Panenka

by Ronan Hession

His name was Joseph, but for years they had called him Panenka, a name that was his sadness and his story.

was this time worse or the same as the last? Was the pain spreading or different? But he had learned to ignore these questions: the Iron Mask was unknowable in any real sense and beyond any bargaining.

Panenka had always liked the invisibility of living in the Crucible, it being full of people from elsewhere who were too busy with their own precarious lives to notice him.

He realised that all through those long nights under the Iron Mask, there had been a knowing – his body had been trying to make him understand that it was betraying him. There had begun a peeling away of identity.

The Iron Mask would eventually prevail, however long that took; his only question was how he should live until then.

To him love was no union between two otherwise incomplete halves, but more like the gravity that locked two bodies into the same orbit, each doing their own thing but by reference to and in concert with the other.

‘A place has to have ambience, mood. When you change things you can lose all that, and it’s not easy to restore it once you do. All the conversations held in this room get baked into its furnishings. You shouldn’t rush into disturbing all that.’

He had thought his days of hurting those he loved were behind him, but when had he ever been able to promise that?

For days his mind had been revisiting the same concern over and over, like a tongue worrying a bad tooth.

The night, with all its questions, called for a full audit of his closest and oldest relationships, in which the ledger recorded that those who had loved him most had lost the most. The only thing he wanted from life now was a settlement, and the time in which to make it.

The tragedy during that time was that he neither let them in nor let them go. But what else is possible for a man unable to solve his own sadness?

He had promised himself that he would never again hurt those he loved.

There was no hostility between them, just the recognition that Lauren had received a poor bargain and that Panenka owed her a debt of distance.

the night, so empty of answers, was again Panenka’s alone.