Florence Nightingale, he says, and she smiles. How was your night, baby?
It was fine. I’m fine, just tired.
How’s Deirdre?
Still alive.
She has the sense that he nods in the dark.
You should be asleep, she says. You’ve got to be up in less than three hours.
I know, baby. I already slept a bit, once Duncan went to bed.
She knows he’s lying, and that if he’s awake now, he’ll probably stay awake until the alarm sounds. She asks: Did you take your meds?
Joshua sighs, rolls his shoulders. She can hear tendons and ligaments crack. Nah, you know I don’t like how they make me feel. I can only do so many days and my head gets messed up.
You’re not supposed to start and stop, she says. It’ll make you manic. No wonder you can’t sleep.
I promise I’ll go back on them tomorrow. Don’t look at me like that, baby.
Howabout you take them now?
Okay. Sure. They’re on the dresser.
Maggie brings him the pill bottles and he takes them from her and she can see that his hands are trembling. He pops three of each in his mouth, washes them down with water from a glass on the side table.
That the right amount?
It’s whatever works.
By the way, thanks for dinner.
No problem. Duncan and me, we made it together. Was it good?
Best lasagna I ever had.
Liar.
Maggie grins. Maybe just a little bit.
How is he?
He’s fine. Wanted me to listen to that radio of his when he went to bed. So, I did.
And?
And what? The damn thing doesn’t work, yet he still listens to it.
Maybe it comforts him to have something from the orphanage with him. I think he gets scared in the night.
We all get scared in the night. I get scared in the night, especially without you. Why don’t you come to bed?
In a little bit, I need to unwind first, decompress.
I’ll help you unwind.
Shhhhhh. You’ll sleep, that’s what you’ll do. Should I turn the TV off?
No, no, I like it on. It helps me sleep.
Okay. Close your eyes.
Joshua laughs and closes his eyes. Goodnight, Baby.
Goodnight.
Maggie pulls the bedroom door closed, leaving it slightly ajar in case Duncan calls out in the night, and glances back at Joshua, bathed in blue light, still staring blankly at the flickering black-and-white images on the screen. She wonders if he’s even aware of what he’s watching. She thinks of Deirdre not because Joshua is dying but because he is never at rest and his soul, she knows, like hers, is a damaged, fragile thing, and she wonders if two people such as herself and Joshua can, together, make the other one strong, and with Duncan, if they can make a life.
May angels lead you into Paradise; may the martyrs receive you at your coming and lead you to the holy city of Jerusalem and O sweet Lord Jesus, grant them rest; grant them everlasting rest.
Chapter 46
March 1984
An hour after Joshua’s night shift on the tunnel has ended, he and Duncan sit at the counter of a greasy spoon over on Kirkland, where the bay washes up against the old forgotten docks and the skeletal remains of wharves, timbers and spars pitched and oilblack sprouting from the sea. The wastes of a once-thriving dockland with cobbled motorways running parallel to empty canning and fishery warehouses stretch as far as the eye can see.
There is the clatter of plates and cutlery, the hoarse voices of rail-workers and dockworkers sitting in ripped and torn vinyl booths. The sound of spitting grease warms the small space even as the rain and cold hisses and presses at the grimy glass. From the windows of the diner Duncan can see the gray waters of the bay and the ragged, frothy tufted heads of decayed piers and pylons first thrusting then disappearing in the small swells as wind and angry dark rain squalls press down from the north.
Behind the counter the single employee of the place, a fry cook in a soiled vest, stokes the grill, breaks open eggs, spills their innards upon the hot metal, shovels potatoes, bacon, sausage back and forth across the charred surface. He’s a tall, gangly, olive-skinned man who seems to suffer from lack of sleep, and has the look of anemia that comes from working in enclosed, sunless places. When he takes their order, Duncan notices the bruise-colored semicircles beneath his eyes, the ashen pallor of his skin.
When the workers are done, boots banging and scraping on the wood, he takes their bills and rings them up on the cash register. Soon the booths are all empty and his shoulders hunch and he moves slowly from counter to grill to clearing the tables to the windowed door, where he stands for a long moment staring out at the empty street and the rain. Beneath his feet the runoff from customers’ shoes has collected, forming a ring as black as an oil slick. The fry cook offers up a forlorn sigh to the glass.
I was an angel once, he says suddenly aloud, to no one it seems, but then he looks, pleadingly, in Duncan’s direction, and Duncan turns his attention quickly back to his food.
Shit, Joshua mutters beneath his breath, and the fry cook sighs again, deeper this time. He turns his head slightly as if listening to something, something other than the grill or the radio or the wind and rain banging against the walls.
I clipped my wings and I can’t go back.
Damn, man, Joshua says, and begins cutting into his egg.
The fry cook shrugs and stares at the blackened lumps of meat slough curling at the edges of the grill. Every so often they start to grow back and I have to cut them again, he says. They come in all wrong. The feathers don’t fold, they’re twisted and bent hard as nails. They hurt.
Joshua sips his coffee and nods.
And when it rains—weather like this—they itch like hell.
I know how you feel, man.
You got wings?
No, just some old scar tissue.
What did they do to you?
It’s nothing.
Jesus, man, the fry-cook says, his voice rising with sudden and surprising desperation, his eyes shining feverishly. What did they do to you?
Duncan stops eating and looks at the two of them, Joshua and the fry cook staring at each other. Joshua has yet to take a shower and chalk marl, throw-off from the tunnel’s muck cars and conveyors, streaks his skin, turning him pale. The fry cook breathes deeply, his mouth partly agape, and then he nods. I know it, man. Don’t I know it, and he touches Joshua briefly upon the hand in which Joshua holds his egg-smeared knife, so that Joshua looks down at his hand as if something had been burnt upon it, and then the fry cook turns back to the grill. From his shoulder blades Duncan sees two stumps pressed against his soiled vest. At the neck of his vest and on the backs of his arms, whitish gray feathers pressed flat quiver as he turns meat with a spatula and then scrapes at the blackened slivers stuck to the grill, and curl slowly into themselves like dark, loam-black worms.
Joshua stirs sugar into his third cup of coffee and says: Didn’t you like it there?
Where? says the fry cook.
With the heavenly chorus, man. Close to God.
Of course I did.
Then why did you clip your wings? Why stay here?
Duncan stares at the cook’s back as he scrapes the grill, as he pushes hash and home fries across the metal surface and through the grease and at those bulging stumps, which jerk and flex with his movements—the amputated nubs of musculature and tendon straining to push through his undershirt.
I had to, he says. Every day here brings me closer to Him. Soon … soon I’ll be able to go back.
Duncan swallows a forkful of omelet and washes it down with milk. What if your wings never grow back right? he asks.
The fry cook looks at him and then slowly turns back to the grill and goes to work vigorously scraping at the hardened meat bits with his spatula.
Go back, Joshua says. Go back, man. Shit, what are you waiting for?
The fry cook bangs the spatula down upon the grill. Dammit, don’t you think I’d go back if I could? Do you think I want to be here? I’m sick of this shithole!
He stares at them, goggle-eyed, fevered and pale as a fish strewn upon a beach, its undersides bared and steaming in the hot sun, then at the rain sweeping relentlessly across the glass, the wind seeming to bow the glass inward; the window frames groaning as if they might shatter. He takes a deep breath and exhales. After a moment: How are your eggs?
I’ve had worse, Joshua says.
Overcooked?
Overcooked.
The fry cook nods sadly. I’m sorry about that. And about the toast and bacon.
A gust of wind rattles the glass. From beyond the sunken piers, a bell buoy clangs. A long groan as the old wharf sways back and forth on the swells, followed by a wet popping sound as old wood collapses.
Joshua rummages in his jean pockets and pulls out a fistful of singles. He places a five on the counter but the fry cook shakes his head. It’s on the house, he says.
Joshua takes back the five and leaves a single instead. At least let us leave a tip then, he says, and the fry cook watches them wistfully as they climb off their stools. Duncan is slow getting off his seat and Joshua’s hand hovers by his shoulder.
Y’know, the fry cook says, our hearts beat faster than any other animal. We breathe faster, we move faster. Our bones our hollow. We weren’t made for staying still in one place, y’know.
Angels?
Birds.
Joshua nods sympathetically and then they head to the door. When Duncan looks back, the fry cook is staring toward the windows over the tables and booths, staring out at the bay and scratching his back vigorously with the spatula. Duncan watches as it moves up and down beneath his vest, back and forth across his shoulder blades, and imagines the stumps of his severed wings and the ragged tufts of nail-hard soot-colored plumage. From the fry cook’s shirt a single feather falls and drifts slowly to the floor, followed by another and then another; yanked from their follicles, they begin to collect on the floor about his boots in a drift, their hollow, pointed calamus, translucent as a filament, bloodied and raw.
C’mon, Joshua says and urges him outside. Slowly, heads turned aslant the wind and rain, they cross the cobbled alley to Joshua’s bike, draped with a tarp lashed down with cord.
Do you believe in angels? Duncan asks him.
Joshua glances at him, squinting against the raindrops as his fingers work to untie the tarp.
All the time, my man. I have the feeling they’re all around us—good and bad—doing their thing, y’know?
But what do they do?
Protect us, I guess. Isn’t that what angels do?
You said good and bad.
Good and bad, sure. I didn’t always think that, but now? Joshua considers this as he folds the tarp and thinks about Jamie Minkivitz and about the way the men pray to St. Barbara, of the various forms of madness that affect the men in the tunnel and of his own dreams of the in-rushing sea.
Duncan’s jacket is soaked through and he’s shivering, but right now he doesn’t care. Yeah, now I do, he says. They do their thing, and it doesn’t really matter what we want or don’t want.
You mean they don’t always protect us or keep us from harm?
I suppose most of the time they do—I don’t know. Mostly I don’t think they give a crap whether we live or die.
Do you think there are angels who would want to hurt us?
Joshua smiles. Kid, imagine if you were stuck here and couldn’t get back. I wouldn’t be too happy, would you? I think I’d be mighty pissed.
But you don’t think he’s an angel, do you? Not like the angel you dreamt of?
I think he’s full of shit. But hell, the man believes he’s an angel. Who are we to argue with him or tell him otherwise? But then Joshua laughs—he closes his eyes and leans against the bike for support as tears come to the corners of his eyes. Oh man, he says and wipes at his cheeks. That angel has his vaccinations. Joshua claps the top of his bicep. The vaccination shots that left big old circles for scars. They did away with them in the sixties. Your mom and me, we got them. Most people who were born before 1970 did. But tell me, man, what’s an angel doing with one?
Joshua shakes his head and laughs some more. Damn, he says. An angel working at a diner down by the old docks. Maybe he stopped being an angel once he’d been here too long. Maybe you just can’t go back. Seems to work that way in the real world too.
And then he nods. Well, I guess that’s about right. He’s the last one left. All the old whores and gangsters are gone. So where the hell else would an angel be?
Chapter 47
Father Magnusson sits looking out the plate glass at the snow falling heavily through the darkness, his down-like hair resting back upon his pillow. Wind shudders beneath the Pullman, ripples against the stamped metal of its sides, and whistles in the spaces of empty rivet holes as if it were stroking the skin of a beast succumbing to sleep. The carriage begins to grow cold, and Duncan shivers.
Father Magnusson sighs. Quite a sight, isn’t it, Duncan?
Duncan is wide-eyed and silent because, after all, this is a dead man who is talking to him, and when the dead speak, he’s come to learn, it is important to listen to them. Yet it seems like the most natural thing in the world that Father Magnusson is talking to him; it’s almost as if he’s been waiting for this from the first moment he dreamt of his mother in the snow and she showed him the Festival of Lights Holiday Train frozen to its rails and imbedded by drifts of snow fifteen feet high. It is necessary that he be with these people at the end and during the final hours of their lives.
Finally Duncan speaks: Are you scared that you’ll die soon, Father? And he is shocked that he has said such a thing—where have these words come from?—and if he could, he would clamp his hands to his mouth, but his hands remain motionless at his sides despite his urging. Father Magnusson merely looks at him and then laughs at his expression.
No, son. I’m not scared. None of us are. You are not seeing us as we were but as we are. We are no longer scared.
You mean you’re already dead?
Yes. And it is no longer important.
But if you’re dead, why are you here? What are you waiting for?
Father Magnusson leans his head away from Duncan. The worst storm in seventy years, isn’t it? They ever say it’s worse than the storm of 1901. I lost an older sister and my grandmother in that one.
We lost most of our livestock and our holding too. Our father had to work the iron range afterwards, and it destroyed his lungs. He contracted mesothelioma from breathing taconite dust, and the arc flare of welding torches ruined his eyes so that he was almost blind.
I was the youngest child and I don’t even think he even knew what I looked like, but I always watched him of an evening when he came in from work and the way he moved about the house, doubled over with the effort to breathe. Often he’d walk into a room and I’d stay very still until he passed through. Sometimes he’d sit and listen to one of his favorite shows on the radio after supper. I don’t think he ever knew I was there watching him, sharing the same space.
They’ll bury you in the spring when the thaw comes, Duncan says.
In the cherry blossom grove beyond the charnel house?
Duncan nods and Father Magnusson smiles as if the idea pleases him immensely. That will be nice, he says. I suppose they will give me an enviable spot. I’m an old man and I’ve spent most of my life here.
The roof creaks and groans with the weight of snow and then settles once more.
I suppose they will say the Requiem Mass in Latin. I do so like the Latin. If only I could remind them not to sing De Profundis at the anniversary. I wish someone would mention that to young Toibin. Ahh, well, but I suppose there are others to think of. There are so many of us lost and in need of help, even here.
The lamps of the carriage suddenly tremor and dim, and then go out. Father Mag
nusson’s hair seems to glow in the dark. When the wind recedes, Duncan hears a child crying.
What about the woman in the snow—my mother—do you know her?
Oh, yes. She’ll be coming also. Have you heard her sing? It’s beautiful, absolutely beautiful. I’ve never heard anything like it in my life.
She’s here on the Holiday Train?
Father Magnusson turns back to the window, about which the glow of Christmas lights shimmer and flicker incandescently from the dark and casts a slight, pulsing glow into the carriage.
She’s always with us, he says. Didn’t you know? She’s an angel.
Duncan? a voice calls into the darkness, and it is as if he is floating and unraveling and spiraling down. It’s snowing, cold and sharp on his face. The clouds are parting briefly, and in the space that remains he can see stars, small and distant, and then growing brighter and falling, blazing from the sky.
I heard you calling, Duncan. Are you all right?
Upon the wall over his dresser the familiar pictures: a smiling, nunlike Olivia de Havilland from Whose Baby Are You Now? staring down at him, her full breasts pressing against her robe; and the Times cover of the 1969 lunar landing. Instinctively he pulls the covers up beneath his chin, listens for the bells of Lauds, of Brothers shuffling and chuffing in the frozen stairwells, stumbling toward morning prayer. He imagines the water in his basin upon the nightstand with its skin of ice, of it splintering beneath his fingertips and the chill of water as he washes his face in the predawn. Then there are the eight footsteps it will take him upon the cold timber floor to reach the door and another twenty to the toilets along the hall and by other rooms in which children he knows only by face moan and snore and toss and dream and for whom there are still hours of sleep.
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