by Colum McCann
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There’s nothing so absurd that you can’t find at least one person to buy it.
I stayed in the water, hoping that he’d leave and go to sleep, but he sat on the dock on a blanket and when I rose from the water, he shrouded me with it. Arm around my shoulder, he walked me back to the cabin. The last thing I wanted was a kerosene lamp. I needed switches and electricity. Blaine tried to guide me to the bed but I simply said no, that I wasn’t interested.
—Just go to bed, I said to him.
I sat at the kitchen table and sketched. It had been a while since I had done anything with charcoal. Things took shape on the page. I recalled that, when we got married, Blaine had raised a glass in front of our guests and said with a grin: ’Til life do us part. It was his sort of joke. We were married, I thought then—we would watch each other’s last breath.
But it struck me, as I sketched, that all I wanted to do was to walk out into a clean elsewhere.
—
not h ing m uc h h ad happened, earlier, with Ciaran, or nothing much had seemed to happen anyway, at least not at first. It seemed ordinary enough, the rest of the day. We had simply driven away from the cemetery, through the Bronx, and over the Third Avenue bridge, avoiding the FDR.
The weather was warm and the sky bright blue. We kept the windows down. His hair wisped in the wind. In Harlem he asked me to slow down, amazed by the storefront churches.
—They look like shops, he said.
We sat outside and listened to a choir practice in the Baptist Church on 123rd Street. The voices were high and angelic, singing about being in the bright valleys of the Lord. Ciaran tapped his fingers absently on the dashboard. It looked like the music had entered him and was bouncing around. He said something about his brother and him not having a dancing bone in their bodies, but their mother had played the piano when they were young. There was one time when his brother had wheeled the piano out into the street along the seafront in Dublin, he couldn’t now for the life of him remember why. That, he said, was the funny thing about memory. It came along at the oddest moments. He hadn’t remembered it in a long time. They had wheeled the piano along the beach in the sun-McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 154
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shine. It was the one time in his life that he remembered being mistaken for his brother. His mother had mixed up the names and called him John —Here, John, come here, love— and even though he was the older brother it was a moment when he saw himself as firmly rooted in childhood, and maybe he was still there, now, today, and forever, his dead brother nowhere to be found.
He cursed and kicked his foot against the lower panels of the car: Let’s get that drink.
At a Park Avenue overpass a kid swung on a harness and ropes, spray-painting the bridge. I thought of Blaine’s paintings. They were a sort of graffiti too, nothing more.
We drove down the Upper East Side, along Lexington Avenue, and found a dumpy little joint around about Sixty- fourth Street. A young bartender in a giant white apron hardly looked us over as we strolled in. We blinked against the beer light. No jukebox. Peanut shells all over the floor.
A few men with fewer teeth sat at the counter, listening to a baseball game on the radio. The mirrors were brown and freckled with age. The smell of stale fryer oil. A sign on the wall read: BEAUTY IS IN THE WALLET OF
THE BEHOLDER.
We slid into a booth, against the red leather seats, and ordered two Bloody Marys. The back of my blouse was damp against the seat. A candle wavered between us, a small lambent glow. Flecks of dirt swam in the liquid wax. Ciaran tore his paper napkin into tiny pieces and told me all about his brother. He was going to bring him home the next day, after cremation, and sprinkle him in the water around Dublin Bay. To him, it didn’t seem nostalgic at all. It just seemed like the right thing to do. Bring him home. He’d walk along the waterfront and wait for the tide to come in, then scatter Corrigan in the wind. It wasn’t against his faith at all. Corrigan had never mentioned a funeral of any sort and Ciaran felt certain that he’d rather be a part of many things.
What he liked about his brother, he said, is that he made people become what they didn’t think they could become. He twisted something in their hearts. Gave them new places to go to. Even dead, he’d still do that.
His brother believed that the space for God was one of the last great frontiers: men and women could do all sorts of things but the real mystery would always lie in a different beyond. He would just fling the ashes and let them settle where they wanted.
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—What then?
—No idea. Maybe travel. Or stay in Dublin. Maybe come back here and make a go of it.
He didn’t like it all that much when he first came—all the rubbish and the rush—but it was growing on him, it wasn’t half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn’t matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.
—You never know, in a place like this, he said. You just never know.
—You’ll be back, then? Sometime?
—Maybe. Corrigan never thought he’d stay here. Then he met someone. I think he was going to stay here forever.
—He was in love?
—Yeah.
—Why d’you call him Corrigan?
—Just happened that way.
—Never John?
—John was too ordinary for him.
He let the pieces of the napkin flutter to the floor and said something strange about words being good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don’t function for what things aren’t. He looked away. The neon in the window brightened as the light went down outside.
His hand brushed against mine. That old human flaw of desire.
I stayed another hour. Silence most of the time. Ordinary language escaped me. I stood up, a hollowness to my legs, gooseflesh along my bare arms.
—I wasn’t driving, I said.
Ciaran folded his body all the way across the table, kissed me.
—I figured that.
He pointed to the wedding ring on my finger.
—What’s he like?
He smiled when I didn’t reply, but it was a smile with all the world of sadness in it. He turned toward the bartender, waved at him, ordered two more Bloody Marys.
—I have to go.
—I’ll just drink them both myself, he said.
One for his brother, I thought.
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—You do that.
—I will, he said.
Outside, there were two tickets in the window of the Pontiac—a parking fine, and one for a smashed headlight. It was enough to almost knock me sideways. Before I drove home to the cabin, I went back to the window of the bar and shaded my eyes against the glass, looked in. Ciaran was at the counter, his arms folded and his chin on his wrist, talking to the bartender. He glanced up in my direction and I froze. Quickly I turned away. There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface.
There is, I think, a fear of love.
There is a fear of love.
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What he has seen often in the meadow: a nest of three red- tailed hawks, chicks, on the ledge of a tree branch, in a thick inter-twine of twigs. The chicks could tell when the mother was returning, even from far away. They began to squawk, a happiness in advance. Their beaks scissored open, and a moment later she winged down
toward them, a pigeon in one foot, held by the talons. She hovered and alighted, one wing still stretched out, shielding half the nest from view. She tore off red hunks of flesh and dropped them into the open mouths of the chicks. All of it done with the sort of ease that there was no vocabulary for. The balance of talon and wing. The perfect drop of red flesh into their mouths.
It was moments like this that kept his training on track. Six years in so many different places. The meadow just one of them. The grass stretched for the better part of a half mile, though the line ran only 250
feet along the middle of the meadow, where there was the most wind.
The cable was guy- lined by a number of well- tightened cavallettis. Sometimes he loosened them so the cable would sway. It improved his balance.
He went to the middle of the wire, where it was most difficult. He would try hopping from one foot to the other. He carried a balancing pole that was too heavy, just to instruct his body in change. If a friend was visiting he would get him to thump the high wire with a two- by- four so that the McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 158
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cable swung and he learned to sway side to side. He even got the friend to jump on the wire to see if he could knock him off.
His favorite moment was running along the wire without a balancing pole—it was the purest bodyflow he could get. What he understood, even when training, was this: he could not be at the top and bottom all at once.
There was no such thing as an attempt. He could catch himself with his hands, or by wrapping his feet around the wire, but that was a failure. He hunted endlessly for new exercises: the full turn, the tiptoe, the pretend fall, the cartwheel, bouncing a soccer ball on his head, the bound walk, with his ankles tied together. But they were exercises, not moves he would contemplate on a walk.
Once, during a thunderstorm, he rode the wire as if it were a surf-board. He loosened the guy cables so the wire was more reckless than ever. The waves the sway created were three feet high, brutal, erratic, side to side, up and down. Wind and rain all around him. The balancing pole touched against the tip of the grass, but never the ground. He laughed into the teeth of the wind.
He thought only later, as he went back to the cabin, that the pole in his hand had been a lightning rod: he could have been lit up with the storm—a steel cable, a balancing pole, a wide- open meadow.
The wood cabin had been deserted for several years. A single room, three windows, and a door. He had to unscrew the shutters to get light.
The wind came in wet. A rusted water pipe hung from the roof and once he forgot and knocked himself out on it. He watched the acrobatics of flies bouncing on cobwebs. He felt at ease, even with the rats scratching at the floorboards. He decided to climb out the windows instead of through the door: an odd habit—he didn’t know where it came from. He put the pole on his shoulder and walked out into the long grass toward the wire.
Sometimes there were Rocky Mountain elk that came to graze at the meadow edge. They raised their heads and peered at him and disappeared back into the treeline. He had wondered what they saw, and how they saw it. The sway of his body. The bar held out in the air. He was ecstatic when the elk began to stay. Clumps of two or three of them, keeping close to the treeline, but venturing forward a little more each day. He wondered if they would come and rub against the giant wooden poles that he had inserted into the ground, or if they would chew them and gnaw them away, leave the line to sag.
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He came back one winter, not to train, but to relax and to go over the plans. He stayed in the log cabin, on a ridge overlooking the meadow. He spread the plans and photographs of the towers out across the rough-hewn table at the small window that looked out and down at the emp -
tiness.
One afternoon he was astounded by a coyote stepping through the snow and jumping playfully just under his wire. At its lowest point in summer the wire had been fifteen feet in the air, but the snow was so deep now that the coyote could have leaped over.
After a while he went to put some wood in the stove and then suddenly the coyote was gone, like an apparition. He was sure he had dreamed it, except when he looked through binoculars there were still some paw marks in the snow. He went out in the cold to the path he had dug in the snow, wearing only boots, jeans, a lumber shirt, a scarf. He climbed the pegs in the pole, walked the wire without a balancing pole, and traveled out to meet the tracks. The whiteness thrilled him. It seemed to him that it was like stepping along the spine of a horse toward a cool lake. The snow reinstructed the light, bent it, colored it, bounced it. He was exuber-ant, almost stoned. I should jump inside and swim. Dive into it. He put one foot out and then hopped, arms stretched, palms flat. But in midflight he realized what he’d done. He didn’t even have time to curse. The snow was crisp and dense, and he had jumped feet- first off the wire, like a man into a pool. I should just have fallen backward, given myself a different form. He was chest- deep in it and could not get out. Trapped, he tried swishing back and forth. His legs felt wrong, neither heavy nor light. He was encased, a cell of snow. He broke free with his elbows and tried to grab the wire above him but he was too far down. The snow leaked along his ankle, down into his boots. His shirt had ridden up on his body. It was like landing in a cold wet skin. He could feel the crystals on his ribcage, his navel, his chest. It was his business to live, to fight for it—it would be, he thought, his whole life’s work just to get himself out of there. He grit-ted his teeth and tried inching himself upward. A long, tugging pain in his body. He sank back into his original form. The threat of gray sunset coming down. The far line of trees like sentries, watching.
He was the sort of man who could do chin- ups on one finger, but there was nothing to reach for—the wire was out of his grasp. There was the momentary thought of remaining there, frozen, until a thaw came, McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 160
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and he’d descend with the thaw until he was fifteen feet under the wire again, rotting, the slowest sort of falling, until he reached the ground, perhaps even gnawed at by the same coyote he admired.
His hands were fully free and he warmed them by tightening and untightening. He removed the scarf from his neck, slowly, in measured motion—he knew his heart would be slowing in the cold—and he looped the wire with it and tugged. Little beads of snow shook from the scarf. He could feel the scarf threads stretch. He knew the wire, the soul of it: it would not betray him, but the scarf, he thought, was old and worn. It could stretch or rip. Kicking his feet out beneath him, through the snow, making room, looking for somewhere compact. Don’t fall backward.
Each time he rose, the scarf stretched. He clawed upward and pulled himself higher. It was possible now. The sun had dipped all the way behind the trees. He made circles with his feet to loosen them, pushed his body sideways through the snow, exploded upward, tore his right foot from the snow and swung his leg, touched the wire, found grace.
He pulled his body onto the cable, kneeled, then lay a moment, looked at the sky, felt the cable become his spinal cord.
Never again did he walk in the snow: he allowed that sort of beauty to remind him of what could happen. He hung the scarf on a hook on the door and the next night he saw the coyote again, sniffing aimlessly around where his imprint still lay.
He sometimes went into the local town, along the main street, to the bar where the ranchers gathered. Hard men, they looked at him as if he were small, ineffectual, effete. The truth was that he was stronger than any of them. Sometimes a ranch hand would challenge him to an arm wrestle or a fight but he had to keep his body in tune. A torn ligament would be disaster. A separated shoulder would set him back six months.
He placated them, showed them card tricks, juggled coasters. On leavi
ng the bar he slapped their backs, pickpocketed their keys, moved their pickup trucks half a block, left the keys in the ignitions, walked home in the starlight, laughing.
Tacked inside his cabin door was a sign: nobody falls halfway.
He believed in walking beautifully, elegantly. It had to work as a kind of faith that he would get to the other side. He had fallen only once while training—once exactly, so he felt it couldn’t happen again, it was beyond possibility. A single flaw was necessary anyway. In any work of beauty McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 161
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there had to be one small thread left hanging. But the fall had smashed several ribs and sometimes, when he took a deep breath, it was like a tiny reminder, a prod near his heart.
At times he practiced naked just to see how his body worked. He tuned himself to the wind. He listened not just for the gust, but for the anticipation of the gust. It was all down to whispers. Suggestion. He would use the very moisture in his eyes to test for it. Here it comes. After a while he learned to pluck every sound from the wind. Even the pace of insects instructed him. He loved those days when the wind rushed across the meadow with a fury and he would whistle into it. If the wind became too strong he would stop whistling and brace his whole self against it.
The wind came from so many different angles, sometimes all at once, carrying treesmell, bogwaft, elkspray.
There were times when he was so at ease that he could watch the elk, or trace the wisps of smoke from the forest fires, or watch the red- tail perning above the nest, but at his best his mind remained free of sight.
What he had to do was reimagine things, make an impression in his head, a tower at the far end of his vision, a cityline below him. He could freeze that image and then concentrate his body to the wire. He sometimes resented it, bringing the city to the meadow, but he had to meld the landscapes together in his imagination, the grass, the city, the sky. It was almost like he was walking upward through his mind on another wire.
