Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann

had been in love with a boy from Dearborn. He’d volunteered for Vietnam, came home with the thousand-yard stare and a piece of bullet lodged perfectly in his spine. In his wheelchair he stunned me by campaigning for Nixon in ′68, going around the inner city, still giving his approval to all he couldn’t understand. We had broken up over the campaign. I thought I knew what Vietnam was—we would leave it all rubble and bloodsoak. The repeated lies become history, but they don’t necessarily become the truth. He had swallowed them all, even plastered his wheelchair with stickers. NIXON LOVES JESUS. He went door to door, spreading rumors about Hubert Humphrey. He even bought me a little chain with a Republican elephant. I had worn it to please him, to give him back his legs, but it was like the firelight had faded on the inside of his eyelids and his mind was punched away in a little drawer. I still wondered what might have happened if I had stayed with him and learned to praise ignorance.