‘Taints’ by David Hayden
Night is one star exchanged for many stars. There is no escaping the motion of our home towards imperfect darkness. I hid in a storm drain in the park until closing time, escaping from what I might find of myself in the sight of others. Now I sit on a bench beneath a tree where the shadows cast their shadows. There is a halo of yellow far off, where green meets the zone of habitation. Boughs and branches move, leaves seethe and shiver. The night has its mouths. Nothing takes flight here. I pause with my abandonment in this place where, as elsewhere, I do not belong.
Dark radiance of sun as heat from the earth, the bodies, the made world, is the star’s return of energy that alters the nocturnal abode of the living and the dead. I would not think to measure the night this way, and yet it is part of the intensity that I feel, even when, as on this winter night, the transmission is hard to detect, notional.
I move into myself here on this bench beneath a tree. Night is something we do to each other. But what is done to us? Our eyes are dabbed on the dark. Our lips are stained from gazing at each other. We see no more of each other. A breath’s take of the icy air tastes of smoke and metal and there is no accounting for the flower that opens in my mind with this flavor. Memory is what I do to myself and she has a name.
Across the park, out on the boulevard, three men sit and drum on upturned plastic tubs to raise a thunder, to split the sidewalk. The cap before them contains their own money and no other’s, perhaps because they are too perfectly fierce and indifferent to praise.
In a sixth-floor apartment three blocks and many years away, a child is awake, in tears, in their lovely bedroom. The nightlight is all buttery comfort. A red tin airplane hangs from the ceiling in one corner next to a hot air balloon with tiny raccoons in the basket. The child is awake, in tears. A rabbit called Fontina and a bear called Taleggio lie face down on the floor. Bricks and trains and track and little wooden people are in three green canvas tidies along the wall. The child is awake, in tears. The smell of spicy food, of steamed rice, oven-warmed flatbread comes under the door with the rumble and purl of grown-up laughter. There is nothing wrong. The child is awake, in tears. No one is coming. On this bench, I wait for forever, but it never comes. Night is the closest I will get, as long as I can stay awake, as long as I manage not to succumb to the shakes in the early hours, the pre-dawnlit hours. The pictures belong to me. They are what I know. The moment before I see, I feel faint, or dense, or sick, or ecstatic, or not quite lonely, or almost totally transparent.
The moon is waxing full tonight, greedy for the whole sky and everything beneath. All who gaze up could drown in its sticky light. All who gaze up might be pulled towards a lunatic longing to live above the eternal night, in an unending present shunning the return of the sun: that tyrant which makes us see what we cannot bear. But forgetting is not for me.
On this bench I roll through five decades, a rosary of bitter recollection, worn smooth but retaining their original weight and consequence. What happened, happens again and again, inescapably. The shape of occurrence is clearest to me at night. The lightside and the nightside co-exist. But there are no unbroken paths through what I did and what was done, only patchworkings of mind and time, of habit and perception. Unreason speaks with the voice of reason, reason speaks with the voice of unreason. Light is speckled with dark, dark is shadowed with light. There is no natural night. But here we are: me and the person I was, the people I might have been, and the ghosts I made.
Bored to sleep by homework, I woke as a child at my desk, a face came out of the blue-black ink bottle, pressed to its surface, his hands appeared, slapped the glass in desperation, bubbles streamed out of his mouth and nostrils. I turned the lid and dipped my pen, attempted to lower the surface to allow the man to escape but no one was under the surface and the ink had stilled. I knew, even then, that this was the older me. The one sitting in a park at night, sitting on a bench beneath a tree, unable to return to the form that leaves traces, unable to erase the traces, unable to read the marks, to speak the words, to live in the silence after speech.
Night-thickened sound is all around me now. The small numbers of the day climb slowly in the darkness. The hours when the body radiates its last heat and becomes even more intolerable to itself. Fingers search fruitlessly for warmth in pockets. Bones turn blue under trembling flesh. The cold persuades me into motion, but I do not wish to stray too far from my bench because I might lose my place. Because I might cross the path of one or more people who could project their thoughts out onto me in blows, with fists and feet if I am lucky, with glass or brick, if I am not. I stamp my feet as I circle the bench. My left ankle is swollen, my head throbs as much as thinks; injuries stay to tell their stories. Speak well, poor body. Talk on in the night.
I held my perfect child once and she gazed back at me. I did not know, and could not think, how I had tainted her. We strived in love to care. The compulsion to break made itself known, again and again, and by the time she had sought, and maybe found, a way to be held together, her mother had passed, and I had lost connection and will and time.
I wait. Each morning, after first light, she will pass the bench where I sit. I am unrecognizable. I will want to reach out to her, but I will not.
From issue 18: autumn/winter 2024
About the Author
David Hayden’s work has been published in Granta, A Public Space, Zoetrope All-Story, The Georgia Review, Zyzzyva, AGNI, Winter Papers and The Stinging Fly. His book, Darker With the Lights On, was an Irish Times Book of the Year
