This Magnificent Desolation (16 page)

Fresh snow muffles his footsteps, soaks through the bottoms of his jeans, as he walks the empty snow-covered streets, his breath steaming the air. He coughs sharp and loud in the deep stillness. He pauses momentarily to stare at the dark windows, the dusted glass, and then behind him to the footprints in the snow becoming rapidly wiped away. He imagines that if he stands here, not only will his footsteps be gone but so will he.

Steam smokes from his mouth as he listens to the wind, its note and pitch, as it sounds off glass and stone, sighing then moaning in the crooks and valleys of streets and buildings, of boulevard and avenue, as gentle as a soft breath through a flute and then gentler still—no more than a tremor of air vibrating an octave. A trash can bangs in a
covered alley suddenly startling him and rolls on cement untouched by snow.

Before him remain all manner of possibilities: He is still a boy and in this wondrous moment the world seems to revolve around him; he is capable of anything. Joshua smiles and holds his face up to the snowfall, stretches wide his arms to receive the snowflakes in hands and hold them in his fists.

A large city plow rumbles down the main avenue with the force of a locomotive, pushing the snow from its canted plow to the side of the road—a great arc of snow from which the spray is taken by the wind and churned into a billowing smoke. A bright red Chevy Nova rumbles slowly down the street, its rear end slipping and fish-tailing slightly whenever the driver guns the engine, snow spraying from its racing widewalls.

Hey, lookit the little nigger playing in the snow. Hey, nigger! Don't you know there's a fawkin blizzard? Get home to your momma, you monkey, before you get run over by a plow!

The driver and his passengers have rolled down their fogged windows to stare at him but Joshua sees only their eyes, blazing it seems from their deep-set sockets, the indistinguishable white faces, and the hovering O of their mouths.

And perhaps it is the falling snow, the gusting wind roaring in his ear like the sea, and the encroaching darkness or the numbness that has taken him, but he has an impression of everything blurring, as if wipers had moved across the men's features, smearing them, turning them into grotesques, and the car rumbling slowly past. Its taillights burning through the white. The deep-set threads of its tires filled with wide ridges of snow. Its dual exhaust shivering with steam. And then the car with its passengers seems to boil into a wispy nothingness. The end of the street is gone and only the closest houses emerge gray and hazy through the rising gusts with the suggestion of architecture: a meager and frantic outline of stolidity, of brick and mortar.

Joshua stares at his legs and boots frozen with snow and at the drifts between buildings, at the scalloped slopes, which have quickly risen to first-floor window lintels. He is wet and cold and can only see a foot or two before him and he thinks of his mother at home waiting anxiously for him. In awe and dawning fear he suddenly understands the power and the ferocity of the storm as he stands briefly at the center of everything, and is obliterated.

He stares at the spider silk spun so unerringly and with such precision from its spinnerets, night dew trembling upon its latticework, and it offers him such a calm that he cannot put words to it—for a moment he closes his eyes in contentment, but only briefly. He looks for the web's maker, hiding secretly at the edge of the web perhaps, with one foot on a signal line from the hub, waiting for the vibrations of prey caught in its web, and finally sees it there, large and unmoving in the low leaves.

Beautiful, he says softly, and the web shudders slightly with his breath, bowing back and forth as if with a breeze. As a child he once saw a 110-million-year-old web preserved in amber. He and his mother had taken the train together from Medford to Boston to see the exhibit on fossils and millennia-old preservations at the Museum of Science. He remembers that she had taken the day off from work as a bookkeeper for the Old Colony Abattoir in Dorchester for their trip together. It's one of the last few memories he has of her before she left them, before she jumped off the Elevated Orange Line train platform at Northampton Street and was electrified by the third rail.

The smoke of mist twirls up through the green jungletop and up the misty mountainside, shadowed and bent by movement as if figures are moving within its cover, like ghosts. Years later, walking through the downtown alleys of the city, along Townsend and Beckman, Windsor and Marlboro, late at night he will observe steam rising from manhole covers and hear the rumbling of the subway below and imagine men—fellow soldiers, phantasm creatures, eviscerated and delimbed, black-scorched flesh hanging from red sinew, bones
protruding from severed limb ends, climbing and crawling from the manholes. He will think of villages in the highland and of the jungle breathing about him, the strange beauty of the ancient silent mountains looming over them, over it all.

And he will experience this later again, on those nights that he emerges from the tunnel beneath the bay through the temporary air vent shafts, up eighty flights of stairs in darkness, his footfalls echoing, his breath loud and magnified in the narrow concrete column—the ballast of a hundred lungs pumping, beating in the dark alongside him, beneath him, around him: a hundred footfalls following him up the stairs, and out onto the street, a bedraggled, partially limbed squad of Special Forces. Emerging from beneath the ground as he had a decade before, only he was crawling in that darkness and unsure if he would ever walk again, let alone upon a city street. And the ghosts of men are with him here also, as elsewhere; always they are with him.

July 1982

They are sitting at the kitchen table, Maggie in her too-tight nurse's uniform smoking a cigarette, and Duncan eating a bowl of cereal. Sunlight spills through the yellow-stained kitchen curtains turning everything sallow. The curtains are used, bought at a Salvation Army thrift Store. Maggie has scrubbed and bleached them, trying to make them white again. For a while she had become almost obsessed with it, as if by doing so she would be able to make other things right in her life as well, make them pure, but her efforts have merely thinned the material, not its dog-piss color.

Duncan watches light dance on the top of her head, highlight the red there like sparks, and shimmer amber along her bare, pale neck. When she exhales, her mouth is a fuchsia O; it floats in the air with the smoke and rises to the ceiling, and then, as it settles, returns to the filter of the cigarette, where it marks its tip, bright pink and wet with the shape of a kiss.

Sometimes he will catch his mother staring at him, tears forming in her eyes, and it will take her a moment to realize he is staring back before she looks away. Duncan sees himself reflected in her eyes, and he wonders what she thinks of him and whether she is thinking she made a mistake in coming to the Home to get him.

Maggie looks up from a magazine on muscle cars that Joshua took from the barbershop and Duncan says: Does it upset you when I look at you?

It makes me sad—she pauses as she takes a drag on her Claymore and her eyes squint through the smoke of her exhale—only because I know why you look at me the way you sometimes do.

Why?

You're trying to figure out if I'll leave you again.

He shrugs. He couldn't explain why he looked at her the way he did. Sometimes he felt invisible and assumed that she couldn't see him even if he willed her to. He stares at her now.

Never, sugar, she says and shakes her head. Trust me. Never again. It's just you and me, together. Always.

Only slowly does Duncan realize that he is still staring; his eyes drift to some point beyond his mother. If he focuses on that point, soon he will be gone, and there will be nothing left, not even a reflected image: he will disappear.

Honey, that's why there's not a line on your beautiful face, Maggie says and laughs. You never smiled as a child. She comes to him then and squeezes the sides of his face tenderly, but there is a flicker of remembrance there too that she quickly pushes away.

Why did you leave me in the Home? he asks again, and even to his ears it sounds like a brittle, grating echo—the sound of the stylus scratching and hissing upon the phonograph late at night, when she's staggered drunkenly to bed and fallen into an impenetrable stupor from which nothing will awake her—something that he has asked so many times and to which she gives no proper answer and the question continues to reverberate empty and vacant and unanswered.

Maggie continues to smoke, puts back her chair and paces the kitchen. It's not the question that bothers her; it's the place where the question brings her, someplace many years before, and neither of them knows why it is so important, but it is.

You were shy, incredibly introverted, so much so that you never socialized with other children your own age. I was worried about you, you wouldn't speak, you wouldn't tell me what was wrong—if I'd only known what was wrong then, I would have tried to fix it, but …

She shakes her head. You were my special child and so I brought you to them. She grits her teeth and exhales, quickly tears the plastic from another pack of Claymores. Opens the pack. Shakes her hand violently to remove the plastic that sticks to the edge of her palm, but in her agitation it seems to cling all the more. Duncan reaches over and peels it off and she is like static electricity to the touch.

The middle of nowhere, she says. Bumfuck America. I hated it, going back there. Not in the beginning though, only later. You never did catch sight of the town, did you? That's where I had to stay when I came to visit. Let me tell you something, honey: You didn't miss a thing. The place was a complete shithole. Those fuckers.

Don't swear, he says softly, and with pursed lips she nods, closes her eyes and inhales deeply on her cigarette.

Duncan rolls the Claymore wrapping in his hands. He wants to tell her that he and Billy saw the town with the dead children from the Festival of Lights train and that he imagined seeing her face in the moon, that in a way he could never explain all these things were leading him to her, to the day when she would come back for him. The day stretches long and far away beyond the curtain blinds. Through the open window comes the sound of children playing on the rusted iron and crumbling stone animals in Joseph Wood Tyner Park, squeezed in between the abandoned warehouse, the Edison plant, and the train yards. Clang of metal and then laughter. Scrape-scrabble of sneakers on rock dust. Gulls shriek harshly as they swirl over the bay.

They had a good reputation, back then, Maggie says. They said they had a wonderful place for special children, an environment where they would flourish, interact, develop, grow. She waves at the air, makes big looping circles with her cigarette. A place where children like you would shine.

She sighs, leans against the countertop, crosses her ankles, and folds her arms beneath the swell of her breasts. She's holding her cigarette loosely, almost even with her mouth, as if it is a talisman, something that can protect her from the truth, a stake that she might drive into the heart of the demon thing fluttering its wings darkly before her. Duncan stares at the hard roundness of her belly that he knows she clutches at night while she sleeps.

It was hard enough to support myself, let alone the two of us. You needed special attention, constant attention. She looks at him. C'mon, honey, look at what I do for a living. This is it. This is all I could have given you.

But this is all I need, Duncan says, his voice cracking suddenly.

Her eyes glisten and she coughs harshly, breaking phlegm in her throat, stamps her cigarette out briskly in the sink and lights another as if to keep her hands busy.

Now it is, honey, but not then. Then you needed more. I'm sorry, it wasn't supposed to happen the way it did. How did I know you would get worse in there, and them telling me everything was fine, would be fine, that it was all adjustment.

She nods her head as if remembering agreeing with them all those years ago. They said it would take time and we all had to be patient. But you didn't get better; you got worse. And they restricted my visits but I was there. Damn their restrictions—who are they to tell me I can't see my own child? I was there every two weeks and every time hoping things would be different, that this time you would look up and recognize me, and see me and smile, but—she shrugs sadly—you never did.

Maggie's shoulders sag. She says: You were in a place that seemed
untouchable. You would look at me and look right through me. I was so scared. I thought I was being punished for something I had done. That somehow I deserved this—a child who doesn't even recognize his own mother. But you didn't recognize anyone, sugar. You didn't speak, you didn't smile, and you didn't cry.

She laughs but she is no longer here; she is somewhere far away, and it seems as if she is on the verge of tears although she is laughing.

I wanted to take you out of there so many times, get you real medical care, but they wrangled me with legalities and what I'd committed to with the papers I'd signed all those years before, and they fought me, fought me so hard I didn't understand it. I saw you less and less … Her voice trails away, and when she begins again, her voice is subdued. She stares at the glowing tip of her cigarette: Four years before I got you out of there, baby, four long years.

But they told me you came during the winter storm. That you left me on the monastery's doorstep when I was just a few days old. Flea-bitten and howling with the hunger, Brother Canice liked to say.

But that's not true, sweetie. Who told you that?

The Brothers, the other children.

I didn't bring you to that place until you were six. That's what I'm trying to tell you. We had a life before you went into the Home. We had a life together. Don't you remember any of it?

I remember being born and—

Stop, Duncan, she says, suddenly angry. Not again. I don't want to hear it.