by Colum McCann
They were sitting there on the knee of a big black woman, long white gloves on her and a fancy red handbag, looking for all the world that she just woke up from the Lord’s bed.
Down I ran straight to the glass wall and stuck my hands in the bottom opening.
“Babies!” I said. “Little Jazzlyn! Janice!”
They didn’t know me. They were sitting on that woman’s lap, sucking their thumbs and looking over her shoulder. Like to broke my heart. They kept snuggling into her bosom, smiling. I kept saying, “Come to Grandma, come to Grandma, let me touch your hands.” That’s all you can do through the bottom of the glass—they got a few inches and you can touch someone’s hands. It’s cruel. I just wanted to hug on them. Still they wouldn’t budge—maybe it was the prison duds, I don’t know. The woman had a southern accent, but I knew her face from the projects, I seen her before. I always thought she was a square, used to stand in the elevator and turn away. She said she was rightly conflicted whether she should bring the babies in or not, but she heard I really wanted to see them and they were living in Poughkeepsie now with a nice house and a nice fence, and it wasn’t too far away. She’d been fostering them awhile now, she got them through the Bureau of Child Welfare, they had to spend a few days in a Seaman’s home or something like that, but now they were being well looked after, she told me, don’t you worry.
“Come to Grandma,” I said again.
Little Jazzlyn turned her face into the woman’s shoulder. Janice was sucking on her thumb. I noticed their necks were scrubbed clean. Their fingernails too were all perfect and round.
“Sorry,” she said, “I guess they’re just feeling shy.”
“They look good,” I said.
“They’re eating healthy.”
“Don’t feed them too much shit,” I said.
She looked at me a second from under her eyebrows, but she was cool, she was. She wasn’t about to say nothing about me cursing. I liked her for that. She wasn’t a stuck- up, she wasn’t making judgments.
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We were silent awhile and then she said that the girls have got a nice room in a little house on a quiet street, much quieter than the projects, she painted the baseboards for them, they got wallpaper with umbrellas on it.
“What color?”
“Red,” she said.
“Good,” I said, because I didn’t want them having no pink parasols.
“Come to Tillie and touch my hands,” I said again, but the babies never once got off her lap. I begged and begged but the more I begged, the more they turned towards her. I guess maybe the prison frightened them, the guards and all.
The woman gave a smile that pinched her face some and said it was time for them to get going. I wasn’t sure if I hated her or not. Sometimes my mind sways between good and bad. I wanted to lean across and smash the glass and grab her nappy hair, but then again, she was looking after my babies, they weren’t in some horrible orphanage, starving, and I could’ve kissed her for not giving them too many lollipops and rotting their teeth.
When the bell rang she held the babies across to kiss me, against the glass. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the smell of them coming in through the little slot at the bottom of the glass, so delicious. I poked my little finger through and little Janice touched it. It was like magic. I put my face against the glass again. They smelled like real babies, like powder and milk and all.
When I was walking back out the courtyard to the pen I felt like someone came and carved my heart out, then put it walking in front of me.
That’s what I thought—there’s my heart going right out in front of me, all on its own, slick with blood.
—
I cried all night. I ain’t ashamed. I don’t want them working no stroll.
Why did I do what I done to Jazzlyn? That’s the thing I’d like to know, Why did I do what I done?
—
What I hated the most: standing under the Deegan among all those splotches of pigeon shit on the ground. Just looking down and seeing them like they was my carpet. I flat- out hated that. I don’t want the babies to see that.
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—
Corrie said there are a thousand reasons to live this life, each one of them fine, but I guess it didn’t do him no good now, did it?
—
My cell mate ratted me out. Said she was worried about me. But I don’t need no prison- house shrink just to tell me that I ain’t gonna be alive if I leave my feet dangling in the air. They pay her for that shit? I missed my calling. I coulda been a millionaire.
Here comes Tillie Henderson with the shrink hat on. You been a bad mother, Tillie, and you’re a shitass grandmother. Your own mother was shitty too. Now give me a hundred bucks, thank you, very good, next in line please, no I don’t take checks, cash only, please.
—
You’re manic- depressive and you’re manic- depressive too and you, you’re definitely manic- depressive, girl. And you over there in the corner, you’re just plain fucking depressive.
—
I’d like to have a parasol the day I go. I’ll hang myself from the jolly pipes and look all pretty underneath.
I’ll do it for the girls. They don’t need no one like me. They don’t need to be out on the stroll. They’re better off this way.
Jolly pipe, here I come.
I’ll look like Mary Poppins swinging underneath.
—
They got these religious meetings take place in the Gatehouse. I went this morning. I was talking to the chaplain about Rumi and shit, but he’s like, “That’s not spiritual, that’s poetry.” Fuck God. Fuck Him. Fuck Him sideways and backwards and any which way. He ain’t coming for me.
There ain’t no burning bushes and there ain’t no pillars of light. Don’t talk to me about light. It ain’t nothing more than a glow at the end of a street lamp.
Sorry, Corrie, but God is due His ass- kicking.
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One of the last things I heard Jazz do, she screamed and dropped the keyring out the door of the paddy wagon. Clink it went on the ground and we saw Corrigan coming out to the street with a muscle in his step. He was red in the face. Screaming at the cops. Life was pretty good then. I’d have to say that’s one of the good moments—ain’t that strange? I remember it like yesterday, getting arrested.
—
There ain’t no such thing as getting home. That’s the law of living far as I can see. I bet they don’t have no Sherry- Netherlands in heaven. The Sherry- Never- lands.
—
I gave Jazzlyn a bath once. She was just a few weeks old. Skin shining. I looked at her and thought she gave birth to the word beautiful. I wrapped her in a towel and promised her she’d never go on the stroll.
Sometimes I want to stab my heart with a stiletto. I used to watch men with her when she was all growed up. And I’d say to myself, Hey that’s my daughter you’re fucking. That’s my little girl you’re pulling into the front seat. That’s my blood.
I was a junkie then. I guess I always have been. That ain’t no excuse.
I don’t know if the world’ll ever forgive me for the bad I slung her way.
I ain’t gonna sling it the way of the babies, not me.
—
This is the house that Horse built.
—
I’d say good- bye, except I don’t know who to say it to. I ain’t whining.
That’s just the fuck- off truth. God is due His ass- kicking.
Here I come, Jazzlyn, it’s me.
I got a knuckle- duster in my sock.
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Before the walk, he would go to Washington Square Park to perform. It marked the beginning of the city’s dangerous side. He wanted the noise, to build up some tension in his body, to be wholly in touch with the filth and the roar. He secured his wire from the ribbed edge of a light pole to another. He performed for the tourists, tiptoeing along in his black silk hat. Pure theater. The sway and fake fall. Defying gravity. He could lean over at an angle and still bring himself back to standing. He balanced an umbrella on his nose. Flipped a coin in the air from his toe: it landed perfectly on the crown of his head. Forward and backward somersaults. Handstands. He juggled pins and balls and flam-ing torches. He invented a game with a Slinky—it looked like the metal toy was unwrapping itself along his body. The tourists lapped it up. They threw money in a hat for him. Most of the time it was nickels and dimes, but sometimes he’d get a dollar, or even five. For ten dollars he would jump to the ground, doff his hat, bow, throw a backflip.
On the first day the dealers and junkies hovered near his show. They could see how much he was making. He stuffed it all in the pockets of his flares, but he knew they’d roll him for it. For his final trick he scooped up the last of his money, put the hat on his head, rode a unicycle along the rope, then simply pedaled off the ten- foot drop, onto the ground and McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 239
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away through the Square, down Washington Place. He waved over his shoulder. He came back the next day for his rope—but the dealers liked the trick enough that they let him stay, and the tourists he brought were easy hits.
He rented a cold- water apartment on St. Marks Place. One night he strung a simple rope across from his bedroom to the fire escape of a Japanese woman opposite: she had lit candles on the ironwork for him.
He stayed eight hours, and when he emerged he found that some kids had tossed shoes up on the wire, a city custom, the laces tied together. He crawled out on the wire, which had grown loose and dangerous, but was still taut enough to hold him, and walked back in through his window.
He saw immediately that the place had been ransacked. Everything. Even his clothes. All the money was gone from the pockets of his pants too. He never saw the Japanese woman again: when he looked across the candles were gone. Nobody had ever stolen from him before.
This was the city he had crawled into—he was surprised to find that there were edges beneath his own edge.
Sometimes he would get hired to go to parties. He needed the money.
There were so many expenses and his savings had been plundered. The wire itself would cost a thousand dollars. And then there were the winches, the false I.D.’s, the balancing pole, the elaborate ploys to get it all up to the roof. He’d do anything to get the money together, but the parties were awful. He was hired as a magician, but he told the hosts that he couldn’t guarantee that he’d do anything at all. They had to pay him, but still he might just sit there all night. The tension worked. He became a party regular. He bought a tuxedo and a bow tie and a cummerbund.
He’d introduce himself as a Belgian arms dealer, or an appraiser from Sotheby’s, or a jockey who’d ridden in the Kentucky Derby. He felt comfortable in the roles. The only place he was entirely himself, anyway, was high on the wire. He could pull a long string of asparagus from his neighbor’s napkin. He’d find a wine cork behind the ear of a host, or tug an endless unfolding scarf from a man’s breast pocket. In the middle of dessert he might spin a fork in the air and have it land on his nose. Or he’d teeter backward on his chair until he was sitting on only one leg, pretending he was so drunk that he’d hit a nirvana of balance. The partygo-ers were thrilled. Whispers would go around the tables. Women would approach him in a cleavage lean. Men would slyly touch his knee. He McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 240
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would vanish from the parties out a window, or the back door, or disguised as a caterer, a tray of uneaten hors d’oeuvres above his head.
At a party at 1040 Fifth Avenue he announced, at the beginning of dinner, that he would, by the end of the evening, tell the exact birth dates of every single man in the room. The guests were enthralled. One lady who wore a sparkling tiara leaned right into him. So, why not the women as well? He pulled away from her. Because it’s impolite to tell the age of a lady.
He already had half the room charmed. He said nothing more the whole night: not a single word. Come on, the men said, tell us our age. He stared at the guests, switched seats, examined the men carefully, even running his fingers along their hairlines. He frowned and shook his head, as if baffled. When the sorbet came out, he climbed wearily into the middle of the table, pointed at each guest one by one and reeled off the birth dates of all but one in the room. January 29, 1947. November 16, 1898. July 7, 1903. March 15, 1937. September 5, 1940. July 2, 1935.
The women applauded and the men sat, stunned.
The one man who hadn’t been pegged sat back smugly in his chair and said, Yes, but what about me? The tightrope walker whisked his hand through the air: Nobody cares when you were born.
The room erupted in laughter and the walker leaned over the women at the table and, one by one, he removed their husbands’ driver’s licenses, from their handbags, from their dinner napkins, from under their plates, even one from between her breasts. On each license, the exact birth date.
The one man who hadn’t been pegged leaned back in his chair and announced to the table that he’d never carried his wallet, never would: he’d never be caught. Silence. The tightrope walker got down from the table, pulled his scarf around his neck, and said to the man as he waved from the dining room door: February 28, 1935.
A flush went to the man’s cheeks as the table applauded, and the man’s wife gave a half- wink to the tightrope walker as he ghosted out the door.
—
t h er e wa s a n a r ro ga nce in it, he knew, but on the wire the arrogance became survival. It was the only time he could lose himself completely.
He thought of himself sometimes as a man who wanted to hate himself.
Get rid of this foot. This toe. This calf. Find the place of immobility. So McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 241
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much of it was about the old cure of forgetting. To become anonymous to himself, have his own body absorb him. And yet there were overlapping realities: he also wanted his mind to be in that place where his body was at ease.
It was so much like having sex with the wind. It complicated things and blew away and softly separated and slid back around him. The wire was about pain too: it would always be there, jutting into his feet, the weight of the bar, the dryness at his throat, the throb of his arms, but the joy was losing the pain so that it no longer mattered. So too with his breathing. He wanted his breath to enter the wire so that he was nothing.
This sense of losing himself. Every nerve. Every cuticle. He hit it on the towers. The logic became unfixed. It was the point where there was no time. The wind was blowing and his body could have experienced it years in advance.
He was deep into his walk when the police helicopter came. Another small gnat in the air, but it didn’t faze him. Together both helicopters sounded like ligaments clicking. He was quite sure they would not be so stupid as to try to approach. It amazed him how sirens could overtake all other sounds; they seemed to drain upward. And there were dozens of cops out on the roof now, screaming at him, running to and fro. One of them was leaning out from the side of the columns on the south tower, held by a blue harness, his hat off, his body leaning outward, calling him a motherfucker, that he better get off the motherfucking wire right motherfuc
king now before he sent the motherfucking helicopter in to pluck him from the motherfucking cable, you hear me, motherfucker, right motherfucking now!—and the walker thought, What strange language.
He grinned and turned on the wire and there were cops on the opposite side too, these ones quieter, leaning into walkie- talkies, and he was sure he could hear the crackle of them, and he didn’t want to taunt them but he wanted to remain: he might never walk like this again.
The shouting, the sirens, the dull sounds of the city. He let them become a white hum. He went for his last silence and he found it: just stood there, in the precise middle of the wire, one hundred feet from each tower, eyes closed, body still, wire gone. He took the air of the city into his lungs.
Someone on a megaphone was screaming at him now: “We’ll send in the helicopter, we’re sending the ’copter. Get off!”
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The walker smiled.
“Get off now!”
He wondered if that was what the moment of death was about, the noise of the world and then the ease away from it.
He realized that he had thought only about the first step, never imagined the last. He needed a flourish. He turned toward the megaphone and waited a moment. He dropped his head as if in agreement. Yes, he was coming in. He lifted his leg. The dark form of his body showing to the people below. Leg held high for drama. Placed the side of his foot on the wire. The duck walk. And then the next foot and the next and then the next until it was pure machinery and then he ran—as quickly as he had ever run a highwire—using the center soles of his feet for grip, toes sideways, the balancing bar held far out in front of him, from the middle of the wire to the ledge.
The cop had to step back to grab him. The walker ran into his arms.
“Motherfucker,” said the cop, but with a grin.
For years afterward he’d still be up there: slippered, dark- footed, agile.
