by Colum McCann
She knows her helicopters, yes she does, and more’s the pity.
—So, anyway, I told him he should mind his own damn business.
—Indeed, says Gloria.
—And sure enough the captain of the ferry, looking through his binoculars, he says to everyone, That’s no projection.
—That’s right.
—And all I could think of, was, Maybe that’s my boy and he’s come to say hello.
—Oh, no.
—Oh.
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—Lord.
A deep swell in her heart for Marcia.
—Man in the air.
—Imagine.
—Very brave.
—Exactly. That’s why I thought of Mike Junior.
—Of course.
—And did he fall? says Jacqueline.
—Shh, shh, says Janet. Let her speak.
—I’m just asking.
—So the captain swings the ferry out so we can get a better look and then brings the boat into dock. You know, it bumped against the river wall. I couldn’t see anything from there. The wrong angle. Our view was blocked. The north tower, south tower, I don’t know which, but we couldn’t see what was happening. And I didn’t even say another word to the guy with the ponytail. I just turned on my heels. I was the very first person off. I wanted to run and see my boy.
—Of course, says Janet. There, there.
—Shh, says Jacqueline.
The room tight now. One turn of the screw and the whole thing could explode. Janet stares across at Jacqueline, who flicks her long red hair, as if tossing off a fly, even a flyman, and Claire looks back and forth between them, anticipating an overturned table, a broken vase. And she thinks, I should do something, say something, hit the release valve, the escape button, and she reaches across to Gloria to take the flowers from her, petunias, lovely petunias, gorgeous green stalks, neatly clipped at the bottom.
—I should put these in water.
—Yes, yes, says Marcia, relieved.
—Back in a jiffy.
—Hurry, Claire.
—Be right back.
The correct thing to do. Absolutely, positively. She tiptoes to the kitchen and stops at the louvered door. Too much farther in and she won’t be able to hear. How silly to say I’d put them in water. Should have delayed somehow, bought more time. She leans against the door slats, straining to hear.
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— . . . so I’m running in those old mazy side streets. Past the auction houses and cheap electronic joints and fabric stores and tenements.
You’d think you’d be able to see the big buildings from there. I mean, they’re huge.
—One hundred stories.
—A hundred ten.
—Shh.
—But they’re not in view. I get glimpses of them but they’re not the right angle. I was trying to take the most direct route. I should have just gone along the water. But I’m running, running. That’s my boy up there and he’s come to say hello.
Everyone silent, even Janet.
—I kept darting around corners, thinking I’d get a better view. Duck-ing this way and that. Looking up all the time. But I can’t see them, the helicopter or the walker. I haven’t run so fast since junior high. I mean, my boobs were bouncing.
—Marcia!
—Most days I forget I have them anymore.
—Ain’t my dilemma, says Gloria, hitching her chest.
There is a swell of laughter around the room and, at the moment of levity, Claire moves back across the carpet, still holding Gloria’s flowers, but nobody notices. The laughter ripples around, a reconciliation song, circling them all, making a little victory lap, and settles right back down at Marcia’s feet.
—And then I stopped running, says Marcia.
Claire settles on the arm of the sofa again. No matter that she didn’t take care of the flowers. No matter that there’s no water reboiling. No matter that there’s no vase in her hands. She leans forward with the rest of them.
Marcia has a tiny quiver in her lip now, a little tremble of portent.
—I just stopped cold, says Marcia. Dead smack in the middle of the street. I almost got run over by a garbage truck. And I just stood there, hands on my knees, eyes on the ground, breathing heavy. And you know why? I’ll tell you why.
Pausing again.
All of them leaning forward.
—Because I didn’t want to know if the poor boy fell.
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— Ah- huh, s ays G loria.
—I just didn’t want to hear him dead.
—I hear you, ah- huh.
Gloria’s voice, as if she’s at a church service. The rest of them nodding slowly while the clock on the mantelpiece ticks.
—I couldn’t stand the mere thought of it.
—No, ma’am.
—And if he didn’t fall . . .
—If he didn’t, no . . . ?
—I didn’t want to know.
— Ah- huhn, you got it.
—’Cause somehow, if he stayed up there, or if he came down safe, it didn’t matter. So I stopped and turned around and got on the subway and came up here without even so much as a second glance.
—Say gospel.
—Because if he was alive it couldn’t possibly be Mike Junior.
All of it like a slam in the chest. So immediate. At all of their coffee mornings, it had always been distant, belonging to another day, the talk, the memory, the recall, the stories, a distant land, but this was now and real, and the worst thing was that they didn’t know the walker’s fate, didn’t know if he had jumped or had fallen or had got down safely, or if he was still up there on his little stroll, or if he was there at all, if it was just a story, or a projection, indeed, or if she had made it all up for effect—they had no idea—maybe the man wanted to kill himself, or maybe the helicopter had a hook around him to catch him if he fell, or maybe there was a clip around the wire to catch him, or maybe maybe maybe there was another maybe, maybe.
Claire stands, a little shaky at the knees. Disoriented. The voices around her a blur now. She is aware of her feet on the deep carpet. The clock moving but not sounding anymore.
—I think I’ll put these in water now, she says.
—
h e woul d w r i t e letters to her about the wheel wars late at night. Four in the morning at his terminal under the white fluorescents, cutting code, when sometimes a message flashed up. Most of the intrusions were from members of his own squad, linked in a couple of desks away, McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 100
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working on other programs, the tallies of war, and it was just a thing to pass the time, to hack another man’s code, to test his strength, find his vulnerability. Harmless, really, Joshua said.
Charlie and the Viet Cong didn’t have any computers. They weren’t going to sneak in past the cathode tubes and transistors. But the phone lines were linked up back to PARC and Washington, D.C., and some universities, so it was possible, every now and then, for a single slider—he called them sliders, she had no idea why—to come in from somewhere else and cause havoc, and once or twice they blindsided him. Maybe he was working on an overlap line, he said, or a code for the disappeared.
And he would be in the zone. He would feel, yes, like he was sliding down the banisters. It was about speed and raw power. The world was at ease and full of simplicity. He was a test pilot of a new frontier. Anything was possible. It could even have been jazz, one chord to the next. All fingertips. He could stretch his fingers and a new chord was suddenly there.
And then withou
t warning it would begin disappearing in front of his eyes. I want a cookie! Or: Repeat after me, Bye- Bye Blackbird. Or: Watch me smile. He said it was like being Beethoven after scribbling the Ninth. He’d be out on a nice stroll in the countryside and suddenly all the sheet music was blowing away in the wind. He sat rooted to the chair and stared at his machine. The small blipping cursor ate away what he’d been doing. His code got munched. No way to stop it. All that dread rose in his throat. He watched it as it climbed over the hills and disappeared into the sunset.
Come back, come back, come back, I haven’t heard you yet.
How strange to think that there was someone else at the other end of the wires. It was like a burglar breaking into his house and trying on his slippers. Worse than that. Someone getting into my skin, Mama, taking over my memory. Crawling right inside him, up his spinal cord, inside his head, deep into the cranium, walking over his synapses, into his brain cells. She could imagine him leaning forward, his mouth almost to the screen, static on his lips. Who are you? He could feel the intruders beneath his fingertips. Thumbs drumming on his spine. Forefingers at his neck. He knew they were American, the intruders, but he saw them as Vietnamese—he had to—gave them a brown slant to their eyes. It was him and his machine against the other machine. Right, okay, now, well done, you got me, but now I’m going to crush you. And then he would step right into the fray.
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And she would go to the fridge and read his letters and sometimes she would open the freezer section and allow it all to cool him down. It’s all right, honey, you’ll get it back.
And he did. Joshua always got it back. He would phone her at odd hours, when he was elated, when he had won one of the wheel wars.
Long, looping calls that had an echo to them. Didn’t cost him a cent, he said. The squad had a switchboard with multiline capability. He said he had tapped into the lines, routed them down through the army recuiting number just for fun. It was just a system, he said, and it was there to be exploited. I’m okay, Mama, it’s not so bad, they treat us fine, tell Dad they even have kosher here. She listened intently to the voice. When the elation wore off, he sounded tired, distant even, a new language creeping in.
Look, I’m cool, Mama, don’t freak out. Since when did he say freak? He had always been careful with language. Wrapped it up in a tight Park Avenue crispness. Nothing loose or nasal about it at all. But now the language was coarser and his accent had stretched. I’m gonna go with the flow but it seems I’m driving another man’s hearse, Mama.
Was he taking care of himself? Did he have enough food? Did he keep his clothes clean? Was he losing weight? Everything reminded her. She even once put an extra plate out on the dinner table just for Joshua.
Solomon said nothing about it. That and her fridge, her little idiosyn-crasies.
She tried not to fret when his letters started to slacken. He wouldn’t call for a day or two. Or three in a row. She would sit staring at the phone, willing it to ring. When she stood, the floorboards gave out a little groan.
He was busy, he said. There had been a new development in electronic postings. There were more nodes on the electronic net. He said it was like a magic blackboard. The world was bigger and smaller both. Someone had hacked in to chew away parts of their program. It was a dogfight, a boxing match, a medieval joust. I’m in the front line, Mama, I’m in the trenches. Someday, he said, the machines would revolutionize the world.
He was helping other programmers. They logged on at the consoles and stayed on. There was a battle going on with the peace protesters, who were trying to break into their machines. But it was not machines that were evil, he said, but the minds of the top brass behind them. A machine could be no more evil than a violin, or a camera, or a pencil. What the intruders didn’t understand is that they were coming in at the wrong McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 102
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place. It was not the technology that they needed to attack, but the human mind, the way it failed, how it fell short.
She recognized a new depth in him, a candor. The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn’t look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. War was a get- together of the vain.
They wanted it simple—hate your enemy, know nothing of him. It was, he claimed, the most un- American of wars, no idealism behind it, only about defeat. There were over forty thousand to account for now in his Death Hack, and the numbers kept growing. Sometimes he would print the names out. He could unfurl them up and down the stairs. He sometimes wished that someone would hack his program from outside, chew it up, spit it all back out, give life again to all those boys, the Smiths and the Sullivans and the Rodriguez brothers, these fathers and cousins and nephews, and then he’d have to do a program for Charlie, a whole new al-phabet of dying, Ngo, Ho, Phan, Nguyen— wouldn’t that be a chore?
—You okay, Claire?
A touch on her elbow. Gloria.
—Help?
—Excuse me?
—You want help with those?
—Oh, no. I mean, yes. Thanks.
Gloria. Gloria. Such a sweet round face. Dark eyes, moist, almost. A lived- in face. A generosity to it. But a little perturbed. Looking at me.
Looking at her. Caught in the act. Daydreaming. Help? She almost thought for a second that Gloria wanted to be the help. Presumptuous.
Two seventy- five an hour, Gloria. Clean the dishes. Mop the floor. Weep for our boys. A chore indeed.
She reaches high into the top cupboard and pulls out the Waterford glass. Intricate cut. Distant men do that. There are some that aren’t sav-ages. Yes, that’ll do nicely. She hands it to Gloria, who smiles, fills it.
—You know what you should do, Claire?
—What?
—Put sugar in the bottom. It keeps the flowers longer.
She has never heard that before. But it makes sense. Sugar. To keep them alive. Fill up our boys with sugar. Charlie and His Chocolate Factory. And who was it called the Vietnamese Charlie anyway? Where did it McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 103
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come from? Some radiospeak, probably. Charlie Delta Epsilon. Incoming, incoming, incoming.
—Even better if you clip the bottom of them first, says Gloria.
Gloria takes the flowers out and spreads them on the dish rack, takes a small knife from the kitchen counter and lops off a tiny segment of each, sweeps the stems into the palm of her hand, twelve little green things.
—Amazing, really, isn’t it?
—What’s that?
—The man in the air.
Claire leans against the counter. Takes a deep breath. Her mind whirling. She is not sure, not sure at all. A nagging discontent about him too. Something about his appearance sitting heavy, bewildering.
—Amazing, she says. Yes. Amazing.
But what is it about the notion that she doesn’t like? Amazing, indeed, yes. And an attempt at beauty. The intersection of a man with the city, the abruptly reformed, the newly appropriated public space, the city as art.
Walk up there and make it new. Making it a different space. But something else in it still rankles. She wishes not to feel this way, but she can’t shake it, the thought of the man perched there, angel or devil. But what’s wrong with believing in an angel, or a devil, why shouldn’t Marcia be allowed to feel that way, why wouldn’t every man in the air appear to be her son? Why shouldn’t Mike Junior appear on the wire? What is wrong with that? Why shouldn’t Marcia be allowed to freeze it there, her boy returned?
Yet still a sourness.
—Anything else, Claire?
—No, no, we’re perfect.
— Right- y- o, t hen. A ll s et.
Gloria smiles and hoists the vase,
goes to the louvered door, pushes it open with her generous bulk.
—I’ll be right out, says Claire.
The door swings back shut.
She arranges the last of the cups, saucers, spoons. Stacks them neatly.
What is it? The walking man? Something vulgar about the whole thing.
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doesn’t quite know what it is. To think this way, how petty. Downright selfish. She knows full well that she has the whole morning to do what they have done on other mornings—bring out the photos, show them the piano Joshua used to play, open the scrapbooks, take them all down to his room, show them his shelf of books, pick him out from the yearbook.
That’s what they have always done, in Gloria’s, Marcia’s, Jacqueline’s, even Janet’s, especially Janet’s, where they were shown a slide show and later they all cried over a broken- spined copy of Casey at the Bat.
Her hands wide on the kitchen counter. Fingers splayed. Pressing down.
Joshua. Is that what rankles her? That they haven’t yet said his name?
That he hasn’t yet figured into the morning’s chatter? That they’ve ignored him so far, but no, it’s not that, but what is it?
Enough. Enough. Lift the tray. Don’t blow it now. So nice. That smile from Gloria. The beautiful flowers.
Out.
Now.
Go.
She steps into the living room and stops, frozen. They are gone, all of them, gone. She almost drops the tray. The rattle of the spoons as they slide against the edge. Not a single one there, not even Gloria. How can it be? How did they disappear so suddenly? Like a bad childhood joke, as if they might spring out of the closets any moment, or pop up from behind the sofa, a row of carnival faces to throw water balloons at.