The Searcher

by Tana French

“Johnny was always a great man for the ideas,” Lena says. “Not so great for making them happen.

Cal feels like he ought to stand on a street corner handing out warnings, little pieces of paper that just say: Anyone could do anything.

Cal has always liked mornings. He draws a distinction between this and being a morning person, which he isn’t: it takes time, daylight and coffee to connect up his brain cells. He appreciates mornings not for their effect on him, but for themselves.

He hated the way every drug in its different way scooped the solidity right out of the world and left it quicksand-textured, cracked across and wavering at the edges.

What makes up Cal’s mind isn’t the fact that quitting now would earn him an ineradicable reputation as a pussy and a tourist, or at least not primarily. What does it is the effortless rhythms of the talk snapping back and forth across the table. Cal has been missing the company of men he’s known a long time. His four best buddies were among the reasons he left Chicago; the depth and detail with which they knew him had come to feel unsafe, something to be kept at as much distance as possible. By that point he couldn’t be sure what there might be, inside him, that they would spot before he did.

“The thing about Brendan,” she says. “He gets ideas, and he gets carried away by them. He forgets to take other people into account.”

The place makes it clear that whoever lives there has only themselves to please.

Everyone was always talking about talking, and the most moral person was the one who yelled at the most other people for doing the talking all wrong.

Lena startles him by bursting out laughing. “You,” she says, shaking her head, “you’re some tulip, d’you know that? And your timing is shite. Come back to me later,

You know exactly what I’m talking about. I know you know. You know I know you know.

In the window behind his head, the fields are a green so soft and deep you could sink into them. Wind blows a whisper of rain against the glass. The washing machine trudges on.

Life seems like a big thing when it takes four days for all of it to leave a man. When it’s gone in a few seconds, it looks awful small all of a sudden. We don’t like to face up to that, but the animals know it. They’ve no notions about their dying. It’s a little thing, only; you’d get it done in no time.

Now there’s too many things you’re told to want, there’s no way to get them all, and once you’re done trying, what have you got to show for it at the end?

I am a poor wayfaring stranger Traveling through this world alone But there’s no sickness, toil or danger In that bright world to which I go. I’m going there to see my loved ones I’m going there, no more to roam I’m only going over Jordan I’m only going over home.