As It Is in Heaven by Niall Williams Page B

enough.”
    “I have to. I have to see her again.”
    Mulvihill paused; he made crinkled lips and raised his face to where the light was breaking on the far side of Ennis.
    “That’s exactly right,” he said, and reached down to untie the tow rope. “That’s exactly right,” he repeated, and then walked
     back to his tractor.
    “Goodbye now,” Mulvihill said over his shoulder, climbing into the cab and throwing in the rope beside him, puttering off
     down the road towards the dawn, disproving once again his brother’s belief that he needed a hearing aid, proud of his conversational
     skills, and certain that the younger man had no idea he was deaf as a stone.

17
      Stephen’s life had already begun to change. It was too soon yet for him to know outright, he was a cautious man and too long
     accustomed to his own unremarkable history to suppose his life could catch fire. He did not yet sense that the fluctuation
     in his heart rate, the fuzziness of his hearing, and the sweetness of tart apples were the early signs of love. He was disturbed,
     he was upset; he admitted that much, and knew too that it was because of the woman with the violin. But just as one day he
     had accepted that no sleep was deep enough or dream powerful enough to bridge him to the next world and meet the lost half
     of his family, so too Stephen Griffin had long accepted that he was to be alone. Imagining love is real makes life hard, and
     so he had instead moved it beyond the history of his future, leaving it rolled up and put away like a scroll of fairy tales
     in the farthest corner of his heart. Now, on the morning after the concert, it was not love he was thinking of. He was not
     thinking he had to see Gabriella Castoldi again so that she might see his face or speak to him, find an attraction in the
     timidity and melancholy of his character, that she might fall in love with him; it never entered his mind. Instead, he thought
     that the desire that was running along the arteries of his arms, that was tingling in his fingers and making them beat softly
     on the top of the steering wheel, was only the desire to hear her play the music again.
    He drove into Ennis. The shops were not yet open, and the narrow streets had a desolate air of aftermath. The chip-bag and
     beer-can litter of tawdry romance was strewn along the gutters of wet footpaths. Dogs roamed and sniffed the dead butts of
     love talk and other promises and pissed the walls and moved on.
    Stephen parked the car by the River Fergus, hurried across Parnell Street and down through the empty market to the Old Ground
     Hotel. The wet air woke his face and gave him a polished rawness like a fruit thinly skinned. He walked in the front door
     and past the reception, bounding up the stairs, as if some mission was balanced on the point of failure and his smallest of
     worlds could only be saved by arriving on the first floor.
    The doors to the concert room were closed, and when he held on to the cold metal of the handle, he was astonished by the heat
     of himself. He stepped into the room; it had not yet been tidied, and the chairs, pushed back in lines slightly askew, spoke
     more of the leaving than of the concert. Stephen moved to his own seat and sat down. He put his hands under his chin and stared
     up at the empty space where the Italians had played. He closed his eyes and sought the image and the sound of them; he sat
     there in the low susurrus of the muffled morning traffic, the distant clink of china and cutlery downstairs, the squeak in
     the chambermaid’s trolley moving down the hall, the tramping of the hundred schoolchildren and the shopkeepers and their customers,
     the steady unstoppable noise of the small town with lorries and vans and buses and cars, and in that galaxy of sounds he listened
     for the music of yesterday.
    What it was about the music he couldn’t say. He didn’t know the simplest of all mathematics, that the potency of the relation
     was in