Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin (26 page)

On the first day the dealers and junkies hovered near his show. They could see how much he was making. He stuffed it all in the pockets of his flares, but he knew they’d roll him for it. For his final trick he scooped up the last of his money, put the hat on his head, rode a unicycle along the rope, then simply pedaled off the ten- foot drop, onto the ground and away through the Square, down Washington Place. He waved over his shoulder. He came back the next day for his rope—but the dealers liked the trick enough that they let him stay, and the tourists he brought were easy hits.

He rented a cold- water apartment on St. Marks Place. One night he strung a simple rope across from his bedroom to the fire escape of a Japanese woman opposite: she had lit candles on the ironwork for him. He stayed eight hours, and when he emerged he found that some kids had tossed shoes up on the wire, a city custom, the laces tied together. He crawled out on the wire, which had grown loose and dangerous, but was still taut enough to hold him, and walked back in through his window. He saw immediately that the place had been ransacked. Everything. Even his clothes. All the money was gone from the pockets of his pants too. He never saw the Japanese woman again: when he looked across the candles were gone. Nobody had ever stolen from him before.

This was the city he had crawled into—he was surprised to find that there were edges beneath his own edge.
Sometimes he would get hired to go to parties. He needed the money. There were so many expenses and his savings had been plundered. The wire itself would cost a thousand dollars. And then there were the winches, the false I.D.’s, the balancing pole, the elaborate ploys to get it all up to the roof. He’d do anything to get the money together, but the parties were awful. He was hired as a magician, but he told the hosts that he couldn’t guarantee that he’d do anything at all. They had to pay him, but still he might just sit there all night. The tension worked. He became a party regular. He bought a tuxedo and a bow tie and a cummerbund.
He’d introduce himself as a Belgian arms dealer, or an appraiser from Sotheby’s, or a jockey who’d ridden in the Kentucky Derby. He felt comfortable in the roles. The only place he was entirely himself, anyway, was high on the wire. He could pull a long string of asparagus from his neighbor’s napkin. He’d find a wine cork behind the ear of a host, or tug an endless unfolding scarf from a man’s breast pocket. In the middle of dessert he might spin a fork in the air and have it land on his nose. Or he’d teeter backward on his chair until he was sitting on only one leg, pretending he was so drunk that he’d hit a nirvana of balance. The partygoers were thrilled. Whispers would go around the tables. Women would approach him in a cleavage lean. Men would slyly touch his knee. He would vanish from the parties out a window, or the back door, or disguised as a caterer, a tray of uneaten hors d’oeuvres above his head.
At a party at 1040 Fifth Avenue he announced, at the beginning of dinner, that he would, by the end of the evening, tell the exact birth dates of every single man in the room. The guests were enthralled. One lady who wore a sparkling tiara leaned right into him.
So, why not the women as well?
He pulled away from her.
Because it’s impolite to tell the age of a lady.
He already had half the room charmed. He said nothing more the whole night: not a single word.
Come on,
the men said,
tell us our age.
He stared at the guests, switched seats, examined the men carefully, even running his fingers along their hairlines. He frowned and shook his head, as if baffled. When the sorbet came out, he climbed wearily into the middle of the table, pointed at each guest one by one and reeled off the birth dates of all but one in the room. January 29, 1947. November 16, 1898. July 7, 1903. March 15, 1937. September 5, 1940. July 2, 1935.
The women applauded and the men sat, stunned.
The one man who hadn’t been pegged sat back smugly in his chair and said,
Yes, but what about me?
The tightrope walker whisked his hand through the air:
Nobody cares when you were born.
The room erupted in laughter and the walker leaned over the women at the table and, one by one, he removed their husbands’ driver’s licenses, from their handbags, from their dinner napkins, from under their plates, even one from between her breasts. On each license, the exact birth date. The one man who hadn’t been pegged leaned back in his chair and announced to the table that he’d never carried his wallet, never would: he’d never be caught. Silence. The tightrope walker got down from the table, pulled his scarf around his neck, and said to the man as he waved from the dining room door:
February 28, 1935.
A flush went to the man’s cheeks as the table applauded, and the man’s wife gave a half- wink to the tightrope walker as he ghosted out the door.

^{there was an arrogance}
in it, he knew, but on the wire the arrogance became survival. It was the only time he could lose himself completely. He thought of himself sometimes as a man who wanted to hate himself. Get rid of this foot. This toe. This calf. Find the place of immobility. So much of it was about the old cure of forgetting. To become anonymous to himself, have his own body absorb him. And yet there were overlapping realities: he also wanted his mind to be in that place where his body was at ease.

It was so much like having sex with the wind. It complicated things and blew away and softly separated and slid back around him. The wire was about pain too: it would always be there, jutting into his feet, the weight of the bar, the dryness at his throat, the throb of his arms, but the joy was losing the pain so that it no longer mattered. So too with his breathing. He wanted his breath to enter the wire so that he was nothing. This sense of losing himself. Every nerve. Every cuticle. He hit it on the towers. The logic became unfixed. It was the point where there was no time. The wind was blowing and his body could have experienced it years in advance.

He was deep into his walk when the police helicopter came. Another small gnat in the air, but it didn’t faze him. Together both helicopters sounded like ligaments clicking. He was quite sure they would not be so stupid as to try to approach. It amazed him how sirens could overtake all other sounds; they seemed to drain upward. And there were dozens of cops out on the roof now, screaming at him, running to and fro. One of them was leaning out from the side of the columns on the south tower, held by a blue harness, his hat off, his body leaning outward, calling him a motherfucker, that he better get off the motherfucking wire right motherfucking now before he sent the motherfucking helicopter in to pluck him from the motherfucking cable, you hear me, motherfucker, right motherfucking now!—and the walker thought, What strange language. He grinned and turned on the wire and there were cops on the opposite side too, these ones quieter, leaning into walkie- talkies, and he was sure he could hear the crackle of them, and he didn’t want to taunt them but he wanted to remain: he might never walk like this again.

The shouting, the sirens, the dull sounds of the city. He let them become a white hum. He went for his last silence and he found it: just stood there, in the precise middle of the wire, one hundred feet from each tower, eyes closed, body still, wire gone. He took the air of the city into his lungs.

Someone on a megaphone was screaming at him now: “We’ll send in the helicopter, we’re sending the ’copter. Get off!”
The walker smiled.
“Get off now!”
He wondered if that was what the moment of death was about, the

He realized that he had thought only about the first step, never imagined the last. He needed a flourish. He turned toward the megaphone and waited a moment. He dropped his head as if in agreement. Yes, he was coming in. He lifted his leg. The dark form of his body showing to the people below. Leg held high for drama. Placed the side of his foot on the wire. The duck walk. And then the next foot and the next and then the next until it was pure machinery and then he ran—as quickly as he had ever run a highwire—using the center soles of his feet for grip, toes sideways, the balancing bar held far out in front of him, from the middle of the wire to the ledge.

The cop had to step back to grab him. The walker ran into his arms. “Motherfucker,” said the cop, but with a grin.
For years afterward he’d still be up there: slippered, dark- footed, agile.

It would happen at odd moments, driving along the highway, or shuttering down the cabin window with boards before a storm, or walking in the fields of long grass around the shrinking meadow in Montana. In midair again, the cable taut through his toe. Cross- weaved by the wind. A sense of sudden height. The city beneath him. He could be in any mood or any place and, unbidden, it returned. He might simply be taking a nail from his carpenter’s belt in order to hammer it into a piece of wood, or leaning across to open a car’s glove compartment, or turning a glass under a stream of water, or performing a card trick at a party of friends, and all of a sudden his body would be drained of everything else but the bloodrush of a single stride. It was like some photograph his body had taken, and the album had been slid out again under his eyes, then yanked away. Sometimes it was the width of the city he saw, the alleyways of light, the harpsichord of the Brooklyn Bridge, the flat gray bowl of smoke over New Jersey, the quick interruption of a pigeon making flight look easy, the taxis below. He never saw himself in any danger or extremity, so he didn’t return to the moment he lay down on the cable, or when he hopped, or half ran across from the south to the north tower. Rather it was the ordinary steps that revisited him, the ones done without flash. They were the ones that seemed entirely true, that didn’t flinch in his memory.

Afterward, he was immediately thirsty. All he wanted was water and for them to unsnap the wire: it was dangerous to leave it there. He said: “You must take down the wire.” They thought he was joking. They had no clue. It could tighten in the wind, snap, take off a man’s head. They pushed him toward the center of the roof. “Please,” he begged. He saw a man step toward the winch to loosen it, to take off the tension. He felt an enormous relief and tiredness sweep over him, sliding into his life again.

When he emerged from the towers, handcuffed, the onlookers cheered. He was flanked by cops, reporters, cameras, men in serious suits. The flashbulbs went off.

He had picked up a paper clip in the World Trade Center’s station command and it was easy enough to open the cuffs: they clicked with a little lateral pressure. He shook out his hand as he walked, then raised it to a cheer. Before the cops even realized what he had done, he snapped the handcuffs shut again, behind his back.

“ Smart- ass,” said the cop, a sergeant, pocketing the paper clip. But there was admiration in the sergeant’s voice: the paper clip would be a story forever.

The walker passed on through the gauntlet across the plaza. The squad car was waiting at the end of the steps. It was strange to revisit the world again: the slap of footsteps, the call of the hot- dog man, the sound of a pay phone ringing in the distance.

He stopped and turned to look at the towers. He could still make out the tightrope: it was being hauled in, slowly, carefully, attached to a chain, to a rope, to a fishing line. It was like watching a child’s Etch A Sketch as the sky shook itself out: the line kept disappearing pixel by pixel. Eventually there would be nothing left there at all, just the breeze.

They were crowding him, shouting for his name, for his reasons, for his autograph. He stayed still, looking upward, wondering how the onlookers had seen it: what line of sky had been interrupted for them. A journalist in a flat white hat shouted, “Why?” But the word didn’t come into it for him. He didn’t like the idea of why. The towers were there. That was enough. He wanted to ask the reporter why he was asking him why. A children’s rhyme slipped through his mind, a riffle of whys, good- bye, good- bye, good- bye.

He felt a gentle shove on his back and a pull on his arm. He looked away from the towers and was guided toward the car. The cop put his hand on the top of his head: “In you go, buddy.” He was guided down onto the hard leather seats, handcuffs on.