Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann

People fell for him. On the street, women ruffled his hair. Workingmen punched him gently on the shoulder. He had no idea that his presence sustained people, made them happy, drew out their improbable yearnings—he just plowed along, oblivious.

Jack

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

She was made up to be seen from a distance:

The projects were a victim of theft and wind. The downdrafts made their own weather. Plastic bags caught on the gusts of summer wind. Old domino players sat in the courtyard, playing underneath the flying litter.

And then the highway ended, middle of nowhere, it seemed like, and I just followed a smaller road.

Know exactly where that is - and I remember my shock that it ended that first time.

It was like I was staring at the ceiling, waiting for the sky.

We bring home with us when we leave.

This is my body, it has been given up for you.

Notes of Mary Magdelene and Jesus.

In the distance, Manhattan was like something made out of play boxes.

A bridge lay between us, composed almost entirely of my brother.

He was at the origin of things and I now had a meaning for my brother—he was a crack of light under the door, and yet the door was shut to him.

It’s like a Walt Whitman poem: you can put in it everything you want.

The walking man? Something vulgar about the whole thing. Or maybe not vulgar. Something cheap. Or maybe not quite cheap.

Possibly that he's toying with life and death for entertainment, while this group mourns equally meaningless death.

Death, the greatest democracy of them all.

So flagrant with his body. Making it cheap. The puppetry of it all.

We greeted sunrises on the tar beaches of Manhattan’s rooftops.

They sat, ruined, leaning against the side of the hut, by some old wagon wheels. I bent down and flicked through. A whole year’s work. The water and paint had bled down into the grass. The frames would soon warp. Fabulous irony. All the wasted work. The cutting of canvas.

I can't think of what medium this could possibly be. Acrylic on canvas would be fine - as would oil. Watercolor would probably run, but it would not be painted on canvas. Guosh - also on paper.

There wasn’t much left for anyone to die for, except the right to remain peculiar.

Little bursts of feathers came from the woman’s hands. She was putting the dead birds in little ziploc bags. White-throated sparrows mostly, some songbirds too.

Claire?

The towers had been designed to sway a full three feet in a storm.

We wanted to drive across country, Jazzlyn and me, but instead we got a skinny dog all the way from Cleveland.

The Greyhound

The sirens were turned on. All was red and blue and wail.

Which was one of the things that made Judge Soderberg think that the tightrope walker was such a stroke of genius.

So - the judge is Claire's husband.

he wasn’t a man to make frivolous complaints: he kept that powder dry in case he’d need it at other times.

Sirens outside. Always sirens: they were the shadow facts of his day.

Besides, every lawyer had a judge inside him.

The greatest part of the law was the wisdom of toleration.

The law was a place to protect the powerless, and also to circumscribe the most powerful.

Thomas. I wrote it in blue eyeliner on my bathroom mirror. I looked through it, beyond, at myself.

perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we’ve left

She is annoyed at herself—she didn’t mean to be so curt, but sometimes it happens, the words come out at the wrong angle, like she’s on the defensive from the very beginning.

The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

Ciaran talked of the Dublin real estate market: but really, Jaslyn felt, they were talking about hidden losses, not profits, all the things they had passed by over the years.

The whole world a Starbucks, and she can’t find a single one.

Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

A man was rising out from the top of a limousine, strange and centaurian.

The body a thin failure now.

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.