Let the Great World Spin Read online

  We hope you enjoy reading Colum McCannʼs LET THE GREAT WORLD

  SPIN. You can purchase the book from your favorite online retailer by clicking on one of the links below.

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  McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page ii A L S O B Y C O L U M M C C A N N

  Zoli

  Dancer

  Everything in This Country Must

  This Side of Brightness

  Songdogs

  Fishing the Sloe-Black River

  McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page iii L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N

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  w o r l d s p i n

  A N o v e l

  C O L U M M c C A N N

  b

  R A N D O M H O U S E

  N E W Y O R K

  McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page vi Let the Great World Spin is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Colum McCann

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  R a n d o m H o us e and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  l i b r a ry o f c o n g r e s s c a t a l o g i n g - i n - p u b l i c a t i o n d a t a McCann, Colum.

  Let the great world spin : a novel / Colum McCann.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-4000-6373-4

  1. Immigrants—Fiction. 2. Irish—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 3. Judges’

  spouses—Fiction. 4. Grief—Fiction. 5. Teenage mothers—Fiction. 6. Petit, Philippe, 1949– —Fiction. 7. Tightrope walking—Fiction. 8. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.

  9. Nineteen seventies—Fiction. 10. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PR6063.C335L47 2009

  823'.914—dc22 2008046963

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper www.atrandom.com

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  f i r s t e d i t i o n

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman

  Title-page drawing by Matteo Pericoli The photograph of Philippe Petit on page 237 is reprinted here courtesy of Rex USA and is © Rex USA.

  McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page vii For John, Frank, and Jim.

  And, of course, Allison.

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  “All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.”

  —Aleksandar Hemon,

  t h e l a z a r u s p r o j e c t

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  T H O S E W H O S A W H I M H U S H E D

  3

  B O O K O N E

  All Respects to Heaven, I Like It Here 1 1

  Miró, Miró, on the Wall 7 3

  A Fear of Love 1 1 5

  L E T T H E G R E AT W O R L D S P I N F O R E V E R D O W N

  1 5 7

  B O O K T W O

  Tag 1 6 7

  Etherwest 1 7 5

  This Is the House That Horse Built 1 9 8

  T H E R I N G I N G G R O O V E S O F C H A N G E

  2 3 8

  B O O K T H R E E

  Part of the Parts 2 4 7

  Centavos 2 7 5

  All Hail and Hallelujah 2 8 5

  B O O K F O U R

  Roaring Seaward, and I Go 3 2 5

  a u t h o r ’ s n o t e 3 5 1

  a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s 3 5 3

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  L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N

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  Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty.

  Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall.

  Others figured it might be the perfect city joke—stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper.

  Up there, at the height of a hundred and ten stories, utterly still, a dark toy against the cloudy sky.

  He could only be seen at certain angles so that the watchers had to pause at street corners, find a gap between buildings, or meander from the shadows to get a view unobstructed by cornicework, gargoyles, balustrades, roof edges. None of them had yet made sense of the line strung at his feet from one tower to the other. Rather, it was the man-shape that held them there, their necks craned, torn between the promise of doom and the disappointment of the ordinary.

  It was the dilemma of the watchers: they didn’t want to wait around for nothing at all, some idiot standing on the precipice of the towers, but they didn’t want to miss the moment either, if he slipped, or got arrested, or dove, arms stretched.

  Around the watchers, the city still made its everyday noises. Car McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 4

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  C O L U M M c C A N N

  horns. Garbage trucks. Ferry whistles. The thrum of the subway. The M22 bus pulled in against the sidewalk, braked, sighed down into a pothole. A flying chocolate wrapper touched against a fire hydrant. Taxi doors slammed. Bits of trash sparred in the darkest reaches of the alleyways. Sneakers found their sweetspots. The leather of briefcases rubbed against trouserlegs. A few umbrella tips clinked against the pavement.

  Revolving doors pushed quarters of conversation out into the street.

  But the watchers could have taken all the sounds and smashed them down into a single noise and still they wouldn’t have heard much at all: even when they cursed, it was done quietly, reverently.

  They found themselves in small groups together beside the traffic lights on the corner of Church and Dey; gathered under the awning of Sam’s barbershop; in the doorway of Charlie’s Audio; a tight little theater of men and women against the railings of St. Paul’s Chapel; elbowing for space at the windows of the Woolworth Building. Lawyers. Elevator operators. Doctors. Cleaners. Prep chefs. Diamond merchants. Fish sellers.

  Sad- jeaned whores. All of them reassured by the presence of one another.

  Stenographers. Traders. Deliveryboys. Sandwichboard men. Cardsharks.

  Con Ed. Ma Bell. Wall Street. A
locksmith in his van on the corner of Dey and Broadway. A bike messenger lounging against a lamppost on West.

  A red- faced rummy out looking for an early- morning pour.

  From the Staten Island Ferry they glimpsed him. From the meat-packing warehouses on the West Side. From the new high- rises in Battery Park. From the breakfast carts down on Broadway. From the plaza below. From the towers themselves.

  Sure, there were some who ignored the fuss, who didn’t want to be bothered. It was seven forty- seven in the morning and they were too jacked up for anything but a desk, a pen, a telephone. Up they came from the subway stations, from limousines, off city buses, crossing the street at a clip, refusing the prospect of a gawk. Another day, another dolor. But as they passed the little clumps of commotion they began to slow down.

  Some stopped altogether, shrugged, turned nonchalantly, walked to the corner, bumped up against the watchers, went to the tips of their toes, gazed over the crowd, and then introduced themselves with a Wow or a Gee- whiz or a Jesus H. Christ.

  The man above remained rigid, and yet his mystery was mobile. He McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 5

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  stood beyond the railing of the observation deck of the south tower—at any moment he might just take off.

  Below him, a single pigeon swooped down from the top floor of the Federal Office Building, as if anticipating the fall. The movement caught the eyes of some watchers and they followed the gray flap against the small of the standing man. The bird shot from one eave to another, and it was then the watchers noticed that they had been joined by others at the windows of offices, where blinds were being lifted and a few glass panes labored upward. All that could be seen was a pair of elbows or the end of a shirtsleeve, or an arm garter, but then it was joined by a head, or an odd- looking pair of hands above it, lifting the frame even higher. In the windows of nearby skyscrapers, figures came to look out—men in shirtsleeves and women in bright blouses, wavering in the glass like fun-house apparitions.

  Higher still, a weather helicopter executed a dipping turn over the Hudson—a curtsy to the fact that the summer day was going to be cloudy and cool anyway—and the rotors beat a rhythm over the warehouses of the West Side. At first the helicopter looked lopsided in its advance, and a small side window was slid open as if the machine were looking for air. A lens appeared in the open window. It caught a brief flash of light. After a moment the helicopter corrected beautifully and spun across the expanse.

  Some cops on the West Side Highway switched on their misery lights, swerved fast off the exit ramps, making the morning all the more magnetic.

  A charge entered the air all around the watchers and—now that the day had been made official by sirens—there was a chatter among them, their balance set on edge, their calm fading, and they turned to one another and began to speculate, would he jump, would he fall, would he tiptoe along the ledge, did he work there, was he solitary, was he a decoy, was he wearing a uniform, did anyone have binoculars? Perfect strangers touched one another on the elbows. Swearwords went between them, and whispers that there’d been a botched robbery, that he was some sort of cat burglar, that he’d taken hostages, he was an Arab, a Jew, a Cypriot, an IRA man, that he was really just a publicity stunt, a corporate scam, Drink more Coca- Cola, Eat more Fritos, Smoke more Parliaments, Spray more Lysol, Love more Jesus. Or that he was a protester and he was going to McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 6

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  C O L U M M c C A N N

  hang a slogan, he would slide it from the towerledge, leave it there to flutter in the breeze, like some giant piece of sky laundry—nixon out now!

  remember ’nam, sam! independence for indochina!—and then someone said that maybe he was a hang glider or a parachutist, and all the others laughed, but they were perplexed by the cable at his feet, and the rumors began again, a collision of curse and whisper, augmented by an increase in sirens, which got their hearts pumping even more, and the helicopter found a purchase near the west side of the towers, while down in the foyer of the World Trade Center the cops were sprinting across the marble floor, and the undercovers were whipping out badges from beneath their shirts, and the fire trucks were pulling into the plaza, and the redblue dazzled the glass, and a flatbed truck arrived with a cherry picker, its fat wheels bouncing over the curb, and someone laughed as the picker kiltered sideways, the driver looking up, as if the basket might reach all that sad huge way, and the security guards were shouting into their walkie- talkies, and the whole August morning was blown wide open, and the watchers stood rooted, there was no going anywhere for a while, the voices rose to a crescendo, all sorts of accents, a babel, until a small red-headed man in the Home Title Guarantee Company on Church Street lifted the sash of his office window, placed his elbows on the sill, took a deep breath, leaned out, and roared into the distance: Do it, asshole!

  There was a dip before the laughter, a second before it sank in among the watchers, a reverence for the man’s irreverence, because secretly that’s what so many of them felt—Do it, for chrissake! Do it!—and then a torrent of chatter was released, a call- and- response, and it seemed to ripple all the way from the windowsill down to the sidewalk and along the cracked pavement to the corner of Fulton, down the block along Broadway, where it zigzagged down John, hooked around to Nassau, and went on, a domino line of laughter, but with an edge to it, a longing, an awe, and many of the watchers realized with a shiver that no matter what they said, they really wanted to witness a great fall, see someone arc downward all that distance, to disappear from the sight line, flail, smash to the ground, and give the Wednesday an electricity, a meaning, that all they needed to become a family was one millisecond of slippage, while the others—those who wanted him to stay, to hold the line, to become the brink, but no farther—felt viable now with disgust for the shouters: they wanted the man to save himself, step backward into the arms of the cops instead of the sky.

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  They were jazzed now.

  Pumped.

  The lines were drawn.

  Do it, asshole!

  Don’t do it!

  Way above there was a movement. In the dark clothing his every twitch counted. He folded over, a half- thing, bent, as if examining his shoes, like a pencil mark, most of which had been erased. The posture of a diver. And then they saw it. The watchers stood, silent. Even those who had wanted the man to jump felt the air knocked out. They drew back and moaned.

  A body was sailing out into the middle of the air.

  He was gone. He’d done it. Some blessed themselves. Closed their eyes. Waited for the thump. The body twirled and caught and flipped, thrown around by the wind.

  Then a shout sounded across the watchers, a woman’s voice: God, oh God, it’s a shirt, it’s just a shirt.

  It was falling, falling, falling, yes, a sweatshirt, fluttering, and then their eyes left the clothing in midair, because high above the man had unfolded upward from his crouch, and a new hush settled over the cops above and the watchers below, a rush of emotion rippling among them, because the man had arisen from the bend holding a long thin bar in his hands, jiggling it, testing its weight, bobbing it up and down in the air, a long black bar, so pliable that the ends swayed, and his gaze was fixed on the far tower, still wrapped in scaffolding, like a wounded thing waiting to be reached, and now the cable at his feet made sense to everyone, and whatever else it was there would be no chance they could pull away now, no morning coffee, no conference room cigarette, no nonchalant carpet shuffle; the waiting had been made magical, and they watched as he lifted one dark- slippered foot, like a man about to enter warm gray water.

  The watchers below pulled in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not
heard it before.

  Out he went.

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  B O O K

  O N E

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  A L L R E S P E C T S T O H E A V E N , I L I K E I T H E R E

  One of the many things my brother, Corrigan, and I loved about our mother was that she was a fine musician. She kept a small radio on top of the Steinway in the living room of our house in Dublin and on Sunday afternoons, after scanning whatever stations we could find, Radio Éireann or BBC, she raised the lacquered wing of the piano, spread her dress out at the wooden stool, and tried to copy the piece through from memory: jazz riffs and Irish ballads and, if we found the right station, old Hoagy Carmichael tunes. Our mother played with a natural touch, even though she suffered from a hand which she had broken many times. We never knew the origin of the break: it was something left in silence. When she finished playing she would lightly rub the back of her wrist. I used to think of the notes still trilling through the bones, as if they could skip from one to the other, over the breakage. I can still after all these years sit in the museum of those afternoons and recall the light spilling across the carpet. At times our mother put her arms around us both, and then guided our hands so we could clang down hard on the keys.

  It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one’s mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid- 1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime. One looks for McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 12

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