Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

How strange to think that there was someone else at the other end of the wires. It was like a burglar breaking into his house and trying on his slippers. Worse than that. Someone getting into my skin, Mama, taking over my memory. Crawling right inside him, up his spinal cord, inside his head, deep into the cranium, walking over his synapses, into his brain cells. She could imagine him leaning forward, his mouth almost to the screen, static on his lips. Who are you? He could feel the intruders beneath his fingertips. Thumbs drumming on his spine. Forefingers at his neck. He knew they were American, the intruders, but he saw them as Vietnamese — he had to — gave them a brown slant to their eyes. It was him and his machine against the other machine. Right, okay, now, well done, you got me, but now I’m going to crush you. And then he would step right into the fray.

And she would go to the fridge and read his letters and sometimes she would open the freezer section and allow it all to cool him down. It’s all right, honey, you’ll get it back.

And he did. Joshua always got it back. He would phone her at odd hours, when he was elated, when he had won one of the wheel wars. Long, looping calls that had an echo to them. Didn’t cost him a cent, he said. The squad had a switchboard with multiline capability. He said he had tapped into the lines, routed them down through the army recuiting number just for fun. It was just a system, he said, and it was there to be exploited. I’m okay, Mama, it’s not so bad, they treat us fine, tell Dad they even have kosher here. She listened intently to the voice. When the elation wore off, he sounded tired, distant even, a new language creeping in. Look, I’m cool, Mama, don’t freak out. Since when did he say freak? He had always been careful with language. Wrapped it up in a tight Park Avenue crispness. Nothing loose or nasal about it at all. But now the language was coarser and his accent had stretched. I’m gonna go with the flow but it seems I’m driving another man’s hearse, Mama.

Was he taking care of himself? Did he have enough food? Did he keep his clothes clean? Was he losing weight? Everything reminded her. She even once put an extra plate out on the dinner table just for Joshua. Solomon said nothing about it. That and her fridge, her little idiosyncrasies.

She tried not to fret when his letters started to slacken. He wouldn’t call for a day or two. Or three in a row. She would sit staring at the phone, willing it to ring. When she stood, the floorboards gave out a little groan. He was busy, he said. There had been a new development in electronic postings. There were more nodes on the electronic net. He said it was like a magic blackboard. The world was bigger and smaller both. Someone had hacked in to chew away parts of their program. It was a dogfight, a boxing match, a medieval joust. I’m in the front line, Mama, I’m in the trenches. Someday, he said, the machines would revolutionize the world. He was helping other programmers. They logged on at the consoles and stayed on. There was a battle going on with the peace protesters, who were trying to break into their machines. But it was not machines that were evil, he said, but the minds of the top brass behind them. A machine could be no more evil than a violin, or a camera, or a pencil. What the intruders didn’t understand is that they were coming in at the wrong place. It was not the technology that they needed to attack, but the human mind, the way it failed, how it fell short.

She recognized a new depth in him, a candor. The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn’t look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. War was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple — hate your enemy, know nothing of him. It was, he claimed, the most un-American of wars, no idealism behind it, only about defeat. There were over forty thousand to account for now in his Death Hack, and the numbers kept growing. Sometimes he would print the names out. He could unfurl them up and down the stairs. He sometimes wished that someone would hack his program from outside, chew it up, spit it all back out, give life again to all those boys, the Smiths and the Sullivans and the Rodriguez brothers, these fathers and cousins and nephews, and then he’d have to do a program for Charlie, a whole new alphabet of dying, Ngo, Ho, Phan, Nguyen — wouldn’t that be a chore?

— You okay, Claire?

A touch on her elbow. Gloria.

— Help?

— Excuse me?

— You want help with those?

— Oh, no. I mean, yes. Thanks.

Gloria. Gloria. Such a sweet round face. Dark eyes, moist, almost. A lived-in face. A generosity to it. But a little perturbed. Looking at me. Looking at her. Caught in the act. Daydreaming. Help? She almost thought for a second that Gloria wanted to be the help. Presumptuous. Two seventy-five an hour, Gloria. Clean the dishes. Mop the floor. Weep for our boys. A chore indeed.

She reaches high into the top cupboard and pulls out the Waterford glass. Intricate cut. Distant men do that. There are some that aren’t savages. Yes, that’ll do nicely. She hands it to Gloria, who smiles, fills it.

— You know what you should do, Claire?

— What?

— Put sugar in the bottom. It keeps the flowers longer.

She has never heard that before. But it makes sense. Sugar. To keep them alive. Fill up our boys with sugar. Charlie and His Chocolate Factory. And who was it called the Vietnamese Charlie anyway? Where did it come from? Some radiospeak, probably. Charlie Delta Epsilon. Incoming, incoming, incoming.

— Even better if you clip the bottom of them first, says Gloria.

Gloria takes the flowers out and spreads them on the dish rack, takes a small knife from the kitchen counter and lops off a tiny segment of each, sweeps the stems into the palm of her hand, twelve little green things.

— Amazing, really, isn’t it?

— What’s that?

— The man in the air.

Claire leans against the counter. Takes a deep breath. Her mind whirling. She is not sure, not sure at all. A nagging discontent about him too. Something about his appearance sitting heavy, bewildering.

— Amazing, she says. Yes. Amazing.

But what is it about the notion that she doesn’t like? Amazing, indeed, yes. And an attempt at beauty. The intersection of a man with the city, the abruptly reformed, the newly appropriated public space, the city as art. Walk up there and make it new. Making it a different space. But something else in it still rankles. She wishes not to feel this way, but she can’t shake it, the thought of the man perched there, angel or devil. But what’s wrong with believing in an angel, or a devil, why shouldn’t Marcia be allowed to feel that way, why wouldn’t every man in the air appear to be her son? Why shouldn’t Mike Junior appear on the wire? What is wrong with that? Why shouldn’t Marcia be allowed to freeze it there, her boy returned?

Yet still a sourness.

— Anything else, Claire?

— No, no, we’re perfect.

— Right-y-o, then. All set.

Gloria smiles and hoists the vase, goes to the louvered door, pushes it open with her generous bulk.

— I’ll be right out, says Claire.

The door swings back shut.

She arranges the last of the cups, saucers, spoons. Stacks them neatly. What is it? The walking man? Something vulgar about the whole thing. Or maybe not vulgar. Something cheap. Or maybe not quite cheap. She doesn’t quite know what it is. To think this way, how petty. Downright selfish. She knows full well that she has the whole morning to do what they have done on other mornings — bring out the photos, show them the piano Joshua used to play, open the scrapbooks, take them all down to his room, show them his shelf of books, pick him out from the yearbook. That’s what they have always done, in Gloria’s, Marcia’s, Jacqueline’s, even Janet’s, especially Janet’s, where they were shown a slide show and later they all cried over a broken-spined copy of Casey at the Bat.