The Beginning of Irish Mist

"Were you the fella with whom I slept last night?"

The woman opened her eyes and peered at me.

"I was."

She closed her eyes again.

"How was I?"

"Memorable."

She snorted derisively, another hint that something was wrong in our relationship.

"Tis all a mistake," she sighed, curling up against me.

"Our sleeping together?"

"No . . . Ourselves going to Ireland."

It was the first hint that she didn’t think our trip was a frigging brilliant idea – to use her slightly cleaned up words.

"Why?"

"Bad things are happening," she said cuddling even closer – as much as a first class seat on an Aer Lignus Airbus 300 permitted.

"To us?"

"Wont we be involved?"

"The Irish media?"

"Them gobshites!"

My hand, always with a mind of its own where she was concerned, found its way under her loose Marquette University sweat shirt and took possession of wondrous bare breast. Bras, she had insisted, were not acceptable on long, overnight plane flights, a declaration I did not dispute.

She sighed contentedly.

"Anyway," she continued, "The woman didn’t do it now, did she?"

"Didn’t do what?"

"Didn’t like the fire."

"Which woman didn’t light what fire?"

"Och, Dermot Michael," she said somewhat impatiently as, under her blanket, she pushed my hand harder against her breast, "If I were knowing that, wouldn’t I be telling you?"

Here we go again, I told myself.

We were at that stage of a trans-Atlantic flight which is much like the old Catholic notion of Purgatory – the minutes seem like hours and the hours like days. The human organism revolts against all the indignities imposed on it in the last seven hours – dry mouth, wet sinuses, aching teeth, the guy across the aisle with a cough like a broaching whale. It will end eventually but only on the day of the final judgment.

My Nuala Anne is, among other things, fey, psychic, a dark one – call it whatever you want. She possesses, though only intermittently, an ability to see and hear things that happened decades ago or are happening now but at some great distance or haven’t happened yet but will. Maybe. My brother George the Priest, the only other one in our family to know of my bride’s "interludes," claims that her ability is a throw back to an earlier age of the evolutionary process when our hominid ancestors, not possessing thoraxes suitable for our kind of speech, communicated mentally.

"There’s a few genes like that around, Little Bro," he informed me, "But don’t invest in any grain futures because of what she thinks she sees."

I had stopped investing in the commodities market several years ago, mostly because I wasn’t very good at it.

"It’s weird, George," I had argued.

"Part of the package," he said with a shrug.

Easy enough for him to say. He didn’t have to live with her. Nor was he awakened in the middle of the night when she had one of her dreams.

She sat up straight in her seat, dislodging my predatory hand.

"They’re going to shoot the poor man, Dermot Michael," she whispered, "And himself going to Mass!"

Fortunately the man across the aisle hacked again, so violently that I thought the plane swayed. His explosion drowned Nuala’s protest.

"Can we do anything?" I asked ineptly.

"’Course not," she replied impatiently. "And ourselves up here in this friggin’ airplane!"

We were getting into trouble again. Whenever my wife had one of her intense spells, it was a sign that we were stumbling towards another strange adventure. Llike the time at Mount Carmel Cemetery when she saw that the grave next to my grandparents’ plot was empty; or the incident on Lake Shore Drive when she heard Confederate prisoners crying out in pain in the Camp Douglas at 31^st and Cottage Grove – in 1864!

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