Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

Nonchalance. Ease. In the dark of tunnel now. Between Fulton and Wall Street. All the suits and haircuts getting ready to pile out.

There is no new rumble from the train and he likes these silences, gives him time to scope out the walls. He takes a quick look down the car to make sure there’re no cops, places one foot on the chains and shunts himself up, grabs the lip of the car, one-arms himself high. If he stood on the roof he could touch the curve of the tunnel — good place for a tag — but he holds on to the lip of the car and peers out over the edge. Some red and white markings on the walls where they curve. A few yellow lights sulfurous in the distance.

He waits for his eyes to adjust, for the little retina stars to leave. Along the rear distance of the train, small bars of color bleed out from the edge of each car and spray outward. Nothing on the walls, though. A tagging Antarctica. What did he expect? Hardly going to be any writers downtown. But you never know. That would be the genius. That would be the point. Buff this, maricón.

He feels the chain jiggle beneath his feet, the first warning of movement, and he holds a little tighter to the rim of the car. None of the bombers ever get the ceiling. Virgin territory. He should start a movement himself, a brand-new space. He looks out along the length of the train, then goes a little higher on his toes. At the far end of the tunnel, he spies a patch of what could be paint on the east wall, a tag he hasn’t seen before, something quick and oblong, with what looks like a tinge of red around silver, a P or an R or an 8 , maybe. Clouds and flames. He should make his way back through the cars — among the dead and dreaming — and get closer to the wall, decipher the tag, but just then the train jolts a second time and it’s a warning signal — he knows it — he hops back down, braces himself. As the wheels grind, he trills the sighting through his mind, matches it up against all the old tags in other parts of the tunnel, and he figures it’s brand new, it must be, yes, and he gives a quiet fist pump — someone’s come and tagged downtown.

Within seconds the train is in the pale station light of Wall Street and the doors are hissing open, but his eyes are closed and he is mapping it out, the height, the color, the depth of the new tag, trying to put a geography on it for the way home, where he can take it back, own it, photograph it, make it his.

A radio sound. The static moving toward him. He leans out. Cops. Coming up from the end of the platform. They’ve seen him, for sure. Going to drag him out, give him a ticket. Four of them, belts jiggling. He slides open the door to the car, ducks inside. Waits for the slap of a hand on his shoulder. Nothing. He leans back against the cool metal of the door. Catches sight of them sprinting out past the turnstiles. Like there’s some fire to get to. All of them clanging. Handcuffs and guns and nightsticks and notepads and flashlights and God knows what else. Someone’s bought it, he thinks. Someone’s gone and bought it.

He squeezes sideways through the closing doors, holding the camera sideways so it doesn’t get scratched. Behind him, the door hisses shut. A jaunt in his step. Out the turnstile and up the stairs. To hell with the barbershop. Irwin can wait.

IT’S EARLY IN THE MORNING and the fluorescents are flickering. We’re taking a break from the graphics hack. Dennis gets the blue-box program running through the PDP-10 to see if we can catch a good hook.

It’s Dennis, Gareth, Compton, and me. Dennis is the oldest, almost thirty. We like to call him Grandpa — he did two tours in ’Nam. Compton graduated U.C. Davis. Gareth’s been programming for must be ten years. Me, I’m eighteen. They call me the Kid. I’ve been hanging out at the institute since I was twelve.

— How many rings, guys? says Compton.

— Three, says Dennis, like he’s already bored.

— Twenty, says Gareth.

— Eight, I say.

Compton flicks a look at me.

— The Kid speaks, he says.

True enough, most of the time I just let my hackwork do the talking. It’s been like that since I sneaked in the basement door of the institute, back in ′68. I was out skipping school, a kid in short pants and broken glasses. The computer was spitting out a line of ticker tape and the guys at the console let me watch it. The next morning they found me sleeping on the doorstep: Hey, look, it’s the Kid.

Nowadays I’m here all day, every day, and the truth is I’m the best hacker they got, the one who did all the patches for the blue-box program.

The line gets picked up on the ninth ring and Compton slaps my shoulder, leans into the microphone, and says to the guy in his smooth clip so as not to freak him out: Hi, yeah, don’t hang up, this is Compton here.

— Excuse me?

— Compton here, who’s this?

— Pay phone.

— Don’t hang up.

— This is a pay phone, sir.

— Who’s speaking?

— What number’re you looking for …?

— I have New York, right?

— I’m busy, man.

— Are you near the World Trade Center?

— Yeah, man, but…

— Don’t hang up.

— You must’ve got a wrong number, man.

The line goes dead. Compton hits the keyboard and the speed dial kicks in and there’s a pickup on the thirteenth ring.

— Please don’t hang up. I’m calling from California.

— Huh?

— Are you near the World Trade Center?

— Kiss my ass.

We can hear a half-chuckle as the phone gets slammed down. Compton pings six numbers all at once, waits.

— Hi, sir?

— Yes?

— Sir, are you in the vicinity of downtown New York?

— Who’s this?

— We’re just wondering if you could look up for us?

— Very funny, ha-ha.

The line goes dead again.

— Hello, ma’am?

— I’m afraid you must have the wrong number.

— Hello! Don’t hang up.

— I’m sorry, sir, but I’m in a bit of a hurry.

— Excuse me …

— Try the operator, please.

— Bite me, says Compton to the dead line.

We’re thinking that we should pack it all in and go back to the graphics hack. It’s four or five in the morning, and the sun’ll soon be coming up. I guess we could even go home if we wanted to, catch a few zees instead of sleeping under the desks like usual. Pizza boxes for pillows and sleeping bags among the wires.

But Compton hits the enter key again.

It’s a thing we do all the time for kicks, blue-boxing through the computer, to Dial-A-Disc in London, say, or to the weather girl in Melbourne, or the time clock in Tokyo, or to a phone booth we found in the Shetland Islands, just for fun, to blow off steam from the programming. We loop and stack the calls, route and reroute so we can’t be traced. We go in first through an 800 number just so we don’t have to drop the dime: Hertz and Avis and Sony and even the army recruiting center in Virginia. That tickled the hell out of Gareth, who got out of ’Nam on a 4-F. Even Dennis, who’s worn his OCCIDENTAL DEATH T-shirt ever since he came home from the war, got off on that one big-time too.

One night we were all lazing around and we hacked the code words to get through to the president, then called the White House. We layered the call through Moscow just to fool them. Dennis said: I have a very urgent message for the president. Then he rattled off the code words. Just a moment, sir, said the operator. We nearly pissed in our pants. We got past two other operators and were just about to get through to Nixon himself, but Dennis got the jitters and said to the guy: Just tell the president we’ve run out of toilet paper in Palo Alto. That cracked us up, but for weeks afterwards we kept waiting for the knock on the door. It became a joke after a while: we started calling the pizza boy Secret Agent Number One.