This Magnificent Desolation

by Thomas O'Malley

  In his bedroom Duncan turns away from the sounds from the radiator pipes and hears the wind whistling across the snowy plains of Thule, bending its notes in the drifts and rills of snow and the Home rising darkly from between the divide of two mining valleys and the stars above blazing in their cold, divine glory. In the dark kitchen Brother Canice is placing more wood in the stove, and the light from the open grate, glowing orange-red embers crackling, bends warmly upon his plump face and upon the peeling wainscoting. Snow taps softly upon the windows. The Vulcanite radio glows amber upon the shelf of tinned goods, humming its vacant, searching sound, which Brother Canice listens to with his head cocked like an old dog, his mouth spitting sunflower seeds into the fire. In a moment he will begin a story and tell Duncan what comes next.

  Chapter 37

  A person is disposed to an act of choice by an angel … in two ways. Sometimes, a man’s understanding is enlightened by an angel to know what is good, but it is not instructed as to the reason why … But sometimes he is instructed by angelic illumination, both that this act is good and as to the reason why it is good.

  —ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

  Every morning Joshua rises at four A.M., and Duncan, listening to the dark, is waiting for him: the creak of the bedsprings, the shifting of the mattress as he begins to stir, rising toward waking, his body and mind so attuned to this schedule that he will wake each morning five to ten minutes before the alarm he has set whether he wants to or not—it’s as if the dark, labyrinthine reaches of the tunnel and the sea are calling to him. Just as the memories of Vietnam are—the two entwined and now inseparable from each other—one reflecting, paralleling, and so powerfully echoing the other that Joshua cannot forget those memories that he has tried all these years and with incredible difficulty to press into darkness, memories that now, as they emerge from darkness, emerge stronger, more powerful and crystalline than ever.

  Duncan knows that Joshua is staring at the ceiling in this moment, just as he is. The anxiety of this time in the morning, when—despite the quiet, the stillness—the weight of the day seems to press heavily, burgeoning upon the nerves, a day when so many things can go wrong and this hour when all he has is the time and space to think of them. Joshua sighs in the darkness and Duncan knows he wishes he could sleep until it is time to rise, less time to think and contemplate, but every morning it is like this. The darkness pressed against the windows, the coldness of the room, and the gray of half-forgotten dreams and memories swirling as fragments in their heads.

  Joshua always prepares his breakfast and his lunch pail the night before and showers before bed. All there is left to do is to rise and dress. All there is left to do is wait for the alarm. But these minutes are the longest. Often he will simply rise and turn off the alarm long before it sounds. A few times he has left the house so early in advance that he has forgotten to turn it off and Duncan will hear it ringing, growing louder and more incessant as it continues, and he will rush into his mother’s bedroom, where she is snoring loudly, the air stale with her breath and the sickly sweet smell of alcohol, and turn it off before she awakens. Only then, will Duncan return to his bedroom and sometimes drift back to sleep.

  Duncan leaves his door partially open in the hope that Joshua might glance in, see him awake, and that he might wave farewell. Duncan has thought about rising and fixing himself breakfast in the kitchen these mornings so that he can be with Joshua, but he senses that this time is a time when Joshua most wishes to be alone, that he is still finding his way through the fog, and if Duncan were to surprise him at the breakfast table, he might not even recognize who he is. Instead, Duncan wakes with Joshua and waits with him from his bedroom and slowly in this way comes to know him better.

  Chapter 38

  Upon Duncan’s bedroom ceiling his mother has painted a sky: varying shades of blue, white clouds, and a 1,021 silver stars—with each paint stroke, mother had counted them—all arranged in distinct constellations. And in the center of this is the skylight through which the true sky is visible. It reminds him of the ceiling in the Home’s charnel house through which he and Billy and Julie often watched the day fade to night.

  Duncan and Maggie lie side by side upon his narrow bed, watching the ceiling and the manner in which it changes as the light outside falls toward dusk. Maggie is drinking; every so often she raises her tumbler from the floor and ice rattles loudly in the glass.

  How is your friend, Magdalene? She asks, her voice loud in the stillness between them. On the ceiling, Mother’s Cassiopeia and Virgo, at the darkest corners of the room, begin to glow.

  Poor child. She’s such a tragic little thing. You must invite her over more often. Think about how alone she must be.

  She pats his arm. You have me, Duncan, and you always will. She has no one but that crazy aunt who only knows she’s there because her damn soup bowls get returned to her.

  Maggie raises her legs and scratches absently; her nails rasp against nylon. She kicks off her heels and with a clatter they bang against the baseboard. She stretches her feet, curls her long toes until they crack.

  How do they treat her at school?

  At school? How would I know? I rarely go to school.

  Oh, Duncan. You know that’s not true. You go to school all the time. You were in school just over a week ago. Maggie waves her tumbler glass in the air, remonstrating.

  I thought we were having a nice time. If you’re going to be so sour and difficult, I see no need for us to talk. Let’s just be quiet then, shall we? We don’t need to say anything at all. We can just be quiet. Look at the stars. My!

  Maggie lifts the tumbler of amber liquor to her lips but it takes a moment for them to grasp the rim. She sucks hungrily and then there is only air, and the pop and rattle of the fully formed ice cubes that remain. She sighs, realizing the glass is empty.

  Feebly, she reaches for his hand. Do you remember the Soap Woman, honey? she mutters. That woman we saw in the museum? Her body left like that for strangers to gawk at and with no family or friends to claim her for their own. That’s what happens when you’re alone in the world. You would never let that happen to me, would you?

  In the Home, the children played a game where they pretended that they were dying from some exotic, rare, incurable disease and that at the End their parents rushed to their deathbeds, to tell them how much they loved them. The children wanted to believe that their parents, no matter their flaws, would come for them when they had no time left and that they would always be there waiting for them—their sons and daughters—when it mattered most.

  Maggie’s glass tumbler slips to the floor, and moments later she begins to snore softly: a warm and pleasant sound like an old, spring-wound, wood clock ticking slowly and imprecisely.

  That poor, poor, unfortunate child, Maggie slurs suddenly into the dark, as if she were speaking from within some terribly sad, prophetic dream, in which only she and Magdalene had a part, and Duncan follows her voice upward toward the ceiling, where the major constellations have emerged, luminescent as fireflies. Maggie rolls onto her side, away from him, and, hugging her arms and legs, curls into a ball, until she seems no larger than a child herself. And Duncan wants to touch her but something holds him back—he feels as he had when he first stared at the Soap Woman through her coffin-glass at the museum.

  Such a tragedy, Maggie murmurs in her dreamsleep. It’s such a tragedy.

  He stares at the clouds turning black on the ceiling and the stars shimmering distantly through the glass skylights and the room becomes cold and he turns inward against Maggie and imagines her as a young girl—not much younger than Magdalene—even as her drunken snores fill the room with their familiar, discordant warmth.

  Chapter 39

  April 1983

  At the tunnel site great excavators and cranes with hydraulic hammers prepare the way for the tunnel crews, and while they shore slurry and silt, set piles for cement and iron forms that will hold back the sea, the tunnelers are allowed a reprieve. It
is a warm day in early spring, two weeks after the latest blackout, and the men sit on the slope of President’s Hill, overlooking the construction, dozing or eating their lunches, smoking and talking with one another. A cool breeze blows in off the water, pushing at the grass, bringing goose bumps up on their skin, and with it the pungent low-tide smell of the excavations and further the black bilge and sulfur from the old tanneries across the bay in Oakland.

  Joshua sits, smoking a cigarette, beside Sully, John Chang, Javier, Minkivitz, and Minkivitz’s younger brother, Jamie; he focuses on the physical sensation of inhaling and exhaling and the burn of the cigarette in his throat, the smoke streaming through his mouth and nostrils. The insides of his eyelids are turned red by the sun and crazy, elliptical shapes bounce and tremble there and in their center, small static dots like the snow upon a television screen when programming has ended. The sound of the heavy cranes dropping their hammers into the piles booms across the bay. Like the footfalls of the colossal prehistoric beasts of the Cretaceous, whose remains they had found buried in the shale and silt at the bottom of the sea.

  You know, we build on major fault in the earth here, Javier says. Right on the very top of it! Through the ground Joshua feels the slight tremors from Javier’s agitation, and he opens his eyes. Javier is rabidly chewing on his sandwich, his cheeks bulging and his Adam’s apple working up and down, and as soon as his mouth is clear he begins speaking rapidly again, wags a finger at the bay: Right here, man. Right fucking here.

  Jamie stares at Javier. Jamie is as pale as porcelain, with small ears, like those of a young boy’s, protruding from the sides of his oval face. Blue veins show beneath the skin below his eyes. His brother, Charlie Minkivitz, the foreman on the job, slurps loudly from a plastic bowl of soup. Every few moments he pauses and glances at his younger brother.

  Javy, man, Joshua says, there’s major faults everywhere in San Francisco. Calm down.

  Yes, yes, of course, but—and now Javier is nodding his head passionately—but no one builds directly over them like we do!

  Listen. If there’s a quake, we’re in the safest spot in the city.

  This is true?

  Sure, that’s why we’re building the tunnel beneath the water. It’s safer down there and stronger than any bridge. When the next one hits, I either want to be down there with you or else on the Transbay.

  Minkivitz looks up from his soup again, thick lips pursed and wet. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and then chortles. Whoo, boy, that’s a good one. We have the chance to die a hundred times a hundred different ways before this dig is ever complete and he’s telling you it’s safe being underground. What you think he knows, Javy? You think he went to goddamn Stanford or something?

  Harvard, Joshua says, and draws from his cigarette. He rolls his shoulders and stretches into the sun. His back creaks loudly and something—a tendon or ligament—sounds in his neck. The muscles spasm and then relax and Joshua winces.

  Wha?

  I went to Harvard, Minkie.

  Bullshit. Can you believe this guy? Can you believe him? Went to Harvard, he says. A nigger in Harvard! Bullshit, I say. You’re a fucking liar.

  And Joshua, looking at Minkivitz’s puckered face, begins to laugh, a belly laugh that shakes his whole body, that leaves him weak, muscles trembling and jittery. He wipes at his eyes, and when he is done, he looks toward Minkivitz, shrugs at Javier, and then stares out over the bay with a serene wide smile on his face.

  Jamie clambers awkwardly to his feet, as if he has suddenly lost his equilibrium, as if he is walking the bow of a ship cresting a great swell at sea. He moves farther down the hill and, after a moment, they hear the sound of retching. Joshua, Javier, and Minkivitz stare after him: the silhouette of a tall narrow figure doubled over upon the scaffolded embankment, swaying uneasily as he stands, and then bending to retch again.

  What’s the matter with your brother, che?

  Minkivitz continues to stare after him—they all do. Finally: He doesn’t like the work, he says. The tunnel—he’s not cut out for it. Says he keeps hearing and seeing things in the dark. I should never have brought him on; he’s too young.

  Maybe it’s the bends? Javier says. Site managers from Bextel and Sonoyama International have been rushing the men through the compression chambers more and more often as the tunnel falls behind schedule—in the last week alone the superintendent has cut the time at each stage by five minutes. He says: I know a man once who had the bends and he used talk to his dead mother. Always puking too. He bleed from the eyes and think he’s Jesus. He went crazy, y’know? I think we all go crazy down there.

  What types of things is Jamie seeing? Joshua asks.

  I don’t know. I don’t ask. Why the hell would I? You listen to too much of that kind of crap and it’ll drive you nuts. He shrugs angrily.

  A moment passes and Minkivitz shakes his head and swears: Fuck! Angels. That’s what he says. He’s seeing fucking angels everywhere. Minkivitz exhales loudly through his nostrils, as if he is trying to contain some great, inexpressible frustration and sadness. Joshua is aware of his chest rising and falling and the silence that has fallen over the three of them and over the hill upon which they’re sitting.

  Our father passed away when Jamie was young, Minkivitz says. I asked the super to make him go get a medical, y’know, see a shrink.

  Joshua and Javier nod. Everyone in Local 223 knows that the Minkivitzes’ father committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge when they were boys.

  Above, gray, swirling clouds move in a twisting gyre over the middle of the water, seeming to turn in concentric circles and then, at the bottommost turn of the screw, seeming to turn fully in upon themselves, and then to churn backward, as the gyre rises once more, moving upward into the dense thunderheads, which seem to have suddenly swept in from the sea, and above these, so high they must crane their necks, an icy white cloud has expanded and spread, pressed against the bottom of the stratosphere until it has flattened into an anvil.

  Well, friend, Javier mutters, glancing up at the clouds nervously and putting out a tentative hand as small chunks of hail begin to fall. The boy not seem well, that for sure.

  Chapter 40

  May 1983

  Joshua and Duncan ride beyond Oakland through a strange dusken light, pink-tinged clouds feathering the sky above them, not speaking but quietly enjoying the sensations of the ride: the sound of the Indian’s heavy engine, the weight of speed pressing upon them, and the world changing so quickly, weaving through the fragmented light seeping down beyond the tree line flickering and blinding as a strobe and then the sudden and comforting reprieve of the nether light before dark. Evening birds—doves and whip-poor-wills—sounding and challenging in the gray, ashy bracken, and barely visible through the high firs, a feathery skein of stars.

  They motor though the ashen twilight, Duncan holding tight to Joshua’s field jacket, along twisting roads soured by the odor of strange tamarind trees and through the high-roofed tunnels of giant Douglas firs, the evergreen smell of them sharp in their nostrils, the loud rumbling sound of the bike’s exhaust cast back at them from the thick surrounding growth, muted and strangely echoed, altering all sense of space and of the distance over which they travel to Admiral’s Point.

  The night comes fully then and a cold breeze with it so that Duncan clings tighter to Joshua’s waist, his eyes watering in the chill, moist air. The Indian’s headlight a narrow white light trembling on the road before them and sweeping across the firs that press out at them from the darkness at the sudden sharp angles of the road, which Joshua handles effortlessly, as if without thought, merely leaning this way and that and slanting the bike so steeply at times that Duncan thinks gravity will pull them down and smash them upon the road, send them spinning like a sparking, gasoline-spewing whirligig hurtling out into the dark.

  Finally they reach Admiral’s Point, cindered gravel crunching beneath the tires, and Duncan climbs, shivering, from the bi
ke. Beyond the wide grass expanse of Soldier’s Park the distant city shimmers.

  Joshua walks toward the flagstone walkway and Duncan instinctively reaches for his hand even though he knows he is too old for this gesture and Joshua takes it in his calloused grip. Duncan wonders about the nights mother rode with Joshua on his bike, which was rare, and to the places they traveled. What did they talk about? Was he ever a part of their discussions? Did he have a place in their plans for the future?

  Do you take mom up here? Duncan asks.

  No. Only you.

  Why?

  Joshua seems to think about this and then shrugs. Some things a man just has to show another man, yeah? Some things that don’t need explaining, some things that you don’t want to explain even if you could. It’s like those trips you take with your momma, just between the two of you. So, this is just between us. I mean, what do you two do when you’re together?

  Nothing. We just drive. And sometimes Mom gets sad or tired and she cries and then we come home again.

  Joshua purses his lips, considering this. Is that all right with you? he says. The driving, I mean. If you don’t want to go, you can tell her, y’know?

  No, it’s okay. I don’t mind.

  Far, far away a tugboat blows its horn. Duncan thinks of the things that fathers say only to their sons and the words that never need to be spoken, uttered aloud. For no reason at all, his heart begins to hammer; it feels tight and squeezed and sore in his chest.

  Joshua, will you tell me about my father? And although this is what Duncan asks, for the first time he is no longer interested in discussing him, who he was or what became of him, he merely wants Joshua to speak and to hear Joshua’s voice.