Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann

Like most things Irish, I was a couple of years too late.

this was not the America I had expected.

He was standing on the little ledge of reality he had left, but it seemed to me that he wasn’t getting high, just getting level. He had an affinity with pain.

children, he used to stand and take the blows—our fights had lasted as long as I punched him.

“You ever have the feeling there’s a stray something or other inside you?” he said. “You don’t know what it is, like a ball, or a stone, could be iron or cotton or grass or anything, but it’s inside you. It’s not a fire or a rage or anything. Just a big ball. And there’s no way to get at it?” He cut himself short, looked away, tapped the left side of his chest. “Well, here it is. Right here.”

“Pain’s nothing. Pain’s what you give, not what you get.”

Family is like water—it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream. I

If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.

It felt cool, like the other side of a pillow.

We were coming in at exits and going out at entrances.

He seemed to me first the sort of man who would be quite happy doing crosswords in bed.

The smashed headlight was apparent and the fender dented. He stopped a moment in the middle of the road, half nodded, as if it all made sense to him now. His face fell in upon itself, like a sandcastle in time lapse.

I needed to be airborne. I wanted to be one of those animals that needed to fly in order to eat.

You should have stopped.

A further part of me wanted him to actually turn and hit me, really hit me, draw blood, hurt me, ruin me.

I got a taste for supermarket cakes. You won’t find that on my yellow sheet.

I’m such a fuck-up. No one’s a bigger fuck-up than me. No one’s gonna know that, though. That’s my secret. I walk through the world like I own it. Watch this spot. Watch it curve.

’Cause men like to think they can rescue you.

They fuck you like they’re doing you a big favor.

He said, “Thanks,” but it sounded like Tanks,

When I first sent Jazzlyn out, I bought her a supermarket cake too. Foodland special. Just for her, to make her feel better. It was half eaten by the time she came back. She stood there in the middle of the room, tears in her eyes: “You ate my goddamn cake, Tillie.” And I was sitting there with icing all over my face, going, “No I didn’t, Jazz, not me, no way.”

I shoulda just stayed at home and ate all the supermarket cakes until I couldn’t even get outta the chair.

I looked at her and thought she gave birth to the word beautiful.

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.

The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.

I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it.

If you start forgetting you’re already lost.

Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.

So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.