This Magnificent Desolation

by Thomas O'Malley

  You’re ruining everything, he hollers, and turns the shower full and cold upon her face, making her sputter and thrash her head violently from the side to side, as if the water were causing her pain. Finally she manages: Duncan, stop it—Stop it! Turn off the fucking water!

  Instead, he leaves her struggling, with the water continuing to beat down upon her and splashing onto the linoleum, and stomps to his room to change his clothes.

  Maggie stares at the green army duffel bag at Duncan’s side, the one she says she bought him years ago, the one in which he carried all his belongings from the Home. She is in her white bathrobe and curled up on the couch with her legs beneath her. Her hair hangs wet and limp on her head and her face is still flushed from the shock of the cold shower. She smells of cold cream and cigarettes. On the television the closing credits to Three’s Company scroll down the screen.

  Why do you drink so much? he says, but it’s more an accusation than a question.

  Maggie lights her cigarette and stares out the window. I like to drink, she says. There’s nothing wrong with that. You should mind your own business. I’ve done just fine all these years without you counting what I drink, you know.

  You’re not doing fine.

  And you’re not my nursemaid.

  Well, it feels like it. I don’t know how Joshua—

  Duncan, you’re really pushing me, okay?

  Duncan shrugs, shifts the bag to his shoulder.

  Where are you going?

  I’m going to look for my father, Duncan says. He’s convinced that he’ll find him too. He’ll hop a train in the yards and, using her postcards, he’ll visit every place his father has been. Duncan imagines that his father might return to the places he once visited and that he might find him there. He might even still live in one of those far-off destinations captured in mother’s photographs, the Kodak prints of azure and Technicolor desert skies.

  He has the train schedules that mother gave to him for Christmas listing every train running out of San Francisco on the Midwestern lines, and more besides. The Union Pacific timetables and schedules are on blue-colored paper, the Missouri Pacific on yellow, the Grand on green, and he even has some copies of the B&R on orange paper, but he knows he won’t be going that far east to look for him. That’s not the way someone like his father would have gone. This he knows. He imagines that he will jump a train in the rail yards before the waterfront and do what his mother could never do—he would leave, and in a matter of hours he would be closer to his father.

  Well good, his mother says. She continues staring out the window. For a moment he thinks he sees anger or perhaps pain in her eyes—and then he realizes it is hurt.

  Color rises to her cheeks. She draws slowly on her cigarette and exhales. Good, she nods. When you find him, would you give him our address so he can send the back child support he’s never sent. I guess it’s about ten grand by now. He can make it up to you with trips to Disneyland, I suppose. If you find him, that is. And if he’s not really dead like I said he was.

  Duncan stares at the floor; it seems a safe place to look. He can’t look at the hurt in her eyes. Finally she says: Where will you go, to look for him, I mean?

  I don’t know yet. I’ll figure it out.

  Mother groans. Duncan, she says. Please, honey, will you just listen to me, for once and for all: You don’t have a father. He died a long time ago, before you were even born. And I got the best parts of him in you. All the parts I ever wanted.

  I don’t believe you.

  Fine, don’t believe me. What else can I say? We all want things we can’t have, but that doesn’t make it so just because we want to believe in them so badly.

  Jesus, Duncan, Maggie says and pushes the hair roughly from her forehead. You drive me to drink, do you know that?

  Duncan clenches his jaws, mutters: You don’t need any help from me for that. He stares at her, daring her to contradict him.

  You think if you look hard enough you’ll find him? she asks.

  Yes.

  Is that what you really, really believe? It’s not just something you’d like to be real?

  No. I really believe.

  The way you believe God spoke to you when you were born. The way you remember being born. The way you remember all kinds of crazy things and yet you can’t remember any goddamn thing before the age of ten. But because you believe your father is out there just waiting for you to find him even though I’ve told you he is dead, that makes sense does it?

  Yes.

  All right, Duncan, have it your way. His mother’s oft-rigid shoulders noticeably sag. She brings her knees up to her chest and curls in further upon the couch, turns slightly away from him. I’m just a liar then, she says and continues smoking. Outside the light is changing, the air growing cooler, and it brings her smoke his way. Children, their bright voices swelling in the dark, are still in the playground. Rain begins to patter the windows. The sill darkens with rain but mother refuses to move.

  God did speak to me, he says and runs from the room. He slams the door behind him and flees up the stairs. From his window overlooking the city and the bay he watches great thunderheads roll in. Smoky shafts of amber split the clouds, and it seems as if a thick writhing gray rain is falling over everything as far the eye can see. Everything is the colour of gray metal and in that metal dark writhing shapes move, falling down from the sky, and the hills and mountains beyond are wreathed in white smoke like mist and then are gone from sight. The ground trembles, the glass panes beneath his fingers vibrate. Thunderous hoofs beat at the air. Ash and smoke are falling through the sky. The ground is boiling up, thrust up into the high clouds and then spent, raining back down to earth. Everything darkens. The city is gone and with it the bay and the sea beyond. Cars screech and horns wail. People are screaming. God, Duncan thinks, and then calls aloud: God; and his window overlooking the bay suddenly bursts wide and shards of glass shower down upon him.

  He feels the splinters falling through the air, and when he opens his eyes, the glass lies in crystalline shards about him; a fire is igniting the sky and its bellows is a wind that shakes one corner of the world to the other. God, he says again, and he is terrified by the reply when a boom shakes the building and an electrical generator blows down the street and a heavy, charred utility pole falls blackened into the road. A fire hydrant blows its plug and a shower of rain arcs like silver over the parked cars.

  He is on the floor moaning, his eyes closed, hands covering his ears as everything trembles and cracks and breaks around him. Mother is at his side, It’s okay, honey, it’s okay. It’s an earthquake. We have to move somewhere safer. It’ll be over soon. She picks him up and carries him to the bathroom. She lays him curled in the porcelain bathtub and crawls in next to him, covers him with her body and sings to him as the building shudders and shakes about them and they hear glass crashing and tinned goods tumbling from the cupboards in the kitchen.

  Later, he is amazed by her strength, how he felt himself moved and lifted through the air by her strong arms. How gently she had eased him into the tub. The world around them shakes, the ceiling above them splinters, and though he feels and sees all this, it is in fragments. He hears his mother’s soft breathing, the reedy whistle from her lungs, and the varying soft pitches of her melody, the words of which seem to be another language, for their meaning is lost on him and he wonders briefly if they are real words at all or merely made up in the moment to match some half-remembered, half-forgotten melody she’d known as a child and from a time and place when her own mother sang to comfort her.

  When it’s over, she lifts him from the tub. Plaster flours her hair white. There’s a gash on her right cheek and bright blood streams from it. She is pale and her eyes red-rimmed. Just when he thinks she will say something to comfort him, something of her love for him, something of how they were okay—everything was okay because they were both still together and would always be together, for nothing could separate them—she says: You don’t hav
e a father, and then, He’s dead, as if she dares him to argue with her, as if in this moment there can only be this one great truth and it cannot be questioned or challenged or denied. Tears stream silently from her eyes.

  Your father is dead, Duncan, and he isn’t coming back.

  And then she says no more, and he stands there as the last of the tremors subside. Everything is still but the shaking of his body. He sits again, curls himself up by the porcelain bowl and lays his cheek against its coolness, listening as night comes on and the room and the city, absent of electric light, darkens, as mother sobs from her room down the hall and sirens wail through the night: a great caterwauling that seems to sound and respond to the aftershocks, the last echoing booms reverberating through the hills as damaged buildings finally collapse in upon themselves.

  Later he wakes and he is in his bed and his mother is curled next to him, a blanket wrapped about them. It is still dark and the streetlights are out and, for a moment, blind and panicked, he does not know where he is and he feels his heart pressing in his chest.

  Shhhh, Duncan, she says, I’m here, and her breath is warm and close and slightly sweet, so he knows that she’s been drinking. She kisses his forehead and then pulls back. Her eyes are open, large glistening ovals in the darkness, watching him.

  And he must have nodded or smiled or spoken somehow because she kisses his brow, like the seal to some arcane pact, and then the comforting, reassuring heat of her closeness, his head pressed into the pillow and the sense of his heart thumping slowly in his ears like loud footfalls, like Brother Canice’s voice of God.

  He mumbles something then, with the weight of the bed pulling him down and a semi-paralysis seeping down his body, a black ink being poured through him and through the bottom of him, the sense of it dripping through the sieve of his toes and fingers and the emptiness that comes with that: You miss him.

  What’s that, sweetie?

  I know you miss him too, he says, clearer this time. Just like me. You’ve always missed him.

  Mother strokes his hair and after a moment whispers, as if she is talking to herself in the dark, and perhaps thinking that he is already asleep. No, sweetie, you’re wrong. I don’t miss him. I don’t miss him at all. Not anymore.

  Chapter 55

  In the morning mother is waiting by the Chevy Impala, determinedly wringing her long red hair into a ponytail. When she sees him, she pulls the wide-brimmed sun hat, the one she wore the day she took him from the Home, down upon her head. Duncan, she says, and the world, just as it did all those years ago, seems to tilt about him. The buildings and the bay and the sky above are stretching backward, and she fills the space that remains. Toward the Bottoms men are working on downed power lines. From the breakwater a tow truck pulls a crushed car onto its flatbed, chains groaning and flashing sunlight as the lines grows taut. After the quake steam billows up through cracks in the road from dozens of underground ruptures and a breeze pushes each fissure as if it were a fog. Gannets and shearwaters are a smoky haze out over the distant water, following the small seiners and trawlers in the bay.

  She crosses the driveway and wraps him in her arms, then pulls back and stares into his eyes.

  Mom, he mouths.

  Do you forgive me?

  No, he says and smiles.

  Mother throws her head back and laughs. No, I didn’t expect you to.

  Come, she says, smiling, and tells him what she always tells him of a weekend: I’ll show you what it was like before you ruined my life.

  The land changes dramatically as they drive southeast from San Francisco along winding Route 58: above them, lush green overhanging boughs of maple and oak like the arches of wild cathedrals buttressed by ancient redwoods and pine dwindling as the landscape becomes rocky and acrid and dry. Within hours burnt-looking scrub huddle meekly against the side of the road and the hills have turned brown and dun.

  Where are we going this time? he asks, and Mother turns to him with her red hair whipping madly about her face. She smiles and even her smile seems mad, distorted and held in its strange rictus so that in looking at her he thinks of animals stuffed and mounted by a taxidermist, dead eyes and mouths and postures holding the illusion of movement and life.

  Nowhere, she grins. We’re just driving!

  They pass a pig farm sitting upon a rise on the otherwise flat, black plain, its corrugated metal silo flashing and blinding. The smell of offal, of silage and pig runoff comes to them suddenly, forcing Duncan to pull the neck of his T-shirt up to his nose. He reaches over, as Maggie drives, and pulls her headscarf down about her nose and mouth. When the farm has disappeared behind them, she takes the scarf from her mouth, turns her head, and spits into the wind. Thanks, she says, and they glance at each other and grin.

  They drive until an hour or so before sunset, with the sun shimmering above distant sandstone peaks to the northwest, and it seems to pause there like the curved bow of a great upended ship, ablaze, with the last of its ballast holding it just above the surface of the sea and the darkness sucking at it hungrily, pulling it slowly down. Its light burns in the rock and buttes, glowing amber—a vast sliver of glowing red flames stretching from east to west—and, as Mother takes an exit and pulls up a deep-rutted dirt road, the great ship of the sun slips over the crest of the horizon and a cobalt-blue, cloudless sky descends with a blacker darkness spilling through its center and from which the first stars begin to show.

  Duncan’s head rocks as the car bottoms out in the ruts, the undercarriage scraping and shuddering against the bowed ridge of sun-hardened dirt at the center of the trail. Far away a train whistle, the sound moving in rings through the darkness and falling on the wide, flat land. The car’s headlights push back the dark desert on either side of them and the sand stretching beyond the guardrails seems to be whispering, as if something or someone was moving stealthily in that vastness, just beyond their senses. At intervals a strange wind comes up and buffets the car, sends sand whirling against the rocker panels, scattering it like hail in the wheel wells and in ghostly, swirling sand funnels across the highway before them. Heat lightning flashes and shimmers in the spaces between the dark hills, and the heat seems to hover in the air just above their heads, sliding like a dense weight over the car. When he turns to follow the path of the lightning, like small explosions blooming in the hills and moving northeast of them, his shirt sticks to the car’s seat, sweat trickles down the channel of his spine, and he pulls at his collar angrily, but then they come over a rise and Mother slows the car as the desert spreads vast below them.

  Sand drifts press against the shale and rock, the highway posts and guardrails, as if the desert is reaching out to reclaim everything, including the road, but mother turns on the stereo and music blares out into the creeping, haunting desert night, and the car accelerates. She looks at him and smiles, the wind whipping her long hair, plastering it across her damp face and neck, and reaches out a hand to touch his. He takes her hand and their knuckles entwine fiercely and Mother begins to shout-sing the song: unintelligible words collapsing out into the desert and lost in the night. She clenches his hand all the tighter until it seems she might break the bones with the excitement she feels, and it’s contagious. Duncan hollers out into the night as well and the desert takes his words and her smile widens and they drive on.

  A hundred yards farther on, Mother swings the car before a rock outcrop so that the headlights show its scarred surface and then, surprisingly, emerging from the dark a chain link fence upon which a rusted sign reads:

  UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS WHO PASS INSIDE THE LIMITS OF THE

  LAS VEGAS BOMBING AND GUNNERY RANGE MAY BE SUBJECT

  TO INJURY FROM OR AS A RESULT OF THE

  ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION’S TEST ACTIVITIES.

  He looks toward mother and she shakes her head, smiling, and says: They stopped testing in the seventies.

  Duncan raises his eyes doubtfully, says: Okay. I guess.

  Mother grins. We do have to watch out for
radioactive snakes though. She puts the car in gear and the headlights tremble against the rock. All right, she says. Take your penknife and cut as much scrub as you can for a fire. Looks like there’s plenty just beyond those rocks. Stomp your feet—okay? Make as much noise as you can.

  Why?

  To shoo out those radioactive rattlesnakes. Don’t worry though, you’ll see them before they see you; they glow in the dark.

  Beyond the enclosure of boulders there is little sound but for a wind moving across the sand and moaning softly in the sandstone outcrops that burst from the desert here and there. Duncan steps out between the rocks toward the plain. A tuft of ragweed rolls lazily across his shoe and then the wind sucks it out into darkness. Across the striated ridges of sand the surface of the desert seems unbroken, until he kneels and looks closer and tunnels with his finger the zigzag hollows made by snakes and the small marking of things for which he has no name.

  Don’t go too far, Mother hollers from their campsite, and he pauses and looks out at the desert. It’s moaning and shifting with a strange, unnatural life. The wind seems to spiral about and turn back upon itself, rising to a scream—sand blasting his face so that he lowers his head—and then subsiding to a moan, and he cannot be sure where it originates nor through what it moves to create such a sound.

  When they get a fire going, his mother heats some chili over the small flames and Duncan makes a bed for them with their blankets. They pause and listen to coyotes wailing across a far ridge and his mother smiles at him. She lights one of Joshua’s rolled cigarettes and absently curls and uncurls her bare toes before the fire. She inhales on the cigarette and, after a moment, lets the smoke out, long and slow.

  They closed the last of the firing ranges just a few years ago, she says. All the newspapers were saying how through the fifties, sixties, and seventies the army had been conducting secret radiation testing while soldiers trained on the desert flats. They’d been repeatedly bombarded with lethal doses of radiation during routine training missions. No one knows exactly how many men died; there’s no record of them. It’s as if hundreds of men and their families simply disappeared.