Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

— The girl died, Blaine.

— Give it over.

— No, I won’t give it over.

He threw up his hands and then slammed them down on the table. The solitary sugar grains jumped. Some men at the counter turned and flicked a look at us.

— Oh, fuck, he said. There’s no use talking to you.

His breakfast came and he ate it sullenly. He kept looking up at me, like I might suddenly change, become the beauty he had once married, but his eyes were blue and hateful. He ate the sausage with a sort of savagery, stabbed at it as if it angered him, this thing once alive. A little bit of egg stuck at the side of his mouth where he hadn’t shaved properly. He tried to talk of his new project, that a man could find meaning anywhere. His voice buzzed like a trapped fly. His desire for surety, for meaning. He needed me as part of his patterns. I felt the urge to tell Blaine that I had in fact spent my whole life really loving the Nixon boy in the wheelchair, and that it had all been pabulum since then, and juvenile, and useless, and tiresome, all of our art, all our projects, all our failures, it was just pure cast-off, and none of it mattered, but instead I just sat there, saying nothing, listening to the faint hum of voices from the counter, and the rattle of the forks against the plates.

— We’re finished here, he said.

Blaine snapped his fingers and the waitress came running. He left an extravagant tip and we stepped outside into the sunlight.

Blaine tipped a pair of giant sunglasses over his eyes, extended his stride, and walked toward the garage at the end of Main Street. I followed a couple of paces behind. He didn’t turn, didn’t wait.

— Hey, man, can you get a special order? he said to a pair of legs that were extended from underneath a car.

The mechanic wheeled himself out, stared upward, blinked.

— What can I get you, bud?

— A replacement headlight for a 1927 Pontiac. And a front fender.

— A what?

— Can you get them or not?

— This is America, chief.

— Get them, then.

— It takes time, man. And money.

— No problem, said Blaine. I got both.

The mechanic picked at his teeth, then grinned. He labored over toward a cluttered desk: files and pencil shavings and pinup calendar girls. Blaine’s hands were shaking, but he didn’t care; he was caught up on himself now and what he would do with his paintings once the car was fixed. As soon as the light and the fender could get repaired the whole matter would be forgotten and then he’d work. I had no idea how long this new obsession might last for him — an hour, another year, a lifetime?

— You coming? said Blaine as we stepped out of the garage.

— I’d rather walk.

— We should film this, he said. Y’know, how this new series gets painted and all. All from the very beginning. Make a document of it, don’t you think?

A ROW OF SMOKERS stood out in front of Metropolitan Hospital on Ninety-eighth and First Avenue. Each looked like his last cigarette, ashen and ready to fall. Through the swinging doors, the receiving room was full to capacity. Another cloud of smoke inside. Patches of blood on the floor. Junkies strung out along the benches. It was the type of hospital that looked like it needed a hospital.

I walked through the gauntlet. It was the fifth receiving room I had visited, and I had begun to think that perhaps both the driver and the young woman had been killed on impact and were taken immediately to a morgue.

A security guard pointed me toward an information booth. A window was cut into the wall of an unmarked room at the end of the corridor. A stout woman sat framed by it. From a distance it looked as if she sat in a television set. Her eyeglasses dangled at her neck. I sidled up to the window and whispered about a man and woman who might have been brought in from a crash on Wednesday afternoon.

— Oh, you’re a relative? she said, not even glancing up at me.

— Yes, I stammered. A cousin.

— You’re here for his things?

— His what?

She gave me a quick once-over.

— His things?

— Yes.

— You’ll have to sign for them.

Within fifteen minutes I found myself standing with a box of the late John A. Corrigan’s possessions. They consisted of a pair of black trousers that had been slit up the side with hospital scissors, a black shirt, a stained white undershirt, underwear, and socks in a plastic bag, a religious medal, a pair of dark sneakers with the soles worn through, his driver’s license, a ticket for parking illegally on John Street at 7:44 A.M. on Wednesday, August 7, a packet of rolling tobacco, some papers, a few dollars, and, oddly, a key chain with a picture of two young black children on it. There was also a baby-pink lighter, which seemed at odds with all the other things. I didn’t want the box. I had taken it out of embarrassment, out of a sense of duty to my lie, an obligation to save face, and perhaps even to save my hide. I had begun to think that perhaps leaving the scene of the crime was manslaughter, or at least some sort of felony, and now there was a second crime, hardly momentous, but it sickened me. I wanted to leave the box on the steps of the hospital and run away from myself. I had set all these events in motion and all they got for me was a handful of a dead man’s things. I was clearly out of my depth. Now it was time to go home, but I had taken on this man’s bloodstained baggage. I stared at the license. He looked younger than my freeze-frame memory had made him. A pair of oddly frightened eyes, looking way beyond the camera.

— And the girl?

— She was D.O.A., said the woman like it was a traffic signal.

She looked up at me and adjusted her glasses on her nose.

— Anything else?

— No thanks, I stammered.

The only things I could really jigsaw together was that John A. Corrigan — born January 15, 1943, five foot ten, 156 pounds, blue eyes — was probably the father of two young black children in the Bronx. Perhaps he had been married to the girl who was thrown through the windshield. Maybe the girls in the key chain were his daughters, grown now. Or perhaps it was something clandestine, as Blaine had said, he could’ve been having an affair with the dead woman.

A photocopy of some medical information was folded at the bottom of the box: his sign-out chart. The scrawl was almost indecipherable. Cardiac tamponade. Clindamycin, 300 mg. I was for a moment out on the highway again. The fender touched the back of his van and I was spinning now in his big brown van. Walls, water, guardrails.

The scent of his shirt rose up as I walked out into the fresh air. I had the odd desire to distribute his tobacco to the smokers hanging around outside.

A crowd of Puerto Rican kids were hanging around in front of the Pontiac. They wore colored sneakers and wide flares and had cigarette packets shoved under their T-shirt sleeves. They could smell my nerves as I sidled through. A tall, thin boy reached over my shoulder and pulled out the plastic bag of Corrigan’s underwear, gave a fake shriek, dropped them to the ground. The others laughed a pack laugh. I bent down to pick up the bag but felt a brush of a hand against my breast.

I drew myself as tall as I possibly could and stared in the boy’s eyes.

— Don’t you dare.

I felt so much older than my twenty-eight years, as if I’d taken on decades in the last few days. He backed off two paces.

— Only looking.

— Well, don’t.

— Gimme a ride.

— Pontiac! shouted one boy. Poor Old Nigger Thinks It’s A Cadillac!

— Gimme one, lady.

More giggles.

Over his shoulder I could see a hospital security guard making his way toward us. He wore a kufi and loped as he came across, talking into a radio. The kids scattered and ran down the street, whooping.