Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness

He keeps his head down and counts his steps as he goes. A curious thing, he likes to land on an even number, although it’s not absolutely necessary. It is just a game of his. In the park, he often gets bothered by male hookers offering him a blow job. The park is one of their favorite haunts. “Not today,” he says, and sometimes he is whistled at; they like it when he wears sleeveless T-shirts, his arms are fretted with muscle. At the door of his apartment there is the traditional joke—“Honey, I’m home!”—and Dancesca appears as if she’s just climbed out of the television set, makeup precise, hair in beads, dark skin, white teeth, their young daughter holding on to her leg. In the hallway, Clarence Nathan takes off his shirt and Dancesca rubs her fingers over his chest and pinches him playfully. Lenora stands outside the shower room as he cleans off the day’s work. When he emerges, he lifts her and spins her in the air above his head until she says, “Daddy, I’m dizzy.” After dinner, he puts the child to bed. On her bedroom wall Lenora has tacked up a huge sheet of see-through blue plastic, which she calls her aquarium. Beneath the plastic there are cut-out photos of fish, shells, plants, people. A Polaroid of her parents, at their wedding, is positioned near the top of the aquarium where her favorite people go. Photographed outside a registry office in 1976, Clarence Nathan wears a wide brown tie and flared trousers. His hair is short. Dancesca is already in a maternity smock. They look embarrassed, bewildered. She folds her hands over the stomach bulge. He has his fingers knotted together nervously. Their shoulders barely touch. But vaguely triumphant in the background is Walker, who, without a hat, is pointing comically at his own bald crown.

There is also a black-and-white of Walker posing with other sandhogs in the mouth of a tunnel. All the other men seem stern under their large mustaches, but Walker, covered in muck, looks happy. A shovel leans against his hip, his hands are folded beneath his arms, and his muscles bulge.

Before she goes to sleep, Lenora shifts the photos around in the aquarium. Clarence Nathan sits by her bedside. When she finally nods off, he blows her a kiss from the doorway. Sometimes, for fun, he closes his eyes and walks blind through the rooms. The apartment is small and old, yet clean, with a stereo, a flowered couch, an old-fashioned television set, a kitchen full of red and white machinery. The bathtub had once been situated in the living room, but it is discarded now, filled with junk now and covered with a tarp. Along the walls there are framed sketches of New York storefronts, presents from Walker.

Popping open a beer, Clarence Nathan sits on the couch beside Dancesca and they watch television. In the late evening they make love, and Dancesca moves under him like a river. Afterward they settle into television shows once more and he likes this dullness, this rhythm. He wants his grandfather to come live with them, but Walker says he will die in Harlem; he will die in the room where he spends his days chatting with the only ghosts in the world worth their salt; he will die with a whisper for each of them: Sean Power, Rhubarb Vannucci, Con O’Leary, Maura, Clarence, Louisa Turiver, and, most of all, Eleanor, who gives him a rude and lovely smile as she adjusts her hair and shunts herself up onto the bathroom sink.

Treefrog’s foot moves forward to steady Angela as he guides her on the beam.

“Just a couple more steps,” he says to her. “A couple more and you’re there.”

Her arms flail wide, and he pins them to her body. He wraps his own arms around her and feels the warmth of her fur coat. Her feet inch along the beam, and just before they reach the low wall of his elevated nest she lunges forward and grabs it with both hands.

“I made it,” says Angela, as she climbs across the low wall and smiles. “That’s easy.”

He swings in front of her, takes two steps, lights a candle on the bedside table.

“Wow,” she says.

“It used to be a storage room. They kept their tunnel stuff up here. I think there musta been a ladder or a stairs up to it one time, but there ain’t anymore. Hardly anybody ever been up here.”

“What the hubcaps for?”

“Plates.”

“Man,” she says. “A traffic light!”

“Faraday found that.”

“You got the electric?”

“I told you, no.”

“Wow. How big is this place?”

“Goes all the way back to a cave there at the back.”

“Treefrog the Caveman.”

“Gonna draw a petroglyph.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing. Listen, we gotta fix those cuts, Angela. Your eye’s bleeding.”

“It don’t hurt me none,” she says, touching her eye.

“It’s just ’cause you got your adrenaline going,” he says. “We should fix it before it begins to hurt.”

She picks her handbag off the floor. “Do I look okay, Treefy?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re lying.”

She rummages in her handbag and then she begins sobbing. “Elijah’s gonna kill us.”

“We’ll hide in the back,” he says, and he grabs a candle and they duck into the rear cave. He puts the candle on the makeshift shelf, and the light makes strange flickers against the blasted-out rock. She puts her hand to her nose.

“Man, you shit in this place,” she says.

“No, I don’t.”

“Smells like shit. I don’t like it here. I want my shoes. I want my mirror.”

“See, all my maps,” he says, pointing to a row of Ziploc bags.

“I don’t care about maps. Elijah’s gonna kill us.”

She moves out from the cave into his front room once more. There is still a tiny bit of light from the grills across the tunnel. “I ain’t staying here, no way. He’ll kill us.”

“Sit on the bed,” he says.

“No way, Treefy.”

“I won’t touch you.”

She fingers her loose front tooth. “He’ll definitely kill us.”

“You should see a doctor.”

She thumbs the tooth back and forth in her gums and whimpers, “No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t like doctors. Excepting Doctor Treefrog.”

He smiles and motions to the yellow canister at the foot of the bed. “I’ll boil some water, and then I’ll clean your face.”

“I’m thirsty.”

“I don’t have any drugs.”

She moves tentatively across the dirt floor to the carpet, and then she sits on the bed. Treefrog lights the remnants of the firewood and newspapers. Angela warms her hands over the fire and then fidgets with an empty cassette box that she finds on the ground. She uses the edge of the inlay card to clean the gaps in her lower teeth. She picks the plaque from the card with her fingers and flicks it away into the fire.

He moves backward, not wanting to frighten her, and sits on the floor at the foot of the bed while the water boils.

“It hurts now,” says Angela, and she climbs into his sleeping bag.

“Gonna fix you up when the water boils.”

“It really really hurts.”

“I know.” Then, after a long silence he says, “Wonder where Castor is? I haven’t seen her for a few hours.”

“How she get up here?” Angela asks.

“I have to lift her.”

She tucks herself further into the sleeping bag. “You gonna look after me, Treefy?”

And he remembers how, when Lenora was five, she got a high fever and he stayed home from the skyscrapers for a week while Dancesca worked. He bought groceries at the local supermarket. He heated cans of chicken soup on the stove. Lenora lay in the bed next to the blue plastic sheet. Father and daughter, they went through every photo in the house. She picked out the ones she liked. He got extra copies made, so Lenora could arrange them in the aquarium. When her fever climbed higher, he smoothed a damp cloth across Lenora’s brow and spooned the soup delicately, blowing on it first to make sure it wouldn’t burn her tongue.