‘Zeno’s Paradox’ by Lucy Sweeney Byrne
Lucy has the thought, unbidden, over and over, catching her quick through the chest; ever since that first time, then, right when, heave gasping over-bent on grass out, frontfallen knees, not knowing, how knowing; door open flung, light pouring limbs out into cool air somehow moving, not hers, nothing now hers known, all; upon hearing, the phone’s screen still aglow with it there on kitchen floor, dropped a clatter, still ablaze with what, irrevocable, voice calling still Lucy are you there are you alright Lucy I’m so sorry Lucy, now known, no; howling out-ow-out with it now, convulsing out hands wet down from it green evening dew cold beneath her, white breath spilling out, the thought:
How easy short there forever looked, from freckled dappled days under swaying shade lying – warm, red soft through foldover eyes, bright dozing, whispers slipped, sipped butterwarm in soft, fluttering dares to keep, fingers interwoven, for better, clam clap clamp palmed in sacred matters only, mattered to them, two, ownly. All promise. Why not yes, alright then yes let’s give it a whirl so, yes.
At least that’s how she remembers it now. Now that he is not here with a memory to contend, to complete. Mix colours in with, all colours turning to brown, round and round, muddied. The way a pot, first just a lump, a nothing, spinning, then fingers from two hands round mould up to form, spinning, a shape, a thing, definite. A shape designed to hold things, together. The history is hers now, and the colours are hers; the shape, all hers, moulded, and she, let loose, is choosing reds and blues and yellows and greens for it. She fears she’s running wild with it. She doesn’t know how she got here.
*
Lucy is on a train travelling forward, rolling on into the city, to collect the keys from his sister. His sister works in an office right in the centre, just west of the river. (Lucy has never been entirely sure what his sister does, but it seems important, and tiring. His sister pauses conversations to purse lips at her buzzing phone’s illuminated screen, and pinches between her eyes, and says no, I’m fine, really it’s fine, what were you saying? And Lucy can never quite remember.) Lucy hasn’t seen her since the funeral, and before that, not for a few months. Certainly not since she, bags packed, closed softly the door behind, while he slept ... They have arranged to meet in a café called La Belle Époque, which serves teas and coffees, and small intricately glazed desserts that Lucy has never seen anyone actually eat.
The café is around the corner from his sister’s large, mirrored office building, and they are meeting at thirty-six minutes past five, after his sister finishes work. His sister has told Lucy in advance that it will take her six minutes to get there, and that she has to collect her son from a piano lesson at seven, and so they can both rest assured that they won’t be obliged to stay long. One precursory hot drink, the required exchange: keys and words, all small, and she’ll be done. Finished.
Lucy is alone on the carriage, right at the back. Waiting. As she breathes long through her nose, she smells stale coffee rising and musty train: familiar. She is trying and failing not to think. Don’t even, she instructs. No. It’s okay, she soothes herself; she cannot reach, it’s okay, she can’t. To get there, Lucy must first cross halfway to B, and then halfway to halfway to B, and so on, and so she will be stuck forever in the halfways, suspended still, back where she started, safe at A. And so she will never have to face that welled-in, just-like face.
The train is silver and clean bright with yellow poles shining and a man’s gentle voice making announcements along the way, telling her all her halfway points; towns that she knows she can never reach, and yet is passing, somehow, steadily. A person before her, gone now, spilled their coffee. Bitter smell rising. The cup rolls. It is small and dark red, styrofoam, with a white plastic lid. One end is larger than the other, so it rolls in lurching circles, getting nowhere. Brown liquid curls in lines, expanding out in widening rings, rolling back and forth in rounds around, up and down across the floor with heaves of movement as the train brakes and accelerates. How many times will it travel to the city and back today? Round and round.
A month ago Lucy awoke, packed two small suitcases from the attic with clothes and a few personal belongings from the spare room, the few items left unshared (so few, by the end: some childhood photographs, one or two CDs, old books, jewellery, a razor, toothbrush ...), and left, softly easing the door closed behind her, the shock of summer’s morning light shining in, momentarily blinding, in a collapsing triangle on the hall’s pine floor as she pulled gently, so as not to wake. She left a note on the kitchen table. She thought it would be easier that way.
Lucy has now been set a task. She must meet his sister and collect the keys to the home they shared. Empty now, waiting. Lucy thinks of the tea in the dark press, milk in the fridge, spoiling into thick white lumps. Bills collecting in a pile in the hall, DVDs lying haphazard on the shelves by the television, left out of cases. Coins wedged down the side of the blue couch cushions, still bruised with indentations, toothpaste stains on the pale green tiles along the wall above the bathroom sink. The heating, she thinks. Probably still on the timer. Seven in the morning, five in the evening, chugging into life, water gurgling. The low constant hum of electronics; a thickened silence.
When she thinks of their – his, now her – house, it’s like picturing a place suspended underwater. Preserved. A sunken house. She imagines swimming through it in a wetsuit and full, hissing, bubbling mask; pushing off door-frames for propulsion, carefully kicking out her legs, so as not to disturb all of the too-familiar items, as she drifts from room to room. She sees the blue Turkish vase on the mantlepiece, brought back from that street market in Kalkan; the watercolour of the lakeside cottage at dusk her grandmother painted; the wobbly kitchen table by the door, the towels folded in the hot press, their two white pillows ... When she pictures them now, they all seem to float; to be held still, static and untouchable. Like items in a museum, or bits of fruit in jelly.
And now she must collect (jingling), into her hand take, front two gold and for the back silver (jangling) with that miniature plastic sandal from Vietnam – 2010, was it? – yellow-faded (jingling) all up in her fingers, her hands, all the memories (jangling). She would give all she owns, she thinks now, sitting and looking out at passing pale yellow fields rolling off to greyblue sea, everything, to never have to see it again. The house where they, where he. To strike a match and walk away. But she can’t do that. She has been irresponsible enough. Caused enough. Now it’s all on her. This is her task.
He and his sister share the same eyes and way of tilting their mouth to the left when something amuses – a lilting face, they – and the dread of what she will see when she sees those well-known so transposed makes her shudder down in the very ashen black pit of her, and she coughs up smoke and soot nothing, raw in her throat, at the thought.
A month ago Lucy left, gently pulling behind her the door to the house they shared, leaving only a note on the table, propped against the fruit bowl, to explain. Two weeks ago, he committed suicide. This is a thing that has happened now, irrevocably.
*
The train heaves to a stop, lulling her upper body forward, holding it there, suspended, before collapsing her back into place. A dark line of coffee, broken free from the circles by the heave, trickles towards her shoe. Lucy’s stomach contracts. She has been unable to keep down food, and the strong bitter smell is making her nauseous. But she sits still; she doesn’t dare move. The silver disks on either side of the doors, surrounded in green, sing out. Nobody gets on or off. Two girls, younger than her, teenagers, are chattering somewhere up the carriage, out of her field of vision. She didn’t notice them embarking. They talk excitedly, interrupting themselves, keen, volume and pitch building in heaving waves. They are discussing boys in their school. A text message, a party. Their chatter reaches climax, and they shriek in a fit of nervous ecstasy over a joke made, something read out from a phone. An allusion to a kiss, a touch maybe. Lucy listens absently, the words only sounds, glancing off her mind. She is now twenty-eight. She doesn’t know how she got here.
Lucy has mousey hair which she usually dyes blonde every month. She has not dyed it in a long time, and so her roots are long and shadowed. She has freckled skin, and bitten fingernails which crack in pointed shards of colour when painted. Reds, yellows, navy blues. She has muddy green eyes, a water-logged field on a dark autumn day, one of which contains three black dots, in the iris. She is of average height, perhaps slightly smaller.
*
He always said she was small, but only to tease her; poking at her, grinning. She pretended to mind. He was so tall. Tall and gangly. He looked like his limbs were going to come loose and break free, when he ran. She hoped when they were younger, that once they grew up he would fill out, that his body would eventually thicken, and catch up with his height, and so they would match better. That was what she consoled herself with, when they walked into restaurants, all squeaky clean, brushed and shining, playing at being a real couple. Or when she saw themselves reflected back through the eyes of others: friends, her family, the men, uncles and grown cousins, sizing him. Yes, their eyes would say. Yes, they could take him.
Once they grew up, she thought. But he didn’t. And he was oblivious. He remained thin, boyish, right to the end. When he lay naked beside her, she could turn over to face him, her fresh round breasts sagging down sideways toward the mattress, her tummy pouring forward, round too, her hip curving up in all the rolling hills of her. He never ceased to find the existence and proximity of her body a wonder. He ran his palms across her, disbelieving. They were calloused from lugging bricks and wood and digging on site, and from strumming guitar strings. His touch was tough and grated slightly against her softness, at the pads. But she didn’t mind. She used to like it.
Lucy thinks now of how he ran his long fingers down her stomach, her hip, into the soft curls and gently inside along, loving soft, his movements slow and tentative. He inspected her all over. His serious, wide eyes. It was like she’d appeared out of nothing, a magical thing. He ran his hand up, large and thin and clumsy, so young, placed it gently on her breast, held, as she looked back at him, willing, open; such soft yielding flesh, and a shudder ran through him and passed into her like a taut string plucked.
And dozing quiet, after, his eyes half-closed, she used to trace her fingers along the edges of him, like she was drawing him into life. His sharp ridges: hip bone, ribs, shoulder. His new pink skin. His limp dick, there, soft, a wonder. A real one, there, all hers, to play. Another body, a foreign body, outside her own. Cool cupped balls, filling her palm. All hers, all freely offered. Or, if he faced the other way, curled up half-asleep; the rungs of his spine; the tendons, tight, stretching across the back of his knees. The line of his bum, the perfect round cheeks against her thighs, warm. Spots, freckles, dotted across his shoulders. All hers, given to her. The first ever she was to see, to feel. And for – they thought then, so young – forever. And now she will be his only, ever. He has left her with this.
Lucy breathes deep, pulling herself up, and places her dry, ember hot gaze outside. Find something there, please. They crashland into the bluegrey hum. Sea there, out. Ever out, to the line, the tide. In out, inout, innoush ... Can do nothing about the sea, she thinks. Just a bigger thing. A Bigger Thing. This thought momentarily reassures her. She was small in that sea and now she is big, and then she will be gone and it will stay the same. Is this the self-same skin, stretched across her bones?
Lucy feels stretched, memories out across expanding, making her skin taut and thin and easily torn. Would she taste the same now, to the sea? All connected, all water connected, going round and round. The cup at her feet. The train sways. Nothing new, just filtered throughout again; sea rivers the sky the earth. Through her, her body, drink it in and piss bleed cry it out, in out, inout, inoush ... Every drink drunk an infinite amount of times before, filtered through. Maybe Shakespeare drank the coffee at her feet, or Sophocles, or Bach. DaVinci’s last sip of wine; Nietzsche’s early morning piss. Steam liquid frozen, all the same, a set amount, round and round. None of it goes anywhere, all here, always. Forever. Matter too, all the same, flesh of my; sinking into the earth, more earth, again, around. His now, too, the earth. Her breath catches hot in her chest. His, the sea, she. She doesn’t know how they –
*
The train heaves and shudders to a halt, and the two girls jostle one another out the doors, their voices echoing down the carriage to Lucy before being lost, dissipating to nothing but disconnected peals of sound on the warm, September evening air. They walk in unison up the platform, arms linked. Lucy is left in silence. Off to the beach for the evening, she thinks. To hang around, to mess, and sit on railings; pass around poorly-rolled smokes and hunch their shoulders against the sea breeze; chat and kick their legs back and forth, suspended. To spend another evening in wait, impatient, for something to happen.
The first time they met was at the seventeenth birthday party of a boy he went to school with on the far side of the city. Took all night to get there, Lucy remembers, she and two other girls; the train and two buses, and a room full of giddy strangers, dark smoke and noise and sex lurking red in corners. Lucy vomited from marijuana and vodka, combined in wild swirls of grey inside her. He brought her water and travelled in the taxi with her all the way back to her town, she crying softly, a child, lying in his lap, hiccups. You’re alright now no worries nearly home now you’re okay. Then, lifting her under the elbow, ever-respectful, carried her stumbling heeled feet to her very front door, before walking the two hour journey back home the way they’d come (the taxi cost him all his money. He was young and poor and teetering on the brink of love).
He texted the next afternoon to see how she was, and she, wrapped up still hidden in bed, full of self-loathing, felt shamefully indebted. And, she supposes, touched. He always was described as kind. He used three smiling emoticons, and misspelled ‘then’ as ‘than’, she remembers. They were together for just under ten years. They were happy, she thinks. They were. As happy as two separate, wrapped up in skins, trying to reach across, to build a life for two, together, can be. How short there forever looked, then. But it hadn’t been enough. And now ... She doesn’t know.
*
Someone in the water, she sees. A man, as she, stock still, sitting on the train, passes, or seems to. Really she knows it’s okay, she’s going nowhere, she cannot reach B. He is swimming in a line parallel to the shore. Parallel to the train, trajectory, same and different. His own infinity of divisions, As to Bs, to travel through, each stroke, all. The weight of them, Lucy thinks, weary. How can he bear? Ahead the man’s black dog paves the way, paddling. It is crisp clear bright out, the sun’s heat thoroughly melted into the dark cliff’s stone face, seagulls squinting in their perches, and she thinks the sharp salt cold against his skin must be a wonderful thing, and envies him. He looks, from Lucy’s elevated view, trundling by the shore, contented. It looks like a routine, a known, back and forth, round. He wears a red cap and it is stark against the rolling greyblue. It marks him out as a definite thing.
A daily ritual, a way of being. To swim, to place oneself in the big and be small. To affect. Yes, she sees. Each stroke, a splash to her, reaching out across, the air in waves, each arm lift, and down, a wave to her. She watches, awaits each wave, a wave, coming now, another wave, round and – all goes black thunder hum, and Lucy starts in her seat. They’ve entered a tunnel. It hushes past beyond her nose. She sits back from the window. The light approaches, white. When they emerge, the sea is gone. The man and his dog are gone. There are high hedges, the banks, swishes of green and dirt flitting. They have turned away, inland. Gone.
The man and his dog, back there, swimming right now, still. Lucy feels herself longing, needing to go back, to watch them, back and forth, forever, and feels a strange aching grief rising. She wants to sit on a wooden bench in her coat in the low September sun, and watch the man and his dog swim back and forth, back and forth, with the sound of the sea, hooshing, as evening falls, shadows stretching tired out across towards her, back and forth, and never leave. Stay and swing her feet a little too; scuff the earth, scratching grains of sand, and watch his strong pink arms turn purple in the dark; watch the lights, small and yellow, appear all along the coast left to right, people readying for night, the day closing soft, back and forth, the waves waving round and round, hooshing and hissing back, with her hands in her pockets, fading too, to nothing; back and forth, breathing into the neck of her coat, warm and moist, as darkness thickens all, forever, blanketing round around her.
But the train is travelling on. Lucy is on her way into the city. She has been set a task. She must breathe evenly, and steady herself. They are slowing now. The man’s gentle voice announces somewhere coming now, along the line, and they slow. The circles by the doors sing out and the button is pressed and they slide open. Lucy sees that she is almost at B. How has that happened? Couldn’t be, she doesn’t know how she. And he is back there, swimming, still. A woman steps onto the carriage with a buggy, empty, a small child pulling from her side, big step now, on. She catches Lucy’s eye, quick, glancing, and pulls the child, come on now this way, away up the carriage, the other way. Lucy sits still. She doesn’t know how she.
*
That public loo she was in, in the garage a few days ago, on the way to the funeral. Filthy, encrusted from those before, stains splattered across the walls, and what was the toilet roll dispenser called again? ‘Big Willy’? She laughed out loud when she read that, smarting hot red eyes, hurting her to shape her face that way, squatting holding up her black skirt and knickers forward at the front, out of the spray, over the bowl, not touching anything. And worried then maybe her mother or father had heard her, waiting outside, both, huddled, lips thin, worrying. Mother smoking again with the stress, trying not to cry herself, plumes emitting in fitful bursts, lingering in white, lazily rising clouds on the cold stark air. Thinking she’d be in there crying, again and again, over. And there she’d been, laughing at Big Willy. Big Willy, with a picture, a little living toilet roll dispenser on the real dispenser, round around, concentric, with a big smile and wide eyes and legs and waving hands. Waving at her, watching her piss. He’d have found that funny too, to be fair, she remembers thinking, pulling up her knickers and carefully letting down her skirt, no longer smiling.
And to think Lucy thought she knew pain before. Had relished it, before. When it was all romance, all manageable. Thought they’d caused each other hurt, before. With biting words and cruel armoured hearts, and all the other things they could think to test each other with over the years. And then there he lay, arms crossed. Serene. In that suit they bought for his cousin’s wedding the year before. His mother there too, overbent womb-clutching. Sedatives, they’d had to, barely seemed to recognise, under elbow led, after the service. And she.
*
The child, down the carriage, cries out, a piercing yowl. Lucy is jolted up. What happened? Nothing, nothing. The here and now. Her eyes focus outwards, the world; the inside images, the memories, sinking heavy back down below. Rooftops outside, flashes of streets. She breathes deep. Tall smoking chimneys from the factory to the east, where the river meets the sea. A crane, slow moving, rotating, over beyond, mustard yellow. Building up or knocking down. People there on the path below, now crossing in a flood, released, green man. The low-buzzing sticky honeycomb of city evening, with the night ahead. She must step into it soon. Her task. How did she get here? The man and a black dog, the sea, hooshing. Red cap, back and forth, the waves. All the divisions through, to B. But now. The gentle voice tells Lucy her stop is approaching. She must alight. She doesn’t know how she. His sister, keys (jingling) that well-worn face, approaching now (jangling).
As it stands, two weeks after Lucy left a note on the kitchen table – to explain, easier, after all they, their bodies, how they fit, no more she – and less than two weeks ago from this moment now, long gone, irrevocable, he shot himself in their room – his, her room – and was found lying on his back, long limbs thrown asunder, after three days of not turning up to work and the phone ringing out. He was found by his father. He’d left the house unlocked. There was a note on the bedroom door saying not to come in, to call the police instead, but his father – desperate hoping – had ignored it.
Lucy looks out at the streets, the roofs, gleaming warm white on slate grey in the low light, the movements darting colours, and she sees him: splayed out across their made bed, the white sheets, his, now her bed, stained in fireworks, dark red and crusty, out from the heart of him. It was in the chest, not the head, so they were able to have an open casket. Thoughtful to the end. His calm pale face. That welled-in lilting face. Hands folded. Those hands on her breasts, a shudder, a taut string plucked.
They did fit well together, somehow, Lucy thinks. In spite of everything, they did. Her breasts would fall forward towards his mouth when she sat above him, across him, reaching. And he would sit forward, body lurching to her, reaching, his fingers clinging hard, trying to melt right into the sides of her, pulling her down, all of her, onto him, to lick and suck, slow, as she rolled up down, and she would feel his sharp hip bones press against her soft, fleshy inner thighs (the first time – the first for both – they had left stormy bruises), and his large knuckles reaching around the round of her, up and down, those calloused hands, hard gripping nails, close, around the dipped bowl of her lower back, to hold, snaking up and down the curling fern of her, to pull her in close, close now, close. He had been all jagged peaks, young, she soft hills, worn down and rolling. But they did fit, she thinks, somehow.
There was a dip between his neck and shoulder in which her head fit perfectly, after, when they, panting, flush hot-skinned, quiet. Fingers laced loose, not yet broken. The sounds of the world out beyond, returning. They always left the window open in summer. A car passing, a neighbour’s radio, voices muffled. A pigeon maybe, from the tree beyond, calling, over and over, the sound rounding around in slow swirls towards them, in the last light. He’d said, suddenly shy, the first time they came to see the house, that late spring and the daffs beginning to sag a little, some broken at the necks, how perfect that tree would be for a swing. And she’d taken his face in her hands and kissed him hard, because she hadn’t known what to say. That sinking feeling, her stomach, heavy; her whole life rolling out there before her, the swing, back and forth, perfect, from that tree. Back and forth. Somehow it wasn’t enough. She wonders now, could he tell by her?
Lucy thinks, now, that she was happy. Mostly happy. It was like they were made for each other, just the right fit, she liked to tell herself, then. That’s what people always said, too, smiling over them. Young love. Not that she ever really believed. Did she? She’s lost the, doesn’t know how she, how they. She doesn’t know now. He had been all concave, to take her, and she had been all convex, reaching out, to fill.
And she still so young, they tell her now, in circles back rubbing. Perhaps in days, she thinks. But all her living done now, all her trying; done back then, back together, aching blissfully. How could she live on now, go on beyond, without him? She is his forever now. He has given her that. But here’s her stop, and she has to get off. Task, meet his sister, keys, round and round. The coffee cup will travel back, all the way back now, spinning round, the smell rising. She cannot help but envy it. The doors are singing, she has to go, her feet, up, go. But A cannot reach B, all the in-betweens, and the man back there still, black dog and red cap, back and forth swimming, as the evening light fades a thinning blue gold haze. All promise, so long there forever looked. Standing at A, fingers interlaced, loose, looking off at B, thinking yes, yes, alright then let’s give it a whirl so, yes.
From issue #4: spring/summer 2017
About the Author
Lucy Sweeney Byrne is the author of the short story collections Paris Syndrome (2019) and Let’s Dance (2024), both published by Banshee Press. Her work has been met with critical acclaim and shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Edge Hill Prize, the Kate O’Brien Award, the Butler Literary Award, and the John McGahern Prize. Lucy’s short fiction, essays and poetry have appeared in The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Southword, AGNI, Litro, Grist, 3:AM magazine, and other literary outlets. She also writes book reviews for The Irish Times.
