Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

There’s nothing so absurd that you can’t find at least one person to buy it. I stayed in the water, hoping that he’d leave and go to sleep, but he sat on the dock on a blanket and when I rose from the water, he shrouded me with it. Arm around my shoulder, he walked me back to the cabin. The last thing I wanted was a kerosene lamp. I needed switches and electricity. Blaine tried to guide me to the bed but I simply said no, that I wasn’t interested.

— Just go to bed, I said to him.

I sat at the kitchen table and sketched. It had been a while since I had done anything with charcoal. Things took shape on the page. I recalled that, when we got married, Blaine had raised a glass in front of our guests and said with a grin: ’Til life do us part. It was his sort of joke. We were married, I thought then — we would watch each other’s last breath.

But it struck me, as I sketched, that all I wanted to do was to walk out into a clean elsewhere.

NOTHING MUCH HAD happened, earlier, with Ciaran, or nothing much had seemed to happen anyway, at least not at first. It seemed ordinary enough, the rest of the day. We had simply driven away from the cemetery, through the Bronx, and over the Third Avenue bridge, avoiding the FDR.

The weather was warm and the sky bright blue. We kept the windows down. His hair wisped in the wind. In Harlem he asked me to slow down, amazed by the storefront churches.

— They look like shops, he said.

We sat outside and listened to a choir practice in the Baptist Church on 123rd Street. The voices were high and angelic, singing about being in the bright valleys of the Lord. Ciaran tapped his fingers absently on the dashboard. It looked like the music had entered him and was bouncing around. He said something about his brother and him not having a dancing bone in their bodies, but their mother had played the piano when they were young. There was one time when his brother had wheeled the piano out into the street along the seafront in Dublin, he couldn’t now for the life of him remember why. That, he said, was the funny thing about memory. It came along at the oddest moments. He hadn’t remembered it in a long time. They had wheeled the piano along the beach in the sunshine. It was the one time in his life that he remembered being mistaken for his brother. His mother had mixed up the names and called him John —Here, John, come here, love— and even though he was the older brother it was a moment when he saw himself as firmly rooted in childhood, and maybe he was still there, now, today, and forever, his dead brother nowhere to be found.

He cursed and kicked his foot against the lower panels of the car: Let’s get that drink.

At a Park Avenue overpass a kid swung on a harness and ropes, spray-painting the bridge. I thought of Blaine’s paintings. They were a sort of graffiti too, nothing more.

We drove down the Upper East Side, along Lexington Avenue, and found a dumpy little joint around about Sixty-fourth Street. A young bartender in a giant white apron hardly looked us over as we strolled in. We blinked against the beer light. No jukebox. Peanut shells all over the floor. A few men with fewer teeth sat at the counter, listening to a baseball game on the radio. The mirrors were brown and freckled with age. The smell of stale fryer oil. A sign on the wall read: BEAUTY IS IN THE WALLET OF THE BEHOLDER.

We slid into a booth, against the red leather seats, and ordered two Bloody Marys. The back of my blouse was damp against the seat. A candle wavered between us, a small lambent glow. Flecks of dirt swam in the liquid wax. Ciaran tore his paper napkin into tiny pieces and told me all about his brother. He was going to bring him home the next day, after cremation, and sprinkle him in the water around Dublin Bay. To him, it didn’t seem nostalgic at all. It just seemed like the right thing to do. Bring him home. He’d walk along the waterfront and wait for the tide to come in, then scatter Corrigan in the wind. It wasn’t against his faith at all. Corrigan had never mentioned a funeral of any sort and Ciaran felt certain that he’d rather be a part of many things.

What he liked about his brother, he said, is that he made people become what they didn’t think they could become. He twisted something in their hearts. Gave them new places to go to. Even dead, he’d still do that. His brother believed that the space for God was one of the last great frontiers: men and women could do all sorts of things but the real mystery would always lie in a different beyond. He would just fling the ashes and let them settle where they wanted.

— What then?

— No idea. Maybe travel. Or stay in Dublin. Maybe come back here and make a go of it.

He didn’t like it all that much when he first came — all the rubbish and the rush — but it was growing on him, it wasn’t half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn’t matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.

— You never know, in a place like this, he said. You just never know.

— You’ll be back, then? Sometime?

— Maybe. Corrigan never thought he’d stay here. Then he met someone. I think he was going to stay here forever.

— He was in love?

— Yeah.

— Why d’you call him Corrigan?

— Just happened that way.

— Never John?

— John was too ordinary for him.

He let the pieces of the napkin flutter to the floor and said something strange about words being good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don’t function for what things aren’t. He looked away. The neon in the window brightened as the light went down outside.

His hand brushed against mine. That old human flaw of desire.

I stayed another hour. Silence most of the time. Ordinary language escaped me. I stood up, a hollowness to my legs, gooseflesh along my bare arms.

— I wasn’t driving, I said.

Ciaran folded his body all the way across the table, kissed me.

— I figured that.

He pointed to the wedding ring on my finger.

— What’s he like?

He smiled when I didn’t reply, but it was a smile with all the world of sadness in it. He turned toward the bartender, waved at him, ordered two more Bloody Marys.

— I have to go.

— I’ll just drink them both myself, he said.

One for his brother, I thought.

— You do that.

— I will, he said.

Outside, there were two tickets in the window of the Pontiac — a parking fine, and one for a smashed headlight. It was enough to almost knock me sideways. Before I drove home to the cabin, I went back to the window of the bar and shaded my eyes against the glass, looked in. Ciaran was at the counter, his arms folded and his chin on his wrist, talking to the bartender. He glanced up in my direction and I froze. Quickly I turned away. There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface.

There is, I think, a fear of love.

There is a fear of love.

WHAT HE HAS SEEN OFTEN in the meadow: a nest of three red-tailed hawks, chicks, on the ledge of a tree branch, in a thick intertwine of twigs. The chicks could tell when the mother was returning, even from far away. They began to squawk, a happiness in advance. Their beaks scissored open, and a moment later she winged down toward them, a pigeon in one foot, held by the talons. She hovered and alighted, one wing still stretched out, shielding half the nest from view. She tore off red hunks of flesh and dropped them into the open mouths of the chicks. All of it done with the sort of ease that there was no vocabulary for. The balance of talon and wing. The perfect drop of red flesh into their mouths.