Life's inexplicable rhythms

It was the sort of morning you'd already like to put a curfew on, to say go no further, this is enough, rest your sorry heat here.

He stood at the metal dustbin, near the row of newspaper vending boxes. All the headlines of the world. A blue postbox. Traffic signals flicked. Walk. Don't walk. He was dipping into the dustbin, like homeless men do, rummaging. It's a sight you see on many a New York street and you forget it almost instantly, as if it's part of a silent movie you're never really going to watch, something immediately abstract, black and white, not part of the colour of your real world.

But I found myself caught in a sort of street corner ornothology. Not the bird, but the watcher. The man flicked around in the rubbish. He wore rags that seemed biblical. His feet were in sandals. His filthy trousers were rolled up around his ankles. The skin of his feet was tanned dark for a white man. His shirt was grey and collarless. His hair fell long and messy but his grey beard was tied neatly in a small red elastic.

He was not looking for bottles or cans like most homeless people do in this vast city of cast-offs -- rather, he was looking for something to drink. The morning was already heating up, after all, and it was expected that we would hit almost 40 degrees celcius. He picked up two water bottles, but both were empty. He shook them, gently, dropped them, then dipped again into the diamond-slatted bin. He found a small blue coffee cup, the kind sold in local delis. He snapped off the white lid. Even from a distance his hands were dark and used.

We wonder how we get where we are.

I passed him as he drank the few drops from the coffee cup. I was on my way to the supermarket to buy my own coffee. Nine dollars a pound for a specially blended roast.

I accuse myself of naïvety before anyone else gets the chance: I stopped. What's a cup of coffee, anyway? I waited in the corner of the Williams Sonoma shop. Shiny white machinery in the window. I fumbled in my pocket for a bill. Stayed in the doorway of the shop. Twenty dollars. I folded it longways.

I didn't want to make a show of it. I've spent a lot of time with homeless people in the past. Once, when researching a novel, This Side of Brightness, I got to know a whole population who lived underground in the tunnels of New York. One African-American woman, Doreen, lived in a railway tunnel on 72nd Street. She used to love when I visited her and brought small sachets of moist paper towels, the kind given out on airplanes. She beamed when I gave her these small, useless things. She would kiss me on the cheek. "Irish!" she'd say, "What have you got for me today?" One morning, in an attempt to be generous, I brought her a whole carton of moist tissues. She looked at them and cried. It took me a long time to realise that she could not carry around a carton in her pocket. It was the sachets she wanted. The ones she could hide away in her pocket. The ones people could not see. We all have our hidden dignities.

The man moved away from the dustbin and I tried not to catch his eye. A bus stopped alongside us and coughed out fumes. The sun had just peaked the top of the buildings and already the city seemed to have accepted the fact of the heat. I walked up towards him. I don't remember what I said. Something like, Here's something for a coffee. I had tucked the bill deep in my hand. I tried to hide it from view. He raised his arm. He bent his body away from me. He said nothing. He shielded his eyes. I saw them a moment. They were pellucid blue. He swerved away from me. He hurried off.

There is no message in any of this, except that the rhyhms of life are inexplicable. I am home now. I can smell the coffee brewing. I went ahead and bought a pound of that nine-dollar blended roast. I have not opened up my newspaper yet. I do not need to. I have a good idea what is there.

There are times, too, I want to put my hand over my own face and not accept what's offered.

Colm McCann's novel, Zoli, will be launched in Hughes and Hughes in Dun Laoghaire on 30 August at 7pm