This Magnificent Desolation (23 page)

She pulls a chair up to the bed and takes Deirdre's hand now: She will be here when she wakes and here with her when she receives news of the biopsy—she will not leave her. Maggie closes her eyes, lets the dim pulse in Deirdre's hand inform her breathing. Deirdre's monitor clicks and beeps softly. From the hallway comes the sound of slippered feet, the loose clattering wheel of a gurney, a page for a doctor from the nurse's station reverberating forlornly through the empty halls, and then the silence of the night, which somehow seems worse, capturing as it does in the absence of noise and hectic industry the solemn weight of pain and suffering and loss. So much loss.

Maggie rubs at her eyes. She is eight again and staring up at the
adults passing about her, their footsteps continually thumping up the back stairs from the landing to the third floor of the apartment on Bartlett Street just outside Boston's Dudley Square. The sullen heat of late summer and even the birds silent in the trees outside the window.

Tar-streaked ceilings still smelling of other people's smoke, the broken latch hook by the back screen door that jangles soft and metallic as people come and go, the smell of boiled foods, and a fan turning impotently in the window of her mother's bedroom, where Mother was lying with closed eyes and dressed in her pastel blue floral summer dress, the spit that glistened her lips in the final rictus of pain now dried, and those same lips that had kissed her goodnight a mere night ago already seeming shriveled and pale despite the recently applied lipstick, like two slivers of worm left upon the sidewalk in the hot sun, and no breeze at the window—the lace curtains flat as a board—to push the strange smell of her out. But where was her father?

Men, holding bottles of beer or glasses of spirits, attired in their mourning wear: black pants and jackets, crumpled white shirts, and thin black ties—she smelled their aftershave and cologne, cigarettes and sweat, a sense of her father in all that, as if many of them had just come from their daily labors. Pushing in and about them she desperately searched for him, an unexplainable panic rising in her chest, first in the kitchen, then the crowded small living room overlooking the street, the bathroom, and finally her mother's bedroom, where she stood looking at her mother, and then to her aunts and female cousins sitting on chairs arranged about the bed, red-eyed and crying softly.

She expected to feel his heavy hand on her shoulder and for him to pull him to her, to hear his voice in song, some manner of lullaby, soothing and yet heartbreaking, filled with the loss of past generations of his people—hundreds upon hundreds of years of it, and that loss came to life with his voice at night as he crooned her to sleep when he and her mother came in from the Dudley Street Opera House or the
Rose Croix, and his breath warm with stout and whiskey. The comfort and shelter of her father's songs, which captured such tragedy and yet were so filled with passion it trilled beneath her skin, reassured her that as long as he was near, nothing could harm her, and if he were here to sing now, surely her mother would awaken. Why wasn't he here? Why wasn't he by her mother's bed?

Where's Daddy? she asked Aunt Una, the one with the lantern jaw and the sharp nose and the sweat beading above her upper lip and the red hair like Maggie and her mother.

I looked all about the place, Maggie said, but I can't find him anywhere—did he go down to the square? And the women in the room stared at her with such pity that she felt she couldn't breathe and Aunt Margaret reached out her hand and then pulled her onto her lap, held Maggie's head against her shoulder and began to cry, her great bosom heaving, but this brought Maggie no comfort—she only wanted to pull away from this woman and demand that they all tell her where he was; she wanted to scream: Where's my father! I need my father! And as if she knew this, Aunt Margaret's words came to her slowly, hiccupping with grief: He's left dear child, sure his heart is broke with your mother's death. He left this morning before dawn. I'm so sorry, my dear. I'm so very sorry.

It's near two A.M. when Maggie leaves the hospital via the emergency room. A young man with long, disheveled hair and high on PCP is bleeding out onto the floor and hollering about angels. He's fallen from a second-floor balcony onto a wrought iron railing, impaling his eye socket, stomach, and leg, and yet somehow he is upright, talking and walking, searching the room with his one blazing eye and clutching his guts spilling from the cavity in his abdomen. She stares at the purple intestine, the deep red of muscle, the strings of tendon and white bone as two nurses and a surgeon frantically work to hold him down upon a table and stop the hemorrhaging.

At home Maggie heats up leftovers in the kitchen, pours herself a whiskey. She pads the hallway, looks in on Duncan, sleeping, turned away toward the wall, the light from the hall casting slivers of refracted light upon his ceiling of stars and constellations. Static pops and bursts from the old Vulcanite radio glowing amber at his bedside, like an eye in the dark, and from which comes the sudden, brief sound of someone talking. She waits, listens to Duncan's breathing, and then, satisfied, goes to change. In the bedroom the television is on, casting shadows upon the wall, and Joshua is on his back, arms stretched wide, and at first she thinks he's asleep. She leans over the bed, kisses him on the cheek. He's looking at her in the dark; she can see his eyes glistening with the light cast from the television.

Florence Nightingale, he says, and she smiles. How was your night, baby?

It was fine. I'm fine, just tired.

How's Deirdre?

Still alive.

She has the sense that he nods in the dark.

You should be asleep, she says. You've got to be up in less than three hours.

I know, baby. I already slept a bit, once Duncan went to bed.

She knows he's lying, and that if he's awake now, he'll probably stay awake until the alarm sounds. She asks: Did you take your meds?

Joshua sighs, rolls his shoulders. She can hear tendons and ligaments crack. Nah, you know I don't like how they make me feel. I can only do so many days and my head gets messed up.

You're not supposed to start and stop, she says. It'll make you manic. No wonder you can't sleep.

I promise I'll go back on them tomorrow. Don't look at me like that, baby.

Howabout you take them now?

Okay. Sure. They're on the dresser.

Maggie brings him the pill bottles and he takes them from her
and she can see that his hands are trembling. He pops three of each in his mouth, washes them down with water from a glass on the side table.

That the right amount?

It's whatever works.

By the way, thanks for dinner.

No problem. Duncan and me, we made it together. Was it good?

Best lasagna I ever had.

Liar.

Maggie grins. Maybe just a little bit.

How is he?

He's fine. Wanted me to listen to that radio of his when he went to bed. So, I did.

And?

And what? The damn thing doesn't work, yet he still listens to it.

Maybe it comforts him to have something from the orphanage with him. I think he gets scared in the night.

We all get scared in the night. I get scared in the night, especially without you. Why don't you come to bed?

In a little bit, I need to unwind first, decompress.

I'll help you unwind.

Shhhhhh. You'll sleep, that's what you'll do. Should I turn the TV off?

No, no, I like it on. It helps me sleep.

Okay. Close your eyes.

Joshua laughs and closes his eyes. Goodnight, Baby.

Goodnight.

Maggie pulls the bedroom door closed, leaving it slightly ajar in case Duncan calls out in the night, and glances back at Joshua, bathed in blue light, still staring blankly at the flickering black-and-white images on the screen. She wonders if he's even aware of what he's watching. She thinks of Deirdre not because Joshua is dying but because he is never at rest and his soul, she knows, like hers, is a
damaged, fragile thing, and she wonders if two people such as herself and Joshua can, together, make the other one strong, and with Duncan, if they can make a life.

May angels lead you into Paradise; may the martyrs receive you at your coming and lead you to the holy city of Jerusalem
and
O sweet Lord Jesus, grant them rest; grant them everlasting rest
.

March 1984

An hour after Joshua's night shift on the tunnel has ended, he and Duncan sit at the counter of a greasy spoon over on Kirkland, where the bay washes up against the old forgotten docks and the skeletal remains of wharves, timbers and spars pitched and oilblack sprouting from the sea. The wastes of a once-thriving dockland with cobbled motorways running parallel to empty canning and fishery warehouses stretch as far as the eye can see.

There is the clatter of plates and cutlery, the hoarse voices of rail-workers and dockworkers sitting in ripped and torn vinyl booths. The sound of spitting grease warms the small space even as the rain and cold hisses and presses at the grimy glass. From the windows of the diner Duncan can see the gray waters of the bay and the ragged, frothy tufted heads of decayed piers and pylons first thrusting then disappearing in the small swells as wind and angry dark rain squalls press down from the north.

Behind the counter the single employee of the place, a fry cook in a soiled vest, stokes the grill, breaks open eggs, spills their innards upon the hot metal, shovels potatoes, bacon, sausage back and forth across the charred surface. He's a tall, gangly, olive-skinned man who seems to suffer from lack of sleep, and has the look of anemia that comes from working in enclosed, sunless places. When he takes their order, Duncan notices the bruise-colored semicircles beneath his eyes, the ashen pallor of his skin.

When the workers are done, boots banging and scraping on the wood, he takes their bills and rings them up on the cash register. Soon the booths are all empty and his shoulders hunch and he moves slowly from counter to grill to clearing the tables to the windowed door, where he stands for a long moment staring out at the empty street and the rain. Beneath his feet the runoff from customers' shoes has collected, forming a ring as black as an oil slick. The fry cook offers up a forlorn sigh to the glass.

I was an angel once, he says suddenly aloud, to no one it seems, but then he looks, pleadingly, in Duncan's direction, and Duncan turns his attention quickly back to his food.

Shit, Joshua mutters beneath his breath, and the fry cook sighs again, deeper this time. He turns his head slightly as if listening to something, something other than the grill or the radio or the wind and rain banging against the walls.

I clipped my wings and I can't go back.

Damn, man, Joshua says, and begins cutting into his egg.

The fry cook shrugs and stares at the blackened lumps of meat slough curling at the edges of the grill. Every so often they start to grow back and I have to cut them again, he says. They come in all wrong. The feathers don't fold, they're twisted and bent hard as nails. They hurt.

Joshua sips his coffee and nods.

And when it rains—weather like this—they itch like hell.

I know how you feel, man.

You got wings?

No, just some old scar tissue.

What did they do to you?

It's nothing.

Jesus, man, the fry-cook says, his voice rising with sudden and surprising desperation, his eyes shining feverishly. What did they do to you?

Duncan stops eating and looks at the two of them, Joshua and the fry cook staring at each other. Joshua has yet to take a shower and chalk marl, throw-off from the tunnel's muck cars and conveyors, streaks his skin, turning him pale. The fry cook breathes deeply, his mouth partly agape, and then he nods. I know it, man. Don't I know it, and he touches Joshua briefly upon the hand in which Joshua holds his egg-smeared knife, so that Joshua looks down at his hand as if something had been burnt upon it, and then the fry cook turns back to the grill. From his shoulder blades Duncan sees two stumps pressed against his soiled vest. At the neck of his vest and on the backs of his arms, whitish gray feathers pressed flat quiver as he turns meat with a spatula and then scrapes at the blackened slivers stuck to the grill, and curl slowly into themselves like dark, loam-black worms.

Joshua stirs sugar into his third cup of coffee and says: Didn't you like it there?

Where? says the fry cook.

With the heavenly chorus, man. Close to God.

Of course I did.

Then why did you clip your wings? Why stay here?

Duncan stares at the cook's back as he scrapes the grill, as he pushes hash and home fries across the metal surface and through the grease and at those bulging stumps, which jerk and flex with his movements—the amputated nubs of musculature and tendon straining to push through his undershirt.

I had to, he says. Every day here brings me closer to Him. Soon … soon I'll be able to go back.

Duncan swallows a forkful of omelet and washes it down with milk. What if your wings never grow back right? he asks.

The fry cook looks at him and then slowly turns back to the grill and goes to work vigorously scraping at the hardened meat bits with his spatula.

Go back, Joshua says. Go back, man. Shit, what are you waiting for?

The fry cook bangs the spatula down upon the grill. Dammit, don't you think I'd go back if I could? Do you think I want to be here? I'm sick of this shithole!

He stares at them, goggle-eyed, fevered and pale as a fish strewn upon a beach, its undersides bared and steaming in the hot sun, then at the rain sweeping relentlessly across the glass, the wind seeming to bow the glass inward; the window frames groaning as if they might shatter. He takes a deep breath and exhales. After a moment: How are your eggs?

I've had worse, Joshua says.

Overcooked?

Overcooked.