This Magnificent Desolation (36 page)

Breathing hard, Joshua stands, muscles quivering and body trembling with adrenaline, and though he should feel fear, he feels nothing at all. In his head the great thump of the compressors and the rumbling thrum of the TBMs, the muted roar of the cutter face shearing rock, the pistoning of hand and arm as he and Jamie bolt the connecting rings, and all this sound filling the silent, dead space within him.

He holds his face up to the rafters and for a moment Duncan is convinced that he can see him, but his eyes are closed as if he is praying. Sweat trickles down his gaunt face. The scar across his neck shines black against his dark skin.

The far edge of the circle parts and another man steps forward and with sudden movement he and Joshua are on each other. In the greasy, smoky light they seem to move as wraiths, hazy vapors swirling about each other and then suddenly and startlingly through which muscle and sinew seems to suddenly thrust, pummeling and bludgeoning each other as if their fists were sledgehammers as they move back and forth across the floor and into the center, where the industrial lights catch them in their harsh glare.

As the crowd shouts and swarms and pushes, Joshua and the other man grapple and punch and drive each other onto the dirt floor, and then rise and do it again. There is struggling movement, flailing arms, and then only Joshua rises. He sways and waits. The other man is helped up and taken off the floor and someone hollers: Five
minutes! and Joshua staggers toward the wall where a chair waits, the crowd stepping back and allowing him a wide passage. He sits, drapes his field jacket over his shoulders, and lowers his head.

On the concrete, blood and dirt pool together. Two more men are taken off the floor. Fists shatter against jawbones and skulls and men stumble and fall, clutching themselves. They mewl and howl like wounded animals or scream and sob like children, and then there is Joshua, who, bloodied and damaged, seems more dead than alive and, aside from his grunts of exertion, utters no sound at all. And outside night has come down.

When Joshua's name is called, he stands slowly, places the jacket over the back of the chair, and walks to the center of the room. This time the crowd has already parted for him and is momentarily silent. The second man is shirtless and pale and young with long, lank orange hair. When Joshua knocks him to the ground, the hair fans the ground about his head and Duncan doesn't think that he'll get up again, but he does briefly. When he crawls blindly on his hands and knees toward the circle, Joshua waves him away, stumbles to his stool, and waits for his next fight.

In the rafters pigeons coo and thrum, sometimes stirring their wings, seemingly unbothered by the violence below, the grunts and squeals, the wet-smack of fists sliding off slick, bloodied skin, the crunch when a fighter breaks his hand or a nose, a jaw, or when a man's entire face seems to disintegrate beneath another man's fist, buckling inward for a moment and then shattering about the cheekbone, nose, and eye, blood spouting from his nostrils in two thin jets.

It is Joshua's turn again and he rises shakily from his chair, moves slowly into the center of the room. Sweat glistens on his arms, soaks his vest. Blood has hardened on his nose and mouth. The men part again and another man steps forward. He is bald, his brow deeply furrowed with ridges of scar. Military tattoos ink his two shoulders like shields and encase his large biceps and forearms in a complex
scrollwork. Joshua seems incredibly small before him, and Duncan thinks:
Please God, let this be the last one, let this be the last one. Joshua's going to die
.

His stomach roils and he closes his eyes to the sound of Joshua and the man striking each other. When he looks again, Joshua lies sprawled upon his back, his face and chest drenched in blood. The muscled, bald man strides toward him and the shouts and hollers of the men grow. The man reaches down, grasps Joshua by his ears, pulls his bloodied face toward him, regards him as if he is about to ask a question, as if he is looking for something in his expression that he might recognize, and then he drives his fist like a pile driver once, twice, three, four times into his face—Joshua's head rocks back and forth and then the man lets him go and Joshua's head falls back to the floor.

The other man waits at the edge of the crowd, hands on his knees, doubled over and breathing deeply. When he sees Joshua attempt to move, he comes forward and kicks him squarely in the face, as if he's punting a football, and Joshua feels his jaw dislodge and teeth splinter and come free of his gums.

He lies there gasping for air, feeling the warmth of blood seeping out of him, from his mouth, his nose, his eye socket, and out of his ear cavity and the ruined flap of his ear. His body seems to scream when he tries to move; he breathes in slowly and knows that his ribs are busted. He reaches down to cradle his swollen testicles and with the touch pain and light flicker in his head and he thinks he will pass out.

He hears Duncan's shouting, calling for him over the din of the other men, and at first he thinks he must be imagining it. Sound is dimming and with it the heart of his rage. And in a moment he is too tired to care; he is cradled by the strange comfort that is pain.

To Duncan the crowd is a great mass of squealing and crying, of retching and swearing. The sound rises up and fills the warehouse as if it is a bowl of sound, each squeal and scream and retch and curse
and slur caught like a visceral echo of history amongst and within its metal clapping, wooden joists, iron beams, and studded sheet metal; and the great fans, revolving slowly above Duncan's head, pull up these sounds and emotions and the terrible pain within them, turn them in the tumid, charged air above their heads, hold them there for one great inexpressible moment so that the din of suffering is an indescribable and uncontainable sonic thrum. Duncan clamps his hands upon his ears and falls to the ground, and then with a great thrush of rushing movement, he feels it all cast out into the night above Oakland and the bay and farther above San Francisco, where the stars glitter bright and low and a satellite circling the earth blinks at the farthest edges of the night.

At home Maggie insists that Joshua empty out his pockets and then asks what meds he is currently on. Joshua sags against the table, sips from his mug, and then slowly tries to light a cigarette, but his fingers seem incapable of doing the work. Duncan stares at the knots of swollen tissue on Joshua's knuckles and at the hardened blood there and reaches over to help him, and Joshua laughs suddenly when they succeed in lighting the cigarette together. After he exhales, he picks tobacco pulp from his lip and says: Doxepin, prazosin, topiramate, propranolol, and lithium, Maggie.

Nothing else? Mother asks, and when Joshua says no, she nods. From her time at St. Luke's, Duncan knows she's seen plenty of her friends and patients OD or slip into comas after taking otherwise harmless drugs in lethal combinations. As she often tells him: If ever I die, it won't be because I'm a fool. But of course she never says this when she is drinking. He listens to her rummaging through the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and then she returns with gauze,
tape, antiseptic, Neosporin, and a brown pill container, which she places on the table. She takes Joshua's vials and, after studying the labels, hands one back.

I'll give you these two back after you've slept, she says. Tonight's it's Percocet and propranolol for you. Mother undoes the tops of the vials and pushes four pills across the table. Asks Duncan to run the sink faucet and pour Joshua a glass of water. Together Duncan and she watch as Joshua takes the pills. He lays his head back, and his dark, hairless Adam's apple bobs as the glass empties, and Duncan has to look away from the narrow loop of scar tissue that stretches from ear to ear and that seems to stretch wider, baring itself, as Joshua swallows. Duncan glances toward his mother but she refuses to look at him.

When Joshua is done, Mother heats some water and begins to clean Joshua's hands and face. Duncan watches as Joshua closes his eyes and she moves the washcloth tenderly over his skin, wincing as she feels the swollen tissue and as she dislodges hardened blood. Under her breath she begins to sing, and it takes Duncan a moment to realize that it is the same song she sings to him during his nightmares, when she holds her hand upon his heart in an effort to calm him and to remind him of the physical world of which he is a part, that they both share together, and that nothing of the world outside this can harm him.

She kneels by Joshua's chair, reaches up and takes his face in her hands, holds the sides of his face tenderly as if she might hurt him here too, as if this is the only place she can touch him without pain.

Please, J. Don't do this anymore. Don't do this. Promise me that you won't. If not for yourself, then for me and for Duncan. And then Mother surprises Duncan by what she says next: I need you. I need you to be here for me. I love you.

Joshua lowers his head. The black whorl of hair there reminds Duncan of a child's and only the full, splayed ears, one mushroomed and slightly swollen, its top split in two and raw-looking, suggests that a man is sitting before them.

Please, Mother continues. Promise me you won't do this. But Joshua doesn't answer and finally she rises from her knees and Duncan stares at the pink, patterned designs the linoleum has shaped upon the skin there.

Good, she says. I'm holding you to it. And don't you dare forget. She looks to Duncan, tries to smile but fails, and comes to him, kisses the top of his head. You need to go to bed, she whispers. It's been a long night. Don't worry about Joshua. He'll be fine, okay?

He sees the doubt in her eyes but he nods, watches her take Joshua's hand and lead him to the bathroom. Joshua sits on the toilet, head bowed, eyes flickering open and closed, head snapping back every few moments as if he is struggling to stay awake, his shirt open as mother washes his chest and the thin, sharp angles of his stomach with a warm, soapy washcloth. In the weak yellow glow of the bare lightbulb dangling over their heads, Duncan watches how she attends to his wounds, patting him dry and then applying a salve from the medicine cabinet. He watches for a moment from the door and then treads to his bedroom softly so as not to disturb them.

Mother puts Joshua to bed and through the night Duncan looks in on him, moonlight temporarily washing his swollen face clean of pain. Discolored lumps make his face look misshapen and strangely disfigured—beneath the white sheets he might have been laid in state—but then he sighs and his mouth parts slightly as if he is about to speak and then closes again. The room grows bright with moonlight so that even in the dark Duncan can see him, hear his breathing at times rattling and gasping in his throat as if some unseen damage has been done to the insides of him, damage to his heart and lungs, to his liver and spleen. Anxiously Duncan treads the landing to his mother's bedroom throughout the night, fearful that each time he will no longer hear Joshua breathing, that something within him will burst and spill silently through him. That he will die in his sleep
unaware that people who loved him are at his side. That he is not alone. That he has only to call out and they will be there. For a while Duncan crouches in the hallway, squats on the cold linoleum with his back against the wall, watching over Joshua in the way that he had with Billy all those nights when he was in the most pain or distress.

Yet every time Duncan checks in on Joshua, from the doorway, he still looks strong and the beating to his face doesn't change this—it makes him look even stronger, as if, despite the brutal violence and damage, the outward sign of such violence reveals how little could actually affect him. That other men could never really touch him or hurt him—the place where pain remained was a place so deep no one could reach it—and that he needed nothing and nobody.

Duncan thinks of the way Joshua had led him though the throng of men in the warehouse and the way they'd parted for them, and how they'd sped home on his motorcycle through the derelict neighborhood and along the waterfront and over the bridge and home to Mother as if Duncan's life depended upon it, as if Duncan mattered and as if he cared about what happened to him. How Joshua had protected him and kept him from harm. Now, staring at him asleep in Mother's bed, Duncan suddenly wishes that he were the man he might call Father and that in the morning he would search Duncan out, look for him, and pull him to him, and that come evening, another night would pass with him beneath their roof and this is the way it would continue until they no longer knew anything else or remembered anything other.

Joshua sleeps through that night, and through the next day. Around dusk he stirs on Mother's bed and Duncan listens as the bedsprings creak and he knows that Joshua is taking in his surroundings, staring at the walls, the ceiling, at the strange light coming in over the bay. Duncan wonders if Joshua knows where he is—he is motionless for a long time—and then Duncan hears him sitting upright and swinging his long legs over the edge of the mattress. He listens to his bare feet
padding the wood and the slow, struggling stream of urine as it sputters in the porcelain and then the flush of the toilet tank beyond the bathroom door.

It's a little after dusk and St. Mary of the Wharves is tolling her bells for evening service. Joshua has come down to the kitchen and sits, bewildered and groggy, at the table sipping his coffee.

We made it, he says wearily, but it seems more a question, and Duncan nods.

Do you remember last night? Duncan asks. Do you remember bringing me home?

Joshua laughs, but it comes up through his throat like a painful bark and he winces as he swallows. Did you steer?

On the midnight tunnel shift, amidst the grind and bore of the TBMs and the pumping of the compressors and hydraulic jacks and the clatter of the conveyers carrying shale and spoil through the tunnel to the surface, comes a frantic hissing sound, and the men pause in their labors, listening to the escape of compressed air. A moment later a section of the south tunnel collapses and the sea rushes in. It comes with such force and speed that the men are swept along by it. P.J. Rollins and John Chang are shattered against the tunnel walls, Joe “Sully” Sullivan and Billy Gillepsie are hurled like human darts and pinioned misshapenly into small crevices and air ducts, and others are sucked into impossible shapes back through the breach and upward into the mud at the bottom of the bay.