Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,12
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 Jazzlyn, 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 everywhere.
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.
“What scriptures did they use?” he said finally.
“I can’t remember. Sorry. Why?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“What would you have used, Corr?”
“Oh, I don’t know, really. Something Old Testament, maybe. Something primal.”
“Like what, Corr?”
“Not sure exactly.”
“Go on, tell me.”
“I don’t know!” he shouted. “Okay? I don’t fucking know!”
The curse stunned me. The shame flushed him red. He lowered his gaze, scrubbed the cup with the flap of his shirt. The sound of it made a high,