After my passenger has departed – the exchange completed in under a minute in an almost empty parking lot – I drive on in silence, the featureless repetition of the landscape unravelling before me as I follow the highways that will bring me back to more familiar worlds and a flight home. Then comes the old familiar press of fear. My childhood nightmare restored unchanged to the present. Have we painted our lintels with blood? Will the terrible plagues and the dark angel sweeping in from the desert pass over us? I want to believe, have to believe that, despite everything that has happened, and in the absence of any other sustaining faith, love will keep me safe if only I can find it once more, and even if it sounds hopelessly naive, that despite every turning gyre of our history it is what we need to have on the nation’s lintels.

I think again of Donovan, and his moment of leaving beneath a panoply of watching stars, and somehow I too am there as the pyre is lit, standing in the sudden shudder of flames as he sets out on his final crossing. And as my hands grip the wheel, with the heat-buckled road wavering like a mirage in front of me, I hear myself say aloud, ‘Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.’ Then the unrelenting highway fades into the distance and I see instead the churning funnel of smoke slowly blending into the dark cloister of the night, until eventually they become one indivisible thing, the wind scattering him to the elements as he crosses over, under the same unblinking stars that look down on all our end.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the writing of this book I was indebted to many sources, but in particular to Frank Snepp’s Decent Interval, his magisterial and insider account of America’s departure from Vietnam.

I am also indebted, as always, to Alexandra Pringle, Sarah-Jane Forder and Allegra Le Fanu.

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

David Park has written ten novels and two collections of short stories. His novel Travelling in a Strange Land won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. He has won the Authors’ Club First Novel Award, the Bass Ireland Arts Award for Literature, the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize and the American Ireland Fund Literary Award. He has received a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and been shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year Award four times.

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First published in Great Britain 2022

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