This Magnificent Desolation (21 page)

You have a sister?

Had. I had a sister. Long time ago.

Joshua rolls a cigarette with his battered fingers, hands Duncan his
pouch of tobacco as he lights it, breathes it in deep and then exhales. The familiar sweet smell of Mother's Burley hangs there between them. He nods toward Oakland.

My father came out here after my mother left, after Boston. Back east we'd lived in West Medford near my mother's aunts and brothers, me and my little sister, my mother and my father. It was hard then, but my mother's family were all educated, had good jobs. My mother had gone to Tufts and my father never could stand that. Very proud he was. Always angry at my mother for showing him up. That's what he'd say, she was always showing him up, with her book smarts. He couldn't stand that she was better than him—it shamed him.

Joshua turns to look at Duncan now and his face is rigid, set like stone.

Don't you ever touch a woman, okay? A man that touches a woman ain't no man. Look at me. Do you hear me?

Duncan stares at Joshua unblinking, and nods.

Duncan, there's going to be a time when I won't be here and you'll need to protect your mother and yourself. And I don't want you to think about it, okay? Just act. Do whatever it takes to protect the both of you. When you hit someone, don't just hit them once. Hit them so many times they'll never be able to lift a finger to you again. You got it? Are you listening?

I'm listening. I just don't know if I can ever hit someone.

Well, then, my man, you're going to have to learn, because in the end no one can protect you but you. And your mother needs you, Duncan. She'll never say it, but she does. Will you promise me you'll be strong for her?

I'll try, I promise.

Joshua nods. My man, I know you will. You're a good kid.

He stares out at the bay; cigarette smoke steams from his nostrils.

I shouldn't be telling you this, but I think you should hear it, you so stuck on your father. When I was sixteen, my father almost beat
my mother to death with a wrench and the only thing that stopped him was me getting in the way. I hit him and I didn't stop hitting him. He crawled out of our house on his belly while I was still hitting him. I broke his nose and his cheekbone. I fractured his eye socket. I doubt the man ever saw properly again. I wanted to kill him, and perhaps I should have. If he'd been around when I came back from Nam, I would have killed him, and he knew it.

Joshua shrugs. But my mother was already dead by then, so it didn't matter any more. He quiets as if he is suddenly aware that he's been talking too much. The sound of him seems to fill up the night; it seeps into the air about Duncan like the fog snaking up the wide banks of the bay.

Duncan looks at him. How did she die?

Jesus, I shouldn't be telling you these things.

His jaws clench and the hollows of his cheeks deepen with shadow so that he appears even more gaunt. He says: She fell on subway tracks, the El in Boston—two years after she left us. It was the rush hour commute and the platform was crowded so maybe she was pushed, or maybe it was an accident, who knows? Anyway, she touched the third rail and she died.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, me too.

He draws on his cigarette and after a moment it steams from his nostrils. He says: I always thought I'd get a chance to see her again.

Below them, and perhaps a quarter of a mile away, at a short distance from the coastline stands a large derrick, two hundred feet high, and on either side within a floating caisson, two cranes. At their height small amber and red lights flash on and off. Out at the center of the bay another derrick tower emerges darkly from the water, its metal and iron skelature like the eviscerated remains of some prehistoric serpent held and frozen aloft in ice, and that remained when the glaciers retreated. Fog swirls and trickles through its vast ribs and spine and they watch—Duncan is aware of Joshua breathing close to
him—as the fog slowly engulfs the derrick entirely, until only the lights remain visible, blinking dully through the ghostly banks of white. The tugboat horns come again, muted and seemingly even farther away.

Right there beneath the water, under the bay, is where we're digging the tunnel, Joshua says. By next Christmastime we should be done.

Joshua points to the center of the strait where the water shudders with sudden movement and turns round and black. Damn, my man! Will you look at that!

A geyser of water shoots into the air in a mushrooming spray. Two massive rudders slap the surface of the water, and then a colossal tail arcs from the whitecaps. Duncan sees a mouth of tufted baleen, a gleaming back and side encrusted with barnacle and scar.

A whale, he says in disbelief.

They watch as it makes its slow way down the bay, a green phosphorescent wake shimmering two hundred feet behind, beneath the fog-entrenched Golden Gate, mist swirling about it like smoke. And its moan a deep, low foghorn sounding the lonely depths of the vast Pacific before it, responding and calling to others of its kind, perhaps a thousand miles away, each sailing its own shadowy and vast corner of the increasingly empty dark spaces of the sea. With one final plumed exhale, it begins to sink beneath the water. Its wide flukes show, and then it rolls and spins into the deep.

October 1983

Magdalene Kopak and her aunt don't have a television—they survive on the aunt's monthly social security checks and that's barely enough to pay for rent and heat—and on the weekends Duncan becomes accustomed to hearing Magdalene's footfalls upon the front stairs and then a knock upon their door, which, on Saturdays, his mother always answers in the simple, black faux-silk dress she wears to the Windsor Tap. He imagines the sight of her as she swings the door wide and stands in the brightly lit vestibule before Magdalene, her coils of red hair coifed in an intricate and elegant French bun atop her head, the short black dress shifting slightly, its diaphanous weight clinging to her lower belly, her thighs and hips, the length of her long legs and muscular calves towering atop three-inch black heels.

Bonjour, Mademoiselle Magdalene, Maggie will say, and then, if Magdalene hesitates, as she often does, Maggie will take her by the hand and escort her the rest of the way into the living room. With
bowls of badly burnt popcorn that mother has prepared for them in a frenetic and excited stir of emotion as she readies herself for work, they sit wrapped in a blanket thick with old animal hair on the long threadbare couch, through which the springs poke and press maddeningly.

Together Magdalene and Duncan wait as the television Maggie and he bought at the St. Vincent de Paul in Chinatown hums to life, its slowly warming transistors clicking, and then the flickering, grainy black-and-white images of NBC's
Saturday Night at the Movies
or ABC's
The Movie of the Week
shuddering in rippling horizontal waves on the bowed screen, in much the same way as it did on the television in the Home, and, always, briefly, Duncan thinks of how he, Julie, and Billy used to crouch behind the couch in the Brothers' lounge, and of Brother Wilhelm snoring and trembling softly in his sleep before the ancient Zenith.

Magdalene's eyes widen when Joshua walks into the room, greets her, and then walks the hall to the bathroom.

Is that's your mother's boyfriend?

Duncan shrugs. I guess.

He seems nice.

He is.

He's older than I thought.

Is he? I hadn't noticed. He was in Vietnam.

Oh, I guess that's it.

They stare at the television but Duncan is aware of Magdalene peeking at his mother, following her movements about the apartment—a darting shape at the edge of their sight—and when she and Joshua have left, Magdalene says: I don't think my aunt likes your mother much.

Duncan looks at her.

I heard my aunt talking to Mrs. Polati. She says your mother is a stripper in a bar down on Columbus.

She isn't a stripper. She sings, Magdalene. She doesn't dance. She sings.

Magdalene shrugs. My mother used to sing, she says. But she wasn't as pretty as your mother. Your mother's beautiful.

I bet she had a nice voice, Mags, Duncan says, and imagines Magdalene on her bed at night, listening to water shunting and hissing through the close radiator pipes, and laying her head toward that sound, perhaps hearing her mother's distant voice, just as he often heard his mother's voice through the pipes, straining to catch those quarter notes and elusive C7.
What might she say to her?

Magdalene considers this. No, she says. Not really. She didn't have a nice voice at all, but I miss it. I miss her.

She shrugs as if to shake herself from the dream, the memory. You ever think what it would be like to have Mr. McGreevey as your father?

Duncan pauses—he doesn't know how to answer. He wants to say, But I have a father! How could he think of someone other than his father being his father, but he can't answer the question because he has wondered about it at times, even wished for it, but the thought of saying it aloud frightens him.

I don't know, he says. I hadn't really thought about it.

November 1983

When Joshua comes home from work, he smells of deep sea silt and shale, of damp and pungent muck and loam, as if he had been dredged from the bottom of the bay, as if it is a part of him now and oozing, seeping from his pores. And his breath is always slightly sour and metallic, something that Duncan imagines occurs like a physical reaction during the stages of decompression in the air locks, that the men slightly change, become something other as they leave the watery world, the world of darkness and weight, for the world above. Or perhaps it is the dream and the fear fantasy of the sea rushing in on them that keeps him and the other men constantly coursing with adrenaline, which long after their shifts are over, turns to acid in their muscle and tendon, makes them feel as if they'd hefted and carried the tunnel itself, much like the hydraulic jacks that push the concrete partitions centimeter by centimeter beneath the seabed.

It is no wonder Joshua sleeps before dinner and then almost immediately after. He tells Duncan's mother that it will not always be this way, that he must take the work when he can, for within the year the tunnel will be completed and there will be no more work other than the odd welding job that comes along. Later Duncan will hear the shower running, and steam will seep beneath the door, making the plaster and paper of the hallway moist—an hour will pass and beads of condensation will slowly trickle down their surface, as Joshua tries to ease the pain from his joints. The corners of the ceiling are already dark with mildew and each night these dark stains grow further, slowly stretching out toward the center. Duncan's mother complains about them, says that she needs to bleach the paint, but they don't have a stepladder and the stains are too high to reach without one. At breakfast Joshua will barely eat because, he complains, his teeth ache, and when Maggie tries to kiss him, he smiles but gives her his cheek as if that, too, causes him pain.

Each crew can work at the tunnel face for only two hours at a time and then they must exit the tunnel as they entered it, through a network of interconnected air locks, going into the lock, the doors sealing after them, waiting for the air pipe to hiss, the men's ears popping as the air pressure climbs. When it has equaled the adjoining lock, the connecting door automatically unlocks and they move into the next chamber. Mostly they do not mind this process, even though it occupies hours of their work shift; when someone becomes restless—a shifting of feet, the rolling of eyes, a deep and pronounced sigh, a grumbling at the back of the throat and then the hacking of phlegm or snot upon the metal floor runner—the shop steward or second man will retell one of the countless stories from the early tunneling days or perhaps a story of the men who died from the bends, in horrible pain as nitrogen bubbles exploded in their bloodstream, bleeding from
their eyes and from their bowels, during the building of the Thames tunnel, and the men will nod or joke and shake their heads, but the eye rolling and restless shifting will stop.

When Joshua is standing in the locks, he is never in the lock itself but outside, rising violently through a bubbling stream of turbulent and violent water as a sudden air breech splits the lock in two and sucks the men from the chamber, hurls them up and then down. Some will never surface and the others will be thrust to the surface so suddenly they will explode upon reaching it, bits of flesh and bone and blood spraying the tops of the waves in a bloody spume. Joshua has imagined being crushed by the sea, of it sweeping in and taking them all, pressing them back down into the primeval slime or hurtling them toward God. There is an immense and spiritual beauty in the sea taking them, he imagines, although he cannot make sense of this nor explain why this should be so as compared with any other type of death. Yet he is not alone—many of the other men also fantasize about death in the tunnel. At night they lie awake next to their girlfriends or wives and upon the black ceiling of their bedroom see the sea rushing in and down upon them, sweeping them up in her arms and dashing them to the bedrock, obliterating them into bone fragments at the bottom of the bay. This manner of death they understand is a type of calling, a spiritual vocation.

At the dinner table Joshua seems sedate and at peace. He breaks bread from the loaf Maggie has placed upon the table, butters it, and, as he chews, tells Duncan of the tunnel that will one day stretch beneath the San Francisco Bay across the northern point of Calisto County. He speaks of the men who work with him in the caisson, of the air locks and the three giant TBMs that they call Barbara, Dymphna, and Gabriel, and of the cutterhead that burrows through the muck and silt. He talks of water breaking through the cavern. Of men detonating on the insides from the force of decompression, of hydrogen
bubbles exploding in their veins, of men rising too quickly to the surface and dying horrifying, agonizing deaths. He speaks of them all being swept away by the sea and his eyes are lit with the passion of a penitent in prayer. He cuts into his steak and says: Today as I was working I dreamed I saw Jamie's angel. It came down into the tunnel, reached beneath my arms and lifted me up through the water, up through the sea and the waves. Up, he laughs, all the way up. He carried me clear across the sky.