Disappearances in the Guarded Sector

Belfast, Winter, 1976 When we stop where you lived, the house has thickened, the entry level to the wall with bricks, as though it could keep you out. Again the dream has fooled you into waking and we have walked out past ourselves, through the windows to be remembered in the light of closed rooms as a series of impositions across the arms of a chair, that woman’s face startled out of us so it lingers along a brick front. You are leading me back to the burned arcade where you said I stood with you in your childhood last night, your childhood which includes me now as surely as the look of that missing face between the rows of houses. We have gone so far into your past that nothing reflects us. No sun gleams from the glassless frame where a room burned, though the house stayed whole. There is your school, your church, the place you drank cider at lunch time. New rows of houses are going up. Children play quietly in a stairwell. Walking back, you tell the story of the sniper’s bullet making two clean holes in the taxi, how the driver ducked and drove on like nothing happened. No pain passed through you; it did not even stop the car or make you live more carefully. Near the check point we stop talking, you let the hands rub your clothes against your body. You seem to be there, all there. Watching, I am more apart for the sign of dismissal they will give me, thinking a woman would not conceal as I have, the perfect map of this return where I have met and lost you willingly in a dead and living place. Now when you find me next in the dream, this boundary will move with us. We will both come back.