Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,156

A bounce in his step as he moves up the line. She edges a little closer to him. The tag on his bag reads: DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS.

The security guard bristles and examines his passport.

—Are you carrying any liquids, sir?

—Just eight pints.

—Excuse me, sir?

—Eight pints of blood. I don’t think they’ll spill.

He taps his chest and she chuckles. She can tell that he’s Italian: the words stretched with a lyrical curl. He turns to her and smiles, but the security guard stands back, stares at the man, as if at a painting, and then says: Sir, I need you to step out of line, please.

—Excuse me?

—Step out of line, please. Now.

Two other guards swing across.

—Listen, I’m only joking, says the Italian.

—Sir, follow us, please.

—Just a joke, he says.

He’s pushed in the back, toward an office.

—I’m a doctor, I was just making a joke. Just carrying eight pints of blood, that’s all. A joke. A bad one. That’s all.

He flings out his hands to plead, but his arm is twisted high behind his back, and the door is closed behind him with a thump.

The rancor passes down the line to her and the other passengers in the security area. She feels a thread of cold along her neck as the security guard stares her down. She has a bottle of perfume sealed in a little ziploc bag, and she places it carefully in the tray.

—Why are you bringing this in carry-on, miss?

—It’s less than three ounces.

—And the purpose of your travel?

—Personal. To see a friend.

—And what’s your final destination, miss?

—New York.

—Business or pleasure?

—Pleasure, she says, the word catching at the back of her throat.

She answers calmly, practiced, controlled, and when she goes through the metal detector she automatically stretches her arms out to be searched, even though she doesn’t set off the alarm.

—

The plane is near empty. The Italian finally slouches on, quiet, embarrassed, contrite. He has a hunch to his shoulders as if he can’t quite deal with his height. His light-brown hair in a havoc. A small shadow of gray-tinged beard on his chin. He catches her eye as he takes the seat behind her. A smile travels between them. She can hear him, behind her, as he takes off his leather jacket and sighs down into his place.

Halfway through the flight she orders a gin and tonic and he extends a twenty-dollar bill across the seat to pay for her drink.

—They used to give things out free, he says.

—You’re used to traveling in style?

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.

—No, not me, he says. Style and I never got along.

She can tell it’s true, the wide collar on his shirt, an ink spot on the breast pocket. He looks like the sort of man who might give himself his own haircut. Not your normal Italian, but what’s a normal Italian anyway? She has grown tired of the people who tell her that she’s not a normal African-American, as if there were only one great big normal box that everyone had to pop out of, the Swedish, the Poles, the Mexicans, and what did they mean anyway that she wasn’t normal, that she didn’t wear gold hoop earrings, that she moved tightly, dressed tightly, kept everything in line?

—So, she says, what did they tell you in the airport?

—Not to make jokes anymore.

—God bless America.

—The bad-joke police. Did you hear the one …

—No, no!

— … about the man who went to the doctor’s office with the carrot up his nose?

Already she is laughing. He gestures to the aisle seat.

—Please, yes.

She is surprised by the immediate comfort she feels, inviting him to sit, even turning toward him, bridging the distance over the middle seat. She is often nervous around men and women her own age, their attention, their desires. A tall, willowy beauty, she has cinnamon skin, white teeth, serious lips, no makeup, but her dark eyes always seem to want to escape her good looks. It adds up to a strange force around her: she strikes people as intelligent and dangerous, an otherland stranger. Sometimes she tries to claw her way through the awkwardness, but falls back down, suffocating. It’s as if she feels it all bubbling up inside, all that wild ancestry, but she can’t get it to boil.

At work she is known as one of the bosses with ice in her veins. If there’s