This Magnificent Desolation (35 page)

His mother nods and stares at the houses and apartment buildings teetering upon the hill, at the lit windows through which the figures of people, crouched and bent or talking into phones or to one
another, are still visible, even at this late hour. Some with the curtains pulled and others black shapes moving restlessly behind their vinyl shades, through which the pale yellow light from interior lamps spills.

Ahh, Maggie says. Half the people in this city can't sleep. Look at all those windows and imagine the people within, staring from the darkness, just like you. They're looking up at the stars and feeling nothing but their own emptiness and their own fear of being alone. I feel it all the time, but I feel it a little less knowing that I have you here with me.

That's true?

Of course it's true. You don't believe me?

I thought God wanted me to do something special. I thought that was why he'd spoken to me when I was born. I thought that was why I was here with you. I dreamed of you and you came. I thought I was special.

You don't hear God speaking to you now?

Duncan shakes his head.

Sweetie, she says as she takes his hands, places them between her own and blows on them. He hasn't gone anywhere. And neither have I. Why are you so far away tonight?

I can't hear him, he says.

His mother's eyes widen in sympathy, eyebrows arching. Perhaps he is talking to you, my Duncan, but perhaps you're just not listening.

Duncan nods but he knows his mother doesn't understand. He thinks of her loneliness and her fear of being alone and the bottle of Old Mainline that she often brings to bed with her and the songs and photographs and memories and ghosts that occupy those nights long after he is asleep. He wonders if his being here perhaps reminds her of everything that is lost to her.

He imagines his mother dying alone and her body being found days later. It will be winter and cold, because the gas company will
have shut off the heat, and she will be perfectly preserved, as beautiful and frozen as she appeared in his dreams, emerging through the white gales of a blizzard and standing before the wreck of the Festival of Lights Holiday Train. She will be wearing her finest gown, the one in which she performed before thousands at the Boston's Symphony Hall. He imagines that he will have forsaken her—although he doesn't know why this would be—and that, like the Soap Woman, she will be abandoned at the End, tragically alone and with no one to share or evoke her life, carrying a mute undistinguished history of loss and grief to the grave.

A seizure of some kind they might say after, and he can hear Father Toibin explaining it: A blood vessel burst high up near her eye, Duncan. So small it was almost undetectable. Such a little thing, Duncan. No one could have known or have done anything about it. Or: Poison in her blood. It was the drink, you see. And your mother did like to drink, didn't she? Her liver stopped working and, well, her belly filled up with poison and made everything hard as stone. It's the disease of alcoholics. When they cut her swollen belly open, they found her liver enlarged and speckled and pockmarked by cirrhosis.

Truly, Father Toibin will say, it reminds us of the fragility of the human body—no matter how beautiful and strong this shell is, it is a fragile thing, a transient thing—and the power and permanence and perfection of the soul. Your mother is with God in His Kingdom now.

And Duncan will think of how strong his mother was. He won't believe that there was one weak spot in her. He will tell Father Toibin that he doesn't believe mother's blood leaked slowly away because something could no longer hold or that her stomach bloated with poison and that her drinking killed her. If she died, it was because her heart wouldn't quit. It burst from pumping so hard for so long. It could do nothing else. Duncan will tell him that she was strong before she ever came to the Home to claim him, that he's the
one who made her fragile, who made her weak. And that he's the type of son that would leave his mother to die alone.

His mother laughs suddenly, surprising him, and then laughs even harder, and pulls the blanket more tightly about them. Jutting her chin out toward the night like some determined and obstinate astronomer checking the readings of her astrolabe with the celestial, it's as if she, too, can now almost see what lies above and before them and as if she is determined to discover it, to see beyond her ability to see. And Duncan watches her eyes, the manner in which various sources of meager light from the surroundings buildings and streets refract and spark in the dark of her large pupils like a devastating collision of stars.

Remember, Duncan …

Remember what?

You dreamed I came for you.

Yes.

And then I did come, didn't I?

In the tunnel Joshua turns to find Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong working next to him, having taken the place of his co-workers. Shambling awkwardly in their thick Mylar suits. Faces glistening with sweat. Mist steaming along the floor of the drill. Ahead, St. Dymphna is seized in the rock.

Joshua blinks sweat from his eyelashes. It was all a sham, he says to them. None of it was real.

That's what you think, Aldrin says, grunting, shoveling sludge and rubble onto a black dump truck last used in the days of the gold rush. We sent men up on missions no one has even heard about. They're still out there. They never came back. If it was all fake, why would this be secret?

Go fuck yourself!

Aldrin squints at mica in the rock, pokes at it with a gloved finger. Tell that to Collins. He's still up there.

Armstrong seems intent at prying something from the far wall
with an ancient forty-niners pickax, and Joshua momentarily considers asking him where he found such a thing. When the hole is large enough, Armstrong drops the ax with a clang onto the rail ties and prods at the hole with his geospectrum analyzer. Its frenetic ticking charges the air with tension, as if a flame had suddenly burst from the device and alighted upon rills of oil. Joshua wants to ask him what the hell's he's doing. Armstrong reads the instrument's gauge, looks toward Aldrin, and nods grimly. He switches the machine off and the three of them stare at one another in the silence.

I don't believe it, Joshua says. You and the fucking angels. I don't believe any of it. In his head he sees Jamie Minkivitz struggling and fighting even as he is pulled by emaciated yet incredibly strong, sinuous arms high above the clouds.

Aldrin purses his lips and shakes his head; Armstrong sighs, deep and mournful. We hear them every night, Armstrong says. Tune your radio in. You'll hear them too.

Hear who? Who the fuck do you hear?

Them. Michael and the others. Listen for yourself if you don't believe us. Jamie heard them, and so will you. You'll see.

June 1985

The clock over the bar seems frozen, its hour hand trembling yet never advancing forward, even as its ticking resounds in the almost-empty room. Outside it is near dusk; a bright red sun sinking into the bay has set the alleys alight with flame and sharpened the black outlines of rooftops and cars parked along the street. Absent of a record, the turntable within the jukebox spins silently and vacantly. There is the sound of pool cues striking balls, of the clatter of beer glasses, of men hacking phlegm in the bathroom, and of flushing toilets and water splashing loudly upon porcelain.

Joshua stumbles from his stool as he goes to stand and when Clay eyes him, Joshua reaches down to massage his thigh, places on arm on Duncan's shoulder for balance, and swings the leg back and forth, wincing as he does so, showing Clay the manner it which the leg has failed him and that he is not inebriated, but Duncan knows better.

You taking the bike, tonight? Clay asks without looking up. He
squints into the glass he has just wiped with the bar towel. But Joshua ignores him.

I have to go now, he says to Duncan, and Duncan feels the sour heat of his breath on his face. Your mother gets off her shift in half an hour. Do you want me to give you a ride home or do you want to wait for her here?

Where are you going?

I have a meeting over at the VA.

Clay glances at the clock upon the wall. At this time?

Duncan shrugs and looks away. I can wait, he says.

All right, my man. Later then.

Once Joshua is out the door, Duncan steps down from the bar.

You leaving too? Clay says. I thought you were waiting for your mom.

Nah. I'll head home.

Suit yourself, kid.

Duncan reaches his Raleigh and is pedaling hard down the avenue when Joshua's Indian rumbles past, and Duncan follows as close as he can, praying that the lights at each intersection will be against them. Farther and farther they travel, with Duncan pedaling as fast as he can, down through Potrero Hill and the Mission, and the back of Joshua's green field jacket at the farthest edges of his sight, and always in danger of disappearing entirely. Duncan watches it bobbing and diminishing as the Indian rumbles ahead, weaves in and out of honking and screeching traffic, darkening twilit shapes of flashing metal from within which the shadowed faces of drivers emerge, glaring intently or open-mouthed, and spewing curses with sudden and startling violence, and then Joshua is gone. Duncan pauses on his bike, gasping for breath, sweat soaking through his shirt and turning his skin cold. He is aware of the traffic lights changing from green to red and back again and the last of the sun flickering red and molten in the spaces between buildings but stares toward the distant, shimmering,
ghostlike impression of Joshua that remains before his eyes with only the vaguest suggestion of where he has disappeared to.

He pulls his bike to the curb, lets it clatter on the concrete. He considers the long ride back to the Windsor Tap and, farther, to Ipswich Street and the Bottoms, and everything is suddenly pulling at him so that he has to struggle not to give in to it and cry. A door bangs open and a man, squinting like a burrowing animal breaking through the earth into sunlight, steps out from a bar, a narrow black railcar of a room visible at his back. The door closes slowly and the man makes his way up the street and Duncan is left staring after him.

He feels the dull, heavy thump of his heart in his chest, the wet suck of his lungs, and tiny electric currents coursing along his arms, just as he felt the day he, Magdalene, and Mother stood beneath the exploding transformers of the Edison plant, protected as they were beneath the cusp of some great hand; and when he looked above Stockholdt and saw his mother's face swimming in the moon and when Father Toibin informed him that she was coming for him and would finally take him from the Home; and on that fateful day when the television screen showed the black-and-white images of the long-dead astronauts walking upon the lunar surface.
De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine
, he whispers.
Apud Dominum misericordia, et copiosa apud eum redemptio.

Pedestrians pause momentarily on the street as they pass him, perplexed or strangely fascinated by him perhaps, this slack-jawed, gape-mouthed boy staring so fixedly at the curbstones, the alleyway walls, and the storefronts, and even gawking now and then at the throngs pressing and pushing about him. The air feels charged about him; it grasps at him as he moves forward, and through it, and as he clambers onto his bike and out into the stream of traffic once more.

The spokes of Duncan's wheels tick loudly amongst the abandoned canneries and warehouses along Oakland's decrepit waterfront. It is
a vast, labyrinthine corridor of dead and vacant industry: sawmills, tanneries, slaughterhouses, stockyards, dairies, a jute mill, a flour mill, dry docks, and a brewery with the original company names faded upon their weather-beaten exteriors: California Cotton, Joseph Rusk Canning Factory, Lowell Manufacturing, Triton Carriage Works. From an ancient, crumbling loading dock, a rail tie stretches to the black water and then disappears, and Duncan pauses as he looks at it.

In the gloom, at an angle of the dock, Joshua's Indian sits upon its kickstand, and there, parked away from the road and hidden in the shadows of the warehouse, late-model cars, and rusted pickups, is a gleaming blue Continental.

A fluttering of wings and Duncan looks up. From a window at the top of the building, pigeons crowd and press, cooing quietly as the sun sinks into the bay, turns the surface of the oily black water orange, burns red on the buildings' white corrugated tin, and bathes the birds in a soft fiery warmth.

He clambers up a rusted fire escape to the top floor of the building, the metal flaking away in his hands, and then, with the pigeons parting on either side of him, unbothered by his presence, climbs through a small window covered by shattered boards black with rot and hardened bird shit to a catwalk girder that stretches the length of the building. The sound of men shouting comes to him, reverberating off the tin. The room below is a wide wooden barn, perhaps used to store linens or wools at the turn of the century. There are marks upon the concrete where ancient wide looms once lay bolted to the floor. Large roof fans, their cases encrusted with stalactites of pigeon shit, turn slowly over his head. The heat at the top of the building makes him feel light-headed; the odor of dried shit mugs his head and he has difficulty breathing.

Below him a crowd of men arranged in a loose circle are shouting and pushing and he moves farther out onto the catwalk to get a better view. The dock's doors are open and late sunlight spills in across the floor of the warehouse and, beyond, he can see it dazzling and
flickering upon the rippling water of the bay. Flax and wool dust spirals in heavy umber clouds in the shaft of light and then the doors are suddenly closed, a man hollers, and the warehouse is immersed in gray nether light and a furnace heat.

Industrial lights mounted atop tripods flicker into buzzing life and Duncan can see more clearly. There is a rippling movement among the throng of men, the edge of the circle parts, and Joshua is sitting there, stripped to his vest. He looks small. His long, sinewy arms are heavily veined and emaciated, the biceps clinging tight to the bone.