Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

I saw the girl from the crash again, her face appearing over his shoulder. It was not the whites of her feet this time. She was full and pretty. No eye shadow, no makeup, no pretense. She was smiling at me and asking me why I had driven away, did I not want to talk to her, why didn’t I stop, come, come, please, did I not want to see the piece of metal that had ripped open her spine, and how about the pavement she had caressed at fifty miles per hour?

— You all right? asked the waitress, sliding the plate of food across the table.

— Fine, yeah.

She peered into the full cup and said: Something wrong?

— Just not in the mood.

She looked at me like I was quite possibly alien. No coffee? Call the House of Un-American Activities.

Hell with you, I thought. Leave me be. Go back to your unwashed cups.

I sat silently and smiled at her. The omelet was wet and runny. I took a single bite and could feel the grease unsettling my stomach. I bent down and extended my foot under the table, pulled in yesterday’s newspaper, lifted it up. It was open to an article about a man who had walked on a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers. He had, it seemed, scoped out the building for six years and had finally not just walked, but danced, across, even lay down on the cable. He said that if he saw oranges he wanted to juggle them, if he saw skyscrapers he wanted to walk between them. I wondered what he might do if he walked into the diner and found the scattered pieces of me, lying around, too many of them to juggle.

I flicked through the rest of the pages. Some Cyprus, some water treatment, a murder in Brooklyn, but mostly Nixon and Ford and Watergate. I didn’t know much about the scandal. It was not something Blaine and I had followed: establishment politics at its coldest. Another sort of napalm, descending at home. I was happy to see Nixon resign, but it would hardly usher in a revolution. Nothing much more would happen than Ford might have a hundred days and then he too would put in an order for more bombs. It seemed to me that nothing much good had happened since the day Sirhan Sirhan had pulled the malevolent trigger. The idyll was over. Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew. There wasn’t much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar.

In the paper there was no mention of a crash on the FDR Drive, not even a little paragraph buried below the fold.

But there she was, still looking at me. It wasn’t the driver who struck me at all — I didn’t know why — it was still her, only her. I was wading up through the shadows toward her and the car engine was still whining and she was haloed in bits of broken glass. How great are you, God? Save her. Pick her up off the pavement and dust the glass from her hair. Wash the fake blood off the ground. Save her here and now, put her mangled body back together again.

I had a headache. My mind reeling. I could almost feel myself swaying in the booth. Maybe it was the drugs flushing out of my body. I picked up a piece of toast and just held it at my lips, but even the smell of the butter nauseated me.

Out the window I saw an antique car with whitewall tires pull up against the curb. It took me a moment to realize it wasn’t a hallucination, something cinematic hauled from memory. The door opened and a shoe hit the ground. Blaine climbed out and shielded his eyes. It was almost the exact same gesture as on the highway two days before. He was wearing a lumber shirt and jeans. No old-fashioned clothes. He looked like he belonged upstate. He flicked the hair back from his eyes. As he crossed the road, the small-town traffic paused for him. Hands deep in his pockets, he strolled along the windows of the diner and threw me a smile. There was a puzzling jaunt in his step, walking with his upper body cocked back a notch. He looked like an adman, all patently false. I could see him, suddenly, in a seersucker suit. He smiled again. Perhaps he had heard about Nixon. More likely he hadn’t yet seen the paintings, ruined beyond repair.

The bell sounded on the door and I saw him wave across to the waitress and nod to the men. He had a palette knife sticking out of his shirt pocket.

— You look pale, honey.

— Nixon resigned, I said.

He smiled broadly as he leaned over the table and kissed me.

— Big swinging Dickey. Guess what? I found the paintings.

I shuddered.

— They’re far out, he said.

— What?

— They got left out in the rain the other night.

— I saw that.

— Utterly changed.

— I’m sorry.

— You’re sorry?

— Yeah, I’m sorry, Blaine, I’m sorry.

— Whoa, whoa.

— Whoa what, Blaine?

— Don’t you see? he said. You give it a different ending. It becomes new. You can’t see that?

I turned my face up to his, looked him square in the eye, and said, No, I didn’t see. I couldn’t see anything, not a goddamn thing.

— That girl was killed, I said.

— Oh, Christ. Not that again.

— Again? It was the day before yesterday, Blaine.

— How many times am I gonna have to tell you? Not our fault. Lighten up. And keep your fucking voice down, Lara, in here, for crying out loud.

He reached across and took my hand, his eyes narrow and intent: Not our fault, not our fault, not our fault.

It wasn’t as if he’d been speeding, he said, or had had an intention to go rear-end some asshole who couldn’t drive. Things happen. Things collide.

He speared a piece of my omelet. He held the fork out and half pointed it at me. He lowered his eyes, ate the food, chewed it slowly.

— I’ve just discovered something and you’re not listening.

It was like he wanted to prod me with a dumb joke.

— A moment of satori, he said.

— Is it about her?

— You have to stop, Lara. You have to pull yourself together. Listen to me.

— About Nixon?

— No, it’s not about Nixon. Fuck Nixon. History will take care of Nixon. Listen to me, please. You’re acting crazy.

— There was a dead girl.

— Enough already. Lighten the fuck up.

— He might be dead too, the guy.

— Shut. The. Fuck. It was just a tap, that’s all, nothing else. His brake lights weren’t working.

Just then the waitress came over and Blaine released my hand. He ordered himself a Trophy special with eggs, extra bacon, and venison sausage. The waitress backed away and he smiled at her, watched her go, the sway of her.

— Look, he said, it’s about time. When you think about it. They’re about time.

— What’s about time?

— The paintings. They’re a comment on time.

— Oh, Jesus, Blaine.

There was a shine in his eyes unlike any I’d seen in quite a while. He sliced open some packets of sugar, dumped them in his coffee. Some extra grains spilled out on the table.

— Listen. We made our twenties paintings, right? And we lived in that time, right? There’s a mastery there, I mean, they were steady-keeled, the paintings, you said so yourself. And they referred back to that time, right?

They maintained their formal manners. A stylistic armor about them, right? Even a monotony. They happened on purpose. We cultivated them. But did you see what the weather did to them?

— I saw, yeah.

— Well, I went out there this morning and the damn things floored me. But then I started looking through them. And they were beautiful and ruined. Don’t you see?

— No.

— What happens if we make a series of paintings and we leave them out in the weather? We allow the present to work on the past. We could do something radical here. Do the formal paintings in the style of the past and have the present destroy them. You let the weather become the imaginative force. The real world works on your art. So you give it a new ending. And then you reinterpret it. It’s perfect, dig?