Emerald Magic_ Great Tales of Irish Fantasy - Andrew M. Greeley [7]
We looked out the window toward the brick façade that the back of Brown Thomas shared with the Marian shrine that also faced onto the street.You could look through one archway and see a painted life-sized knockoff version of the Pietá, the sculpted Lady raising a hand in a “what can you do?” gesture over her Son’s sprawled body, her expression not of shock or grief but of resigned annoyance—“Never mind, he’ll be right as rain in a few days . . .”—and through another doorway, a few doors down, you could see Mammon in its tawdry glory, all the Bally and Gucci and the many other choicer fruits of world consumerism laid out for the delectation of the passersby. The Pietá was not entirely without Her visitors, but plainly Brown Thomas was getting more trade. Closer to us, the street was full of cars; fuller of cars than it should have been, strictly speaking. There was a superfluity of Mercs and Beemers, and the occasional Lexus, all double-parked outside the restaurant, next to the entrance to the Brown Thomas parking structure. The cold fact of the Garda Pick-ItUp-And-Take-It-Away fleet working its way around the city had plainly not particularly affected these people. They could soak up the tickets and the impound fees and never even notice.
“In God’s name, what’s happened to us?” the leprechaun said. “What’s happened to us that we don’t care what happens to other people anymore? Look at it out there: it’s nothing much right now, but this street’s a bottleneck; in twenty minutes the whole of center city will be gridlocked. And it’s worse elsewhere. The rents are through the roof. It’s a good thing I can just vanish into one of the ‘hills’ in Phoenix Park at night. Otherwise, I’d be in a bedsit twenty miles south, in Bray, or somewhere worse—Meath or Westmeath or Cavan or whatever, with a two-hour commute in and back, in a minivan loaded over capacity. And probably with clurachaun as well. Have you ever been stuck in a minivan for two hours between Virginia and the North Circular Road with a bunch of overstressed clu-rachaun trying to do . . . you know . . . what clurachaun do??”
Another unanswerable question, even if I had been. “It’s tough,” I said.“Hard all around.”
There wasn’t a lot more out of him after that. All the same, I was sorry when he called the waiter over to get his plates tallied up.
He looked up at me. “It’s not what it was,” he said, “and it’s a crying shame.”
“We all say that about our own times,” I said. “They’ve said it since ancient Greece.”
“But it’s truer now than it ever was,” said the leprechaun. “Look at the world we were in a hundred years ago. We had poverty, and starvation, and unemployment from here to there, and people being forced out of their homes by greedy landlords. But we still had each other; at least we had a kind word for each other when we passed in the road. Now we have immigrants on the street who’re poorer than we ever were; and people getting fat and getting heart attacks from the crap ready-made food that’s nine-tenths of what there is to eat these days; and work that kills your soul, but it’s all you can get. And forget being forced out of anywhere to live, because you can’t afford to get in in the first place. The only kind word you hear from anybody nowadays is when you take out your wallet . . . and it’s not meant. Things are so wrong.”
He eyed me. “But you’ll say there are good things about it, too,” he said.
“You’ve been here longer than I have,” I said. “Maybe I should keep my opinions to myself.”
“It was different once,” the leprechaun said. “It was different when She ran things.”And he stared into the last of his sake, and past it at the black granite of the sushi bar, and looked even more morose than he had before we’d started talking.
He tossed the rest of his sake back in one shot. “Good night to you,” he said at last, slid off the cream-colored barstool,