Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,67
style of the past and have the present destroy them. You let the weather become the imaginative force. The real world works on your art. So you give it a new ending. And then you reinterpret it. It’s perfect, dig?
—The girl died, Blaine.
—Give it over.
—No, I won’t give it over.
He threw up his hands and then slammed them down on the table. The solitary sugar grains jumped. Some men at the counter turned and flicked a look at us.
—Oh, fuck, he said. There’s no use talking to you.
His breakfast came and he ate it sullenly. He kept looking up at me, like I might suddenly change, become the beauty he had once married, but his eyes were blue and hateful. He ate the sausage with a sort of savagery, stabbed at it as if it angered him, this thing once alive. A little bit of egg stuck at the side of his mouth where he hadn’t shaved properly. He tried to talk of his new project, that a man could find meaning anywhere. His voice buzzed like a trapped fly. His desire for surety, for meaning. He needed me as part of his patterns. I felt the urge to tell Blaine that I had in fact spent my whole life really loving the Nixon boy in the wheelchair, and that it had all been pabulum since then, and juvenile, and useless, and tiresome, all of our art, all our projects, all our failures, it was just pure cast-off, and none of it mattered, but instead I just sat there, saying nothing, listening to the faint hum of voices from the counter, and the rattle of the forks against the plates.
—We’re finished here, he said.
Blaine snapped his fingers and the waitress came running. He left an extravagant tip and we stepped outside into the sunlight.
Blaine tipped a pair of giant sunglasses over his eyes, extended his stride, and walked toward the garage at the end of Main Street. I followed a couple of paces behind. He didn’t turn, didn’t wait.
—Hey, man, can you get a special order? he said to a pair of legs that were extended from underneath a car.
The mechanic wheeled himself out, stared upward, blinked.
—What can I get you, bud?
—A replacement headlight for a 1927 Pontiac. And a front fender.
—A what?
—Can you get them or not?
—This is America, chief.
—Get them, then.
—It takes time, man. And money.
—No problem, said Blaine. I got both.
The mechanic picked at his teeth, then grinned. He labored over toward a cluttered desk: files and pencil shavings and pinup calendar girls. Blaine’s hands were shaking, but he didn’t care; he was caught up on himself now and what he would do with his paintings once the car was fixed. As soon as the light and the fender could get repaired the whole matter would be forgotten and then he’d work. I had no idea how long this new obsession might last for him—an hour, another year, a lifetime?
—You coming? said Blaine as we stepped out of the garage.
—I’d rather walk.
—We should film this, he said. Y’know, how this new series gets painted and all. All from the very beginning. Make a document of it, don’t you think?
—
A ROW OF SMOKERS stood out in front of Metropolitan Hospital on Ninety-eighth and First Avenue. Each looked like his last cigarette, ashen and ready to fall. Through the swinging doors, the receiving room was full to capacity. Another cloud of smoke inside. Patches of blood on the floor. Junkies strung out along the benches. It was the type of hospital that looked like it needed a hospital.
I walked through the gauntlet. It was the fifth receiving room I had visited, and I had begun to think that perhaps both the driver and the young woman had been killed on impact and were taken immediately to a morgue.
A security guard pointed me toward an information booth. A window was cut into the wall of an unmarked room at the end of the corridor. A stout woman sat framed by it. From a distance it looked as if she sat in a television set. Her eyeglasses dangled at her neck. I sidled up to the window and whispered about a man and woman who might have been brought in from a crash on Wednesday afternoon.
—Oh, you’re a relative? she said, not even glancing up at me.