Let the Great World Spin (38 page)

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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.

—

t h er e wa s a n a r ro ga nce 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 McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 241

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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!”

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The walker smiled.

“Get off now!”

He wondered if that was what the moment of death was about, the noise of the world and then the ease away from it.

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 shutter-ing 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 harpsi-chord 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.

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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 McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 244

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hand on the top of his head: “In you go, buddy.” He was guided down onto the hard leather seats, handcuffs on.

The photographers put their lenses against the car window. An erup-tion of light against the glass. It briefly blinded him. He turned to face the other side of the car. More cameras. He stared ahead.

The sirens were turned on.

All was red and blue and wail.

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B O O K

T H R E E

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P A R T O F T H E P A R T S

The theater began shortly after lunch. His fellow judges and court officers and reporters and even the stenographers were already talking about it as if it were another of those things that just happened in the city. One of those out- of- the- ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

He had a theory about it. It happened, and re- happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. He had seen a T- shirt once that said: NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.

New York kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it had left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey.