Entangled States with an Irish Addict, a Rovers & Risings series tale
It can be a strange chain of events that plunge you into someone else’s struggles. It’s still early spring days of 2020’s quarantine, sitting in your Dublin city centre flat, and hitting that familiar crossroads for the week between being productive and saying ‘ah fuck it’. A typical weekend passes with mixed emotions, activities, the highs and the lows. From good exercise, reading and family chats, and then descending to heavy drinking, smoking, late night lunacy and the inevitable lazy lie-in. Yesterday’s Monday routine had been understandably low and laced with self-soothing, Netflix, a bike delivered Indian curry, and a separate bike delivery with some ill-advised session IPAs. But now you push into Tuesday, and wonder if this lockdown is driving every Irish denizen into the same spiral.
You’re an American national, but still pride yourself on being able to drink with the best of the Irish. You consider yourself superhuman, a skilled drinker, better than most amateurs you used to see out in town making a mess of themselves on Harcourt street. You’re more resilient and should have better odds of thriving amidst these dark days. Good survival skills, easily entertained, and a unique skill to bounceback.
But as the weekend hangover starts carrying over to Tuesday, you stop relying on natural instincts to shake it off, your chance to settle back into the usual rhythm. You should be spending today sweating out the stank in your modified home gym, making a healthy cooking plan, breaking out that sweet new cast iron skillet, roasting a chicken – striving for better living, a better you.
Alas, no, you sigh. This little funk will clearly carry over an extra day, and you find yourself negotiating in and out of the day’s nap, an instinct to find some food, a reason to push off the couch. Part of the debate involves how to juggle a modest evening meal, and some small indulgence, like a glass of wine, to make it worth your while. Something classy maybe to dress up this waning day, even something heady like a documentary or an artsy indie film, from your infinite library of streaming tv. Really just anything to call this: “a day that happened”, before heading to bed and crossing fingers for a committed reset tomorrow.
Your negotiations conclude with one perked eyebrow, a concession not to again overspend your budget on Deliveroo or Uber Eats. Not to take the easy route, no, but not to overburden yourself with cooking either. A promise to push outside to the Spar convenience store for maybe a small charcuterie snack, that pre-packaged prosciutto and ham, some aged Irish cheddar, and oh hell, why not, as a reward for getting outdoors on your longboard – maybe that top shelf bottle of Rioja they keep tucked away in the corner. This plan sounded fancier than it is, and could easily be done right just five more minutes south to a real grocery store. But the clock was ticking, and you decide to treat this like a trip to a corner store along the Costa del Sol, not to acknowledge this fine Rioja is about as fine as a bar’s finest bottle of rail gin.
It’s funny how people convince themselves of what are acceptable concessions, and how they’re only relative to personal standards and expectations of the world. That seems to be what happens to addicts, from gambling to drug-users. Your relative median, your baseline of normal keeps shifting a little without you realizing until enough time has passed. Like the earth turning under your feet, a few years go by, and you can’t even trust your own orientation to remember which way you were facing yesterday. Yet here you are, your new normal settled differently. Your north points elsewhere.
These thoughts flash together while skating up to the Spar, and like a summons from the cosmos, you spot the neighborhood beggar in her usual spot. Beggar? Sorry, drifter? Vagabond? Transiently unsheltered? You can’t say hobo, or tramp anymore, right? And street urchin is a mouthful, even if it does harkon back to the quaint nostalgia of a Dicken’s novel. Let’s just say she was destitute. You have seen her often this year, seemingly having migrated over and finding this store a new and non-competitive beat. She wasn’t a traveler, or part of a community. She was a homeless girl, a rough sleeper, in her 20’s and, by the looks of her gray jaggedly cut teeth, most definitely a meth addict. Huddled, legs folded on a rain soaked tattered piece of cardboard along the sidewalk, her quiet desperation reflects your own on this day.
Through her grungy haze, you could still see she was very sweet, with a soft house mouse demeanor, always quietly reading a magazine under her worn hoodie, peaking out a pursed lip smile with warm gratitude whenever you could spare a coin to her collection cup. And although these quick glimpses and polite exchanges are all you had known of her, it was on this day – this particular day when you barely made it out the door – that you feel briefly entangled to her fate.
Not long after you enter the store, tip-toeing your way two meters away from any other shopper to the wine section on the back wall, you hear a commotion behind you. Whipping around you notice the store clerk paused in his checkout process, with a fixed gaze, as the little homeless girl scurried rushedly to the back wall. She darts around the end of the aisle, and cowers to a crouch on the floor just beside you. She pretends to flip through her bag, but it’s clear she was stalling for time, as the clerk approached and asked what she was doing. She simply whispered, “I just need a minute, I’ll buy something, I swear.” It feels tense, and something was wrong.
You linger in pity for a while, but quickly shake it off, feeling a bit nosey and intrusive. Red wine, faux chic snacks, and an impulse bag of crisps in hand, you head to check out, and can tell the clerk was still confused and distracted, looking past you, clearly this being an unusual turn for his sidewalk tenant. As you walk outside, everything fades to black and white, as the chain of events unfolds to you a little better. There stands waiting two nefarious gang-looking characters, straight out of a Guy Ritchie movie. A man and a woman in their 40s – the man in a velour tracksuit and the woman busy on her phone. She’s wearing silver studded black boots, with a buzzed haircut dyed a cheap bath sink kool-aid red. He’s mouth breathing with a scruffy chubby face, prison-style neck tattoos, one too many gold chains, and wildly out of breath.
You avert your eyes and brush shoulders past, as they ignore you, shifting their weight impatiently from foot to foot. You look down at your skateboard, you look at your path home, you look back behind you. And you decide you can not leave. Instead you take a post on a bench by the canal basin across the street and pretend to check your phone.
The thugs had been milling around earlier, you remember, mostly because they were out of place in this neighborhood along the Grand Canal. These Silicon Docks, Dublin’s business and tech hub, were a bit off-limits for their species of animal, but not so far away from their territory. The gangs from Sheriff Street tend to stick to the North and East Wall areas, so God knows what caused them to come hunting here. Maybe something about a pandemic, a city on lockdown and empty streets that brought all the wild predators out to sniff about undisturbed.
You feel affected, responsible, dizzy with adrenaline, yet paralyzed with indecision – the gravity of being entangled with this new reality. But what could you do, how could you get involved? More importantly, why should you? You make a balance sheet in your mind of options, pros and cons, risks versus rewards. Your rational mind quickly kicks in, screaming, pleading with you, “this is not an action movie, you are NOT the hero!” as it races for more modest options. None of them help to unglue yourself from that bench. So you just sit. You observe. You wait to see how things play out. God dammit man, but to what end?
The tracked-suited ape walks inside several times, arms crossed at his front, smartly knowing not to attract attention to himself as he scouts around inside. He comes back out to report to his bitch handler, who would pause her phone conversation to mouth words like, “Well, how much cash does she have on her? Can you get her outside? Any trouble from the staff?” You peer through windows to see what the clerks are doing inside, seemingly aware of the situation but paying little mind to the comings and goings of the thug. He was just discreet enough, tip toeing on the line of civility, knowing to keep the customers unpanicked, or the staff unalarmed. Certainly knowing the gamble of collecting his dues without warranting unwanted attention from the Garda.
Calling the Garda, that is the first option you cross off your hero’s list. Afterall what would you say if the store owners weren’t even concerned? Second thing on the list: investigate closer, reveal yourself to the pursuers, just act nosey. Walk in like you forgot something and start asking questions. Call it the ‘journalist’s instinct’ to be bold. Like those guerilla documentarians who so clearly make pests of themselves out of genuine curiosity and the pure ambition to seek a deeper truth. The ability to scratch at the surface of the skin until it bleeds. The resilience to go with your gut. The sheer fucking balls to tiptoe around danger without catching fire.
Today, you’ll find out you just don’t seem to have that instinct… and that’s probably for the better. You settle deeper on the bench watching the pacings of these stalking wolves, and resign to the sensible strategy of fading away into the background. Perhaps if only to be here as a witness if it was needed later.
The last thing we need in this world is real-life vigilante justice, and whether it is through self-preservation or simple logic, you do not feel a hero’s spirit welling up inside. Instead, there was just an overwhelming compassion for a girl in trouble. Perhaps undeserved compassion, sure – you knew very little at this point on what led everyone here to this head – but it was pure compassion just the same. So you wait.
An hour went by, without notice or unsettlement, only your own interest growing along with the magnetic pull of this little triangle. You feel locked together in an impressively stubborn stand-off. You would’ve stayed here all night, but thankfully it was the stalkers who threw their hands up first in defeat. They made one last futile plunge into the store to see if they could flush out their prey, a few whispered decisions on the sidewalk, and off they wander, hopefully fucking off forever to their wolf den across the river. You would like to think based on their persistence that this was more than a money shakedown, more than just bored bullying, but that there would be real consequences from their bosses or collectors for their failed mission. You sit imagining that the law of the jungle will dole out the right justice, perhaps.
Not more than ten minutes go by, before the troubled girl, shuffles her feet to the entrance, peering her head around the corner like a tiny desert mouse from a hole in the sand. You feel that opportunity now to follow your instinct, the only card left to play, the one of compassion. You break your cover, walk across the street, and straight up to her. She isn’t startled, perhaps remembering your face from past days, or sensing you are there to help. You point out the direction of her pursuers, so that she might head the other way, and ask if she needs your help.
“Thank you so much, but no, I’ll be okay for tonight”, she says sheepishly through gray teeth and cracked lips, with quiet indifference. And that’s all you can offer, so you pack up and skate home.
Now perhaps other lunatics like you think about quantum mechanics in moments like these. Earlier skating in you had already thought a bit about ‘entangled states’, even before all the drama of this evening. And now you’re thinking about the physics theory about Schrödinger’s cat – that concept of infinite possibilities waiting to collapse into reality upon sheer observation. This makes you think about what will be next for this poor wounded soul. Off she will go outside your observation, out there wandering around tomorrow swimming in infinite waves of probable outcomes, waiting for any new predator to spot her and for her fate to collapse. Perhaps it’s best you didn’t witness this event in the first place, thus making it real. And perhaps even better that you don’t try to find out about what comes next, and by your very observation deciding her fate.
Tomorrow, you will however feel compelled to know more. Still feeling a twinge of regret for not harnessing the ‘journalist’s instinct’, you will go out and see if you can run into any of the store clerks from the previous day, if only to ask for more detail. And maybe even understand better the things we take for granted, shining a light on this dark forest of a neighborhood. But tomorrow you will find nothing, the staff will be all different and there will be an empty spot of cardboard on the sidewalk outside, unoccupied. The troubled girl will be out seeking help, changing her routines, breaking her patterns, or being caught by new pursuers. She is off now swimming around in that soup of the unknown.
As for tonight, on this day, and for the first time in a real long time, you bring home a bottle of wine that you don’t even open, previously having chased the impulse to feel something on an otherwise numb day. You bring home that fine, fine bottle of Rioja and put it aside for a different rainy day. Afterall, you fulfilled your wish, your fix for the day, a day that did not pass unnoticed. And you know now your fate is entangled with that of a troubled addict so your gift of compassion, that shared sense of humanity, will serve you both better by lifting yourself back into the light.
Paul Carreo 