Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin (15 page)

—You coming? said Blaine as we stepped out of the garage.
—I’d rather walk.
—We should film this, he said. Y’know, how this new series gets painted and all. All from the very beginning. Make a document of it, don’t you think?

^{a row of smokers}
stood out in front of Metropolitan Hospital on Ninety- eighth and First Avenue. Each looked like his last cigarette, ashen and ready to fall. Through the swinging doors, the receiving room was full to capacity. Another cloud of smoke inside. Patches of blood on the floor. Junkies strung out along the benches. It was the type of hospital that looked like it needed a hospital.

I walked through the gauntlet. It was the fifth receiving room I had visited, and I had begun to think that perhaps both the driver and the young woman had been killed on impact and were taken immediately to a morgue.

A security guard pointed me toward an information booth. A window was cut into the wall of an unmarked room at the end of the corridor. A stout woman sat framed by it. From a distance it looked as if she sat in a television set. Her eyeglasses dangled at her neck. I sidled up to the window and whispered about a man and woman who might have been brought in from a crash on Wednesday afternoon.

—Oh, you’re a relative? she said, not even glancing up at me. —Yes, I stammered. A cousin.
—You’re here for his things?
—His what?
She gave me a quick once- over.
—His things?
—Yes.
—You’ll have to sign for them.
Within fifteen minutes I found myself standing with a box of the late

John A. Corrigan’s possessions. They consisted of a pair of black trousers that had been slit up the side with hospital scissors, a black shirt, a stained white undershirt, underwear, and socks in a plastic bag, a religious medal, a pair of dark sneakers with the soles worn through, his driver’s license, a ticket for parking illegally on John Street at 7:44
A
.
M
. on Wednesday, August 7, a packet of rolling tobacco, some papers, a few dollars, and, oddly, a key chain with a picture of two young black children on it. There was also a baby- pink lighter, which seemed at odds with all the other things. I didn’t want the box. I had taken it out of embarrassment, out of a sense of duty to my lie, an obligation to save face, and perhaps even to save my hide. I had begun to think that perhaps leaving the scene of the crime was manslaughter, or at least some sort of felony, and now there was a second crime, hardly momentous, but it sickened me. I wanted to leave the box on the steps of the hospital and run away from myself. I had set all these events in motion and all they got for me was a handful of a dead man’s things. I was clearly out of my depth. Now it was time to go home, but I had taken on this man’s bloodstained baggage. I stared at the license. He looked younger than my freeze- frame memory had made him. A pair of oddly frightened eyes, looking way beyond the camera.

—And the girl?
—She was D.O.A., said the woman like it was a traffic signal. She looked up at me and adjusted her glasses on her nose. —Anything else?
—No thanks, I stammered.
The only things I could really jigsaw together was that John A. Corrigan—born January 15, 1943, five foot ten, 156 pounds, blue eyes—was probably the father of two young black children in the Bronx. Perhaps he had been married to the girl who was thrown through the windshield. Maybe the girls in the key chain were his daughters, grown now. Or perhaps it was something clandestine, as Blaine had said, he could’ve been having an affair with the dead woman.

A photocopy of some medical information was folded at the bottom of the box: his sign- out chart. The scrawl was almost indecipherable.
Cardiac tamponade. Clindamycin, 300 mg.
I was for a moment out on the highway again. The fender touched the back of his van and I was spinning now in his big brown van. Walls, water, guardrails.

The scent of his shirt rose up as I walked out into the fresh air. I had the odd desire to distribute his tobacco to the smokers hanging around outside.

A crowd of Puerto Rican kids were hanging around in front of the Pontiac. They wore colored sneakers and wide flares and had cigarette packets shoved under their T- shirt sleeves. They could smell my nerves as I sidled through. A tall, thin boy reached over my shoulder and pulled out the plastic bag of Corrigan’s underwear, gave a fake shriek, dropped them to the ground. The others laughed a pack laugh. I bent down to pick up the bag but felt a brush of a hand against my breast.

I drew myself as tall as I possibly could and stared in the boy’s eyes. —Don’t you dare.
I felt so much older than my twenty- eight years, as if I’d taken on

decades in the last few days. He backed off two paces.
—Only looking.
—Well, don’t.
—Gimme a ride.
—Pontiac! shouted one boy. Poor Old Nigger Thinks It’s A Cadillac! —Gimme one, lady.
More giggles.
Over his shoulder I could see a hospital security guard making his

way toward us. He wore a kufi and loped as he came across, talking into a radio. The kids scattered and ran down the street, whooping. —You all right, ma’am? said the security guard.
I was fumbling with the keys at the door of the car. I kept thinking the guard was going to walk around the front and see the smashed headlight and put two and two together, but he just guided me out into the traffic. In the rearview mirror I saw him picking up the plastic bag of underwear I’d left on the pavement. He held them in the air a moment and then shrugged, threw them in the garbage can at the side of the road.
I turned the corner toward Second Avenue, weeping.
I had gone to the city ostensibly to buy a newfangled video camera for Blaine, to record the journey of his new paintings. But the only stores I knew were way down on Fourteenth Street, near my old neighborhood. Who was it said that you can’t go home anymore? I found myself driving to the West Side of the city instead. Out to a little parking area in Riverside Park, along by the water. The cardboard box sat in the passenger seat beside me. An unknown man’s life. I had never done anything like this before. My intent had entered the world and become combustible. It had been given to me far too easily, just a simple signature and a thank- you. I thought about dropping it all in the Hudson, but there are certain things we just cannot bring ourselves to do. I stared at his photograph again. It was not he who had led me here, but the girl. I still knew nothing about her. It made no sense. What was I going to do? Practice a new form of resurrection?
I got out of the car and fished in a nearby garbage can for a newspaper and scanned through it to see if I could find any death notices or an obituary. There was one, an editorial, for Nixon’s America, but none for a young black girl caught in a hit- and- run.
I screwed up my courage and drove to the Bronx, toward the address on the license. Entire blocks of abandoned lots. Cyclone fences topped with shredded plastic bags. Stunted catalpa trees bent by the wind. Autobody shops. New and used. The smell of burning rubber and brick. On a half- wall someone had written:
DANTE HAS ALREADY DISAPPEARED
.
It took ages to find the place. There were a couple of police cars out under the Major Deegan. Two of the cops had a box of doughnuts sitting on the dashboard between them, like a third- rate TV show. They stared at me, open- mouthed, when I pulled up the car alongside them. I had lost all sense of fear. If they wanted to arrest me for a hit- and- run, then go ahead.
—This is a rough neighborhood, ma’am, one of them said in a New York nasal. Car like that’s going to raise a few eyebrows.
—What can we do for you, ma’am? said the other.
—Maybe not call me ma’am?
—Feisty, huh?
—What you want, lady? Nothing but trouble here.
As if to confirm, a huge refrigerator truck slowed down as it came through the traffic lights, and the driver rolled down the window and eased over to the curb, looked out, then suddenly gunned it when he saw the police car.
—No nig- knock today, shouted the cop to the passing truck.
The short one blanched a little when he looked back at me, and he gave a thin smile that creased his eyelids. He ran his hands over a tube of fat that bulged out at his waist.
—No trade today, he said, almost apologetically.
—So, what can we do for you, miss? said the other.
—I’m looking to return something.
—Oh, yeah?
—I have these things here. In my car.
—Where’d you get that? What is it? Like the 1850s?
—It’s my husband’s.
Two thin smiles, but they looked happy enough that I’d broken their tedium. They stepped over to my car and rumbled around, running their hands along the wooden dash, marveling at the hand brake. I had often wondered if Blaine and I had gone on our twenties kick simply so we could keep our car. We had bought it as a wedding present for ourselves. Every time I sat in it, it felt like a return to simpler times.
The second cop peered into the box of possessions. They were disgusting, but I was hardly in a position to say anything. I felt a sudden pang of guilt for the plastic bag of underwear that I had left behind at the hospital, as if it somehow might be needed now, to complete the person who was not around. The cop picked up the parking ticket and then the license from the bottom of the box. The younger one nodded.
—Hey, that’s the Irish guy, the priest.
—Sure is.
—The one that was giving us shit. About the hookers. He drove that funky van.
—He’s up there on the fifth floor. I mean, his brother. Cleaning out his stuff.
—A priest? I said.
—A monk or some such. One of these worker guys. Liberation theowhateveritis.
—Theologian, said the other.
—One of those guys who thinks that Jesus was on welfare.
I felt a shudder of hatred, then told the cops that I was a hospital administrator and that the items needed to be returned—did they mind leaving them with the dead man’s brother?
—Not our job, miss.
—See the path there? Around the side? Follow that to the fourth brown building. In to the left. Take the elevator.
—Or the stairs.
—Be careful, but.
I wondered how many assholes it took to make a police department. They had been made braver and louder by the war. They had a swagger to them. Ten thousand men at the water cannons. Shoot the niggers. Club the radicals. Love it or leave it. Believe nothing unless you hear it from us.
I walked toward the projects. A surge of dread. Hard to calm the heart when it leaps so high. As a child I saw horses trying to step into rivers to cool themselves off. You watch them move from the stand of buckeye trees, down the slope, through the mud, swishing off flies, getting deeper and deeper until they either swim for a moment, or turn back. I recognized it as a pattern of fear, that there was something shameful in it— these high- rises were not a country that existed in my youth or art, or anywhere else. I had been a sheltered girl. Even when drug- addled I would never have gone into a place like this. I tried to persuade myself onward. I counted the cracks in the pavement. Cigarette butts. Unopened letters with footprints on them. Shards of broken glass. Someone whistled but I didn’t look his way. Some pot fumes drifted from an open window. For a moment, it wasn’t like I was entering water at all: it was more like I was ferrying buckets of blood away from my own body, and I could feel them slap and spill as I moved.
The dry brown remnants of a floral wreath hung outside the main doors. In the hallway the mailboxes were dented and scorch- marked. There was a reek of roach spray. The overhead lights were spray- painted black for some reason.
A large middle- aged lady in a floral- patterned dress waited at the elevator. She kicked aside a used needle with a deep sigh. It settled into the corner, a small bubble of blood at its tip. I returned her nod and smile. Her white teeth. The bounce of imitation pearls at her neck. —Nice weather, I said to her, though both of us knew exactly what sort of weather it was.
The elevator rose. Horses into rivers. Watch me drown. I said good- bye to her on the fifth floor as she continued upward, the sound of the cables like the crack of old branches.
A few people were gathered outside the doorway, black women, mostly, in dark mourning clothes that looked as if they didn’t belong to them, as if they’d hired the clothes for the day. Their makeup was the thing that betrayed them, loud and gaudy and one with silver sparkles around her eyes, which looked so tired and worn- down. The cops had said something about hookers: it struck me that maybe the young girl had just been a prostitute. I felt a momentary sigh of gratitude, and then the awareness stopped me cold, the walls pulsed in on me. How cheap was I?
What I was doing was unpardonable and I knew it. I could feel my chest thumping in my blouse, but the women parted for me, and I went through their curtain of grief.
The door was open. Inside, a young woman was sweeping the floor clean. She had a face that looked like it came from a Spanish mosaic. Her eyes were darkened with streaks of mascara. A simple silver chain around her neck. She was clearly no hooker. I felt immediately underdressed, like I was barging in on her silence. Beyond her, a replica of the man from the photo on the license, only heavier, jowlier, more sparsely stubbled. The sight of him knocked the oxygen out of me. He wore a white shirt and a dark tie and a jacket. His face was broad and slightly florid, his eyes puffy with grief. I stammered that I was from the hospital and that I was here to drop off the things that had belonged to a certain Mr. Corrigan.
—Ciaran Corrigan, he said, coming across and shaking my hand.
He seemed to me first the sort of man who would be quite happy doing crosswords in bed. He took the box and looked down, searched through it. He came to the keyring and gazed at it a moment, put it in his pocket.
—Thanks, he said. We forgot to pick these things up.
He had a touch of an accent to him, not very strong, but he carried his body like I had seen other Irishmen carry themselves, hunched into himself, yet still hyperaware. The Spanish woman took the shirt and brought it into the kitchen. She was standing by the sink and sniffing the cloth deeply. The black bloodstains were still visible. She looked across at me, lowered her gaze to the floor. Her small chest heaved. She suddenly ran the tap and plunged the cloth into the water and began wringing it, as if John A. Corrigan might suddenly appear and want to wear it again. It was quite obvious that I wasn’t wanted or needed, but something held me there.
—We’ve got a funeral service in forty- five minutes, he said. If you’ll excuse me.
A toilet flushed in the apartment above.
—There was a young girl too, I said.
—Yes, it’s her funeral. Her mother’s getting out of jail. That’s what we heard. For an hour or two. My brother’s service is tomorrow. Cremation. There’ve been some complications. Nothing to worry about.
—I see.
—If you’ll excuse me.
—Of course.
A short heavyset priest made his way into the apartment, announcing himself as a Father Marek. The Irishman shook his hand. He glanced at me as if to ask why I was still there. I went to the door, stopped, and turned around. It looked like the door locks had been jimmied a number of times.
The Spanish woman was still in the kitchen, where she suspended the wet shirt from a hanger above the sink. She stood there with her head down, like she was trying to remember. She put her face in the shirt again.
I turned and stammered.
—Would you mind if I went to the girl’s service?
He shrugged and looked at the priest, who scribbled a quick map on a scrap of paper, as if he was glad for something to do. He took me by the elbow and then down the corridor.
—Do you have any influence? the priest asked.
—Influence? I asked.
—Well, his brother has insisted on getting him cremated before he goes back to Ireland. Tomorrow. And I was wondering if you could talk him out of it.
—Why?
—It’s against our faith, he said.
Down the corridor, one of the women had begun wailing. She stopped, though, when the Irishman stepped out the door. He had jammed his tie high on his neck and his jacket was pulled tight across his shoulders. He was followed by the Spanish woman, who had a stately pride about her. The corridor was hushed. He pressed the button for the elevator and looked at me.
—Sorry, I said to the priest. I don’t have any influence.
I pulled away from him and hurried toward the elevator as it was closing. The Irishman put his hand in the gap and pulled the door open for me, and then we were gone. The Spanish woman gave me a guarded smile and said she was sorry she couldn’t go to the girl’s funeral, she had to go home and look after her own children, but she was glad that Ciaran had someone to go with.
I offered him a lift without thinking, but he said no, that he had been asked to travel in the funeral cortege, he didn’t know why.
He wrung his hands nervously as he stepped out into the sunlight.
—I didn’t even know the girl, he said.
—What was her name?
—I don’t know. Her mother’s Tillie.
He said it with a downward finality, but then he added: I think it’s Jazzlyn, or something.