Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

I watched as the short nurse negotiated the ramp with the wheelchairs. She had a tattoo at the base of her ankle. It crossed my mind that she might be the one supplying him heroin, but she looked so cheerful in the hot slanting sun.

“Adelita,” she said, extending her hand out to me through the van window. “Corrigan’s told me all about you.”

“Hey, get your carcass out here and help us,” my brother said from the side of the van.

He was straining to get the old Galway woman through the door. The veins in his neck pulsed. Sheila was just a rag doll of a thing. I had a sudden recollection of our mother at the piano. Corrigan breathed heavily as he heaved her inside, arranged a series of straps around the woman’s body.

“We have to talk,” I said to him.

“Yeah, whatever, let’s just get these people in the van.”

He and the nurse glanced at each other across the rim of the seats. She had a little bead of sweat around the top of her lip and she wiped it away with the short sleeve of her uniform. As we drove off, she leaned against the ramp and lit a cigarette.

“The lovely Adelita,” he said as he turned the corner.

“That’s not what I want to talk about.”

“Well, it’s all I want to talk about,” he said. He flicked a look in the rearview mirror and said: “Right, Sheila?” He did a fake drum roll on the steering wheel.

He was back to his old singsong self. I wondered if perhaps he had shot up while inside the nursing home: from what little I knew of addiction, anything at all could happen. But he was bright and cheery and didn’t have many of the hallmarks of heroin, or at least the ones I imagined. He drove with one arm out the window, the breeze blowing back his hair.

“You’re a mystery, you are.”

“Nothing mysterious at all, brother.”

Albee piped up from the backseat: “Pussy.”

“Shaddup,” said Corrigan with a grin, his accent tinged a little by the Bronx. All he cared about was the moment he was in, the absolute now. When we had fought as children, he used to stand and take the blows — our fights had lasted as long as I punched him. It would be easy to thump him now, fling him back against the van door, rifle his pockets, take out the packets of poison that were ruining him.

“We should make a visit back, Corr.”

“Yeah,” he said absently.

“I mean to Sandymount. Just for a week or two.”

“Isn’t the house sold?”

“Yeah, but we could find somewhere to stay.”

“The palm trees,” he said, half smiling. “Strangest sight in Dublin. I try to tell people about them, but they just don’t believe me.”

“Would you go back?”

“Sometime, maybe. I might bring some people with me,” he said.

“Sure.”

He flicked a look in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t imagine that he wanted to bring the old woman back to Ireland, but I was ready to let Corrigan have whatever space he needed.

At the park he wheeled them into the shadows by the wall. It was a bright day, sunny and close. Albee took out his sheaf of papers, muttering the moves to himself as he worked on his chess problems. Every time he made a good move he let the brake go on his wheelchair and rocked himself back and forth in joy. Sheila wore a wide-brimmed straw hat over her long white hair. Corrigan dabbed his handkerchief on her brow. She scratched out some sounds from her throat. She had that emigrant’s sadness — she would never go back to her old country — it was gone in more senses than one — but she was forever gazing homewards anyway.

Some kids nearby had turned on a fire hydrant and were dancing in the spray. One of them had taken a kitchen tray and was using it as a surfboard. The water skimmed him along by the monkey bars, where he fell headlong, laughing, into the fence. Others clamored to use the tray. Corrigan moved over to the fence and pressed his hands against the wire diamonds. Beyond him, farther, some basketball players, sweat-soaked, driving towards the netless basket.

It seemed for a moment that Corrigan was right, that there was something here, something to be recognized and rescued, some joy. I wanted to tell him that I was beginning to understand it, or at least get an inkling, but he called out to me and said he was running across to the bodega.

“Watch Sheila for a while, will you?” he said. “Her hat’s tilted. Don’t let her get sunburned.”

A gang of youths in bandannas and tight jeans hung out in front of the bodega. They lit one another’s cigarettes importantly. They gave Corrigan the usual handslaps, then disappeared inside with him. I knew it. I could feel it welling up in me. I jogged across, my heart thumping in my cheap linen shirt. I stepped past the litter piled up outside the shop, liquor bottles, torn wrappers. A row of goldfish bowls sat in the window, the thin orange bodies spinning in aimless circles. A bell sounded. Inside, Motown came over the stereo. A couple of kids, dripping wet from the fire hydrant, stood by the ice cream vault. The older ones, in their red bandannas, were down by the beer fridges. Corrigan was at the counter, a pint of milk in his hand. He looked up, not the least bit disturbed. “I thought you were watching Sheila.”

“Is that what you thought?”

I expected some shove, a packet of heroin into his pocket, some clandestine transaction across the counter, another handslap with the gang, but there was nothing. “Just put it on my tab,” said Corrigan to the shopowner, and he tapped one of the fishbowls on the way out.

The shop doorbell rang.

“They sell smack there too?” I asked as we crossed through the traffic to the park.

“You and your smack,” he said.

“Are you sure, Corr?”

“Am I sure of what?”

“You tell me, brother. You’re looking rough. One look in the mirror.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” He reared back and laughed. “Me?” he said. “Shooting smack?”

We reached the fence.

“I wouldn’t touch that stuff with a barge pole,” he said. His hands tightened around the wire, the tip of his knuckles white. “With all respects to heaven, I like it here.”

He turned to look at the short row of wheelchairs set out along the fence. Something remained fresh about him, young, even. When he was sixteen Corrigan had written, in the inside of a cigarette packet, that all the proper gospel of the world could be written in the inside of a cigarette packet — it was that simple, you could do unto others what you’d have them do unto you, but at that time he hadn’t figured on other complications.

“You ever have the feeling there’s a stray something or other inside you?” he said. “You don’t know what it is, like a ball, or a stone, could be iron or cotton or grass or anything, but it’s inside you. It’s not a fire or a rage or anything. Just a big ball. And there’s no way to get at it?” He cut himself short, looked away, tapped the left side of his chest. “Well, here it is. Right here.”

We seldom know what we’re hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.

“You’re having me on, right?”

“Wish I was,” he said.

“Come on now …”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Jazzlyn?” I asked, floored. “You haven’t fallen for that hooker, have you?”

He laughed heartily but it was a laugh that ran away. His eyes shot across the playground, and he ran his fingers along the fence. “No,” he said, “no, not Jazzlyn, no.”

CORRIGAN DROVE ME through the South Bronx under the flamed-up sky. The sunset was the color of muscle, pink and striated gray. Arson. The owners of the buildings, he said, were running insurance scams. Whole streets of tenements and warehouses abandoned to smolder.