Free This Side of Brightness by Colum McCann Page A

the windows, letting the Amtrak rifle past.
    He sits on the ground and puts his hand to his heart and closes his eyes and says aloud to nobody, “Thank you, thank you.”
    She moves on once more in the tremendous cold. Treefrog follows behind at a safe distance, all the way down to the cubicles at 95th Street. The cubicles—concrete bunkers once used by the railway workers—are set in a long row.
    She doesn’t even flinch when Faraday comes out from his solitary cell and stares at her. Faraday, in his filthy black suit, lets out a low whistle and she ignores it, swings her handbag like a weapon.
    â€œHey, honey,” says Faraday.
    â€œI ain’t your honey.”
    â€œYou sure look like it.”
    â€œFuck you.”
    Her voice is high and shrill and uneven, and Treefrog is sure she is sobbing.
    â€œYes, please,” says Faraday. “Fuck me please.”
    And then she steps through the orchard of garbage outside the cubicle where Dean the Trash Man lives. Light spills in behind her and she goes tiptoeing past the mounds of human feces and the torn magazines and the empty containers and the hypodermic needles with blobs of blood at their tips like poppies erupting in a field—in her black high heels she moves like a dark, long-legged bird—past the broken bottles and rat droppings and a baby carriage and smashed TVs and squashed cans and discarded cardboard boxes and shattered jars and orange peels and crack vials and a single teddy bear with both its eyes missing, its belly nibbled by rats. She keeps on going among all the leftovers of human ruin.
    Dean comes out of his cubicle when she passes. He wears a rescued pince-nez and shoves it to his eyes and watches her go. Dean licks his lips, and there is a smile on his face as if he might one day collect her too.
    An old piece of newspaper catches on her foot and wraps around her ankle, and she carries the page for about twenty yards. Treefrog—hidden way back in the shadows—thinks of headlines sweeping down into her ankles and being carried the length of the tunnels forever, but she kicks off the paper and reels on toward Elijah’s place. She must have been here before, thinks Treefrog, the way she moves, the way she never looks over her shoulder.
    She stops outside Elijah’s cubicle where the ground is clean and free of rubbish. Papa Love has planted a tiny tree in the hard-packed dirt, and she rubs her hands along the brown deadness of its branches. Catching her breath, she stands in the shaft of light and then shouts, “Elijah! Hey, Elijah!”
    She looks up and down the row of concrete cubicles.
    â€œElijah!” she shouts again.
    Treefrog can tell she’s crying, and he wants to stretch out and touch her, but as he steps out of the shadows Elijah emerges from his cubicle. He rubs his eyes and looks across the tracks to where she stands by the tree. Treefrog tucks himself away in the dark once more.
    Elijah steps across the tracks and takes the woman in his arms, and she collapses into his shoulder and sobs. She pulls back the hood of Elijah’s sweatshirt and rubs her fingers over the scar on his face. Elijah shoulders her to his cubicle, kicks the door open. It swings drunkenly on one hinge.
    Treefrog sits outside and waits.
    After an hour Elijah comes out of the cubicle and pisses against the wall like a dog marking his territory. He punches his arms toward the roof of the tunnel in delight. Treefrog turns and walks back down the tunnel to his solitary nest. He takes out the photograph of Dancesca and his daughter, throws the photo up and down in the air, catching it with both hands before it hits the dirt floor.
    *   *   *
    Chilblains. Hands so big from the cold and damp they feel like they could burst their gloves.
    *   *   *
    He will find out later that her name is Angela. She was living in another tunnel, downtown, between Second Avenue and