He hears Duncan’s shouting, calling for him over the din of the other men, and at first he thinks he must be imagining it. Sound is dimming and with it the heart of his rage. And in a moment he is too tired to care; he is cradled by the strange comfort that is pain.
To Duncan the crowd is a great mass of squealing and crying, of retching and swearing. The sound rises up and fills the warehouse as if it is a bowl of sound, each squeal and scream and retch and curse and slur caught like a visceral echo of history amongst and within its metal clapping, wooden joists, iron beams, and studded sheet metal; and the great fans, revolving slowly above Duncan’s head, pull up these sounds and emotions and the terrible pain within them, turn them in the tumid, charged air above their heads, hold them there for one great inexpressible moment so that the din of suffering is an indescribable and uncontainable sonic thrum. Duncan clamps his hands upon his ears and falls to the ground, and then with a great thrush of rushing movement, he feels it all cast out into the night above Oakland and the bay and farther above San Francisco, where the stars glitter bright and low and a satellite circling the earth blinks at the farthest edges of the night.
Chapter 72
At home Maggie insists that Joshua empty out his pockets and then asks what meds he is currently on. Joshua sags against the table, sips from his mug, and then slowly tries to light a cigarette, but his fingers seem incapable of doing the work. Duncan stares at the knots of swollen tissue on Joshua’s knuckles and at the hardened blood there and reaches over to help him, and Joshua laughs suddenly when they succeed in lighting the cigarette together. After he exhales, he picks tobacco pulp from his lip and says: Doxepin, prazosin, topiramate, propranolol, and lithium, Maggie.
Nothing else? Mother asks, and when Joshua says no, she nods. From her time at St. Luke’s, Duncan knows she’s seen plenty of her friends and patients OD or slip into comas after taking otherwise harmless drugs in lethal combinations. As she often tells him: If ever I die, it won’t be because I’m a fool. But of course she never says this when she is drinking. He listens to her rummaging through the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and then she returns with gauze, tape, antiseptic, Neosporin, and a brown pill container, which she places on the table. She takes Joshua’s vials and, after studying the labels, hands one back.
I’ll give you these two back after you’ve slept, she says. Tonight’s it’s Percocet and propranolol for you. Mother undoes the tops of the vials and pushes four pills across the table. Asks Duncan to run the sink faucet and pour Joshua a glass of water. Together Duncan and she watch as Joshua takes the pills. He lays his head back, and his dark, hairless Adam’s apple bobs as the glass empties, and Duncan has to look away from the narrow loop of scar tissue that stretches from ear to ear and that seems to stretch wider, baring itself, as Joshua swallows. Duncan glances toward his mother but she refuses to look at him.
When Joshua is done, Mother heats some water and begins to clean Joshua’s hands and face. Duncan watches as Joshua closes his eyes and she moves the washcloth tenderly over his skin, wincing as she feels the swollen tissue and as she dislodges hardened blood. Under her breath she begins to sing, and it takes Duncan a moment to realize that it is the same song she sings to him during his nightmares, when she holds her hand upon his heart in an effort to calm him and to remind him of the physical world of which he is a part, that they both share together, and that nothing of the world outside this can harm him.
She kneels by Joshua’s chair, reaches up and takes his face in her hands, holds the sides of his face tenderly as if she might hurt him here too, as if this is the only place she can touch him without pain.
Please, J. Don’t do this anymore. Don’t do this. Promise me that you won’t. If not for yourself, then for me and for Duncan. And then Mother surprises Duncan by what she says next: I need you. I need you to be here for me. I love you.
Joshua lowers his head. The black whorl of hair there reminds Duncan of a child’s and only the full, splayed ears, one mushroomed and slightly swollen, its top split in two and raw-looking, suggests that a man is sitting before them.
Please, Mother continues. Promise me you won’t do this. But Joshua doesn’t answer and finally she rises from her knees and Duncan stares at the pink, patterned designs the linoleum has shaped upon the skin there.
Good, she says. I’m holding you to it. And don’t you dare forget. She looks to Duncan, tries to smile but fails, and comes to him, kisses the top of his head. You need to go to bed, she whispers. It’s been a long night. Don’t worry about Joshua. He’ll be fine, okay?
He sees the doubt in her eyes but he nods, watches her take Joshua’s hand and lead him to the bathroom. Joshua sits on the toilet, head bowed, eyes flickering open and closed, head snapping back every few moments as if he is struggling to stay awake, his shirt open as mother washes his chest and the thin, sharp angles of his stomach with a warm, soapy washcloth. In the weak yellow glow of the bare lightbulb dangling over their heads, Duncan watches how she attends to his wounds, patting him dry and then applying a salve from the medicine cabinet. He watches for a moment from the door and then treads to his bedroom softly so as not to disturb them.
Mother puts Joshua to bed and through the night Duncan looks in on him, moonlight temporarily washing his swollen face clean of pain. Discolored lumps make his face look misshapen and strangely disfigured—beneath the white sheets he might have been laid in state—but then he sighs and his mouth parts slightly as if he is about to speak and then closes again. The room grows bright with moonlight so that even in the dark Duncan can see him, hear his breathing at times rattling and gasping in his throat as if some unseen damage has been done to the insides of him, damage to his heart and lungs, to his liver and spleen. Anxiously Duncan treads the landing to his mother’s bedroom throughout the night, fearful that each time he will no longer hear Joshua breathing, that something within him will burst and spill silently through him. That he will die in his sleep unaware that people who loved him are at his side. That he is not alone. That he has only to call out and they will be there. For a while Duncan crouches in the hallway, squats on the cold linoleum with his back against the wall, watching over Joshua in the way that he had with Billy all those nights when he was in the most pain or distress.
Yet every time Duncan checks in on Joshua, from the doorway, he still looks strong and the beating to his face doesn’t change this—it makes him look even stronger, as if, despite the brutal violence and damage, the outward sign of such violence reveals how little could actually affect him. That other men could never really touch him or hurt him—the place where pain remained was a place so deep no one could reach it—and that he needed nothing and nobody.
Duncan thinks of the way Joshua had led him though the throng of men in the warehouse and the way they’d parted for them, and how they’d sped home on his motorcycle through the derelict neighborhood and along the waterfront and over the bridge and home to Mother as if Duncan’s life depended upon it, as if Duncan mattered and as if he cared about what happened to him. How Joshua had protected him and kept him from harm. Now, staring at him asleep in Mother’s bed, Duncan suddenly wishes that he were the man he might call Father and that in the morning he would search Duncan out, look for him, and pull him to him, and that come evening, another night would pass with him beneath their roof and this is the way it would continue until they no longer knew anything else or remembered anything other.
Joshua sleeps through that night, and through the next day. Around dusk he stirs on Mother’s bed and Duncan listens as the bedsprings creak and he knows that Joshua is taking in his surroundings, staring at the walls, the ceiling, at the strange light coming in over the bay. Duncan wonders if Joshua knows where he is—he is motionless for a long time—and then Duncan hears him sitting upright and swinging his long legs over the edge of the mattress. He listens to his bare feet padding the wood and the slow, struggling stream of urine as it sputters in the porcelain and then the flush of the
toilet tank beyond the bathroom door.
It’s a little after dusk and St. Mary of the Wharves is tolling her bells for evening service. Joshua has come down to the kitchen and sits, bewildered and groggy, at the table sipping his coffee.
We made it, he says wearily, but it seems more a question, and Duncan nods.
Do you remember last night? Duncan asks. Do you remember bringing me home?
Joshua laughs, but it comes up through his throat like a painful bark and he winces as he swallows. Did you steer?
Chapter 73
On the midnight tunnel shift, amidst the grind and bore of the TBMs and the pumping of the compressors and hydraulic jacks and the clatter of the conveyers carrying shale and spoil through the tunnel to the surface, comes a frantic hissing sound, and the men pause in their labors, listening to the escape of compressed air. A moment later a section of the south tunnel collapses and the sea rushes in. It comes with such force and speed that the men are swept along by it. P.J. Rollins and John Chang are shattered against the tunnel walls, Joe “Sully” Sullivan and Billy Gillepsie are hurled like human darts and pinioned misshapenly into small crevices and air ducts, and others are sucked into impossible shapes back through the breach and upward into the mud at the bottom of the bay.
The bodies are found slowly. At first twelve men and then no more after a week of digging and dredging. Another body, in an advanced state of decomposition and absent its head, is recovered on June 20.
The last five workers, Minkivitz and Jimmy Paterniti among them, are finally found huddled together in the north tunnel on June 23. Their clothes are mostly rotted away and their bones gleam as if some solvent had been rubbed across them—where Minkivitz’s left eye had been a decaying fish hung limply, as if it had been caught there, wriggling out of the eye socket, when the water receded.
On June 27 the final human remains are recovered: It is the missing head, submerged in silt and slurry, and like the artifacts the tunnelers have, over time, pulled from the floor of the bay, it remains strangely preserved, so they are finally able to give one man his name: Javier Lopes.
Joshua is not among the dead. He is at home in bed, bathed in morning sunlight, with Duncan sitting upon the edge of the mattress spooning cereal in a bowl, when they receive the news, the damp washcloth that moments before he’d held to his bloodied eyes lying upon the sheets and wrung tightly in his hand, as he watches the television replay images from the semi-darkness before dawn, of helicopters hovering above the water, divers emerging and submerging like glistening seals in the wide oval wakes created by the helicopters’ propeller, and flashing harbor rescue craft cutting wider and wider silver swathes upon the surface. Duncan looks at the screen and then to Joshua and then Maggie comes and quickly ushers Duncan from the room.
From Maggie’s bedroom Joshua stares out toward the bay’s perfectly flat surface, glittering with reflected sunlight, its calm undisturbed by the churning violence of the night before. Who would know that thirty men had lost their lives two hundred feet below its gray water? Cars are passing as ever over the bridge; pedestrians are laughing, their voices sounding all the more distinct on the late-summer air; workers are making their way from the Edison plant and the rail yards; and his mind rails against the sickeningly strange normalcy of it all, as in the days when he first returned from Vietnam and, he realizes, all the days since. He is floating, flying numbly above it all. He gazes down at the destruction below him as strong, talonlike hands carry him upward, and he thinks of Javier, Sully, Chang, P.J., Gillepsie, and their foreman, Charlie Minkivitz. He closes his eyes as he imagines how Jamie Minkivitz must have felt at the end, and there is a tightness in his shoulders and chest more painful than the many beatings he has taken or the wounds he received in the war, and he is powerless before it. He opens his eyes and stares desperately at everything about him, and attempts to see, to really see for the first time in over a decade, and to make sense of it all. Yet the act of it engulfs him and overwhelms him. Tears come to his eyes as he remains silent, unmoving, and stares at the heaving view of the sea beyond the bedroom window where nothing and everything has utterly changed, and he can smell the smell of it upon him still, stuck to him, a skin-deep, mucky putrescent sea smell that when he inhales makes his stomach roil. He begins to gag and retch and puts a hand to his mouth to stop the vomit from spilling onto the floor.
Chapter 74
July 1985
It’s Sunday, a pleasantly mild day, and Joshua and Duncan sit outside on the steps as the light fades. Joshua smokes a cigarette, throws it on the stone, and then lights another. He hardly touched his dinner, and even Maggie’s singing couldn’t soothe him. Duncan thinks that he will jump upon his bike at any moment with the need, the urge to be gone, but something seems to prevent him—perhaps it is Duncan or his mother keeping him here imprisoned, as it were, and against his will.
There is something frenetic and strangled-seeming in the way he rolls his cigarettes and in the way he looks at them, and Duncan wonders if he needs a fix, the violent physical brutality of the warehouses or the oblivion of pills. Mother has him on a more rigid schedule with his meds and hands them to him one by one at breakfast and then again at suppertime.
Now he is staring so hard that Duncan looks away. Why are you still wearing that crap? he says. I told you, it’s all a lie.
Duncan hugs his jacket and his patches tightly and looks up at the marble sky. In his head he recites a litany: The moon is 240,000 miles away. Apollo 11 Mission Commander: Neil Armstrong. Lunar Module Pilot: Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin. Command Module Pilot: Michael Collins. Apollo 11 was carried into space by a Saturn V booster rocket, the most powerful rocket ever built. Reaching speeds of 24,000 miles per hour, Apollo 11 took four days to reach the moon. After thirteen lunar orbits, the lunar module Eagle separated from the command and service module Columbia. On July 20, 1969, lunar module Eagle touched down upon the moon’s surface, and Neil Armstrong took one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind. But they never lifted off the moon and died up there. And there are other astronauts up there and his father too, and someday they would all come back—once their orbits decayed they’d blaze up in the outer atmosphere and come hurtling down like fiery angels, that is unless God wanted them at His side.
How old are you?
Almost fifteen.
Shit, you were barely born. Joshua shakes his head, frustrated. After a moment he rises and gestures for Duncan to follow him to the curb, where his Indian angles its weight against the kickstand. Look, he says, forget that crap and come here. He sits on the seat, moves the bike with his legs so it is upright, and motions for Duncan to sit before him. When Duncan struggles to get a leg over the gas tank, Joshua grabs a handful of jacket, and hoists him up. Duncan’s legs kick at the air.
C’mon, get your feet over. Now rest your feet flat on the ground, jump up and down. Move from left to right, get a feel for its center of gravity.
The bike leans to the right, and Duncan feels the immense weight of it falling.
He turns to look at Joshua.
I’m here, he says, it’s not going anywhere. He places Duncan’s hands on the handlebars. Good. That’ll do. Now watch.
He turns the key, pumps the kick start with his boot three times. Can you hear that? he says, and Duncan listens: like the sound of a small bellows wheezing. Compression, he says, not too much now, just enough to turn her over. He jumps on the kick start, the bike shudders, and the engine rumbles into loud, syncopated life.
Eighty-cubic-inch V-twin, he says, the last they made. She needs a lot of choke in cool weather, but if you’re good to her, she’ll treat you right. Duncan cranes his neck at him, and Joshua smiles but there are tears in his eyes. His breath shudders against Duncan’s back. Duncan holds tight to the handlebars, and Joshua holds tight to Duncan’s shoulders.
He places his hands over Duncan’s, squeezes them until his knuckles are white, and though Duncan winces, he doesn’t say a word, and Joshua revs th
e engine louder, and the motor turns faster and faster until it whines. Mother is coming down the stairs and she pauses and looks at Joshua warily. She carries a pot of coffee, and two ceramic mugs clutched in her hand. Joshua takes his hands from Duncan’s, and the blood rushes back into Duncan’s fingers; the motor settles into a choppy rumble. He tugs at Duncan’s jacket, and Duncan climbs from the bike.
An Indian, my man, Joshua says, the best-built American bike ever. He strokes the black enameled gas tank then thumps the metal with his fist again and again until the metal is dented. Yesss, my man. Made the last of them in the fifties, this same line, fucking Springfield, Massa-chu-setts!
Maggie places the coffeepot and cups on the stone sidewall. J, you’re drunk, again. My son’s not getting on that thing if you’ve been drinking.
Joshua shuts off the motor and continues to stare at Duncan. He climbs from the bike and pulls Duncan tight against him, and Duncan listens to the manifolds ticking as they cool, smells Joshua’s sweat, the Brilliantine in his hair, the burnt-oil smell of his clothes, and still the sea, always the sea.
Duncan, Joshua says. You trust me, don’t you? Don’t you? Of course you do. So don’t worry, it’s all cool. It’s all going to be okay, my man. I promise. Then he looks at Maggie for a moment. His jaws clench and unclench. A bubble of rheum bursts from his nose. Quickly he wipes his eyes with the back of his bloodied hand and shakes his head. Mother hands him a cup of coffee.
I’m not drunk, Maggie, he says. And I haven’t taken my meds in weeks. I’ve been flushing them down the toilet. I’m fucking alive is what I am. Fucking alive again, and it’s killing me.
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