Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

— You all right, ma’am? said the security guard.

I was fumbling with the keys at the door of the car. I kept thinking the guard was going to walk around the front and see the smashed headlight and put two and two together, but he just guided me out into the traffic. In the rearview mirror I saw him picking up the plastic bag of underwear I’d left on the pavement. He held them in the air a moment and then shrugged, threw them in the garbage can at the side of the road.

I turned the corner toward Second Avenue, weeping.

I had gone to the city ostensibly to buy a newfangled video camera for Blaine, to record the journey of his new paintings. But the only stores I knew were way down on Fourteenth Street, near my old neighborhood. Who was it said that you can’t go home anymore? I found myself driving to the West Side of the city instead. Out to a little parking area in Riverside Park, along by the water. The cardboard box sat in the passenger seat beside me. An unknown man’s life. I had never done anything like this before. My intent had entered the world and become combustible. It had been given to me far too easily, just a simple signature and a thank-you. I thought about dropping it all in the Hudson, but there are certain things we just cannot bring ourselves to do. I stared at his photograph again. It was not he who had led me here, but the girl. I still knew nothing about her. It made no sense. What was I going to do? Practice a new form of resurrection?

I got out of the car and fished in a nearby garbage can for a newspaper and scanned through it to see if I could find any death notices or an obituary. There was one, an editorial, for Nixon’s America, but none for a young black girl caught in a hit-and-run.

I screwed up my courage and drove to the Bronx, toward the address on the license. Entire blocks of abandoned lots. Cyclone fences topped with shredded plastic bags. Stunted catalpa trees bent by the wind. Auto-body shops. New and used. The smell of burning rubber and brick. On a half-wall someone had written: DANTE HAS ALREADY DISAPPEARED.

It took ages to find the place. There were a couple of police cars out under the Major Deegan. Two of the cops had a box of doughnuts sitting on the dashboard between them, like a third-rate TV show. They stared at me, open-mouthed, when I pulled up the car alongside them. I had lost all sense of fear. If they wanted to arrest me for a hit-and-run, then go ahead.

— This is a rough neighborhood, ma’am, one of them said in a New York nasal. Car like that’s going to raise a few eyebrows.

— What can we do for you, ma’am? said the other.

— Maybe not call me ma’am?

— Feisty, huh?

— What you want, lady? Nothing but trouble here.

As if to confirm, a huge refrigerator truck slowed down as it came through the traffic lights, and the driver rolled down the window and eased over to the curb, looked out, then suddenly gunned it when he saw the police car.

— No nig-knock today, shouted the cop to the passing truck.

The short one blanched a little when he looked back at me, and he gave a thin smile that creased his eyelids. He ran his hands over a tube of fat that bulged out at his waist.

— No trade today, he said, almost apologetically.

— So, what can we do for you, miss? said the other.

— I’m looking to return something.

— Oh, yeah?

— I have these things here. In my car.

— Where’d you get that? What is it? Like the 1850s?

— It’s my husband’s.

Two thin smiles, but they looked happy enough that I’d broken their tedium. They stepped over to my car and rumbled around, running their hands along the wooden dash, marveling at the hand brake. I had often wondered if Blaine and I had gone on our twenties kick simply so we could keep our car. We had bought it as a wedding present for ourselves. Every time I sat in it, it felt like a return to simpler times.

The second cop peered into the box of possessions. They were disgusting, but I was hardly in a position to say anything. I felt a sudden pang of guilt for the plastic bag of underwear that I had left behind at the hospital, as if it somehow might be needed now, to complete the person who was not around. The cop picked up the parking ticket and then the license from the bottom of the box. The younger one nodded.

— Hey, that’s the Irish guy, the priest.

— Sure is.

— The one that was giving us shit. About the hookers. He drove that funky van.

— He’s up there on the fifth floor. I mean, his brother. Cleaning out his stuff.

— A priest? I said.

— A monk or some such. One of these worker guys. Liberation theowhateveritis.

— Theologian, said the other.

— One of those guys who thinks that Jesus was on welfare.

I felt a shudder of hatred, then told the cops that I was a hospital administrator and that the items needed to be returned — did they mind leaving them with the dead man’s brother?

— Not our job, miss.

— See the path there? Around the side? Follow that to the fourth brown building. In to the left. Take the elevator.

— Or the stairs.

— Be careful, but.

I wondered how many assholes it took to make a police department. They had been made braver and louder by the war. They had a swagger to them. Ten thousand men at the water cannons. Shoot the niggers. Club the radicals. Love it or leave it. Believe nothing unless you hear it from us.

I walked toward the projects. A surge of dread. Hard to calm the heart when it leaps so high. As a child I saw horses trying to step into rivers to cool themselves off. You watch them move from the stand of buckeye trees, down the slope, through the mud, swishing off flies, getting deeper and deeper until they either swim for a moment, or turn back. I recognized it as a pattern of fear, that there was something shameful in it — these high-rises were not a country that existed in my youth or art, or anywhere else. I had been a sheltered girl. Even when drug-addled I would never have gone into a place like this. I tried to persuade myself onward. I counted the cracks in the pavement. Cigarette butts. Unopened letters with footprints on them. Shards of broken glass. Someone whistled but I didn’t look his way. Some pot fumes drifted from an open window. For a moment, it wasn’t like I was entering water at all: it was more like I was ferrying buckets of blood away from my own body, and I could feel them slap and spill as I moved.

The dry brown remnants of a floral wreath hung outside the main doors. In the hallway the mailboxes were dented and scorch-marked. There was a reek of roach spray. The overhead lights were spray-painted black for some reason.

A large middle-aged lady in a floral-patterned dress waited at the elevator. She kicked aside a used needle with a deep sigh. It settled into the corner, a small bubble of blood at its tip. I returned her nod and smile. Her white teeth. The bounce of imitation pearls at her neck.

— Nice weather, I said to her, though both of us knew exactly what sort of weather it was.

The elevator rose. Horses into rivers. Watch me drown.

I said good-bye to her on the fifth floor as she continued upward, the sound of the cables like the crack of old branches.

A few people were gathered outside the doorway, black women, mostly, in dark mourning clothes that looked as if they didn’t belong to them, as if they’d hired the clothes for the day. Their makeup was the thing that betrayed them, loud and gaudy and one with silver sparkles around her eyes, which looked so tired and worn-down. The cops had said something about hookers: it struck me that maybe the young girl had just been a prostitute. I felt a momentary sigh of gratitude, and then the awareness stopped me cold, the walls pulsed in on me. How cheap was I?