Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

At the door he took a quick look over his shoulder. In the upper reaches of the next-door building he noticed a few people leaning out of the windows, looking westward, pointing, but he ignored them, assumed it was a car crash or another morning altercation. He unlocked the metal door. If only he had turned around, paid attention, he might have been able to go upstairs and see it all unfolding in the distance. But he keyed himself in, pressed the button for the elevator, waited for the door to accordion open, and went up to the fourth floor.

In the corridor he stepped along in his plain black everyday shoes. The dark walls with a deep fungal smell. The squeak of his shoes sounded out in the quiet. The place had the summer blues. His office was a high-ceilinged room at the far end of the corridor. When he had first become a judge he’d had to share chambers in a grimy little box not fit for a shoeshine boy. He’d been astounded how he and his fellows were treated. There were mouse droppings in the drawers of his desk. The walls desperately in need of paint. Cockroaches would perch and twitter on the edge of the windowsill, as if they too just wanted to get out. But five years had gone by and he’d been shunted around from office to office. His was a more stately chambers now, and he was treated with a modicum more respect. Mahogany desk. Cut-glass inkwell. Framed photos of Claire and Joshua by the sea in Florida. A magnetized bar that held his paper clips. The Stars and Stripes on a standing pole behind him, by the window, so that sometimes it fluttered in the breeze. It wasn’t the world’s fanciest office, but it sufficed. Besides, he wasn’t a man to make frivolous complaints: he kept that powder dry in case he’d need it at other times.

Claire had bought him a brand-new swivel chair, a leather number with deep pouchy patterns, and he liked the moment, first thing every morning, when he sat and spun. On his shelves there were rows and rows of books. The Appellate Division Reports, the Court of Appeals Reports, the New York Supplements. All of Wallace Stevens, signed and arranged in a special row. The Yale yearbook. On the east wall, the duplicates of his degrees. And the New Yorker cartoon neatly framed by the doorway — Moses on the mountain with the Ten Commandments, with two lawyers peeping over the crowd: We’re in luck, Sam, not a word about retrospectivity.

He switched on his coffeepot, spread The New York Times on the desk, shook out a few packets of creamer. Sirens outside. Always sirens: they were the shadow facts of his day.

He was halfway through the business section when the door creaked open and another shiny head peeped itself around. It was hardly fair, but justice was largely balding. It wasn’t just a trend, but a fact. Together they were a team of shiny boys. It had been a phantom torment from the early days, all of them slowly receding: not many follicles among the oracles.

— G’morning, old boy.

Judge Pollack’s wide face was flushed. His eyes were like small shining metal grommets. Something of the hammerhead about him. He was blabbering about a guy who had strung himself between the towers. Soderberg thought at first it was a suicide, a jump off a rope suspended to a crane or some such thing. All he did was nod, turn the paper, all Watergate, and where’s the little Dutch boy when you need him? He made an off-color crack about G. Gordon Liddy putting his finger in the wrong hole this time, but it whizzed past Pollack, who had a small piece of cream cheese on the front of his black robe and some white spittle coming from his mouth. Aerial assault. Soderberg sat back in his chair. He was about to mention the stray breakfast when he heard Pollack mention a balancing bar and a tightrope, and the penny dropped.

— Say again?

The man Pollack was talking about had actually walked between the towers. Not only that, but he had lain down on the wire. He had hopped. He had danced. He had virtually run across from one side to the other.

Soderberg spun in the chair, a decisive quarter-turn, and yanked open the blinds and tried looking across the expanse. He caught the edge of the north tower, but the rest of the view was obstructed.

— You missed him, said Pollack. He just finished.

— Official, was it?

— Excuse me?

— Sanctioned? Advertised?

—’Course not. The fellow broke in during the night. Strung his wire across and walked. We watched him from the top floor. The security guards told us.

— He broke into the World Trade Center?

— A looney, I’d say. Wouldn’t you? Take him off to Bellevue.

— How did he get the wire across?

— No idea.

— Arrested? Was he arrested?

— Sure, said Pollack with a chuckle.

— What precinct?

— First, old boy. Wonder who’ll get him?

— I’m on arraignment today.

— Lucky you, said Pollack. Criminal trespass.

— Reckless endangerment.

— Self-aggrandization, said Pollack with a wink.

— That’ll brighten the day.

— Get the flashbulbs going.

— Takes some gumption.

Soderberg wasn’t quite sure if the word gumption was another phrase for balls or for stupidity. Pollack gave him a wink and a senatorial wave, closed the door with a sharp snap.

— Balls, said Soderberg to the closed door.

But it would indeed brighten the day, he thought. The summer had been so hot and serious and full of death and betrayal and stabbings, and he needed a little entertainment.

There were only two arraignment courts and so Soderberg had a fifty percent chance of landing the case. It would have to come through on time. It was possible that they could shove the tightrope walker swiftly through the system — if they found it newsworthy enough, they could do anything they wanted. They could have him squared away in a matter of hours. Fingerprinted, interviewed, Albany-ed, and away. Brought in on a misdemeanor charge. Perhaps him and some accomplices. Which made him think: How the hell had the walker gotten the cable from one side to the other? Surely the tightrope was a piece of steel? How did he toss it across? Couldn’t be made of rope, surely? Rope would never hold a man that distance. How then did he get it from one side to the other? Helicopter? Crane? Through the windows somehow? Did he drop the tightrope down and then drag it up the other side? It gave Soderberg a shiver of pleasure. Every now and then there was a good case that would come along and add a jolt to the day. A little spice. Something that could be talked about in the backrooms of the city. But what if he didn’t get the case? What if it went across the hall? Perhaps he could even have a word with the D.A. and the court clerks, strictly on the sly, of course. There was a system of favors in place in the courts. Pass me the tightrope walker and I’ll owe you one.

He propped his feet on the desk and drank his coffee and pondered the pulse of the day with the prospect of an arraignment that wasn’t, for once, dealing with pure drudge.

Most days, he had to admit, were dire. In came the tide, out they went again. They left their detritus behind. He didn’t mind using the word scum anymore. There was a time when he wouldn’t have dared. But that’s what they mostly were and it pained him to admit it. Scum. A dirty tide coming in on the shores and leaving behind its syringes and plastic wrappers and bloody shirts and condoms and snotty-nosed children. He dealt with the worst of the worst. Most people thought that he lived in some sort of mahogany heaven, that it was a highfalutin job, a powerful career, but the true fact of the matter was that, beyond reputation, it didn’t amount to much at all. It landed the odd good table in a fancy restaurant, and it pleased Claire’s family no end. At parties people perked up. They straightened their shoulders around him. Talked differently. It wasn’t much of a perk, but it was better than nothing. Every now and then there was a chance for promotion, to go upstairs to the Supreme Court, but it hadn’t come his way yet. In the end so much of it was just mundanity. A bureaucratic babysitting.