This Magnificent Desolation (15 page)

La mort
his mother calls it, and laughs. Softly she sings the words of the Queen of the Night:
Disowned may you be forever, Abandoned may you be forever, Destroyed be forever.
She shakes her head. I could fail, but not there, not on an opera stage. I'd rather people never knew I ever existed than to hear me sing like that.

She touches her neck again, stretching the skin, flicks cigarette ash absently onto a plate. Now, she says, I can't hold a note to save my life.

She is wrong, she can still sing, and Duncan loves to hear her voice. When he wakes screaming in the night, burning with sudden fever, a great weight pressing upon his chest and so cold he is shaking, she comes to him from her bedroom and soothes him with music. Listen to this, she will say, taking his hand, placing it upon the center of her collarbone and she will sing and he will feel the vibrations of her song humming through the bone. What do you feel?

I feel cold, Mom, he tells her.

Shhhhh, no you're not. Her hand is on his brow, then touching each cheek as if she's blessing him with the sign of the cross:
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
It's warm, she says and yanks at the curtains, drawing them back. The night is warm outside, Duncan. See, can you feel it?

It's cold.

Shhhhh, everything's okay. I'm here.

And Duncan will close his eyes and sway with the sound of her voice until gradually her song fills him and there is no clamor or thought or worry in his head and the cold and the pain is only a distant memory. Until he feels completely at peace, until all the monsters are gone.

Monsters, she tells him, is from the Latin word
monstrum
, meaning “omen,” meaning “portent.” A monster was a messenger, an angel, that in olden days was considered to be a divine messenger. A monster, she says, was something very special and important given to people, it explained that which could not be explained, and only the
very blessed received such aid. A monster was not something that could hurt you. Next time you dream or have a nightmare, try to think of it as an angel delivering a message, it is telling you something, if only you can listen and hear what it is that it is trying to tell you. It is not always about bad things, she says, most often it is something good.

Duncan looks at her, and says: Like hearing God speak to you when you're born? Or believing Daddy is really alive, or hearing Elvis singing “Blue Moon,” or wishing Joshua peace, and like watching Neil Armstrong take one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind?

More and more Duncan fears greatly for the lives of the Apollo astronauts. In his dreams, he sees Michael Collins aboard the command module
Columbia
, turning in his slow, lonely, vigilant revolutions around the moon, descending again and again in and out of complete darkness, shooting, skimming, sixty-nine miles above its opaque and glittering gray pockmocked surface, spinning without end through the black vacuum, the integrity of his silvery Mylar and Kapton suit compromised, and he an eviscerated corpse within it—yet still he waits. The sad astronaut who can only watch from his small window and imagine what Aldrin and Armstrong are doing in those minutes, those hours after the landing, even as
Columbia
passes into the shadow on the far side of the moon and into radio silence: wondering if he perhaps will ever get the chance to touch the lunar surface himself.

Day after day after week after month after year, waiting for the return of the lunar module
Eagle
while the bodies of Aldrin and Armstrong lie prostrate upon the moon's surface, the American flag held at eternal mast, the powerful sodium bulbs encircling the lunar module slowly extinguishing one by one and blackening into charred oblivion in the black, starless night.

Shhhhh, Maggie says and squeezes his hand harder. Shhhhh. Be quiet, Duncan, and listen to the music.

Later in the night, although he cannot remember having turned it on, Duncan wakes to the yellow glow of the Vulcanite radio upon his bedside table shimmering out of the darkness. Its hum vibrates in the stillness, crackling across empty, vacant wave bands, waiting to receive a signal from somewhere out in the night. And then there comes sound that Duncan at first mistakes as loud, whining static, until he hears garbled words and then, when he reaches out and turns the dial—little more than a touch—there comes momentarily, through the hissing, the distinct beeps and clicks of the Apollo radio transmissions, and then the urgent voices of the astronauts, but he cannot make out what they are saying, and then they are gone.

May 1982

Sundays after Mass when Joshua doesn't show for dinner, Maggie often rolls the old Chevy Impala from the garage, and packed with their sleeping bags and tinned foods, drives them out of the city. From Ipswich Street out along Calistas and then over the Bay Bridge they travel; every weekend driving farther and farther, Maggie moving them southeast in a strange if unconscious parallel with the rail tracks to their left, winding and twisting into the foothills beyond the city and, farther still, the semi-arid desert plains with their small, desolate, single-intersection towns about which the wind seems to constantly swirl fine red sandstone dust. At first Duncan enjoys watching the passing landscape and changing country as Mother shows him the roads she'd traversed as a young woman many years before his birth and the quality of her voice—exuberant and filled with life—as she tells him of a time, smiling as she does so, when it seems she believed everything was possible. But as they move ever farther from the
city—perhaps minutes after they've passed the red-winged horse of the Mobil gas station on Route 5 or the Nightstop truckers' motel with its large neon green cactus just after Harlow and perhaps as Mother begins to feel the distance between them and the city widening and only the vast American landscape looming on the horizon and threatening to engulf them—something strange and inexplicable happens to her. She begins to mutter to herself: I can't do this, I can't do this, and swears, Shit, Shit Fuck! and grapples with the steering wheel, and in her fit of cursing, they take the next exit that comes upon them and turn north, his mother in a foul mood until the lights of San Francisco show themselves upon the horizon, shining blearily through a fog as night comes down.

Sometimes they will drive until Maggie realizes they are almost out of gas and they have to refuel, and at other times she simply drives and drives, refueling at one roadside gas station after another until, inexplicably panicked, she turns the car around and heads home or until she seems to wake suddenly—eyes blinking, eyelashes fluttering, tongue licking her lips savagely—from her fugue. And always she stares at Duncan in confusion, as if he is a stranger sitting next to her, and he wonders if she remembers a single thing they spoke of during the many hours of those trips, or if she even thinks of him or of Joshua, in his single room at the Langham Hotel, lying awake listening to men retching, puking, and loosing their bowels into the shatencrusted toilet at the end of the hall.

And mostly Duncan is too exhausted to care about or to try to understand these seeming fits. Instead he closes his eyes and waits for the smells of the Gravel, the Bends, and the Bottoms, the shift whistle from the Edison plant, the pungent tannic odor from the tannery, the rumble and grind of the diesel engines motoring out of the rail yard, or, hopefully, the sight of Joshua's Indian aslant the curbstone before their house to tell him that they are home again.

C'mon, sweetie, Mother says as she leads him, half-asleep, from the car. We're home, and there is a flatness to her voice as if she has
momentarily stepped far outside of herself and her voice is coming from very far away, or as if someone else has taken her place, someone who is merely mimicking her, and he can only think of the disembodied voices of lost astronauts that murmur through Brother Canice's radio late in the night. Soon she retreats to her bedroom with a bottle while Duncan, now suddenly awake, stares at the bare bulb dangling from the ceiling, as it shudders and sways slightly with the thumping bass reverberations from her stereo sounding from down the hall, and wonders where she goes to in these moments, what manner of madness affects her, and, if somehow, he is responsible for it all.

Joshua? Duncan calls into the telephone:
Joshua?
And waits, listening to static; slowly he hears the other sounds on the line from Joshua's netherworld across the bay.

She's drinking again, Joshua. She's drunk.

We miss you, Joshua.

I don't want there to be other men here. I just want you.

Then, from the void: She don't mean anything by it, kid.

I know.

Joshua exhales long and hard and Duncan hears him shifting on his mattress, the click and snap of his butane lighter igniting and the flare as he inhales upon the cigarette, and when he speaks, Duncan pictures him staring at the ceiling just as he is—a parallax view—and his own ghostly astronauts floating there in the empty, long dark unraveling before him.

My father was a no-good, he says softly, so softly he might be whispering but his mouth is directly against the receiver and Duncan
can hear his lips shaping the words. He beat my mother. He cheated on her with every skirt that came along. He drove her to drink. All the days until she left us she needed it to get by. She couldn't find comfort in anything else. She was a good woman, and the drinking—it shamed her. Living with us reminded her of that shame, until it was too much to bear. And so she left.

Joshua shifts on his mattress and Duncan hears the clatter of him rummaging on a bedside table.

Joshua?

Yeah.

Will you come by tomorrow?

It's time to go to sleep, my man.

Will you come by?

A freight train's whistle sounds in the distance and Duncan can picture Joshua angling toward that sound, neck craning, eyes lingering on his open window. After a moment Joshua sighs: Sure, kid. I'll come by.

Goodnight then, Duncan says.

Goodnight, kid.

Joshua puts the phone back in its cradle, slowly exhales on his cigarette so that a gray plume of smoke drifts upward in the dark. From the bathroom down the hall there is the sound of puking and of running water. Someone is banging on the door, telling whoever is inside to hurry the fuck up. The torn blinds tap softly against the windowsill; he can smell the oil-thick diesel fumes from the train, the sulfur from its batteries. His eyelids flutter lazily. Cigarette smoke churns slowly out into the night. He thinks of Duncan across the bay and wishes that he could go to him and to Maggie and comfort the both of them, but he is incapable of moving, incapable of rising from his bed to prepare food—even the courage to walk the hall to the toilets fails him and he must piss in the sink in his room like some animal and run the water from the faucet to rid the place of the smell of him. He's been off the tunnel job for a week now, and even though
he's called in to the union hall, they'll replace him if he's out much longer.

Another train thumps the rails and the building shudders as it approaches. He turns toward the sound of the train, eyes on his open window and the space beneath the yellowed blinds that offers him a view of the tracks, and in a moment comes the clanging cars, and the engine's mercurial light sweeps across his bed, holds him briefly in its white glare so that he blinks and is awake again with his heart hammering anxiously in his chest. He is surrounded by the thumping of heavy wings, the thrashing disturbance of charged air, the fear of being held as if by manacles and then yanked helplessly upward: the sense of his skin stretched and about to be pulled apart. Trembling, Joshua puts four doxepin and four prazosin in his mouth, washes them down with tepid beer, and waits in the dark for sleep to take him.

Always Joshua and his men are moving, moving between alternating hues of reddish-brown and green: a misty dusk-land upon which the wind sets the rain at sharp angles across rice paddies against them and everything turns to muck in the dark. Rice paddies and foothills, one burned-out blackened village after another, and mist rising thick from the jungle roof above everything as they approach, and above that mist the mountains rising into her clouds.

It is night when they reach the village of Loc Noi and the land is steaming. Air so thick with moisture that rain drips from bowed leaves. Damp ash smell of extinguished wood smoke from the last of the cooking fires, the murmur of a fitfully sleeping child, a pig grunting softly in a sty of wood and bamboo littered with straw, and
O au o. The lights in Sai Gon are green and red, the lamps in My Tho are bright and dim
…
O au o …
the hush of sleep over everything. A laughing thrush sounds in the darkness—a sound so bright with pain and loneliness Joshua will still hear its sound over a decade later.

He turns on his back, resting for a moment. Squares his shoulders against the ground. His breath is mist, his movements ghostlike. He blinks and through the gossamer of a shuddering spiderweb woven across the low canopy above him he can see the stars. The spiderweb glistens with moisture, a drop falls from the canopy and shatters along its silver lines. Shadows are moving through the jungle, the sounds of his men and the company of Montagnard tribesmen, so familiar he can smell them. A rustling in the undergrowth. He can hear the trees breathing. The thick knocking of the earth beneath him. A bale of concertina wire rattles across the muddy track. An old, wizened woman is letting loose her bowels at the edge of a field.

He focuses on the space before him—the foreground of his sight—and then when he looks beyond this: from the complex design, intricacies, and beauty of the spiderweb to the vast expanse of the all-encompassing height of the highland jungle and mountains, and above and far distant, through the veils of mist, farther than the height of the great mountains, pinpricks of stellar light. He is a child again and walking the snowy winter streets of Brighton, the early darkness, the stars blazing in the sky like small flames and dawn still many hours away.