This Magnificent Desolation (33 page)

He knows that he is going to die but does not feel peace in this, no strange comfort calms him, rather he feels rage and incredible fear, and the longer he must wait to die and see the bay emerging fully before him, the more this fear increases, and he begins to wail and cry. Tears force their way from his eyes and freeze on his cheeks. Snowflakes swirl in brief, random orbits down from the sky and he raises his face to them as he falls, feels them melting slowly on his skin. The air is sharp and crystalline and the moon so bright that he is momentarily blinded.

For a moment it feels as if he has slowed again, and things come much clearly into focus; everything appears incredibly sharp and distinct, as if a veil had been lifted from his eyes. Below him now the lights of San Francisco, in dazzling, wind-blurred heliographic quadrants, the flashing red warning beacons atop the Golden Gate Bridge, to the cars, minute streamers of white and amber lights, and the water, a serrated silver and gray, which when he strikes will be as hard as concrete.

There is so little time, he knows, and he wants to hold on to something, something that he can hold to his heart, some happy memory, of his life, of his family, of his loved ones, but all he can think of is the fear that very soon he will be dead and he is powerless to prevent it.

The water looks like fractured glass, hard and sharp and unforgiving. Once he strikes it, whatever is left of him will be swallowed up and carried out to sea on the wake of the barges humping slowly through the sound. But there will probably be very little of him left. Small whitecaps stir the tops of waves as freighters and tugs pass beneath the bridge's massive pylons and cables.

He stopped struggling long ago and gave himself over to the talonlike hands that had carried him ever upward, and when they were rising through the clouds and he was looking into its wind-sheared face, he knew that it was hopeless to argue, or plead, or fight any longer. Now he opens his mouth to say something, a prayer perhaps, or to call out to his mother or father or brother—perhaps it is a name—and his lungs fill up with rich, briny air so cold and clear it is as if he is drinking it, gulping it down, and then he strikes the water and explodes.

San Francisco Chronicle

TUESDAY, APRIL 12, 1985

SAN FRANCISCO—COAST GUARD ID
BODY FOUND IN SF BAY

At about 7:30 a.m., the U.S. Coast Guard recovered the body of James Minkivitz, a worker on the San Padre underwater tunnel project, off Brooks Island. An autopsy conducted Monday found that Minkivitz died from multiple blunt-force injuries, a county deputy coroner said, most likely, from a high fall
onto the rocks. Speculation as to where Minkivitz's fall occurred remains but there is no suspicion of foul play and the cause of death has been pronounced accidental.

Brooks Island Regional Preserve, a 373-acre island off the Richmond inner harbor, is a nesting ground for terns, herons, and egrets. It is also the site of an ancient Indian burial ground, with shell mounds as old as 2,500 years, and lies approximately six miles north of the San Padre underwater tunnel project currently underway and scheduled to be completed in four years.

At the Windsor Tap, Duncan and Joshua play Texas hold 'em, with Clay placing the blind, slapping down another card at their request as he passes back and forth behind the bar. Because they must wait for Clay, it is a slow-moving game and Joshua seems distracted and keeps glancing at the crumpled pages of the
Chronicle
spread upon the bar. Duncan knows he is bored, but, to Duncan, this movement—sluggish and melancholy through the shifting hues, fragments of the day passing outside and filtered through the cubed windows—is immensely pleasing: They are outside time and Duncan can pretend that Joshua's presence is not merely a temporal and transient thing, but something that will last. When these games end, and Duncan cannot explain why, he is often filled with sadness.

As Clay thrumps back and forth behind the bar, Duncan changes his mind repeatedly, and if he pauses in deliberation when Clay returns, Clay does not wait but continues on behind the bar. Duncan is about to say something and then catches himself and Clay shrugs
and is past them, and from somewhere in Joshua's throat comes a raspy, almost undetectable moan. He takes a swig of his beer and glances down the bar toward what's left of the day simmering and coalescing and then fading in the glass. Duncan looks down at his cards.

Jamie, Minkie's brother, Joshua calls to Clay, but Clay has his back to him and doesn't appear to be listening and Joshua continues anyway. They think he committed suicide just like his father.

They say he died jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, that his body floated upriver to fucking Brook's Island—can you fucking believe that? But he didn't hit no rocks. Minkie told me Jamie's insides imploded when he hit water. Means he dropped a long way. A long, long way. Much higher than any bridge.

Duncan considers his cards and what lies beneath Clay's blind. He's not really thinking about what Joshua is saying. There is the tinkling of glass as Clay empties the dishwasher and places the glasses behind the bar.

I mean that's motherfucking bullshit, man. Bullshit!

Duncan looks up. Clay gestures with his hand for Joshua to lower his voice.

That's all right, that's all right, Joshua says and nods. I know what's going on. Fucking bullshit, that's what. He lifts his beer bottle again, and when he's done, his chin glistens wetly.

Angels, he says and laughs emptily. An angel lifted Jamie up miles above the bay and then let him go. That's what happened.

Joshua makes his hands into wings, the touching fingertips of each hand like the apex of two muscled foramen, and, pouting his lips, creates a whooshing sound like bellows as he flaps the wings slowly and raises his arms up, up, up, high above his head, and then holds them there for a moment. A wall-eyed drunk at the far end of the bar holds his cigarette before his mouth and watches mesmerized; Duncan holds his breath and glances at Clay, who seems to be doing the same. And then Joshua lets his hand go. One rigid, calloused finger
drops in a straight line to the bar and slaps the wood violently: a plummeting Jamie Minkivitz turned to pulp upon the surface of the bay.

That's enough! Clay hollers and shakes his head when Joshua stares him down.

Duncan looks at Joshua questioningly. As he waits, there is only the sound of the fan revolving above them and sloughing the smoky air, thrumming so loudly in his ears it is as if hands were squeezing his head. Joshua leans close to him, puts his arm about his shoulders.

I used to think they were good, my man, he says hoarsely. I believed in their goodness. Just like God and Jesus and doing what's right for your country, no questions asked. Don't you see, my man? They're no fucking good—they ain't never been good. It's all shit. They need us for our pain. They fucking thrive on it. It's what keeps them here.

Who, Joshua? Duncan asks, alarmed; he can feel the weight of Joshua's arm tightening across his back. What are you talking about?

When Joshua speaks it is in an urgent whisper: Angels, my man. I'm talking about fucking angels.

In the tunnel beneath the sea Joshua tries to find some manner of peace, peace like he once knew in the jungles of Vietnam, in those rare moments in-country before and sometimes during a nighttime mission when he listened to the jungle breathing about him, felt it moving beneath his skin, his fingertips, vibrating like a tine through his body as he lay prostrate in the dark or as he lay upon his back, staring up at the jungle canopy and the mist through which a scattering of stars sometimes glimmered.

As he labors, his mind becomes vast and empty and the great centrifuge, which so often spins there, whooshing and thumping like a never-ending press, like the giant cranes with their drop hammers bludgeoning the piles into the bay, is suddenly silent. There is only the grunt of physical exertion: the digging, the drilling, the hammering, the shoveling, the excavation of chalk and marl spoil, the hooking and unhooking of electric tow carts, the clearing of the bore face when the giant TBMs go off track or the cutterheads seize, the realignment
of the hydraulic jacks, and the meager interactions with the men who surround him through almost imperceptible nods, glances, and reflexive gestures and movements, an intricate and complex orchestration as one man fills the space of another, changing his role as each new job requires.

This, too, is familiar to him, to the way he worked with the other soldiers in his unit, who although he could rarely see them in the dark, were there with him, waiting and then moving quickly but silently into action, each fulfilling his necessary role. It is the moments before these actions that Joshua tries to hold on to, those moments of peace and the comforting silence he feels in that peace, a peace he must eventually turn toward the great emptiness that spirals inside him, growing ever larger and larger like an abyss into which he is always on the verge of falling.

Above him, above the jungle top, a meteor flares briefly as it arcs the sky and he thinks suddenly of Jamie Minkivitz—it covers the breadth of the world in seconds, hurtling on its journey across the black of space, and he blinks: This is the trajectory and the space that he feels within himself growing ever larger and expansive so that the longer he remains here, the more lost he becomes. It begins to rain, tapping the fat leaves above his head, pooling in their center and then spilling to the ground. He turns on his stomach and slithers deeper into the undergrowth, burying himself in the pulsations of the warm, heaving darkness.

In the darkness it is always Vietnam with its atrocities again, always the past, his father's brutality, his mother's leaving and her death; the way she looked at him once as his father struck her and called out his name and he turned away in fear—the darkness created in the space of her absence, of all the absences that now seems to fill him; a darkness that not even the depth of the tunnel, nor all his digging and labor, nor his love for Maggie and Duncan can affect. And gradually, even with his meds, this small manner of peace is no longer enough. He thinks of Jamie Minkivitz and his brother trying
to look after him and keep him safe all the years since their father's death and knows that no matter how much he would want to, he cannot keep Maggie and Duncan safe in this world.

Gradually Joshua loses his sense of temporality: space, distance, and time come to mean nothing. His sense of the world above changes as well, so that in certain moments, when he has passed through the air locks and is ascending from the tunnel, climbing the stairs of the massive ventilation shafts, it feels as if he will never reach the surface, but merely some destination in between, and he pauses in the semi-darkness, peering up and waiting, his breath thumping loudly, amplified in the concrete chamber. He begins to dream of the sky far above him, high above the city: blue sky and startling white cloud; the slow, wide thump of a gull's hover, and in the background, almost a mile distant, up at what seems to be the farthest edge of the sky, the white jet stream of an airplane, its fuselage blinking in the sun, and beyond that, such a vast, impossible emptiness. And silence.

It's late afternoon and the light in the Windsor Tap is smoky, the color of gun metal and ash, filled with hours upon hours of cigarette smoke; Duncan's eyes sting and it's as if a hazy, sheer gauze has been pulled across them—the men in the room sit on their stools or move from the pool tables to the toilets as trembling, gray chimeras moving in and out of darkness, oblivious, it seems, to the smoke.

At the farthest corner of the bar Joshua is licking the edge of a rolling paper, and when Mother sees him, she smiles. Clay waves and, laying his towel on the wood, reaches up to the shelf for Maggie's whiskey. In the dim light it takes Duncan a moment to see Joshua properly as he turns toward them and as his dark face emerges from darker shadow, but the shadows remain and Joshua suddenly seems deformed. One eye is a blood-encrusted slit, the lids swollen and enlarged. Beneath the closed eyelid his eyeball moves back and forth blindly; his long eyelashes flutter.

His good eye stares at them, bright and fierce from shimmering
dark skin. His cheek and the side of his neck look as if he has been struck repeatedly by a mallet, black and purple where the blood has congealed just beneath the skin. Joshua tries to smile but only one side of his mouth seems to be working.

It looks worse than it is, he says slowly, tenderly shaping his lips as if even this small movement hurts. Looking at him, Duncan is amazed that he can talk at all.

Joshua, Maggie begins, but can say no more. She stares at his face, her eyes following the damage along his cheekbones and jaw, the swollen tissue above the ridge of his brow, the splice of skin at the bridge of his nose that exposes the pink and raw skin beneath, and the edge of his mouth where his lips have been torn. Her hands reach out for him, trembling tentatively at either side of his head, wanting to touch him and afraid to—his face looks bloated and swollen with blood—and then her hands fall back to her sides.

Really, Maggie. The VA patched me up. I've got cotton in my mouth. It makes it look much worse.

Joshua reaches into his mouth and pulls out, one after the other, four dark, blood-soaked cotton balls, and throws them into the trash barrel behind the bar: The cotton matting slaps the plastic bag wetly, and leaves behind black smears at the top of the barrel's insides.

He runs his tongue about the insides of his mouth, spits brown, rust-colored saliva into an empty glass at his side, and takes a large swig from his beer bottle. The lacquered bar top glows faintly. At the back of the bar, above the cash register where the flies congregate, the motor of a yellowed and greasy electric sign for Dockyard Ale drones as it unfolds and loops a rolling holographic picture of a waterfall cascading down a mountaintop into a shimmering blue pool. Joshua's rolled cigarette sits wrinkled and fat on the wood, twitching slightly from the tapping of his fingertips to some melody sounding in his head.