Colum McCann - Thirteen Ways of Looking

(He has, he must admit, no idea yet.)

What he does know is that the sense of cold seclusion is important: not only because it is a New Year’s Eve story, but because it freezes Sandi in her cube of human loneliness, like most of us, at the unfolding of a year, looking backward and forward, both. Not only that, but the reader must begin to feel the cold that claws Sandi up there on the 308-meter ridge: so much so that she, or he, almost inhabits the very trees that want to step off the cliff. We should feel our own eyelashes freeze, and clench our cheeks to stop our own teeth chattering, because, like Sandi, we have something we must see, or understand, or at least imagine into existence, far away, and we, too, have a distant hope that Sandi will say something into her satellite phone, perhaps not a resolution, but at least a resolve of some sort, a small parcel of meaning.

(Though he still has little idea of what exactly she might say, she is beginning to become a little more complex for him, which he’s grateful for, since deadline is approaching, he has to have it finished by mid-October at the latest, and he hunkers down for three or four days, in late September, in his apartment on Eighty-sixth Street in New York, though he can still somehow feel the cold seeping in from the Afghan hills, and he wants now to capture the essence of what it feels like to be far from home, to be in two or three places all at once, and the simple notion that what we really need on New Year’s Eve is a sense of return, whether to his own original Dublin, or to Sandi’s Charleston, or to his New York, or Sandi’s birthplace which is, let’s say, Ohio, though Sandi of course could be born just about any place, but Ohio feels right, let’s say Toledo.)

5

This he now knows: Sandi Jewell is twenty-six years old, from Toledo, she lives in the south, she’s a Marine, she perches in her camouflage more than 1,010 feet high in the debilitating cold, wearing a balaclava, looking out at the Afghan dark on the eve of the new year, about to dial a loved one on a satellite phone at her side. (He wonders what might happen if once, a year ago, there were three space heaters in the lookout, but they leaked out a light so that a sniper took out another Marine simply by lining up the shot in the center of the heaters, a perfect mathematical triangulation, an incident Sandi might have been aware of when she volunteered to take the outpost, adding another sense of dread to the story — perhaps it could happen again, a leak of light from her satellite phone this time? After a few days he decides against it — it would be far too simple to embrace the ease of death by sniperfire, and what sort of New Year’s story might that be anyway?) The essence of Sandi’s story has begun to place layers upon layers, though he does not know yet who the loved one is, or what might eventually exist between them. Still, a certain mystery has begun to join things together.

6

What Sandi sees, or what he imagines Sandi can see: the boy lays his bicycle down in the driveway, somewhere suburban, a Legoland of houses, on the outskirts of Charleston. It is midafternoon in mid-America, eight and a half hours behind Afghanistan. He is a tall, thin handsome boy. Let’s say he is definitely her son (the desire to talk must be immense, and the potential for tragedy real: what might happen if she doesn’t get to talk to him? What happens if the line goes dead? What happens if a shot rings out in the night?). He is fourteen years old, tricky, of course, since Sandi was earlier established as twenty-six years old. (Is he really her son? Is that feasible? Is it even possible?) The boy lifts the corrugated garage door, his heart thumping in his blue-and-white-striped shirt, and he hears a shout from inside the house, a woman (let’s name her Kimberlee) trilling out to him (let’s name him Joel) to say: Quick, Joel, your mom’s about to call. And Joel is late, he knows he’s late, and he’s old enough now — almost fifteen in fact — to have a sweetheart and to know some things about the complexities of loss. He has spent an afternoon with her down there near the school bleachers on Lancaster Street. He has pledged himself to her, he will be with her later tonight when the real clock (the American clock) strikes midnight, but first he must talk to his second mother in Afghanistan from the kitchen of his first mother’s house.

(And though Joel calls her his “second mother,” and he has only known Sandi for four years, he has scrawled an ink tattoo inside his wrist, K & S. )

Joel hurries through the house, slings his jacket across the kitchen table, yanks up a chair, glances at Kimberlee, and says, while he stares at gaps in the hardwood floor: “What time is it now, where she is?”

7

Sandi sits in the dark, wearing a watch strapped to the outside of her wrist, over her tan Nomex fireproof gloves, waiting for the countdown. There have been problems with the phone signal in the past — dropped calls, endless ringing, failed satellites.

It is too early yet to call but she keys the phone alive anyway and touches the ridges of the numbers, a rehearsal.

Out beyond the outpost, nothing but the dark and the white frost on the land. The stars themselves like bulletholes above her.

8

He wants desperately to create gunfire across the Afghan hills, or to see a streak of light that is not just a metaphor — an RPG perhaps, or the zip of an actual bullet into one of the sandbags — to force a tracerline across the reader’s brain, to ignite alternative fireworks on the eve of the new year, and to increase the intensity of the possible heartbreak.

But the simple fact is that the Afghan night remains quiet, no matter what he imagines, not even the howl of a stray dog, or the faint hint of voices in the outpost.

At two minutes to midnight Sandi drops the balaclava from between her teeth and leans across to pick up the satellite phone once more. (He has an inkling now of what she might say to her son, or rather Kimberlee’s son.) Sandi clicks the flashlight on the front of her helmet, thumbs the phone on forcefully. The front panel lights up. She has been given a code. She takes off her gloves in order to dial the numbers precisely. She has a botched tattoo on the flap of skin between her thumb and forefinger, the initials of someone else’s name from long ago, she does not think of him anymore.

It is midnight in Afghanistan and early afternoon in South Carolina.

9

He is writing this (almost) last part now in France where he is traveling after a book event. It is the middle of September and deadline is looming. Some things he knows for sure — Sandi will not die, she will simply pick up the phone, she will dial through, she will call her lover and her lover’s son, and she will simply say, “Happy New Year,” in the most ordinary way, and they will return the greeting, and life will go on, since this is what our New Year’s Eves are about, our connections, our bonds, no matter how inconsequential, and the story will be quiet and slip its way into its own new year.

10

Inside the kitchen on North Murray Avenue, Kimberlee stands at the counter, with her hands webbed wide, waiting for the call. Spread out in front of her is the prospect of a feast — chopped peppers, onions, a half pound of oysters, a cup of cooked shrimp, tomatoes, sprigs of thyme, lemon, lime, olive oil, salt, three cloves of garlic for the bouillabaisse she has planned.

Kimberlee has placed a second wineglass at the end of the table. She is thirty-eight years old, tall, slim, pretty, a university professor. She aches for the call. She has not talked to Sandi in a week, since just after Christmas, when they argued about the length of Sandi’s tour. The call itself has become a distant memory, a barely remembered pulse. Kimberlee listens to the wine gurgle against the side of the glass. This to her is the essence of the season: the loneliness, the longing, the beauty. She reaches for a spoon and begins to stir.