Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness

* * *

In the evening, Elijah shouts from beneath the catwalk and then slings a bloody plastic bag up into the nest, where it lands with a thump.

* * *

Before they leave the nest he chooses a section of floor that he hasn’t done in a long time. His hands trembling, he takes a new sheet of paper and draws a horizontal graph on one side and a long straight line below it, using the edge of a cigarette box to guide the pencil.

He walks through the nest, feeling the landscape with his boots. He shows Angela how to mark it. As he walks he calls out to her and she makes dots with the pencil where the floor of his nest rises, each half inch an increment on the graph, and she flicks the lighter and marks the paper carefully. He shuffles backward, knowing exactly what his heels will touch. He has to stoop low to step out of the cave. His feet touch against his collection of hubcaps, and Angela’s pencil traces the rim of a half circle. Toward the front of his nest, he steps on the mattress. It seems like a huge drop from the bed down to the floor once more. He feels his way with his hands over the bedside table, touches the length of a Sabbath candle, zooms down again, just misses bumping against the smashed traffic light, and comes to the end of the nest and the dropoff to the tunnel below. He returns along the same journey, making sure it is all correct, lingering over the mattress with his eyes closed.

The candle leaks down to its very last, white wax seeping into the dirt.

He finishes the graph — the cave, the bed, the Sabbath candle, the little hump of dirt where, in his grief, he just buried Castor — and, when he is done, the geography is one of massive valleys and cliffs and mountains and canyons, a difficult journey, he knows, even for God.

He winds some duct tape on his boots where a flap has come loose, swings his way onto the catwalk, and then helps Angela down to the tunnel floor. She comes tentatively, slowly. He carries blankets. “Where we going?” Angela asks. “Somewhere I been thinking about,” he replies. “I’m thirsty,” she says. And he whispers to her that they’re going to a place where she can find the candy man. She asks if he has enough money and he nods, yes. She skips across the tunnel and collects her high heels and shakes the snow out of them, and then she comes back and leans up on the tips of her toes and kisses him and says, “Come on. I hope you ain’t lyin’.”

He wipes his eyes dry. And then he says that if he sees Elijah he will kill him this time without a doubt, he will crush his skull, he will strangle him, he will mash him into the ground beside Castor’s body. But as they move along the tunnel through all the dimensions of darkness they don’t hear a soul, and when they reach topside it is cold and clear without any snow. They walk through the park and up the street and, outside an all-night store where he buys cigarettes, Angela pulls up her collar and touches the bruises on her face and then she stops for a moment, smiles—“Candy,” she says — and overdoses her mouth with lipstick in anticipation.

He was living up there on 131st Street. He’d got himself mostly silence for a life now. But you see I loved him more than anything else in the world, so we’d all visit much as we could. Like I told you, he’d been making furniture. But for some reason he took to deciding, right at the very end of his life, that he’d make a fiddle. And he got some wood and he carved it out and it was shaped like a fiddle — like this, ya know? Some people call it a violin. He had garnet paper, and he wrapped it around a cork and he sat out there all day, varnishing and carving and sanding. Then he got some horsehair, shit knows where, and strung his-self a bow. He said that music’d been some sort of gift in his life, there’d been this important piano and all. My grandmother even played a piano down the tunnels, but that’s something else altogether. Wrap yourself in that blanket there, sister. Anyways, yeah. So he’d be there making tea in his apartment and waiting to go down to the stoop to work on his fiddle and he had this thing, this tea cosy, to keep the pot warm. It belonged to my grandmother’s mother, Maura O’Leary. And one day when he’s making tea he just leaves it on his head! It was something his kids did to him once. Even did it for me when I was a kid. Just cause he liked it, it was funny to him. And maybe he liked it there, on his own head, like it was keeping his memories warm or something.

And he’d go on down and sit there on 131st with his half-made fiddle and this goddamn tea cosy on his head. He got laughed at, but he didn’t care; he was dying, he allowed hisself some of that there eccentricity, ya know? I bought him a Walkman once — I had money back then — but he didn’t take no truck in those sort of things. Damn, he even got a small cosy for my Lenora, but she didn’t like to wear it, can’t rightly blame her. We was visiting lots and sitting out there with him on the stoop and those were the good days, the best of days. And we was all there — Lenora too — when he played that fiddle for the first time. Man, he played so bad, it sounded terrible, man; it was awful, right? But it was beautiful too. And he sang this song which is a blues song which don’t go with no fiddle, and it goes, Lord, I’m so lowdown I think I’m looking up at down. We was so happy sitting there on the stoop that we went changed the words, and we were singing, Lord, I’m so high up I believe I’m looking down at up. Cars going by. We even heard some gunshots far on down the street, but we didn’t pay no mind.

Which is one of the things I always do find myself thinking about. Looking up at down and looking down at up. I never heard nicer than that, no matter which way you believe it.

I know you’re cold, sister, but I’m cold too. And, man, it was the coldest day when I went to his apartment. Dancesca and Lenora, they’re making visits to her family; we all of us got two families no matter which way we think on it. Like ol’ Faraday. I went on up the stairs and I was smoking then — no, no — cigarettes; cigarettes, sister — and so I always made sure that I stubbed it out in the flowerpot just one floor down from his apartment, ’cause I told him I’d given up the smoking.

I told you. Later.

Anyways. Listen up.

Just me on my own, knocking on the door. Normally he’d be curled up on the couch or something, in some amount of pain, but this time he just opened the door for me — it was 1986 and he was eighty-nine and he was shoving close to timber. But this time he opened up the door and said, I saw you coming down the street, son. He was all done up in his overcoat and scarf and that damn stupid tea cosy. I went on in and took off my coat and sat myself down and turned on the TV and this baseball game came on, see, the Yankees and the Red Sox. He asked me who’s winning? And I told him the Yankees just scored, even though they hadn’t. He had this old friend who liked the Dodgers and the Yankees. So it made my grandaddy happy if the Yankees won. Yankees just hit a homer, I said. And then he just came on over to the couch and said, Let’s you and me take a walk. I says to him, It’s cold out, but he says, I’m feeling good today, I could walk a million miles. Let’s watch the game, I said, but then he just reached out and dragged me up from the seat — he had some power still — and we put on our overcoats and went outside. Here’s this old man with a tea cosy on his head and outside it’s colder’n fuck and the only ones about are a couple of guys selling smack and sprung.

We went on down the deli and bought ourselves a copy of the Daily News, and I never seen him with so much energy. I heard sometimes if you know you’re gonna die then you get energy.