This Magnificent Desolation

by Thomas O'Malley

  Sure, Mags, sure. Whatever you want. Just let me turn up the heat in here before you freeze to death.

  But the room is already warm. Duncan sways, suddenly lightheaded, the heat of so many people pressed against him that he has to focus on breathing deeply through his nostrils. The smell of grease from the grill as Clay cooks some burgers puts his stomach roiling. His mother drains the whiskey in her glass but Clay doesn’t refill it. She stares, eyes red-shot and unblinking, into the mirror behind the bar and quietly taps the empty glass upon the wood. Duncan looks at her reflection in the mirror, searching for her eyes. He puts his arm about her shoulder, and when she looks at his face in the glass, he mouths the words: It’s okay, Mom. Her eyes blink and look through him and she continues to tap the bar sharply with her glass until Clay brings her a bottle of Old Mainline 454.

  Late that night they stagger home, with Duncan holding tight to Maggie’s waist and Maggie seeming to lean her full weight upon his shoulder, as they lurch stumbling up Ipswich Hill from the Bottoms with a quarter moon glinting like a scythe suspended above them.

  He leads Maggie into her bedroom, lays her upon her bed, unconscious and snoring, it seems, from the moment he lets loose her hands and she drops to the mattress. After he pulls off her shoes and spreads the comforter over her, he sits at the kitchen table beneath the yellow glare of the bare bulb and stares at the black windows. Hours pass like this, time in which he is not conscious of sound or thought or physical discomfort. But then slowly he becomes aware of the room about him; it is a sensation he has experienced once before—when he’d first woken in the Home and heard the sound of Elvis Presley. The washer on the faucet over the sink needs replacing and water drips methodically upon the tin basin. As he becomes aware of it, the sound seems to grow—a singular loud, incessant hammering—and only as he becomes aware of other sounds and sensations about him does this sound decrease and fade to the background.

  He rises from his chair and begins to open the kitchen cupboards, slamming and banging open the doors, finding one of his mother’s bottles almost immediately, and then another and another, and slamming and banging the doors with more and more vehemence with each bottle he discovers. He looks beneath the sink and under the trash can lining and then moves to the St. Vincent de Paul sofa bed, where amber-colored bottles lie between the rows of rusted springs, and when he looks up, he sees Maggie standing in the doorway, swaying.

  I’m sorry, she says, hiccuping and holding a hand to her mouth. I don’t feel so well.

  She goes to wash but halfway across the room she clutches her stomach, doubles over, and upon her knees vomits onto the bright blue shag carpet. She vomits until there is nothing left to vomit, her mouth agape over the floor, gagging and retching painfully, a thick thread of mucus hanging from her nose and mouth.

  Oh, Duncan, I’ll clean that up as soon as I’m able. Don’t touch it, sweetie. I’ll get to it in a moment. Just give me a moment. And then rocking on her heels, gagging some more, and finally rising to her feet, she makes her way to the bathroom, closes and then locks the door behind her.

  The faucet runs and he listens as she splashes water upon her face, rinses her mouth, then lowers the toilet seat and sits down. Duncan stretches back on his bed and stares at the ceiling. Stares through it, up through the plaster and Sheetrock, through nails and joists, up through the crawl space and ventilation shafts between the headers, up through the roof joists and the plywood and shingles to the night beyond with Michael Collins and all the angels and astronauts and perhaps Joshua up there with them, and then he is simply gone, gone from his bed and the room and the house and everything it contains.

  Chapter 79

  The bowed acetate revolves slowly on the Victrola’s turntable, its warped black surface creating the illusion that it is made of liquid, that if Duncan attempts to pick it up, it will merely slip through his fingers. He winds the motor and sets the tone arm upon the record. Maggie sits in the chair by the window, looking out onto the street.

  What’s this? she calls at the ceiling.

  This, Duncan says, is the only recording we have of you.

  The Victrola’s stylus rasps in the grooves, and gradually, rising in volume, Duncan’s mother’s laugh, startling and bright, emerges from the speaker, followed by her talking, it seems, to a technician, her voice fading now and echoing ghostlike as if it were traversing some vast hallway and moving farther and farther away: You gotta pay the dues if you wanna sing the blues, Harry.

  The phonograph’s spring-powered motor clicks as its worn tumblers rotate and the old acetate sighs and hisses against the stylus. When his mother’s voice comes, Duncan holds his breath, just as he always does, for on this recording, where she emulates the velvety vibrato of Sissieretta Jones, her voice seems suddenly such a fragile and tenuous thing, momentarily suspended between this world and some other and filled not with the desperation and longing of a latter-day, ruined Silva Bröhm, but with a singular, plaintive joy:

  ’Tis the last rose of summer,

  Left blooming alone;

  All her lovely companions Are faded and gone;

  No flower of her kindred

  No rosebud is nigh,

  To reflect back her blushes,

  Or give sigh for sigh!

  I haven’t listened to this in so long, Maggie whispers. Her mouth is open and her breath comes deep and loud, almost as if she is snoring, sounding the way she does when she’s been drinking, or after a night of singing at the Windsor Tap, when her adenoids and cartilage tightened and became like bark in her throat.

  So soon may I follow,

  When friendships decay,

  And from love’s shining circle

  The gems drop away!

  When true hearts lie wither’d,

  And fond ones are flown,

  Oh! Who would inhabit

  This bleak world alone?

  Sunlight fades from the room and the darker hues upon the ceiling take prominence and Maggie and Duncan watch, stilled by the music, as the room turns to night. His mother seems to be daydreaming, jaundiced skin pulled tight at the edges of her mouth. Beneath half-closed eyelids her eyes remain fixed on some distant point upon the ceiling. She sighs, opens her eyes wide. After a moment she says, with something that sounds like envy and sadness: This young girl, she’s a great singer. I don’t think I could ever sound like that.

  His mother’s song is fading. The record ends. The stylus hisses and spits in the groove, and Duncan picks it up, listening to the whirr of the motor, and lowers it again. He kneels beside her as her voice blooms young and strong through the speakers, and takes her hand, squeezes so hard that she flinches and looks at him with something like recognition. This is you, Mom, he says. This is you, and this is what you’re meant to do.

  She shakes her head, eyes wide in fear. But I can’t, she says. I can’t Duncan, and I so wanted to make him proud. I wanted to be—I wanted to be better than this.

  You can sing. You need to sing.

  He stares at her until she looks away, and then she hears him pulling out the bureau drawers in her bedroom. Duncan, she says softly, what are you doing?

  When he returns, he’s holding an issue of Opera and rustling through the yellowed pages. Please, Duncan, she murmurs, don’t. I don’t need to hear you read what they said about me.

  But Duncan ignores her. Mom, they call you extraordinary, they compared you to Callas and Bröhm … They say that no previous singer in history excelled to such an extent in both the Verdi Requiem and the Mozart C Minor Mass … That your Vespers was in a class with the fabled recorded versions by Ursula van Diemen and Jennifer Vyvyan … They say your voice was angelic, that it was immaculate and as close to God as possible and that it brought them to tears … One reviewer says—

  Duncan, please stop. You didn’t read the final ones. They spoke the truth. I was an embarrassment not fit to be on the stage.

  You’re wrong, I’ve heard you. You need to sing.

 
; Maggie sighs and wipes the back of her hand across her mouth.

  Why?

  Because you’ll die otherwise. That’s what you said. Remember?

  Mother shakes her head, waves weakly at the air. Duncan, maybe that’s not enough of a reason.

  Chapter 80

  September 1985

  The San Padre Tunnel beneath the bay is never completed. With the price tag twenty million overbudget and a multitude of OSHA infractions, fines, and forced work stoppages, the federal government steps in and shuts Bextal and Sonoyama International down. California governor Jason Pettite decries the abysmal failure of the major contractors and subcontractors and the lack of federal supervision to oversee the tunnel management and how all have combined to fail San Francisco and the Bay Area and all the men who have died. This is a sad day, he says on the Channel 7 evening news, as Duncan and his mother, chewing stale popcorn, watch from the sofa. Governor Jason Pettite is a tall, dour man shimmering in black and white and ripples of static upon their old television. A sad day for our great city.

  Two hundred feet beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, one hundred and fifty feet to the floor of the bay, and seventy-five feet beneath its shale and silt sits a dark, cavernous tunnel extending three fourths of a mile out into the bay—fully formed and shaped upon bedrock, its slurried walls partially reinforced with cement pylons, and within its tub the floors leveled to receive the hydraulic drill and the t-jacks. The boot prints of Joshua and the other men remain hardened and compressed in the cavern’s floor, reminders if one were to look for them that men had indeed been here, had struggled and labored, and had even died. For now it is like the surface of the moon: An inviolate space undisturbed by wind or motion.

  Through the string of construction lights electricity still flows and a meager light continues to glow—the bulbs stretching into the tunnel’s depths, breaking the darkness at intervals, and occasionally shuddering and trembling in some unseen wind, until even their light, staggered farther and farther apart, disappears in the darkness.

  In another month the electricity will be turned off, the light will be extinguished, and the tunnel will return to darkness. Gradually the pressure of the bay will begin to exert itself in fractures here and there in the partially formed structure, along its seams, crumbling cement and warping metal. Within eight months water will trickle and stream and flood the chamber and then the once celebrated San Padre Tunnel will be gone.

  From Admiral’s Point, Duncan and Maggie watch with other spectators as they detonate what is left of the tunnel, its underwater caissons, transepts, sluice tunnels, and derricks. A rumble sounds deep below the water and the water churns and steams. The concussive shock of the explosions echo off and reverberate about the shoreline and the tunnel’s labyrinthine corridors and secret walkways to the surface collapse beneath a hundred pounds of explosive charges staged at two-hundred-foot intervals along its three-quarter-mile length. Three large circles ringed with white waves appear upon the surface of the water. The rings rise up briefly and then collapse and the surface seems to collapse with them and into them, spiraling downward into the empty space they’ve created. The vortex lasts only a moment and then the surface is as it had been before, with the wind stirring up whitecaps. In his mind Duncan sees all the parts of the blasted tunnel turning and falling through the deep and with it everything Joshua has told him: the fuselage and wing section of a WWII Hellcat, the giant tattered face of the housewife on the Byer’s bread billboard comes gleaming, the bones of a cow and the wings of some prehistoric avian. And he imagines he hears whales, a vast school of them far, far out, moaning, crying in cadence to one another in the deep and to others still waiting across the vast breadth of the ocean half a world away and that they might never see.

  Maybe that’s where Joshua was going, Maggie says, staring out at the water and the headlands. Maybe he was swimming out there to be back with the men of the tunnel, to be back with his friends.

  One day maybe we’ll put some of his things together, put them in a metal box and seal it up. We’ll row out there—my father taught me to row when I was a little girl—right to the place where they finished tunneling and we’ll drop it down, down to the deepest part of the bay. I think Joshua would like that.

  They sit there long after the crowds upon the banks have gone. Duncan looks at Maggie and asks: Should we go, Mom? and she continues to stare off toward the bridge and the distant horizon and everything Joshua left them for and finally says: Go where, honey? Where are we gonna go?

  Chapter 81

  Through the screen door Duncan can sense the man’s tension filling the space like electricity, in the way you can feel the resistance coursing through a charged fence without even touching it. The man leaves the porch light off, and the only light cast is from a lamp in the living room and the television flickering blue behind him and which burns softly at the edges of his clothes, as if he is caught and held in amber. The man leans closer to the screen door and the liquid of his eyes glistens from the streetlamps as he searches the darkness, and Duncan can make out their shape and then he knows that he is Joshua’s father.

  What do you want? he asks.

  Down the street a couple of kids play stickball and a group of teenagers lean against an Oldsmobile sitting on cinder blocks, smoking and swearing loudly and calling out to some girl moving on the other side of the street and in the darkness. From one of the backyards comes the smell of a barbecue and there is the splash as someone jumps into a pool. It’s almost ten o’clock and yet the air is still and muggy, and pushing a hundred degrees. From the streetlights, telephone poles, and apartment buildings comes the cicada thrum of electricity—that dulled and numbing sound that only seems to exist on the hottest days of the year in the city. Air conditioners click on and off, hissing and dripping into life. Up and down the street, window fans burr like hornets and above them the cables thrum in a numb, bruising way.

  Finally, Duncan speaks: Are you Joshua McGreevy’s father? He gave me something I thought you should have. Duncan holds out the bandanna, wrapped and tied in a loose ball, toward the screen door.

  Huh, the man grunts. Joshua left a lot behind but that was a long time ago. I haven’t seen Joshua in years. He’s my son all right, but I bet he hasn’t thought of me as family in a long time. How did you find me?

  He told me you lived in Oakland.

  I’m not the only McGreevey in Oakland.

  I looked in the yellow pages. There’s a hundred. I called them. I called you too but no one answered the phone.

  They cut it off a while back. He nods to Duncan’s hand.

  What is it?

  His medals.

  Medals? Medals for what?

  For bravery in the war. For uncommon valor. Joshua was a hero.

  Hero? The man smiles in the darkness, his teeth flashing. And then he laughs but it is a sad, defeated sound. Shit. My Joshua was no hero, boy. Did he tell you that?

  No, sir. But these are his medals. He left them behind. When he left.

  Duncan stares at the screen door, searching the man’s eyes. The street grows darker, and when more and more streetlamps come on, everything beyond their glare—the sidewalk, parked cars, and front yards—disappears into blackness. Duncan squints into the light and then turns back to the door, losing his hold upon the man in the doorway and his sense of him. He has returned to an amorphous, barely formed shape. For a moment Duncan cannot even be sure that he is still there. His arm begins to tremble and he lets it drop to his side and then he hears the man’s breathing, the sickly sweet warmth of cheap beer, the sound of his lips as they come together. He swallows hard.

  Where did he go, my Joshua? Where did he go?

  Duncan thinks of Joshua swimming across the bay, beneath the bridge and out to the Pacific, and he sees him, his strong stokes churning him through the water and farther and farther from everything he has known. Duncan hears his voice singing still in his mind, reverberating and echoing in the high, hollow metal s
paces of the bridge’s iron balustrades and stanchions and the cars tires’ hissing on the cross-sections four hundred feet above his head, moving back and forth in their endless journey through the night from Oakland to the city and back again. When he imagines this, he imagines that Joshua is still swimming and that he has made it all the way to the Pacific and he hears his voice singing out at the stars and this is what he want to tell this man who is his father.

  I watched him swim out into the bay, he wants to say. I waited but he didn’t come back.

  But instead he shrugs. I don’t know, sir, he says. He just went away.

  Duncan reaches out his hand to the door again. He left these behind, he says. They’re for you.

  Large winged insects throw themselves at the dim glow beyond the screen door; they tap the screen like heavy drops of rain and then fall to the concrete, dazed.

  The screen door opens with a groan and the man calls out to him: Jesus, boy, get in here then. And with Joshua’s father shaking his head, muttering to himself, There must be something the matter with you, Duncan steps into the hall and follows him to the living room.

  He watches the man’s bowed back swaying from side to side, shoulders brushing the plaster walls, the pain evident in every movement. In the living room he can see him more clearly. His brown skin is sallow and stretched-looking. His legs and arms are thin, the muscles clinging tightly, feverishly to the bone. Only his stomach protrudes, a large belly that, when he brushes past Duncan, feels as hard as cement and makes Duncan touch his arm with surprise, unsure of what he has felt.

  He eases himself onto a couch before a coffee table stained with white rings from the bottoms of beer cans and upon which tattered, dog-eared paperbacks and a few framed photographs sit, and points impatiently for Duncan to do the same.