This Magnificent Desolation

by Thomas O'Malley

  Maggie’s shoulders sag. She says: You were in a place that seemed untouchable. You would look at me and look right through me. I was so scared. I thought I was being punished for something I had done. That somehow I deserved this—a child who doesn’t even recognize his own mother. But you didn’t recognize anyone, sugar. You didn’t speak, you didn’t smile, and you didn’t cry.

  She laughs but she is no longer here; she is somewhere far away, and it seems as if she is on the verge of tears although she is laughing.

  I wanted to take you out of there so many times, get you real medical care, but they wrangled me with legalities and what I’d committed to with the papers I’d signed all those years before, and they fought me, fought me so hard I didn’t understand it. I saw you less and less … Her voice trails away, and when she begins again, her voice is subdued. She stares at the glowing tip of her cigarette: Four years before I got you out of there, baby, four long years.

  But they told me you came during the winter storm. That you left me on the monastery’s doorstep when I was just a few days old. Flea-bitten and howling with the hunger, Brother Canice liked to say.

  But that’s not true, sweetie. Who told you that?

  The Brothers, the other children.

  I didn’t bring you to that place until you were six. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. We had a life before you went into the Home. We had a life together. Don’t you remember any of it?

  I remember being born and—

  Stop, Duncan, she says, suddenly angry. Not again. I don’t want to hear it.

  Maggie turns to the sink, and though she has barely smoked her cigarette, she stamps it out, banging it against the tin, her back trembling.

  The day has darkened and Duncan is aware for the first time of the shadows in the normally bright hallway and the shifting gray beyond the kitchen windows. The children from the park have gone home. Gulls shriek as they swoop down across the street, skimming the parked cars, and a distant clap of thunder is quickly followed by rain tapping the glass, a soft, soothing sound that seems to resound in the silent room, rain-shadow through the diffuse light shuddering upon the walls, and then the shift siren from the Edison plant sounds, startling the both of them.

  Chapter 31

  In her bedroom, Maggie pours herself a drink, sets it upon the dresser, and sits upon the bed, stares blankly for a moment at the vanity mirror atop the bureau, where she has taped pictures of her and Duncan, squeezed their edges into the space where the glass meets the tin frame, the old black-and-whites she has stared at all these years, the ones she has forced herself to think are real. Late sunlight comes down the hill, shimmers in the glass tumbler.

  She pulls out her drawer, rummages through her clothes, takes the pictures from under its cloth-covered bottom, lays them on the bed, spreads them with her hands, and stares at them: a woman and a young boy hand in hand, an abject-looking young boy by himself standing in the center of the frame, a blurred background of three-story buildings beyond wrought iron railings, perhaps where they once lived, stark and dissolved in black and white and something she can almost believe in, and she hopes that Duncan will as well. She is his mother, after all—that is all she’s ever been and hoped to be. Here she laughs bitterly and shakes her head, for amongst the photographs there are also his letters, crossbound by two faded ribbons, letters that speak of his love for her—oh, how eloquently and, at turns, graphically, and crudely he spoke of his love!—and of their future together.

  And now on the bed with these photographs of someone else’s life and decade-old letters from a man who had promised her so much—who’d been so much like father, had his strengths and his weaknesses too, and she’d wanted to make him love her, love her so greatly he would never want for anything more, but in the end, he’d left her just as her father had and after everything had already been taken from her so that what she regrets most is the sacrifices she’d made for him: her voice, her child, her sweet, strange, beautiful Duncan, who managed to believe in angels and God and all manner of goodness in the world with such faith that it made her heart ache to experience it and yet not believe in it and know that sooner or later the world would crush him also.

  Sighing, she pulls a record from its sleeve, drops it onto the phonograph, and, suddenly fatigued, sits heavily upon the edge of the bed. Through the sheer lace curtains she can see gulls wheeling silently above the street. A mother with her child walking hand in hand toward the park. The distant pitons of the Golden Gate Bridge rising above shoals of fog like the walls to some distant, impenetrable fortress in one’s dreams.

  Mom? Duncan calls hesitatingly from the hallway, and she feels the uncertainty in those words, and she wants to go to him but in this moment right now she doesn’t have the strength or the courage and she is very much afraid. She closes her eyes and sips from her glass and calls out: Yes, my sweet, what is it? I’ll be right there. Don’t worry. I’ll be right there.

  She reaches for the bottle of Old Mainline upon the weathered bureau and considers it: the only comfort in her isolation, in this daily giving up. And how much can one give up in one’s life before there is nothing more? The stylus has slipped into the groove and she turns away as a young woman’s voice spills through the old speaker, haunting amidst the popping static and hiss, then rising, resplendent and disorientating in its power. How proud he’d have been if only he could have seen her on the stage, if only he could have heard her like this. How proud he’d have been of her, his only daughter. If only he’d known, he never would have left her while her mother lay in state, gawked at by family and old acquaintances, caked in mortician’s makeup and smelling of the disease Maggie still smells as she makes her rounds through the terminal ward. Slowly she raises the bottle to her lips and drinks deeply, nodding to herself bitterly. And if he could only see the woman, the mother she’d become. Oh, how proud.

  It wasn’t until half a decade of trying and of touring with poor production companies all across the country that Maggie knew her opera career was over. On the night she realizes that she can no longer sing, the truth comes to her in a dream in a motel room on the Arizona-Utah border. It is a sweltering midsummer night, and hours after what will be her final performance, Maggie lies in a semiconscious stupor, inebriated and drenched and tossing upon the bed. The lights in the room have been turned off and the curtains pulled back; the black glass that looks out upon a second-floor landing above a motor court shimmers with heat lightning pulsing through slow-moving darkness in the north. An ancient air conditioner, alternately clicking on and off, thrums and rattles in its brackets, and a gust of fetid air billows weakly across the bed, lightly rippling the bedsheet. When its motor dies and there is silence, you can hear the tap, tap, tapping of dank water dripping slowly upon the red shag carpet.

  In her dream, Maggie Bright is sitting with Silva Bröhm in a bleak, empty opera house. There are black velvet chairs, shadowy ribbed walls, a dark glittering proscenium. They seemed to wait forever, sitting together in silence, until finally the red curtains part to reveal the stage, and there stands Maria Callas, and she begins to sing, only it is with Silva Bröhm’s and Maggie Bright’s former voices that she sings, stolen as it were, or incorporated, into the vast spiritus mundi of which they are no longer a part and from which they can draw no sound.

  Together they watch Maria Callas with such fierce longing their chests ache. How could their voices be lost to them forever. How could they?

  As Maria’s song reaches its height, the two woman rise in silence and their voices follow them from the hall and into the vast hallways of the opera house, where Maggie and Silva fade and depart like pale phantasms to Callas’s rendition of Lakmé’s “Bell Song,” softly reverberating and resounding in the high domed eaves and falling empty in all the caverns of the hall.

  Maggie wakes, sobbing but quite still. From the open window just above her head she hears the thrum of locusts in the desert night, at first such a soft and distant sound that it seems to ma
gnify her isolation, and then, as she wakes more fully and her ears attune themselves to that sound, she realizes that there are thousands and thousands of them out there, rasping their legs and wings together, a frantic, violent vibration without voice conducting thunderheads and lightning in the dark.

  Maggie raises her head off the pillow, hair matted and stuck to her neck and shoulders and wrapped to her face. She looks through the glass and gasps. In the desert night beyond she can see the shape of them, millions of them writhing and undulating: a single swarm, perhaps two hundred miles wide and four hundred miles long, stretching farther than the eye can see and so high and dense that it obscures all light and darkens the distant desert mesas. She watches as they writhe and crack, their shells splintering as they climb over one another, as they pulverize one another to death with their wings, and she continues watching, her mouth working soundlessly, her voice hardening in her throat, until she can no longer tell whether she is awake or still dreaming, or, in that dark, terrible writhing, where she begins and the locusts end.

  She could never go back, and she would never sing as the phenomena she had been ever again. In that moment, for all intents and purposes, she becomes a different woman altogether: She begins to make herself into someone other. A year passes and then another, and soon so many years lie between what she was and what she has become she no longer recognizes the difference.

  Chapter 32

  At times when the company generators in the tunnel fail, Joshua and the other men are cast into darkness, and as they wait for the light to return, wait for the first faint flickering from the safety bulbs at the bend of the tunnel five hundred feet away that will signal that the generators are working again and that more light will soon illuminate the space between them, Joshua quotes Dante’s Purgatario aloud to himself in the dark.

  It’s a book his mother had him read to him as a child, in both translation and Italian, and although he did not know the language, gradually, as he poured over the words, with their strange sounds and constructions, and spoke the words aloud, they began to make a strange and mystical sense to him. Later, in Vietnam, he came to understand the book in other ways, in those places where words had no meaning or articulation but merely hummed in his head, thrummed beneath his skin, and ached in that place his mother might have called a soul, the place where the center of all good things lay; it was an understanding so quick and terribly complete that he felt as if he was no longer reading but in the slick, sloshing belly of It, as he believed Dante must have been, and with this reality came a certain peace with and even acceptance of his condition, the war, and his part in all things that not only ruined other men but also, fundamentally, irrevocably ruined himself.

  When his recon party passed through the sites of day-old fire-fights deep in the jungle, and he slowed at the sight of their fellow soldiers’ bodies or what remained of their bodies turned pulpy in the heat and black with flies, so that the bodies seemed to shudder as the flies moved in waves across them, it might have been Dante rather than Sergeant O’Neil at his side, uttering a cadence that would become so familiar to him that it would soon come to mean how far he and the other soldiers could distance themselves from the death about them and how long before they became strong in the ability to survive here by coming to feel almost nothing at all: Ain’t nothin but dead meat, Greenie. Ain’t nothin. But dead meat. Keep walking.

  Now, as the men wait for light to return to the tunnel beneath the bay, they listen to one another’s breathing and, perhaps for the first time since their shift began, become aware of the smell and the physical presence of one another and of their world around them: the drip and ceaseless stream of water pushing up through cracks and fault lines in the pit; the cooling tick of extinguished filaments and motors of the jackhammers and pneumatic shovels; the swamp of old, bilious, tepid, green-colored water upon the floor of the tunnel; the muck and paste of the thirty-foot-thick chalk marl they are boring through; and the smell of the sea pushing in on them and down on them, just feet from their faces. In the darkness the tunnel boring machines have stilled. The slurry tubes and conveyors are quiet.

  From the section of the tunnel where he waits, foot resting upon the pneumatic press, Joshua forces himself to inhale and exhale, to calm and relax his tired muscles, which every so often spasm uncontrollably. He leans his head against the damp shale, sweat dripping into his eyes, and speaks softly, as if to himself, letting the words shape his breathing, slow his pulse, but all the men hear him, and listen:

  Toiling in tight quarters and breathing sulfurous fumes, slaves and prisoners of war, we were forced to work amidst the screams of our wounded and dying fellows.

  Shut your trap, McGreevey! Charlie Minkivitz, the foreman, snaps at him, the angry breath of him close and heavy as if he’d just materialized out of the dark, and then turns back to the tunnel wall, stares blankly at the seams of water running in small rivulets there, visible now in the darkness as fluttering movement, his eyes seeming to float in the darkness, reflecting the small glints of droplets, and despite the anger, even hatred, in his voice, Joshua realizes that he is scared.

  The men’s breathing continues to thump the darkness, even and measured yet deeply drawn and exhaled with the anxiety of waiting. Leg muscles clench and cramp, acid churns and sours in the muscles, as if they are animals and all waiting to lunge, to flee, and to rush forward, screaming, as they each imagine that the rear wall has collapsed behind them, trapping them, and that in a moment the waters of the bay will come rushing in to crush them. Que Dios nos ayude, Javier Lopes says softly in the dark, his voice trembling. He hears the muted bickering of P.J. Rollins and John Chang and the other team: Joe “Sully” Sullivan and Billy Gillespie. The distant sound of Charlie’s younger brother, Jamie Minkivitz, retching echoes in the cavern, and then of his vomit splattering onto the watery floor.

  Sully? someone calls but the voice is moist and phlemgy and Joshua cannot recognize it.

  What are they saying? Any word from up above? What’s the delay?

  No word, Jimmy. We’re waiting for the engineers. All of you sit tight.

  This is the world of our ancestors, Joshua says aloud suddenly. It don’t matter if we die. He spits into the blackness. At the far end of the tunnel a man coughs wetly.

  Shut up, McGreevey, Minkivitz says again, but this time his voice is subdued, tired-sounding, defeated. This is the third time this week the lights have failed and each time the men have waited in the darkness as if it is their End, and the constant anxiety, fear, and anticipation of impending disaster has taken its toll upon them.

  Eternity, Minkivitz, Joshua calls. Eternity! What do you think about spending eternity together? They’ll find our bones in two hundred years. They’ll dig us up and our bones will have come together, a black man and a white man clinging to each other as they die, as if they needed each other to survive. Maybe we crawl the last ten feet to each other as the air runs out. Maybe you whisper sweet nothings in my ear.

  Fuck you, McGreevey.

  You’re as black as me down here, brother.

  Oh for Christsake, will someone shut him up.

  Chapter 33

  August 1982

  Holding hands, Maggie and Duncan walk the rooms of the Museum of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of San Francisco, their footfalls reverberating on the stone tiles. For a while it has been one of her favorite places to visit; she’ll be waiting for him after school, standing on the corner of the street, squinting into the sun, looking slightly lost, and when Duncan emerges from between the double doors with the throng of squirming, hollering children, she will seem both surprised and strangely elated, as if she’s convinced herself that she’s only imagined him into existence, as if with the sight of him she is always waking from a dream. They’ll jump a trolley with the tourists and head downtown, perhaps get dim sum in Chinatown or fish chowder in the Mission, catch the second matinee at the Viceroy and then stroll over to Humboldt Street.

  Today they e
nter the high-ceilinged gallery that houses the collection, two floors of stately dark-wood-trimmed display cases backlit by soft warm light, their footfalls sounding upon the tiled floors. Hanging from the wall on wires are two eviscerated children and an adult. Their chest and bellies have been cut open and the skin pinned back to reveal the internal organs. There is the skeleton of a man whose muscle turned to bone and who died in the pain of rigor. The limbs are so horribly and fantastically contorted that for a moment Duncan can’t believe that he could ever have been a real man.

  Young doctors, aspiring surgeons, move about the room smiling. Two men laugh and their laughter follows them down the wide stairwell. Shivering Duncan stares at the brains of murderers and epileptics as if he can understand them, as if they share something in common, a hereditary closeness perhaps, like brothers.

  And then in the last room there is the sad body of the nameless Soap Woman, who died of yellow fever sometime in the nineteenth century. Buried deep in warm, damp ground her corpse turned to soapy adipocere. An accompanying display shows an X-ray cross-section and tells her brief story. All that’s left of her is bone, a little bit of hair, and the soaplike substance, which preserves her.

  Mother is at his side. She stares down at the Soap Woman and her face visibly softens—there is a release of tension and of pain perhaps but in this there is also incredible sadness. I used to bring you here, when you were little, she says, as if she is speaking from a dream. This is what she always says to him when she picks him up at school and on the trolley ride here. Her eyes open and close slowly. She stares at the Soap Woman’s face and says to her, It’s not right that you don’t have a name. It’s not right that they took it away from you. She whispers reverently, evoking a past only she can see, her fingers lightly, frenetically touching the mahogany cabinet, like spiders scuttling across wood, as if she is unable to help herself from touching it. Duncan looks at the contorted face beneath the glass and tries to feel something, tries to remember the past she speaks of.