Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann

  He seemed to be talking to a point over my shoulder. His eyes were deep and pouchy. “That’s what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.”

  “You all right, Corr?”

  “Never better.”

  “So who beat you up?”

  He looked away. “I had a run- in with one of the pimps.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Because why, man?”

  “Because he claimed I was taking up their time. Guy calls himself Birdhouse. Only got one good eye. Go figure. In he came, knocked on the door, said hello, called me brother this, brother that, real nice and polite, even hung his hat on the doorknob. Sat down on the sofa and looked up at the crucifix. Said he had a real appreciation for the holy life. Then produced a length of lead pipe that he’d ripped from the toilet. Imagine that.

  He’d been sitting there all that time, just letting my bathroom flood.”

  He shrugged.

  “But they still come around,” he said. “The girls. I don’t encourage it, really. I mean, what are they going to do? Pee on the street? It’s not much.

  Just a little gesture. A place they can use. A tinkling shop.”

  He arranged the tea and a plate of biscuits, went to his prayer kneeler—a simple piece of wood that he tucked behind him to support McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 28

  28

  C O L U M M c C A N N

  his body as he knelt—and gave his thanks to God for the biscuits, the tea, the appearance of his brother.

  He was still praying when the door swung hard and in marched three hookers. “Ooh, snowing in here,” cooed the parasol hooker as she stood under the fan. “Hi, I’m Tillie.” The heat oozed from her: little droplets of sweat on her forehead. She dropped her parasol on the table, looked at me with a half- grin. She was made up to be seen from a distance: she wore huge sunglasses with rose- colored rims and sparkly eye makeup.

  Another girl kissed Corrigan on the cheek, then started primping in the broken slice of mirror. The tallest, in a white tissue minidress, sat down beside me. She looked half Mexican, half black. She was taut and lithe: she could have been walking down a runway. “Hi,” she said, grinning.

  “I’m Jazzlyn. You can call me Jazz.”

  She was very young—seventeen or eighteen—with one green eye, one brown. Her cheekbones were pulled even higher by a line of makeup. She reached across, lifted Corrigan’s teacup, blew it cool, left a smudge of lipstick on the rim.

  “I don’t know why you don’t put ice in this shit, Corrie,” she said.

  “Don’t like it,” said Corrigan.

  “If you wanna be American you gotta put ice in it.”

  The parasol hooker giggled then as if Jazzlyn had just said something fabulously rude. It was like they had a code going between them. I edged away, but Jazzlyn leaned across and picked a piece of lint off my shoulder.

  Her breath was sweet. I turned again to Corrigan.

  “Did you get him arrested?”

  My brother looked confused: “Who?” he said.

  “The bloke who beat you up?”

  “Arrested for what?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Why would I get him arrested?”

  “Did someone beat you up again, honey?” said the parasol hooker.

  She was staring at her fingers. She bit a long edge of fingernail from her thumb, examined the little slice. She scraped the fingernail paint off with her teeth, and flicked the slice of nail towards me from off her extended finger. I stared at her. She flashed a white grin. “I can’t stand it when I get beaten up,” she said.

  “Jesus,” I muttered to the window.

  McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 29

  L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N

  29

  “Enough,” said Corrigan.

  “They always leave marks, don’t they?” said Jazzlyn.

  “Okay, Jazz, enough, okay?”

  “Once, this guy, this asshole, this quadruple motherfucker, he used a telephone book on me. You want to know something about the telephone book? Lots of names and not one of them leaves a mark.”

  Jazzlyn stood up and removed her loose blouse. She wore a neon-yellow bikini underneath. “He hit me here and here and here.”

  “Okay, Jazz, time to go.”

  “I bet you could find your own name here.”

  “Jazzlyn!”

  She stood and sighed. “Your brother’s cute,” she said to me. She buttoned her blouse. “We love him like chocolate. We love him like nicotine.

  Isn’t that right, Corrie? We love you like nicotine. Tillie’s got a crush on him. Ain’t you, Tillie? Tillie, you listening?”

  The parasol hooker stepped away from the mirror. She touched the edge of her mouth where the lipstick smeared. “Too old to be an acrobat, too young to die,” she said.

  Jazzlyn was fumbling under the table with a small glassine package.

  Corrigan leaned across and touched her hand. “Not here, you know you can’t do that in here.” She rolled her eyes, sighed, and dropped a needle in her handbag.

  The door bounced on its hinges. All of them blew kisses, even Jazz -

  lyn, with her back turned. She looked like some failed sunflower, her arm curving backwards as she went.

  “Poor Jazz.”

  “What a mess.”

  “Well, at least she’s trying.”

  “Trying? She’s a mess. They all are.”

  “Ah, no, they’re good people,” Corrigan said. “They just don’t know what it is they’re doing. Or what’s being done to them. It’s about fear. You know? They’re all throbbing with fear. We all are.”

  He drank the tea without cleaning the lipstick off the rim.

  “Bits of it floating in the air,” he said. “It’s like dust. You walk about and don’t see it, don’t notice it, but it’s there and it’s all coming down, covering everything. You’re breathing it in. You touch it. You drink it. You eat it. But it’s so fine you don’t notice it. But you’re covered in it. It’s ev-McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 30

  30

  C O L U M M c C A N N

  erywhere. What I mean is, we’re afraid. Just stand still for an instant and there it is, this fear, covering our faces and tongues. If we stopped to take account of it, we’d just fall into despair. But we can’t stop. We’ve got to keep going.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know—that’s my problem.”

  “What are you into here, Corr?”

  “I suppose I have to put flesh on my words, y’know. But sometimes that’s my dilemma too, man. I’m supposed to be a man of God but I hardly ever mention Him to anyone. Not to the girls, even. I keep these thoughts to myself. For my own peace of mind. The ease of my conscience. If I started thinking them out loud all the time I think I’d go mad. But God listens back. Most of the time. He does.”

  He drained the teacup and cleaned the rim with the flap of his shirt.

  “But these girls, man. Sometimes I think they’re better believers than me. At least they’re open to the faith of a rolled- down window.”

  Corrigan turned the teacup upside down onto his palm, balanced it there.

  “You missed the funeral,” I said.

  A little dribble of tea sat in his palm. He brought his hand to his mouth and tongued it.

  Our father had died a few months before. In the middle of his university classroom, a lecture about quarks. Elementary particles. He had insisted on finishing his class while a pain shot down his left arm. Three quarks for Muster Mark. Thank you, class. Safe home. Good night. Bye-bye. I was hardly devastated, but I had left Corrigan dozens of messages, and even got through to the Bronx police, but they said there was nothing they could do.

  In the graveyard I had kept turning, hoping to see him coming up the narrow laneway, maybe even in one of our father’s old suits, but he never
appeared.

  “Not too many people there,” I said. “Small English churchyard. A man cutting the grass. Didn’t turn the engine off for the service.”

  He kept tilting the teacup on his hand, as if trying to get the last drops out.

  “What scriptures did they use?” he said finally.

  “I can’t remember. Sorry. Why?”

  McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 31

  L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N

  31

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “What would you have used, Corr?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, really. Something Old Testament, maybe. Something primal.”

  “Like what, Corr?”

  “Not sure exactly.”

  “Go on, tell me.”

  “I don’t know!” he shouted. “Okay? I don’t fucking know!”

  The curse stunned me. The shame flushed him red. He lowered his gaze, scrubbed the cup with the flap of his shirt. The sound of it made a high, unusual squeak and I knew then that there’d be no more talk about our father. He had closed that path down, quick and hard, made a border; do not cross here. It pleased me a little to think that he had a flaw and that it went so deep that he couldn’t deal with it. Corrigan wanted other people’s pain. He didn’t want to deal with his own. I felt a pulse of shame too, for thinking that way.

  The silence of brothers.

  He tucked the prayer kneeler at the back of his knees, like a wooden cushion, and he began mumbling.

  When he stood he said: “Sorry for cursing.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  At the window, he absently pulled the cord of the blinds open and shut. Down below, a woman by the underpass screamed. He parted the window blind again, with two fingers.

  “Sounds like Jazz,” he said.

  The orange streetlight from the window latticed him as he crossed the floor at a clip.

  —

  hour s a nd hour s of insanity and escape. The projects were a victim of theft and wind. The downdrafts made their own weather. Plastic bags caught on the gusts of summer wind. Old domino players sat in the courtyard, playing underneath the flying litter. The sound of the plastic bags was like rifle fire. If you watched the rubbish for a while you could tell the exact shape of the wind. Perhaps in a way it was alluring, like little else around it: whole, bright, slapping curlicues and large figure eights, helixes and whorls and corkscrews. Sometimes a bit of plastic McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 32

  32

  C O L U M M c C A N N

  caught against a pipe or touched the top of the chain- link fence and backed away gracelessly, like it had been warned. The handles came together and the bag collapsed. There were no tree branches to be caught on. One boy from a neighboring flat stuck a lineless fishing pole out the window but he didn’t catch any. The bags often stayed up in one place, as if they were contemplating the whole gray scene, and then they would take a sudden dip, a polite curtsy, and away.

  I’d fooled myself into thinking I’d some poems in me while I was in Dublin. It was like hanging old clothes out to dry. Everyone in Dublin was a poet, maybe even the bombers who’d treated us to their afternoon of delight.

  I’d been in the South Bronx a week. It was so humid, some nights, we had to shoulder the door closed. Kids on the tenth floor aimed television sets at the housing cops who patrolled below. Air mail. The police came in, clubbing. Shots rang out from the rooftop. On the radio there was a song about the revolution being ghettoized. Arson on the streets. It was a city with its fingers in the garbage, a city that ate off dirty dishes. I had to get out. The plan was to look for a job, get my own little place, maybe work on a play, or get a job on a paper somewhere. There were ads in the circulars for bartenders and waiters, but I didn’t want to go that way, all flat hats and micks in shirtsleeves. I found a gig as a telemarketer but I needed a dedicated phone line in Corrigan’s apartment, and it was impossible to get a technician to visit the housing complex: this was not the America I had expected.

  Corrigan wrote out a list of things for me to see, Chumley’s bar in the Village, the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park by day. But I had little money to speak of. I went to the window and watched the plot of the days unfold.

  The rubbish accused me. Already the smell rose up to the fifth- floor windows.

  Corrigan worked as part of his Order’s ethic, made a few bob by driving a van for some old folk in the local nursing home. The bumper was tied with rusted wire. The windows were plastered with his peace stickers. The front headlights hung loose in the grille. He was gone most of the day, in charge of the ones that were infirm. What was ordeal for others was grace for him. He picked them up in the late morning in the nursing home on Cypress Avenue—mostly Irish, Italian, one old Jewish McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 33

  L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N

  33

  man, nicknamed Albee, in a gray suit and skullcap. “Short for Albert,” he said, “but if you call me Albert I’ll kick your ass.” I sat in with them a few afternoons, men and women—most of them white—who could have been folded up just like their wheelchairs. Corrigan drove at a snail’s pace so as not to bounce them around. “You drive like a pussy,” said Albee from the backseat. Corrigan laid his head against the steering wheel and laughed, but kept his foot on the brake.

  Cars behind us beeped. A hellish ruckus of horns. The air was stifled with ruin. “Move it, man, move it!” Albee shouted. “Move the goddamn van!”

  Corrigan took his foot off the brake and slowly guided the van around to the playground at St. Mary’s, where he wheeled the old folk out into whatever bits of shade he could find. “Fresh air,” he said. The men sat rooted like Larkin poems. The old women looked shaken, heads nodding in the breeze, watching the playground. It was mostly black or Hispanic kids, zooming down the slides or swinging on the monkey bars.

  Albee managed to wheel himself into the corner, where he took out sheets of paper. He bent over them and said not another word, scratching on the paper with a pencil. I hunkered down beside him.

  “What you doing there, friend?”

  “None of your goddamn business.”

  “Chess, is it?”

  “You play?”

  “Right on.”

  “You rated?”

  “Rated?”

  “Oh, get the fuck outta here—you’re a pussy too.”

  Corrigan winked at me from the edge of the playground. This was his world and he plainly loved it.

  Lunch had been made for them in the old folks’ home, but Corrigan went across the road to the local bodega to buy them extra potato crisps, cigarettes, a cold beer for Albee. A yellow awning. A bubblegum machine sat triple- chained to the shutters. A dustbin was overturned at the corner.

  There had been a garbage strike earlier that spring and still it wasn’t all cleaned up. Rats ran along the street gutters. Young men in sleeveless tops stood malevolently in the doorways. They knew Corrigan, it seemed, McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 34

  34

  C O L U M M c C A N N

  and as he disappeared inside he gave them a series of elaborate handshakes. He spent a long time inside and came out clutching large brown paper bags. One of the hoodlums back- slapped him, grabbed his hand, drew him close.

  “How d’you do that?” I asked. “How d’you get them to talk to you?”

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “It just seems, I don’t know, they’re tough, y’know.”

  “Far as they’re concerned, I’m just a square.”

  “You’re not worried? You know, a gun, or something, a switchblade?”

  “Why would I be?”

  Together we loaded the old folk up in the van. He revved the engine and drove to the church. There had been a vote among the old folk, the church as opposed to the synagogue. It was daubed in graffiti—whites, yellows, reds, silvers. TAGS 173. GRACO
76. The stained- glass windows had been broken with small stones. Even the cross on top was tagged. “The living temple,” said Corrigan. The elderly Jewish man refused to get out.

  He sat, head down, saying nothing, skipping through the notes in his book. Corrigan opened the back of the van and slipped him an extra beer over the seat.

  “He’s all right, our Albee,” said Corrigan as he strolled away from the back of the van. “All he does is work on those chess problems all day long.

  Used to be a grandmaster or something. Came from Hungary, found himself in the Bronx. He sends his games off in the post somewhere.

  Does about twenty games all at once. He can play blindfolded. It’s the only thing that keeps him going.”

  He helped the others out of the van and we wheeled them one by one towards the entrance. “Let’s walk the plank.” There were a series of broken steps at the front but Corrigan had stashed two long pieces of wood around the side, near the sacristy. He laid the planks parallel to each other and guided the chairs up. The wood lifted in the air with the weight of the wheelchairs, and for a moment they looked like they were bound for the sky. Corrigan pushed them forward and the planks slapped back down. He had the look of a man at ease. A shine in the corners of his eyes. You could see the gone boy in him, the nine- year- old back in Sandymount.

  He left the old folk waiting by the holy- water font, until they were all lined up, ready to go.

  McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 35

  L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N

  35

  “My favorite moment of the day, this,” he said. He crossed over into the cool dark of the church, rolled them to whatever spot they wanted, some in the rear pews, some to the sides.

  An old Irish woman was brought up to the very front, where she wrapped and rewrapped her rosary beads. She had a mane of white hair, blood in the corner of her eyes, an otherworldly stare. “Meet Sheila,” said Corrigan. She could hardly speak anymore, barely able to make a sound.

  A cabaret singer, she had lost most of her voice to throat cancer. She had been born in Galway but emigrated just after the First World War. She was Corrigan’s favorite and he stayed near her, said the formal prayers alongside her: a decade of the Rosary. She had no idea, I’m sure, about his religious ties, but there was an energy about her in that church she didn’t have elsewhere. She and Corrigan, it was like they were praying together for a good rain.