Remembering a bad memory

It’s hard to see Heaven through the grey skies of Ireland.

Yet, there is no better place to spend a vacation, even if that word is a tentative replacement for exile. From yourself. From everything you’ve known. This place, the place where our hero crawled out of the sordid mire that was his mother’s cocaine-sodden womb, is a place of emptiness. Nothing days and nowhere nights. A place where nothing ever changes.

Truly, Ireland is a place where time stands still.

A torrent of the ether’s excrement accosts all life without the pickup truck as Dark Angel winds through the slithering slug trail back roads at the arse-end of a town called Kilrea, the muck and dying leaves dancing behind him as he goes. An unnoticed theatre that makes pantomime gestures dedicated to the thing that gives them their paltry life.

Beside him, the breathless voice breaks the silence of the journey.

‘So, Andrew,’ says the man, long, brown coat covering most of his body and his hat shadowing his eyes. ‘Are you going to tell me why you’re here?’

Angel feels an itch on his leg behind the pocket that holds his hip flask.

‘You know why I’m here, Savage.’

‘Humour me, then, old friend,’ the man says, smiling in response as he cuts the tip from his cigar and rolls it around in his mouth while he holds the lit match to the end. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

‘Hardly.’ He replies.

After snaking around several more corners, Angel sighs. ‘Can’t we just chalk it up to nostalgia? I do come every year.’

‘That you do, lad. That you do. But for once I want you to justify it. Not to me, but to yourself.’

‘I’m the one person that I don’t need to justify anything to.’

‘Nonsense,’ replies this Savage person, taking a nice, long drag of his cigar, letting it fill his mouth before the smoke bleeds out slowly and calmly, like the final exhale of a drowning man. ‘If you don’t know why you do things then why do anything at all?’

Magnet’s “See You In Hell” tries with all of its might to drown out the question, but unfortunately, it fails.

‘Okay,’ Savage says, coughing. ‘Let me have a stab at it then.’

Death Angel looks dead ahead at the road beyond.

‘It’s guilt. The last three months have passed you by like a ghost in fog, and you’re wondering why you feel like this. After all, isn’t this the dream? Wonderful career, make the money, get a family and then finally settle down being well enough off so that you never have to work another day in your life. Now you’re sitting at home with your perfect wife. Adorable children. Big house, four cars and a hamster. And you’re bored as Hell. You think that there are other people that would kill for your life, and you’re right… yet you always feel like there’s something missing. Worse – there is. There isthing missing. It’s agony. Giving it, taking it and using it to make you feel alive. So it’s guilt. Guilt at not being thankful enough for what you have. And guilt for not feeling enough joy at being with your family.’

Still Death Angel’ gaze stays fixed upon the road.

‘You know,’ our hero rasps. ‘For a priest, you can be a right cunt when you want to be.’

‘Though it’s true, you do come and see me every year. It’s just that, this time, you have a reason. This time, you have to convince yourself that you want to go back to work. More importantly, you have to convince yourself that it’s not a sin to want it. And after all you’ve been through since we were kids to get to where you are, I’m sure it’s hard to change your ways.’

Death Angel’ pickup lurches around a corner and slovenly slides into a parking space in the car park behind an old, worn-down chapel. Our hero exits his vehicle and sparks up a cigar of his own as he glowers towards the graveyard, only big enough for around fifty people, beside a church so small that there’d hardly be enough room inside to wave your dick around. Or whatever it is people do there.

‘Now that we’re here, sighs Savage, ‘have you convinced yourself?’

Dark Angel simply rolls the cigar smoke around in his mouth.

‘When you,and the others all decided to leave this place, we thought we did it for the right reasons. None of that nonsense about the grass being greener or home was too depressing… nothing like too much hardship or boredom. None of us could’ve lived with ourselves if we had of made our exodus into some clichéd damage case. We went over the water because we wanted to make big decisions, and have our lives mean something.’

‘Look at us now,’ replies Death Angel, exhaling.

‘I don’t think we did too badly,’ says Savage, following as Death Angel walks up the crooked, broken pathway beside the graveyard. ‘Ash had a family… Fallen, James and yourself went on to be great entertainers, bringing joy or, at the very least, some form of distraction to those that can’t escape their little, dull, normal lives.’

‘And Doc?’

Savage’s head lowers at the mention of the name.

‘I’m sure he made some people relish their last moments of life. And those that left behind are scarred, carrying his taint with them for the rest of their time on Earth. He did end up making a lasting difference to some people… even though that difference was horrible.’

‘And you saved souls. How the fuck were we supposed to compete with that?’

Savage smiles.

‘Maybe all of us saved souls over time.’

‘Enough to make up for the ones we destroyed?’

‘One can’t atone for something if he gives up.’

Death Angel stops at a grave and kneels down to wipe dirt and dust and plant life from the headstone.

‘You’ll go back, Death Angel. And I forgive you for it.’

Our hero reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a wooden box full of Don Pepin Carcia cigars, placing them carefully underneath the information chiselled into the marble.

“Sacred to the memory of Doc Savage, 1973-????”

‘Thanks, Doc.’