Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann

  There were other places where he practiced—a field in upstate New York, the empty lot of a waterfront warehouse, a patch of isolated sea marsh in eastern Long Island—but it was the meadow that was hardest to leave. He’d look over his shoulder and see that figure, neck- deep in snow, waving good- bye to himself.

  He entered the noise of the city. The concrete and glass made a racket.

  The thrup of the traffic. The pedestrians moving like water around him.

  He felt like an ancient immigrant: he had stepped onto new shores. He would walk the perimeter of the city but seldom out of sight of the towers. It was the limit of what a man could do. Nobody else had even dreamed it. He could feel his body swelling with the audacity. Secretly, he scouted the towers. Past the guards. Up the stairwell. The south tower was still unfinished. Much of the building was still unoccupied, nursed in scaffold. He wondered who the others walking around were, what their purpose was. He walked out onto the unfinished roof, wearing a McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 162

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  construction hat to avoid detection. He took a mold of the towers in his head. The vision of the double cavallettis on the roof. The y- shaped spread of the wires as they would eventually be. The reflections from the windows and how they would mirror him, at angles, from below. He put one foot out over the edge and dipped his shoe in the air, did a handstand at the very edge of the roof.

  When he left the rooftop he felt he was waving to his old friend again: neck- deep, this time a quarter of a mile in the sky.

  He was checking the perimeter of the south tower one dawn, marking out the schedules of delivery trucks, when he saw a woman in a green jumpsuit, bent down as if tying her shoelaces, over and over again, around the base of the towers. Little bursts of feathers came from the woman’s hands. She was putting the dead birds in little ziploc bags. White- throated sparrows mostly, some songbirds too. They migrated late at night, when the air currents were calmest. Dazzled by the building lights, they crashed into the glass, or flew endlessly around the towers until exhaustion got them, their natural navigational abilities stunned. She handed him a feather from a black- throated warbler, and when he left the city again he brought it to the meadow and tacked that too just inside the cabin wall.

  Another reminder.

  Everything had purpose, signal, meaning.

  But in the end he knew that it all came down to the wire. Him and the cable. Two hundred and ten feet and the distance it bridged. The towers had been designed to sway a full three feet in a storm. A violent gust or even a sudden change in temperature would force the buildings to sway and the wire could tighten and bounce. It was one of the few things that came down to chance. If he was on it, he would have to ride out the bounce or else he’d go flying. A sway of the buildings could snap the wire in two. The frayed end of a cord could even chop a man’s head clean off in midflight. He needed to be meticulous to get it all right: the winch, the come- along, the spanners, the straightening, the aligning, the mathematics, the measuring of resistance. He wanted the wire at a tension of three tons. But the tighter a cable, the more grease that might ooze out of it.

  Even a change in weather could make a touch of grease slip from the core.

  He went over the plans with friends. They would have to sneak into the other tower, put the cavallettis in place, winch the wire tight, look out for security guards, keep him up to date on an intercom. The walk would be McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 163

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  impossible otherwise. They spread out plans of the building and learned them by heart. The stairwells. The guard stations. They knew hiding places where they would never be found. It was like they were planning a bank raid. When he couldn’t sleep, he’d wander alone down to the tone-less streets near the World Trade Center: in the distance, lights on, the buildings seemed one. He’d stop at a street corner and bring himself up there, imagine himself into the sky, a figure darker than the darkness.

  The night before the walk he stretched the cable out the full length of a city block. Drivers stared at him as he unfurled it. He needed to clean the wire. Meticulously he went along and scrubbed it with a rag soaked in gasoline, then rubbed it with emery. He had to make sure there were no stray strands that might poke his foot through the slippers. A single splinter—a meat hook—could be deadly. And there were spaces in each cable where the wires needed to be seated. There could be no surprises.

  The cable had its own moods. The worst of all was an internal torque, where the cable turned inside itself, like a snake moving through a skin.

  The cable was six strands thick with nineteen wires in each. Seven eighths of an inch in diameter. Braided to perfection. The strands had been wound around the core in a lay configuration, which gave his feet the most grip. He and his friends walked along the cable and pretended that they were high in the air.

  On the night of the walk it took them ten hours to string the furtive cable. He was exhausted. He hadn’t brought enough water. He thought perhaps he mightn’t even be able to walk, so dehydrated that his body would crack on movement. But the simple sight of the cable tightened between the towers thrilled him. The call came across the intercom from the far tower. They were ready. He felt a bolt of pure energy move through him: he was new again. The silence seemed made for him to sway about in. The morning light climbed over the dockyards, the river, the gray waterfront, over the low squalor of the East Side, where it spread and dif-fused—doorway, awning, cornice piece, window ledge, brickwork, railing, roofline—until it took a lengthy leap and hit the hard space of downtown.

  He whispered into the intercom and waved to the waiting figure on the south tower. Time to go.

  One foot on the wire—his better foot, the balancing foot. First he slid his toes, then his sole, then his heel. The cable nested between his big and second toes for grip. His slippers were thin, the soles made of buf-McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 164

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  falo hide. He paused there a moment, pulled the line tighter by the strength of his eyes. He played out the aluminum pole along his hands.

  The coolness rolled across his palm. The pole was fifty- five pounds, half the weight of a woman. She moved on his skin like water. He had wrapped rubber tubing around its center to keep it from slipping. With a curve of his left fingers he was able to tighten his right- hand calf muscle.

  The little finger played out the shape of his shoulder. It was the thumb that held the bar in place. He tilted upward right and the body came slightly left. The roll in the hand was so tiny no naked eye could see it.

  His mind shifted space to receive his old practiced self. No tiredness in his body anymore. He held the bar in muscular memory and in one flow went forward.

  What happened then was that, for an instant, almost nothing happened. He wasn’t even there. Failure didn’t even cross his mind. It felt like a sort of floating. He could have been in the meadow. His body loosened and took on the shape of the wind. The play of the shoulder could instruct the ankle. His throat could soothe his heel and moisten the ligaments at his ankle. A touch of the tongue against the teeth could relax the thigh. His elbow could brother his knee. If he tightened his neck he could feel it correcting in his hip. At his center he never moved. He thought of his stomach as a bowl of water. If he got it wrong, the bowl would right itself. He felt for the curve of the cable with the arch and then sole of his foot. A second step and a third. He went out beyond the first guy lines, all of him in synch.

  Within seconds he was pureness moving, and he could do anything he liked. He was inside and outside his body at the same time, indulging in what it meant to belong to the air, no future, no past, and this gave him the offhand vaunt to his walk. He was carrying his life from one side to the other. On the lookout for the moment when he wasn’t even aware of his
breath.

  The core reason for it all was beauty. Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the air. New things were possible with the human form. It went beyond equilibrium.

  He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.

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  B O O K

  T W O

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  T A G

  Catch him here, in the crook of the carriages, with the morning already ovened up and muggy. Nine shots left on the roll. Nearly all the photos taken in darkness. Two of them, at least, the flash didn’t work. Four of them were from moving trains. Another one, taken up in the Concourse, was a pure dud, he was sure of it.

  He surfs the thin metal platform as the train jags south out of Grand Central. At times he gets dizzy just anticipating the next corner. That speed. That wild noise in his ears. The truth is, it frightens him. The steel thrumming through him. It’s like he has the whole train in his sneakers.

  Control and oblivion. Sometimes it feels like he’s the one driving. Too far left and the train might smash into the corner and there’ll be a million mangled bodies along the rail. Too far right and the cars will skid sideways and it’ll be good- bye, nice knowing you, see you in the headlines.

  He’s been on the train since the Bronx, one hand on his camera, the other on the car door. Feet wide for balance. Eyes tight to the tunnel wall, looking for new tags.

  He’s on his way to work downtown, but to hell with those combs, those scissors, those shave bottles—he’s hoping for the morning to open up with a tag. It’s the only thing that oils the hinges of his day. Everything else crawls, but the tags climb up into his eyeballs. PHASE 2. KIVU. SUPER

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  KOOL 223. He loves the way the letters curl, the arcs, the swerves, the flames, their clouds.

  He rides the local just to see who’s been there during the night, who came and signed, how deep they got into the dark. He doesn’t have much time for the aboveground anymore, the railway bridges, the platforms, the warehouse walls, even the garbage trucks. Chumpwork that. Any chulo can do a throw- up on a wall: it’s the underground tags he’s grown to love the most. The ones you find in darkness. Way in the sides of the tunnels. The surprise of them. The deeper, the better. Lit up by the moving lights of the train and caught for just an instant so that he’s never quite sure if he’s seen them or not. JOE 182, COCO 144, TOPCAT 126. Some are quick scrawls. Others go from gravel to roof, maybe two or three cans’

  worth altogether, letters looping like they want to keep from ending, as if they’ve taken themselves a lungful of air. Others go five feet along the tunnel. The best of all is an eighteen- foot stretch under the Grand Concourse.

  For a while they were tagging with just one color, mostly silver so it’d shine in the depths, but this summer they’ve gone up to two, three, four colors: red, blue, yellow, even black. That stumped him when he saw it first—putting a three- color tag where nobody would see it. Someone was high or brilliant or both. He walked around all day, just turning it over in his mind. The size of the flare. The depth. They were even using different- size nozzles on their cans: he could tell by the texture of the spray. He thought of the taggers scooting in and ignoring the third rail, the rats, the moles, the grime, the stink, the steel dust, the hatches, the steps, the signal lights, the wires, the pipes, the split tracks, the John 3:16’s, the litter, the grates, the puddles.

  The sheer cojones of it was that they were doing it underneath the city. Like the whole of upstairs had already been painted and the only territory left was here. Like they were hitting a new frontier. This is my house. Read it and weep.

  Used to be, he dug the bombings, riding in a swallowed- up train, where he was just another color himself, a paint spot in a hundred other paint spots. Slamming downtown, through the rat alleys. No way out.

  He’d close his eyes and stand near the doors and roll his shoulders, think of the colors moving around him. Not just anyone could bomb a whole train. You had to be in the heart of things. Scale a yard fence, hop a track, McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 169

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  hit a car, run off, send the steel out into the bright morning without a window to see through, the whole train tagged head to toe. He even tried a few times to hang out on the Concourse, where the ’Rican and Domini-can taggers were, but they had no time for him, none of them, told him he didn’t jive, called him names again, Simplón, Cabronazo, Pendejo.

  Thing was, he had been a straight- A student all year long. He didn’t want to be, but that’s how it turned out—he was the only one who hadn’t cut classes. So they laughed him off. He slumped away. He even thought of going across to the blacks on the other side of the Concourse, but decided against it. He returned with his camera, the one he got from the barbershop, went to the ’Ricans, and said he’d be able to make them famous.

  They laughed again and he got bitch- slapped by a twelve- year- old Skull.

  But then in the middle of summer, on his way to work, he stepped between the cars; the train had stopped just outside 138th Street, and he was tottering on the steel plate, just as the train started up again, when he caught the quick blur. He had no idea what it was, some enormous silver flying thing. It stayed on his retina, an afterburn, all the way through the barbershop day.

  It was there, it was his, he owned it. It would not be scrubbed off.

  They couldn’t put an underground wall in an acid bath. You can’t buff that. A maximum tag. It was like discovering ice.

  On the way home to the projects he rode the middle of the train again, just to check it out, and there it was once more, STEGS 33, fat and lonely in the middle of the tunnel with no other tags to brother it. It flat- fuck- out amazed him that the tagger had gone down into the tunnel and signed and then must just have walked straight back out, past the third rail, up the grimy steps, out the metal grating, into the light, the streets, the city, his name underneath his feet.

  He walked across the Concourse then with a swagger, looked across at the taggers who’d been aboveground all day. Pendejos. He had the secret.

  He knew the places. He owned the key. He walked past them, shoulders rolling.

  He began to ride the subway as often as he could, wondering if the taggers ever brought a flashlight down with them, or if they moved in teams of twos and threes, like the bombers in the train yards, one on the lookout, one with the flashlight, one to tag. He didn’t even mind going downtown to his stepfather’s barbershop anymore. At least the summer McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 170

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  job gave him time to ride the rails. At first he pressed his face close to the windows, but then began surfing the cars, kept his gaze on the walls, looking for a sign. He preferred to think of the taggers working alone, blind to the light, except for a match here and there, just to see the outline, or to jazz up a color, or to fill in a blank spot, or to curve out a letter.

  Guerrilla work. Never more than half an hour between trains, even late at night. What he liked most were the big freestyle wraparounds. When the train went past he froze them tight in his head, and pulled them around in his mind all day long, followed the lines, the curves, the dots.

  He has never once tagged a thing himself, but if he ever got a clear chance, no consequences, no stepfathersmack, no lockdown, he’d invent a whole new style, draw a little black in the blackness, a little white on deep white, or stir it up with some red, white, and blue, screw with the color scheme, put in some ’Rican, some black, go wild and stump them, that’s what it was all about—make them scratch their heads, sit up and take not
ice. He could do that. Genius, they called it. But it was only genius if you thought of it first. A teacher told him that. Genius is lonely. He had an idea once. He wanted to get a slide machine, a projector, and put a photograph of his father inside. He wanted to project the image all around the house, so that at every turn his mother would see her gone husband, the one she kicked out, the one he has not seen in twelve years, the one she’d swapped for Irwin. He’d love to project his father there, like the tags, to make him ghostly and real in the darkness.

  It’s a mystery to him if the writers ever get to see their own tags, except for maybe one step back in the tunnel after it’s finished and not even dry. Back over the third rail for a quick glance. Careful, or it’s a couple of thousand volts. And even then there’s the possibility a train will come. Or the cops make it down with a spray of flashlights and billy clubs. Or some long- haired puto will step out of the shadows, white eyes shining, knife blade ready, to empty out their pockets, crush and gut. Slam that shit on quick, and out you go before you get busted.

  He braces against the shake of the carriage.

  Thirty-

  third Street.

  Twenty- eighth. Twenty- third. Union Square, where he crosses the platform and switches to the 5 train, slips in between the cars, waits for the shudder of movement. No new tags along the walls this morning. Sometimes he thinks he should just buy some cans, hop off the train, and begin spraying, but deep down he knows he doesn’t have what it takes: McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 171

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  it’s easier with the camera in his hands. He can photograph them, bring them out of the darkness, lift them up from the alleys. When the train picks up speed he keeps his camera under the flap of his shirt so it doesn’t bounce around. Fifteen pictures already gone from a roll of twenty- four. He’s not even sure any of them will come out. One of the customers in the barbershop gave him the camera last year, one of the downtown hotshots, showing off. Just handed it to him, case and all. Had no idea what to do with it. He threw it behind his bed at first, but then took it out one afternoon and examined it, started clicking what he saw.