On the midnight tunnel shift, amidst the grind and bore of the TBMs and the pumping of the compressors and hydraulic jacks and the clatter of the conveyers carrying shale and spoil through the tunnel to the surface, comes a frantic hissing sound, and the men pause in their labors, listening to the escape of compressed air. A moment later a section of the south tunnel collapses and the sea rushes in. It comes with such force and speed that the men are swept along by it. P.J. Rollins and John Chang are shattered against the tunnel walls, Joe “Sully” Sullivan and Billy Gillepsie are hurled like human darts and pinioned misshapenly into small crevices and air ducts, and others are sucked into impossible shapes back through the breach and upward into the mud at the bottom of the bay.
The bodies are found slowly. At first twelve men and then no more after a week of digging and dredging. Another body, in an advanced state of decomposition and absent its head, is recovered on June 20.
The last five workers, Minkivitz and Jimmy Paterniti among them, are finally found huddled together in the north tunnel on June 23. Their clothes are mostly rotted away and their bones gleam as if some solvent had been rubbed across them—where Minkivitz’s left eye had been a decaying fish hung limply, as if it had been caught there, wriggling out of the eye socket, when the water receded.
On June 27 the final human remains are recovered: It is the missing head, submerged in silt and slurry, and like the artifacts the tunnelers have, over time, pulled from the floor of the bay, it remains strangely preserved, so they are finally able to give one man his name: Javier Lopes.
Joshua is not among the dead. He is at home in bed, bathed in morning sunlight, with Duncan sitting upon the edge of the mattress spooning cereal in a bowl, when they receive the news, the damp washcloth that moments before he’d held to his bloodied eyes lying upon the sheets and wrung tightly in his hand, as he watches the television replay images from the semi-darkness before dawn, of helicopters hovering above the water, divers emerging and submerging like glistening seals in the wide oval wakes created by the helicopters’ propeller, and flashing harbor rescue craft cutting wider and wider silver swathes upon the surface. Duncan looks at the screen and then to Joshua and then Maggie comes and quickly ushers Duncan from the room.
From Maggie’s bedroom Joshua stares out toward the bay’s perfectly flat surface, glittering with reflected sunlight, its calm undisturbed by the churning violence of the night before. Who would know that thirty men had lost their lives two hundred feet below its gray water? Cars are passing as ever over the bridge; pedestrians are laughing, their voices sounding all the more distinct on the late-summer air; workers are making their way from the Edison plant and the rail yards; and his mind rails against the sickeningly strange normalcy of it all, as in the days when he first returned from Vietnam and, he realizes, all the days since. He is floating, flying numbly above it all. He gazes down at the destruction below him as strong, talonlike hands carry him upward, and he thinks of Javier, Sully, Chang, P.J., Gillepsie, and their foreman, Charlie Minkivitz. He closes his eyes as he imagines how Jamie Minkivitz must have felt at the end, and there is a tightness in his shoulders and chest more painful than the many beatings he has taken or the wounds he received in the war, and he is powerless before it. He opens his eyes and stares desperately at everything about him, and attempts to see, to really see for the first time in over a decade, and to make sense of it all. Yet the act of it engulfs him and overwhelms him. Tears come to his eyes as he remains silent, unmoving, and stares at the heaving view of the sea beyond the bedroom window where nothing and everything has utterly changed, and he can smell the smell of it upon him still, stuck to him, a skin-deep, mucky putrescent sea smell that when he inhales makes his stomach roil. He begins to gag and retch and puts a hand to his mouth to stop the vomit from spilling onto the floor.