Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann

  But there it was again, the girl’s spreading bloodstain.

  I tried to catch the waitress’s eye. She was leaning on her elbows on the counter, chatting with the men. Something about their urgency McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 129

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  trilled through the room. I coughed loudly and smiled across at her again. She sighed as if to say that she’d be there, for God’s sake, don’t push me. She rounded the counter, but stopped once more, in the middle of the floor, laughed at some intimate joke.

  One of the men had unfolded his paper. Nixon’s face on the front page rolled briefly before me. All slicked back and rehearsed and glut-tonous. I had always hated Nixon, not just for obvious reasons, but it seemed to me that he had learned not only to destroy what was left behind, but also to poison what was to come. My father had part- owned a car company in Detroit and the whole enormity of our family wealth had disappeared in the past few years. It wasn’t that I wanted the inheritance—I didn’t, not at all—but I could see my youth receding in front of me, those good moments when my father had carried me on his shoulders and tickled my underarms and even tucked me in bed, kissed my cheek, those days gone now, made increasingly distant by change.

  —What’s going on?

  My voice as casual as possible. The waitress with her pen poised over her writing pad.

  —You didn’t hear? Nixon’s gone.

  —Shot?

  —Hell, no. Resigned.

  —Today?

  —No, tomorrow, honey. Next week. Christmas.

  —’Scuse me?

  She tapped her pen against the sharp of her chin.

  —Whaddaya want?

  I stammered an order for a western omelet and sipped from the water in the hard plastic glass.

  A quickshot image across my mind. Before I met Blaine—before the drugs and the art and the Village—I had been in love with a boy from Dearborn. He’d volunteered for Vietnam, came home with the thousand-yard stare and a piece of bullet lodged perfectly in his spine. In his wheelchair he stunned me by campaigning for Nixon in ’68, going around the inner city, still giving his approval to all he couldn’t understand. We had broken up over the campaign. I thought I knew what Vietnam was—we would leave it all rubble and bloodsoak. The repeated lies become history, but they don’t necessarily become the truth. He had McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 130

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  swallowed them all, even plastered his wheelchair with stickers. NIXON

  LOVES JESUS. He went door to door, spreading rumors about Hubert Humphrey. He even bought me a little chain with a Republican elephant.

  I had worn it to please him, to give him back his legs, but it was like the firelight had faded on the inside of his eyelids and his mind was punched away in a little drawer. I still wondered what might have happened if I had stayed with him and learned to praise ignorance. He had written to me that he had seen Blaine’s Clock Tower film and it had made him laugh so hard he had fallen out of his chair, he couldn’t get up, now he was crawling, was it possible to help him up? At the end of the letter he said, Fuck you, you heartless bitch, you rolled up my heart and squeezed it dry.

  Still, when I recalled him I would always see him waiting for me under the silver high school bleachers with a smile on his face and thirty- two perfect shining white teeth.

  The mind makes its shotgun leaps: punch them away, yes, in a drawer.

  I saw the girl from the crash again, her face appearing over his shoulder. It was not the whites of her feet this time. She was full and pretty. No eye shadow, no makeup, no pretense. She was smiling at me and asking me why I had driven away, did I not want to talk to her, why didn’t I stop, come, come, please, did I not want to see the piece of metal that had ripped open her spine, and how about the pavement she had caressed at fifty miles per hour?

  —You all right? asked the waitress, sliding the plate of food across the table.

  —Fine, yeah.

  She peered into the full cup and said: Something wrong?

  —Just not in the mood.

  She looked at me like I was quite possibly alien. No coffee? Call the House of Un- American Activities.

  Hell with you, I thought. Leave me be. Go back to your unwashed cups.

  I sat silently and smiled at her. The omelet was wet and runny. I took a single bite and could feel the grease unsettling my stomach. I bent down and extended my foot under the table, pulled in yesterday’s newspaper, lifted it up. It was open to an article about a man who had walked on a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers. He had, it seemed, McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 131

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  scoped out the building for six years and had finally not just walked, but danced, across, even lay down on the cable. He said that if he saw oranges he wanted to juggle them, if he saw skyscrapers he wanted to walk between them. I wondered what he might do if he walked into the diner and found the scattered pieces of me, lying around, too many of them to juggle.

  I flicked through the rest of the pages. Some Cyprus, some water treatment, a murder in Brooklyn, but mostly Nixon and Ford and Water-gate. I didn’t know much about the scandal. It was not something Blaine and I had followed: establishment politics at its coldest. Another sort of napalm, descending at home. I was happy to see Nixon resign, but it would hardly usher in a revolution. Nothing much more would happen than Ford might have a hundred days and then he too would put in an order for more bombs. It seemed to me that nothing much good had happened since the day Sirhan Sirhan had pulled the malevolent trigger. The idyll was over. Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew. There wasn’t much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar.

  In the paper there was no mention of a crash on the FDR Drive, not even a little paragraph buried below the fold.

  But there she was, still looking at me. It wasn’t the driver who struck me at all—I didn’t know why—it was still her, only her. I was wading up through the shadows toward her and the car engine was still whining and she was haloed in bits of broken glass. How great are you, God? Save her.

  Pick her up off the pavement and dust the glass from her hair. Wash the fake blood off the ground. Save her here and now, put her mangled body back together again.

  I had a headache. My mind reeling. I could almost feel myself swaying in the booth. Maybe it was the drugs flushing out of my body. I picked up a piece of toast and just held it at my lips, but even the smell of the butter nauseated me.

  Out the window I saw an antique car with whitewall tires pull up against the curb. It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t a hallucination, something cinematic hauled from memory. The door opened and a shoe hit the ground. Blaine climbed out and shielded his eyes. It was almost the exact same gesture as on the highway two days before. He was wearing a lumber shirt and jeans. No old- fashioned clothes. He looked like he McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 132

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  belonged upstate. He flicked the hair back from his eyes. As he crossed the road, the small- town traffic paused for him. Hands deep in his pockets, he strolled along the windows of the diner and threw me a smile.

  There was a puzzling jaunt in his step, walking with his upper body cocked back a notch. He looked like an adman, all patently false. I could see him, suddenly, in a seersucker suit. He smiled again. Perhaps he had heard about Nixon. More likely he hadn’t yet seen the paintings, ruined beyond repair.

  The bell sounded on the door and I saw him wave across to the waitress and nod to the men. He had a palette knife sticking out of his shirt pocket.

  —You look pale, honey.

  —Nixon resigned, I said.

  He smiled broadly as he leaned over the table and kissed me.

&nb
sp; —Big swinging Dickey. Guess what? I found the paintings.

  I shuddered.

  —They’re far out, he said.

  —What?

  —They got left out in the rain the other night.

  —I saw that.

  —Utterly changed.

  —I’m sorry.

  —You’re sorry?

  —Yeah, I’m sorry, Blaine, I’m sorry.

  —Whoa, whoa.

  —Whoa what, Blaine?

  —Don’t you see? he said. You give it a different ending. It becomes new. You can’t see that?

  I turned my face up to his, looked him square in the eye, and said, No, I didn’t see. I couldn’t see anything, not a goddamn thing.

  —That girl was killed, I said.

  —Oh, Christ. Not that again.

  —Again? It was the day before yesterday, Blaine.

  —How many times am I gonna have to tell you? Not our fault.

  Lighten up. And keep your fucking voice down, Lara, in here, for crying out loud.

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  He reached across and took my hand, his eyes narrow and intent: Not our fault, not our fault, not our fault.

  It wasn’t as if he’d been speeding, he said, or had had an intention to go rear- end some asshole who couldn’t drive. Things happen. Things collide.

  He speared a piece of my omelet. He held the fork out and half pointed it at me. He lowered his eyes, ate the food, chewed it slowly.

  —I’ve just discovered something and you’re not listening.

  It was like he wanted to prod me with a dumb joke.

  —A moment of satori, he said.

  —Is it about her?

  —You have to stop, Lara. You have to pull yourself together. Listen to me.

  —About Nixon?

  —No, it’s not about Nixon. Fuck Nixon. History will take care of Nixon. Listen to me, please. You’re acting crazy.

  —There was a dead girl.

  —Enough already. Lighten the fuck up.

  —He might be dead too, the guy.

  —Shut. The. Fuck. It was just a tap, that’s all, nothing else. His brake lights weren’t working.

  Just then the waitress came over and Blaine released my hand. He ordered himself a Trophy special with eggs, extra bacon, and venison sausage. The waitress backed away and he smiled at her, watched her go, the sway of her.

  —Look, he said, it’s about time. When you think about it. They’re about time.

  —What’s about time?

  —The paintings. They’re a comment on time.

  —Oh, Jesus, Blaine.

  There was a shine in his eyes unlike any I’d seen in quite a while. He sliced open some packets of sugar, dumped them in his coffee. Some extra grains spilled out on the table.

  —Listen. We made our twenties paintings, right? And we lived in that time, right? There’s a mastery there, I mean, they were steady- keeled, the paintings, you said so yourself. And they referred back to that time, right?

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  They maintained their formal manners. A stylistic armor about them, right? Even a monotony. They happened on purpose. We cultivated them.

  But did you see what the weather did to them?

  —I saw, yeah.

  —Well, I went out there this morning and the damn things floored me. But then I started looking through them. And they were beautiful and ruined. Don’t you see?

  —No.

  —What happens if we make a series of paintings and we leave them out in the weather? We allow the present to work on the past. We could do something radical here. Do the formal paintings in the style of the past and have the present destroy them. You let the weather become the imaginative force. The real world works on your art. So you give it a new ending. And then you reinterpret it. It’s perfect, dig?

  —The girl died, Blaine.

  —Give it over.

  —No, I won’t give it over.

  He threw up his hands and then slammed them down on the table.

  The solitary sugar grains jumped. Some men at the counter turned and flicked a look at us.

  —Oh, fuck, he said. There’s no use talking to you.

  His breakfast came and he ate it sullenly. He kept looking up at me, like I might suddenly change, become the beauty he had once married, but his eyes were blue and hateful. He ate the sausage with a sort of sav-agery, stabbed at it as if it angered him, this thing once alive. A little bit of egg stuck at the side of his mouth where he hadn’t shaved properly. He tried to talk of his new project, that a man could find meaning anywhere.

  His voice buzzed like a trapped fly. His desire for surety, for meaning. He needed me as part of his patterns. I felt the urge to tell Blaine that I had in fact spent my whole life really loving the Nixon boy in the wheelchair, and that it had all been pabulum since then, and juvenile, and useless, and tiresome, all of our art, all our projects, all our failures, it was just pure cast- off, and none of it mattered, but instead I just sat there, saying nothing, listening to the faint hum of voices from the counter, and the rattle of the forks against the plates.

  —We’re finished here, he said.

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  Blaine snapped his fingers and the waitress came running. He left an extravagant tip and we stepped outside into the sunlight.

  Blaine tipped a pair of giant sunglasses over his eyes, extended his stride, and walked toward the garage at the end of Main Street. I followed a couple of paces behind. He didn’t turn, didn’t wait.

  —Hey, man, can you get a special order? he said to a pair of legs that were extended from underneath a car.

  The mechanic wheeled himself out, stared upward, blinked.

  —What can I get you, bud?

  —A replacement headlight for a 1927 Pontiac. And a front fender.

  —A what?

  —Can you get them or not?

  —This is America, chief.

  —Get them, then.

  —It takes time, man. And money.

  —No problem, said Blaine. I got both.

  The mechanic picked at his teeth, then grinned. He labored over toward a cluttered desk: files and pencil shavings and pinup calendar girls. Blaine’s hands were shaking, but he didn’t care; he was caught up on himself now and what he would do with his paintings once the car was fixed. As soon as the light and the fender could get repaired the whole matter would be forgotten and then he’d work. I had no idea how long this new obsession might last for him—an hour, another year, a lifetime?

  —You coming? said Blaine as we stepped out of the garage.

  —I’d rather walk.

  —We should film this, he said. Y’know, how this new series gets painted and all. All from the very beginning. Make a document of it, don’t you think?

  —

  a row of s m o k er s

  stood out in front of Metropolitan Hospital on Ninety- eighth and First Avenue. Each looked like his last cigarette, ashen and ready to fall. Through the swinging doors, the receiving room was full to capacity. Another cloud of smoke inside. Patches of blood on the floor. Junkies strung out along the benches. It was the type of hospital that looked like it needed a hospital.

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  I walked through the gauntlet. It was the fifth receiving room I had visited, and I had begun to think that perhaps both the driver and the young woman had been killed on impact and were taken immediately to a morgue.

  A security guard pointed me toward an information booth. A window was cut into the wall of an unmarked room at the end of the corridor. A stout woman
sat framed by it. From a distance it looked as if she sat in a television set. Her eyeglasses dangled at her neck. I sidled up to the window and whispered about a man and woman who might have been brought in from a crash on Wednesday afternoon.

  —Oh, you’re a relative? she said, not even glancing up at me.

  —Yes, I stammered. A cousin.

  —You’re here for his things?

  —His what?

  She gave me a quick once- over.

  —His things?

  —Yes.

  —You’ll have to sign for them.

  Within fifteen minutes I found myself standing with a box of the late John A. Corrigan’s possessions. They consisted of a pair of black trousers that had been slit up the side with hospital scissors, a black shirt, a stained white undershirt, underwear, and socks in a plastic bag, a religious medal, a pair of dark sneakers with the soles worn through, his driver’s license, a ticket for parking illegally on John Street at 7:44 A.M. on Wednesday, August 7, a packet of rolling tobacco, some papers, a few dollars, and, oddly, a key chain with a picture of two young black children on it. There was also a baby- pink lighter, which seemed at odds with all the other things. I didn’t want the box. I had taken it out of embarrassment, out of a sense of duty to my lie, an obligation to save face, and perhaps even to save my hide. I had begun to think that perhaps leaving the scene of the crime was manslaughter, or at least some sort of felony, and now there was a second crime, hardly momentous, but it sickened me. I wanted to leave the box on the steps of the hospital and run away from myself. I had set all these events in motion and all they got for me was a handful of a dead man’s things. I was clearly out of my depth. Now it was time to go home, but I had taken on this man’s bloodstained baggage. I stared at the license. He looked younger than my freeze- frame memory McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 137

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  had made him. A pair of oddly frightened eyes, looking way beyond the camera.