Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness

Sometimes there is a mother and child in the park. He moves up quickly behind them and then covers his face and passes them, waits by a lamppost or a park bench, turns around, and sees that it isn’t them.

On an afternoon of torpor he sees a pigeon wing its way through the park; it swoops down toward the bottom of the hill and flies through the ironwork gate, and he wonders if the pigeon lives in the tunnel. He descends the embankment that leads to the gate. Some flowers are in bloom by the crab-apple trees. His feet slide in the muck. The gate is locked. Clarence Nathan gazes at the ironwork and at a bar that is bent backward. He waits a long time for his heart to quiet itself; then he bends his body and nudges his way through the gap. He stands for a long time on the metal platform, like he and his grandfather had once done. All is quiet. The tunnel is high and wide and gracious. Goose bumps on his skin when he descends the steps. He moves into the shadowy depths, across a heap of garbage. He opens a bottle and sips from it and looks up at the ceiling. He gazes along the tunnel and then he feels it: it rises right through him; it is primitive and necessary; and he knows now that he belongs here, that this is his place.

Shuffling along, he sees a dead tree planted in a mound of dirt and he sees murals lit from above. Further up the tunnel, he wonders about the world that is walking above him, all those solitary souls with their banalities and their own peculiar forms of shame. Dancesca is up there. And Lenora. Somewhere, he doesn’t know where. He has tried calling Chicago, but the phone gets slammed down. He has even thought of buying a bus ticket, but the ache is too tremendous within him; he can go nowhere except here; he likes it here, this darkness. He steps on a rail and can feel a slight rumble in his foot, and a few seconds later there is a train with its horn blasting and he steps aside to watch it pass and all the commuters are at their windows unaware and then the train is gone and all that is left is the imprint of its red lights on his eyes and he goes over to the wall and he lies beneath a mural of Salvador Dali’s Melting Clock and he has no idea what time it is.

He looks up through the ceiling grill, watching as the light leaves the sky. He runs his hands over his body and then punches a fist into the tunnel wall and does it again, and each time he can feel a crack in his hands. He keeps on thumping until there is blood on both fists and then he mixes the blood together and keeps on thumping until he is exhausted — he even slaps at it with his elbows — and then he stumbles into the blackest blackness and there is not a sound in the tunnel.

Clarence Nathan can feel the pain in his hands but he doesn’t care; he wishes he could murder them, annihilate them, suicide them; they form no meaningful connection to his wrists — more than anything he wants to get rid of his hands.

Returning to where he saw the pigeon flying, the cantankerous dark all around him, he bumps into a pillar. With all his remembered gymnastics, he climbs the pillar and finds himself on a narrow catwalk and walks along it, welcoming the pain in his hands — he doesn’t even feel it anymore, it is part of him, organic — and he is high up in the tunnel, all spectacular balance still in him; there is no sign of anything or anyone, it is cold and quiet and otherworldly, and he is amazed to find that the walkway leads to an elevated room, and he opens his hands to the dark room and falls there and curls up into himself and he doesn’t sleep.

* * *

The thing about it is, Angie, a man needs time to bury his hands. You listening? I could go bury my hand right here if I wanted to. Just watch me. See how it disappears. Right down here in the sand. Both of them. Angie. Angela. Where the goddamn hell you gone, anyway? Angie? See how they disappear.

He wakes alone on the Coney Island sand, high tide just five feet from him, pieces of plastic and filthy foam carried on the waves, all unaccustomed water noise around him, an anemic wolfhound sniffing at his feet. The dog runs off when he stirs. His toes are freezing in his boots, and he remembers giving Angela his socks. Moving to rub the sand from his hair, he is shocked at its shortness. He stands and shakes the sand from his clothes and the blankets, reaches in his pocket for his sunglasses, but they have been smashed, cracked into two pieces. He tries to balance the glasses on his ears but they fall off and he leaves them in the sand and looks out to sea, sensing a shift in the weather, morning redness far out on the horizon. It is strange to him how quickly the sun rises, the one abrupt moment before it moves into lethargy, its arc of slowness, its daily grind.

He turns his back and walks from the beach.

Up on the boardwalk there are some early joggers. A few straggling lovers hung over from nightclubs. A Russian Jew with a black hat and long beard and ringlets. A man with a silver cart is selling coffee and doughnuts.

Reaching inside his overcoat pocket, he still has, from Faraday’s funeral, a five-dollar bill with pins through it. He buys coffee and a bagel, walks a short way along the boardwalk, coughs and spits. More blood in his phlegm than ever before. He feels the heat of the coffee sear through him, and his stomach has shrunken so much he can eat only half the bagel. He tosses the rest to the wolfhound, which is still down below on the sand. The wolfhound sniffs at the half bagel and then turns and lopes away. In the distance, he hears the rumble of trains on the elevated track. He counts out a dollar twenty-five cents and makes his way toward the station. Slush at the edge of the sidewalk. The palms of his hands are scabbed over now from where he cut them.

He tips the rim of his wool hat and allows two old ladies to go past him.

“Good morning, ladies,” he says, and they ignore him, scuttle on.

He vaults the turnstile and nobody stops him. In the train he sits in the second carriage from the front, in the middle of the row of seats, away from the subway map. The train is full of well-dressed suits and skirts, one woman powdering her face. He notices that all the seats are taken except those around him, and he knows how badly he must smell, and for a moment he thinks about standing up and giving his seat to a woman — any woman — and then going to stand between the two carriages to let the wind drive the scent of him away. But instead he stretches out on the seat, curls his body, puts his hands in under his head, and rocks with the rhythm of the D-train. He has emptied himself of history, and everything Clarence Nathan Walker has ever known in his life stands between here and a tunnel.

* * *

“And ol’ Sean Power, Lord save his soul, ol’ Power said to me once that God just went ahead and let one go, God went ahead and farted. But I don’t like to think on it that way, son, even though it’s funny and it makes me laugh. Me, I think on it as something else altogether. And sometimes at night, see, I can still feel my whole self rising up through that river.”

* * *

He waits at the gate, in the sharp silence of a last snowfall, picks up a clump of snow and scrubs his face, feels refreshed, vital, alert. He has spent the morning at the bus station — fifteen dollars one way, they told him. In his pocket he has twenty dollars. Bottles and cans. Redemption money.

There is a single set of footprints in the snow, and he knows they belong to Angela. He places his boots in the prints and lengthens them.

Removing both his overcoats, Clarence Nathan squeezes his way through the gate, stands on the metal platform, and catches his breath as he puts the coats back on. Along the tunnel the brilliant blue light shafts slip in and out of the darkness. The flakes of snow make their long familiar journeys through the light — their spin, their fall, their gathering. He moves down the steps and walks quickly from light shaft to light shaft, enjoying the brief rage of brightness.