Thirteen Ways of Looking

by Colum McCann

  Or maybe this is not the case at all. Maybe he is triumphant. Maybe he is raw with joy. Maybe he feels strong and justified. Perhaps he did this to avenge his daughter and her children, their poverty, their sadness, their loss of their father, the sins of their mother. Perhaps there is something entirely congratulatory in the way he walks back down the boardwalk, past the carnival grounds, under the twinkling lights. Perhaps he feels that he should do the same with the son of the man he killed. Perhaps he is thinking, Fuck you, Elliot Mendelssohn, you’re next.

  It is happening, as the poet says, and it is going to happen.

  Pedro will be arrested six days later. He will be charged. He will plead not guilty. His daughter will make bail for him. The State will offer. Pedro will not take it. The State says it will go all-out: second-degree murder. Pedro’s lawyer will say he should take a lesser charge, manslaughter perhaps, but Pedro will say no, he is too old for jail, he would rather fight it. He will go to trial almost a full year later. It will be up to a jury to decide. In a high-ceilinged room on Centre Street in lower Manhattan they will weigh it all up. Sift through the evidence. Disregard. Reinstate. A form of excavation and rebuilding. They will look for the one moment of revelation that might eventually turn to truth.

  There will be doctors and paramedics and cardiologists and blunt-trauma experts, one who will say that Mendelssohn was killed by the punch, another who will say that he died when his head hit the ground. There will be two forensic video analysts who will ask for the courtroom curtains to be drawn. They will carefully analyze the footage for the jury using six flat screens: one for the judge, one for the prosecution, one for the defense, three for the jury. They will discuss compression, resolution, blurring, time stamps, frame rates, comparative analysis. They will show the angle of the fall. They will point out the brief appearance of the assailant. They will crop in and zoom out. They will focus on the cap and the jacket. They will argue about unique characteristics, the known and the unknown. They will not be able to show a recognizable face. They will, however, show the footage of the kitchen argument of Dandinho and Pedro. They will count through the minutes and seconds of Pedro’s bathroom visit. They will show Pedro returning to the giant sinks beneath the Brooklyn Cyclones poster. They will freeze him there a moment, plunging his hands into warm water.

  Are those hands cold? Are those hands tormented? Are those hands simply doing their chores?

  The prosecution will call on Elliot Mendelssohn to testify. He will tighten his jacket and stride to the front of the courtroom, then slide into the witness box. He will try earnestness, rage, prolonged silence, even tears, but the judge will cut him short. His voice will crack on cross-examination. He will say he never met the accused in his life. He will showcase his habit of raising his forefinger when answering a question. A little tremble will animate his neck. He will say that the death of his father has left him bereft. He will look at his hands as if to check that what he just said was correct. He will say that he will never recover from the shock. He will plead and cajole. He will glance once at Pedro, then quickly away. He will step down from the dock with two ovals of sweat appearing even through the cloth of his jacket. At the rear of the Centre Street courtroom he will look at his cell phone as if the answers to all the questions can be found there.

  The days will go on.

  They will call on the restaurant manager, Christopher Eagleton, and the waitress, Rosita Oosterhausen. Rosita’s testimony will be curt and polite. She will say that she helped Mendelssohn into his coat at the door. She will say that he was a sweet old man, and she has no idea who would choose to hurt him, or why. She will say that the trauma made her give up her job. She will say that she never saw such a pointless death. She will step down from the witness stand, furtive, coiled, as if embarrassed by her testimony. She will flick a quick look at Pedro, though he will not return her glance. Christopher Eagleton will appear nervous, as if anything he might say will affect the business of his restaurant. He will loosen his tie and say that he is very sorry for the loss of his favorite customer and he really has no clue why the attack might have occurred. He was present in the restaurant, yes, and he heard a commotion outside. He ran out to help, but did not see the assailant, or even the shape of the assailant, and really there was little more that he could say. He bent down to Mendelssohn, who appeared already dead. It all seemed entirely senseless to him. Certainly he never heard Pedro say an errant word about anyone, least of all Mendelssohn. He will leave the witness stand, head bowed, fists thrust into his jacket pockets.

  The court will be told that the whereabouts of Dandinho are unknown, he is thought to be in Rio de Janeiro with a wife and three children, although it is also possible that he was spotted working in a restaurant in Toronto, and he may also have been seen in a barbecue restaurant in South Carolina. They will hear that all attempts to contact him after the initial interrogations were impossible. The defense will claim that without Dandinho there is no case. The prosecution will say that the evidence is clear-cut, and Dandinho clearly aided in the crime, underlined by his subsequent disappearance. The court will call on Sally James who will have just returned from Tobago for a week with her nephew to settle her financial affairs. She will be polite and confused and she will carry a little handkerchief to dab her eyes. They will call on Maria Casillias who will testify to the fact that, yes, she is currently in the process of bringing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the Barner Funds, though settlement is imminent. She will say that, yes, she told her father about losing her job. She will admit that, yes, she mentioned Elliot’s name. But she will say that, no, she never told him of the affair. And she will say that he never displayed any anger, she has never seen him raise a fist to anyone, least of all an old man, there is simply no way her father could have done such a thing. She will say that it’s much more likely that Elliot came out of the snow and punched his own father, he is that sort of man. The court will hear an objection. She will say that, even if it wasn’t Elliot, the old man probably slipped, that is the logical thing, it was snowing, can’t you see that he slipped, didn’t they say he had two glasses of wine? The judge will instruct her, quietly, to limit her emotions. She will step down from the stand, glancing at her father, and then turn away when her ex-husband emerges from the gallery to hold her hand.

  The court will call on Pedro who, on his attorney’s advice, will not testify. He will sit in the courtroom, stone-faced, gentle, unmoving, a hard man to read. The jurors will wait and they will listen. They will weigh up notions of truth and lies—the truth with its border emptiness, and lies with their standard narrative conventions. They will trawl through the vast compendium of facts and figures and conjecture. It will be, to them, like trying to mine for light in the darkness, working in shafts, pockets, seams, chutes. The judge will instruct the jury members of their responsibilities and they will retire to deliberate. They will watch—once again—the footage of Mendelssohn’s fall outside the restaurant. They will watch, too, the footage of Pedro and Dandinho in the kitchen. They will ask to see it again and again: each time it appears to them differently. They will freeze Mendelssohn in midfall and that image itself will become the screensaver upon their imaginations: they will wake with it for many days, weeks, even months afterward.

  Twelve days of testimony, then the verdict. It is captured on video of course. A high angle designed not to include the faces of the jurors. The wood-paneled room is airy and spacious. The judge is seated high at the front. The Star-Spangled Banner on one side of him. The New York State flag on the other. The court reporter to the judge’s right. The lawyers set up on opposite sides of each other. A sense that the room has been here forever, set down in aspic, a place that will never change.

  There is a courtroom window right behind Pedro Jiménez. When he stands, he blocks out some of the light. The lens takes a moment to adjust. It flares and comes back into focus. His head is bowed. His hands are clasped at his waist. His suit is a hopeful blue. He waits as th
e jury forewoman steps forth. He closes his eyes while pronouncement is read out.

  The sky outside is an immense sheet of gray. There is no movement in the clouds at all.

  More cameras in the city than birds in the sky.

  1

  He had agreed in spring to write a short story for the New Year’s Eve edition of a newspaper magazine. An easy enough task, he thought at first. In late May he settled down to sketch out a few images that might work, but soon found himself struggling, adrift. For a couple of weeks in early summer he cast about, chased ideas and paragraphs, left a few hanging, found himself postponing the assignment, putting it to the back of his mind. Occasionally he pulled his notes out again, then abandoned them once more.

  He wondered how he would ever push into the territory of a New Year’s Eve story—create a series of fireworks perhaps, drop a mirrored ball in a city, or allow snow to slowly scatter across the face of a windowpane?

  All the beginnings he attempted—scribbled down in notebooks—wrote themselves into the dark.

  2

  In early summer he landed on the idea that he could perhaps defy his own notions of what a New Year’s Eve story could achieve and tell a military tale, perhaps the portrait of a soldier somewhere far away, a young American, say, in a distant land. He could find himself, say, in a barracks on New Year’s Eve in Afghanistan, the simple notion of a Marine—let’s say a young woman, slightly exhausted by war, sitting on the edge of a valley, in the cold, surrounded by sandbags, in the vast quiet, looking eastward, under a steel mesh of stars, all silence, not even the thrup of machine-gun fire in the distance, the grim perimeter of the soldier’s reality set against the possibility of what might be happening elsewhere, say, at home in South Carolina, say, a relentless suburb of no great distinction, say, a house gone slightly sour with the years, say, a broken drainpipe hanging down from the garage, say, a boy in the driveway, a young boy, in a striped shirt and torn jeans, with a bicycle lying forlorn at his feet, her brother, or her cousin, or perhaps even her son, yes, maybe her son.

  3

  Looking out into the Afghan night—although it would be better to be specific, and she could be facing the gothic dark of the Kerengal Valley, maybe even the ridge over Loi Kolay Village—she would draw herself into the savagery found at the outpost of every war, several layers of black pressing down on the already-dark mountains, an area where even the stunted trees might seem as if they want to step off the cliffs and hurtle themselves to the valley floor, the darkness made again more visible by the layer of frost covering everything, the sandbags, the steel rebars, the machine gun, a Browning M-57, the impossible stretch of distance, the enormity of black sky, with everything so cold that the young Marine, let’s call her Sandi, wears a balaclava over her face, under her helmet, and the tip-ends of Sandi’s eyelashes have frozen and her lungs feel thick with ice and when she looks through the small gap in the sandbags her teeth chatter so much that she is afraid she might chip them, a personal dread, since Sandi is hipheavy and small-breasted and unpretty in her own eyes, and twenty-six years old and feeling every single day of it, but proud of her strong white teeth, so that when she takes the upper lip of the balaclava and stretches it down across her mouth, the fabric tastes hard and rough and synthetic against her tongue.

  4

  Sandi sits alone in her rocky outpost. Unlikely of course, but he knows a few Marines back in New York, and he has heard their stories, and he is well aware that reality so often trumps invention, so he justifies her aloneness with the idea that a New Year’s Eve party is taking place in the village barracks below, and Sandi has agreed to give the other Marines a break, that she will take the post alone for an hour while midnight tips over, while the ball drops distantly, because everyone in Sandi’s unit knows that Sandi is decent, Sandi is cool, Sandi knows the score, and, let’s be honest, Sandi likes her privacy, and she has been given special access to a satellite phone that she can use at the stroke of midnight, since who wants to be alone on New Year’s Eve without a way to at least call home and say—and what is Sandi going to say?

  (He has, he must admit, no idea yet.)

  What he does know is that the sense of cold seclusion is important: not only because it is a New Year’s Eve story, but because it freezes Sandi in her cube of human loneliness, like most of us, at the unfolding of a year, looking backward and forward, both. Not only that, but the reader must begin to feel the cold that claws Sandi up there on the 308-meter ridge: so much so that she, or he, almost inhabits the very trees that want to step off the cliff. We should feel our own eyelashes freeze, and clench our cheeks to stop our own teeth chattering, because, like Sandi, we have something we must see, or understand, or at least imagine into existence, far away, and we, too, have a distant hope that Sandi will say something into her satellite phone, perhaps not a resolution, but at least a resolve of some sort, a small parcel of meaning.

  (Though he still has little idea of what exactly she might say, she is beginning to become a little more complex for him, which he’s grateful for, since deadline is approaching, he has to have it finished by mid-October at the latest, and he hunkers down for three or four days, in late September, in his apartment on Eighty-sixth Street in New York, though he can still somehow feel the cold seeping in from the Afghan hills, and he wants now to capture the essence of what it feels like to be far from home, to be in two or three places all at once, and the simple notion that what we really need on New Year’s Eve is a sense of return, whether to his own original Dublin, or to Sandi’s Charleston, or to his New York, or Sandi’s birthplace which is, let’s say, Ohio, though Sandi of course could be born just about any place, but Ohio feels right, let’s say Toledo.)

  5

  This he now knows: Sandi Jewell is twenty-six years old, from Toledo, she lives in the south, she’s a Marine, she perches in her camouflage more than 1,010 feet high in the debilitating cold, wearing a balaclava, looking out at the Afghan dark on the eve of the new year, about to dial a loved one on a satellite phone at her side. (He wonders what might happen if once, a year ago, there were three space heaters in the lookout, but they leaked out a light so that a sniper took out another Marine simply by lining up the shot in the center of the heaters, a perfect mathematical triangulation, an incident Sandi might have been aware of when she volunteered to take the outpost, adding another sense of dread to the story—perhaps it could happen again, a leak of light from her satellite phone this time? After a few days he decides against it—it would be far too simple to embrace the ease of death by sniperfire, and what sort of New Year’s story might that be anyway?) The essence of Sandi’s story has begun to place layers upon layers, though he does not know yet who the loved one is, or what might eventually exist between them. Still, a certain mystery has begun to join things together.

  6

  What Sandi sees, or what he imagines Sandi can see: the boy lays his bicycle down in the driveway, somewhere suburban, a Legoland of houses, on the outskirts of Charleston. It is midafternoon in mid-America, eight and a half hours behind Afghanistan. He is a tall, thin handsome boy. Let’s say he is definitely her son (the desire to talk must be immense, and the potential for tragedy real: what might happen if she doesn’t get to talk to him? What happens if the line goes dead? What happens if a shot rings out in the night?). He is fourteen years old, tricky, of course, since Sandi was earlier established as twenty-six years old. (Is he really her son? Is that feasible? Is it even possible?) The boy lifts the corrugated garage door, his heart thumping in his blue-and-white-striped shirt, and he hears a shout from inside the house, a woman (let’s name her Kimberlee) trilling out to him (let’s name him Joel) to say: Quick, Joel, your mom’s about to call. And Joel is late, he knows he’s late, and he’s old enough now—almost fifteen in fact—to have a sweetheart and to know some things about the complexities of loss. He has spent an afternoon with her down there near the school bleachers on Lancaster Street. He has pledged himself to her, he will be with
her later tonight when the real clock (the American clock) strikes midnight, but first he must talk to his second mother in Afghanistan from the kitchen of his first mother’s house.

  (And though Joel calls her his “second mother,” and he has only known Sandi for four years, he has scrawled an ink tattoo inside his wrist, K & S.)

  Joel hurries through the house, slings his jacket across the kitchen table, yanks up a chair, glances at Kimberlee, and says, while he stares at gaps in the hardwood floor: “What time is it now, where she is?”

  7

  Sandi sits in the dark, wearing a watch strapped to the outside of her wrist, over her tan Nomex fireproof gloves, waiting for the countdown. There have been problems with the phone signal in the past—dropped calls, endless ringing, failed satellites.