Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,17

piss in their own apartments then?”

“Because they’ve got families. Mothers and fathers and brothers and sons and daughters. They don’t want their families to see them dressed like that.”

“They’ve got kids?”

“Sure.”

“Jazz, she got kids?”

“Two,” he said.

“Oh, man.”

“Tillie’s her mother.”

I turned on him. I knew how it sounded. Step into that river, you don’t step out—no return. It came out in a torrent, how disgusting they were, sucking on his blood, all of them, leaving him thin, dry, helpless, taking the life out of him, leeches, worse than leeches, bedbugs that crawled from the wallpaper; he was a fool—all his religiosity, all his pious horse-shit, it came down to nothing, the world is vicious and that’s what it amounts to, and hope is nothing more or less than what you can see with your own bare eyes.

He pulled at a small thread on the sleeve of his shirt, but I caught his elbow.

“Don’t give me your shit about the Lord upholding all that fall and raising up all that be bowed down. The Lord’s too big to fit in their miniskirts. Guess what, brother? Look at them. Look out the window. No amount of sympathy is ever going to change it. Why don’t you cop on? You’re just placating your conscience, that’s all. God comes along and sanctifies your guilt.”

His lips broke open a little. I waited but still he did not speak. We were so close together I could see his tongue move behind his teeth, flicking up and down like something nervous. His eyes were fixed and intent.

“Grow up, brother. Pack your bags, go somewhere you matter. They deserve nothing. They’re not Magdalenes. You’re just a bum among them. You’re looking for the poor man within? Why don’t you humble yourself at the feet of the rich for once? Or does your God just love useless people?”

I could see the small, oblong reflection of the white door in his pupils, and I kept thinking that one of his hookers, one of his holy failures, was going to walk in and I’d see her reflection in the flicker.

“Why don’t you embarrass the rich with some of your charity? Go sit on a rich woman’s step and bring her to God? Tell me this—if the poor really are the living image of Jesus, why are they so fucking miserable? Tell me that, Corrigan. Why are they standing out there, displaying their misery to the rest of the world? I want to know. It’s just vanity, isn’t it? Love thy neighbor as thyself. It’s rubbish. You listening? Why don’t you take all those hookers of yours and have them go sing in the choir? The Church of the High Vision. Why don’t you have them sit in the front pews? I mean, there you go on your knees to all the tramps and the lepers and the cripples and dopeheads. Why don’t they do something? Because they want nothing but to suck you dry, that’s why.”

Exhausted, I laid my head against the windowsill.

I kept waiting for him to give me some sort of bitter benediction—something about being weak towards the strengthless, strong against the powerful, there is no peace save in Jesus, freedom is given, not received, some catch-all to soothe me, but instead he let it all wash over him. His face did not betray a thing. He scratched the inside of his arm and nodded.

“Just leave the door open,” he said.

He went down the stairwell, footsteps echoing, around the edge of the courtyard, disappeared into the grayness.

I ran down the slick steps of the apartment building. Huge swirls of fat graffiti on the walls. The drift of hash smoke. Broken glass on the bottom steps. Smells of piss and puke. Through the courtyard. A man held a pit bull on a training rope. He was teaching it to bite. The dog snapped at his arm: there were huge metal bracelets strapped across the man’s wrists. The snarls rolled across the yard. Corrigan was backing up his brown van, which he’d parked on the side of the road. I slapped the windows. He didn’t turn. I suppose I thought I might knock some sense into him, but after a moment the van was out of sight.

Over my shoulder the dog was snapping again at the man’s arm, but the man was staring at me, like I was the one trying to rip his wrists. A half-smile crawled over his face, malevolent and pure. I thought: Nigger. I couldn’t help it, but