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A hush fell. “We don’t dare!” somebody said from the back of the crowd.

“We have to dare,” the Eldest said. “We need the one who died but did not die, the one of whom it was prophesied that he would come back to the Island in its darkest moment and save its people.We need Ireland’s only superhero!”

A great cheer went up. Everybody piled out the doors of the Long Hall, carrying me with them.

That’s how we wound up heading down College Green in an untidy crowd, around the curve of the old Bank of Ireland and past Trinity College, heading for the river. Across O’Connell Bridge and up O’Connell Street we went, in the dark dead of night, and late-night revelers and petty crooks alike fled before our faces, certain that we were an outflow of Ecstasy-crazed ravers, or something far less savory. Past them all we went, nearly to the foot of the grayly shining needle of the Millennium Spire, and then hung a right into the top of North Earl S treet, catty-corner from the GPO . . . and gathered there, six deep and expectant, around the statue of James Joyce.

DUBLINERS HAVE AN AMBIVALENT RELATIONSHIP, at best, to their landmarks and civic statuary.Whether they love them or hate them, the landmarks are given names that don’t necessarily reflect the desires of the sculptors, but certainly sum up the zeitgeist.

The first one to become really famous had been the statue of Molly Malone at the top of Grafton Street. Some well-meaning committee had set there a bronze of the poor girl, representing her wheeling her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow; and popular opinion had almost instantaneously renamed this statue The Tart with the Cart.Within weeks, the bright brass shine of the tops of her breasts (as opposed to her more normal patina elsewhere) seemed to confirm as widespread a friend’s opinion that Miss Molly was peddling, as one wag delicately put it, “more than just shellfish” around the streets broad and narrow.

The convention swiftly took hold in Dublin, as all things do there that give the finger to propriety. The chimney of a former city distillery, turned into a tourist attraction with an elevator and a glassed-in viewing platform on top, became The Flue with the View. The attempt to put a Millennium Clock into the river had overnight become The Time in the Slime. And the bronze statue around which we now stood, the natty little man in his fedora, standing looking idly across O’Connell Street toward the GPO—the wild-tongued exile himself, the muse of Irish literature in the twentieth century, James Joyce himself had been dubbed The Prick with the Stick.

And so here we stood around him, none of us insensible to what everybody called the statue—and by extension, the man. We’d all done it. And now we needed him.Was this going to be a problem?

The Eldest Leprechaun raised his hands in the air before the statue and spoke at length in Gaeilge, an invocation of great power that buzzed in all our bones and made the surrounding paving blocks jitter and plate-glass windows ripple with sine waves: but nothing happened.

Glances were exchanged among those in the gathered crowd. Then one of the Washers at the Ford raised her voice and keened a keen as it was done in the ancient days, though with certain anarchic qualities—a long twelve-tone ululation suggestive of music written in the twenties, before the atonal movement had been discredited.

And nothing happened at all.

The Eldest Leprechaun stood there thinking for a moment. “Working with effigies isn’t going to be enough,” he said. “It might be for one of us . . . but not for him, a mortal. We’ve got to go to the graveside and raise his ghost itself.”

“Where’s he buried?” said another leprechaun. “We’ll rent a van or something . . .”

“You daft bugger,” said another one, “he’s not buried here. He was never at home after they banned his books. It was always Trieste or Paris, all these fancy places with faraway names . . .”

Finally, I could contribute something.“Zürich,” I said. “It was Zü-rich. A cemetery above the city . . .”

“We’ll go,