Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness

A shorn man wrapped in the darkest of coats, the inside lining flapping down beyond his thighs, he looks thin and sculpted by some terrible human degradation, his construction boots wrapped in tape, his purple hat tight down over his ears, motes of dust in the light shaft crashing off him at all angles as if the light itself mightn’t even want him. Yet he moves with a strange fluidity, a sureness, balancing on the edge of a rail as he goes. Clarence Nathan has revisited himself, arrived full circle, each shadow of himself leading to the next, which is just another shadow in the fun-house darkness. He shivers when he sees a small rat moving at the side of the tracks as if it might accompany him the rest of his life. Picking up a handful of pebbles, he flings them at the rat and walks on.

Thirty-nine days of snow and ice and ferocious cold. His feet so numb there is hardly any pain. Already the stubble beginning to darken his cheeks. But he moves quickly, with intent, solitary and sure.

At Elijah’s place he stops and puts his ear to the door and is not surprised by the sound of radio music drifting underneath the giggles of Angela. With his eyes closed, he can imagine Elijah and the thump of love moving through his body, even the smashed shoulder and the shattered kneecap, and the tender way Elijah might be preparing to strike her pure and hard in the low part of her stomach. Clarence Nathan notices that the door has been fixed and that Elijah has appropriated Faraday’s toilet seat. For a moment a smile flickers across his lips, until he thinks of Castor and the smile is gone, and he wants to burst in upon them, but he doesn’t and he knows he won’t; he never will. He will leave them to their own brutalities and all the winters yet to come.

“Angela,” he whispers. “Angie.”

He throws a shadow punch and moves on, past the pile of cans and the shopping cart and the baby carriage and the dead tree and the scent of shit and piss and every other ounce of imaginable worldly filth. He touches his fingers against the dead tree, wondering if it could someday bloom. He chuckles at the absurdity, fabulous petals erupting like the sound of some distant piano played years ago underneath the earth. There was a tree once in Harlem, the Tree of Hope — his grandfather told him — and it was chopped down when Seventh Avenue was widened. A slice of it still remains in an uptown theater.

A memory whips through Clarence Nathan as he moves through the tunnel. All that ancestry of song. Lord, I ain’t seen a sunset since I come on down.

He sticks a hand in his pocket, finds a pink handball in the depths. As he rolls the handball around in his palm he spies a movement in the shadows, and his eyes are so well trained now that he sees it is a man, long-haired, bearded, filthy, and he realizes that he is looking at Treefrog. “Heyyo,” he says, and the figure nods back and smiles. Clarence Nathan turns his back and slams the ball against the wall. The slaps on either side of his body begin to heat him and he feels the figure still staring. Clarence Nathan keeps the ball in the air, back and forth over the dead tree, and, as he plays, all inheritance moves through him: Walker in Georgia staring at a snakeskin hung on a wall, Walker putting his face to a pillow that moves in his dreams, Walker by the East River with men in their hats, Walker in joy painting halfness on pigeons, Walker with his fingers over a ribboned piano, Walker pounding his fists into an automobile, Walker by a lakeside with a tiny girl, Walker with garnet paper wrapped around a cork, Walker looking up at him from a subway track, Walker in a red hat, Walker on a massive torrent of water, what do we do now, son, now that we’re happy?

The rubbery thump against the wall is the only sound in the tunnel as Clarence Nathan keeps the ball aloft.

Catching the ball in his right hand, he bites the inside of his cheeks. He looks over his shoulder and down the length of the tunnel with all the light shafts spilling through. Still in the shadows stands Treefrog, watching him. Theirs is a silent communication, a nod to each other, an understanding. Clarence Nathan flings the ball against the wall and allows himself a laugh as he catches it. He places the ball in the crook of one of the branches of the tree and walks away, toward the nest.

The stalactite has begun to drip. He stretches out a hand, just one hand, and holds the drops in his palm, scrubs his face, and his eyes shine with alacrity: Walker pressing his thumb down on the skipping needle of a phonograph, Walker driving his shovel into the brown bank, the swish of paddle as Walker sits knee-bent in a low boat of moss, Walker reading a newspaper to a tunnel ceiling, the spoke song of Walker on a bicycle with cages balanced delicately on the handlebars, Walker carving initials on a shovel.

Clarence Nathan crosses the tracks and comes to the column, grabs the handhold, and drags himself up. His body is assured, each move comes around to the same move, he could walk these columns and beams endlessly. Ten feet in the air, he knows that — even if he wanted to fall — there would be a difficulty in it, his arms would fight against memory and the limbs would catch and hold and he would be dead but his body might still be alive. The beam is still cold to the touch. Maybe his skin will stick to the beam and leave the imprint of his hand forever. He walks across the beam, not counting the steps, up along the second column, and across the final catwalk. He shunts himself fluently over the low wall, near the traffic light, and looks down at the shadow of Treefrog, alone now in the tunnel. Clarence Nathan sits for a moment with his eyes closed and then feels about on the floor for a candle, finds only one stub, which he lights. A small ring of light around him: Walker with a billy club leaving a scar on his forehead, Lenora tumbling from a tricycle, Walker in a shop full of tuxedos, Lenora coming home swinging a schoolbag, Walker with the heel of his palm smashing into the teeth of a welder, Lenora pulling her bedsheets around herself, Walker dressing himself in front of a mirror, Lenora shifting the old man’s photo on a wall, Walker winded under the awning of a cigar shop, Lenora staring at pieces of a birthday cake, Walker dipping down to catch a hat, the straps of a girlhood nightdress falling, Walker guiding a canoe down the tunnel, return and collection, return and collection, Walker swiping parts of Lenora from the trees, Walker on a geyser of water, rising, rising, rising.

* * *

Leaning over the side of his nest, Clarence Nathan looks down into the shadows, and with half a grin he says to the darkness, “Our resurrections aren’t what they used to be.”

* * *

It doesn’t come to him like a burning bush or a pillar of light, but he grins and then he touches the end of the bedside table with his foot.

The candle wax lies in a hardened puddle on the table. He nudges the table again and watches the white lake move with the sway. Then he hits the table harder with his foot and it feels good to him, it feels right; he hits it harder so that it topples for a second and then rights itself. A morning train rushes through the tunnel, but he ignores it, steps back. He swings with just one foot and the bedside table crashes against the wall and the white lake is upside down now, and — with tremendous energy — he lifts the bedside table and smashes it against the wall, hears the crack and splinter. Reaching down for the pieces, he breaks them into different bits. He throws the pieces down from his nest to where they land in the tunnel, away from the tracks.

Clarence Nathan swings his boot at the traffic light. It vibrates against the barbed wire and hook that holds it in the wall. He takes off both his overcoats and throws them on his bed and begins wrenching at the light. The light trembles minutely, dust leaks out from the hook hole, and he keeps pulling until it frees itself. He falls backward with the light in his hands and chuckles. Lifting the traffic light — take it easy, don’t crash — he puts a fist hole in each piece of glass, green first, then yellow, then red. He grins as he hefts the traffic light and throws it over the catwalk. The light spins through the air and goes down and smashes, and the colored glass shatters further and splays in the tunnel gravel.