Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

I left him in bed and went out onto the porch. It was just before sunrise and already the heat had burned the night rain off the grass. A light wind riffled across the surface of the lake. I could hear the faintest sounds of traffic from the highway a few miles away, a low gurgle.

A single jet stream cut across the sky, like a line of disappearing coke.

My head was pounding, my throat dry. It took a moment to realize that the previous two days had actually occurred: our trip to Manhattan, the humiliation at Max’s, the car crash, a night of sex. What had been a quiet life had gotten its noise again.

I looked over at the hut where Blaine had hidden the Pontiac. We had forgotten the paintings. Left them out in the rain. We hadn’t even covered them in plastic. They sat, ruined, leaning against the side of the hut, by some old wagon wheels. I bent down and flicked through. A whole year’s work. The water and paint had bled down into the grass. The frames would soon warp. Fabulous irony. All the wasted work. The cutting of canvas. The pulling of hair from brushes. The months and months spent painting.

You clip a van, you watch your life fade away.

I let Blaine be, didn’t tell him, spent the whole day avoiding him. I walked in the woods, around the lake, out onto the dirt roads. Gather all around the things that you love, I thought, and prepare to lose them. I sat, pulling the roots of vines off trees: it felt like the only valuable thing I could do. That night I went to bed while Blaine stared out over the water, licking the very last of the coke from the inside of the plastic baggie.

The following morning, with the paintings still out by the garage, I walked toward town. At a certain stage every single thing can be a sign. Halfway down the road a group of starlings flew up from a pile of discarded car batteries.

THE TROPHY DINER was at the end of Main Street, in the shadow of the bell-tower church. A row of pickup trucks stood outside with empty gun racks in their windows. A few station wagons were parked on the church grounds. Weeds had cracked through the pavement at the door. The bell clanged. The locals on the swivel seats turned to check me out. More of them than usual. Baseball caps and cigarettes. They turned quickly away again, huddled and chatting. It didn’t bother me. They never had much time for me anyway.

I smiled across at the waitress but she didn’t gesture back. I took one of the red booths under a painting of ducks in flight. Some sugar packets, straws, and napkins were scattered on the table. I wiped the formica top clean, made a structure out of toothpicks.

The men along the stools were loud and charged up but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. There was a momentary panic that they somehow knew of the accident, but it seemed beyond the bounds of logic.

Calm down. Sit. Eat breakfast. Watch the world slide by.

The waitress finally came and slid the menu across the table, placed a coffee in front of me without even asking. She usually wore her weariness like an autograph, but there was something jumped-up about her as she hurried back to the counter and settled in once more among the men.

There were small drip marks on the white coffee mug where it hadn’t been washed properly. I scrubbed it with a paper napkin. On the floor beneath me there was a newspaper, folded over and egg-stained. The New York Times. I hadn’t read a paper in almost a year. In the cabin we had a radio with a crank arm that we had to wind up if we wanted to listen to the outside world. I kicked the paper under the far side of the booth. The prospect of news was nothing in the face of the accident and the paintings we had lost as a result. A full year’s work gone. I wondered what might happen when Blaine found out. I could see him rising from bed, tousled, shirtless, scratching himself, the male crotch adjust, walking outside and looking over at the hut, shaking himself awake, running through the long grass, which would rebound behind him.

He didn’t have much of a temper — one of the things I still loved about him — but I could foresee the cabin strewn with bits and pieces of the smashed frames.

You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lift miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day untouched, some old, lost sweet-tasting time.

But there it was again, the girl’s spreading bloodstain.

I tried to catch the waitress’s eye. She was leaning on her elbows on the counter, chatting with the men. Something about their urgency trilled through the room. I coughed loudly and smiled across at her again. She sighed as if to say that she’d be there, for God’s sake, don’t push me. She rounded the counter, but stopped once more, in the middle of the floor, laughed at some intimate joke.

One of the men had unfolded his paper. Nixon’s face on the front page rolled briefly before me. All slicked back and rehearsed and gluttonous. I had always hated Nixon, not just for obvious reasons, but it seemed to me that he had learned not only to destroy what was left behind, but also to poison what was to come. My father had part-owned a car company in Detroit and the whole enormity of our family wealth had disappeared in the past few years. It wasn’t that I wanted the inheritance — I didn’t, not at all — but I could see my youth receding in front of me, those good moments when my father had carried me on his shoulders and tickled my underarms and even tucked me in bed, kissed my cheek, those days gone now, made increasingly distant by change.

— What’s going on?

My voice as casual as possible. The waitress with her pen poised over her writing pad.

— You didn’t hear? Nixon’s gone.

— Shot?

— Hell, no. Resigned.

— Today?

— No, tomorrow, honey. Next week. Christmas.

—’Scuse me?

She tapped her pen against the sharp of her chin.

— Whaddaya want?

I stammered an order for a western omelet and sipped from the water in the hard plastic glass.

A quickshot image across my mind. Before I met Blaine — before the drugs and the art and the Village — I had been in love with a boy from Dearborn. He’d volunteered for Vietnam, came home with the thousand-yard stare and a piece of bullet lodged perfectly in his spine. In his wheelchair he stunned me by campaigning for Nixon in ′68, going around the inner city, still giving his approval to all he couldn’t understand. We had broken up over the campaign. I thought I knew what Vietnam was — we would leave it all rubble and bloodsoak. The repeated lies become history, but they don’t necessarily become the truth. He had swallowed them all, even plastered his wheelchair with stickers. NIXON LOVES JESUS. He went door to door, spreading rumors about Hubert Humphrey. He even bought me a little chain with a Republican elephant. I had worn it to please him, to give him back his legs, but it was like the firelight had faded on the inside of his eyelids and his mind was punched away in a little drawer. I still wondered what might have happened if I had stayed with him and learned to praise ignorance. He had written to me that he had seen Blaine’s Clock Tower film and it had made him laugh so hard he had fallen out of his chair, he couldn’t get up, now he was crawling, was it possible to help him up? At the end of the letter he said, Fuck you, you heartless bitch, you rolled up my heart and squeezed it dry. Still, when I recalled him I would always see him waiting for me under the silver high school bleachers with a smile on his face and thirty-two perfect shining white teeth.

The mind makes its shotgun leaps: punch them away, yes, in a drawer.