Free Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

simple, you could do unto others what you’d have them do unto you, but at that time he hadn’t figured on other complications.
    “You ever have the feeling there’s a stray something or other inside you?” he said. “You don’t know what it is, like a ball, or a stone, could be iron or cotton or grass or anything, but it’s inside you. It’s not a fire or a rage or anything. Just a big ball. And there’s no way to get at it?” He cut himself short, looked away, tapped the left side of his chest. “Well, here it is. Right here.”
    We seldom know what we’re hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.
    “You’re having me on, right?”
    “Wish I was,” he said.
    “Come on now . . .”
    “You don’t believe me?”
    “Jazzlyn?” I asked, floored. “You haven’t fallen for that hooker, have you?”

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    He laughed heartily but it was a laugh that ran away. His eyes shot across the playground, and he ran his fingers along the fence.
    “No,” he said, “no, not Jazzlyn, no.”
    —
    c or r i ga n d rov e m e through the South Bronx under the flamed- up sky.
    The sunset was the color of muscle, pink and striated gray. Arson. The owners of the buildings, he said, were running insurance scams. Whole streets of tenements and warehouses abandoned to smolder.
    Gangs of kids hung out on the street corners. Traffic lights were stuck on permanent red. At fire hydrants there were huge puddles of stagnant water. A building on Willis had half collapsed into the street. A couple of wild dogs picked their way through the ruin. A burned neon sign stood upright. Fire trucks went by, and a couple of cop cars trailed each other for comfort. Every now and then a figure emerged from the shadows, homeless men pushing shopping trolleys piled high with copper wire.
    They looked like men on a westward- ho, shoving their wagons across the nightlands of America.
    “Who are they?”
    “They ransack the building, pull the guts of the walls out, and then they sell the copper wire,” he said. “They get a dime a pound or something.”
    Corrigan pulled the van up outside a series of tenements that were abandoned but untouched by fire, yanked the gearshift on the steering column down into park.
    A haze hung over the street. You could hardly see the top of the street lamps. Warning tape had been fixed over the doorways but the doors behind them had been kicked in. He drew his feet up onto the seat, so that his sandals were nestled close to his crotch. He lit a cigarette and brought it right down to the dregs, threw the butt out the window.
    “Thing is, I have a mild case of a thing called TTP or something,” he said finally. “I started getting these bruises all over. Here and here. It’s worst on my legs. They’re splotchy. About a year or so ago. At first I didn’t really think anything of it, honest. I had a bit of a fever. A few dizzy spells.
    “And then I was in the nursing home in February. Helping them move some furniture from the first floor to the third. Stuff too big to fit McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 49
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    in the elevator. And it was hot as hell in there. They keep the heat turned up for all the old ones. You can’t imagine how hot, especially in the stairwell there, where the pipes were. Like Dante had furnished the place.
    Rough work. So I took off my shirt. Down to my string vest. You know how many years it’s been since I’ve been down to a string vest? And I was halfway up the stairs with a few lads, when one of them points to me, my arms and shoulders, and says that I must have been in some sort of fight.
    Truth is, I had