At the tunnel site great excavators and cranes with hydraulic hammers prepare the way for the tunnel crews, and while they shore slurry and silt, set piles for cement and iron forms that will hold back the sea, the tunnelers are allowed a reprieve. It is a warm day in early spring, two weeks after the latest blackout, and the men sit on the slope of President’s Hill, overlooking the construction, dozing or eating their lunches, smoking and talking with one another. A cool breeze blows in off the water, pushing at the grass, bringing goose bumps up on their skin, and with it the pungent low-tide smell of the excavations and further the black bilge and sulfur from the old tanneries across the bay in Oakland.
Joshua sits, smoking a cigarette, beside Sully, John Chang, Javier, Minkivitz, and Minkivitz’s younger brother, Jamie; he focuses on the physical sensation of inhaling and exhaling and the burn of the cigarette in his throat, the smoke streaming through his mouth and nostrils. The insides of his eyelids are turned red by the sun and crazy, elliptical shapes bounce and tremble there and in their center, small static dots like the snow upon a television screen when programming has ended. The sound of the heavy cranes dropping their hammers into the piles booms across the bay. Like the footfalls of the colossal prehistoric beasts of the Cretaceous, whose remains they had found buried in the shale and silt at the bottom of the sea.
You know, we build on major fault in the earth here, Javier says. Right on the very top of it! Through the ground Joshua feels the slight tremors from Javier’s agitation, and he opens his eyes. Javier is rabidly chewing on his sandwich, his cheeks bulging and his Adam’s apple working up and down, and as soon as his mouth is clear he begins speaking rapidly again, wags a finger at the bay: Right here, man. Right fucking here.
Jamie stares at Javier. Jamie is as pale as porcelain, with small ears, like those of a young boy’s, protruding from the sides of his oval face. Blue veins show beneath the skin below his eyes. His brother, Charlie Minkivitz, the foreman on the job, slurps loudly from a plastic bowl of soup. Every few moments he pauses and glances at his younger brother.
Javy, man, Joshua says, there’s major faults everywhere in San Francisco. Calm down.
Yes, yes, of course, but—and now Javier is nodding his head passionately—but no one builds directly over them like we do!
Listen. If there’s a quake, we’re in the safest spot in the city.
This is true?
Sure, that’s why we’re building the tunnel beneath the water. It’s safer down there and stronger than any bridge. When the next one hits, I either want to be down there with you or else on the Transbay.
Minkivitz looks up from his soup again, thick lips pursed and wet. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and then chortles. Whoo, boy, that’s a good one. We have the chance to die a hundred times a hundred different ways before this dig is ever complete and he’s telling you it’s safe being underground. What you think he knows, Javy? You think he went to goddamn Stanford or something?
Harvard, Joshua says, and draws from his cigarette. He rolls his shoulders and stretches into the sun. His back creaks loudly and something—a tendon or ligament—sounds in his neck. The muscles spasm and then relax and Joshua winces.
Wha?
I went to Harvard, Minkie.
Bullshit. Can you believe this guy? Can you believe him? Went to Harvard, he says. A nigger in Harvard! Bullshit, I say. You’re a fucking liar.
And Joshua, looking at Minkivitz’s puckered face, begins to laugh, a belly laugh that shakes his whole body, that leaves him weak, muscles trembling and jittery. He wipes at his eyes, and when he is done, he looks toward Minkivitz, shrugs at Javier, and then stares out over the bay with a serene wide smile on his face.
Jamie clambers awkwardly to his feet, as if he has suddenly lost his equilibrium, as if he is walking the bow of a ship cresting a great swell at sea. He moves farther down the hill and, after a moment, they hear the sound of retching. Joshua, Javier, and Minkivitz stare after him: the silhouette of a tall narrow figure doubled over upon the scaffolded embankment, swaying uneasily as he stands, and then bending to retch again.
What’s the matter with your brother, che?
Minkivitz continues to stare after him—they all do. Finally: He doesn’t like the work, he says. The tunnel—he’s not cut out for it. Says he keeps hearing and seeing things in the dark. I should never have brought him on; he’s too young.
Maybe it’s the bends? Javier says. Site managers from Bextel and Sonoyama International have been rushing the men through the compression chambers more and more often as the tunnel falls behind schedule—in the last week alone the superintendent has cut the time at each stage by five minutes. He says: I know a man once who had the bends and he used talk to his dead mother. Always puking too. He bleed from the eyes and think he’s Jesus. He went crazy, y’know? I think we all go crazy down there.
What types of things is Jamie seeing? Joshua asks.
I don’t know. I don’t ask. Why the hell would I? You listen to too much of that kind of crap and it’ll drive you nuts. He shrugs angrily.
A moment passes and Minkivitz shakes his head and swears: Fuck! Angels. That’s what he says. He’s seeing fucking angels everywhere. Minkivitz exhales loudly through his nostrils, as if he is trying to contain some great, inexpressible frustration and sadness. Joshua is aware of his chest rising and falling and the silence that has fallen over the three of them and over the hill upon which they’re sitting.
Our father passed away when Jamie was young, Minkivitz says. I asked the super to make him go get a medical, y’know, see a shrink.
Joshua and Javier nod. Everyone in Local 223 knows that the Minkivitzes’ father committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge when they were boys.
Above, gray, swirling clouds move in a twisting gyre over the middle of the water, seeming to turn in concentric circles and then, at the bottommost turn of the screw, seeming to turn fully in upon themselves, and then to churn backward, as the gyre rises once more, moving upward into the dense thunderheads, which seem to have suddenly swept in from the sea, and above these, so high they must crane their necks, an icy white cloud has expanded and spread, pressed against the bottom of the stratosphere until it has flattened into an anvil.
Well, friend, Javier mutters, glancing up at the clouds nervously and putting out a tentative hand as small chunks of hail begin to fall. The boy not seem well, that for sure.