It was an odd ragbag of tidbits, stories, practical advice about the importance of paper clips. “Always be on the lookout for surprise,” he suggested, “but do not flatter yourself you will see it in time. If you did, it wouldn’t be a surprise, now would it?” Porter Edwards saw bomb disposal as metaphor. In the end, he said, the trick was all internal. What would destroy you, as in any Greek tragedy, would be your own character. With booby-trapped bombs in the North, you would be hung by your own predictability—like the boys who were blown away by a pressure switch triggered by the ripping down of slanderous, anti-British posters on a gable wall. You had to overcome yourself, become larger, so you would cease to be manipulated by what you were like. And devices taught humility and respect. Farrell gagged. Whole chapters read like reruns of Kung Fu. “On Immortality and Arrogance” particularly got up his nose: “If you believe you’re immortal you probably think you’re special. You’re not,” Bream wrote flat. “You’re a dummy. Everyone thinks that. It’s only the rare fellows who grasp they can die who have a clue.”
Though by all indications Porter Edwards Bream was a whopping pain in the arse, Farrell needed tutelage, and traced Corporal Bream to the small Yorkshire town of Beverly. At the first pub he hit, Porter’s name worked a treat. “Watch yourself, now,” Farrell was forewarned. “Bream’s a touch of the second sight. Funny—creepy-funny. Might not like what he sees.”
“Bollocks,” said Farrell.
It took an hour to escape all the embellishments and cautions. Christ, the last thing anyone from Ulster hunted was another myth. And Farrell knew how to decode these fables by now: Porter Edwards Bream was an opinionated, abusive drunk. Locals indulged him from their own need, their pitiable internal poverty. Their awe was detestable. Their patience was detestable. They tolerated the corporal’s endless boozy blithering just to have someone to talk about.
He found Bream in a palatial house tended by two doting women whose relation to the man was obscure. An enormous, cigar-fogged old gout, he was not surprised by Farrell’s visit, or particularly curious. For a spindly Catholic to have sought him out all the way from Belfast seemed perfectly reasonable. He was dead senile, and through the afternoon kept falling asleep.
They despised each other straight off. “If there’s anything I can’t bear,” Porter announced not two minutes into their acquaintance, “it’s one more sod’s decided he’s self-destructive. Your sort’s problem: you’re not self-destructive enough! Little better at it and we’d be rid of you! Blast it, know how easy it is to die? If you can’t manage to stick your head in an oven, what kind of nincompoop are you?” Porter slammed down a full liter gauntlet of single malt, and the duel began.
“If we’re talking sorts,” Farrell started in, “why don’t we move on to yours: the fat, spoiled fraud. You fill out a bar. You rant through lulls in conversation, so the lot can lap their beer. Sure at the Rose and Crown didn’t they wax eloquent on Porter Edwards Bream. Naturally that delights you. But without you they’d find some other puppet. They use you—you’re to be wise, to be anecdotal, to be merciless. They make you wise, they feed you lines, they allow you to be merciless. Your audience demands it, all your orneriness and declarations and drink. A retired army corporal with stories. It’s trite. You’ll cough the same tales till you die, like phlegm. In the end, you’re their creature. And you think differently. That’s what’s so paltry and sad.”
“I don’t think in those terms at all, who is whose creature. You’re sick, man. You’ll do a lot of damage thrashing about if you don’t get hold of yourself. It’s always the, quote, self-destructive, do they ever so much as bump their own elbows? Anything but! Oh, the self-destructive, they go for the rest of the world at the throat. Look at you! Trying so hard to hurt my feelings there’s sweat in your hair.”
If so, Farrell hadn’t succeeded. Throwing insults at Porter Edwards Bream was like flinging Harp tins at a Saracen. Farrell could almost hear the clink, the harmless rattle down the street. He felt childish.
“I didn’t come here for sophistry,” Farrell dignified. “I suffered my share in your pretentious little volume, Kahlil Gibran Joins the Army. I need information, and about bombs, not about my soul.”
Porter’s smile spread like something spilled. “Liar. Besides, shaking out your grubby bathmat of a shadow is about all I can offer. The only thing an intelligent man wants to know about bombs is where they are, so he can arrange to be somewhere else. And the Confidential Telephone no longer rings on my desk, boyo.”
The bottle trickled down steadily as an hourglass. Farrell could not remember a more exhausting session before or since. “If you’re supposed to know so bloody much,” Farrell slurred, “see so bloody much, what can you see in me, fella? Mystic guru bomb man? Oh, X-ray vision ATO?”
“I have seen through pressboard.” Porter nodded; his eyes, for the all-seeing, had grown remarkably tiny. “I know what’s inside a bomb by looking at it, though that took years. How they tick, people are easier. Come with instructions printed on the box.”
“And what have you told me, huh, fella? Codswallop.”
“Jesus God, you are desperate,” Porter whispered.
“Holding out? Don’t want to give away the big secret about O’Phelan? Know how many theories I inspire in Belfast? Think you’re the first shaman to come along? Dozens. Women. Dozens. They’re writing novels, some of them. Wanna write a book? About me? Better’n Device. Wick title. Wick book …”
“Go ahead, kick at me all you like. That’s safe. I should keep you here, harmless. Neutralized.”
“With all this revelation about my deep inner self, how could I ever leave?”
“All right …” Porter grumbled. “You want something? A tidbit, a morsel, proof? Why so anxious for what you already know? That you are a bully. That you’re bigger and stronger than you pretend. Asthmatic? Poser! And part of your power is getting people to feel sorry for you.”
Abruptly, Farrell cried. The charges slipped into a tiny hole in his side. “It’s not fair, is it?” he blubbered. “They do, they all feel sorry for me. Bugger, and every one of them’s worse off by far—debt, dead fathers, husbands in gaol … They think that’s all perfectly normal! Me, I’ve always had enough to eat. My mother probably bleeding loves me, even if I can’t admit it. And, Port old boy, I can’t explain it, but lately women fawn all over me. One more potted egocentric. You and I, we’re the same, and you revolt me.”
Farrell sniffled; Bream fell asleep.
It may have been an hour later that Porter roused himself from a snore. “My poor fanatic!” he sighed, air puttering from his fat lips. “Seared by the agony of the world.”
Farrell looked hard. Was he joking? But Porter went back to sleep with a little smile. This was the joke: that even myths need myths, or especially, and after years of soldiering on as one himself, Porter had knighted a Greatheart in his own study, a hero for heroes—now, Farrell lad, where would you get yours? It was a way of no longer taking Farrell seriously, for in an instant he transformed Farrell to a like-minded larger-than-life to adore or deplore, rather than one tall stranger on his doorstep with whom he might permit a smaller, more complex relationship that in the end is so much more flattering. Farrell was surprised to find his new title a demotion. He had been cursed: a Character.
So that last bit, it was nothing but meanness. But as for being a bully, Farrell subscribed. He didn’t change, mind you, but attended, how he enticed women with his own Troubles—now there was a capital T. The conceit was they wanted to cure him, but he discovered their sympathy was sicker than that: they thought his unhappiness was better than theirs. Incredibly, it was envy. The women saw themselves as merely neurotic, while Farrell O’Phelan was afflicted with the agony of the world—they could buy that? True, Farrell’s desolation was his pride and joy; all polished up, Estrin, it is my accomplishment. But the value of the dolor relied on mirrors; it was a magic show. Alone in a room, he knew it for a shabby thing: a worn top hat, a few cards, a rabbit. Farrell’s