Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin (27 page)

judges and court officers and reporters and even the stenographers were already talking about it as if it were another of those things that just happened in the city. One of those out- of- the- ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.

He had a theory about it. It happened, and re- happened, because it was a city uninterested in history. Strange things occurred precisely because there was no necessary regard for the past. The city lived in a sort of everyday present. It had no need to believe in itself as a London, or an Athens, or even a signifier of the New World, like a Sydney, or a Los Angeles. No, the city couldn’t care less about where it stood. He had seen a T- shirt once that said:
NEW YORK FUCKIN
’
CITY
. As if it were the only place that ever existed and the only one that ever would.

New York kept going forward precisely because it didn’t give a good goddamn about what it had left behind. It was like the city that Lot left, and it would dissolve if it ever began looking backward over its own shoulder. Two pillars of salt. Long Island and New Jersey.

He had said to his wife many times that the past disappeared in the city. It was why there weren’t many monuments around. It wasn’t like London, where every corner had a historical figure carved out of stone, a war memorial here, a leader’s bust there. He could only really pinpoint a dozen true statues around New York City—most of them in Central Park, along the Literary Walk, and who in the world went to Central Park these days anyway? A man would need a phalanx of tanks just to pass Sir Walter Scott. On other famous street corners, Broadway or Wall Street or around Gracie Square, nobody felt a need to lay claim to history. Why bother? You couldn’t eat a statue. You couldn’t screw a monument. You couldn’t wring a million dollars out of a piece of brass.

Even down here, on Centre Street, they didn’t have many public backslaps to themselves. No Lady Justice in a blindfold. No Supreme Thinkers with their robes wrapped around themselves. No Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil carved into the upper granite columns of the criminal courts.

Which was one of the things that made Judge Soderberg think that the tightrope walker was such a stroke of genius. A monument in himself. He had made himself into a statue, but a perfect New York one, a temporary one, up in the air, high above the city. A statue that had no regard for the past. He had gone to the World Trade Center and had strung his rope across the biggest towers in the world. The Twin Towers. Of all places. So brash. So glassy. So forward- looking. Sure, the Rockefellers had knocked down a few Greek revival homes and a few classic brownstones to make way for the towers—which had annoyed Claire when she read about it—but mostly it had been electronics stores and cheap auction houses where men with quick tongues had sold everything useless under the sun, carrot peelers and radio flashlights and musical snow globes. In place of the shysters, the Port Authority had built two towering beacons high in the clouds. The glass reflected the sky, the night, the colors: progress, beauty, capitalism.

Soderberg wasn’t one to sit around and decry what used to be. The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

He figured that the tightrope walker must have thought it over quite a bit beforehand. It wasn’t just an offhand walk. He was making a statement with his body, and if he fell, well, he fell—but if he survived he would become a monument, not carved in stone or encased in brass, but one of those New York monuments that made you say:
Can you believe it?
With an expletive. There would always be an expletive in a New York sentence. Even from a judge. Soderberg was not fond of bad language, but he knew its value at the right time. A man on a tightrope, a hundred and ten stories in the air, can you possibly fucking believe it?

^{soderberg himself had}
just missed the walk. It upset him to think so, but he had, just by minutes, seconds, even. He had taken a cab all the way downtown. The driver was a sullen black man blaring music through the speakers. A smell of marijuana in the cab. Sickening, really, the way you couldn’t get a clean, decent ride anymore. Rastafarian music from the eight- track. The driver dropped him off at the rear of 100 Centre Street. He walked past the D.A.’s office, stopped at the locked metalframed door on the side, an entrance only the judges used, their one concession, designed so they wouldn’t have to mix with the visitors at the front. It wasn’t so much a furtive doorway, or even a privileged thing. They needed their own entrance, just in case some idiot decided to take matters into his own hands. Still, it brightened him: a secret passage into the house of justice.

At the door he took a quick look over his shoulder. In the upper reaches of the next- door building he noticed a few people leaning out of the windows, looking westward, pointing, but he ignored them, assumed it was a car crash or another morning altercation. He unlocked the metal door. If only he had turned around, paid attention, he might have been able to go upstairs and see it all unfolding in the distance. But he keyed himself in, pressed the button for the elevator, waited for the door to accordion open, and went up to the fourth floor.

In the corridor he stepped along in his plain black everyday shoes. The dark walls with a deep fungal smell. The squeak of his shoes sounded out in the quiet. The place had the summer blues. His office was a high- ceilinged room at the far end of the corridor. When he had first become a judge he’d had to share chambers in a grimy little box not fit for a shoeshine boy. He’d been astounded how he and his fellows were treated. There were mouse droppings in the drawers of his desk. The walls desperately in need of paint. Cockroaches would perch and twitter on the edge of the windowsill, as if they too just wanted to get out. But five years had gone by and he’d been shunted around from office to office. His was a more stately chambers now, and he was treated with a modicum more respect. Mahogany desk. Cut- glass inkwell. Framed photos of Claire and Joshua by the sea in Florida. A magnetized bar that held his paper clips. The Stars and Stripes on a standing pole behind him, by the window, so that sometimes it fluttered in the breeze. It wasn’t the world’s fanciest office, but it sufficed. Besides, he wasn’t a man to make frivolous complaints: he kept that powder dry in case he’d need it at other times.

Claire had bought him a brand- new swivel chair, a leather number with deep pouchy patterns, and he liked the moment, first thing every morning, when he sat and spun. On his shelves there were rows and rows of books. The Appellate Division Reports, the Court of Appeals Reports, the New York Supplements. All of Wallace Stevens, signed and arranged in a special row. The Yale yearbook. On the east wall, the duplicates of his degrees. And the
New Yorker
cartoon neatly framed by the doorway— Moses on the mountain with the Ten Commandments, with two lawyers peeping over the crowd:
We’re in luck, Sam, not a word about retrospectivity.

He switched on his coffeepot, spread
The New York Times
on the desk, shook out a few packets of creamer. Sirens outside. Always sirens: they were the shadow facts of his day.

He was halfway through the business section when the door creaked open and another shiny head peeped itself around. It was hardly fair, but justice was largely balding. It wasn’t just a trend, but a fact. Together they were a team of shiny boys. It had been a phantom torment from the early days, all of them slowly receding: not many follicles among the oracles.

Judge Pollack’s wide face was flushed. His eyes were like small shining metal grommets. Something of the hammerhead about him. He was blabbering about a guy who had strung himself between the towers. Soderberg thought at first it was a suicide, a jump off a rope suspended to a crane or some such thing. All he did was nod, turn the paper, all Watergate, and where’s the little Dutch boy when you need him? He made an off- color crack about G. Gordon Liddy putting his finger in the wrong hole this time, but it whizzed past Pollack, who had a small piece of cream cheese on the front of his black robe and some white spittle coming from his mouth. Aerial assault. Soderberg sat back in his chair. He was about to mention the stray breakfast when he heard Pollack mention a balancing bar and a tightrope, and the penny dropped.

The man Pollack was talking about had actually
walked
between the towers. Not only that, but he had lain down on the wire. He had hopped. He had danced. He had virtually run across from one side to the other.

Soderberg spun in the chair, a decisive quarter- turn, and yanked open the blinds and tried looking across the expanse. He caught the edge of the north tower, but the rest of the view was obstructed.

—You missed him, said Pollack. He just finished.
—Official, was it?
—Excuse me?
—Sanctioned? Advertised?
—’Course not. The fellow broke in during the night. Strung his wire

across and walked. We watched him from the top floor. The security guards told us.
—He broke into the World Trade Center?
—A looney, I’d say. Wouldn’t you? Take him off to Bellevue.
—How did he get the wire across?
—No idea.
—Arrested? Was he arrested?
—Sure, said Pollack with a chuckle.
—What precinct?
—First, old boy. Wonder who’ll get him?
—I’m on arraignment today.
—Lucky you, said Pollack. Criminal trespass.
—Reckless endangerment.
— Self- aggrandization, said Pollack with a wink.
—That’ll brighten the day.
—Get the flashbulbs going.
—Takes some gumption.
Soderberg wasn’t quite sure if the word
gumption
was another phrase for balls or for stupidity. Pollack gave him a wink and a senatorial wave, closed the door with a sharp snap.
—Balls, said Soderberg to the closed door.
But it would indeed brighten the day, he thought. The summer had been so hot and serious and full of death and betrayal and stabbings, and he needed a little entertainment.
There were only two arraignment courts and so Soderberg had a fifty percent chance of landing the case. It would have to come through on time. It was possible that they could shove the tightrope walker swiftly through the system—if they found it newsworthy enough, they could do anything they wanted. They could have him squared away in a matter of hours. Fingerprinted, interviewed, Albany- ed, and away. Brought in on a misdemeanor charge. Perhaps him and some accomplices. Which made him think: How the hell had the walker gotten the cable from one side to the other? Surely the tightrope was a piece of steel? How did he toss it across? Couldn’t be made of rope, surely? Rope would never hold a man that distance. How then did he get it from one side to the other? Helicopter? Crane? Through the windows somehow? Did he drop the tightrope down and then drag it up the other side? It gave Soderberg a shiver of pleasure. Every now and then there was a good case that would come along and add a jolt to the day. A little spice. Something that could be talked about in the backrooms of the city. But what if he didn’t get the case? What if it went across the hall? Perhaps he could even have a word with the D.A. and the court clerks, strictly on the sly, of course. There was a system of favors in place in the courts.
Pass me the tightrope walker and I’ll owe you one.
He propped his feet on the desk and drank his coffee and pondered the pulse of the day with the prospect of an arraignment that wasn’t, for once, dealing with pure drudge.
Most days, he had to admit, were dire. In came the tide, out they went again. They left their detritus behind. He didn’t mind using the word
scum
anymore. There was a time when he wouldn’t have dared. But that’s what they mostly were and it pained him to admit it.
Scum.
A dirty tide coming in on the shores and leaving behind its syringes and plastic wrappers and bloody shirts and condoms and snotty- nosed children. He dealt with the worst of the worst. Most people thought that he lived in some sort of mahogany heaven, that it was a highfalutin job, a powerful career, but the true fact of the matter was that, beyond reputation, it didn’t amount to much at all. It landed the odd good table in a fancy restaurant, and it pleased Claire’s family no end. At parties people perked up. They straightened their shoulders around him. Talked differently. It wasn’t much of a perk, but it was better than nothing. Every now and then there was a chance for promotion, to go upstairs to the Supreme Court, but it hadn’t come his way yet. In the end so much of it was just mundanity. A bureaucratic babysitting.
At Yale, when he was young and headstrong, he’d been sure that one day he’d be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that. A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you’d make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little niche and you make it your own. You ride out the time as best you can. You go home to your good wife and you calm her nerves. You sit down and compliment the cutlery. You thank your lucky stars for her inheritance. You smoke a fine cigar and you hope for an occasional roll in the silk sheets. You buy her a nice piece of jewelry at DeNatale’s and you kiss her in the elevator because she still looks beautiful, and well preserved, despite the years rolling by, she really does. You kiss her good- bye and you go downtown every day and you soon figure out that your grief isn’t half the grief that everyone else has. You mourn your dead son and you wake up in the middle of the night with your wife weeping beside you and you go to the kitchen, where you make yourself a cheese sandwich and you think, Well, at least it’s a cheese sandwich on Park Avenue, it could be worse, you could have ended up far worse: your reward, a sigh of relief.
The lawyers knew the truth. The court clerks too. And the other judges, of course. Centre Street was a shithouse. They actually called it that:
the shithouse.
If they met one another at official functions.
How was the shithouse today, Earl? I left my briefcase in the shithouse.
They had even made it into a verb:
Are you shithousing it tomorrow, Thomas?
He hated admitting it even to himself, but it was the truth. He thought of himself as being on a ladder, a well- dressed man on a ladder, a man of privilege and style and learning, in a dark robe, in the house of justice, using his bare hands to pull the rotting leaves and the twigs from the shithouse gutters.
It didn’t bother him half as much as it used to. The fact was that he was part of a system. He knew that now. A small piece of skin on a large elaborate creature. A cog that turned a set of wheels. Perhaps it just was a process of growing older. You leave the change to the generations that come behind you. But then the generation that comes behind you gets blown asunder in Vietnamese cafés, and you go on, you must go on, because even if they’re gone they still can be remembered.
He was not the maverick Jew that he had once set out to be; still Soderberg refused to surrender. It was a point of honor, of truth, of survival.
When he first got called, back in the summer of ’67, he thought that he’d take the job and be a paragon of virtue. He wouldn’t just survive, but flourish. He packed up his job and took a fifty- five percent pay cut. He didn’t need the money. He and Claire had already set a good deal aside, their accounts were healthy, the inheritance strong, and Joshua was squared away at PARC. Even if the idea of being a judge came as a complete surprise, he loved it. He had spent some early years in the U.S. Attorney’s office, sure, and he had put his time in, had served on a tax commission, built himself a track record, buttered up the right people. He had taken a few difficult cases in his time, had argued well, had struck a balance. He’d written an editorial for
The New York Times
questioning the legal parameters of the draft dodgers and the psychological effects conscription had on the country. He had weighed the moral and constitutional aspects and came out firmly on the side of the war. At parties on Park Avenue he had met Mayor Lindsay, but only glancingly, and so when the appointment was suggested, he thought it was a ruse. He put the phone down. Laughed it off. It rang again.
You want me to do what?
There was talk of eventual promotion, first as acting judge of the Supreme Court of New York, and then, who knows—from there anything was still possible. A lot of the promotions had stalled when the city started to go bankrupt, but he didn’t mind, he would surf it out. He was a man who believed in the absolute of the law. He would be able to weigh and dissect and ponder and make a change, give something back to the city where he’d been born. He always felt that he had skirted the city’s edges and now he would take a pay cut and be at its core. The law was fundamental to how it was imparted and to what degree it could contain the excesses of human folly. He believed in the notion that even when laws were written down they ought not to remain unaltered. The law was work. It was there to be sifted. He was interested not just in the meaning of what could be, but also what ought to be. He would be at the coal face. One of the important miners of the morality of the city. The Honorable Solomon Soderberg.
Even the name rang right. Perhaps he had been used as judicial fodder, a balancing of the books, but he didn’t mind too much; the good would outweigh the bad. He’d be rabbinical, wise, caring. Besides, every lawyer had a judge inside him.
He had walked in, his very first day, with his heart on fire. Through the frontentrance. He wantedto savor it.He’d bought a brand- new suit from a swanky tailor on Madison Avenue. A Gucci tie. Tassels on his shoes. He approached the building in a great swell of anticipation. Etched outside the wide gold- colored doors were the words
THE PEOPLE ARE THE FOUNDATION OF POWER
. He stood a moment and breathed it all in. Inside, in the lobby, there was a blur of movement. Pimps and reporters and ambulance chasers. Men in purple platform shoes. Women dragging their children behind them. Bums sleeping in the window alcoves. He could feel his heart sink with each step. It seemed for just a moment that the building could still have the aura—the high ceilings, the old wooden balustrades, the marble floor—but the more he walked around the more his spirit sank. The courtrooms were even worse than he remembered. He shuffled around, dazed and disheartened. The corridor walls were graffitied. Men sat smoking in the back of the courtrooms. Deals were going down in the bathrooms. Prosecutors had holes in their suits. Crooked cops roamed about, looking for kickbacks. Kids were doing complicatedhandshakes. Fathers sat Mothers wept over their long- hairedsons. fancy red leather pouching was slit. Attorneys went by with battered attaché cases. He ghosted past them all, took the elevator upstairs, then pulled up a chair at his new desk. There was a piece of dried chewing gum underneath the desk drawer.
Still and all, he said to himself, still and all, he would soon have it all sorted out. He could handle it. He could turn things around.
He announced his intentions in chambers one afternoon, at a retirement party for Kemmerer. A snicker went around the room.
So sayeth Solomon,
said one sad sack.
Slice the baby, boys.
Great hilarity and the tinkling of glasses. The other judges told him he’d get used to it eventually, that he’d see the light and it’d still be in a tunnel. The greatest part of the law was the wisdom of toleration. One had to accept the fools. It came with the territory. Every now and then the blinkers had to be lowered. He had to learn to lose. That was the price of success.
Try it,
they said.
Buck the
with smacked- outdaughters. On the courtroom doors, the