Let the Great World Spin (5 page)

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 McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 25

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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.”

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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, long-sleeved, 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 re-McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 27

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minded 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 waist-high 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 McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 28

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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.

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“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 neon-yellow 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 ev-McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 30

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erywhere. 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.

Our father had died a few months before. In the middle of his university classroom, a lecture about quarks. Elementary particles. He had insisted on finishing his class while a pain shot down his left arm.
Three
quarks for Muster Mark.
Thank you, class. Safe home. Good night. Bye-bye. I was hardly devastated, but I had left Corrigan dozens of messages, and even got through to the Bronx police, but they said there was nothing they could do.

In the graveyard I had kept turning, hoping to see him coming up the narrow laneway, maybe even in one of our father’s old suits, but he never appeared.

“Not too many people there,” I said. “Small English churchyard. A man cutting the grass. Didn’t turn the engine off for the service.”

He kept tilting the teacup on his hand, as if trying to get the last drops out.