Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,141

of us stuffed together. The hand of the clock by the bedside table didn’t move anymore, maybe the batteries were expired, but it got to ticking in my mind. I could feel myself drifting. I didn’t want to fall asleep. I had to bite the inside of my lip to keep myself from nodding off. Sure enough, it wasn’t just me, we were all getting a little itchy, I could feel it, the shifting of bodies, and the way Jacqueline was breathing and the little cough that came every now and then from Janet, and Marcia wiping her brow with her little handkerchief.

I could feel a case of pins and needles coming on. I kept trying to move my toes and tighten my calf muscles—I guess I was grimacing a little, moving my body, making too much noise.

Claire smiled at me but it was one of those smiles that has a little zipper in it, a little too tight at the edges. I gave her a smile back, and tried hard not to make it seem like I was fidgety and awkward both. It wasn’t as if she was boring me, it had nothing at all to do with what she was telling me, just my body giving me a hard time. I tightened my toes again, but that didn’t work, and as quiet as possible I started knocking my knee off the edge of the bed, trying to get that half-gone feeling out of my leg. Claire gave me a look like she was disappointed, but it wasn’t me who stood up at all; it was Marcia who finally stretched herself up in the air and flat-out yawned—yawned, like a child pulling a piece of chewing gum from her mouth, a thing that said, Look at me, I’m bored, I’m going to yawn and nobody’s going to stop me.

“Excuse me,” she said with a half-apology

There was a lockdown for a moment. It was like seeing the air fall apart so that you could recognize all the separate things that go together to make it.

Janet leaned across and tapped Claire on the knee and said: “Go on with your story.”

“I forget what I was saying,” she said. “What was I saying?”

Nobody stirred.

“I know I was saying something important,” she said.

“It was about Joshua,” said Jacqueline.

Marcia glared across the room.

“I can’t for the life of me recall what it was,” said Claire.

She smiled another one of her quick zipper smiles, like her brain was refusing to accept the bold-faced evidence, and took a deep breath and jumped right in. Soon she was traveling on that highballing Joshua train again—he was at the cusp of something so entirely new, she said, that the world would never quite know what it missed, he was bringing machines to a place where they would do good things for man and mankind, and someday these machines would talk to each other just like people, even our wars would be fought through machines, it might be impossible to understand, but believe me, she said, it was the direction the world was going.

Marcia stood up again and stretched near the doorway. Her second yawn was not as bad as the first, but then she said: “Has anyone got the timetable for the ferry?”

Claire stopped cold.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt you. Sorry. I just don’t want to get caught up in any rush hour,” said Marcia.

“It’s lunchtime.”

“I know, but it gets very busy sometimes.”

“Oh, it does, yes,” piped Janet.

“Sometimes you have to wait in line for hours.”

“Hours.”

“Even on Wednesdays.”

“We could order something in,” said Claire. “There’s a new Chinese place on Lexington.”

“Really, no. Thank you.”

I could see the red rising to Claire’s cheeks. She tried to smile again, a neutral smile, and I thought of that old yea-saying line A little bit of poison helped her along, from an old song my mother had taught me as a child.

Claire was pulling at her dress, straightening it, making sure it wasn’t puckered. Then she picked the photo of her Joshua off the window ledge, and got to her feet.

“Well, I can’t thank you enough for coming,” she said. “It’s been I don’t know how long since someone has been in this room.”

Her smile could’ve broken glass.

Marcia smiled a hammer blow right back. Jacqueline wiped her brow like she’d just been through the longest ordeal. The room filled with hems and haws and pauses and coughs, but Claire still clutched the photo frame right into her dress. Everyone began saying what