This Magnificent Desolation Read online

  Chapter 2

  In the beginning, Duncan remembers the sense of cold, so strong it stilled his breath, made him feel as if a great weight were constricting his limbs and pressing upon his chest, and amidst this intense cold there was a brilliant white flash of light, stars exploding supernovae, and then falling collapsing, turning in upon themselves; and God’s voice calling to him and so much pain and longing and Duncan—not knowing what those things meant then and having no way to say what he felt—just crying, bawling, his lungs filling with the raw, harsh air that seemed to seize in his throat, and nothing to see but blinding white light.

  His mother was sitting with her knees up and apart and the room was dark about them. Through a haze of ice and mist, flickering lights swayed back and forth and Duncan was stuck between his mother’s thighs, halfway out and halfway between this world and some other. She bent herself forward so that they were looking at each other for the first time; he could just see her there high above him, so very pale, and suddenly he was calm. His mother gritted her teeth; a purple vein pulsed at her temple. He wonders how he looked to her then: calm or complacent or petulant perhaps, a stubborn little thing refusing to budge and not offering help of any kind.

  Breathe! Someone hollered and pleaded. You must breathe!

  He stared into her eyes and they were filled with pain. Fine red cobwebs of broken capillaries shot through her eyes like inkblots. Red hair lay frozen in sharp-looking crystalline angles to her head. Her body shook and her jaws trembled. Her face, drained of all color, seemed to glisten and shine. In the darkness someone shouted something about his failing heartbeat, and only then, finally, did his mother at last breathe—a great bellowing, spittle-filled cry that steamed the air before them: Son of a Bitch!

  Swaddled in a receiving blanket, Duncan watched in the darkness as they sewed her up. She went into shock as they worked on her, and as someone scrambled to plunge a hypodermic into her shuddering thigh, she turned to look at him one last time before her eyes rolled back in her head.

  Duncan watched and listened without a voice, and although he couldn’t speak, he knew it was God who had spoken to him at the first moment of his birth, just as he knew it was God’s light and music he had been born from, and now—the cold, so very cold, and the dark and his mother’s ashen blue, pain-washed face.

  Brother Canice says it was all a dream, he couldn’t possibly remember being born, that Duncan and his mother never saw each other—such a thing was impossible—and even if he could or had, God certainly didn’t speak to him. Duncan reminds him that he’s special, they all tell him he’s special because he was born the night of the storm, and Brother Canice looks at the ceiling and far away, as if he’s listening to the children tossing and struggling and moaning in their dreamsleep against the parents who abandoned them here and their anguish like the caterwaul of distant animals, and says slowly, Oh, Duncan, you’re special all right.

  Perhaps Brother Canice was right. Perhaps it was all a dream. But that is all Duncan remembers: cold and light and pain and God’s voice calling to him, the peace he felt looking upon his mother’s face even amidst her terrible struggle, and then something akin to sleepwalking for a long, long time.

  Then into this constantly shifting gray—with the sense of things half formed and a brief flickering awareness always dimming into shadow—comes music: the faint, distant sound of an old transistor radio and Elvis Presley singing “Blue Moon.” And it is raining. Duncan listens to the sound of raindrops tap-tap-tapping glass. Light trembles and shudders upon a far wall, and the shadow of rain trickles down the paint.

  He is in a large room that smells slightly of disinfectant, a room that he would later learn the Brothers called the pellegrinaro, or sick room: dark wide-board floors burnished brown and gold with patterns of wear upon which moribund light briefly shimmers as if passing through a bowl of murky water; brightly colored frescoes adorning the walls and showing a narrative of some kind: robed figures journeying though pastureland amidst slanting sunlight, huddled men and women clinging to one another beneath tempestuous black clouds, all leading toward a far hill, where three crucifixes rise in stark silhouette. The image presses at his eyes to rise also, and he cranes his neck toward the ceiling, which, some thirty feet above, curves into a pinioned, gilt dome, bordered by elaborate filigree: a fiery ring in which the faces of the saints and martyrs, in bas-relief, stare down at him.

  Panicked, he tries to follow the sound of Elvis’s voice, for, with his song, there comes peace and a sense of the divine. The transistor radio momentarily crackles and then its sound reverberates, haunting and thin, as if it were traveling the length of some tiled hallway between distant rooms.

  He listens to Elvis’s fragile, high, crooning voice and for a moment he closes his eyes and lets the sense of it fill him. If there had been a memory in his head of something other, a thought, or dream, he should have fled there and hid, but there was nothing. Nothing he could evoke and nothing in which he might find comfort besides the sound of Elvis.

  A small, wizened old man with a large, almost perfectly rounded skull sits with his eyes closed in a chair opposite him, tapping a white walking stick on the floor in time to the music—or perhaps he is listening to another song, some other music somewhere else, deep inside his head, but it doesn’t matter, because there is a big smile on his face and Duncan feels his face and realizes that he is smiling as well. Tall, leaded windows are open to the outside and the smell and sounds of the day drift in; Duncan can hear children laughing and shouting in play, and rainwater hissing through trees. He blinks rapidly and then a girl is standing before him, staring intently.

  She is tall and pale and has long dark hair that she repeatedly pushes from her face and from her large, serious brown eyes. She is wearing a blue-and-yellow-flowered dress that seems much too small for her, with the hem resting on her thighs, and a soft-looking velvet belt pinching the material tightly about her waist. She leans forward, hands upon white kneecaps, chin thrust out, and regards him intently.

  You’re awake, she says and raises both hands off her knees. Finally!

  Hello, the girl says, extending a narrow hand. My name’s Julie.

  Duncan remains still; he doesn’t know what to do. Finally, Julie lifts his hand from the chair, places it in her own, and pumps it vigorously.

  Julie can talk, and she talks in volumes. She tells Duncan that he’s been asleep for a long time—she seems to be the only one able to perceive that he was asleep—as long as she’s been here, she says, which is a long, long time. My mother dropped me off here when I was a baby, she says. She was a famous actress.

  Julie stares intently at his face, her brown eyes searching his mouth, his forehead, and hairline, and lastly his eyes, for something—a defect perhaps?

  She touches his hand. It’s okay, she says. We’re harmless. Her fingers are cool and reassuring and tender. Gradually, Duncan loosens his grip upon the armrests.

  How old are you? he asks, and his voice sounds strange to his ears—immense and cavernous. It’s as if he has bellowed the words, but the girl doesn’t hear him, and he must repeat himself. She leans forward and there is the scent of her hair and the rustle of her clothes as she moves.

  The same age as you, Julie says. I’m ten.

  And that, that’s Billy Bowen, she whispers, and then kicks the old man’s stick with her shoe. Hey, Billy, she says. Hey.

  Billy opens his eyes and they are large ovals, the dark blue irises occupying all. Billy, Julie tells Duncan, is a nine-year-old boy trapped in the body of an eighty-year-old man—he suffers from the rare disease progeria—and Duncan stares at him and Billy shrugs. It’s okay, he says, I’m meant to do something special. This is just my disguise.

  Julie pats his knee. Yes, she says, her brow furrowed and her lips pursed with conviction. It’s a good disguise, Billy.

  The notes of Elvis’s “Blue Moon” are fading again, and in the song’s echo and reverb there is a tremulous, hesitant qu
ality that makes Duncan pause. And then the song ends and there is silence, and in that silence Duncan wonders if he has merely imagined the song. A delicate wind sighs in the crooked alleys above the windows, and there is a soft slapping sound of sandals on wet concrete outside. A crystalline metal peal breaks the silence: a bell tolling the hour. The sound is oddly familiar, and, with Elvis gone, he finds a strange comfort in that.

  I think I’m supposed to do something special too, Duncan says, and Billy smiles at him.

  You’ll need a disguise, he says.

  Chapter 3

  You could see the Home for miles. It rose upon a hill between farmed valleys and the mining range and looked as if it did not belong to that part of the Midwest at all but rather as if it were a dwelling from Western Europe or Britain of five hundred years before, with its chevet and buttressed bell tower, its Romanesque archways and gilt-roofed chapels, beehive oratories and Cistercian-Gothic chancellery. Turning your gaze east and west on that Thule hillside, in the brisk autumn air, you see the landscape of the Home and of the Minnesota plains: the sweep of terrace and playing field, the perimeter wall with its red bricks glowing as if heated by flame, and, beyond the wall, the farms and rugose hills and highlands of coniferous forests and the far, wide crown of the Iron Range; the red peaks of dairy farms, of galvanized sheet-metal grain silos sparking silver; wooded uplands, fat white clouds blurring and breaking apart in the blustery twilit pewter-blue sky.

  The immensity of the land gathered you in and pressed you toward the monastery’s stone walls, covered with hanging ivy whose leaves were a warm burnt orange, curved wide and open at their ends to receive you like welcome arms into the shelter of its mortared and gardened depths. Its halls and courtyards and prayer rooms held the memory and the ghosts of the dead: influenza patients from World War I, and, from later, those with tuberculosis, and later still, mad young men returned home with arms and limbs and minds missing, left behind in parts of Europe and Africa and Asia. Day after day and night after night, amidst the constant low hum of prayer, Duncan can still hear the ghostly echo of these men and their wide-mouthed screams filled with the nightmare of war.

  To the Capuchins who ran it, the abbey was known as the Blessed House of Gray Fathers of Mercy. To the children, it was simply the Home, for it was all they knew. The Home held their lives, their bodies and their souls, in its care. They were the children of God, and nothing but nothing could touch them there in that place, not if they were good. God would not let it. Father Toibin used to tell them this, remind them that if they trusted in God and had faith, then they would always be safe, no matter what else had befallen them.

  Duncan’s dormitory leads off the main hallway on the second floor of the east eave of the Home. It is a small room with eight metal beds—four on either side—and damp: the wallpaper has come away from the wall at the seams and at the top of the ceiling and along the baseboards. The plaster beneath is gray and dark with moisture; in places it is swollen or chalky and soft where it has begun to crumble.

  From outside comes the sound of children running upon the flagstones, and laughter. A faint red band of refracted light shimmers like a stain upon the ceiling. Cautiously, Duncan climbs from the bed and peers out the window. A fine latticework of ice frosts the glass like a shattered prism; he scrapes at the ice and, through the fog-bloom of his breath, looks out across the valley. The sun is sinking toward the prairie and there is a thickening of reddish light as everything becomes compressed into that low space above the horizon.

  With his face pressed against the cold glass, he continues to stare out at the strange landscape that surrounds him and at the dark walkway that stretches across the courtyard to the chapel. The bell for supper sounds, and a Brother begins to light the lamps throughout the cloister. The lamps on the walkway have yet to be lit, and children are dark shapes passing before slanting bars of amber light cast from the chapel’s high arched windows. As they move toward the doors of the dining hall and kitchen, their footfalls clatter upon the stone and their laughter resonates in the chill air—a sound that both scares Duncan and makes him wish that he were one of them.

  An hour before sunrise the Brothers stir for Lauds and in the kitchen firewood wheezes and splinters apart in the cast-iron stove. Through its grill Duncan sees twisting flames, sparks of cinder, and the severed stumps, chopped by an ax. From the campanile, Brother Canice tolls the morning bells, and slowly the children emerge from their rooms. One moment the kitchen table is empty of people and then, suddenly, everyone is sitting around it, thumping, scraping chairs, wielding spoons, and, in great shoveling motions, loudly slurping porridge.

  And the bells continue to peal, maddeningly, crazily, and Duncan can see Brother Canice beneath the belfry, his wide head and heavy limbs, the great weight of him jumping upon the cottonstave ropes, throwing himself up and down and back and forth against the walls of the bell tower, heaving the bells up and down, and swaying frantically, desperately, from the rope’s end, as if, with the effort, he is trying to extinguish something corrupt within himself.

  The Brothers stand by the hot stoves in rolled-up sleeves, their white aprons stained with meat juice and offal. A novitiate stirs the contents of a pot over an iron trivet. Another pulls loaves of bread from the oven. There is the steam of cooking, the sounds of clattering pots, scraping plates, and dropped cutlery. One of the Brothers turns on a radio to The Gardening Hour, raises the volume over the clanging bells. Old Father Wilhelm trudges slowly through the room to the Great Hall and smiles blearily at the children, as if he has momentarily forgotten who they are and where he is.

  Weak rain dribbles down the windowpanes, and two frail light-bulbs hang bare from frayed electric cords sprouting from the cracked plaster ceiling. Sheeting gray upon the wide transom glass, in greater and greater billows, the rain bends and warps the view of the landscape beyond. Duncan shivers and pushes the bowl across the ragged wood. Then he thinks of the hours before supper, the day stretching in such a determinate and yet seemingly endless manner before night, and pulls the bowl back to him. Julie looks up from her own bowl and smiles. Billy nods; his cane taps the floor like the meter of a clock counting the slow minutes of these days.

  After breakfast Duncan stands along the stone wall at the rear of the chapel, stomps his worn Sorel boots against the frozen gravel to warm his toes, presses his mittens tightly against his ears, and watches the other children in the yard at play. Then his attention shifts toward the horizon and the pastureland upon the plain that, in undulating valleys, gradually rises toward the hardwood forests of the north and the Iron Range. Turning away from the other children, he journeys the boundaries of the Home, the walls and enclosed gardens, the arbors and the frozen pond with its dusting of snow, upon which he can make out the tracks of a small animal. He walks the grounds and everything seems oddly familiar—it’s as if he has been here before in a dream of falling snow and fire.

  Later, when he tells Father Tobin of what he sees and hears and feels, Father Tobin will smile and place his hand upon Duncan’s chest and Duncan will feel the weight of the hand, callused and hard from years of field labor, against his heart.

  But Duncan, he will say, you already know what that is. It is God in everything around you. It’s what you’ve said from the very beginning. It is God talking to you.

  And Duncan will laugh inside because Father Tobin understands and because Father Tobin must hear God in his world also, and in these moments it is not so important that he can not always make sense of the words but only that they are.

  Chapter 4

  Dr. Mathias is a tall, wiry, shortsighted man; he wears round, thick spectacles that make his eyes seem watery and small, yet when he removes his spectacles, his eyes are voluminous and startled. In occupying so much of his lean, badly shaven face, his eyes seem to take in the entirety of the room as they scan the space before them blindly. There is desperation in those eyes, a panic that Duncan feels he knows, full with the sense of being abando
ned and lost and unsure of oneself. Then he returns his spectacles to the bridge of his nose and his eyes recede and float in the dark and murky waters of those thick lenses as he adjusts himself in his seat, his hand pulling at the crotch of his trousers, and regards Duncan from some great, unimpassioned distance.

  I wasn’t here, Duncan says to him.

  They’re sitting in Dr. Mathias’s office in the dormer that encircles the prayer room. Like all the rooms on the exterior of the Home, it looks out upon the grounds, and beyond, the rolling green pastureland of Thule and Stockholdt. The light and the scented air are dizzying. Duncan feels as if he could sleep.

  Of course you were here, Dr. Mathias says. You’ve been withdrawn for quite some time, I’ll grant you, but you’ve been here, mind and body. I’ve seen you twice a week for as long as I can remember. I’ve spoken with you. I’ve seen you playing with other children about the monastery.

  You have to realize, Duncan, that you and so many of the other children here have been dealt a terrible blow. The absence or loss of a parent creates a hole inside us—just as all loss does—that we find all different ways to fill, but we can never fill it fully. And what is left are the echoes of that trauma. Never mind the trauma you experienced when you first arrived as a baby suffering from sever hypothermia, the night of the storm. You may have experienced a simple psychogenic amnesia that is common among children who have suffered some type of trauma, and very common to children of an orphanage. Dr. Mathias slaps his hands upon his knees, where his corduroy pants have worn to a shine, as if they have reached some kind of agreement, and says, But you’ve definitely been here, Duncan.

  Duncan doesn’t reply. Instead he focuses on the physical world about him, those things that remind him God is close by: the ribbed stone archways, the steeples, and buttresses of the monastery; the stained rosette glass above the chancel; rain misting the glass and pooling upon the bowed stone; the clatter of the Brothers’ sandals in the stairwells, and the thrum of prayer that resonates like a slow, steady wing-beat in the cloister’s walkways from the oratories and chapel.