Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,155

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The girls were being guided down the path by a man and a woman. Social workers, their pale skin shining, a scared look on their faces.

The girls were dressed in little pink dresses, with bows high on their chests. Their hair was done in beads. They wore plastic flip-flops on their feet. They were no more than two or three years old, like twins, but not twins. They were both smiling, which is strange now when I think back on it: they had had no idea what was happening and they looked a picture of health.

“Adorable,” said Claire, but I could hear the terror in her voice.

The social workers wore the straitjacket stare. They were pushing the kids along, trying to guide them through the remaining hookers. A cop car idled farther up the block. The onlookers were trying to wave to the little girls, to lean down and say something, maybe even gather them up in their arms, but the social workers kept pushing the women away.

Some things in life just become very clear and we don’t need a reason for them at all: I knew at that moment what I’d have to do.

“They’re taking them away?” said Claire.

“I suppose.”

“Where’ll they go?”

“Some institution somewhere.”

“But they’re so young.”

The kids were being bundled towards the back of the car. One of them had started crying. She was holding on to the antenna of the car and wouldn’t let go. The social worker tugged her, but the child hung on. The woman came around the side of the car and pried the child’s fingers off.

I stepped out. It didn’t seem to me that I was in the same body anymore. I had a quickness. I stepped off the pavement and onto the road. I was still in Claire’s slippers.

“Hold on,” I shouted.

I used to think it had all ended sometime long ago, that everything was wrapped up and gone. But nothing ends. If I live to be a hundred I’ll still be on that street.

“Hold on.”

Janice—she was the older of the two—let her fingers uncurl and reached out to me. Nothing felt better than that, not in a long time. The other one, Jazzlyn, was crying her eyes out. I looked over my shoulder to Claire, who was still in the backseat, her face shining under the dome light. She looked frightened and happy both.

“You know these kids?” said the cop.

I guess I said yes.

That’s what I finally said, as good a lie as any: “Yes.”

ROARING SEAWARD, AND I GO

October 2006

SHE OFTEN WONDERS WHAT IT is that holds the man so high in the air. What sort of ontological glue? Up there in his haunted silhouette, a dark thing against the sky, a small stick figure in the vast expanse. The plane on the horizon. The tiny thread of rope between the edges of the buildings. The bar in his hands. The great spread of space.

The photo was taken on the same day her mother died—it was one of the reasons she was attracted to it in the first place: the sheer fact that such beauty had occurred at the same time. She had found it, yellowing and torn, in a garage sale in San Francisco four years ago. At the bottom of a box of photographs. The world delivers its surprises. She bought it, got it framed, kept it with her as she went from hotel to hotel.

A man high in the air while a plane disappears, it seems, into the edge of the building. One small scrap of history meeting a larger one. As if the walking man were somehow anticipating what would come later. The intrusion of time and history. The collision point of stories. We wait for the explosion but it never occurs. The plane passes, the tightrope walker gets to the end of the wire. Things don’t fall apart.

It strikes her as an enduring moment, the man alone against scale, still capable of myth in the face of all other evidence. It has become one of her favorite possessions—her suitcase would feel wrong without it, as if it were missing a latch. When she travels she always tucks the photo in tissue paper along with the other mementoes: a set of pearls, a lock of her sister’s hair.

—

At the security line in Little Rock she stands behind a tall man in jeans and a battered leather jacket. Handsome in an offhand way. In his late thirties or early forties, maybe—five or six years older than she is.