Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,23

necessarily like it. He’s out of my range. But that’s no problem. Plenty of times I haven’t liked Him. It’s good to be at a disturbance with God. Plenty of fine people have been in my place and worse.

“I figure being sick is old news anyway and dying’s even older than that. What’s fatal is the big hollow echo every time I tried Him out. See, I just felt hollow every time I tried talking with Him. I gave it everything, brother. My proper confession, you know, about maintaining faith and all. I talked with Father Marek there in St. Ann’s. A good priest. We struggled together, him and I. Hours on end. And with Him too, with God, at all hours of the day. Used to be, though, that the arguments with Him stirred the depths of my heart. I wept in His presence. But He kept coming back at me with all His pure logic. Still, I knew it would pass. I knew I’d get over it. I wasn’t even thinking about Adelita then. She wasn’t even on my mind. It was losing God. The prospect of losing that. The rational part of me knew it was me—I mean, I was just talking to myself. I was obstructing Him. But being rational about it didn’t cure it. You meet a rational God and you say, Well, okay, that’s not my cup of tea right now, Heavenly Father, I’ll come back at a better time.

“You know, when you’re young, God sweeps you up. He holds you there. The real snag is to stay there and to know how to fall. All those days when you can’t hold on any longer. When you tumble. The test is being able to climb up again. That’s what I’m looking for. But I wasn’t getting up. I wasn’t able.

“So, anyway, I’m in the nursing home one Friday afternoon and Adelita was sitting in the stock room, going through the bottles of cough mixture. And I just sat down on the low ladder and was chatting away with her. She was asking me if I was getting treatment in the hospital and I find myself lying, flat-out lying, saying, Yes, of course, everything’s fine, not a bother on me. ‘That’s good,’ she said, ‘because you really need to be looking after yourself.’ Then she stepped over beside me, pulled up a chair, and started rubbing the inside of my arm. She said that I had to keep the blood flowing. She pushed her fingers into my arm here. And it was like she put her hands down deep in the earth. That’s how it felt. I got goosebumps, my blood moving under her fingers. My other hand gripped the side of the ladder. And there was a voice inside me saying, ‘Strengthen yourself against this, this is a test, be ready, be ready.’ But it’s the same voice I don’t like. I’m looking behind the veil of it and all I see is this woman, it’s a catastrophe, I’m descending, sinking like a hopeless swimmer. And I’m saying, God don’t allow this to happen. Don’t let it. She was tapping the inside of my arm with her fingernail, just flicking it. I closed my eyes. Please don’t allow this. Please. But it was so pleasant. So so very pleasant. I wanted to keep my eyes closed and pry them open at the same time. No words for it, brother. I couldn’t stand it. I got up and stormed out of the place. Stumbled out into the van.

“I think I drove all night. I just kept going. Following the white lines. I got snared up on bridges. Had no idea where I was going. Soon enough the lights of the city were fading. I figured I was out somewhere way upstate, but it was the island, man, Long Island. I thought I was going west, across some great open land, where I’d work everything out, but I wasn’t, I was actually heading east along this big highway. And I just kept going. Driving and driving. Cars zipping by me. I had to keep muttering to myself and lighting matches, smelling the sulfur, to keep awake. Trying to pray. To make two plus two equal five. And then the highway ended, middle of nowhere, it seemed like, and I just followed a smaller road. Out through farmland and past these isolated houses, little pinpoints of light. Montauk. I’d never been there before. The dark got thicker,