Conner stepped away from his desk, grabbed his satchel and stuffed a stack of two-hundred ungraded exams into it as he headed for the door. Taking them helped assuage the guilt he felt for not having returned them to the students in a timely manner, but it made the weight of the bag seem so much more than the sum of its contents.
It wasn’t long before he found himself at a bar near Trinity College, the nearest place that felt to him like better times. As soon as he arrived, the satchel had gone to the foot of his stool in an effort to forget.
With a regular flow of beers his worries faded. Conner waved off multiple offers for food and his mind began to slow down. That’s when a young woman approached him.
“Hi, my name’s Amy, what’s yours?” she said.
He was suddenly aware that he was way past social-friendly, but also past discretion, so he replied. “I’m Conner, I’m not from around here.”
His accent told him as American so she laughed at the obvious. “I can tell. What’re you doin’ here, in Dublin, I mean.”
He paused then looked down and pointed to the satchel below him. “I’m here to grade exams, apparently.” The last came out slurred.
“Can’t you mark exams in America then?”
He didn’t respond because he had turned inward after seeing the satchel, so she looked to the bar tender who was passing by. He gave her a nod that said, ‘this one’s a lost cause.’
Conner finally answered abruptly, “Maybe I’ll find a fucking leprechaun to do it for me.”
His tone was angry, the spite he held inside him all the time spilled out onto everyone around him. It was one of those moments when the world pauses to look and see if you’re for real and it turned out that Conner was uncomfortably real. The other patrons who were startled by his outburst shook their heads at him and kindly looked away from Amy as she moved off to rejoin her friends. Conner returned to his beer. He swallowed the rest of it in one go and the bartender had the bill ready before he could ask for another.
Message received, leaving his satchel at the foot of the bar, he moved for the door. He made it outside and around to the alley, lurched in and got sick all over the ground. Then, too tired and pissed do otherwise, he collapsed in it and passed out.
Hours later, Amy and her friend Oscar found him as they were heading out. They recognized him as the guy that had embarrassed himself so talked it over and decided to abduct him.
Oscar’s family owned a farm on the outskirts of Dublin where Conner found himself the next morning. Amy and Oscar had dragged him to pile of old seed bags and wrapped him with stale quilt that did nothing to cover the scent of sick still clinging to his clothes and hair. He found them nearby on a patio next to the farmhouse.
Through the hangover fog, Conner vaguely recalled Amy and learned how she and Oscar had brought him there. Instead of any number of other questions that ought to have come to mind, it was the satchel and its contents that blasted into his head. There was going to be trouble over their loss and the panic that followed nearly made him vomit again.
Eventually Conner managed to clean up and get to know his kidnappers. He turned himself over to them and he became their weekend project.
After she and Oscar learned about his life and how he had come to Dublin to be a teacher, it was obvious that he wasn’t suited for it. He told them how he would sometimes imagine getting himself hurt in order to have an excuse to call in for a day or two—but then never doing it. Grading exams and showing up to class or staff meetings became harder as time went on. Wasn’t it supposed to get easier?
“There’s something wrong with you Conner.” Amy said over dinner.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that you make things too complicated. You look for things that are far off, like leprechauns and far-away lands when you ought to be lookin’ at what’s obviously right in front of you.”
She reached down and produced the lost satchel from her feet at the table. His reaction went quickly from surprise to relief and then settled on panic.
“I knew it.” She said to no one.
“I thought they were lost,” then Conner corrected himself. “I mean, I think I wanted them to be lost.”
Amy passed over the satchel and Conner pulled the stack of exams out to find that they had all been graded. Amy said, “You see, there’s nothin’ hard about doin’ the work, I just followed the answer key—no leprechauns required. The trouble is deciding whether to do it in the first place.”
After a short pause, Oscar said, “Suppose there’s nothin’ wrong with you at all.”
They dropped Conner off at his flat later that night, with the promise to see each other again soon. On his way to the door he paused by a street bin, opened the satchel and pitched the contents in. There would be angry parents and the faculty would be calling for his resignation. That would be ugly, but soon forgotten—the relief of burden would be with him forever.
A weekend in Dublin, Ireland
