This Magnificent Desolation (26 page)

I copied it from the pictures in your magazines, Maggie says as she carefully collects the wrapping paper, folds it, and places it back in her bag. Looks pretty good, doesn't it? Joshua helped.

Duncan nods. It looks just like the real thing, he says.

He pokes at the lunar module affixed to the top, with its miniature convex windows, plastic portals though through which the small plastic shapes of Buzz, Armstrong, and Collins are visible. Of course their features are indistinguishable, but he tilts the rocket from side to side anyway to get a better glimpse of them in their chairs and he suddenly has the suffocating, claustrophobic sense of them trapped, and of Collins circling the moon, spiraling alone through the dark.

You've even painted the LM the right color, he says. It must have taken you forever.

Happy birthday, she says and grins.

This cost a lot of money.

She shrugs. It's not every day you turn fourteen, and like I said, Joshua helped. And so did Magdalene. There she is now!

The rain has finally stopped and Magdalene is treading across the
waterlogged pavement toward them, stomping through the puddles. She waves and rushes forward, breathless. Happy birthday, she says. I wanted to give you and your mother a moment alone. Besides, Mr. Hotchkiss had made a mistake on our biology exam.

You knew and you didn't tell me.

Magdalene raises an eyebrow, conspiratorially. I'm good at keeping secrets.

Duncan laughs, hefts the rocket in his hands.

Maggie is looking at him, smiling. Well, aren't you going to try it out?

I can try it?

Of course.

Duncan chooses the empty railway cut as their test site, where shale and cinder piles, gleaming black and mercurial in the gray light, and dark creosote soaked track timbers lay stacked one atop the other. Beyond the switching signals and engineer shack, enclosed by a barbed wire fence, a grid of transformers adjust and pre-amp the flow of electricity from the power plant, and beyond that the lights of the Edison plant blinking red and white. Standing a dozen feet back from the launch site, Duncan, baring his teeth, flicks the switch on the remote and Maggie and Magdalene cheer as the rocket's thruster ignites and the rocket surges upward upon a white-gray plume of combusting fuel.

About two hundred feet up the rocket's nose dips as it adjusts its telemetry just as the real
Saturn V
would to propel itself out of Earth's orbit. And then the C series rocket dips lower, the lunar module seeming to tremble and vibrate at its tip.

Uh-oh, Duncan says, hoping it might right itself, but then it rolls, inverts, and shoots in mad, looping circles down, streaming circles of white smoke behind it.

Uh-oh, Maggie and Magdalene echo, and they watch as it arcs in crazy parabolas toward the distant power station's transformers.

Turn it off, Duncan! Turn it off! Maggie shouts—her hands
cupped around her mouth like a bullhorn—but it's too late. The propellant has already extinguished itself and the rocket continues on its spiral downward.

Duncan drops the remote and the three of them run across the rail yards, stumbling and falling down the empty rail bed amongst the wet coal and tinder and then splashing through the muddy pools that fill the length of the cut. They're a hundred feet away when the rocket strikes the transformers and the first generator blows. There's a muted explosion, a dull thump and a shower of sparks, and then another explosion, louder than the first, and then a third: rising concussive blasts that suck the wind from Duncan's lungs, and from the center of this black cloud, a fireball emerges, blazing orange and red. Blue silvery light snakes up the towers and across the conduits and cables between the generators. The lights pulse and throb, convulse and tremor like writhing bands of water, and then, beneath this umbrella of electricity, the generators begin to blow, one after the other.

A great firework of electrical sparks showers into the air and floats down around them. Duncan's toes and fingertips go numb with the charge. His heart seems to have suddenly been jump-started. He feels the currents of electricity passing over him, wave after wave, and he fears for a moment that more will come, and that when the last wave buffets them, they'll be burnt to a crisp like the life-size mannequins posed amidst the prefabricated plywood houses he's seen in the films of the 1955 Operation Cue A-bomb tests at the Nevada test site. But the sensation remains the same and he, Maggie, and Magdalene stare, entranced, at the electrical umbrella of showering sparks a hundred feet high, its strands of charged particles, crackling blue wisps and tendrils, falling and dissipating ghostlike in the air about them.

Maggie reaches out and takes Duncan's and Magdalene's hands as the city begins to darken, whole neighborhoods suddenly falling into blackness, and then it continues, each section of lit homes becoming dark, street after street, as if a wave is passing over the rooftops and obliterating the light, as overloaded street boxes and
transformers blow. Only the lights upon the plant's smoke stacks continue to flash, blinking off and on, a strange beacon belching in the dark. Car horns begin to sound.

Mom, how come we're not electrocuted?

I don't know, Maggie says, shaking her head.

She puts her hands out as if it is still raining and they are merely catching raindrops. And then Duncan and Magdalene do the same. The sound of arcing hisses in the air about them. Orange and white and blue slivers of discharge snake back and forth above them and at their sides, and only slowly does it dissipate, dissolve, and then disappear. It begins to drizzle again and the raindrops hiss and sizzle upon the metal, white smoke steaming from the charred remains of the generators. The burnt smell of the electrical charge comes with the rain, and Maggie searches his body and his clothes and then does the same to Magdalene to make sure neither one of them have been scorched. She takes hold of Duncan and turns him back to front and then back again. They smell of sulfur and magnesium and of something oddly metallic. For a moment Duncan imagines they shine phosphorescent blue.

You're both all right, she says, and he nods.

I thought we were dead. Are we dead?

The sounds of police cars and fire engines come from the Bottoms, and Duncan can see their lights as they descend the hill and motor along the San Cordono riverway and over the Cantabery Street trestle bridge. We've got to go, Maggie says, and she takes his and Magdalene's hands again and they race to the derelict warehouses along Montgomery and the Tannery, Maggie stumbling in her heels. As they run, she lets go of their hands so that in mid-stride she can slip off her heels, cursing as one splinters loudly. Thank you, Mom, Duncan shouts as they run. That was the best present ever.

Maggie laughs breathlessly. Good, she says. Because that's the last rocket I'm ever getting you.

In the electric charged air above them, clouds of arcing blue
spiderwebs pulse and throb and it is as if a million pairs of eyes are looking down upon them, watching them as they race and stumble along the muddy rail cut to the car, their shadows cast in startling black against the background of phosphorescent flames.

Duncan! Magdalene says at his ear. Your mother's crazy!

And Duncan, laughing, turns to look at her. I know! he hollers. I know!

Three days later Duncan and Maggie return to look at the remains of the transformers. The center of the facility looks as if a fireball had raged at its heart for hours. The chain link and barbed wire fence surrounding the generators to the east and west are melted. Only the blackened tops of the rooted stanchions remain, half-torn from the ground and canting away from the center of the explosion. The sun is angling toward the roofs of the city, and the shadows create stark, moonlike craters before the crumbling buildings and abandoned warehouses along the rail cut.

Thirty feet before them the ground is fused and turned glasslike. They walk and gaze in awe at the destruction before them and, as they move, Duncan is keenly aware of his body performing its functions, his legs lifting, fingers sensing, eyes peering upon the wreckage, of his breath coming from his mouth, lungs working like efficient bellows, and of his heart thumping softly, anxiously beneath his thin breastplate. He feels a strange, exhilarating aching there and the sense of being alive suddenly overjoys him. Maggie pales. Her eyes are wide and unblinking. They stare at each other and color slowly returns to her face. Jesus, she mouths. Jesus, Duncan, and then slowly they begin to grin.

There is nothing left of the rocket and only the melted remains of empty metal containers, their torn edges thrust outward in dangerous-looking shards, but there, glinting in the fulgurite, lies the unscathed gray lunar command module. Duncan steps forward, stomping on the
glittering ground cautiously, picks it up, and peers through the plastic windows into the interior, where the miniature figures of Aldrin, Armstrong, and Collins sit strapped into their seats, tipped at a forty-five degree angle, waiting for liftoff and the thrust of the rocket upward.

It survived, Duncan says. They survived. He turns the command module in his hands, unbelieving.

How did we not die, Duncan? Maggie wonders aloud again. How come we're not dead?

On their walk home Duncan considers the manner in which they survived the electrical storm, caught as if they were beneath the sheltering, invisible hand of God and his angels, and he is convinced that he saw them peering down upon him and his mother—their gaze implacable yet obviously tender and benevolent—as they fled from the explosion and as the Bottoms fell into darkness. The entire time God was with them, he was everywhere around them, they were in His care—he hadn't forsaken or abandoned Duncan any more than his mother had, and Duncan holds Him in his heart now and his heart seems to swell with the sense of Him. Maggie squeezes his hand and looks at him. Are you okay, Duncan? she asks, and he nods, smiling widely.

A few stars twinkle dully near the roof of the world in the dark blue that is the end of the day. Night will soon sink down like ink through a sieve, and suddenly the sky holds numerous unforeseen, unconsidered wonders—he now knew that beyond the astronauts and Apollo rockets, beyond the moon and the stars, there lay something far greater. God had been with him all this time and now he had a clear sign of his presence. He had called out to him, just as he had at his birth.

In the earth the men find strange things: the fossilized bones of ancient cows and horses, the curving swanlike neck of some strange feathered raptor impressed into the frozen chalk and clay, half a wing section of a WWII hellcat, and a giant billboard for Regal Pale beer. No one can explain how such a thing came to be, three hundred feet below San Francisco. At times such as these, they feel as if they have been blessed, deigned to witness such sights, chosen from millions of others for this special task, and they think of the men and women upon the city streets above them, the throng and press of bodies, the blaring of car horns and screeching of brakes. Working in the tunnel they realize they have been granted a special dispensation, a divination promise of brotherhood and illumination as long as they continue to strike and chisel and hammer and drill and pull and cart and drag the earth of the ocean bed.

While the cutterhead on St. Dymphna is being replaced and Gabriel is moved ahead in the shaft, there is a pause in their work
and Joshua stares at the whorls of gravel and mica upon the tunnel wall. Gradually, a woman's face, the length of her body, and an upraised hand emerge. She seems to be stretching, yearning out of the rock face at him, and he stands transfixed as she comes more fully to life the more he stares: She is smiling at him.

When they lived in Boston, when he was young, and it rained, all manner of things would come to the surface, in the basement and in the yard: old bikes, prams, pushchairs, even bedposts from the turn of the century. His father said it was because the houses had been built upon landfill. That most of Boston was landfill. And that's where the poor people used to live. Their houses flooded in the rain and the sewage came up out of the ground so that they were living in it, and it made them sick, spread cholera and tuberculosis through the immigrant and black tenements. The rain always pushed up the past so that you couldn't forget it. In that place nothing could stay buried.

Shit, get a load of that, someone says from behind him, and the men converge about him. They set to wiping the grime and silt from the image emerging in the rock and then dig into the earth to pry it free. A billboard from the 1930s of a housewife: wide gleaming smile, apron stretched taut by the rocketlike thrust of her pointed cone bra beneath her red cotton cardigan, holding a loaf of Byer's home-style white: Just Like Your Mother Made!

P.J. Rollins shakes his head. How the hell did something like that get way down here? But no one can answer him properly, although they all have theories:

I'd heard they began building a subway down here in the thirties but the quakes of '42 destroyed it. Didn't believe it till I saw this.

It must be part of the old wharf that gradually collapsed and sank into the bay. The current has just kept pushing it deeper and deeper.

It came off the junk barges that ferry the trash from Santa Clarista to San Mucal.

The men plant the billboard near the mouth of the tunnel and, to a man, touch it when they come and go in the manner that they
touch the statue of St. Barbara, for good luck, for a blessing of sorts, although none can explain why they believe that it is a good omen and that it will keep them safe. For most of them it becomes a holy article imbued with the power of the Holy Spirit in the various and distinct ways each man perceives his god. It draws them together and forges a sense of community, of alien brotherhood in the murky, Silurian dark.

In the evening Joshua brings home some of things he has discovered and lays them upon the table before Maggie serves dinner: the narrow whalebone of a woman's corset, an arrowhead, the fossil of an ancient worm, a bent pewter fork, a civil war musket ball, a rag doll from perhaps two hundred years ago, pressed flat by the earth, with small holes where its eyes once were. Duncan lays the plates and cutlery on the table and sits next to him, listens as Joshua narrates the possible history of each object or as he pauses, fascinated by another, with an origin as unexpected and startling as the one that came before.