This Magnificent Desolation (37 page)

The bodies are found slowly. At first twelve men and then no more after a week of digging and dredging. Another body, in an advanced state of decomposition and absent its head, is recovered on June 20.

The last five workers, Minkivitz and Jimmy Paterniti among them, are finally found huddled together in the north tunnel on June 23. Their clothes are mostly rotted away and their bones gleam as if some solvent had been rubbed across them—where Minkivitz's left eye had been a decaying fish hung limply, as if it had been caught there, wriggling out of the eye socket, when the water receded.

On June 27 the final human remains are recovered: It is the missing head, submerged in silt and slurry, and like the artifacts the tunnelers have, over time, pulled from the floor of the bay, it remains strangely preserved, so they are finally able to give one man his name: Javier Lopes.

Joshua is not among the dead. He is at home in bed, bathed in morning sunlight, with Duncan sitting upon the edge of the mattress spooning cereal in a bowl, when they receive the news, the damp washcloth that moments before he'd held to his bloodied eyes lying upon the sheets and wrung tightly in his hand, as he watches the television replay images from the semi-darkness before dawn, of helicopters hovering above the water, divers emerging and submerging like glistening seals in the wide oval wakes created by the helicopters' propeller, and flashing harbor rescue craft cutting wider and wider silver swathes upon the surface. Duncan looks at the screen and then to Joshua and then Maggie comes and quickly ushers Duncan from the room.

From Maggie's bedroom Joshua stares out toward the bay's perfectly flat surface, glittering with reflected sunlight, its calm undisturbed by the churning violence of the night before. Who would know that thirty men had lost their lives two hundred feet below its gray water? Cars are passing as ever over the bridge; pedestrians are laughing, their voices sounding all the more distinct on the late-summer air; workers are making their way from the Edison plant and the rail yards; and his mind rails against the sickeningly strange
normalcy of it all, as in the days when he first returned from Vietnam and, he realizes, all the days since. He is floating, flying numbly above it all. He gazes down at the destruction below him as strong, talonlike hands carry him upward, and he thinks of Javier, Sully, Chang, P.J., Gillepsie, and their foreman, Charlie Minkivitz. He closes his eyes as he imagines how Jamie Minkivitz must have felt at the end, and there is a tightness in his shoulders and chest more painful than the many beatings he has taken or the wounds he received in the war, and he is powerless before it. He opens his eyes and stares desperately at everything about him, and attempts to see, to really see for the first time in over a decade, and to make sense of it all. Yet the act of it engulfs him and overwhelms him. Tears come to his eyes as he remains silent, unmoving, and stares at the heaving view of the sea beyond the bedroom window where nothing and everything has utterly changed, and he can smell the smell of it upon him still, stuck to him, a skin-deep, mucky putrescent sea smell that when he inhales makes his stomach roil. He begins to gag and retch and puts a hand to his mouth to stop the vomit from spilling onto the floor.

July 1985

It's Sunday, a pleasantly mild day, and Joshua and Duncan sit outside on the steps as the light fades. Joshua smokes a cigarette, throws it on the stone, and then lights another. He hardly touched his dinner, and even Maggie's singing couldn't soothe him. Duncan thinks that he will jump upon his bike at any moment with the need, the urge to be gone, but something seems to prevent him—perhaps it is Duncan or his mother keeping him here imprisoned, as it were, and against his will.

There is something frenetic and strangled-seeming in the way he rolls his cigarettes and in the way he looks at them, and Duncan wonders if he needs a fix, the violent physical brutality of the warehouses or the oblivion of pills. Mother has him on a more rigid schedule with his meds and hands them to him one by one at breakfast and then again at suppertime.

Now he is staring so hard that Duncan looks away. Why are you still wearing that crap? he says. I told you, it's all a lie.

Duncan hugs his jacket and his patches tightly and looks up at the marble sky. In his head he recites a litany: The moon is 240,000 miles away. Apollo 11 Mission Commander: Neil Armstrong. Lunar Module Pilot: Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin. Command Module Pilot: Michael Collins. Apollo 11 was carried into space by a
Saturn V
booster rocket, the most powerful rocket ever built. Reaching speeds of 24,000 miles per hour, Apollo 11 took four days to reach the moon. After thirteen lunar orbits, the lunar module
Eagle
separated from the command and service module
Columbia
. On July 20, 1969, lunar module
Eagle
touched down upon the moon's surface, and Neil Armstrong took one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind. But they never lifted off the moon and died up there. And there are other astronauts up there and his father too, and someday they would all come back—once their orbits decayed they'd blaze up in the outer atmosphere and come hurtling down like fiery angels, that is unless God wanted them at His side.

How old are you?

Almost fifteen.

Shit, you were barely born. Joshua shakes his head, frustrated. After a moment he rises and gestures for Duncan to follow him to the curb, where his Indian angles its weight against the kickstand. Look, he says, forget that crap and come here. He sits on the seat, moves the bike with his legs so it is upright, and motions for Duncan to sit before him. When Duncan struggles to get a leg over the gas tank, Joshua grabs a handful of jacket, and hoists him up. Duncan's legs kick at the air.

C'mon, get your feet over. Now rest your feet flat on the ground, jump up and down. Move from left to right, get a feel for its center of gravity.

The bike leans to the right, and Duncan feels the immense weight of it falling.

He turns to look at Joshua.

I'm here, he says, it's not going anywhere. He places Duncan's hands on the handlebars. Good. That'll do. Now watch.

He turns the key, pumps the kick start with his boot three times. Can you hear that? he says, and Duncan listens: like the sound of a small bellows wheezing. Compression, he says, not too much now, just enough to turn her over. He jumps on the kick start, the bike shudders, and the engine rumbles into loud, syncopated life.

Eighty-cubic-inch V-twin, he says, the last they made. She needs a lot of choke in cool weather, but if you're good to her, she'll treat you right. Duncan cranes his neck at him, and Joshua smiles but there are tears in his eyes. His breath shudders against Duncan's back. Duncan holds tight to the handlebars, and Joshua holds tight to Duncan's shoulders.

He places his hands over Duncan's, squeezes them until his knuckles are white, and though Duncan winces, he doesn't say a word, and Joshua revs the engine louder, and the motor turns faster and faster until it whines. Mother is coming down the stairs and she pauses and looks at Joshua warily. She carries a pot of coffee, and two ceramic mugs clutched in her hand. Joshua takes his hands from Duncan's, and the blood rushes back into Duncan's fingers; the motor settles into a choppy rumble. He tugs at Duncan's jacket, and Duncan climbs from the bike.

An Indian, my man, Joshua says, the best-built American bike ever. He strokes the black enameled gas tank then thumps the metal with his fist again and again until the metal is dented. Ye
sss
, my man. Made the last of them in the fifties, this same line, fucking Springfield, Massa-chu-setts!

Maggie places the coffeepot and cups on the stone sidewall. J, you're drunk, again. My son's not getting on that thing if you've been drinking.

Joshua shuts off the motor and continues to stare at Duncan. He climbs from the bike and pulls Duncan tight against him, and
Duncan listens to the manifolds ticking as they cool, smells Joshua's sweat, the Brilliantine in his hair, the burnt-oil smell of his clothes, and still the sea, always the sea.

Duncan, Joshua says. You trust me, don't you? Don't you? Of course you do. So don't worry, it's all cool. It's all going to be okay, my man. I promise. Then he looks at Maggie for a moment. His jaws clench and unclench. A bubble of rheum bursts from his nose. Quickly he wipes his eyes with the back of his bloodied hand and shakes his head. Mother hands him a cup of coffee.

I'm not drunk, Maggie, he says. And I haven't taken my meds in weeks. I've been flushing them down the toilet. I'm fucking alive is what I am. Fucking alive again, and it's killing me.

We wake at the self-same point of the dream—
All is here begun, and finished elsewhere.

—VICTOR HUGO

He considers suicide, the ending of it, that simple passage to silence. Not as a giving up but as a passing on, in the way of his mother perhaps stepping off the train platform at Northampton Street of the El Orange Line in Boston on a summer evening twenty years before. From where she stood, she would have been able to see into the third-floor windows of the factories, tenements, and apartments that abutted the elevated tracks. Perhaps she stared briefly at the families who lived there—a woman smiling as she watched a child moving a fire engine–red car across a shag carpet in the center of the room—and perhaps his mother briefly considered him and his sister before she stepped forward. A passing on in the way of that
angel lifting him up somewhere that he can't yet envision, but perhaps that “seeing” is part of the journey. He thinks of Javier and Minkie and John Chang and of water rushing into the tunnel and of loam and shale and marl filling their mouths and he thinks of the others drowned beneath the bay and wonders where all their souls are now, whether they are looking down on him or not, and he longs to have been with them when they died.

Jo Stafford's “There's a Kind of Hush (All Over the World)” plays through the bar's radio and Clay turns it up, so it becomes loud and tinny, the words and vocals stretching and distorting across the wide space of the empty bar flickering with Christmas lights:
There's a kind of hush all over the world tonight, all over the world you can hear the sounds of lovers in love. You know what I mean. Just the two of us and nobody else in sight, there's nobody else and I'm feeling good just holding you tight
. It's the USO performers station that Clay closes the night with. Tonight it's being broadcast from East Germany. Soon the show will end and they'll play the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but the soldiers in the bar will already be gone.

Maggie leans her head on Joshua's shoulder and each seems to take the weight of the other and they lean and rock to the music, but the tempo is much too fast, the horns punchy and upbeat, and Duncan imagines the bandleader snapping his fingers, and keeping pace with the song seems to exhaust his mother and Joshua, until finally they give up and adopt their own rhythm, turning slowly, decrepitly, on the dance floor. Mother's eyes are closed. Mascara stains her eyelids and upper cheeks black. When she opens her eyes—the shocking whites of them gleaming out of those streaks of black—she stares at him and through him and he knows that she is crying.

The bar is empty now but for them and Clay pulls the mop and wash bucket from the closet and wheels it to the toilets, the plastic cast rollers squeaking across the burnished parquet. He props the
bathroom door open and Duncan hears him stop, then curse—Dirty fuckers!—and begin banging with the mop around the urinals and against the stalls of the toilets, and the smell of ammonia seeps from the bathroom and out into the bar and fills Duncan's mouth and the back of his throat. He strains to hear Jo Stafford's voice,
So listen very carefully, closer now, and you will see what I mean it isn't a dream. The only sound that you will hear is when I whisper in your ear, I love you, I love you forever and ever
, and he sips from his bottle of Coke and forces himself to smile as Mother and Joshua continue to turn around and around and around and the night's cigarette smoke floats down from the ceiling now that Clay has turned off the fans and like a thin greasy haze settles upon the bar and the branches of the armed forces flags.

Clay swears and bangs his mop in a frenzy, against the stall walls and pipes, around the urinals and toilets, pushing the piss and puke spilled onto the floor into the gutters and drains, as if it is a job with no end, and the radio continues to play amidst the bar's flickering, pulsing Christmas lights,
There's a kind of hush all over the world tonight, all over the world you can hear the sounds of people in love. The swinging sounds of people in love
, and Clay hollering all the while: Goddamn, you dirty fuckers, God damn you!

August 1985

On the last night that Duncan will ever see Joshua, they leave the Windsor Tap and Joshua rides them down to the wharves and the empty lot overlooking the bay. It's a full moon and the waters seem to be lit up all the way to the bridge. In the dark places beneath the abutments, a shoal of fish spirals in shining phosphorescence. Joshua slowly smokes a cigarette, silently considers the traffic upon the bridge, the soft murmur of the waves slapping against its distant pylons and coming to them seconds later on the breeze.

Joshua shudders, then undoes his field jacket, empties the pockets into his bandanna, folds it, and places it on the seat of his bike. He drops his jeans, removes his socks, and stands there in his grayed underwear. Duncan looks at him, waiting for him to say what he's doing.

How long do you think before he comes down, Joshua says, and gestures with his head to the sky and the stars there that have seemed to suddenly emerge one by one.

Collins?

Yeah. Collins, your daddy, all the angels.

Duncan looks instinctively toward the horizon, searching for Cygnus and Andromeda at the height of the autumn sky, the next conjunction of
Columbia
's erratic rendezvous with Earth, but the stars all seem a blur tonight and he rubs at his eyes and thinks: A hundred years, it might be a hundred years before the spaceship decays and Collins's Mylar-encased body falls like a star from its orbit.