Hidden Symptoms by Deirdre Madden

ended, he was dead.

The coda to that summer…
    The coda to that summer was a day spent in Lugano when they were on their way home, and by the side of the lake they saw a small boy with golden-tanned skin and a navy sailor-suit who was tossing little pebbles to break and break again the lake’s still surface. He was quite unaware that he was being watched, and Theresa and Francis looked at him for a long time before Theresa spoke.
    â€œIf we had been here a hundred years ago, we might well have seen such a child.”
    Francis continued to look at him and did not answer her for quite some time, then said, “Yes. When you think of that and continue to look at him he ceases to be a particular small boy and becomes the eternal small boy. We’re all like that. Everything we suffer has been suffered before, everything that gives us joy has been enjoyed before. Nothing is new: but that doesn’t make it any easier to suffer.”
    â€œAnd joy?”
    He smiled. “It doesn’t diminish joy.”
    And the summer’s final image was a little Lugano fountain, the basin of which had been painted sky blue. People had dropped coins into the water for wishes and good luck, and the blue paint was marked with brown or green rings where the coins had lain and corroded. A stream of bright, fresh water spurted to the sky through a thin bronze pipe, and as it tumbled down to the painted bowl it caught and warped the sunlight. They dipped their hands in the cold water and accidentally their fingers touched. Now, when she tried to visualize the distant Heaven where Francis was, her imagination balked and she could think only: perhaps a well of light; perhaps a stream of bright water ascending to the sun, spurting upwards and away from a small, blue, painted, tainted bowl.

Night had fallen.
    Night had fallen. Robert sat by his desk and stared obliquely at the window, behind which a perfect image of his room was suspended in the dark air. He arose and walked to another chair so that he, too, was now reflectedand was thus substantially within and insubstantially without. Glumly, he stared at his dark doppelganger, which stared back as it floated above the street in its intangible apartment. Could this room and this person, who looked so solid and so real, actually be a mere reflection, nothing more than a trick of glass, air and light? Yes, it was just that, and he found the realization liberating. The reflection looked like him but it was not him: this is me, he thought, refined to perfection. A shadow upon glass could not feel worried or lonely. It could not have a sister or a girlfriend or a dull book to compile. Its body could not feel pain. I should write to the papers, he thought, and say political initiative be damned! The solution to the Irish crisis is for everyone to live by night, to put strong lights in their rooms and draw back the curtains and so make a whole new population identical to the one here now in all things but reality. Let these dark illusions live our lives for us: they will do it much better than we can. For how can a reflection hate? Or be bigoted? Or kill? How could it ever know the futility of suffering? He gave a little laugh which his dark double mirrored. He wished that he could stop being himself and become that double so that he could be dissolved into nothingness when the morning came.
    He turned from the window and looked back into his own room. It made him feel ill. He wondered why he accumulated so assiduously this arty clutter of books and prints and rugs and trinkets; such having and hoardingstruck him as rather pathetic. Often he felt genuinely queasy just to think of the vast glut of personal possessions in the world. On his way to the library in the mornings, he tried not to imagine all the things which people around him in the streets had recently used; tried to keep at bay a nightmare vision of countless tea-bags and crusts and toothbrushes and combs and bus tickets and