He's not been seen outside the text before - it seems pointless to describe him visually but marking his existence in the world with pictures now seems possible, just not useful. Oh but it is said Mulligan. We see you in front of us framed by the great works of God's sea from this tower but you are not known to the rest.
It's like I saw it all. A great sweep of the bay - mixing with those pastelloved boys and their true colours, the big pictures in the sky. Buck will dive in and I will not see him again, the splash of holy water on the shore lost forever in the ocean. They'll plunge into the deeps and never once find it my boy. He'll be a smudge or revenge in the papers tomorrow.
The sound and service, the religious decanterings of that befailed Doctor faded out in the distance like a dog or some other meaningless living thing castigating the moon for its bravado and cheek at staying up to keep us awake with his orbit, his perigee becoming our own lift off this earth. What now? My head is racing the moon to the horizon, drifting foreverwards down and down behind the earth to keep us from seeing the southern stars. On my way to work I am and my feet consider the way before my thought. Out of time. I can contemplate what constitutes the epitome of genuine Macaroons - the blasphemy of Chocolate and the absence of rice-paper - the art and work of heretics blown from the sky, exiled from Eden with the fallen angels, left to sweep the floor for tea. They laugh at us in the orient, for our belief that tea is dust and floor-dirt, the brooms of the Chinese collect and forage and we remunerate like kings.
Remember our dinner shouted Malachai from the distant sea - make it a fry of unimaginable extent you fearful Fenian. It faded on the hush of surf, a lost demand, headed moonwards and spacewards, into that ellipse that careered out into the universe like a bolt, a blue bolted formless idea, a philosophical failure, an allusion to a lost and devildecked worm.
The spark of stick on rock, became a rhythm, a beat for the terpsichorean statuary that began at this point in the commute to line the path as its rocky birth merged into the human-bonded stream of tarmac and dust leading through the seaside park to the lands of gold and suburb beyond.
Stephen was happy he thought, happy in his despair maybe but happy and not at all distracted by the lifted skirts of those sherbet-eating girls on their way to late-opening department stores and stopping in the fine morning to take the beautiful salt-seasoned air of Irish shoreline. The sky lit up, became the frame for these distractions. Suzanne was one, a slight girl, who traded longingly on her time in America, on her twang of transatlanticism, built around her self-proclaimed exoticism, the woman made human somewhere on the creaking ship between Cork and New Jersey. Truth, a fine vice, made her homesicken for these shores, for the legend of Celts and stones of the green land. For she had seen the dust and filth of the Manhattan island, the broken fragments of land in that great, grey, green, greasy harbour made by mothers and other natural things and the dust had caught her throat, and the authorities had picked her up as sickening and sent her home to her mother. And here she was, something from her mixing with the sea and salt-licks of the shore where she mirrored the butterflies out of place over the lapping water where the mild swell of this June day became like a terrible maelstrom to the overwinged and overcoloured maggoty things that they were.
Her shoes, kicked distantly, led Stephen to her and he saw her testing Dublin Bay for heat and cold, and he stared at the ogive of her, delicately framed like the wings of the lepidopterous fauna that ringed her head and shone in the not-yet full sun.
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