Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin (3 page)

corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth—the filth, the war, the poverty—was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn’t interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey- soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence.

After our mother died, we sold the house. Our father took half the money. Corrigan gave his portion away. He lived off the charity of others and began studying the work of Francis of Assisi. For hours on end he would walk the city, reading. He made himself sandals out of some scrap leather and wore wild- colored socks underneath. He became a staple on the streets of Dublin in the mid- sixties, with stringy hair and carpenter pants, books tucked under his arm. He had a long, shambling stride. He went around penniless, coatless, shirtless. Every August, on the anniversary of Hiroshima, he locked himself to the gates of the Parliament on Kildare Street, a quiet vigil for one night, no photos, no journalists, just him and his cardboard box spread out on the ground.

When he was nineteen he began studying with the Jesuits at Emo College. Mass in the early dawn. Hours of theological study. Afternoon walks through the fields. Night walks along the Barrow River, beseeching his God out under the stars. The morning prayers, the noontime prayers, the evening prayers, the complines. The glorias, the psalms, the gospel readings. They gave a rigor to his faith, it staked him to a purpose. Still, the hills of Laois couldn’t hold him. He couldn’t be an ordinary priest—it wasn’t the life for him; he was ill defined for it, he needed more space for his doubt. He left the novitiate and went to Brussels, where he joined a group of young monks who took their vows of chastity, poverty, obedience. He lived in a small flat in the center of the city. Grew his hair out. Kept his head in books: Augustine, Eckhart, Massignon, Charles de Foucauld. It was a life of ordinary labor, friendship, solidarity. He drove a fruit truck for a local cooperative and organized a labor union for a small group of workers. In his work he wore no religious garments, or collars, carried no Bible, and preferred to stay quiet, even around the brothers of his own Order.

Few of the people who came across him ever knew of his religious ties and, even in those places where he spent the longest, he was seldom known for his beliefs—instead, people looked at him with a fondness for another era, when time seemed slower, less complicated. Even the worst of what men did to one another didn’t dampen Corrigan’s beliefs. He might have been naïve, but he didn’t care; he said he’d rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.

The only furniture he owned was his oak- wood prayer kneeler and his bookshelves. The shelves were lined with a number of religious poets, radicals mostly, and some liberation theologians. He had long angled for a posting somewhere in the Third World but couldn’t get one. Brussels was too ordinary for him. He wanted somewhere with a rougher plot. He spent a while in the slums of Naples, working with the poor in the Spanish Quarter, but then was shipped off to New York in the early seventies. He disliked the idea, bucked against it, thought New York too mannered, too antiseptic, but had no sway with those higher up in his Order—he had to go where he was sent.

i had dropped out of university and spent the best part of my late twenties in a basement flat on Raglan Road, catching the tail end of the hippie years. Like most things Irish, I was a couple of years too late. I drifted into my thirties, found a desk job, but still wanted the old reckless life.

I had never really followed what happened up north. Sometimes it seemed like an entirely foreign land, but in the spring of ’74 the violence came south.

I went to the Dandelion Market one Friday evening to buy some marijuana, an occasional habit. It was one of the few places where Dublin hummed: African beads, lava lamps, incense. I bought half an ounce of Moroccan hash at a stall for secondhand records. I was walking along South Leinster Street into Kildare Street when the air shook. Everything went yellow for an instant, a perfect flash, then white. I was knocked through the air, against a fence. I woke, panic all around. Shards of glass. An exhaust pipe. A steering wheel rolling in the street. The wheel flopped, exhausted, and all was strangely still until the sirens rang out, as if already mourning. A woman went by with her dress torn neck to hem, as if designed to show off her chest wound. A man stooped to help me up. We ran together a few yards, then parted. I was stumbling around the corner towards Molesworth Street when a Garda stopped me and pointed to a few spots of blood on my shirt. I fainted. When I woke in hospital they told me I’d lost a little flesh at the lobe of my right ear when I’d been slammed back against the spear of a railing. A fleur- de- lis. Such fine irony. The tip of my ear left behind on the street. The rest of me was intact, even my hearing. At the hospital the police went through my pockets to look for identification. I was arrested for possession and brought to the courthouse, where the judge took pity and said it was a wrongful search, gave me a lecture, and sent me on my way. I went straight to a travel agency on Dawson Street, bought my ticket out.

I came through John F. Kennedy Airport in a long necklace and an Afghan coat, carrying a torn copy of
Howl.
The customs men sniggered. The cloth latch on my rucksack snapped when I tried to put it together again.

I stood looking around for Corrigan—he had promised, in a postcard, that he’d meet me. It was eighty- seven degrees in the shade. The heat hit me with the force of an ax. The waiting area pulsed. Families roamed about, pushing past one another to get at flight information. Taxi drivers had a shiny menace to them. No sign of my brother anywhere. I sat on my rucksack for an hour until a policeman with a billy club prodded me and knocked the book out of my hands.

I boarded a bus amid the swelter and noise. Later on the subway I loitered beneath the whirling fan. A black woman stood beside me, fanning herself with a magazine. Ovals of sweat at her underarms. I had never seen a black woman so close before, her skin so dark it was almost blue. I wanted to touch it, just press her forearm with my finger. She caught my eye and pulled her blouse tight: “Whatcha lookin’ at?”

A moment later she glanced at me again. “No kiddin’,” she said. She got off at 125th Street, where the train screeched to a halt.
It was nightfall by the time I reached the Bronx. I stepped out of the station to the late heat. Gray brick and billboards. A rhythmic sound came from a radio player. A kid in a sleeveless shirt spun on a piece of cardboard, his shoulder somehow a fulcrum for his whole body. A loosening of contour. No limits. Hands to the ground, his feet whipped out a long extended circle. He went low and suddenly spun on his head, then arced backwards, unsprung, and hopped into the air, pureness moving.
Some gypsy cabs idled on the Concourse. Old white men in wide hats. I flung my rucksack into the boot of a giant black car.
“Ants in their pants, man,” said the driver as he leaned over the seat. “You think that kid’s gonna go anywhere? After spinning on his goddamn head?”
I gave him Corrigan’s address on a slip of paper. He grunted something about power steering, said they never had it in ’Nam.
After half an hour we pulled sharply into the curve. We had been driving in elaborate circles. “Twelve bucks, bud.” No point in arguing. I threw the money over the seat, got out, grabbed my rucksack. The driver of the cab pulled off before I got a chance to close the boot. I clutched my copy of
Howl
to my chest.
I saw the best minds of my generation.
The lid of the taxi bounced and slammed shut when the driver turned sharply by the traffic lights and away.
On one side was a row of high- rise tenements behind a chain- link fence. Parts of the fence were topped with razor wire. On the other, the expressway: the light- streak of cars zipping above. Below, by the underpass, a long line of women. Cars and trucks were pulling into the shadows. The women struck poses. They wore hotpants and bikini tops and swimsuits, a bizarre city beach. An angled arm, in the shadowlight, reached the top of the expressway. A stiletto climbed to the top of a barbed- wire fence. A leg stretched half the length of a city block.
Nightbirds flew out from under the highway girders, momentarily intent on the sky, but then swooped back into hiding.
A woman emerged from under the girdings. She wore a fur coat open at the shoulders and spread her knee- high boots wide. A car went by and she threw open the coat. Underneath she wore nothing at all. The car beeped and sped off. She screamed after it, started walking my way, carrying what looked like a parasol.
I scanned the balconies of the high- rises for any sign of Corrigan. The street lights flickered. A plastic bag tumbled. Some shoes were strung on the high telegraph wire.
“Hey, honey.”
“I’m broke,” I said without turning around. The hooker spat thickly at my feet and raised the pink parasol over her head.
“Asshole,” she said as she walked past.
She stood on the lit side of the street and waited underneath the parasol. Every time a car went past she lowered and raised it, making herself into a little planet of light and dark.
I carried my rucksack towards the projects with as much nonchalance as I could. Heroin needles lay along the inside of the fence, among the weeds. Someone had spray- painted the sign near the entrance to the flats. A few old men sat outside the lobby, fanning themselves in the heat. They looked ruined and decrepit, the sort of men who’d soon turn into empty chairs. One of them reached for the slip of paper with my brother’s address written on it, shook his head, sagged back.
A kid ran past, a metallic sound coming from him, a tinny bounce. He disappeared into the darkness of a stairwell. The smell of fresh paint drifted from him.
I turned the corner to another corner: it was all corners.
Corrigan’s place was in a gray block of flats. The fifth floor of twenty. A little sticker by the doorbell:
PEACE AND JUSTICE
in a crown of thorns. Five locks on the doorframe. None of them worked. I pushed the door open. It swung and banged. A little bit of white plaster fell from the wall. I called his name. The place was bare but for a torn sofa, a low table, a simple wooden crucifix over the single wooden bed. His prayer kneeler faced against the wall. Books lay on the floor, open, as if speaking to one another: Thomas Merton, Rubem Alves, Dorothy Day.
I stepped over to the sofa, exhausted.
I woke later to the parasol hooker slamming through the doorway. She stood mopping her brow, then threw her handbag on the sofa beside me. “Oops, sorry, honey,” she said. I turned my face so she wouldn’t recognize me. She walked across the room, hitching off her fur coat as she went, naked but for her boots. She stopped a moment, looked in a long slice of broken mirror propped against the wall. Her calf muscles were smooth and curved. She hitched the flesh of her bottom, sighed, then stretched and rubbed her nipples full. “Goddamn,” she said. The sound of running water came from the bathroom.
The hooker emerged with her lipstick bright and a new clack in her step. The sharp smell of perfume filled the air. She blew me a kiss, waved the parasol, left.
It happened five or six times in a row. The turn of the door handle. The ping of stilettos on the bare floorboards. A different hooker each time. One even leaned down and let her long thin breasts hang in my face. “College boy,” she said like an offer. I shook my head and she said curtly: “I thought so.” She turned at the door and smiled. “There’ll be lawyers in heaven before you see somethin’ so good again.” She went down the corridor, laughing.
In the bathroom was a small metal rubbish can. Tampons and sad polyps of used condoms wrapped in tissue.
Corrigan woke me later that night. I had no idea what time it was. He wore the same type of thin shirt he had for years: black, collarless, longsleeved, with wooden buttons. He was thin, as if the sheer volume of the poor had worn him wayward to his old self. His hair was shoulder length and he had grown out his sideburns, a little punch of gray already at his temples. His face was cut slightly, and his right eye bruised. He looked older t han thirty- one.
“Beautiful world you’re living in, Corrigan.”
“Did you bring tea?”
“What happened you? Your cheek? It’s cut.”
“Tell me you at least brought a few tea bags, brother?”
I opened the rucksack. Five boxes of his favorite. He kissed my forehead. His lips were dry. His stubble stung.
“Who beat you up, Corr?”
“Don’t worry about me—let me see you.”
He reached up and touched my right ear, where the tip of the lobe was gone.
“You all right?”
“It’s a memento, I suppose. You still a pacifist?”
“Still,” he said with a grin.
“You’ve got nice friends.”
“They just need to use the bathroom. They’re not allowed turn tricks. They weren’t turning tricks in here, were they?”
“They were naked, Corrigan.”
“No they weren’t.”
“I’m telling you, man, they were naked.”
“They don’t like cumbersome clothes,” he said with a little laugh. He palmed my shoulder, pushed me back on the couch. “Anyway, they must’ve been wearing shoes. It’s New York. You have to have good stilettos.”
He put the kettle on, lined up the cups.
“My very serious brother,” he said, but his chuckle died away as he turned the flame on the stove high. “Look, man, they’re desperate. I just want to give them a little spot that they can call their own. Get out of the heat. Splash some water on their faces.” His back was turned. I was reminded of how, years before, he had drifted away from one of our afternoon strolls and got surrounded by the tide—Corrigan, isolated on a sandbar, tangled in light, voices from the shore drifting over him, calling his name. The kettle whistled, louder now and shrill. Even from the back he looked like he’d been knocked around. I said his name, once, twice. On the third time he snapped to, turned, smiled. It was almost the same as when he’d been a child—he looked up, waved, and returned waisthigh through the water.
“On your own here, Corr?”
“Just for a while.”
“No Brothers? No others with you?”
“Oh, I’m getting to know the immemorial feelings,” he said. “The hunger, the thirst, being tired at the end of the day. I’ve started wondering if God’s around when I wake up in the middle of the night.” He seemed to be talking to a point over my shoulder. His eyes were deep and pouchy. “That’s what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence.”
“You all right, Corr?”
“Never better.”
“So who beat you up?”
He looked away. “I had a run- in with one of the pimps.” “Why?”
“Because.”
“Because why, man?”
“Because he claimed I was taking up their time. Guy calls himself Birdhouse. Only got one good eye. Go figure. In he came, knocked on the door, said hello, called me brother this, brother that, real nice and polite, even hung his hat on the doorknob. Sat down on the sofa and looked up at the crucifix. Said he had a real appreciation for the holy life. Then produced a length of lead pipe that he’d ripped from the toilet. Imagine that. He’d been sitting there all that time, just letting my bathroom flood.” He shrugged.
“But they still come around,” he said. “The girls. I don’t encourage it, really. I mean, what are they going to do? Pee on the street? It’s not much. Just a little gesture. A place they can use. A tinkling shop.” He arranged the tea and a plate of biscuits, went to his prayer kneeler—a simple piece of wood that he tucked behind him to support his body as he knelt—and gave his thanks to God for the biscuits, the tea, the appearance of his brother.
He was still praying when the door swung hard and in marched three hookers. “Ooh, snowing in here,” cooed the parasol hooker as she stood under the fan. “Hi, I’m Tillie.” The heat oozed from her: little droplets of sweat on her forehead. She dropped her parasol on the table, looked at me with a half- grin. She was made up to be seen from a distance: she wore huge sunglasses with rose- colored rims and sparkly eye makeup. Another girl kissed Corrigan on the cheek, then started primping in the broken slice of mirror. The tallest, in a white tissue minidress, sat down beside me. She looked half Mexican, half black. She was taut and lithe: she could have been walking down a runway. “Hi,” she said, grinning. “I’m Jazzlyn. You can call me Jazz.”
She was very young—seventeen or eighteen—with one green eye, one brown. Her cheekbones were pulled even higher by a line of makeup. She reached across, lifted Corrigan’s teacup, blew it cool, left a smudge of lipstick on the rim.
“I don’t know why you don’t put ice in this shit, Corrie,” she said.
“Don’t like it,” said Corrigan.
“If you wanna be American you gotta put ice in it.”
The parasol hooker giggled then as if Jazzlyn had just said something fabulously rude. It was like they had a code going between them. I edged away, but Jazzlyn leaned across and picked a piece of lint off my shoulder. Her breath was sweet. I turned again to Corrigan.
“Did you get him arrested?”
My brother looked confused: “Who?” he said.
“The bloke who beat you up?”
“Arrested for what?”
“Are you serious?”
“Why would I get him arrested?”
“Did someone beat you up again, honey?” said the parasol hooker. She was staring at her fingers. She bit a long edge of fingernail from her thumb, examined the little slice. She scraped the fingernail paint off with her teeth, and flicked the slice of nail towards me from off her extended finger. I stared at her. She flashed a white grin. “I can’t stand it when I get beaten up,” she said.
“Jesus,” I muttered to the window.
“Enough,” said Corrigan.
“They always leave marks, don’t they?” said Jazzlyn.
“Okay, Jazz, enough, okay?”
“Once, this guy, this asshole, this quadruple motherfucker, he used a telephone book on me. You want to know something about the telephone book? Lots of names and not one of them leaves a mark.”
Jazzlyn stood up and removed her loose blouse. She wore a neonyellow bikini underneath. “He hit me here and here and here.”
“Okay, Jazz, time to go.”
“I bet you could find your own name here.”
“Jazzlyn!”
She stood and sighed. “Your brother’s cute,” she said to me. She buttoned her blouse. “We love him like chocolate. We love him like nicotine. Isn’t that right, Corrie? We love you like nicotine. Tillie’s got a crush on him. Ain’t you, Tillie? Tillie, you listening?”
The parasol hooker stepped away from the mirror. She touched the edge of her mouth where the lipstick smeared. “Too old to be an acrobat, too young to die,” she said.
Jazzlyn was fumbling under the table with a small glassine package. Corrigan leaned across and touched her hand. “Not here, you know you can’t do that in here.” She rolled her eyes, sighed, and dropped a needle in her handbag.
The door bounced on its hinges. All of them blew kisses, even Jazz lyn, with her back turned. She looked like some failed sunflower, her arm curving backwards as she went.
“Poor Jazz.”
“What a mess.”
“Well, at least she’s trying.”
“Trying? She’s a mess. They all are.”
“Ah, no, they’re good people,” Corrigan said. “They just don’t know what it is they’re doing. Or what’s being done to them. It’s about fear. You know? They’re all throbbing with fear. We all are.”
He drank the tea without cleaning the lipstick off the rim.
“Bits of it floating in the air,” he said. “It’s like dust. You walk about and don’t see it, don’t notice it, but it’s there and it’s all coming down, covering everything. You’re breathing it in. You touch it. You drink it. You eat it. But it’s so fine you don’t notice it. But you’re covered in it. It’s everywhere. What I mean is, we’re afraid. Just stand still for an instant and there it is, this fear, covering our faces and tongues. If we stopped to take account of it, we’d just fall into despair. But we can’t stop. We’ve got to keep going.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know—that’s my problem.”
“What are you into here, Corr?”
“I suppose I have to put flesh on my words, y’know. But sometimes that’s my dilemma too, man. I’m supposed to be a man of God but I hardly ever mention Him to anyone. Not to the girls, even. I keep these thoughts to myself. For my own peace of mind. The ease of my conscience. If I started thinking them out loud all the time I think I’d go mad. But God listens back. Most of the time. He does.”
He drained the teacup and cleaned the rim with the flap of his shirt. “But these girls, man. Sometimes I think they’re better believers than me. At least they’re open to the faith of a rolled- down window.” Corrigan turned the teacup upside down onto his palm, balanced it there.
“You missed the funeral,” I said.
A little dribble of tea sat in his palm. He brought his hand to his mouth and tongued it.