Read Online As It Is in Heaven by Niall Williams - Free Book Online

soon asleep. It was the way he finished every schoolday in winter, drowsing in the corner armchair
     into a forgetfulness, like slipping through the back door of the world. His dreams were not fretful or anxious but a changing
     tapestry of recollection and mild invention, which was in fact the history of his heart. His head lay tilted to one side,
     and his white face looked painted in the deepening shadows. If he had died then, there in the armchair, the world would have
     moved on without him with little pause or regret, like a winter army leaving the long-suffering wounded to fall behind in
     the snow. He was a casualty of circumstances, and as he sat slumped in the chair, with the music playing and the sea breaking
     in the wind outside, he had no idea that rescue was at hand.
    Stephen dreamed he was a child on the stairs. He was standing on the small landing where the stairs turned, and his mother
     was downstairs in the kitchen cooking. It was only when he looked down that he realized he had legs, for he seemed frozen
     and was unable to move even when Anne Griffin called out his name and his sister, Mary, came running past him with her doll
     Philomena. He heard his name being called again, and then saw the long, slim figure that was his mother appear at the bottom
     of the stairs and say to him, “Stephen, are you coming down?” And still he could not move. The wallpaper with its printed
     flowers in yellow and gold seemed to give way beneath his hand as he reached for something to grasp, and then there was music
     playing. It sounded like a cello, like the simple cello music Mary made that swam around the house and was soft and easy,
     and still he could not move his legs, even when his mother said again, “Stephen, are you coming down?” And he wanted to, wanted
     with all the desperation only dreams can hold, as he saw his mother walk away into the kitchen and heard the music grow louder
     and louder still, swaying the stairs, the hallway, the house itself, until he had to turn his head and let out a cry and open
     his eyes to see the darkness of the room about him.
    He lowered his head into his hands and felt the filmy sweat of his dream.
    Then he heard the music.
    It was coming from the radio. It was a Mozart quartet. Whether Stephen had heard a fragment of the music as he was sleeping
     or whether he had dreamt it, the strange synchronicity of its playing to the tune and tempo of his dreaming was a manifestation
     of something. He sat up in his armchair and felt strangely that the music was for him. Whatever makes the world move moved
     the world then for Stephen Griffin. Whatever causes the drear of ordinariness to shake and be dazzled with brilliance, until
     the illumination changes forever the shape of the thousand moments that follow, it dazzled then. Though Stephen did not quite
     know it. He listened to the piece until it was over and then heard the announcer on the Clare station say it was the Interpreti
     Veneziani, who were playing that evening in the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis.
    One hour later he was driving past the night fields of Inagh in the ten-year-old yellow Ford that was the only car he had
     ever owned. He drove with a kind of jerky, quick-slow motion, pressing on the accelerator and letting his foot off again at
     each bend, until the car slowed and he pumped it again. It was a style of driving that sickened any passenger but had become
     so habitual to Stephen that he hardly seemed to notice the way his foot pressed the pedal as if it belonged to a piano. Foot
     on, foot off, the car seemed to row forward like a yellow gondola, pressing and easing against some invisible current that
     was flowing ceaselessly against him in the darkness.
    He drove on with music playing in his head. His face was a white moon pressed forward over the steering wheel. Wind buffeted
     the car. Bits of hedgerow and black plastic flew through the beams of the headlights. The wipers smeared the spits of rain