Free Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann Page A

been in a fight. The pimps were giving me a hard time for letting the girls use the bathroom. I’d been knocked around a little. Had some stitches over my eye. One of them wore cowboy boots and roughed me up good. But I didn’t give it a second thought until we got the furniture up on the third floor and Adelita was there, directing the traffic. ‘Put this here. Put that there.’ We heaved this big desk into a corner. And the lads were still giving me a hard time about being the only white bloke who still gets in fights in the neighborhood. Like I’m some throwback.
    Like I’m some Big Jack Doyle, you know. They’re all joking: ‘Come on Corrigan, let’s dance, man, let’s rumble!’ They say they ought to bring me to Zaire, I’m such a fighter. They don’t know I’m in the Order. Nobody knows. Not then anyway, they didn’t. And Adelita came over and just pushed her finger down hard on one of the bruises and she said something like, ‘You’ve got TTP.’ And I made some crack about DDT and she said, ‘No, I think it could be TTP.’ It turns out she’s studying at night.
    She wants to do medicine. She was a nurse in Guatemala in a couple of fancy hospitals. Always wanted to be a doctor, even went to university and all, but the war kicked in, and she got all caught up in it. Lost her husband. So she nurses here. They won’t take her credentials. She’s got two kids. They’ve got American accents now. Anyway she says something about low platelet counts and bleeding into the tissues and that I’ve got to get it seen to. She surprised me, brother.”
    Corrigan rolled down the window of the van and sprinkled some tobacco on a thin piece of paper, lit up.
    “So, fair enough, I get it seen to. And she’s bang on. I have this thing they don’t know much about. It’s idiopathic, you know, they don’t know what causes it. But they say it’s serious enough, you can get real sick from it. I mean, you gotta eventually get the treatment or you can die. And so I go home at night and I call on God in the dark, and I say, ‘Thanks, God, another thing to worry about.’ But the thing is, God’s there this time, McCa_9781400063734_4p_01_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:31 PM Page 50
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    brother. He’s there. In plain sight. It would be easier if He wasn’t there. I could pretend I was searching for Him. But no, He’s there, the son of a gun. He’s telling me all the logical things about being sick and getting over it and dealing with it and looking at the world in a new way, the way He does, the way He should talk to you, the Body, the Soul, the sacrament of being alone, being furious with an aim, using it for the greater good.
    Opening yourself to the promise. But, see, this logical God, I don’t like him all that much. Even His voice, He’s got this voice that I just can’t, I don’t know, I can’t like. I can understand it, but I don’t necessarily like it.
    He’s out of my range. But that’s no problem. Plenty of times I haven’t liked Him. It’s good to be at a disturbance with God. Plenty of fine people have been in my place and worse.
    “I figure being sick is old news anyway and dying’s even older than that. What’s fatal is the big hollow echo every time I tried Him out. See, I just felt hollow every time I tried talking with Him. I gave it everything, brother. My proper confession, you know, about maintaining faith and all. I talked with Father Marek there in St. Ann’s. A good priest. We struggled together, him and I. Hours on end. And with Him too, with God, at all hours of the day. Used to be, though, that the arguments with Him stirred the depths of my heart. I wept in His presence. But He kept coming back at me with all His pure logic. Still, I knew it would pass. I knew I’d get over it. I wasn’t even thinking about Adelita then. She wasn’t even on my mind. It was losing God. The prospect of losing that. The rational part of me knew it was me—I mean, I was just