Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann

  In the summer quiet. Just be. Joshua liked the Beatles, used to listen to them in his room, you could hear the noise even through the big head-phones he loved. Let it be. Silly song, really. You let it be, it returns.

  There’s the truth. You let it be, it drags you to the ground. You let it be, it crawls up your walls.

  She pulls again on the cigarette and looks over the wall. A momentary vertigo. The creek of yellow taxis along the street, the crawl of green in the median of the avenue, the saplings just planted.

  Nothing much happening on Park. Everyone gone to their summer homes. Solomon, dead against. City boy. Likes his late hours. Even in summertime. His kiss this morning made me feel good. And his cologne smell. Same as Joshua’s. Oh, the day Joshua first shaved! Oh, the day!

  Covered himself in foam. So very careful with the razor. Made an avenue through the cheek, but nicked himself on the neck. Tore off a tiny piece of his Daddy’s Wall Street Journal. Licked it and pasted it to the wound.

  The business page clotting his blood. Walked around with the paper on his neck for an hour. He had to wet it to get it off. She had stood at the bathroom door, smiling. My big tall boy, shaving. Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

  No newspapers big enough to paste him back together in Saigon.

  She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs—she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison. No wonder they gave them out free to the soliders. Lucky Strikes.

  She spies a black woman on the corner, turning away. Tall and bosom-burdened. Wearing a flowery dress. Perhaps Gloria. But all alone. A housekeeper, probably. You never know. She would love to run down-McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 82

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  stairs and go to the corner and scoop her up, Gloria, her favorite of them all, gather her in her arms, bring her back, sit her down, make her coffee, talk and laugh and whisper and belong with her, just belong. That’s all she wants. Our little club. Our little interruption. Dearest Gloria. Up there in her high- rise every night and day. How in the world did she live in such a place? The chainlink fences. The whirling litter. The terrible stench. All those young girls outside selling their bodies. Looking like they would fall on their backs and use their spines as mattresses. And the fires in the sky—they should call it Dresden and be finished with it.

  Perhaps she could hire Gloria. Bring her in. Odd jobs around the house. The bits and pieces. They could sit at the kitchen table together and while away the days, make a secret gin and tonic or two, and let the hours just drift, her and Gloria, at ease, at joy, yes, Gloria, in excelsis deo.

  Down on the street, the woman turns the corner and away.

  Claire stamps out the cigarette and totters back toward the roof door.

  A little dizzy. The world shifted sideways for an instant. Down the stairs, head spinning. Joshua never smoked. Maybe on his way to heaven he asked for one. Here’s my thumb and here’s my leg and here’s my throat and here’s my heart and here’s one lung and, hey, let’s bring them all together for a final Lucky Strike.

  Back inside, through the maid’s entrance, she hears the clock in the living room striking time.

  To the kitchen.

  Woozy, now. Take a breath.

  Who needs a master’s degree to boil water?

  She steps unsurely along the corridor and back to the kitchen. Marble countertop, gold- handled cabinets, lots of white machinery. The others had made a rule early on in their coffee mornings: the visitors are the ones to bring the bagels, muffins, cheese Danish, fruit, cookies, crullers.

  The host makes the tea and coffee. A nice balance that way. She had thought about ordering a whole tray of goodies from William Green-berg’s up on Madison, rainbow cookies and pecan rings and challahs and croissants, but that would be oneupmanship, womanship, whatever.

  She turns the flame under the water high. A little universe of bubble and burn. Good French roast. Instant satisfaction. Tell that to the Viet Cong.

  A row of tea bags on the counter. Five saucers. Five cups. Five spoons.

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  Perhaps the cow- shaped creamer for a touch of humor. No, too much.

  Too whimsical. But can I not laugh in front of them? Didn’t Dr. Tonnemann tell me to laugh?

  Go ahead, please, laugh.

  Laugh, Claire. Let it out.

  A good doctor. He would not let her take pills. Try each day just to laugh a little bit, it’s a good medicine, he said. Pills were a second option.

  I should have taken them. No. Better off to try laughing. Die laughing.

  Yes, move wild laughter in the throat of death. A good doctor, yes.

  Could even quote Shakespeare. Move wild laughter indeed.

  Joshua had written her a letter once about water buffalo. He was amazed by them. Their beauty. He saw a squadron once tossing grenades by a river. All merrily laughing. Throat of death indeed. When the water buffalo were finished, he said, the soldiers shot the brightly colored birds out of the trees. Imagine if they had to count that too. You can count the dead, but you can’t count the cost. We’ve got no math for heaven, Mama. Everything else can be measured. She had turned that letter over and over in her mind. A logic in every living thing. The patterns you get in flowers.

  In people. In water buffalo. In the air. He hated the war but got asked to go while out in California at PARC. Got asked politely, of all things. The president wanted to know how many dead there were. Lyndon B.

  couldn’t figure it out. Every day the advisers came to him with their facts and figures and laid them down on his desk. Army dead. Navy dead. Ma-rine dead. Civilian dead. Diplomatic dead. MASH dead. Delta dead.

  Seabee dead. National Guard dead. But the numbers didn’t compute.

  Someone was messing up somewhere. All the reporters and TV channels were breathing down LBJ’s neck and he needed the proper information.

  He could help put a man on the Moon, but he couldn’t count the body bags. Send a satellite spinning, but he couldn’t figure out how many crosses to go into the ground. A crack computer unit. The Geek Squad.

  Quick initiation. Serve your nation. Get your hair cut. My country, ’tis of thee, we’ve got technology. Only the best and brighest came. From Stanford.

  MIT. University of Utah. U.C. Davis. His friends from PARC. The ones who were developing the dream of the ARPANET. Kitted up and sent off.

  White men, all. There were other systems also—how much sugar was used, how much oil, how many bullets, how many cigarettes, how many cans of corned beef, but Joshua’s beat was the dead.

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  Serve your country, Josh. If you can write a program that plays chess you surely can tell us how many are falling to the gooks. Give me all your ones and zeros, heroes. Show us how to count the fragged.

  They could hardly find uniforms small enough at the shoulders or long enough at the legs for him. He stepped onto the plane, trouser legs at half- mast. I should have known then. Should have just called him back. But on he went. The plane took off and went small against the sky.

  A barracks was already built out in Tan Son Nhut. At the air force base. A small brass band was there to meet them, he said. Cinder block and desks of pressure- treated wood. A room full of PDP- 10’s and Honeywells.

  They walked inside and the place hummed for them. A candy store, he said.

  She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to b
urn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re- create. Theorem, anti- theorem, corollary, anti- corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers.

  Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.

  But he stood, buzz- haired and red- cheeked, in front of her, and she said nothing.

  Say something to him. That shine to his cheeks. Say something. Tell him. Tell him. But she just smiled. Solomon pressed a Star of David into his hands and turned away and said: Be brave. She kissed his forehead good- bye. She noticed the way the back of his uniform creased and un-creased in perfect symmetry, and she knew, she just knew, the moment she saw him go, that she was seeing him go forever. Hello, Central, give me heaven, I think my Joshua is there.

  Can’t indulge this heartsickness. No. Spoon the coffee out and line the tea bags up. Imagine endurance. There’s a logic to that. Imagine and hang on.

  How is it being dead, son, and would I like it?

  Oh. The buzzer. Oh. Oh. Spoon clang to the floor. Oh. Stepping quickly along the corridor. Return and pick up the spoon. Everything neat now, neat, yes. Give me back his living body, Mr. Nixon, and we will not quarrel. Take this corpse, all fifty- two years of it, swap it; I won’t regret it, I won’t complain. Just give him back to us all sewn up and handsome.

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  Control yourself, Claire.

  I shall not fall apart.

  No.

  Quick now. Doorwise. At the buzzer. Her mind, she knows, needs a quick dip in water. A momentary cold swell, like those little buckets outside a Catholic church. Dip in and be healed.

  —Yes?

  —Your visitors, Mrs. Soderberg.

  —Oh. Yes. Send them up.

  Too harsh? Too quick? Should have said, Wonderful. Great. With a big swell to my voice. Instead of Send them up. Not even please. Like hired hands. Plumbers, decorators, soldiers. She engages the button to listen in. Curious thing, the old intercoms. Faint static and buzz and some laughter and door close.

  —The elevator’s straight ahead, ladies.

  Well, at least there’s that. At least he didn’t show them to the service elevator. At least they’re in the warm mahogany box. No, not that. The elevator.

  The faint mumble of voices. All of them together. They must have met up beforehand. Prearranged. Hadn’t thought of that. Hadn’t let it cross my mind. Wish they hadn’t.

  Talked about me, maybe. Needs a doctor. Awful gray streak in her hair.

  Husband’s a judge. Wears implausible sneakers. Struggles to smile.

  Lives in a penthouse but calls it upstairs. Is terribly nervous. Thinks she’s one of the gals, but she’s really a snob. Is likely to break down.

  How to greet? Handshake? Air kiss? Smile? The first time around they had hugged good- bye, all of them, in Staten Island, at the doorstep, with the taxi beeping, her eyes streaked with tears, arms around one another, all of us happy, at Marcia’s house, when Janet pointed to a yellow balloon caught in the treetops: Oh, let’s meet again soon! And Gloria had squeezed her arm. They had touched cheeks. Our boys, you think they knew each other, Claire? You think they were friends?

  War. The disgusting proximity of it. Its body odor. Its breath on her neck all this time, two years now since pullout, three, two a half, five million, does it matter? Nothing’s over. The cream becomes the milk. The first star at morning is the last one at night. Did she think they were friends? Well, they could have been, Gloria, they certainly could have been.

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  Vietnam was as good a place to start as any. Yes indeed. Dr. King had a dream and it would not be gassed on the shores of Saigon. When the good doctor was shot, she sent a thousand dollars in twenty- dollar bills to his church in Atlanta. Her father raved and roared. Called it guilt money.

  She didn’t care. There was plenty to be guilty for. She was modern, yes.

  She should have sent her whole inheritance. I like fathers; I just think everyone should disown one. Like it or not, Daddy, it goes to Dr. King, and what do you think of your niggers and kikes now?

  Oh. The mezuzah on the door. Oh. Forgot about that. She touches it, stands in front of it. Just tall enough to obscure it. The top of her head.

  The clang of the elevator. Why the shame? But it’s not shame, not really, is it? What is there possibly to be ashamed of? Solomon insisted on it years ago. That’s all. For his own mother. To make her comfortable when she visited. To make her happy. And what’s wrong with that? It did make her happy. Isn’t that enough? I have nothing to apologize for. I have scut-tled around all morning with my lips puckered, afraid to breathe. Swallowed a bag of air. I should have been a pair of ragged claws. What is it the young ones say? Get a grip. Hang on. Ropes and helmets and carabiners.

  What was it I never said to Josh?

  She can see the numbers as they rise. A bustle from the elevator shaft and a loud chatter. They are comfortable already. Wish I had met them earlier, in some coffee shop. But here they are, here they come.

  What was it?

  —Hello, she says, hello hello hello, Marcia! Jacqueline! Look at you!

  Come in, oh, I love your shoes, Janet, this way, this way. Gloria! Oh, hi, oh, look, please, come in, it’s lovely to see you.

  The only thing you need to know about war, son, is: Don’t go.

  —

  i t wa s a s if s h e could travel through the electricity to see him. She could look at any electronic thing—television, radio, Solomon’s shaver—

  and could find herself there, journeying along the raw voltage. Most of all it was the fridge. She would wake in the middle of the night and wander through the apartment into the kitchen and lean against the freezer. She would open the door then and blast herself with cool. What she liked about it was that the light wouldn’t come on. She could go from warm to McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 87

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  cold in an instant and she could remain in the darkness and not wake Solomon. No sound, just a soft plop of the rubber- edged opening, and then a rush of cold over her body, and she could gaze past the wires, the cathodes, the transistors, the hand- set switches, through the ether, and she could see him, all of a sudden she was in the very same room, right beside him, she could reach out and lay her hand on his forearm, console him, where he sat under the fluorescents, amid the long rows of desks and mattresses, working.

  She had inklings, intuitions about how it all worked. She was no slouch. She had her degree. But how was it, she wondered, that machines could count the dead better than humans? How was it that the punch cards knew? How did a series of tubes and wires know the difference between the living and the dead?

  He sent her letters. He called himself a hacker. It felt like a word to chop down trees. But all it meant was that he programmed the machines.

  He created the language that tripped the switches. A thousand micro-scopic gates fell in an instant. She thought of it as opening up a field. One gate led to another, and another, over the hill, and soon he was on a river and away, rafting down the wires. He said that just being at a computer made him so giddy that he felt he was sliding down the banisters, and she wondered what banisters he meant, because there had been no banisters in his childhood, but she accepted it, and she saw him there, in the hills around Saigon, sliding down the banisters toward a concrete basement in a cinder- block building, stepping to his desk, punching the buttons alive.

  The crisp cursor flicking in front of his eyes. The furrow of his brow. His fierce scan through the printouts. His laughter at a joke as it rippled along the row of desks. The breakthroughs. The breakdowns. The plates of food on the floor. The Rolaids strewn on the desks. The web of wires.


  The whirl of switches. The purr of fans. It got so hot in the room, he said, that they would have to step out every half an hour. Outside, they kept a water hose to cool down. Back at their consoles they would be dry within seconds. They called each other Mac. Mac this, Mac that. Their favorite word. Machine- aided cognition. Men against computers. Multi- access cognition. Maniacs and clowns. Must ask coyly. Might add colostomy bag.

  Everything they did centered around their machines, he said. They divided, linked, nested, chained, deleted. Rerouted switches. Cracked passwords. Changed memory boards. It was a sort of black magic. They knew McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 88

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  the inner mysteries of each and every computer. They stayed inside all day. Working with hunches, failures, intangibles. If they needed sleep they just slid in under the desk, too tired to dream.

  The Death Hack was his core project. He had to go through the files, key all the names in, add the men up as numbers. Group them, stamp them, file them, code them, write them. The problem was not even so much the dying as the overlap in the deaths. The ones who had the same names—the Smiths and the Rodriguezes and the Sullivans and the Johnsons. Fathers with the same names as their sons. The dead uncles with the exact initials as the dead nephews. The ones who went AWOL. The split missions. The misreported. The mistakes. The secret squadrons, the flotillas, the task forces, the reconnaissance crews. The ones who got married in little rural villages. The ones who stayed deep in the jungle.

  Who could account for them? But he fit them into his program as best he could. Created a space for them so that they became a sort of alive. He put his head down, worked it, asked no questions. It was, he said, the patri-otic thing to do. What he liked most was the moment of creation, when he solved what nobody else could solve, when the solution was clean and elegant.

  It was easy enough to write a program that would collate the dead, he said, but what he really wanted was to write a program that could make sense of the dying. That was the deep future. One day the computers would bring all the great minds together. Thirty, forty, a hundred years from now. If we don’t blow one another asunder first.