Cathedral or cliff-face?, a photo by Diane Duane on Flickr.

The forced perspective of the photo doesn’t begin to give a sense of how overwhelming this structure seems when you look straight up at it.

So we saw Marvel’s Avengers Assemble last night. (Aka The Avengers in the US.)

Don’t ask me why we get to see this first, instead of North American audience  getting it now: but I am so emphatically not complaining. (I should add this: I can think of several marketing/rollout strategies that would explain why this move makes sense for this franchise, but I have no data to suggest that what I’m thinking has any connection to reality in this case, so I’ll just shut up about that now.)

Let me say right here that I come from a position of bias. I have been actively reading comics since I was eight, and have been reading the Avengers characters (separately and together) since my teens. But I can normally put bias aside sufficiently to tell other people whether the film I’ve just seen is any good or not.

Anyway: we saw it at an eight PM screening in center-city Dublin last night. The audience was thoughtful (not a single damn mobile phone went off during the performance) and well-behaved, which always helps. There was a line of people twenty deep at the concession stand when I ducked out for popcorn before things started, so I went back in, resolved to find a screenplay “quiet moment” to go out and get some later.

It never happened, because there are no quiet (read “boring”)  moments in this screenplay. Not to say that there aren’t lulls in the action (sensible: incessant action is fatiguing and tends to do the storytelling harm) and pauses to handle character business: but regardless of these, the script clicks along at an amazing rate. The dialogue is crisp and the “smart lines” feel natural: characters sniping at each other because that’s what they would do, rather than because that’s what they should do now. The pacing is just faultless. And most importantly, the characters are perfectly introduced, so that whether you know them or not when you sit down, you know them quite well enough when you leave.

This is always a problem with ensemble films: getting everyone introduced and getting the character interactions sufficiently well laid down that the action which should flow from them does so naturally when it starts moving. In this case, the characters start feeling out each others’ weaknesses and picking at each other in absolutely natural and understandable ways, to the point where you do start wondering whether this team is going to come together correctly. (And the acting is almost certainly helped by the fact that all these actors seem to genuinely like each other.) There was — to my mind — a sort of thematic breathing space almost exactly in the middle of the film where the viewer is allowed a few moments to mull over the possibility that things are not going to go according to plan. And then plans start going wrong, very wrong indeed, and things come together, very believably, more in spite of what’s happening than because of it.

This is storytelling of a very high level indeed. But then, this is Joss Whedon we’re talking about: so, ’nuff said. (And though this is not a place where the majority of viewers will be coming from, let me say now that there’s a tremendous pleasure as a writer in sitting back and watching a fellow professional, who has finally been given enough money and enough time, just do his thing and knock the story and the visuals right out of the park. It is — if you’re a baseball fan like me — the visual equivalent of hearing the batter hit the ball just that way and produce that particular CRACK that gives you warning enough to sit back in sheer pleasure and watch the ball start describing that long lazy arc up and out.)

I don’t dare go into too much detail here about the film: it’s so tough to tell what people consider spoilery any more that it seems better to say too little than too much. But I don’t mind sharing a few general personal opinions.

• Mark Ruffalo picks up this film, stuffs it into his pocket and runs off with it in some of the most charming ways possible. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Hulk, and the portrayal of his Bruce Banner side is just winning: dry and witty and so enjoyable. I could have watched Bruce sparring with Tony Stark for hours. (I leave aside the wonderful snarkfest with Loki. I was privileged to see some of this material at an advanced trailer showing in Munich in November of last year, courtesy of our old friend and fellow film fan Torsten Dewi at Wortvogel.de… and it’s been preying on my mind and making me grin mindlessly at things for no particular reason ever since. You have no idea what a pain in the butt it is to see something so marvelous and then have to keep quiet about it for five months. God, how I suffer for my art.)  (Heh.)
• I also couldn’t get enough of Chris Evans’ innocent — let’s just say the word — beauty, and the way he carries himself and his character: to my mind he’s even better as Captain America here than he was in his own movie, which is saying something. For me at least he’s always been at the core of the Avengers concept, a character with his own special something, akin to what Superman has — that quality of just being good — and it’s marvelous to see Cap so well played.
• I want to have Agent Coulson’s babies. (Perhaps fortunately it’s way too late for this. But still.) I have always loved the character, and I now love him, if possible, even more. You’ll find out why.
• And a side issue: I don’t think I’ve ever seen New York so beautifully destroyed. (Disclaimer: I am a native Manhattanite, born on East 86th Street.) If you’ve read much of my novel work, you know that in fiction I occasionally destroy cities, or bits of cities, that seem to need it. I once dropped an alien spacecraft on top of the main train station in Zürich because I didn’t like the floor tile they’d installed during a renovation. (…Well, I mean, who installs tile that’s going to be slippery when it’s wet, in a space where people are going to be tracking in snow for a third of the year? I ask you. It made me cranky.) But the outdoor CGI during the whole climactic sequence was utterly believable. I know that lighting: I’ve been there when the weather’s like that: it felt real. The whole thing was magnificently done — the cinematographer deserves an Oscar. And as for details… I won’t go into too much here. Let”s just say that I’ve trashed Grand Central in my time, but boy, not like this. I was awed. (And can’t wait to see it again.)
• Pepper and Tony have a moment while they’re working on something. Watch what Pepper does to what they’re working with.  This throwaway, wide-angle moment perfectly sums up why this will go down as a classic “four-quadrant” film.

…I may add some notes  to this posting later as things occur to me that I haven’t mentioned here.  However: one of the blurb sources presently being mentioned in the European trailers says of the film, “Possibly the best superhero film of all time.” Now, that’s a pretty high bar to jump. (I hold the original Superman in high regard.) But it’s possible, just possible, that this opinion is correct. In any case, there are relatively few films that I buy on DVD, not just to watch repeatedly for pleasure, but to study so that I can better understand the reasons why a movie works so well. This is going to be one of those films. And it’s going to take me weeks to get to the studying part, because this film is going to keep sucking me into Insane Enjoyment mode time… after time… after time.

Whether it’s “the best superhero film ever made” or not: you have a truly superior viewing experience ahead of you. The characters work together, they care about each other, and the Spectacle kicks right in on schedule in the proper ancient Greek sense….so as a result, this whole damn thing is unmissable.

Enjoy!

I intend to, again, as soon as possible.

In the heart of Dublin, something is killing the People of the Hills — and it’s going to take Ireland’s only superhero to stop it…

In honor of Saint Patrick’s Day: a taste of something Irish.

The Irish Thing can hardly avoid being part of the “ground of being” of someone who’s lived in Ireland for more than quarter-century. That familiarity, though, with the way things really are here (insofar as anyone, “blow-in” or native, can ever tell what’s really going on in this island…) can make the inhabitant a little impatient with the perceptions of outsiders: particularly those who think Ireland is some kind of theme park that should be preserved to match its overflow into the last couple of centuries’ popular culture. I have actually stood in Dublin Airport and heard fellow Americans complaining that Ireland has broadband: as if it’s somehow polluting the cultural purity of the place. (I saw another American look around absolutely without irony or humor intended and say, disbelieving, “I thought it was supposed to be thatched.” The airport. Was supposed. To be thatched.)

…Yeah. So you will understand that when I was invited to participate in an anthology called Emerald Magic: Great Tales of Irish Fantasy, before I decided what story I wanted to write, I asked casually if I could see a list of the other contributors. When I saw the list, it was as I thought: only one of them (our former neighbor Morgan Llewellyn) had ever lived here. One of them (the excellent Tanith Lee) might have at least been here. And I knew in my bones what way everyone else would be going with their stories: the Celtic twilight, thatch everywhere, the soft green countryside, the old school Ireland and the old-school myths of a century or so back. I immediately thought, Somebody’s got to actually get into Dublin, where a third of the damn population lives! Somebody’s got to at least spend a little time in the here and now. …I’m going urban on this one.

And so I did. “Herself” was briefly offered here as a standalone download for St. Patrick’s Day of 2011, and today we’re offering it on this page for you to read. The text will vanish when St. Patrick’s Day does. Tomorrow, though, if you’d still like to read the story, you can do so by acquiring the anthology in which it appears, “Uptown Local” and Other Interventions.

 

Herself

 

I met the leprechaun for the first and last time in the conveyor-sushi bar behind Brown Thomas. It was the “holy hour”, between three and four, when the chefs go upstairs for their own lunch, and everything goes quiet, and the brushed stainless-steel conveyor gets barer and barer.

The leprechaun had been smart and had ordered his yasai-kakiage  just before three. He sat there now eating it with a morose expression, drinking sake and looking out the Clarendon Street picture windows at the pale daylight that slid down between the high buildings on either side.

While I’d seen any number of leprechauns in the street since I moved here—our family always had the Sight—I’d never found myself so close to one. I would have loved to talk to him, but just because you can see the Old People is no automatic guarantee of intimacy: they’re jealous of their privacy, and can be more than just rude if they felt you were intruding. I weighed a number of possible opening lines, discarded them all, and finally said, “Can I borrow your soy sauce? I’ve run out.”

He handed me the little square pitcher in front of his place-setting and picked up another piece of yasai-kakiage. I poured shoyu into the little saucer they give you, mixed some green wasabi horseradish with it, and dunked in a piece of tuna sashimi.

“You’re not supposed to do that,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“Mix them like that.” He gestured with his chin at the wasabi. “You’re supposed to just take it separately.”

I nodded. “I’m a philistine,” I said.

“So are we all these days,” the leprechaun said, and looked even more morose. He signaled the obi-clad waitress, as she passed, for another sake. “Precious little culture left in this town any more. Nothing but money, and people scrabbling for it.”

It would hardly have been the first time I’d heard that sentiment coming from a Dubliner, but it hadn’t occurred to me that one of the Old People thought the same way. I’d have thought they were above such things. “Do you work in town?” I said.

He nodded. The waitress came back, swapped him a full flask of sake for his empty one, left again.

“Shoes?” I said.

He laughed, a brief bitter crack of a sound. “Have you ever tried to cobble a Nike?” he said.

I shook my head. It wasn’t something I’d had to try lately, though I’d had enough job worries of my own. The Dublin journalistic grind is not a simple one to navigate.  I had gone from features editor to sub-features editor at one of the CityWatch magazines, always being hurled from scandal to scandal—they would keep publishing badly-concealed ads for the less discreet of the massage parlors and lap-dancing joints over by Leeson Street.

“That line of work’s all done now,” he said. “Planned obsolescence… it runs straight to the heart of things. People don’t want shoes that last years. They want shoes that maybe last a year. My folk, we couldn’t do that. Against our religion.”

I didn’t say anything, not knowing if it would be wise. I did some interviewing for the magazine I worked for, and had learned to appreciate the sound of a subject that the speaker didn’t want you to follow up on.

“It’s the death of craftsmanship,” the leprechaun said. “Nike and all the other big conglomerates, they’d sooner have slave labor in Malaysia than honest supernatural assistance from a first-world country with good tax breaks…” He drank some sake. “No, we’re all in information technology  now, or high-end manufacturing, computers and so on. It’s the only place left for skilled hand-workers to go. My clan was all out in Galway once: they’re all in Fingal now, for the work. Damn made-up county, nothing real about it but freeways and housing developments. Name me a single hero-feat that was ever done in Fingal!”

“I got from Independent Pizza to the airport once in less than half an hour,”  I said: and it was all I could think of. It didn’t count, and we both knew it. All the same, he laughed.

It broke the ice. We were there for a few hours at least, chatting. The belt started up again while we talked, and some more people drifted in; and still we talked while the light outside faded through twilight to sodium-vapor streetlight after sunset. The leprechaun turned out not to be one of those more-culchie-than-thou types, all peat and poitín, but an urbanite—clued-in and streetwise, but also well read. He knew where the hot clubs were, but he could also quote Schopenhauer as readily as he could Seamus Heaney; and as for culture, he told me several things about Luciano Pavarotti’s last visit to Dublin that made me blink. He was, in short, yet another of that classic type, the genuine Dublin character. When you live here, it’s hard to go more than a few days before meeting one. But you don’t routinely meet “Dublin characters” who saw the Vikings land.

I ordered more sake, and paused. Slipping into a seat around the corner of the sushi bar from us was someone at first sight more fairy-tale looking than the leprechaun: a baby-teen, maybe thirteen if that, in red velvet hooded sweatshirt and fake wolf-claw wristlet. Little Red Riding Hood squirmed her blue-jeaned, tanga-briefed self in the seat as she began picking at some fried tofu. The leprechaun glanced at her, glanced back at me again, the look extremely ironic. By contrast, he was conservatism itself, just a short guy with hair you’d mistake for sixties-length, in tweeds and extremely well-made shoes.

“She’d have been a nice morsel for one of the Greys in my day,” he said under his breath, and laughed again, not entirely a pleasant sound. “Before the wolfhounds did for them, and ‘turncoat’ men ran with the wolfpacks, getting off on the beast-mind and the blood feast…  Just look at all that puppy fat.” His grin was feral. “But I shouldn’t complain. She pays my salary. I bet her daddy and mammy buy her a new computer every year.” He scowled.

“Do you really miss the shoes that much?” I said.

It was a mistake. His eyes blazed as he took a plate of the spiced soba noodles, another of the green plates, the least expensive sushi. He didn’t have a single blue or gold or silver plate in his “used” stack. “Don’t get me started,” he said. “Nike, Adidas, whoever: we would have worked with them. We would have worked with them! Work is what we live for; good work, well done, they could have had a labor force like the world never saw. We could have shod the planet.”

The leprechaun chewed. “But no,” he said. “A decent wage was too much for them. Why should we pay you minimum wage, they say, when we can get the work for almost nothing from these poor starving mortals over in Indonesia or wherever, who’re grateful for a penny a day? And so they gave us their back.”

He poured himself more sake, drank. “We were to be here for you, from the beginning of things,” he said more softly; “we were to help you have the things you needed when you couldn’t have them otherwise.  But your people have made us redundant. Spiritually redundant as well as fiscally. So now, as we can’t earn, neither can we spend. ‘And who of late,’“ he said sadly into his sake, “‘for cleanliness, finds sixpence in her shoe?’”

“Bad times,” I said, looking past the Mercedeses and the BMWs and the ladies walking past the sushi bar toward the “signature” restaurants further down the road, where you couldn’t get out the door at the end of the night for less than three hundred Euro for just a couple of you and wine.

“Bad times,” the leprechaun said.

“And it’s hard to find a decent pint,” I said.

His eyes glittered, and I kept my smile to myself. Any Dubliner is glad to tell a stranger, or somebody with my Manhattan accent, where the best pint is. Sometimes they’re even right. Sometimes it’s even someplace I haven’t already heard of. I don’t drink the Black Stuff myself, especially since there’s better stout to be found than Uncle Arthur’s overchilled product in the Porterhouse brewpub in Parliament Street; but that’s not the point.

His eyes slid sideways to betray the great secret, whose betrayal is always joy. “You know Great Saint Georges Street?”

“Yeah.” It was a few blocks away.

“The Long Hall,” he said. “Good place. The wizards drink there too.”

“Really,” I said.

“That’s where most of us go now.” There was a silent capital on the “u” that I nodded at.  “We go down there Tuesdays and Thursdays, in the back, for a pint. And the wakes,” he said. His look went dark. “A lot of wakes lately…”

“Suicide?” I said softly. Irish males have had a fairly high suicide level of late, something no one understands with the economy booming the way it’s been, and somehow I wouldn’t have been surprised to find the trend had spread to the Old Ones.

He shook his head. “Nothing like,” the leprechaun said. “None of these people were suicidal. They had good jobs…as good as jobs get for our people these days. Coding over at Lotus, hardware wrangling over at Gateway and Dell. They never seem to stop hiring up there in the Wasteland.” It was a slang name for the jungle of industrial estates that had sprung up around Dublin Airport, and there seemed to be a new one every month, more and more land once full of Guinness-destined barley, or of sheep, now full of Europe-destined PCs and other assorted chippery.

“But it’s not the same,” I said, because I knew what was coming. I’d heard it before.

“No, it’s not,” the leprechaun said with force. “Once upon a time I didn’t even know what the ISEQ was!  When did our people ever have to worry about stocks and shares, and ‘selling short?’  But now we have to, because that’s how you tell who’s hiring, when you can’t make a living making shoes anymore.”  He  scowled again. “It’s all gone to hell,” he said. “It was better when we were poor.”

“Oh, surely not,” I said. “You sound like those people in Russia, now, moaning about how they miss the good old days in the USSR.”

“Poor devils,” the leprechaun said, “may God be kind to them, they don’t know any better. But it’s nothing like what we have to deal with. Once upon a time we gave thanks to God when the leader of our country stood up and announced to the world that we were self-sufficient in shoelaces. Who knew that it could go downhill from that, because of too much money? But people aren’t like people used to be any more. It’s not that the money would spoil them…we always knew that was going to happen, maybe. But it’s how it’s spoiled them. Look at it!”

We looked out the window toward the brick façade that the back of Brown Thomas shared with the Marian shrine that also faced onto the street. You could look through one archway and see a painted life-sized knockoff version of the Pietá, the sculpted Lady raising a hand in a “what can you do?” gesture over her Son’s sprawled body, her expression not of shock or grief but of resigned annoyance—“Never mind, sure he’ll be grand in a few days…” —and through another doorway, a few doors down, you could see Mammon in its tawdry glory, all the Bally and Gucci and the many other choicer fruits of world consumerism laid out for the delectation of the passers-by. The Pietá was not entirely without Her visitors, but plainly Brown Thomas was getting more trade. Closer to us, the street was full of cars; fuller of cars than it should have been, strictly speaking. There was a superfluity of Lexuses and various other glossy, high-wheeled uglies, all double-parked outside the restaurant, next to the entrance to the Brown Thomas parking structure. The cold fact of the Garda Pick-It-Up-And-Take-It-Away fleet working its way around the city had plainly not particularly affected these people. They could soak up the tickets and the impound fees and never even notice.

“In God’s name, what’s happened to us?” the leprechaun said. “What’s happened to us that we don’t care what happens to other people any more? Look at it out there: it’s nothing much right now, but this street’s a bottleneck; in twenty minutes the whole of center city will be gridlocked. And it’s worse elsewhere. The rents are through the roof. It’s a good thing I can just vanish into one of the ‘hills’ in Phoenix Park at night. Otherwise I’d be in a bedsit twenty miles south, in Bray, or somewhere worse—Meath or Westmeath or Cavan or whatever, with a two-hour commute in and back, in a minivan loaded over capacity. And probably with clurachaun as well. Have you ever been stuck in a minivan for two hours between Virginia and the North Circular Road with a bunch of overstressed clurachaun trying to do…you know…what clurachaun do??”

Another unanswerable question, even if I had been. “It’s tough,” I said, “hard all around.”

There wasn’t a lot more out of him after that. All the same, I was sorry when he called the waiter over to get his plates tallied up.

He looked up at me. “It’s not what it was,” he said, “and it’s a crying shame.”

“We all say that about our own times,” I said. “They’ve said it since ancient Greece.”

“But it’s truer now than it ever was,” said the leprechaun. “Look at the world we were in a hundred years ago. Sure we had poverty, and starvation, and unemployment from here to there, and people being forced out of their homes by greedy landlords. But we still had each other; at least we had a kind word for each other when we passed in the road. Now we have immigrants begging in the street who’re poorer than we ever were; and people getting fat and getting heart attacks from the crap ready-made food that’s nine-tenths of what there is to eat these days; and work that kills your soul, but it’s all you can get. And forget being forced out of anywhere to live, because you can’t afford to get in in the first place. The only kind word you hear from anybody nowadays is when you take out your wallet…and it’s not meant. Things are so wrong.”

He eyed me. “But you’ll say there are good things about it too,” he said.

“You’ve been here longer than I have,” I said. “Maybe I should keep my opinions to myself.”

“It was different once,” the leprechaun said. “It was different when She ran things.” And he stared into his last of his sake, and past it at the black granite of the sushi bar, and looked even more morose than he had before we’d started talking.

He tossed the rest of his sake back in one shot. “Good night to you,” he said at last, slid off the cream-colored bar stool, and went out into the night.

So it was a shock, the next day, to find that he was dead.

 

*

 

Leprechauns don’t die the way we do: otherwise the Gardaí would have a lot more work on their plates than they already do with the drug-gang warfare and the joyriders and the addicts shooting up in the middle of Temple Bar. At the scene of a leprechaun’s murder, you find a tumble of clothes, and usually a pair of extremely well-made shoes, but nothing else. That was all the Folk found the next morning, down the little back alley that runs from the Grafton Street pedestrian precinct to behind the Porterhouse Central brewpub.

At first everyone assumed that he’d run afoul of some druggie desperate for money and too far separated from his last fix. They may be of the Old Blood, but leprechauns can’t vanish at will without preparation: you can get the drop on one if you’re smart and fast. Various pots of gold were lost to mortals this way in the old days, when there was still gold in Ireland. But the leprechauns had the advantage of open ground and non-urban terrain into which to vanish. It’s harder to do in the city. There are too many eyes watching you—half of a leprechaun’s vanishing is skilful misdirection—and, these days, there are too many dangers too closely concentrated. The sense of those who knew him was that he just got unlucky.

I confess it was partly curiosity that brought me to the wake, where I was told all this. But it was partly the astonishment of having another of the leprechaun’s people actually look me up at the magazine. There he stood, looking like a youthful but much shorter Mickey Rooney in tweeds, waiting in the place’s glossy, garish reception area and looking offended by it all. I came out to talk to him, and he said, “Not here…”

My boss, in her glass-walled inner office, was safely on the phone, deep in inanely detailed conversation with some publishing or media figure about where they would be going for lunch. This happened every day, and no one who went missing from now to three PM, when the Boss might or might not come back, would be noticed. I stepped outside with the leprechaun and went down to stand with him by the news kiosk at the corner of Dawson Street.

“You were the last one to see him alive,” the leprechaun said. I knew better than to ask “who?”; first because I immediately knew who he meant, and second because you don’t ask leprechauns their names—they’re all secret, and (some say) they’re all the same.

“He was all right when he left,” I said. “What happened?”

“No one knows,” said the leprechaun. “He wasn’t drunk?”

“He didn’t have anything like enough saké.” Privately I doubted there was that much saké in the city. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen someone try to drink a leprechaun under the table.

The leprechaun nodded, and he looked grim as my dinner companion had the other night.

“He was murdered,” he said.

I was astounded. “How? Why?”

“We don’t know. But he’s not the first. More like the tenth, and they’re coming closer together.”

“A serial killer…”

There were no answers for my questions then. I went back to work, because there was nothing better to do, and when my boss still wasn’t back by four, I checked out early and made my way down to the Long Hall.

The place doesn’t look very big from the frontage on Great Saint George’s Street. A red and white sign over a wide picture window, obscured by ancient, dusty stained-glass screens inside; that’s all there is. The place looks a little run down. Doubtless the proprietors encourage that look, for the Long Hall is a pint house of great fame, and to have such a place be contaminated by as few tourists as possible is seen as a positive thing in Dublin. If you make it past the genteelly-shabby façade and peeling paint, you find yourself surrounded by ancient woodwork, warm and golden-colored, and glossy wallpaper and carved plaster ceilings that were white in the 1890s, but are now stained down by time and pre-ban smoke to a warm nicotine brown.

The pub’s name is deserved. It’s a narrow place, but it goes on and on, nearly the width of the block in which it resides. There are bar stools down the right side, and behind them a bar of great height, antiquity, and splendor—faded, age-splotched mirrors, bottles of every kind racked up to the ceiling, and most importantly, long shelves running the length of the back of the bar, to put pints on.

I wandered in, pushed between a couple of occupied barstools, and ordered myself a pint. This by itself gives you plenty of time to look around, as a well-pulled pint of Guinness takes at least seven minutes, and the best ones take ten. Right now, the front of the bar was full of people who had left work early. It was full of the usual sound of Dubliners complaining about work, and the people they worked with. “So I said to him, why don’t you tell him to go to the F ing Spar and get a sandwich and then sit down for five F ing minutes, sure she’ll be back then. …Are you F ing nuts? he says. I can’t spare the time in the middle of the F ing day—“

I had to resist the urge to roll my eyes… yet still I had to smile. This is how, when I return home, I know for sure that I’m in Dublin again. The second you’re past passport control in Dublin Airport, you hear it…and after that, until you’re well past the city limits, you hear it everywhere else, from every one between nine and ninety-five. Only in Dublin do people use the F word as casually as they use “Hey” or “Sure” or “Listen” in the US. It’s an intensifier, without any meaning whatsoever except to suggest that you’re only mildly interested in what you’re saying. Only in Ireland would such a usage be necessary: for here, words are life.

I glanced toward the back of the bar. Between the front and the back of the pub was a sort of archway of wood, and looking at it, I realized that it was a line of demarcation in more ways than one. A casual glance suggested that the space behind it was empty. But if you had the Sight, and you worked at seeing, slowly you could see instinct shapes, standing, gesturing. You couldn’t hear any sound, though; that seemed to stop at the archway.

It was an interesting effect. I guessed that the wizards the leprechaun had mentioned had installed it. I walked slowly towards the archway, and was surprised, when I reached it, to feel strongly as if I didn’t want to go any further. But I pushed against the feeling and kept on walking.

Once through the archway, the sound of conversation came up to full as if someone had hit me “un-mute” button on a TV remote. There had to be about eighty of the Old People back here, which was certainly more warm bodies than the space was rated for; it was a good thing all the occupants were smaller than the normal run of mortals.

There was just as much F-ing and blinding going on back here as there had been in the front of the bar, but otherwise, the back-of-the-pub people were a less routine sort of group. There was very little traditional costume in evidence; all these Old People seemed very city-assimilated. I glanced around, feeling acutely visible because of my height—and I’m only five foot seven. Near me, a tall slender woman, dressed unfashionably all in white, turned oblique eyes on me, brushing her long, lank, dark hair back to one side. Only after a long pause did she smile. “Oh, good,” she said. “Not for a while yet…” And she clinked her gin and tonic against my pint.

“Uh,” I said. A moment later, next to me, a voice said, “It’s good of you to come.”

I glanced down. It was the leprechaun who had come up to the office. “This is one of the Washers,” he said.

Even if I’d thought about it in advance, the last thing I’d have expected to see in a city pub would’ve been a banshee, one of the “Washers at the Ford” who prophesy men’s deaths. I was a little too unnerved right then to ask her what her work in the city was like. She smiled at me—it was really a very sweet smile—and said, “It’s all right…I’m not on duty. Days I work over in Temple Bar, in a restaurant there. Dishwashing.”

“Dishwashing??”

She took a drink of her G and T, and laughed. “Most of us give up laundry right away. Won’t do their ‘shell suits’ and the rest of their F ing polyester!”

We chatted casually about business, and weather, and about the departed, while I glanced around at the rest of the company, trying not to stare. There were plenty of others there besides leprechauns and bansidhe and clurichauns. There were a few pookas—two of them wearing human shape, and one, for reasons best known to himself, masquerading as an Irish wolfhound. There were several dullahans in three-piece suits, or polo shirts and chinos, holding leisurely conversations while holding their heads in their hands (the way a dullahan drinks while talking is worth watching). There was a gaggle of green-haired merrows in sealskin jackets and tight pants, looking like slender biker babes but without the tattoos or studs, and all looking faintly wet no matter how long they’d been out of the Bay. There was a fat round little fear gorta in a sweatsuit and glow-step Nikes, staving off his own personal famine by gorging on bagged-in McDonalds from the branch over in Grafton Street. And there were grogachs and leanbaitha and other kinds of the People that I’d never seen before; in some cases I never did find out what they were, or did, or what they were doing in town. There was no time, and besides, it seemed inappropriate to be inquiring too closely about everybody else while the purpose was to wake one particular leprechaun.

They waked him. It wasn’t organized, but stories started coming out about him—how much time he spent down around the Irish Writers Center, how he gave some mortal entrepreneur-lady the idea for the “Viking” amphibious-vehicle tours up and down the river Liffey: endless tales of that kind. He was well liked, and much missed, and people were angry about what had happened to him. But they were also afraid.

“And who the F are we supposed to tell about it?” said one of the dullahan to me and the banshee at one point. “Sure there’s no help in the Guards—we’ve a few of our own kind scattered here and there through the force, but no one high up enough to be paid any mind to.”

“We need our own guards,” said another voice, one of the clurachauns.

“And you’d love that, wouldn’t you? You’d be the first customers,” said one of the leprechauns.

There was a mutter. Clurachauns are too well known for their thieving habits, which make them no friends among either the “trooping” people like the Sidhe or the “solitaries” like the leprechauns, dullahans and merrows. The clurachaun only snickered.

“What do you call a northsider in a Mercedes? Thief!” said one of the leprechauns, under his breath. “What’s the difference between a northsider and a clurachaun? The northsider is better dressed!”

The clurachaun turned on him. The others moved back to give them room for what was probably coming. But there was one of the People I’d earlier noted, a grizzled, older leprechaun whom the others of his kind, and even the clurachauns, seemed to respect: when he’d spoken up, earlier, they’d gotten quiet. “The Eldest,” the banshee had whispered in my ear. Now the Eldest Leprechaun moved in fast and gave the younger leprechaun a clout upside the head. To my astonishment, no fight broke out.

“Shame on you, and the two of you acting like arseholes in front of a mortal,” said the Eldest. The squabblers both had the grace to look at least sullenly shamefaced. “Here we are in this time of grief when no one knows what’s happening, or who it might happen to next, and you make eejits of yourself. Shut up, the both of you.”

They turned away, muttering, and moved to opposite sides of the pub. The Eldest nodded at me and turned back to the conversation he’d been having with one of the merrows, who looked nervous. “I did see it, Manaanan’s name I did,” she said, shrugging back the sealskin jacket to show that strange pearly skin underneath: it was hot in the back of the pub, with so many People in there. “Or… I saw something. I was comin up out of the river the other night, you know, by where the coffee shop is on the boardwalk. I wanted a latte. And I saw it down the street, heading away from the Liffey, past one of those cut-rate furniture stores. Something… not normal.”

“What was it?” the Eldest said.

She shook her head, and the dark wet hair sprayed those standing nearest as she did. “Something big and green.”

No one knew what to make of that. “Aah, she’s got water on the brain,” said one of the clurachauns standing nearest. “It’s all just shite anyway. It’s junkies doin it.”

The Eldest glared at him. “It might be,” he said, “and it might not. We don’t dare take anything for granted. But we have to start taking care of ourselves now. Everybody so far who’s been taken has been out in some quiet place like a park, or in the waste places around housing estates. Now whatever’s doing this is doing it in the city. Nowhere’ll be safe soon. We have to put a stop to it. We need to start doing a neighborhood-watch kind of thing, such as mortals do.”

To my surprise, then, he turned to me. “Would you help us with that?” he said. “We could use a mortal’s eye on this. You know the city as well as we do, but from the mortal’s side. And you’re of good heart, otherwise the deceased wouldn’t have given you a word. He was a shrewd judge of character, that one.”

“How can I help?” I said.

“Walk some patrols with us,” he said. “That’s how we’ll have to start. We can get more of our city People in to help us if it’s shown to work.”

My first impulse would have been to moan about my day job and how I had little enough time off as it was. Then I thought,  What the hell am I thinking? I wanted to know more about these People—

“Sure,” I said. “Tell me where to meet you.

“Tomorrow night,” said the Eldest. “Say, down by the bottom of Grafton Street, by St. Stephen’s Green. We’ll ‘beat the bounds’ and see what we can find.”

 

*

 

And so we did that for five nights running, six… and saw nothing. People’s spirits began to rise: there was some talk that just the action we’d taken had put the fear on whatever we were trying to guard ourselves against. It would have been nice if that was true.

We walked, most of the time, between about nine at night and one in the morning: that was when the last few who’d been taken had vanished. I was out with a group including one of the merrow babes—I could never tell them apart—and two more leprechauns from my first one’s clan, over on the north side of the Liffey, not far from the big “industrial” pubs that have sprung up there, all noise and no atmosphere. As we went past the biggest of them, heading east along the riverbank, we heard something that briefly froze us all. A shriek—

As a mortal I would have mistaken it for a child’s voice. But the People with me knew better. The three of them ran across the Ha’penny Bridge, past startled tourists who felt things jostle them, saw nothing, and (as I passed in their wake) started feeling their pockets to see if they’d been picked. The People sprinted across the Quay in the face of incoming traffic, just made it past, and ran up the stairs and through the little tunnelway that leads into Temple Bar. And there, just before the alleyway opens out into the Square, when I caught up with them, I saw them staring at the cracked sidewalk, and on it, the empty tumble of clothes.

It was another of the People, but a clurachaun this time, stolen things spilling out of the clothing’s pockets—billfolds, change, jewelry, someone’s false teeth. But the threadbare tweeds were all shredded to rags as if by razors.

The merrow began to tremble. She pointed into the shadows, between the kebab place next to us, and the back door of the pub down at the corner.

Something green, yes. A green shadow melting out of the courtyard by Temple Street, turning, looking to left and right…and when it looked right, it saw us.

The great round eyes were yellow as lamps, and glowed green at their backs with the reflection of the sodium vapor lights back on the Quay. Humans walked by it and never saw; and it looked through them as if they were the mist curling up off the water of the Liffey, as if they didn’t matter. Massive, low-slung and big-shouldered, swag-bellied but nonetheless easily two tons of hard lean muscle, the size of a step van, the big striped cat put its tremendous round plate of a face down, eyeing us, and the whole block filled with the low, thoughtful sound of its growl, like a tank’s engine turning over.

It saw the leprechauns. It saw the Washer. It saw me…or at least I think it did, as someone who could see the Old Folk and was therefore of interest. It didn’t need us, though, for tonight. It had had enough. It gazed yellowly at us for a moment more and then padded leisurely away across Temple Bar Square into the shadows behind the Irish Film Centre—the lighter-colored stripes, livid green like a thunderstorm sunset, fading into grimy city shadow as it went, the darker stripes gone the color of that shadow already, vanishing into it as the lighter ones faded. Only the shape of the slowly lashing tail remained for a moment under the stuttering light of the streetlamp at the corner of the Square…then slipped into the dark and was gone.

A horrified, frozen silence followed.

“F me,” said the leprechaun at last, when he could speak again. “It’s the Celtic Tiger….”

 

*

 

The Old People met again late that night in the Long Hall, after chucking-out time had officially been called and the mortals pushed (or in select cases, thrown) out into the street. The Old Folk, for their own part, pay no attention to licensing laws, having little to fear from them. There’s s no point staging Garda raids on pubs open past “time” when between the first bang on the door and the forced entry, everybody inside literally vanishes.

Many of the Old Ones were afraid to say the name of what we’d seen. The idiom had become popular in the early 90’s, adopted as inward investment boomed and the economy became the fastest-growing in Europe. It had become a favourite phrase and image for Irish people everywhere, a matter of pride, turning up in countless advertisements. But no one had foreseen the side effects, perhaps not even the Old People. They were seeing them now.

“We should hunt down whoever coined the F ing name and make their last hours unpleasant,” said one of the Washers.

“Too late for that now,” the Oldest Leprechaun said. “The damage is done. Give the thing a name and it takes shape. They gave a name and a shape to the force that’s always hated us. It’s everything we’re not. It’s New Ireland, it’s money for money’s sake, brown paper envelopes stuffed full of bribes—the turn of mind that says that the old’s only good for theme parks, and the new is all there needs to be. It’s been getting stronger and stronger all this while. And now that it’s more important to the people living in the city than we are, it’s become physically real.  It’s started killing us to take our strength from us, and it’ll keep killing us and getting bigger and stronger… until it’s big enough to breed.”

A sort of collective shudder went through the room. I shuddered too, though it was as much from the strangeness of the moment as anything else. There are no female leprechauns, but nonetheless there are always enough younger ones to replace the old who die. Power in Ireland does not run to mortal’s rules, either in reproduction or in other ways. If the Folk said the Tiger could make more of itself, it could. And when the food supply ran out in the city, the Tiger’s brood would head into the countryside and continue the killing until there were none of the Old Folk left…and none of Old Ireland. What remained would be a wealthy country, the fastest-growing economy in Europe, then as now: but spiritually it would be a dead place, something vital gone from it forever.

“I think we all know who we need now,” the Oldest Leprechaun said. “We need the one who speaks to the Island in tongues and knows all its secrets—”

A hush fell. “We don’t dare!” somebody said from the back of the crowd.

“We have to dare,” the Eldest said. “We need the one who died but did not die, the one of whom it was prophesied that he would come back to the Island in its darkest moment and save its people. We need Ireland’s only superhero!”

A great cheer went up. Everybody piled out the doors of the Long Hall, carrying me with them.

That’s how we wound up heading down College Green in an untidy crowd, around the curve of the old Bank of Ireland and past Trinity College, heading for the river. Across O’Connell Bridge and up O’Connell Street we went, in the dark dead of night, and latenight revelers and petty crooks alike fled before our faces, certain that we were an outflow of ecstasy-crazed ravers, or something far less savory. Past them all we went, nearly to the foot of the grayly shining quarter-mile-high needle of the Millennium Spire, and then hung a right into the top of North Earl Street, catty-corner from the GPO…and gathered there, six deep and expectant, around the statue of James Joyce.

 

*

 

Dubliners have an ambivalent relationship, at best, to their landmarks and civic statuary. Whether they love them or hate them, they are given names that don’t necessarily reflect the desires of the sculptors, but certainly sum up the zeitgeist.

The first one to become really famous had been the statue of Molly Malone at the top of Grafton Street. Some well-meaning committee had set there a bronze of the poor girl, representing her wheeling her wheel barrow through streets broad and narrow; and popular opinion had almost instantaneously renamed this statue The Tart with the Cart. Within weeks, the bright brass shine of the tops of her breasts (as opposed to her more normal patina elsewhere) seemed to confirm as widespread a friend’s opinion that Miss Molly was peddling, as one wag delicately put it, “more than just shellfish” around the streets broad and narrow.

The convention swiftly took hold in Dublin, as all things do that give the finger to propriety. The chimney of a former city distillery, turned into a tourist attraction with an elevator and a glassed-in viewing platform on top, became The Flue with the View. The attempt to put a millennium clock into the river had overnight become The Time in the Slime. And the bronze statue around which we now stood, the natty little man in his fedora, standing looking idly across O’Connell Street toward the GPO—the wild-tongued exile himself, the muse of Irish literature in the twentieth century, James Joyce himself had been dubbed the Prick with the Stick.

And so here we stood around him, none of us insensible to what everybody called the statue—and by extension, the man. We’d all done it. And now we needed him. Was this going to be a problem?

The Oldest Leprechaun raised his hands in the air before the statue and spoke at length in Irish, an invocation of great power that buzzed in all our bones and made the surrounding paving-blocks jitter and plate-glass windows ripple with sine waves: but nothing happened.

Glances were exchanged among those in the gathered crowd. Then one of the Washers at the Ford raised her voice and keened a keen as it was done in the ancient days, though with certain anarchic qualities—a long twelve-tone ululation suggestive of music written in the twenties, before the atonal movement had been discredited.

And nothing happened at all.

The Oldest Leprechaun stood there thinking for a moment. “Working with effigies isn’t going to be enough,” he said. “It might be for one of us…but not for him, a mortal. We’ve got to go to the graveside and raise his ghost itself.”

“Where’s he buried?” said another leprechaun. “We’ll rent a van or something…”

“You feckwit,” said another one, “he’s not buried here.  He was never at home after they banned his books. It was always Trieste or Paris, all them fancy places with faraway names…”

Finally I could contribute something. “Zürich,” I said. “It was Zürich. A cemetery above the city…”

“We’ll go,” said the Oldest. “You’ll come with us. And one or two others. We’ll fly to Zürich tomorrow…wake him up, and at the very least get his advice. If we can, we’ll bring him back. Until then,” the Oldest said, “everyone travel in groups. Stay off the streets at night if you can. We won’t be long.”

 

*

 

Leprechauns still have some access to gold, or at least to gold cards: we flew out on Swiss after lunchtime the next day, the direct flight to Zürich. That evening, about five, we were on the ground, and nothing would satisfy the Eldest but that we go straight to the grave, right then.

I’d been in Switzerland once or twice, and I was against it. “I’m not sure you should do that,” I said. “The Swiss are really big on not going into places after they’re officially closed…”

The Eldest gave me a look.

As a result we immediately took the feeder train from the airport to the main station, and the Number 6 tram from the main station tram depot to the Zürichbergstrasse. At Zürichbergstrasse 129 are the gates to Fluntern Cemetery. We got out, and found the place locked and apparently deserted behind its high granite walls; but there was a little iron-barred postern gate that was open—or at least, it opened to the Eldest Leprechaun. We went in.

The cemetery is beautifully kept, and we headed around and up several curving pathways, climbing, for the cemetery is built against the slope of the Zürichberg mountain that leans above the city. Finally we found the spot. Under a stand of trees, in a sort of semicircular bay, were some tasteful plantings, a bronze of Joyce sitting on a rock and admiring the view, a plaque in the ground saying who was buried here, with dates of birth and death, and a stern sign in German, French and Italian saying WALKING ON THE GRAVE IS FORBIDDEN.

The other leprechauns took off their hats. Once more the Eldest raised his arms and spoke that long, solemn invocation in Irish. All around us, the wind in the aspens and birches fell quiet. And suddenly there were three men standing there; or the ghosts of three men.

One was tall, one was short, and one was of middle height. They were all wearing clothes from the turn of the 20th century—loose trousers held up over white shirts with suspenders. They looked at us in some confusion.

“Where is James Joyce?” said the Eldest Leprechaun.

“He’s dead,” said the shortest of the three.

The Eldest Leprechaun rolled his eyes. “I mean, where is he now?”

“He is not here,” said the middle-sized figure. “He is risen.”

The tallest of them checked his watch. “And since it’s the time that’s in it,” he said, “why would he still be here at all? He’s in the pub.”

The leprechauns looked at each other.

“We should have known,” one of them said.

“Pelikanstrasse?” the Eldest said to the three shadowy figures.

“That’s the one.”

“Thanking you,” said the Eldest, and we went straight back out of the cemetery to catch the tram back down the hill.

At Pelikanstrasse is one of the bigger complexes of one of the bigger Swiss banks. There, in a little plaza by Bahnhofstrasse, you see a number of granite doorways, all leading nowhere; and past them the street curves down into what seems at first a nondescript arc of shop windows and office doorways.

“Those three guys—”

“They’re something from Finnegan’s Wake,” said the leprechaun who was walking next to me, behind the Eldest. “Three guys always turn up together with the initials H C and E. Never got into that one, too obscure, don’t ask me for the details. But the pub’s in there too, and in Ulysses….”

He told me how once upon a time, the bar had been the Antique Bar in the first Jury’s Hotel, in Dame Street. There, at a corner table, a little man in round-framed glasses and a slouch hat could often have been seen sitting in front of a red wine and a gorgonzola sandwich, when he could afford them, relaxing in the dim pub-misted afternoon sunlight, while other languages, other universes, roiled and teemed in his brain.

“But someone had a brain seizure,” the leprechaun said. “Jury’s sold off their old property in Dame Street, and arranged to have the hotel knocked down. Urban renewal, progress, all that shite. They wanted the money for the land: that was all. And, they said to themselves,  we’ll auction off the innards and get a few extra bob for it. If not, we’ll just throw it all in the tip, and in any case we’ll build a much better bar somewhere else, in a nice new hotel, all covered with lovely Formica.”

The leprechaun grimaced. “But then along came, would you believe it, the head of the Swiss security services. He was afraid the Russians would invade his country, and he was looking for a safe house in Ireland where the Swiss government could hide if that happened. And wouldn’t you know he was a Joyce fan. He found out about Jury’s auctioning off the bar, and he got one of the big Swiss banks and some people from their government to buy the whole thing. And then the Swiss came along and took it to bits and numbered every piece, and put it back together in Zurich, and here it is.”

The leprechaun lowered his head conspiratorially toward mine.

“The Swiss,” he whispered, “are Celts, did you know.”

I nodded. “The Helvetii,” I said after few moments. “They made cheese. It’s in the Gallic Wars.”

“And why wouldn’t they have,” the leprechaun said with relish, “seeing that the furious and bloody Queen Maeve herself was killed by being slung at and hit in the forehead by her stepson with a great lump of the Irish version of Parmesan.” He paused. “…Or it might have been Regato.”

We came to the door of the bar—a simple wooden door, nothing exciting about it—pulled it open, and went in.

An Irish country-house chef I know once described Zürich to me, under his breath, as “a kick-ass party town.” And so it is. It has many sleek, slinky bars, jumping with the sound of the moment, well hidden from the tourists whom such relentless buzz would confuse. But here, in that busy and congenial city, is something completely different—a corner that is forever Ireland, all dark wood and gleaming brass and painted tile a hundred years old and more. Here Irish-strength cigarette and cigar smoke tangles (ever so briefly) under the lights before being sucked away by the relentlessly efficient Swiss ventilation system. Here voices converse at Irish volume levels, nearly enough to curl the turbine fans on a Concorde. Here Irish craic (if there is such a word) seeps out of the teak-panelled, glinting, polished walls.

And here we found Joyce. He was dead, but he didn’t mind, for he was in his local.

He sat at the back corner table, by himself; amazing that the rest of the place was practically groaning with people, but this one island of quiet remained. His hat lay on the leather banquette next to him, his cane leaned against the table, and a glass of red wine sat on the table before him. He looked very much the dapper young man of a statelier time… though there was something else about him, something in his eyes, that brought the hair up on the back of my neck. It was more than just being dead. Words are power, and against some words even Death strives in vain.

Respectfully we approached him, and the Eldest Leprechaun stood by Joyce’s table. “Mr. Joyce,” he said, “you’re needed.”

You would have wondered, if you’d been watching Joyce’s eyes earlier, whether he was quite in this time and place, or wandering in mind or spirit to some other time, the twenties or thirties perhaps. Now, though, those eyes snapped into the here and now.

The Eldest Leprechaun spoke to Joyce, quietly and at some length, in Irish. While he did, the narrow, wise little eyes rested on each of us in turn, very briefly. And when he spoke, he sounded annoyed.

“Well, this is tiresome,” Joyce said.

Everyone who had the sense to do so, cringed. I didn’t. Later I found out that “tiresome” was as close as Joyce ever got to saying “f”.

“What can be done, Sir?” said the Eldest Leprechaun.

Joyce looked thoughtful for a moment. “There is only one hope,” he said. “We must conjure the river.”

The Eldest Leprechaun blanched.

“We must raise up Anna Livia,” Joyce said, “the Goddess of the Liffey, and put your case to Her. Only she can save your people now. She may refuse. She is Herself, and has her own priorities. But I think She will be kindly disposed toward you. And if anyone can raise her for you, I can. She and I… we were an Item.” And his eyes glinted.

“You’ll come back with us tomorrow, then?”

“First thing,” Joyce said.

 

*

And so it came to pass. I have no idea how one handles airline ticketing for dead people these days, but he was right there with us in business class the next morning, Saturday morning—critiquing the Swiss wines on board and flirting with the flight attendants. Two hours later, just in time for lunch, we were home.

A minivan-cab took us back to town. “Bloomsday early this year, is it?” said the cab driver to Joyce.

Joyce smiled thinly and didn’t answer: apparently even the dead knew that every June 16th the city filled up with counterfeit Joyces. “There was a statue of Anna Livia in town, wasn’t there?” he said.

“Oh, the Floozie in the Jacuzzi,” the driver said. “They moved it.”

“Where is it now?”

“North Quay.”

“Then that’s where we’re going, my good man.”

He took us there. We paid him off, and after he’d left, Joyce went over to the statue and looked at it rather sadly.

It had always resembled a dissolute, weedy-haired woman in a concrete bathtub at the best of times, when it had been installed in the middle of O’Connell Street and running with the music of flowing water. Now, though, sitting dusty, high and dry on wooden pallets in the middle of the stones of an unfinished memorial plaza, surrounded by marine cranes and dingy warehouses, the statue just looked ugly.

Joyce looked at it and frowned. “Well, we have no choice,” Joyce said. “For this we need the concrete as well as the abstract.”

He walked over to the waterside. The Eldest Leprechaun went with him. Joyce took off his hat and handed it to the leprechaun. Then he stood straight, his cane in one hand, and suddenly was all magician…

“O tell me all about Anna Livia,” he said in that thin, singing little tenor voice: and though he didn’t raise that voice at all, the sound hit the warehouses and the freighters and the superstructure of the Eastlink Bridge half a mile away, and ricocheted and rattled from building to building until the water itself started to shake with it, rippling as if from an earth tremor underneath. “I want to hear all about Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You’ll die when you hear—”

The water inside the river walls leaped and beat against the banks, soaking us all. I began to wonder if we would die: I hadn’t seen the river like this since the last hurricane. Joyce spoke on, and the wind rose, and the stones under our feet shook. “Then, then, as soon as the lump his back was turned, with her mealiebag slung over her shoulder, Anna Livia, oysterface, forth of her bassein came—!”

“I hear, I wake,” said a tremendous voice in response. If you’ve once heard it, you will never forget it; Liffey in spate, a thunder, a roar between her banks, lightning trapped in the water, a green and white irresistible fury pushing everything before Her into the Bay.

She rose up. Those who had the sense to do so, covered their eyes. The rest of us were immediately showered with sodden sneakers, slime-laden Coke cans, ancient tattered plastic Superquinn bags from before the plastic-bag ban, and much other, far less printable detritus of urban Dublin existence. She towered up, towered over us. She was water, water in the shape of a woman: her hair streamed with water, streamed down and became part of her again; her gown was water, and the water glowed. She looked up Her river, and down Her river, and said:

“Where am I?”

There was a profound silence all around that had nothing to do with the awe and majesty of Herself.

“Where am I?” said Anna Livia again, in a tone of voice that suggested someone had better F ing tell her.

One lone voice raised itself, unafraid, over the dead stillness. “North Quay,” Joyce said.

There was a long, long pause.

“North Quay?” said the gracious Goddess, looking around her. “What the F am I doin here? I was in O’Connell Street last time I looked out this ugly thing’s eyes, with wee ‘uns playin in me in the hot weather!  When we had it, which was not often, and no point in blaming poor Met Eireann. F ing climate change, I know who’re responsible, them and their peat-burning power stations, and all these F ing SUVs.”

And then she peered down. “Can that be you?” she said in an accent more of the Gaiety Theatre than anything else. “Jimmy, you son of a bitch, my love, my great and only love, what the F are you doing here? You were at peace this long while, I thought, after they put you in the ground far from home, thanks to that F ing deValera—“

She went on in this vein for half a minute or so more, splendidly, but ran down at last. “You didn’t wake me up for nothing, James my love,” she said at last. “What’s to do?”

“There is a tiger eating our people,” Joyce said. “A Celtic one. It preys on the Old Ones and tries to kill Old Ireland—”

She was looking around her at the skyline. Not much had changed in terms of tall buildings—the Irish don’t approve of skyscrapers—but much, much else was different, and we were all watching Her face with varying degrees of nervousness.

“Sure I can smell it,” she said. “Nasty tomcat stink, they’ll always be spraying all over everything. Marking their territory. Their territory indeed!”

For a long moment more She stood there, head raised against the blue-milk sky, sniffing the air. “Lady,” the Eldest Leprechaun said, “it only comes out at night—”

“It lies up by day,” She said. “And can’t I just smell it. Hiding won’t help it today. Come on—”

Anna Livia strode on up the river, slowly, looking from side to side at her city, while we pursued Her on land as best we could. She was looking increasingly annoyed as she went. Maybe it was the traffic on the Quays, or the pollution, or the new one-way system, which drove everybody insane: or maybe it was some of the newer architecture. One glance She gave the Millennium Spire, erected at last three years late. That glance worried me—Dubliners are sufficiently divided on the Spire that they haven’t yet reached consensus on a rude name for it—but Anna Livia then turned her attention elsewhere, looking over the intervening rooftops, southward. Four or five blocks inland stood the Irish Financial Services Center, next to one of the city’s two main train stations. It was an ugly building, a green-glass-and-white-marble chimera, dwarfing everything around it—a monument to money, built during the height of the Tiger time.

“Yes,” she said softly, “there it is, I’ll be bound. Kitty, kitty, kitty!”

She came up out of the river, then, and started to head crosstown. What other unsighted mortals were able to make of the sudden flood that leapt up out of the Liffey, I don’t know: but the water got into the underground wiring and immediately made the traffic lights go on the blink, bringing traffic on the Quays to a halt. Maybe it’s a blessing, I thought, as I ran after the others, trying to keep out of the flood of water that followed the colossal shape up out of the river.

Anna Livia came up to the IFSC and looked it over, peering in through the windows. Then she stood up straight.

“Gods bless all here save the cat!” she said in a voice of thunder.

At the sound of Her raised voice, glass exploded out of the IFSC in every possible direction, as if Spielberg had come back to town and said, “Buy all the sugar glass on Earth, and trash it.” From the spraying, glittering chaos, at least one clandestine billionaire plunged in a shrieking, flailing trajectory toward the parking lot of Tara Street Station, missed, and made an most terminal sound on impact: apparently blessings weren’t enough. He was followed by his chef, who had fallen on hard times (only recently acquitted of stealing a Titian from his signature restaurant’s host-hotel) and now fell on something much harder, ruining the no-claims bonuses of numerous Mercedes and BMW sedans parked below.

And in their wake, something else came out—growling, not that low pleased growl we’d heard the other night, but something far more threatened, and more threatening.

Through the wall, or out one of the openings left by the broken glass, out it came. It slunk, at first, and it looked up at Herself, and snarled and showed its teeth. But there was going to be no contest. Anna Livia was the height of the Customs House dome, and Her proportions to the Celtic Tiger’s proportions were those of an angry housewife to that of an alley cat.

It did all it could do, as She bent down and reached for it. It ran. Crushing cars, knocking mortals aside, it ran to get as far inland as it could.  It got as far as St. Stephen’s Green, and dove into the square, through the trees, and out of sight.

From way behind, I cursed when I saw it do that. By the time we caught up with the Tiger, it would be out the other side of the Green and into Dublin 2 somewhere—

I looked over at the Eldest Leprechaun, then back to see where Anna Livia had gone. She was briefly out of sight, a block or so over now. “Come on,” he said, “the Green—”

We went there—it was all we could do. When we got to St. Stephen’s Green, all surrounded by its trees, there was no sound of further disturbance anywhere else.  “It’s still in here—” I said. We looked through the archway at the bottom of Grafton Street and could see nothing but the little lake inside, placid water, and some slightly startled-looking swans.

“Now what?” I said under my breath.

The Oldest Leprechaun gestured. I looked where he pointed. At the top of Grafton Street, by Trinity College, Anna Livia had taken a stand.

She ventured no further south. She simply raised Her hands and began speaking in Irish. And as we looked back through the archway into the Green, down toward the lake, we saw something starting to happen: water rising again—

“The swans…!” the Eldest Leprechaun said.

It wasn’t the regular swans he meant. These were crowding back and away from the center of the lake as fast as they could. The shapes rising from the water now were swans as well, but more silver than the normal ones, and far, far bigger. They reached their necks up; they trumpeted; they leapt out of the water, into the greenery, out of sight.

A roar of pain and rage went up, and the Celtic Tiger broke cover and ran up out of St. Stephen’s Green into Grafton Street, down the red bricks, in full flight, with the Children of Lir coming after him fast. It may not sound like much, five swans against a tiger:  but one swan by itself is equal to an armed knight on horseback if it knows what it’s doing. Five swans fighting, choreographed, in unison, are a battalion. In a city street, lined with chain stores and with plate glass everywhere, when you hear the whooping whooshing uncanny sound of swan-wings coming after you, you think: where can I hide? But five giant swans who are also four pissed-off Irish princes, and their sister, worth all the rest of them put together… if you were a tiger with any sense, you’d leave the country.

This one didn’t have quite that much sense. Maybe it was bloated with its own sense of its power—for hadn’t it had its way all this while? It turned, roaring with fury, and leapt back down the street toward its pursuers—

A swan’s wing caught it full across the face. The Tiger shied back like a horse struck with a whip across the eyes, and then was battered by more wings, merciless. The Tiger turned and ran again, back the way it had been going first, around the curve in Grafton Street, with the Children in hot pursuit…and ran, in turn, right into Anna Livia.

She reached down and picked it up, yowling and howling, like a woman picking up a badly behaved housecat. Herself turned and walked past Trinity, the flood that had been following her carefully containing itself, and she made her way north toward O’Connell Bridge, the waters roaring, the tiger roaring, the horns of frustrated drivers honking all up and down the Quays as she went. What are they seeing? I wondered, as in company with the leprechauns I followed Herself as best I could. I had a feeling that the next day there would be stories in the Irish Times about flash floods, water main breaks, anything but the truth.

The truth was mind-bending enough, though, as we looked at the River Herself standing on O’Connell Bridge and looking north up the street.

“Yes,” she said, and her voice rumbled against the buildings. “Yes, that’ll do nicely—”

In her hands, as she walked up O’Connell Street, the Tiger writhed and splashed and yowled desperately to get away. But there was no escape. Slowly it was borne up the street, shoulder-high to Herself, spitting and clawing in terror, until She stood right across from the GPO. Slowly she lifted the Tiger up over her head.

“So you would kill Old Ireland?” Anna Livia said. “You would kill yourself, for without Old Ireland, you wouldn’t be. And as we brought you about…”

In one hard gesture she brought the Tiger down.

“So we can end you,” She said, “or the badness in you… if we have the sense.”

She turned and made her way back to O’Connell Bridge. Traffic was in an uproar, and Gardaí were rushing in every direction. No one noticed a guy and a few leprechauns and a little slender man in turn-of-the-century clothes standing there by the water, watching the huge woman’s shape that eased down into it again….if they saw that last at all

“Not dead yet, boys,” She said, as she subsided gently into the water: “not dead yet.” She threw a last loving glance at Joyce.

He took his hat back from the Eldest Leprechaun and tipped it to Herself.

The waters closed over her again. Joyce, or his ghost, vanished as She did. Overhead, we glanced up at the sound of swans’ wings, heavy and dangerous, beating their way down the air over the river.

And then I looked back over my shoulder, north up O’Connell Street, and had to grin. There, at the top of the Spire, impaled like a limp hors d’ouevre on a cocktail stick, and not burning at all bright—hung something green.

 

 

 

ATTENTION ALL: please read the spoiler warning below before clicking on anything in this post. Thanks!

There it is: right now, possibly one of the most familiar images in the TV-fannish regions of the Intarwebz, one which is routinely greeted by many of those who recognize it with miserable sighs, in some cases with weeping and wailing, and (in many forums and online havens) with the gnashing of teeth and anguished cries of “MOFFAAAAAT!!” …

…For a decade or so now, Peter and I have had the privilege and constant delight of being friends with a very gifted German screenwriter by the name of Torsten Dewi. Torsten worked closely with us on the miniseries Die Niebelungen (which aired in the US on SyFy under the title Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King), and was the source of endless good advice and encouragement all through what turned into kind of a crazed process.

In more recent years, besides his continuing TV and film work (he was, in particular, the man who introduced the telenovela concept to Germany with Lotta in Love), Torsten has become a most popular and prolific blogger on TV, film, and media in general. Some weeks ago he let us know that he and his Very Significant Other, the beautiful Britta, were going to be taking a holiday this month; and rather than let his blog at Wortvogel.de go quiet, or do a bunch of canned postings, he asked me (among various others) whether I’d like to do a guest piece for him. I immediately said yes, and almost as immediately knew what I wanted to do for him: for “The Reichenbach Fall” had just aired.

Here, then, is a link to what I wrote for Torsten –  a general overview of Sherlock (for those in Germany who might not have seen it yet) and some notes about issues that have developed over the past two seasons, and particularly in the wake of the most recent episode. Please note that this blog is absolutely overrun with spoilers for everything in series 1 & 2 up to and including specifics of events in “The Reichenbach Fall.”

Otherwise: enjoy!

On this day twenty-five years ago, I got married (for the first time*) to the coolest man on Earth.

 

There he is in a pic I took of him some months previously, by the boathouse on Central Park Lake. That afternoon seems like about ten minutes ago, some ways. And even after two and a half decades spent being with this man and learning his complexities, the experience never gets old. My life and my work would be utterly empty without him: his presence and his gifts inform everything I do.

He contains multitudes. Hotshot novelist, gourmet cook, indefatigable researcher (“Are you still on TV Tropes??”), crazed modeller, retrotech geek, artist, sound effects specialist, raconteur, friend of all cats (especially big ones) and softie about all cute things, eagle-eyed pilot, militaria expert, swordsman and screenwriter, connoisseur of fountain pens and typewriters, sex god, ever-understanding confidant, protector and defender, best friend, kindly and incisive critic, Calvin to my Susie: he is all of these and more… way more.

Peter, I love you.

Bring on the next twenty-five years.

*There were two weddings: one in LA to get the paperwork handled, and the second on in Boston so that the maximum number of friends could be there.

There is a moment in Sherlock‘s second-season episode “The Hounds of Baskerville” in which the world’s first and only consulting detective is attempting to get to grips with the fact that his senses, the tools of his trade, utterly reliable for all his past life, have apparently turned on him and are no longer to be trusted. As have many other artists in similar situations — painters who suddenly can’t paint, sculptors who can’t find the shapes hidden in the stone any more — Sherlock briefly comes a bit undone under the pressure of the untoward circumstance.

 

INT. CROSS KEYS -- NIGHT

Sherlock sits by the fire in the pub. His breathing is labored as he stares into the fire, and he’s squeezing his eyes shut and opening them again as if his vision’s giving him trouble. This behavior continues while John sits down with him and briefs him on Henry Baskerville’s condition --

JOHN

Well, he’s in a pretty bad way. Manic. Totally convinced that there’s some mutant superdog roaming the moors. And there isn’t, is there? Because if somebody knew how to make a mutant superdog, we’d know. They’d be for sale. I mean, that’s how it works....

John shares a little more info about what may or may not be clues to the present mystery, but Sherlock isn’t engaging with him. His face works a bit bizarrely as he tries to hang onto his composure. And after a moment’s pause he says something that costs him a great deal:

SHERLOCK

Henry’s right. I saw it too.

JOHN

What?

SHERLOCK

I saw it too, John.

JOHN

Just a moment. You saw what?

SHERLOCK

A hound. Out there in the Hollow. A gigantic hound.

He blinks again, the trouble-with-my-eyes expression: but the trouble they’re giving him is that they’ve shown him something he cannot possibly believe. John too is having trouble believing what he’s hearing from the 2012 finalist for the title of Earth’s Most Rigorous Thinker.

JOHN

Um. Look, Sherlock. We have to be rational about this. And you, of all people, can’t -- Look, let’s just stick to what we know. Stick to the facts.

SHERLOCK

Once you rule out the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be true.

JOHN

What’s that mean?

Sherlock picks up the glass of whisky sitting beside him and stares at it: stares in horrified fascination and loathing at the shaking of the hand holding it.

SHERLOCK

Look at me. I’m afraid, John. Afraid.

Sherlock takes a big swig of the whisky.

JOHN

Sherlock --

SHERLOCK

(another swig)

Ought to be able to keep myself distant. To divorce myself from feelings.

He holds up the glass. His hand shakes worse. John’s eyes rest on it, on his friend’s desperately working face as Sherlock struggles for control.

SHERLOCK (CONT’D)

But look. You see? The body’s betraying me. Interesting, yes? -- emotions? The grit on the lens, the fly in the ointment --

JOHN

(concerned but gently ironic)

All right, ‘Spock,’ just take it easy. You’ve been pretty wired lately. You know you have. I think you’ve just gone out there, got yourself a bit worked up...

SHERLOCK

Worked up?

JOHN

It was dark and scary --

SHERLOCK

Me? There’s nothing wrong with me!

…Sherlock then veers into a fairly emphatic anxiety attack with a side order of unusually driven and angry off-the-cuff deduction. But I had to roll the recording back to get back into sync with it, for the narrative had unseated me at the word “Spock” and kept right on running, leaving me sitting there a bit dazed. I’d expected a lot of things from this episode, but seeing two of my favorite fandoms cross the streams with such flair left me shaking my head and grinning.

Sherlock and Spock. I’ve been a friend of the one since my teens — maybe earlier — and an off-canon chronicler of the other for twenty or thirty years. As such, the confluence of the two universes was hardly news to me: Star Trek (and Star Trek writers) have had the hots for Holmes for a long time, and dialogue references and outright cameos are commonplace. Nick Meyer, the director of arguably the single best of all Trek movies until the Great Reboot, is probably the best-known of the Holmes fans to become involved in Trek’s newer, younger Canon. Data routinely goes sleuthing in the original Holmes’s gaslit London on the holodeck (and Moriarty has escaped from it, creating the predictable mayhem). There’s even the line referred to in the tumblr gif below — which, since all Trek film is canonical, makes the connection concrete: either Spock and Sherlock Holmes, or Spock and Arthur Conan Doyle, are (it says here) related. But whether or not you accept that last statement as gospel truth or a Vulcan “exaggerating”, there’s no denying that 1701/1701A and 221B are thematic and spiritual neighbors. The Trek universe has been nodding amicably toward Doyle’s creation for many years.

But this was the first time the other universe, in mass media at least, had ever nodded back. I don’t know how other Trek fans felt, but I was seriously tickled: as if in some obscure and very satisfying way, a circle had closed.

And of course early in January news got out that Benedict Cumberbatch will have a major role in Star Trek 2. And by all reports, he’s settling into the new job nicely. So as one circle is closed, another one opens. What a world…

(Over here, by the way, is the clip referenced in the script extract above.)

…It’s nice to see the two universes on mutual nodding acquaintance, though. For the great core relationships at the heart of each of them have resonances to each other that may or may not be entirely accidental. The correspondences naturally aren’t exact (and it’d be boring if they were), particularly because in Trek the core relationship is a triad and in Holmes’s world it’s a dyad. But the strength of the similarities is striking.

In both worlds, you could make a case that it’s the rational, logical creatures inhabiting them that give the Enterprise and the upstairs flat at 221B Baker Street their spice and potential drama… for acting reasonably and rationally isn’t normally a favorite occupation of human beings. Though logic is unquestionably a good thing, years and years of Star Trek episodes and many of the Holmes stories remind us that in either past or future, unless tempered by human qualities, the logic becomes a serious pain in the butt and occasionally a stumbling block, or even a liability. So in each world, the most committed humans/”normal people” slowly educate the local logician in the usages and usefulness of the human heart; and along the way, the logician normally manages to teach the humans something about how to really think. Everyone benefits from this arrangement… assuming that they don’t kill each other first. (Cue the iconic music from “Amok Time” here.) But the meat and drama of the stories arises mostly from this learning process, and the ways it goes wrong, or right.
If they don’t kill each other first. This was a close call…

I hardly need to get into the Kirk/Spock/McCoy dynamic very deeply at this late date: the way the characters interact is so well known. Outside of fiction, I’m sure endless reams of material have been written about the putative relationships between the characters seen as id/ego/superego or parent/child/adult or Moe/Larry/Curly or Roddenberry-only-knows what else, mostly as attempts to explain where the Logician fits in and how the others manage to affect him. Some of these theories may actually have some application. On my own time I’ve normally felt that all three characters are too complex to reduce to such simplistic formulae. But there are certainly themes that recur when Kirk is interacting with Spock (in terms of looking past the rigidity of logic toward ways to push out the boundaries of the envelope, or break some otherwise deadly paradigm to save everybody’s lives) and when McCoy is interacting with him (in terms of forcefully putting the emotional/ethical side of a situation and getting up in Spock’s face, sometimes quite rudely, until the message gets across to best effect). And if anything, these tendencies have become stronger and more effective in the reboot, with the reincarnation of Kirk, Spock and McCoy in the personas of younger characters making it plainer that they’re all in the same learning experience together — a three-part work in progress, but with the foundations of a lifelong friendship now firmly laid.

In Sherlock’s boot-forward into the 21st century from the 19th, the same situation obtains, with serious benefits. For example, the unnerving scene above would never have played with a middle-aged Holmes and Watson: to make it work you need two younger men who’re still learning the extent of their powers and settling into their roles. These might at first glance look simpler than those of the Trek core team, since this team’s built for two rather than three — but it actually makes their dynamic even more complicated. Watson, as both doctor and military man, combines the opportunities and challenges of the Kirk/McCoy roles… and winds up being able to affect his opposite number in two entirely different ways.

His own complexities aren’t to be dismissed. Here you have a man disciplined and tough-minded, deeply wounded by his experiences in Afghanistan but not conquered by them — a crack shot possessed of what Sherlock quickly (and almost inopportunely) identifies as “strong moral principle” and “nerves of steel”. But perfectly balancing this is Watson’s slight, charming diffidence, unfailing kind-heartedness, and gentle bedside manner. (Close inspection of the DVD makes available some useful and rather diagnostic background information on him, including his interest in a career in advanced A&E with an emphasis on laparoscopy and other associated styles of “bloodless surgery”. Click here for screencaps with some light clinical commentary.) John’s underlying compassion positions him perfectly to understand and support his scary-smart, high-functioning sociopath roommate day by day. Yet he’s both willing and able to kick Sherlock’s butt physically if circumstances require, or to administer him a succinct no-holds-barred tonguelashing that would do McCoy proud. This is no mere sidekick: this is a teammate, well along in the process of being/becoming a rock-solid friend.

He’s got a BAFTA and he’s not afraid to use it

And John’s presence and qualities point up another of the resonances between the Starship and the upstairs flat. Just as you could make a case that the real narrative of James Kirk’s greatness in Starfleet doesn’t get started until he and Spock meet, realize each other’s strengths, and come to initial terms, you could also say that Holmes is just an Annoying Incredibly Smart Guy until Watson’s transformative influence starts having its effect — tempering that awesome intellect and processing ability with more regularly expressed humanity, taught the best way: by example. In all these characters’ cases, the temptation to employ the way-overused line about “they complete each other” has to be resisted at all costs, because any “completing” in the case of these two teams of characters is decades away… if it can ever happen this side of all their graves.

In particular, the Holmes and Watson story, as it’s been reframed, isn’t about completion at all. It’s about growth, and what each of these men has to teach the other over time. It’s equally tempting, in service of this theme, to reach for the old no-brainer mind/heart-duality model and say that each man brings one half of a whole to the table. But there’s nothing so simplistic about this character dyad, who come to us with many layers of history and complexity laid on in various media over the last century, like a much-loved painting that the artist just can’t stop working on. It’d probably be more accurate to say that John has as much to learn from Sherlock about the arts of thought and observation as Sherlock has to learn from John about the uses of concern and compassion. Each man is going to make the other whole — though there’ll be the usual missteps and kicking and screaming along the way. But this is what makes for great and satisfying drama: characters who change each other and are changed themselves — not running together like two drops of water into one, but each growing more perfect in the exercise of some unique gift — say, the conduction of light or the reception of it — simply because of the other’s continued and reliable presence in an otherwise unreliable world.

Maybe that’s a clue to why both these worlds have rebooted so cleanly into this century (besides the fact that both have good solid writing teams, hard at work and intent on taking the time to get it right). Both Star Trek and Sherlock’s world still speak on a very basic level to people who — besides a little adventure and excitement — want and need stories about how friendship and intelligence, working in tandem, have a fighting chance at conquering the world and making a difference, on the small scale or the very large. In both cases you may hear the usual noise about old wine in new bottles. But this presupposes an audience that still thinks the old wine’s worth drinking… and who’re willing to take the chance to see if the new bottles might actually make it taste even better this time round. For such people, it looks more and more like there’ll always be somewhere to beam up to: and a door on Baker Street that, when they knock, will always be answered.