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.