Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

Over my shoulder the dog was snapping again at the man’s arm, but the man was staring at me, like I was the one trying to rip his wrists. A half-smile crawled over his face, malevolent and pure. I thought: Nigger. I couldn’t help it, but that’s what I thought: Nigger.

This place would ruin me: how did Corrigan stand it?

I wandered the neighborhood, hands down deep in my pockets, not on the pavement, but at the edge of parked cars, an altered perspective. Taxis brushed by, close to my hip. The wind blew the smell of the subways up through the traffic. A hard, musty waft.

I went to the church on St. Ann’s. Up the broken steps, into the vestibule, past the holy-water font, into the dark. I was half expecting to see him there, head bowed, praying, but no.

Small red electric candles could be lit at the back of the church. I dropped a quarter inside and heard the deep rattle against the emptiness. My father’s ancient voice in my ear: If you don’t want the truth, don’t ask for it.

Corrigan came home to the apartment late that night. I left the door unlocked but he came in with a screwdriver anyway, began to take all the screws from the chains and locks. “Job to do.” He was lethargic and his eyes were rolling around in his head and I should have known then, but I didn’t recognize it. He knelt on the floor, eye-level with the doorknob. The underside of his sandals were worn down. The sole had faded away, a little bubble of flat rubber. His carpenter pants were tied around his waist with a length of cord. They wouldn’t have stayed up on his hips otherwise. The long-sleeved shirt he wore was tight to his body and the bones of his ribcage were like some odd musical instrument.

He worked intently but he was using a flathead screwdriver for a Phillips head bolt and he had to prop the screwdriver sideways and angle it into the grooves.

I had already packed my bag and was ready to go, find a room, get a bartending job, anything, just get out of there. I pulled the couch into the center of the room under the ceiling fan, folded my arms, waited. The blades couldn’t cut through the heat. For the first time ever I noticed that Corrigan had a bald spot beginning in the back of his hair. I wanted to make some crack about it being a monkish thing but there was nothing between us anymore, no words or glances. He toiled away at the locks. A couple of screws fell on the floor. I watched the beads of sweat come down the back of his neck.

He rolled up his sleeve absentmindedly, and then I knew.

IF YOU THINK YOU know all the secrets, you think you know all the cures. I suppose it wasn’t too much of a surprise to me that Corrigan was scoring heroin: he had always done what the least of them had done. It was the perverse mantra of what he believed. He wanted to hear his own footsteps to prove that he trod the ground. There was no getting away from it. It was what he had done in Dublin too, though a different quarry of recklessness. He was standing on the little ledge of reality he had left, but it seemed to me that he wasn’t getting high, just getting level. He had an affinity with pain. If he couldn’t cure it, he took it on. He was shooting smack because he couldn’t stand the thought of others being left alone with the same terror.

He left his sleeve rolled up for an hour or so while he dealt with the locks. The bruises inside his arm were a deep blue. When he was finished, the door didn’t even click closed, just swung on the hinges.

“There,” he said.

He went into the bathroom, where I was sure I could hear him strapping an elastic band around his arm. He came out, long-sleeved again.

“Now leave the friggin’ door alone,” he said.

He fell soundlessly into bed. I was sure I wouldn’t sleep, but I woke to the usual thrum of the Deegan. The outside world was dependable. Engine noise and tire song. Huge metal sheets had been laid over some potholes. They boomed deeply when a truck ran over them.

It was an easy enough choice to stay: it wasn’t as if Corrigan was ever going to ask me to leave. I was up and shaved early in the morning to accompany him on his rounds. I stirred him from the blankets. He had a faint nosebleed and the blood was dark against his stubble. He turned away. “Put on the tea, will you?” When he stretched, he touched the wooden crucifix on the wall. It swung back and forth on its nail. There was a light patch where the paint was not discolored. The faint imprint of the cross. He reached up to steady it, muttered something about God being ready to move sideways.

“Leaving today?” he asked.

The rucksack was packed on the floor.

“I was thinking I’d stay a couple more days.”

“No problem, brother.”

He combed his hair in the fragment of broken mirror, sprayed on some deodorant. At least he was keeping up pretenses. We took the lift instead of the stairs.

“A miracle,” said Corrigan as the door sighed open, and the little moons of light shone on the inside panel. “It’s working.”

Outside, we crossed the small patch of grass in front of the projects, among the broken bottles. All of a sudden, being around him felt right for the first time in years. That old dream of purpose. I knew what I had to do — bring him on the long walk back towards a sensible life.

Among the early-morning hookers I felt strangely charmed. Corr-gan. Corr-i-gun. Corry — gan. It was, after all, my last name too. It was a strange taking of ease. Their bodies did not embarrass me as much as when I’d watched them from afar. Coyly, they covered their breasts with their arms. One had dyed her hair a bright red. Another wore sparkling silver eyeliner. Jazzlyn, in her neon swimsuit, positioned the strap over her nipples. She took a deep drag on her cigarette and exhaled smoke in expert streams from nose and mouth. Her skin shone. In another life she could have been aristocratic. Her eyes went to the ground as if she was looking to find something she had dropped. I felt a softening for her, a desire.

They kept up a wavery pitch of banter. My brother gazed across at me and grinned. It was like Corrigan whispering in my ear to give his approval to all I couldn’t understand.

A few cars cruised past. “Get outta here,” said Tillie. “We got business to accomplish.” She said it like it was a stock exchange transaction. She nodded to Jazzlyn. Corrigan pulled me into the shadows.

“They all use smack?” I said.

“Some of them, yeah.”

“Nasty stuff.”

“The world tries them, then shows them a little joy.”

“Who gets it for them? The smack?”

“No idea,” he said as he took a small silver pocket watch out from his carpenter pants. “Why?”

“Just wondering.”

The cars rumbled above us. He slapped my shoulder. We drove to the nursing home. A young nurse was waiting on the steps. She stood up and waved brightly as the van pulled in. She looked South American— small and beautiful with a clout of black hair and dark eyes. Something fierce shot in the air between them. He loosened around her, his body more pliable. He put his hand on the small of her back, and they both disappeared inside the electronic door.

In the glove box of the van I looked for evidence: needles, packets, drug paraphernalia, anything. It was empty except for a well-worn Bible. In the inside flap Corrigan had written scattered notes to himself: The wish to make desire null. To be idle in the face of nature. Pursue them and beg for forgiveness. Resistance is at the heart of peace. When he was a boy he had seldom even folded down the pages of his Bible — he had always kept it pristine. Now the days were stacked up against him. The writing was spidery and he had underlined passages in deep-black ink. I recalled the myth that I had once heard as a university student — thirty-six hidden saints in the world, all of them doing the work of humble men, carpenters, cobblers, shepherds. They bore the sorrows of the earth and they had a line of communication with God, all except one, the hidden saint, who was forgotten. The forgotten one was left to struggle on his own, with no line of communication to that which he so hugely needed. Corrigan had lost his line with God: he bore the sorrows on his own, the story of stories.