Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness

“Now swear on it,” he says aloud to nobody.

“I swear.”

“Swear on your life that you ain’t gonna give her another dime.”

“I swear on it.”

All repeated twice.

Once he dials Information and gets a number for a Nathan Walker in Manhattan; he hears a voice answer and he replaces the receiver without saying a word. Then he picks up the receiver with his left hand, dials, lays the phone down a second time. For a moment suicide scratches the side of his brain. He lets it rest there and gouge a ditch into his thoughts.

* * *

We had a nice apartment, see. On West End Avenue. Up on the fifth floor, except we didn’t have a view or anything, but it was nice. I’d been making money on the ’scrapers. Back then an ironworker could make fifty grand a year. We had money in the bank. We were doing okay, even though the money’s going down some. The union had good insurance.

Thirty-two or so.

Now? Thirty-six, I think. How old’re you?

Take it easy, don’t crash.

Anyways, I was staying in Lenora’s room. It’s with this yellow wallpaper and the aquarium and all, and she’s getting older; she’s got movie stars in there now, boys from school, singers too — Stevie Wonder, Kool & the Gang. She don’t like being away from the aquarium, but the room is for me to get my head together; that’s why I’m staying there. So she’s sleeping with Dancesca. But Lenora, she comes in and visits all the time. I rig a blue light there above the aquarium and it goes shining down into the plastic, and she likes that. It was bright at the top and darker at the bottom, just like a real aquarium. Even ol’ Faraday woulda liked that. Once we went together down to Penn Station, me and Lenora, and we got ourselves one of those photos in the photo booth with the swivel seat, four pictures of her and me, and they went on top of the aquarium. See, I still got one, see?

Yeah.

And, see, every day she brings in plates of food to me. Sandwiches and coffee and all. Milk in a nice little jug. Even the crusts cut off the sandwiches. And she’s there, looking at me and asking me, Daddy, why can’t you have any knives with your food? Daddy, how come Mommy says you can’t have shoelaces?

Sometimes Dancesca comes in too, and she sits on the end of the bed and she cuts my hair and says to me, she says, It could happen to anybody. It weren’t your fault. And she’d bring Lenora in to kiss me good night and all. She’s the best child. I mean, she got that aquarium on her wall, right? And there’s Walker, at the very top. I found the negative in the kitchen cupboard, went to the photo shop, made another copy, then another and another, until he was swimming all around me. I made I don’t know how many copies. I suppose I shoulda gone to the nuthouse but I paid a couple of visits, outpatient. And they was telling me that I was fine, that I was just inventing this all for myself. They had all these speech people and psychologists and all saying how I’m very interesting, ’cause there’s no chemical imbalance, when they give me drugs it just gets worse, so they don’t give me drugs anymore, and Dancesca, she tells them she’ll look after me. And she does. She looks after me real good. She makes sure I’m okay. And dinnertime, she lays out the table real nice with a cloth and she doesn’t say a word even though I’m doing that switch with the fork still. And we’re talking small talk and happy enough, I’m getting my head together. But I’m drinking some, getting the money from Dancesca’s purse. Going up to the liquor store where they got it cheap. Sometimes a bottle a day.

Uh-huh.

She’s cutting hair to make money, and Lenora’s at school, and I’m home most of the time and we even bought a new TV after I smashed the first one.

I don’t know, Angie. Maybe I was.

Shit, everyone’s a bit crazy, ain’t they?

What?

No.

Don’t leave.

Stay here. The sun’ll come up. Here, look, I got three pairs of socks. Put ’em on. Put ’em on your hands, I don’t care. I don’t care about nothing anymore. I never told nobody this story. Here. Put them on.

Why don’t you want the blue ones?

Oh. Yeah. No problem. I forgot.

But they ain’t washcloths.

Whatever.

Don’t get frostbit.

Look, look how it is. Ain’t it nice? Don’t leave, Angie. Just sit here till the sun comes up, then we see it real nice.

Uh-huh.

Tide’s out.

Yeah yeah yeah, cold sand, ain’t that something?

Don’t leave, Angie.

Elijah?

Elijah’s got nothing but a fucked-up shoulder. He’ll kill you anyway. You saw what he did to Castor. Just pull the goddamn blanket up and listen.

Angela. Listen. You gotta tell me something.

You gotta tell me that y’ain’t gonna hate me.

Just tell me.

’Cause I don’t want you to hate me.

Just tell me that, ’cause Dancesca she hates me, Lenora too. They went off, and I never even seen them since. So you just gotta tell me that you ain’t gonna hate me.

* * *

At the Port Authority bus station he meets Dancesca and Lenora. They have spent two weeks in Chicago with relatives. The three of them take a taxi home together. He asks the driver to stop near a parking meter and he does his trick, but Dancesca doesn’t watch; she keeps her head down as he moves from one parking meter to the other. He stretches his arms out, imploring her to watch, until Lenora rolls the window down and says, “Mommy wants you to get back in the car.”

* * *

It’s been bad, see. I been going a little crazy. Lenora, she’s been asking questions, like, Why you don’t have a job anymore? And, Why does Mommy say you’re sick? And, Why does Mommy want to go see her cousins in Chicago all the time? Little things like this. She’s about nine or ten and she’s looking up at me and asking me these questions. Sometimes, when I go to the bathroom or I’m watching TV or something, she’d go switching my photo around in her aquarium, so sometimes I’d be at the bottom where all the plankton was. That’s making me feel bad, but I don’t say anything, not a word. She’s got these small eyes for a little girl, most kids got big eyes, but hers are small. And a scar on her ear where she fell off a tricycle. She’s looking up at me. I know it sounds stupid, but it’s the little things break your heart.

Yeah, I remember the story. You were in the backseat.

Now you see it, Angie. Well, almost. When the sun is up fully.

Yeah. I remember that too. Your old man.

That Cindy girl sure can dance.

But listen. I have to tell you this.

Listen.

See, a lot of the time we go down the park and it’s all three of us, and if it’s wet I slide down twice with the towel underneath my ass and if it’s dry she climbs on up, but she’s getting a little old for the slide, she don’t like it too much, but she likes the swings, maybe they remind her of when times were all right with us, before I was so fucked up in the head. Maybe she’s remembering that. Sometimes Dancesca and me sit on the benches and she says to me, You gotta pull yourself together. And I know that. I mean, it’s not me that’s doing this to me. It’s just my head. It’s just, you know, the playground—

The one on 97th there.

Yeah.

All right, already. Just take it easy, okay?

Put your head on my shoulder. There you go. That’s nice. Don’t that feel good?

I ain’t whispering.

I ain’t crying.

Angie.

I’m in the room, ya know? I been in the room a few days. Just laying there. Alone. And then I hear all these kids coming in and I say to myself, What the hell’s that? I came outa the room and all these kids are there with nice clothes on and all. Lenora’s friends. It got all silent when I came out. And there’s this big cake on the table. Lenora, she comes up to me and says, It’s my birthday, Daddy. And then I get that hollowness in my stomach like I told you about, and I says, Happy birthday, happy birthday. And I see this huge cake on the table. So I go into the kitchen and get some money out of Dancesca’s purse, the last five dollars. We don’t have a lot of money, even our savings gone down. I weren’t working on the ’scrapers no more. Hid that money in my pocket. Went on outside and went to the supermarket where they got a cake shop. But when I came back it wasn’t as big as the first cake. So I go to the kitchen drawer, and Dancesca she grabs me by the wrist and says, Put that knife back. I’m only gonna cut the cake, I says. And she says, It’s Lenora’s birthday, let Lenora cut the cake. And I says, Please, I just wanna arrange the pieces.