly gown, and mention words like “faith” and “fellowship,” does not determine my allegiance.”
“Hmph, I gotcha. A rose by any other name, am I right?”
The Mysterious Stranger’s face tightened. He forced a smile of acknowledgment to the middle-aged man’s quip, replied with a drawling “You could say that.”
And then…well, he then made no further efforts to engage the middle-aged man in conversation. Drifting further and further after that secret thought, it became clear that he had mentally ditched his neighbor at the runway. Then, the Mysterious Stranger went too far: he unboxed a long, hearty candy cane, and began incessantly sucking away at one end for the remainder of the flight. It was a clear sign that he would no longer be open for confessionals.
The middle-aged man was offended. He tried to meet the Mysterious Stranger’s eye, but it was fixated on something beyond him. He looked hungrily at the delicious candy cane, in the hopes that the Mysterious Stranger might demonstrate some of that good Christian charity. But his neighbor had moved on, and the middle-aged man quickly gave up under the pressures of rising frustration. Thirty seconds wasted on a vague adage, and he wouldn’t even be rewarded with an interesting conversation? Now enactments and reenactments of the debate that could have been would most certainly plague him all the way to New York. He could have worked out this Christmas pickle he found himself in – his discontent with the words “family” and “home” – for this Mysterious Stranger was obviously a man of wisdom by the way he carried himself and sucked on that candy cane.
Yet, the priest chose to act the miser by keeping all his good reason all to himself. How inconsiderate young people were these days, forcing him to pop pills just to sleep through the abrupt and uncomfortable end of their conversation. Melatonin wasted, just to keep from worrying what others thought! Why would anyone open that door, and leave it open?
After hounding down a stewardess who promptly brought him some ginger ale, he gave a sideways sneer to the Mysterious Stranger, a sneer he thought went ignored like their pseudo-conversation, gradually drifted in and out of sleep. Darkness finally came uninterrupted from the pills, paired with the slow rumble of the plane’s ascent. The middle-aged man’s last thought was, if the plane did not land before he woke up, that the Mysterious Stranger would excuse himself to another part of the plane. It was the kind thing to do.
It was a drowsy flight overall. When the plane touched down at JFK, you could feel the cabin’s energy returning in full force, bit by bit, as passengers prepared to push and shove a path to their connecting gates. There was not a whole lot of passengers, but it was still three-quarters full, and, when a three-quarters-full plane is convinced that, if they dart for the exit fast enough, they stand a chance of skipping ahead of the other three quarters, they get tangled with the flight crew and then no one gets ahead. Then, we have a whole lot of frustrating, foaming, fed-up travelers dealing with the biggest obstacle to a journey: other travelers. All this, compounded by the stress of the holidays. As they stumbled over each other, tearing bags down from overhead compartments, hasty to get on to another flight so they might be free to feel drowsy once again, the violence seems normal – never mind the fingers scratched and belongings trampled, it’s all part and parcel of the traveling experience. The afflicted would have a chance to sleep their complaints off as well, if being shoved turns out to be that much of an inconvenience.
Once the horde had passed on with the voracity of a stampede of early risers heading to the Vegas buffet lines, a stewardess picked herself off the ground where she had been trampled. She was used to this sort of thing – flicking off the gum transferred from someone’s shoe to her braid, stitching the rips in her skirt, searching for her nametag that had been kicked several rows down. These were the battle scars of the service industry, and hers were deeper and bloodier than any base barista at Starbucks. She brandished them with pride to the men who comforted her for the short nights in Dubai, or brief mornings in Shanghai. To them, she would be beyond time, cursed to fly over temporal frames from country to country, continent to continent. And, yet, even a heavenly being as she could be summoned back to Earth, subjected to the human wounds of eye bags and short-temper. This mix of the pathetic and the divine entranced the men she happened upon in her travels. They were often dying to be entranced, for the world had become a desert of unromantic designs, all tailored to reach one preferred outcome: the expected. No one expected a servant of the consumer to be so elevated in existence, nor the denizen from some aerial plane to be so beaten to the ground. Men were drawn to her grey eyes staring at night and day simultaneously, her auburn hair frazzled from the sugary glob she tore into pieces to remove. The Stewardess denied her men of the hour their expected outcome, and they felt rewarded by the unknown. And, after all this praise, after all this pride, after all this pleasure, she always got exactly what she expected: more and more tired.
The Stewardess resigned herself to that fate, getting on her hands and knees on that familiar search for her nametag, kicked under some random chair as it had always been and always would be. She found it, as expected. Rising, she found something else unexpected, and a sudden inexplicable thrill slipped down her spine.
All by itself in a seat by the window, alone and bloated as could be, sat a bag. A bag! Whoever heard of such a thing being left behind nowadays, when every thing one chose to carry was precious? What made the situation even more unusual was that the person who left the bag behind took the pains to strap it in with a seat buckle, clamp a pair of headphone around its top with the cord leading back inside itself, and lean the seat back. All this, just so a duffel bag could feel as nice and comfortable as any other passenger. Perhaps even more so, actually.
Oh, the Stewardess was overwhelmed by so many questions! Surely, the owner left their bag behind on purpose? Should she open it? Should she report it first, in case it was a bomb? Was the seat leaning back while they were landing, totally breaking protocol, and no one else seemed to notice? Didn’t the bag seem a bit too engorged, for both carry-on and overhead? While these questions, and many more besides, ran through her mind, the Stewardess was already unzipping the duffel. She was a woman possessed by the chase for the thrill; one does not let an opportunity like this go by, especially when the usualness in one’s life is so tempted with the unusual. She just had to see. She had to see the story out to its conclusion, to relate it properly later to those one-night gentlemen and entrance them further. Or at least learn the truth, so she could craft a more entrancing story. Maybe then…maybe then…she might start to become just as entranced with herself.
The duffel held nothing but disappointment. Clothes, condoms, and a sleeping bag about summed it up, and those three things caused her to be more tired than ever before. What was the point of hoping, if even generalities wouldn’t come true? She wasn’t asking for a bomb, or a decapitated head, or hundreds of dollar bills. She wasn’t asking for something more; she just wanted something other. But that clearly wasn’t happening this time, just as it never happened before, and would never happen period. So, with a grunt, the Stewardess heaved that abandoned duffel over her shoulder and opened the overhead compartment for the next flight, before she would sprint after the owner and probably receive no compensation for her hopes for compensation.
It was then that the corpse of the middle-aged man rolled out from the overhead compartment to land soggily on top of her, and she vowed never to hope again.
Morning's Early Dark 