Notes from a Coma. Mike McCormack

without precedent in the annals of such occasions. It builds slowly, now clearly audible, strengthening under its own strength, three decades of shame and privation surfacing. The Conducator’s face twitches in disbelief, a fleeting shadow crossing the blankness of his cheekbones. His wife leans into him and quite audibly says, “Promise them something. Talk to them.” This is the precise moment when history fractures, the point at which a specific time has run its course. This moment separates before from after. A new epoch has begun, a new calendar starts from this moment.

      Four days from this, on Christmas Day, the Conducator and his wife will sit in a child’s school desk in a military barracks arraigned before a hastily convened court. The charges against them will range from corruption and impoverishment of a nation to mass murder. Recording proceedings against God knows what sort of reprisals the video footage will show that as the charges are being read out the Conducator gazes at his watch like a man concerned with missing an important engagement elsewhere. It will be a moment of studied, elegant contempt. Refusing a plea of mental instability he will hold his nerve and say that he refuses to recognise the court and will answer only to the Grand National Assembly; an old hand at this sort of thing himself he will recognise a show trial when he sees one. When the death sentence is read out and as he is being led from the room we will hear him humming “The Internationale.” His wife, however, in a last outburst will brush aside a young soldier who reaches to assist her. Her last recorded words will be, “Take your hands off me, motherfucker.”

      ³ Registered to Interskan Shipping out of Antwerp, Le Soleil Noir, an eighty-metre cargo coaster, had for ten years plied its trade ferrying alumina trihydrate to the municipal water systems of coastal cities in the North Sea and Baltic. Detained by Dutch immigration authorities when a backload of pig iron from the Russian Federation was found to be bulked out with twenty refugees from Kaliningrad, the vessel had lain in Antwerp pending the trial of its owner, Hans Luyxx. Fifteen months later the liquidation of Interskan Shipping brought the vessel to the attention of the European Penal Commission. Its three-thousand-metre hold met the specifications of those architects on secondment to the EPC. Purchased at scrap value, renamed and registered, the Somnos spent the autumn of that year in Odense being refitted as a high-security neuro-intensive-care unit. On the twenty-fifth of May, after a three-week voyage, the Somnos was piloted into Killary fjord and dropped anchor in twelve fathoms of water. In line with naval protocol, captaincy of the ship was handed over to Norris Whelan, vice-governor of the Irish prison system. Three weeks of system checks followed, during which trial telemetry was relayed over the Astra satellite to Beaumont Hospital.

      ⁴ Too narrowly conceived as a notional boundary beyond which it is impossible to speak or relay information, the Event Horizon is more fully understood as a structure determined within and without the nature of the Somnos project itself, a structure which functions as an endo- and exoskeletal support which upholds and inscribes the project as a site within which identities as ongoing processes morph and shift through spatio-temporal planes. And while it is itself both speculative and conjectural and its arrhythmic moods are ever likely to falter and decay, it is an interweaving of shards and fragments linked by suggestive coherences we are compelled to reason with.

      While the Event Horizon lies beyond an appeal to scholarship, evidentiary texts, archival research, the historical record, etc.—marginalia as a buttressing authority—as an attempt to describe a definitive circumference around any singularity it will always fall short as a final statement of containment. Any site wherein identities are stressed and deliquesced beyond their stand-alone sovereignty, any site which facilitates the neither-here-nor-there ontologies of imaging and information technologies, will always resist such delimitative attempts.

      ⁵ Footnoted beneath the Twin Towers collapse the Somnos takes its place amid the gathering iconography of twenty-first-century anxiety. Through reproductions on album covers and as a generative image in cultural studies it will achieve universal recognition. Filed in media memory it will become the nation’s first image of the new millennium to achieve such instant recognition.

      Centered in the surrounding darkness of the fjord, the ship’s security and navigation lights give it the incandescent appearance of an alien spacecraft, strobing and numinous with first-contact immanence. Its pallid occupants have come among us with their refined metabolisms and liminal communiqués from some higher-order teleology beyond our imagining. And while they are unlikely to play out the classic scenarios—stripping the planet of mineral resources, conscripting our womenfolk into some ghoulish reproductive project—they have already started to assimilate a whole culture. With all media commandeered and their names on everyone’s lips there is already something worshipful in our gaze. We are ready to move on, beyond our childhood’s end, into some transcendent forgetting of ourselves.

      FRANK LALLY

      I drive out once a week to the Killary to look out at that ship. Usually in the middle of the week when it’s quiet because at weekends you can’t get parking along that road with all those tourists taking pictures and looking out with binoculars . . .

      I try and picture JJ out there on that ship, JJ and those other lads wired up to those machines and somewhere along the way I’ve found myself praying for him.¹ He’d get a laugh out of that, the same JJ. Everyone knows that he himself has no truck with that kind of thing and to tell the truth it was news to me that I did. It just happened one day when I was standing on the old pier looking out at him. Without thinking about it or anything I said a small prayer for him and it was over and done with before I realised it. It was news to me that I believed in God; I’ve never given that sort of thing a lot of thought. As long as a man has his health and everything around him is going middling then it’s up to him to get on with it and make the best of things, that’s what I’ve always thought. But I surprised myself that day standing there with that little prayer for him. Now, and for whatever reason, every time I go out there to look at him I always find myself saying a prayer. JJ needs all the goodwill he can get and if people like me don’t do it, who will?

      People will tell you that JJ was a lucky lad, a lucky child having the life he had compared to what it might have been; that’s one of those careless things people say without thinking. But he wasn’t and he isn’t. JJ’s never had a day’s luck in his life. Anything that was given to him with one hand was taken away with the other. You’ve only to look back at all the time that lad spent in hospital when he was a child or to that day in the church to see that he would never have a day’s luck in his life . . .

      There were only a few of us in the church that day. It was the middle of a Sunday afternoon and JJ and Owen were making their debuts as altar boys. It was a bit of an occasion, as you can imagine, otherwise I wouldn’t have been there. Nor would Anthony either who was beside me in the seat. It was afternoon benediction and the idea was that the two boys would have their first try-out in front of a small audience; if anything went wrong there wouldn’t be too many people to see it and not much embarrassment for the lads. All I remember hoping was that it would be over quickly and that we’d get away to watch the second half of the match—Mayo were playing Sligo that day in the Connaught final.

      A few minutes before three JJ walked out of the sacristy carrying this long taper to light the candles on the altar. There was these two candelabra things at either end of the altar, ten candles on each of them reaching up to the centre in a kind of arch effect. JJ lit the right-hand one first, standing and leaning on his tiptoes to reach the last two or three. Then he went over to the one on the left. He lit the first five or six and was stretching up to the top ones when it happened. The cuff of his surplice must have caught on one of the lower candles. As quick as lightning this orange flame shot up his sleeve towards his shoulder. JJ jumped down from the altar shaking his arm, trying to put out the flame. Of course this only made things worse, fanning and spreading the flames to the rest of his body. I was out of the seat in a shot, racing up the aisle, pulling off my jacket. JJ was now dancing around in front of the altar, waving his arms and screeching, almost covered in flames—you’d think to look at him he’d just grown these big orange wings. I threw the jacket over him and wrestled him to the ground. It seemed like all this went on about half an hour but from the moment he walked out with the taper in his hand to the moment I put the