This Magnificent Desolation (28 page)

Across the top of the bureau he spreads the other crew patches emblazoned with the names of long-dead astronauts. From Apollo 11: Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin; from Apollo 18: Commander Richard Gordon, Command Module Pilot Vance Brand, Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt; from Apollo 19: Commander Fred Haise, Command Module Pilot William Pogue, Lunar Module Pilot Gerald Carr; and from Apollo 20: Commander Charles Conrad, Command Module Pilot Paul Weitz, Lunar Module Pilot Jack Lousma. All of them still spiraling somewhere up there in the darkness.

From his mother's room comes the sound of her retching again and then her toilet flushing. Duncan places the Apollo patches back beneath his T-shirts on the wax paper, and slides the drawer shut.
He lies back on his bed and stares out the window at the night sky; fog has rolled in and climbed the hills: there isn't a thing to see but he tries to imagine the stars anyway and the place where he was conceived.

It's not yet five o'clock, and a dense drizzly fog lies low upon the city. Even the horns of the bay seem very far away. Down the wharves, where bells are softly tolling and boats' lanyards are jangling, the streetlamps shine with a diffused amber light through the mist. A yellow glare from basement walk-ups streams out into the steamy air and throws a murky, shifting radiance across the streets and on each passerby who walks, ghostlike, before their window. Maggie places the dinner plates upon the table before them. She's been crying and her eyes look swollen and tired. Slowly, she spoons mashed potatoes and peas from serving bowls onto their plates, her shoulders trembling slightly.

Hush, Maggie, Joshua says. It's okay, baby, it's okay. Don't fret so. C'mon, Sit down and let me do that. He pushes back his chair, puts on the oven mitts, bangs open the oven door, and checks on the roast.

She looks at Duncan, stares at him with her red-rimmed and bloodshot eyes. She sees an image of her mother in her blue-flowered
summer frock with eyes as blank as pennies and the white glare of the bleached sheer curtains blinding and the smell of her parents' bedroom high in her nostrils and all the things she'd wanted to say to her forever left unsaid.

I love you, she says now to Duncan and reaches for his hand. You're my special Duncan. And then, when he doesn't respond: You're so special, she says and stares at him as if her look can convince him that this is so.

Yeah, that's what they called me in the Home.

Forget about what they called you there, she says angrily. You
are
special, my special Duncan, and don't you ever forget it. She leans forward and takes his face in her hands. Her nails are long and chipped, and without meaning to, she scratches him.

Her eyes widen, her brows lined in expectation. And I'm so lucky to have you as my child, she says. She almost impresses him with her faith, or perhaps it is her determination.

Sure, he says, and shrugs. After a moment his mother relaxes, lets go of his face, and reaches for her cigarettes. Damn right you're special, she mutters as she fumbles with her lighter.

Just hush now, Joshua says. Let all that old stuff go. Let's just enjoy our meal. He lays the roast at the center of the table, pulls off the oven mitts.

After dinner Duncan and me will do the dishes, he says, eyeing Duncan knowingly, and then you and me can head down to the Windsor. That'll pick you up, baby. You'll see.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, Maggie says suddenly and slams the lighter down upon the table. She raises her head back, and looks as if she might cry but doesn't. She stares at some point at the top of the wall and speaks softly, as if to herself: Why does everything have to be so hard, kiddo, hmmm? Why?

And Duncan might have answered her then for he feels sure he knows the answer.

Later, when she and Joshua have gone down to the Windsor Tap, Duncan treads the carpet of her bedroom, slowly parts the clothes in her closet, runs his hands along its top shelf, opens and then closes shoeboxes, stares at the box of black-and-white photographs sitting in a box on the floor. Finally, he sits on the edge of her bed listening to the familiar creaking of its springs and watches the fading light wavering upon the lace curtains as it spills through the trees. Amongst his mother's belongings, in the third drawer of her bureau, beneath frayed and faded underthings and tattered copies of
Opera
magazine describing her meteoric rise as a young soprano phenomena and a scathing and heartbreaking review of her final performance, he discovers a photo that she has never shown him: an image in black and white before he was born. It is a picture taken by the front-seat passenger in a car. His mother at the wheel of a convertible, her hair held back with a kerchief, and she's looking toward the lens—looking toward the man whom Duncan imagines is taking the picture—and smiling, a length of hair pulled free from her kerchief and lashed in a blur across her face. She has on the large oval sunglasses that were in vogue at the time and she might have been a movie starlet or a Jackie O impersonator.

There are more pictures in this sequence, and when he looks at them, one after the other, he has the sense of movement, of her turning back to the road, and the car pushing ahead, moving farther and farther down the glittering desert road. It becomes a running silent film in black and white, her turning to the passenger and talking to him, laughing, nudging the wheel from left to right. But always Duncan sees only her, sees what the photograph has already given him, and the perspective the picture projects into some near future, but nothing more. He wishes he could make the leap and imagine the lens from her eyes, and see what she sees—the sweeping landscape, hundreds of miles of flat plain or incomprehensibly vast peaks stretching to the far edges of the distant horizon and the towns and cities through
which she passes, and the man with whom she shares this all, his father, he assumes—but he cannot. Perhaps this is due to a flaw within him, and the absence of something fundamental. Dr. Mathias might be interested in that.

October 1984

Hours after her shift at the hospital has started Maggie is still sprawled upon her mattress, face turned into the pillow, spittle caking the side of her mouth, eyelashes fluttering in the dark hollows of smeared mascara. A record spins hissing on her turntable. Mid-morning sunlight traps the room in frowzy light through which clouds of dust motes spin and tumble, the windows shuttered and the sickly reek of stale alcohol and sweat lifting warmly from the sheets when Duncan pulls them back.

Mom, he calls. It's time to wake up. He sits on the edge of her bed and shakes her shoulder, calls her again. He shakes harder and still nothing. Mom, you need to get up for work.

Eyes opening slightly and then rolling back in her head, Maggie slurs: Fuck 'em.

C'mon, he says and urges her up, wraps her arms about his neck and, staggering, drags her to the bathroom.

Let me go, she says.

Yes, Mom.

Shifting his weight from hip to hip for balance, he bangs them against the hallway walls, knocking a framed picture from the wall, which falls and the glass shatters.

Where's Joshua? I want Joshua.

Duncan clenches his jaws in anger as her feet give out and the full weight of her comes down upon him. Where is he ever? he says. How should I know. He's wherever Joshua goes.

They make it to the bathroom and he yanks the shower curtain wide and, slipping on the tile, drops her awkwardly into the tub.

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.