TransAtlantic

by Colum McCann

  She holds her foot in the elevator door for a moment longer than she should. But then it closes and he is gone, and all she can hear is the electronic pulleys as he descends through the heart of the building. He will be home in two weeks. By Easter Sunday. He has made a promise.

  She hears the faint ting of the elevator bell below.

  THE LINCOLN CENTER traffic. The merge of the avenues. The bustle. Dancers hurrying across the plaza. The buskers beneath the awning, tromboning the raindrops down.

  He likes it here on the West Side, though sometimes he wishes they could live farther east, just to make it easier to get to the airport. A simple, sharp practicality: to save half a travel hour, to be with her and Andrew just a moment or two longer.

  Out onto Broadway. Left onto Sixty-Seventh Street. They turn onto Amsterdam and head uptown. If Ramon catches the lights properly they can go all the way, transform it into an avenue of yellow awnings. Past the cathedral. East, through Harlem. The whirl of faces and umbrellas. Onto 124th Street. The Bobby Sands mural on the wall near the police station. He has been meaning to find out who painted it, and why. Odd to have a mural in New York. Saoirse painted in bright letters above the hunger striker’s face. A word he has learned over the past few years. The streets of Belfast, too, are covered in murals: King, Kennedy, Cromwell, Che Guevara, the Queen painted huge on gable-ends and walls.

  A quick merge and swerve. Onto the Triborough Bridge. A glimpse of water. In the distance, somewhere up the river, is Yankee Stadium. He is all of a sudden back at Fenway Park, thirteen years old: the great swell and hush of green as he steps into the top tier of seats, his first flash of ballpark, Birdie Tebbetts, Rudy York, Johnny Pesky at shortstop. A country boy. First time in the city. Watching Ted Williams step up to the plate. The Kid, the Thumper, the Splendid Splinter. He can hear the crack of the first ball cut across the floodlights. Good days, those. Long ago, not far away.

  He leans against the cool of the seat. He has traveled in all manner of cavalcades, processions, parades down through the years, but what he likes most of all is this silence. To travel under the radar. If even just for an hour or two.

  He opens the briefcase. They cross the bridge at a clip. Ramon has a badge that he flashes at the tollbooth. Sometimes the police try to peer inside, past the dark glass, as if they are looking beneath the surface of a river. To gauge the importance of the catch. Only me, I’m afraid. His staff is already in Belfast and Dublin. And he has refused security while at home in New York, Washington, Maine. No need. They will hardly strap a bomb beneath his lawn mower anyway.

  There is much to catch up on. A report from Stormont. An internal memo on decommissioning. A file that came through from MI-5 on the prisoner release. All the secret histories. The ancient longings. The violence of feeble men. He is weary of it all, tired of the permutations. What he wants is a clear, fine skyline. He puts the files aside a moment, looks out the rain-hammered window at the riffle of New York. All the grays and yellows. The concrete cubes of Queens. The broken neon signs. The leaning water towers with their rotting wood. The spindlework of the elevated trains. It’s a primitive city, aware of its own shortcomings, its shirt stained, its teeth plaqued, its fly open. But it is Heather’s city. She loves it. She wants to be here. And he has to admit that there is something grudgingly attractive about it. It is not quite Maine, but nothing is ever Maine.

  He has heard once that a man knows where he is from when he knows where he would like to be buried. He knows his spot already, on the cliff, looking out to sea, Mount Desert Island, the deep green, the curve of horizon, the angled rock, the waves spindrifting upwards. Give him a small square of grass over the cove, a low white fence around it. A few sharp rocks to dig into his back. Sow my soul in the rugged red soil. Let me rest there, happy, watching the lift of the lobster pots, the slow saunter of seacaps, the curl of the gulls. But have some patience, please, Lord. Another twenty years at least. Thirty, even. Thirty-five, why not? Many mornings yet left. He might as well crawl up towards the full century.

  The hiss of rainwater sounds underneath the tires. Ramon has a heavy foot when it comes to highways. Onto the Grand Central Parkway. From lane to lane. The brief thwap of dryness beneath the underpasses. Out towards the Van Wyck. No going back. The light fading through the slender shoulders of afternoon rain.

  Easter two weeks away.

  Last chance.

  Si vispacem, para bellum.

  YESTERDAY, IN CENTRAL Park, in the yellow sunlight, she reached for a backhand, caught it perfectly, sliced the racquet so that the ball floated a moment and dropped just over the net, and he lurched forward, laughing at the audacity of the shot, the perfect backwards spin, as he went crashing into the net. All around, the applause of the city, in the leaves and trees and buildings, and a red-tail hawk shooting over the courts, and some clouds skillful overhead in the blue, and the babysitter in the background, rocking the carriage, and he had the fleeting desire to make the phone calls to Stormont, leave it all at deuce.

  AT THE CURBSIDE he quietly slips Ramon a gift. Three tickets for Opening Day. The Mets. Second deck. Not far from home plate. Bring your boys, Ramon. Teach them well. Tell Bobby Valentine to let loose the cowhide.

  THEY KNOW HIM so well at JFK that it almost feels as if he should stand at the counter and negotiate from there. Your air rights. Your refunds. Your delays.

  The stewardesses have a fondness for him, his quietness, his humility. From a distance he looks like a man who might shuffle through a constant gray, but up close he is fluid and sharp. His shyness carries a form of flirt.

  At the British Airways desk he is taken by the arm and brought beyond check-in to what they call the Vippery. No metal detectors. No search at all. He wishes he could go through the channels, like a normal traveler, but the airline insists and they always whisk him through. This way, Senator, this way. The corridor to the Vippery is rutted and stained. Odd how badly painted the walls are. A sickly mauve color. The baseboards broken and scuffed.

  He is brought through the back entrance into the gold-plated shine. Two lovely beaming smiles from the front desk. Girls in silk scarves of red, white, and blue. Their perfect English accents. As if serving all their vowels on a fine set of tongs.

  —Wonderful to see you again, Senator Mitchell.

  —Good afternoon, ladies.

  He wishes they weren’t quite so loud with his name, but he nods to them, glances at their name badges. Always a good idea to have a first name. Clara. Alexandra. He thanks them both and he can almost hear the noise of their blushes. He glances over his shoulder, the slight rascal in him, and is guided towards the back of the lounge. He has met movie stars here, diplomats, ministers, captains of industry, a couple of rugby players up to their broad shoulders in wine. The minor figures of public glory, their Rolexes peeping out from beneath their cuffs. It doesn’t much interest him, the spotlight. What he looks for is a seat where he won’t be disturbed, yet can get up and stretch his legs if needs be. He has taken to yoga in recent times, on Heather’s insistence. Felt rather stupid at first. Downward dog. Dolphin plank. Crane pose. But it has loosened him up enormously, untightened all the bolts. In his younger years he was far less supple. A certain mental agility in it, too. He can sit and close his eyes and find a good meditative point.

  He spots a likely place, in the far corner of the lounge, where the rain rolls decoratively down the darkness, shifts his weight towards the window, allows the young lady to shepherd him along. As if she is the one to have chosen the seat. Her hand at the small of his back.

  He keeps the briefcase between them. For distance and decorum.

  —Can I get you a beverage, Senator?

  He has become a man of tea. He never would have believed it. This unasked-for life, it always surprises. It began in the North. He couldn’t get away from it. Tea for breakfast, tea for lunch, tea in the afternoon, tea before bedtime, tea between the tea. He has learned the art of it. Choosing the right kettle. Running the
tap water until cold. Boiling it beyond the boil. Heating the teapot with a swish. Doling out the leaves. Timing the brew. Wetting the tea, the Irish call it. He is not a man for alcohol, and it is the tea that has dragged him through many a late evening. With cookies. Or biscuits as they say. Every man with his own peculiar vice. His will hardly rock heaven or hell. McVitie’s Digestives.

  —Milk and three sugars, please.

  He is careful not to watch the swish of her as she moves away through the lobby. He leans back against the seat. But Lord, he is tired. He has, in his briefcase, a few sleeping pills prescribed by a doctor friend, but he is not fond of the idea. Perhaps in an emergency. A newspaper wag said: Some calm in the Stormont. He can already feel the weight of the days ahead, the changed minds, the semantical shuffling, the nervous search for equilibrium. He and his team have given them a deadline. They will not go beyond it. They have promised that to themselves. A finishing line. Otherwise the whole process will drag on forever. The rut of another thirty years. Clauses and footnotes. Systems and subsystems. Visions and revisions. How many times has it all been written and rewritten? He and his team have allowed them to exhaust the language. Day after day, week after week, month after month. To roil in their own boredom. To talk through the vitriol towards a sort of bewilderment that such a feeling could have existed at all.

  It has been, on occasion, like playing hide-and-seek with oneself. Open the door and there you are. Count to twenty yet again. Ready or not. Run and hide. Pretend you don’t know where you are.

  He used to play that game with his brothers when he was young, in the small house in Waterville. He hid in the closet beneath the stairs where his mother kept the jars of figs. A familiar smell. The jars were ranged high on the shelves: his own small Lebanon, cramped and tidy. A tiny glint of light came from the hallway, leaked in, clarified the dark. He tucked himself away in the corner, at the base of the wooden shelves, waiting to be caught. His brothers got so used to him hiding in the same place that once they left him for hours, just to rile him, and to rile them back he just stayed completely still, remained beneath the stairs until after dinner when they finally came to get him out, cramped, sore, vaguely victorious.

  The old days, they arrive back in the oddest ways, suddenly taut, breaking the surface, a salmon leap. The Waterville house backed onto the wide Kennebec River. The smoke from the mill drifted downstream. Huge logs arrived and were winched, dripping wet, from the gray river. The wood saws whined. Sawdust whipped across the wind. Railway whistles pierced the air. The town had a vigilance about it. He worked the newspaper route. Rode a bicycle with fringed handlebars. Hopped across the railway trestles. Learned the back roads and the byways. The coins in his pockets clanged. He liked the days when the river iced and he wondered about what it carried underneath: water beneath water. He watched the men coming home from the factories after long days of giving up their flesh. Mornings of fresh blue snowfalls. By the end of the day the snow was dark with grit.

  He grew up in his brother’s clothes. It used to make his mother smile to see the shirts slide from one shoulder to another, as if youth were just a thing that would always be passed along the line. When he was finished with the clothes, she would load them up and drive them to the Salvation Army store down on Gilman. Ya hadi she would say. Give us grace.

  He was aware of the Horatio Alger quality that hung around him. His mother was Lebanese, a textile worker. His father, an orphan, a janitor in a college. An American boyhood. The newspapers sometimes mocked it. He walked out of college into an unquiet life. Torts, contracts, deeds, the gavel. He could quite easily have been a lawyer in a bow tie, or a small-town judge living on the outskirts of town. He thrived on Webster and Darrow. A Plea for Harmony and Peace. Resist Not Evil. Mysteries dissolving into facts. As a lawyer, he hated to lose. No virtue in second place. He took his chances. Attorney, candidate for governor, federal judge. Fifteen years in Washington. Majority leader for six years. The second most powerful man in America.

  He knew how to flip a coin in the air and listen to the language of how it was made to land: what amazed him was that there were times when a coin could land sideways. Vietnam. Grenada. El Salvador. Kuwait. Bosnia. Mexico. All those times when logic was perched on a rim. Health care. NAFTA. The Clean Air Act. The occasional dividend of change.

  He retired then, ready to pursue his own route, practice law, breathe easy, leave the flashbulbs behind. Even turned down the Supreme Court. But then the President phoned again. Clinton’s casual charm. The ambitious ease. A favor, George, he said. Two weeks in Northern Ireland. It’s just a trade convention. That’s all. An escape across the water. The Senator was drawn in. He would go for a fortnight, that was all. Before he knew it, it was a year, then two, then three. The shadows of Harland and Wolff falling over Belfast. Where the Titanic had once been built. The vague hope of helping to turn the long blue iceberg, the deep underwater of Irish history.

  He glances out the window now at the rows of planes, the moving carts, the men on the runway waving their neon sticks. All the world, always going somewhere. Everyone in a rush. The fatal laws of our own importance. How many aloft at this very moment? Looking down on ourselves in the hazy and confused landscape below. How odd to glimpse the reflection of himself in the window, as if he is both inside and outside at the same time. The young boy looking in at the man in his late years, a father again, surprised to be here at all. The manner in which life deals the unexpected. So constantly unfinished.

  He has been asked many times by reporters if he can explain Northern Ireland. As if he could whisk a phrase out of the air, a sound bite for the ages. He is fond of Heaney. Two buckets were easier carried than one. Whatever you say, say nothing. Brief breakthroughs. Intermittent calm. Large ruptures in the landscape. He has never even been able to get all the political parties together in the same room, let alone the whole situation in a single phrase. It is one of their beauties, the Irish, the way they crush and expand the language all at once. How they mangle it and revere it. How they color even their silences. He has sat in a room for hours on end listening to men talk about words and yet never mention the one word they want. The maniacal meanderings. The swerves and sways. And then, all of a sudden, he has heard them say, No, no, no, as if the language only ever had one word that made any sense at all.

  Paisley. Adams. Trimble. McGuinness. Throw a word in their midst and watch them light the fuse. Ahern. Blair. Clinton. Mowlam. Hume. Robinson. Ervine. Major. Kennedy. McMichael. A fine cast. Shakespearean almost. And he sits in the wings, with de Chastelain and Holkeri, waiting for the moment for the cast to bring out their spears. Or not.

  There has been, he must admit, a thrill to his days in the North. An edge. A recklessness he enjoys. Another boyhood. Under the stairs. Ready to emerge, in suit and tie, with hands raised high in false surrender. Strand One, Strand Two, Strand Three. He dislikes the praise, the glad-handing, the false backslaps, the gestures to his patience, his control. It’s the tenacity of the fanatic that he wants to pitch himself against. There is, he knows, something akin to his own form of violence in the way he wants to hang on and fight. The way the terrorist might hide himself in a wet ditch all night. Cold and the damp seeping down into the gunman’s boots, right up into the small of his back, along his spine, through his cranium, out his pores, so cold, so very cold, watching, waiting, until the stars are gone, and the morning chatters with a bit of light. He would like to outlast that man in the ditch, outwait the cold and the rain and the filth, and the opportunity for a bullet, remain down in the reeds, underwater, in the dark, breathing through a hollow piece of grass. To stay until the cold no longer matters. Fatigue conquering tedium. Match him breath for breath. Let the gunman grow so cold that he cannot pull the trigger and then allow the silhouette to trudge dejected over the hill. To filibuster the son of a bitch, and then watch him climb out the ditch and to thank him and shake his hand and escort him down the high-brambled laneway with the senatorial knife in his back.<
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  —Your tea, sir.

  He touches his palms together in grateful thanks. She is carrying a silver tray: small neat sandwiches, biscuits, cashews.

  —Some nuts, Senator?

  —Ah, yes.

  He tries hard to hold back the blatant grin, if not outright laughter. He would like to tell her that he’s had too many of them in recent times, but she might misunderstand, or take it rudely, so he simply smiles and takes the tea, allows her to place the cashews on the table. Indeed, they have been many and legion, the nuts. The paramilitaries, the politicians, the diplomats, the civil servants, too. The polygon of Northern Ireland. He can see six, seven, eight sides to it all, even more. A firefly flashing forward at regular intervals. Context crossing context. There is nothing to gain from the North: no oil, no territory, no DeLoreans anymore. He is not even paid for the work: just his expenses, that’s all. No salary. Some political traction, of course, for him, for the President, and for posterity, maybe even history itself, but there are easier ways to get that, simpler vanities, more approachable conceits.

  He is well aware that there are some out there who think they have him on an endless looping string. The judicial puppet. Peace and Judy. But it doesn’t bother him one bit, even when they draw him, glum and dangling, in one of their crude newspaper cartoons. Or their backhanded jibes. There is something fierce about him: he has earned the right to part the darkness slightly, to go with them into the corners.