This Magnificent Desolation (24 page)

The fry cook nods sadly. I'm sorry about that. And about the toast and bacon.

A gust of wind rattles the glass. From beyond the sunken piers, a bell buoy clangs. A long groan as the old wharf sways back and forth on the swells, followed by a wet popping sound as old wood collapses.

Joshua rummages in his jean pockets and pulls out a fistful of singles. He places a five on the counter but the fry cook shakes his head. It's on the house, he says.

Joshua takes back the five and leaves a single instead. At least let us leave a tip then, he says, and the fry cook watches them wistfully as they climb off their stools. Duncan is slow getting off his seat and Joshua's hand hovers by his shoulder.

Y'know, the fry cook says, our hearts beat faster than any other animal. We breathe faster, we move faster. Our bones our hollow. We weren't made for staying still in one place, y'know.

Angels?

Birds.

Joshua nods sympathetically and then they head to the door. When Duncan looks back, the fry cook is staring toward the windows over the tables and booths, staring out at the bay and scratching his back vigorously with the spatula. Duncan watches as it moves up and down beneath his vest, back and forth across his shoulder blades, and imagines the stumps of his severed wings and the ragged tufts of nail-hard soot-colored plumage. From the fry cook's shirt a single feather falls and drifts slowly to the floor, followed by another and then another; yanked from their follicles, they begin to collect on the floor about his boots in a drift, their hollow, pointed calamus, translucent as a filament, bloodied and raw.

C'mon, Joshua says and urges him outside. Slowly, heads turned aslant the wind and rain, they cross the cobbled alley to Joshua's bike, draped with a tarp lashed down with cord.

Do you believe in angels? Duncan asks him.

Joshua glances at him, squinting against the raindrops as his fingers work to untie the tarp.

All the time, my man. I have the feeling they're all around us—good and bad—doing their thing, y'know?

But what do they do?

Protect us, I guess. Isn't that what angels do?

You said good and bad.

Good and bad, sure. I didn't always think that, but now? Joshua considers this as he folds the tarp and thinks about Jamie Minkivitz and about the way the men pray to St. Barbara, of the various forms of madness that affect the men in the tunnel and of his own dreams of the in-rushing sea.

Duncan's jacket is soaked through and he's shivering, but right now he doesn't care. Yeah, now I do, he says. They do their thing, and it doesn't really matter what we want or don't want.

You mean they don't always protect us or keep us from harm?

I suppose most of the time they do—I don't know. Mostly I don't think they give a crap whether we live or die.

Do you think there are angels who would want to hurt us?

Joshua smiles. Kid, imagine if you were stuck here and couldn't get back. I wouldn't be too happy, would you? I think I'd be mighty pissed.

But you don't think he's an angel, do you? Not like the angel you dreamt of?

I think he's full of shit. But hell, the man believes he's an angel. Who are we to argue with him or tell him otherwise? But then Joshua laughs—he closes his eyes and leans against the bike for support as tears come to the corners of his eyes. Oh man, he says and wipes at his cheeks. That angel has his vaccinations. Joshua claps the top of his bicep. The vaccination shots that left big old circles for scars. They did away with them in the sixties. Your mom and me, we got them. Most people who were born before 1970 did. But tell me, man, what's an angel doing with one?

Joshua shakes his head and laughs some more. Damn, he says. An angel working at a diner down by the old docks. Maybe he stopped being an angel once he'd been here too long. Maybe you just can't go back. Seems to work that way in the real world too.

And then he nods. Well, I guess that's about right. He's the last one left. All the old whores and gangsters are gone. So where the hell else would an angel be?

Father Magnusson sits looking out the plate glass at the snow falling heavily through the darkness, his down-like hair resting back upon his pillow. Wind shudders beneath the Pullman, ripples against the stamped metal of its sides, and whistles in the spaces of empty rivet holes as if it were stroking the skin of a beast succumbing to sleep. The carriage begins to grow cold, and Duncan shivers.

Father Magnusson sighs. Quite a sight, isn't it, Duncan?

Duncan is wide-eyed and silent because, after all, this is a dead man who is talking to him, and when the dead speak, he's come to learn, it is important to listen to them. Yet it seems like the most natural thing in the world that Father Magnusson is talking to him; it's almost as if he's been waiting for this from the first moment he dreamt of his mother in the snow and she showed him the Festival of Lights Holiday Train frozen to its rails and imbedded by drifts of snow fifteen feet high. It is necessary that he be with these people at the end and during the final hours of their lives.

Finally Duncan speaks: Are you scared that you'll die soon, Father? And he is shocked that he has said such a thing—where have these words come from?—and if he could, he would clamp his hands to his mouth, but his hands remain motionless at his sides despite his urging. Father Magnusson merely looks at him and then laughs at his expression.

No, son. I'm not scared. None of us are. You are not seeing us as we were but as we are. We are no longer scared.

You mean you're already dead?

Yes. And it is no longer important.

But if you're dead, why are you here? What are you waiting for?

Father Magnusson leans his head away from Duncan. The worst storm in seventy years, isn't it? They ever say it's worse than the storm of 1901. I lost an older sister and my grandmother in that one.

We lost most of our livestock and our holding too. Our father had to work the iron range afterwards, and it destroyed his lungs. He contracted mesothelioma from breathing taconite dust, and the arc flare of welding torches ruined his eyes so that he was almost blind.

I was the youngest child and I don't even think he even knew what I looked like, but I always watched him of an evening when he came in from work and the way he moved about the house, doubled over with the effort to breathe. Often he'd walk into a room and I'd stay very still until he passed through. Sometimes he'd sit and listen to one of his favorite shows on the radio after supper. I don't think he ever knew I was there watching him, sharing the same space.

They'll bury you in the spring when the thaw comes, Duncan says.

In the cherry blossom grove beyond the charnel house?

Duncan nods and Father Magnusson smiles as if the idea pleases him immensely. That will be nice, he says. I suppose they will give me an enviable spot. I'm an old man and I've spent most of my life here.

The roof creaks and groans with the weight of snow and then settles once more.

I suppose they will say the Requiem Mass in Latin. I do so like the Latin. If only I could remind them not to sing
De Profundis
at the anniversary. I wish someone would mention that to young Toibin. Ahh, well, but I suppose there are others to think of. There are so many of us lost and in need of help, even here.

The lamps of the carriage suddenly tremor and dim, and then go out. Father Magnusson's hair seems to glow in the dark. When the wind recedes, Duncan hears a child crying.

What about the woman in the snow—my mother—do you know her?

Oh, yes. She'll be coming also. Have you heard her sing? It's beautiful, absolutely beautiful. I've never heard anything like it in my life.

She's here on the Holiday Train?

Father Magnusson turns back to the window, about which the glow of Christmas lights shimmer and flicker incandescently from the dark and casts a slight, pulsing glow into the carriage.

She's always with us, he says. Didn't you know? She's an angel.

Duncan?
a voice calls into the darkness, and it is as if he is floating and unraveling and spiraling down. It's snowing, cold and sharp on his face. The clouds are parting briefly, and in the space that remains he can see stars, small and distant, and then growing brighter and falling, blazing from the sky.

I heard you calling, Duncan. Are you all right?

Upon the wall over his dresser the familiar pictures: a smiling, nunlike Olivia de Havilland from
Whose Baby Are You Now?
staring down at him, her full breasts pressing against her robe; and the
Times
cover of the 1969 lunar landing. Instinctively he pulls the covers up beneath his chin, listens for the bells of Lauds, of Brothers shuffling and chuffing in the frozen stairwells, stumbling toward morning prayer. He imagines the water in his basin upon the nightstand with its skin of ice, of it splintering beneath his fingertips and the chill of water as he washes his face in the predawn. Then there are the eight footsteps it will take him upon the cold timber floor to reach the
door and another twenty to the toilets along the hall and by other rooms in which children he knows only by face moan and snore and toss and dream and for whom there are still hours of sleep.

But the room is not cold and the radiators are silent. From down the hall, a record spins softly upon a phonograph. A moist cough sounds outside his door. Feet move restlessly upon the creaking floorboards. Duncan? the voice calls again, slurred and urgent now.

Yes, Mom, Duncan says, and he wonders if he is still dreaming. Yes. I'm okay. Please go back to sleep.

And he waits and listens to her pad back down the hallway, to the volume of her phonograph rising as she opens the door and then diminishing, to old bed springs creaking in distress as she settles upon the mattress. The phonograph's tone arm swings out and then back and her song begins again and he recognizes it as “The Bell Jar” from mother's
Last Rose of Summer
album and the only recording of her startling five-octave range, years before her voice broke. He hears the sound of her whiskey tumbler sliding upon wood, of glass tinkling as she lifts the bottle of Old Mainline to the tumbler, and knows that Joshua must be working the graveyard shift again, for he isn't home yet. He stares into the darkness long enough and his eyes adjust to the light.

From a pair of tall windows on which the blinds are rolled up comes the sounds of the street and the diffuse, blue ashen light in the hour before dawn. He lifts his arms above the bedclothes, turns them this way and that in the strange moon water as if they are ghostly, translucent limbs belonging to somebody else. He imagines that this is what Joshua sometimes does as he works in the tunnel, as he sits in the compression chamber before sinking down the shaft with the other men and then later as he rises to street level, always surprised by the quality of light that greets him and the strangeness of his feet upon sidewalk absent the pressure of the sea.

Sitting on the edge of his bed, his toes curled from brief contact with the floor, he peers out the window. The tops of cars shine dark
with dew. A dog squats on the sidewalk, empties its bowels, and moans as if it is in pain. Yesterday he saw a homeless man in an alley crying out in much the same way. In the gloom a bus idles on the street corner bathed in the light of a sodium streetlamp. Its doors close and then, with a belch of exhaust, a hydraulic groan and a hiss of airbrakes, it humps up dark Divisadero: gray, faceless, seated figures shuddering behind its windows like small, hungry children waiting at a cold breakfast table.

I will love the light for it shows me the way; yet I will love the darkness for it shows me the stars.

—AUGUSTINE “OG” MANDINO

May 1984

At the Windsor Tap, Duncan sits on a stool beside Joshua, waiting for Maggie to finish her shift at St. Luke's. Joshua buys him a second Coke after he promises that he'll make it last, and Clay tells him to go easy on the bowls of nuts: They're for paying customers, son. I can't keep replacing them. Don't your mother feed you?

Joshua is humming to himself and tying a red cocktail straw into knots. In the backroom, a shouting and hollering begins and a body thumps the floor. Joshua pauses in his knot tying.

My man, it's time to go. Charlie's everywhere.

Duncan nods.
Charlie
, he knows, refers to the Viet Cong, to the
enemy, to anything that poses a threat or is, as Joshua often says, just a pain in the fucking ass.

They climb off their stools and Duncan eyes Clay at the rear of the room with his Louisville. A man lies on the floor by the pool tables, clutching his arms to his body and sobbing. A dark stain spreads across the crotch of his pants and then a rivulet of urine trickles from his pant leg across the wood. Joshua moves Duncan toward the door, his hands pressed gently on the backs of his shoulders.

Joshua's bike looks as if it has been left out in all manner of weather: The leather is torn and the chrome pipes oxidized, the metal of the gas tank stamped as if by a ball-peen hammer. Duncan sits on the saddle behind Joshua and holds on tight to his field jacket as they speed through the streets with Joshua leaning the bike at right angles as they take the curves. My man, will you relax, he says. You want to take us both off the bike? Just enjoy the ride. Chill. Be cool.

They cross an old rusted trellis bridge, tires thumping the dividers in trainlike cadence, and Duncan peers down: wind in his face and a slow-moving gray channel streaked with iridescent oil smears passing into the bay. Joshua parks the bike down by an empty lot that abuts the water, knocks down the kickstand with a shudder that trembles through the frame, and jockeys the bike slowly backward until the rear tire bumps the curbstone. A rusted metal guardrail lines the wall. Behind them: Industrial buildings and tenements waiting for the wrecking ball. Two large stacks blowing white smoke into the sky. The twenty-four-hour diner across the narrow cobbled street where the fry cook believes he's an angel, and a bar. Paint-peeling facades. Adverts in the window from another generation. A faded poster for Chesterfield cigarettes. Kohl's beer. A handwritten sign: PRESCRIPTIONS FILLED.