Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,81
tower was still unfinished. Much of the building was still unoccupied, nursed in scaffold. He wondered who the others walking around were, what their purpose was. He walked out onto the unfinished roof, wearing a construction hat to avoid detection. He took a mold of the towers in his head. The vision of the double cavallettis on the roof. The y-shaped spread of the wires as they would eventually be. The reflections from the windows and how they would mirror him, at angles, from below. He put one foot out over the edge and dipped his shoe in the air, did a handstand at the very edge of the roof.
When he left the rooftop he felt he was waving to his old friend again: neck-deep, this time a quarter of a mile in the sky.
He was checking the perimeter of the south tower one dawn, marking out the schedules of delivery trucks, when he saw a woman in a green jumpsuit, bent down as if tying her shoelaces, over and over again, around the base of the towers. Little bursts of feathers came from the woman’s hands. She was putting the dead birds in little ziploc bags. White-throated sparrows mostly, some songbirds too. They migrated late at night, when the air currents were calmest. Dazzled by the building lights, they crashed into the glass, or flew endlessly around the towers until exhaustion got them, their natural navigational abilities stunned. She handed him a feather from a black-throated warbler, and when he left the city again he brought it to the meadow and tacked that too just inside the cabin wall. Another reminder.
Everything had purpose, signal, meaning.
But in the end he knew that it all came down to the wire. Him and the cable. Two hundred and ten feet and the distance it bridged. The towers had been designed to sway a full three feet in a storm. A violent gust or even a sudden change in temperature would force the buildings to sway and the wire could tighten and bounce. It was one of the few things that came down to chance. If he was on it, he would have to ride out the bounce or else he’d go flying. A sway of the buildings could snap the wire in two. The frayed end of a cord could even chop a man’s head clean off in midflight. He needed to be meticulous to get it all right: the winch, the come-along, the spanners, the straightening, the aligning, the mathematics, the measuring of resistance. He wanted the wire at a tension of three tons. But the tighter a cable, the more grease that might ooze out of it. Even a change in weather could make a touch of grease slip from the core.
He went over the plans with friends. They would have to sneak into the other tower, put the cavallettis in place, winch the wire tight, look out for security guards, keep him up to date on an intercom. The walk would be impossible otherwise. They spread out plans of the building and learned them by heart. The stairwells. The guard stations. They knew hiding places where they would never be found. It was like they were planning a bank raid. When he couldn’t sleep, he’d wander alone down to the toneless streets near the World Trade Center: in the distance, lights on, the buildings seemed one. He’d stop at a street corner and bring himself up there, imagine himself into the sky, a figure darker than the darkness.
The night before the walk he stretched the cable out the full length of a city block. Drivers stared at him as he unfurled it. He needed to clean the wire. Meticulously he went along and scrubbed it with a rag soaked in gasoline, then rubbed it with emery. He had to make sure there were no stray strands that might poke his foot through the slippers. A single splinter—a meat hook—could be deadly. And there were spaces in each cable where the wires needed to be seated. There could be no surprises. The cable had its own moods. The worst of all was an internal torque, where the cable turned inside itself, like a snake moving through a skin.
The cable was six strands thick with nineteen wires in each. Seven eighths of an inch in diameter. Braided to perfection. The strands had been wound around the core in a lay configuration, which gave his feet the most grip. He and his