Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann

  It would happen at odd moments, driving along the highway, or shutter-ing down the cabin window with boards before a storm, or walking in the fields of long grass around the shrinking meadow in Montana. In midair again, the cable taut through his toe. Cross- weaved by the wind. A sense of sudden height. The city beneath him. He could be in any mood or any place and, unbidden, it returned. He might simply be taking a nail from his carpenter’s belt in order to hammer it into a piece of wood, or leaning across to open a car’s glove compartment, or turning a glass under a stream of water, or performing a card trick at a party of friends, and all of a sudden his body would be drained of everything else but the bloodrush of a single stride. It was like some photograph his body had taken, and the album had been slid out again under his eyes, then yanked away. Sometimes it was the width of the city he saw, the alleyways of light, the harpsi-chord of the Brooklyn Bridge, the flat gray bowl of smoke over New Jersey, the quick interruption of a pigeon making flight look easy, the taxis below.

  He never saw himself in any danger or extremity, so he didn’t return to the moment he lay down on the cable, or when he hopped, or half ran across from the south to the north tower. Rather it was the ordinary steps that revisited him, the ones done without flash. They were the ones that seemed entirely true, that didn’t flinch in his memory.

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  Afterward, he was immediately thirsty. All he wanted was water and for them to unsnap the wire: it was dangerous to leave it there. He said:

  “You must take down the wire.” They thought he was joking. They had no clue. It could tighten in the wind, snap, take off a man’s head. They pushed him toward the center of the roof. “Please,” he begged. He saw a man step toward the winch to loosen it, to take off the tension. He felt an enormous relief and tiredness sweep over him, sliding into his life again.

  When he emerged from the towers, handcuffed, the onlookers cheered. He was flanked by cops, reporters, cameras, men in serious suits. The flashbulbs went off.

  He had picked up a paper clip in the World Trade Center’s station command and it was easy enough to open the cuffs: they clicked with a little lateral pressure. He shook out his hand as he walked, then raised it to a cheer. Before the cops even realized what he had done, he snapped the handcuffs shut again, behind his back.

  “ Smart- ass,” said the cop, a sergeant, pocketing the paper clip. But there was admiration in the sergeant’s voice: the paper clip would be a story forever.

  The walker passed on through the gauntlet across the plaza. The squad car was waiting at the end of the steps. It was strange to revisit the world again: the slap of footsteps, the call of the hot- dog man, the sound of a pay phone ringing in the distance.

  He stopped and turned to look at the towers. He could still make out the tightrope: it was being hauled in, slowly, carefully, attached to a chain, to a rope, to a fishing line. It was like watching a child’s Etch A Sketch as the sky shook itself out: the line kept disappearing pixel by pixel. Eventually there would be nothing left there at all, just the breeze.

  They were crowding him, shouting for his name, for his reasons, for his autograph. He stayed still, looking upward, wondering how the onlookers had seen it: what line of sky had been interrupted for them. A journalist in a flat white hat shouted, “Why?” But the word didn’t come into it for him. He didn’t like the idea of why. The towers were there. That was enough. He wanted to ask the reporter why he was asking him why.

  A children’s rhyme slipped through his mind, a riffle of whys, good- bye, good- bye, good- bye.

  He felt a gentle shove on his back and a pull on his arm. He looked away from the towers and was guided toward the car. The cop put his McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 244

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  hand on the top of his head: “In you go, buddy.” He was guided down onto the hard leather seats, handcuffs on.

  The photographers put their lenses against the car window. An erup-tion of light against the glass. It briefly blinded him. He turned to face the other side of the car. More cameras. He stared ahead.

  The sirens were turned on.

  All was red and blue and wail.

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  B O O K

  T H R E E

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  P A R T O F T H E P A R T S

  The theater began shortly after lunch. His fellow judges and court officers and reporters and even the stenographers were already talking about it as if it were another of those things that just happened in the city. One of those out- of- the- ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

  He had a theory about it. It happened, and re- happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. He had seen a T- shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.

  New York kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it had left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey.

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  He had said to his wife many times that the past disappeared in the city. It was why there weren’t many monuments around. It wasn’t like London, where every corner had a historical figure carved out of stone, a war memorial here, a leader’s bust there. He could only really pinpoint a dozen true statues around New York City—most of them in Central Park, along the Literary Walk, and who in the world went to Central Park these days anyway? A man would need a phalanx of tanks just to pass Sir Walter Scott. On other famous street corners, Broadway or Wall Street or around Gracie Square, nobody felt a need to lay claim to history. Why bother? You couldn’t eat a statue. You couldn’t screw a monument. You couldn’t wring a million dollars out of a piece of brass.

  Even down here, on Centre Street, they didn’t have many public back-slaps to themselves. No Lady Justice in a blindfold. No Supreme Thinkers with their robes wrapped around themselves. No Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil carved into the upper granite columns of the criminal courts.

  Which was one of the things that made Judge Soderberg think that the tightrope walker was such a stroke of genius. A monument in himself. He had made himself into a statue, but a perfect New York one, a temporary one, up in the air, high above the city. A statue that had no regard for the past. He had gone to the World Trade Center and had strung his rope across the biggest towers in the world. The Twin Towers. Of all places. So brash. So glassy. So forward- looking. Sure, the Rockefellers had knocked down a few Greek revival homes and a few classic brown-stones to make way for the towers—which had annoyed Claire when she read about it—but mostly it had been electronics stores and cheap auction houses where men with quick tongues had sold everything useless under the sun, carrot peelers and radio flashlights and musical snow globes. In place of the shysters, the Port Authority had built two towering beacons high in the clouds. The glass reflected the sky, the night, the colors: progress, beauty, capitalism.

  Soderberg wasn’t one to si
t around and decry what used to be. The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

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  a bit beforehand. It wasn’t just an offhand walk. He was making a statement with his body, and if he fell, well, he fell—but if he survived he would become a monument, not carved in stone or encased in brass, but one of those New York monuments that made you say: Can you believe it?

  With an expletive. There would always be an expletive in a New York sentence. Even from a judge. Soderberg was not fond of bad language, but he knew its value at the right time. A man on a tightrope, a hundred and ten stories in the air, can you possibly fucking believe it?

  —

  soder b erg h im s e l f h ad just missed the walk. It upset him to think so, but he had, just by minutes, seconds, even. He had taken a cab all the way downtown. The driver was a sullen black man blaring music through the speakers. A smell of marijuana in the cab. Sickening, really, the way you couldn’t get a clean, decent ride anymore. Rastafarian music from the eight- track. The driver dropped him off at the rear of 100 Centre Street. He walked past the D.A.’s office, stopped at the locked metal-framed door on the side, an entrance only the judges used, their one concession, designed so they wouldn’t have to mix with the visitors at the front. It wasn’t so much a furtive doorway, or even a privileged thing.

  They needed their own entrance, just in case some idiot decided to take matters into his own hands. Still, it brightened him: a secret passage into the house of justice.

  At the door he took a quick look over his shoulder. In the upper reaches of the next- door building he noticed a few people leaning out of the windows, looking westward, pointing, but he ignored them, assumed it was a car crash or another morning altercation. He unlocked the metal door. If only he had turned around, paid attention, he might have been able to go upstairs and see it all unfolding in the distance. But he keyed himself in, pressed the button for the elevator, waited for the door to ac-cordion open, and went up to the fourth floor.

  In the corridor he stepped along in his plain black everyday shoes.

  The dark walls with a deep fungal smell. The squeak of his shoes sounded out in the quiet. The place had the summer blues. His office was a high- ceilinged room at the far end of the corridor. When he had first become a judge he’d had to share chambers in a grimy little box not fit for a shoeshine boy. He’d been astounded how he and his fellows were McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 250

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  treated. There were mouse droppings in the drawers of his desk. The walls desperately in need of paint. Cockroaches would perch and twitter on the edge of the windowsill, as if they too just wanted to get out. But five years had gone by and he’d been shunted around from office to office. His was a more stately chambers now, and he was treated with a modicum more respect. Mahogany desk. Cut- glass inkwell. Framed photos of Claire and Joshua by the sea in Florida. A magnetized bar that held his paper clips. The Stars and Stripes on a standing pole behind him, by the window, so that sometimes it fluttered in the breeze. It wasn’t the world’s fanciest office, but it sufficed. Besides, he wasn’t a man to make frivolous complaints: he kept that powder dry in case he’d need it at other times.

  Claire had bought him a brand- new swivel chair, a leather number with deep pouchy patterns, and he liked the moment, first thing every morning, when he sat and spun. On his shelves there were rows and rows of books. The Appellate Division Reports, the Court of Appeals Reports, the New York Supplements. All of Wallace Stevens, signed and arranged in a special row. The Yale yearbook. On the east wall, the duplicates of his degrees. And the New Yorker cartoon neatly framed by the doorway—

  Moses on the mountain with the Ten Commandments, with two lawyers peeping over the crowd: We’re in luck, Sam, not a word about retrospectivity.

  He switched on his coffeepot, spread The New York Times on the desk, shook out a few packets of creamer. Sirens outside. Always sirens: they were the shadow facts of his day.

  He was halfway through the business section when the door creaked open and another shiny head peeped itself around. It was hardly fair, but justice was largely balding. It wasn’t just a trend, but a fact. Together they were a team of shiny boys. It had been a phantom torment from the early days, all of them slowly receding: not many follicles among the oracles.

  —G’morning, old boy.

  Judge Pollack’s wide face was flushed. His eyes were like small shining metal grommets. Something of the hammerhead about him. He was blabbering about a guy who had strung himself between the towers.

  Soderberg thought at first it was a suicide, a jump off a rope suspended to a crane or some such thing. All he did was nod, turn the paper, all Wa-tergate, and where’s the little Dutch boy when you need him? He made an off- color crack about G. Gordon Liddy putting his finger in the wrong McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 251

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  hole this time, but it whizzed past Pollack, who had a small piece of cream cheese on the front of his black robe and some white spittle coming from his mouth. Aerial assault. Soderberg sat back in his chair. He was about to mention the stray breakfast when he heard Pollack mention a balancing bar and a tightrope, and the penny dropped.

  —Say again?

  The man Pollack was talking about had actually walked between the towers. Not only that, but he had lain down on the wire. He had hopped.

  He had danced. He had virtually run across from one side to the other.

  Soderberg spun in the chair, a decisive quarter- turn, and yanked open the blinds and tried looking across the expanse. He caught the edge of the north tower, but the rest of the view was obstructed.

  —You missed him, said Pollack. He just finished.

  —Official, was it?

  —Excuse me?

  —Sanctioned? Advertised?

  —’Course not. The fellow broke in during the night. Strung his wire across and walked. We watched him from the top floor. The security guards told us.

  —He broke into the World Trade Center?

  —A looney, I’d say. Wouldn’t you? Take him off to Bellevue.

  —How did he get the wire across?

  —No idea.

  —Arrested? Was he arrested?

  —Sure, said Pollack with a chuckle.

  —What precinct?

  —First, old boy. Wonder who’ll get him?

  —I’m on arraignment today.

  —Lucky you, said Pollack. Criminal trespass.

  —Reckless endangerment.

  — Self- aggrandization, said Pollack with a wink.

  —That’ll brighten the day.

  —Get the flashbulbs going.

  —Takes some gumption.

  Soderberg wasn’t quite sure if the word gumption was another phrase for balls or for stupidity. Pollack gave him a wink and a senatorial wave, closed the door with a sharp snap.

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  —Balls, said Soderberg to the closed door.

  But it would indeed brighten the day, he thought. The summer had been so hot and serious and full of death and betrayal and stabbings, and he needed a little entertainment.

  There were only two arraignment courts and so Soderberg had a fifty percent chance of landing the case. It would have to come through on time.

  It was possible that they could shove the tightrope walker swiftly through the system—if they found it newsworthy enough, they could do anything they wanted. They could have hi
m squared away in a matter of hours. Fin-gerprinted, interviewed, Albany- ed, and away. Brought in on a misdemeanor charge. Perhaps him and some accomplices. Which made him think: How the hell had the walker gotten the cable from one side to the other? Surely the tightrope was a piece of steel? How did he toss it across?

  Couldn’t be made of rope, surely? Rope would never hold a man that distance. How then did he get it from one side to the other? Helicopter?

  Crane? Through the windows somehow? Did he drop the tightrope down and then drag it up the other side? It gave Soderberg a shiver of pleasure.

  Every now and then there was a good case that would come along and add a jolt to the day. A little spice. Something that could be talked about in the backrooms of the city. But what if he didn’t get the case? What if it went across the hall? Perhaps he could even have a word with the D.A. and the court clerks, strictly on the sly, of course. There was a system of favors in place in the courts. Pass me the tightrope walker and I’ll owe you one.

  He propped his feet on the desk and drank his coffee and pondered the pulse of the day with the prospect of an arraignment that wasn’t, for once, dealing with pure drudge.

  Most days, he had to admit, were dire. In came the tide, out they went again. They left their detritus behind. He didn’t mind using the word scum anymore. There was a time when he wouldn’t have dared. But that’s what they mostly were and it pained him to admit it. Scum. A dirty tide coming in on the shores and leaving behind its syringes and plastic wrappers and bloody shirts and condoms and snotty- nosed children. He dealt with the worst of the worst. Most people thought that he lived in some sort of mahogany heaven, that it was a highfalutin job, a powerful career, but the true fact of the matter was that, beyond reputation, it didn’t amount to much at all. It landed the odd good table in a fancy restaurant, and it pleased Claire’s family no end. At parties people perked up. They McCa_9781400063734_4p_04_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:39 PM Page 253

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