The Celtic Riddle

LYING, I can tell you, is not what it's cut out to be. I can personally attest that all that stuff about bright lights, long tunnels, and a transcendent feeling of peace is a crock, a figment of someone's imagination. I felt completely lucid but irritatingly cold, my fingers and toes blocks of ice.

I could hear everything, understood everything. I just couldn't move or speak, although I followed everything with a kind of detached interest as if it really had nothing to do with me. I had it in my mind, however, that I had something very important to say.

Gradually, I began to realize that some of the voices I could hear belonged to people I knew. I recognized Rob, Alex, and then Moira and Clive. Moira and Clive! Either I was having an otherworldly experience, or I'd been out for a bit, long enough for Moira and Clive to get themselves across the Atlantic to Ireland. And if the latter possibility was the correct one, then I must have been in pretty bad shape.

I heard a door swing open, and new footsteps in the room.

"Hello Breeta, dear," Alex said.

"How is she?" Breeta said. She sounded almost her old self. That was something, anyway. And I'd certainly be interested in the answer to her question.

"She's come through the operation all right," someone said, a doctor presumably.

How reassuring, I thought.

"But now it's a matter of seeing how she does over the next few hours."

What did that mean? I wondered.

"Can she hear us?" Breeta demanded.

"Possibly," the doctor said. "It's good to keep talking to her."

I heard footsteps come up right beside me and breath very near my ear. "I know you've had a very bad time, frightened for your life out there on the hill with that lunatic; shot and lying there in the mud and the rain," Breeta said. "And I'll grant you that Rob and the gardai cut it a little fine getting to you. And no doubt being operated on for hours and hours must have been very difficult whether you were conscious or not. But you've had long enough. From now on you're just wallowing. So pull yourself together, and wake up!"

People who hurl your own words back at you when you are in a weakened condition are a blight on the landscape, I decided. Not quite as bad as people who shoot you, perhaps, but a blight, nonetheless. I ignored her.

"This is all my fault," Jennifer sobbed. "She went after that awful man because she was worried about me.

"No, it's not," Rob said. "It's mine. I lied about where I was going when I left the station. I didn't want anybody to know I'd gone to Maeve's place to discuss things. If I'd told someone, or gone back to my room sooner, we'd have figured it out and got there before she did."

Oh dear, I thought, I really will have to rouse myself and say something. I wouldn't want them to go through life thinking it was their fault. I was the one who'd persisted in this whole thing. Heaven knows, I should have known better. Deirdre had warned me after all. But I couldn't wake up, try as I might. Instead, I found myself drifting away. Soon, I was sitting in an empty theater, empty, that is, except for me. A single spotlight made a bright circle on the stage.

After a few minutes of silence, I heard loud echoing footsteps, and a man in bowler hat, black suit, and umbrella, his face painted completely white, stepped into the circle of light. I kept staring at him, thinking I should know who he was, but I couldn't figure it out, and in the end I gave up trying.

"And now, for your viewing enjoyment," the man said. "For one last time on the silver screen, sailor, world traveller, scholar, antiquarian, successful entrepreneur, and family man, from County Kerry, Ireland, please welcome, ladies and gentlemen, Missssster Ea-monnnnnn Byrrrne!"

The screen behind the man lit up, as his footsteps died away, and there, larger, much larger, than life, was, as announced, Eamon Byrne. "I suppose you're wondering why I called you all together," the giant face said. "Particularly," and here he coughed, "particularly seeing as how I'm dead."

"I've seen this one," I said to the empty theater. "This must be summer reruns."

But it wasn't.

"I wish," Eamon Byrne said looking right at me. "I wish more than anything, that I'd told them, all of them, my sister Rose, my friends, my business partners, my staff, Kitty, John, Michael, even Deirdre, my wife Margaret, but most especially my darling daughters, my little Eriu, Fotla, and Banba-I wish that instead of saying those horrible things I did, that I'd told them that I love them."

And with that the screen went blank and I was back in my hospital room.

This, it seemed to me, called for decisive action. With all the strength I could muster, I opened my eyes. I must have been gone awhile, because Breeta was no longer there. All the rest of them were, though, and they were the ones I wanted to talk to.

"She's awake," Alex exclaimed.

"About time," Moira said, smiling at me.