Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann

  “A miracle,” said Corrigan as the door sighed open, and the little moons of light shone on the inside panel. “It’s working.”

  Outside, we crossed the small patch of grass in front of the projects, among the broken bottles. All of a sudden, being around him felt right for the first time in years. That old dream of purpose. I knew what I had to do—bring him on the long walk back towards a sensible life.

  Among the early- morning hookers I felt strangely charmed. Corr- gan.

  Corr- i- gun. Corry—gan. It was, after all, my last name too. It was a strange taking of ease. Their bodies did not embarrass me as much as when I’d watched them from afar. Coyly, they covered their breasts with their arms. One had dyed her hair a bright red. Another wore sparkling silver eyeliner. Jazzlyn, in her neon swimsuit, positioned the strap over her nipples. She took a deep drag on her cigarette and exhaled smoke in expert streams from nose and mouth. Her skin shone. In another life she could have been aristocratic. Her eyes went to the ground as if she was looking to find something she had dropped. I felt a softening for her, a desire.

  They kept up a wavery pitch of banter. My brother gazed across at me and grinned. It was like Corrigan whispering in my ear to give his approval to all I couldn’t understand.

  A few cars cruised past. “Get outta here,” said Tillie. “We got business to accomplish.” She said it like it was a stock exchange transaction. She nodded to Jazzlyn. Corrigan pulled me into the shadows.

  “They all use smack?” I said.

  “Some of them, yeah.”

  “Nasty stuff.”

  “The world tries them, then shows them a little joy.”

  “Who gets it for them? The smack?”

  “No idea,” he said as he took a small silver pocket watch out from his carpenter pants. “Why?”

  “Just wondering.”

  The cars rumbled above us. He slapped my shoulder. We drove to the nursing home. A young nurse was waiting on the steps. She stood up and waved brightly as the van pulled in. She looked South American—

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  small and beautiful with a clout of black hair and dark eyes. Something fierce shot in the air between them. He loosened around her, his body more pliable. He put his hand on the small of her back, and they both disappeared inside the electronic door.

  In the glove box of the van I looked for evidence: needles, packets, drug paraphernalia, anything. It was empty except for a well- worn Bible. In the inside flap Corrigan had written scattered notes to himself: The wish to make desire null. To be idle in the face of nature. Pursue them and beg for forgiveness. Resistance is at the heart of peace. When he was a boy he had seldom even folded down the pages of his Bible—he had always kept it pristine. Now the days were stacked up against him. The writing was spidery and he had underlined passages in deep- black ink. I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student— thirty- six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten. The forgotten one was left to struggle on his own, with no line of communication to that which he so hugely needed. Corrigan had lost his line with God: he bore the sorrows on his own, the story of stories.

  I watched as the short nurse negotiated the ramp with the wheel -

  chairs. She had a tattoo at the base of her ankle. It crossed my mind that she might be the one supplying him heroin, but she looked so cheerful in the hot slanting sun.

  “Adelita,” she said, extending her hand out to me through the van window. “Corrigan’s told me all about you.”

  “Hey, get your carcass out here and help us,” my brother said from the side of the van.

  He was straining to get the old Galway woman through the door. The veins in his neck pulsed. Sheila was just a rag doll of a thing. I had a sudden recollection of our mother at the piano. Corrigan breathed heavily as he heaved her inside, arranged a series of straps around the woman’s body.

  “We have to talk,” I said to him.

  “Yeah, whatever, let’s just get these people in the van.”

  He and the nurse glanced at each other across the rim of the seats.

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  away with the short sleeve of her uniform. As we drove off, she leaned against the ramp and lit a cigarette.

  “The lovely Adelita,” he said as he turned the corner.

  “That’s not what I want to talk about.”

  “Well, it’s all I want to talk about,” he said. He flicked a look in the rearview mirror and said: “Right, Sheila?” He did a fake drum roll on the steering wheel.

  He was back to his old singsong self. I wondered if perhaps he had shot up while inside the nursing home: from what little I knew of addiction, anything at all could happen. But he was bright and cheery and didn’t have many of the hallmarks of heroin, or at least the ones I imagined. He drove with one arm out the window, the breeze blowing back his hair.

  “You’re a mystery, you are.”

  “Nothing mysterious at all, brother.”

  Albee piped up from the backseat: “Pussy.”

  “Shaddup,” said Corrigan with a grin, his accent tinged a little by the Bronx. All he cared about was the moment he was in, the absolute now.

  When we had fought as children, he used to stand and take the blows—

  our fights had lasted as long as I punched him. It would be easy to thump him now, fling him back against the van door, rifle his pockets, take out the packets of poison that were ruining him.

  “We should make a visit back, Corr.”

  “Yeah,” he said absently.

  “I mean to Sandymount. Just for a week or two.”

  “Isn’t the house sold?”

  “Yeah, but we could find somewhere to stay.”

  “The palm trees,” he said, half smiling. “Strangest sight in Dublin. I try to tell people about them, but they just don’t believe me.”

  “Would you go back?”

  “Sometime, maybe. I might bring some people with me,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  He flicked a look in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t imagine that he wanted to bring the old woman back to Ireland, but I was ready to let Corrigan have whatever space he needed.

  At the park he wheeled them into the shadows by the wall. It was a bright day, sunny and close. Albee took out his sheaf of papers, mutter-McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 46

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  ing the moves to himself as he worked on his chess problems. Every time he made a good move he let the brake go on his wheelchair and rocked himself back and forth in joy. Sheila wore a wide- brimmed straw hat over her long white hair. Corrigan dabbed his handkerchief on her brow. She scratched out some sounds from her throat. She had that emigrant’s sadness—she would never go back to her old country—it was gone in more senses than one—but she was forever gazing homewards anyway.

  Some kids nearby had turned on a fire hydrant and were dancing in the spray. One of them had taken a kitchen tray and was using it as a surf-board. The water skimmed him along by the monkey bars, where he fell headlong, laughing, into the fence. Others clamored to use the tray. Corrigan moved over to the fence and pressed his hands against the wire diamonds. Beyond him, farther, some basketball players, sweat- soaked, driving towards the netless basket.

  It seemed for a moment that Corrigan was right, that there was something here, something to be recognized and rescued, some joy. I wanted to tell him that I was beginning to understand it, or at least get an inkling, but he called out to me and said he was running across to
the bodega.

  “Watch Sheila for a while, will you?” he said. “Her hat’s tilted. Don’t let her get sunburned.”

  A gang of youths in bandannas and tight jeans hung out in front of the bodega. They lit one another’s cigarettes importantly. They gave Corrigan the usual handslaps, then disappeared inside with him. I knew it. I could feel it welling up in me. I jogged across, my heart thumping in my cheap linen shirt. I stepped past the litter piled up outside the shop, liquor bottles, torn wrappers. A row of goldfish bowls sat in the window, the thin orange bodies spinning in aimless circles. A bell sounded. Inside, Motown came over the stereo. A couple of kids, dripping wet from the fire hydrant, stood by the ice cream vault. The older ones, in their red bandannas, were down by the beer fridges. Corrigan was at the counter, a pint of milk in his hand. He looked up, not the least bit disturbed. “I thought you were watching Sheila.”

  “Is that what you thought?”

  I expected some shove, a packet of heroin into his pocket, some clandestine transaction across the counter, another handslap with the gang, but there was nothing. “Just put it on my tab,” said Corrigan to the shopowner, and he tapped one of the fishbowls on the way out.

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  The shop doorbell rang.

  “They sell smack there too?” I asked as we crossed through the traffic to the park.

  “You and your smack,” he said.

  “Are you sure, Corr?”

  “Am I sure of what?”

  “You tell me, brother. You’re looking rough. One look in the mirror.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” He reared back and laughed. “Me?” he said. “Shooting smack?”

  We reached the fence.

  “I wouldn’t touch that stuff with a barge pole,” he said. His hands tightened around the wire, the tip of his knuckles white. “With all respects to heaven, I like it here.”

  He turned to look at the short row of wheelchairs set out along the fence. Something remained fresh about him, young, even. When he was sixteen Corrigan had written, in the inside of a cigarette packet, that all the proper gospel of the world could be written in the inside of a cigarette packet—it was that simple, you could do unto others what you’d have them do unto you, but at that time he hadn’t figured on other complications.

  “You ever have the feeling there’s a stray something or other inside you?” he said. “You don’t know what it is, like a ball, or a stone, could be iron or cotton or grass or anything, but it’s inside you. It’s not a fire or a rage or anything. Just a big ball. And there’s no way to get at it?” He cut himself short, looked away, tapped the left side of his chest. “Well, here it is. Right here.”

  We seldom know what we’re hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.

  “You’re having me on, right?”

  “Wish I was,” he said.

  “Come on now . . .”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Jazzlyn?” I asked, floored. “You haven’t fallen for that hooker, have you?”

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  He laughed heartily but it was a laugh that ran away. His eyes shot across the playground, and he ran his fingers along the fence.

  “No,” he said, “no, not Jazzlyn, no.”

  —

  c or r i ga n d rov e m e through the South Bronx under the flamed- up sky.

  The sunset was the color of muscle, pink and striated gray. Arson. The owners of the buildings, he said, were running insurance scams. Whole streets of tenements and warehouses abandoned to smolder.

  Gangs of kids hung out on the street corners. Traffic lights were stuck on permanent red. At fire hydrants there were huge puddles of stagnant water. A building on Willis had half collapsed into the street. A couple of wild dogs picked their way through the ruin. A burned neon sign stood upright. Fire trucks went by, and a couple of cop cars trailed each other for comfort. Every now and then a figure emerged from the shadows, homeless men pushing shopping trolleys piled high with copper wire.

  They looked like men on a westward- ho, shoving their wagons across the nightlands of America.

  “Who are they?”

  “They ransack the building, pull the guts of the walls out, and then they sell the copper wire,” he said. “They get a dime a pound or something.”

  Corrigan pulled the van up outside a series of tenements that were abandoned but untouched by fire, yanked the gearshift on the steering column down into park.

  A haze hung over the street. You could hardly see the top of the street lamps. Warning tape had been fixed over the doorways but the doors behind them had been kicked in. He drew his feet up onto the seat, so that his sandals were nestled close to his crotch. He lit a cigarette and brought it right down to the dregs, threw the butt out the window.

  “Thing is, I have a mild case of a thing called TTP or something,” he said finally. “I started getting these bruises all over. Here and here. It’s worst on my legs. They’re splotchy. About a year or so ago. At first I didn’t really think anything of it, honest. I had a bit of a fever. A few dizzy spells.

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  in the elevator. And it was hot as hell in there. They keep the heat turned up for all the old ones. You can’t imagine how hot, especially in the stairwell there, where the pipes were. Like Dante had furnished the place.

  Rough work. So I took off my shirt. Down to my string vest. You know how many years it’s been since I’ve been down to a string vest? And I was halfway up the stairs with a few lads, when one of them points to me, my arms and shoulders, and says that I must have been in some sort of fight.

  Truth is, I had been in a fight. The pimps were giving me a hard time for letting the girls use the bathroom. I’d been knocked around a little. Had some stitches over my eye. One of them wore cowboy boots and roughed me up good. But I didn’t give it a second thought until we got the furniture up on the third floor and Adelita was there, directing the traffic. ‘Put this here. Put that there.’ We heaved this big desk into a corner. And the lads were still giving me a hard time about being the only white bloke who still gets in fights in the neighborhood. Like I’m some throwback.

  Like I’m some Big Jack Doyle, you know. They’re all joking: ‘Come on Corrigan, let’s dance, man, let’s rumble!’ They say they ought to bring me to Zaire, I’m such a fighter. They don’t know I’m in the Order. Nobody knows. Not then anyway, they didn’t. And Adelita came over and just pushed her finger down hard on one of the bruises and she said something like, ‘You’ve got TTP.’ And I made some crack about DDT and she said, ‘No, I think it could be TTP.’ It turns out she’s studying at night.

  She wants to do medicine. She was a nurse in Guatemala in a couple of fancy hospitals. Always wanted to be a doctor, even went to university and all, but the war kicked in, and she got all caught up in it. Lost her husband. So she nurses here. They won’t take her credentials. She’s got two kids. They’ve got American accents now. Anyway she says something about low platelet counts and bleeding into the tissues and that I’ve got to get it seen to. She surprised me, brother.”

  Corrigan rolled down the window of the van and sprinkled some tobacco on a thin piece of paper, lit up.

  “So, fair enough, I get it seen to. And she’s bang on. I have this thing they don’t know much about. It’s idiopathic, you know, they don�
��t know what causes it. But they say it’s serious enough, you can get real sick from it. I mean, you gotta eventually get the treatment or you can die. And so I go home at night and I call on God in the dark, and I say, ‘Thanks, God, another thing to worry about.’ But the thing is, God’s there this time, McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 50

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  brother. He’s there. In plain sight. It would be easier if He wasn’t there. I could pretend I was searching for Him. But no, He’s there, the son of a gun. He’s telling me all the logical things about being sick and getting over it and dealing with it and looking at the world in a new way, the way He does, the way He should talk to you, the Body, the Soul, the sacrament of being alone, being furious with an aim, using it for the greater good.

  Opening yourself to the promise. But, see, this logical God, I don’t like him all that much. Even His voice, He’s got this voice that I just can’t, I don’t know, I can’t like. I can understand it, but I don’t necessarily like it.

  He’s out of my range. But that’s no problem. Plenty of times I haven’t liked Him. It’s good to be at a disturbance with God. Plenty of fine people have been in my place and worse.

  “I figure being sick is old news anyway and dying’s even older than that. What’s fatal is the big hollow echo every time I tried Him out. See, I just felt hollow every time I tried talking with Him. I gave it everything, brother. My proper confession, you know, about maintaining faith and all. I talked with Father Marek there in St. Ann’s. A good priest. We struggled together, him and I. Hours on end. And with Him too, with God, at all hours of the day. Used to be, though, that the arguments with Him stirred the depths of my heart. I wept in His presence. But He kept coming back at me with all His pure logic. Still, I knew it would pass. I knew I’d get over it. I wasn’t even thinking about Adelita then. She wasn’t even on my mind. It was losing God. The prospect of losing that. The rational part of me knew it was me—I mean, I was just talking to myself. I was obstructing Him. But being rational about it didn’t cure it. You meet a rational God and you say, Well, okay, that’s not my cup of tea right now, Heavenly Father, I’ll come back at a better time.