Duncan stares at her and knows he needs to speak. Do I have a father? he asks. Joshua said he knew my father.
His mother picks up her smoldering Claymore from the ashtray, ash peppering the Formica, and squints at him as she inhales on it and then exhales slowly. The plume of smoke rises up to the tin ceiling and seems to hang there, churning and dark.
If I have a father, why do you never talk about him? What’s so wrong?
His mother grinds the cigarette out in the ashtray. Nothing’s wrong, sweetie, except there isn’t anything to tell. You had a father—of course you had a father, but he died before you were born. I’ve told you that.
What did he die of?
She shakes her head. I don’t know what he died of. He left us—okay? He left before you were born. I heard later that he’d died back east.
But you never made sure? You never wanted to find out? Perhaps he’s still alive somewhere.
He’s dead and there’s nothing else to say. She picks up the blunted cigarette and then grinds it some more into the rust speckled tin then works at lighting another.
Duncan stares at her. You don’t have any pictures of him, nothing at all?
No. If I had pictures, I would show you. We’d only known each other a short while when I became pregnant. I don’t think he even knew.
Perhaps if he knew, he’d have come back.
I told you, he’s dead.
What was he like?
Like I said, we only knew each other a short while. Okay, he was fine, just fine.
Well, what did he look like?
I don’t know how to describe him. He was good-looking, I guess.
Do I look like him?
He has often tried to picture what his father looked like but can only imagine his own face as it stares back at him in the bathroom mirror—the mercury plating worn away so that the glass is pock-mocked with slivers of gray and black—as he brushes his teeth before bed or as he splashes cold water on his face in the mornings before school. The hollow points of large pupils dilating in dark blue irises, strawlike black hair sitting at all angles upon his head no matter how he combs it and no matter how the Spanish barber on Columbus tries to mat it down with sweet smelling pomade and brilliantine.
No. Perhaps. Jesus, I don’t know, Duncan. This was over ten years ago. You look a little bit like him. You have his eyes, but then he had eyes like my father, so I suppose your eyes are from my side.
What was he like? You must have liked him to have me, didn’t you?
I liked him just fine. Now will you stop with the questions? I’m sorry there isn’t more to tell you, but that’s just the way it is. I used to be an opera singer, and I never thought things would change, but they did. If it wasn’t for the war, Joshua might have made something of himself—he might have been anything he wanted to be. Sometimes things don’t work out the way you want them to, and that’s all there is to it. Your father died a long time ago, and the only thing I have to remember him by is you, and for that I thank God. She shrugs, and turns away, sucks on her cigarette.
His mother’s eyes follow the next engine as it motors out over the trestle bridge above the narrow channel that divides San Listes from Mission Hill, its motor thrumming high and loud before the engineer opens it up, the halogens along the gravel rail cut glinting on the top of the engine’s metal canopy and then on each successive rail car, shimmering like water flowing down their dark sides.
When you jump a train, she says suddenly, you must always make sure to move with the speed of the train, to jump and climb in one motion. If you merely reach for a handhold, the train will pull your arm out of its socket. They key is always to keep moving and to match your speed to the train’s.
You jumped trains?
Maggie smiles wistfully. No, she says. Never. But I always dreamed of it.
At night Duncan sits by his bedroom window on the third floor with his copy of The Collected Works of Douglas Graham Purdy: Tales of Horror and the Macabre open on his lap and looks out at the same rail yard that his mother often does. He stares at the telephone lines that stretch like a jangle of dark snakes writhing toward the horizon, and he imagines the voices from all the surrounding houses and towns and cities that traveled along them and he hears hot water bubbling and gurgling in the pipes and the sounds of his mother’s visitors rising with the sound of bursting bubbles—it is like listening undersea. He presses his ears to the pipes until they are too hot to stand and the underwater voices rise and fall with the bubbles. His mother is usually quiet but sometimes he hears her offering words of comfort, encouragement, or, he guesses, whatever else they want and need to hear. And gradually those voices too meld into the eternal hum in his head, right along with the telephone lines and the electrical conducting towers and the trains thumping and banging in the rail yards beyond.
Nightly, he stares from that window and watches the strangers that pass beneath the streetlights and disappear beneath the awning of their porch; the footsteps on the wooden stairs echoing loudly, abruptly, after the soft hiss, spatter on the rain-washed street, then follows the knock at the door, and his mother’s voice in greeting.
He watches them emerge at the far end of the street, these dark amorphous shapes twisting and twining themselves from shadow and molten cement, through the gray rain, rising up from the very fabric of the misty air and the sidewalk like phantasms, and he can tell, even then, by their walk, that they are coming to their house. At first it is a game he plays to pass the time, to see how often he can guess correctly, but in the end, he is always right. These men, even the way they move is predictable. He grows bored and stops counting but he continues to watch and listen, and often he falls asleep, head on his arms, arms folded on the hard surface of the windowsill and the angled surface of the radiator, half his skin cold from the cold night pushing the glass, the other half burning with the heat of the radiator he lies pressed against, and the image of men growing from the pavement and the sound of them below with his mother, and he imagines the distance from his room to the moon and of his body, disintegrated and reduced to subatomic particles, passed along a radio wave and shot out into the cosmos with the speed of a quasar, to where Michael Collins, his father, and all the lost astronauts waited in limbo.
Chapter 25
Duncan stares out the window onto the avenue. From his mother’s room down the hall he hears a man’s gravel-rough voice followed by his laughter; the flick of a lighter, once, twice, butane igniting, and the inhale as a cigarette is lit; his mother’s tights rasp like snakes coiling across her skin as she removes them, and then the scrape of clothing, the rustle of underthings. SQUEAK SQUEAL the beds springs shudder, BANG BANG the headboard hammers faster and faster and harder and harder, and then JESUS, FUCKING JESUS YEAH.
Water thrums in the pipes and bubbles in the radiators. The window blooms white with Duncan’s breath; the cold from outside tightens the skin at the top of his brow. A door opens, closes. Urine splashing in the bathroom, the sound resounding off the porcelain and tiles. A man hacking phlegm and then flushing. Duncan closes his eyes. Footsteps recede, and he imagines they are going down the stairs, out the front door, down the street and the hill to the city, and never coming back. But the front door never opens and then the bed begins to move again, the walls shudder, and his mother’s voice calls out as if in pain. The man’s voice rises, swearing at his mother, calling her all manner of terrible things, so that Duncan raises the volume on the Vulcanite radio as loud as it will go, places his hands over his ears, buries his head beneath the blankets, and tries to lose himself in the numbing, swirling dark.
110:08:53 COLLINS: Houston, Columbia on the high gain. Over.
110:08:55 MCCANDLESS: Columbia, this is Houston. Reading you loud and clear. Over.
110:09:03 COLLINS: Yeah. Reading you loud and clear. How’s it going?
110:09:05 MCCANDLESS: Roger. The EVA is progressing beautifully. I believe they are setting up the flag now.
110:09:14 CO
LLINS: Great!
110:09:18 MCCANDLESS: I guess you’re about the only person around that doesn’t have TV coverage of the scene.
110:09:25 COLLINS: That’s all right. I don’t mind a bit. [Pause] How is the quality of the TV?
110:09:35 MCCANDLESS: Oh, it’s beautiful, Mike. It really is.
110:09:39 COLLINS: Oh, gee, that’s great! Is the lighting halfway decent?
110:09:43 MCCANDLESS: Yes, indeed. They’ve got the flag up now and you can see the stars and stripes on the lunar surface.
110:09:50 COLLINS: Beautiful. Just beautiful.
Chapter 26
April 1982
Maggie sang Elizabethan madrigals and Catholic hymns and Baptist choruses and the low blue notes of Muddy Waters from the bottom of the Mississippi Delta. And in all of this she searched for the divine, those notes and measures that could hold the soul, make the heart ache, and break it in two. These songs shared a special grace, for in them, Duncan knows, she found her way to God and, perhaps, as she sang, imagined what she was once capable of.
I lost my voice, she says, and had to leave the opera. She runs a finger along her throat. And after him, I lost everything else. I was ruined.
Duncan cannot tell if she means his father, and, at times, he even wonders if she might mean him. After all, she’s risked so much taking him from the Home and has sacrificed so much for him, including her career. If there is anyone to be blamed for where she is now, it is him; he is the one who has truly ruined her.
La mort his mother calls it, and laughs. Softly she sings the words of the Queen of the Night: Disowned may you be forever, Abandoned may you be forever, Destroyed be forever. She shakes her head. I could fail, but not there, not on an opera stage. I’d rather people never knew I ever existed than to hear me sing like that.
She touches her neck again, stretching the skin, flicks cigarette ash absently onto a plate. Now, she says, I can’t hold a note to save my life.
She is wrong, she can still sing, and Duncan loves to hear her voice. When he wakes screaming in the night, burning with sudden fever, a great weight pressing upon his chest and so cold he is shaking, she comes to him from her bedroom and soothes him with music. Listen to this, she will say, taking his hand, placing it upon the center of her collarbone and she will sing and he will feel the vibrations of her song humming through the bone. What do you feel?
I feel cold, Mom, he tells her.
Shhhhh, no you’re not. Her hand is on his brow, then touching each cheek as if she’s blessing him with the sign of the cross: In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. It’s warm, she says and yanks at the curtains, drawing them back. The night is warm outside, Duncan. See, can you feel it?
It’s cold.
Shhhhh, everything’s okay. I’m here.
And Duncan will close his eyes and sway with the sound of her voice until gradually her song fills him and there is no clamor or thought or worry in his head and the cold and the pain is only a distant memory. Until he feels completely at peace, until all the monsters are gone.
Monsters, she tells him, is from the Latin word monstrum, meaning “omen,” meaning “portent.” A monster was a messenger, an angel, that in olden days was considered to be a divine messenger. A monster, she says, was something very special and important given to people, it explained that which could not be explained, and only the very blessed received such aid. A monster was not something that could hurt you. Next time you dream or have a nightmare, try to think of it as an angel delivering a message, it is telling you something, if only you can listen and hear what it is that it is trying to tell you. It is not always about bad things, she says, most often it is something good.
Duncan looks at her, and says: Like hearing God speak to you when you’re born? Or believing Daddy is really alive, or hearing Elvis singing “Blue Moon,” or wishing Joshua peace, and like watching Neil Armstrong take one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind?
More and more Duncan fears greatly for the lives of the Apollo astronauts. In his dreams, he sees Michael Collins aboard the command module Columbia, turning in his slow, lonely, vigilant revolutions around the moon, descending again and again in and out of complete darkness, shooting, skimming, sixty-nine miles above its opaque and glittering gray pockmocked surface, spinning without end through the black vacuum, the integrity of his silvery Mylar and Kapton suit compromised, and he an eviscerated corpse within it—yet still he waits. The sad astronaut who can only watch from his small window and imagine what Aldrin and Armstrong are doing in those minutes, those hours after the landing, even as Columbia passes into the shadow on the far side of the moon and into radio silence: wondering if he perhaps will ever get the chance to touch the lunar surface himself.
Day after day after week after month after year, waiting for the return of the lunar module Eagle while the bodies of Aldrin and Armstrong lie prostrate upon the moon’s surface, the American flag held at eternal mast, the powerful sodium bulbs encircling the lunar module slowly extinguishing one by one and blackening into charred oblivion in the black, starless night.
Shhhhh, Maggie says and squeezes his hand harder. Shhhhh. Be quiet, Duncan, and listen to the music.
Later in the night, although he cannot remember having turned it on, Duncan wakes to the yellow glow of the Vulcanite radio upon his bedside table shimmering out of the darkness. Its hum vibrates in the stillness, crackling across empty, vacant wave bands, waiting to receive a signal from somewhere out in the night. And then there comes sound that Duncan at first mistakes as loud, whining static, until he hears garbled words and then, when he reaches out and turns the dial—little more than a touch—there comes momentarily, through the hissing, the distinct beeps and clicks of the Apollo radio transmissions, and then the urgent voices of the astronauts, but he cannot make out what they are saying, and then they are gone.
Chapter 27
May 1982
Sundays after Mass when Joshua doesn’t show for dinner, Maggie often rolls the old Chevy Impala from the garage, and packed with their sleeping bags and tinned foods, drives them out of the city. From Ipswich Street out along Calistas and then over the Bay Bridge they travel; every weekend driving farther and farther, Maggie moving them southeast in a strange if unconscious parallel with the rail tracks to their left, winding and twisting into the foothills beyond the city and, farther still, the semi-arid desert plains with their small, desolate, single-intersection towns about which the wind seems to constantly swirl fine red sandstone dust. At first Duncan enjoys watching the passing landscape and changing country as Mother shows him the roads she’d traversed as a young woman many years before his birth and the quality of her voice—exuberant and filled with life—as she tells him of a time, smiling as she does so, when it seems she believed everything was possible. But as they move ever farther from the city—perhaps minutes after they’ve passed the red-winged horse of the Mobil gas station on Route 5 or the Nightstop truckers’ motel with its large neon green cactus just after Harlow and perhaps as Mother begins to feel the distance between them and the city widening and only the vast American landscape looming on the horizon and threatening to engulf them—something strange and inexplicable happens to her. She begins to mutter to herself: I can’t do this, I can’t do this, and swears, Shit, Shit Fuck! and grapples with the steering wheel, and in her fit of cursing, they take the next exit that comes upon them and turn north, his mother in a foul mood until the lights of San Francisco show themselves upon the horizon, shining blearily through a fog as night comes down.
Sometimes they will drive until Maggie realizes they are almost out of gas and they have to refuel, and at other times she simply drives and drives, refueling at one roadside gas station after another until, inexplicably panicked, she turns the car around and heads home or until she seems to wake suddenly—eyes blinking, eyelashes fluttering, tongue licking her lips savagely—from her fugue. And always she stares at Duncan in confusion, as if he is a stranger si
tting next to her, and he wonders if she remembers a single thing they spoke of during the many hours of those trips, or if she even thinks of him or of Joshua, in his single room at the Langham Hotel, lying awake listening to men retching, puking, and loosing their bowels into the shatencrusted toilet at the end of the hall.
And mostly Duncan is too exhausted to care about or to try to understand these seeming fits. Instead he closes his eyes and waits for the smells of the Gravel, the Bends, and the Bottoms, the shift whistle from the Edison plant, the pungent tannic odor from the tannery, the rumble and grind of the diesel engines motoring out of the rail yard, or, hopefully, the sight of Joshua’s Indian aslant the curbstone before their house to tell him that they are home again.
C’mon, sweetie, Mother says as she leads him, half-asleep, from the car. We’re home, and there is a flatness to her voice as if she has momentarily stepped far outside of herself and her voice is coming from very far away, or as if someone else has taken her place, someone who is merely mimicking her, and he can only think of the disembodied voices of lost astronauts that murmur through Brother Canice’s radio late in the night. Soon she retreats to her bedroom with a bottle while Duncan, now suddenly awake, stares at the bare bulb dangling from the ceiling, as it shudders and sways slightly with the thumping bass reverberations from her stereo sounding from down the hall, and wonders where she goes to in these moments, what manner of madness affects her, and, if somehow, he is responsible for it all.
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