We wake at the self-same point of the dream—
All is here begun, and finished elsewhere.
—VICTOR HUGO
He considers suicide, the ending of it, that simple passage to silence. Not as a giving up but as a passing on, in the way of his mother perhaps stepping off the train platform at Northampton Street of the El Orange Line in Boston on a summer evening twenty years before. From where she stood, she would have been able to see into the third-floor windows of the factories, tenements, and apartments that abutted the elevated tracks. Perhaps she stared briefly at the families who lived there—a woman smiling as she watched a child moving a fire engine–red car across a shag carpet in the center of the room—and perhaps his mother briefly considered him and his sister before she stepped forward. A passing on in the way of that angel lifting him up somewhere that he can’t yet envision, but perhaps that “seeing” is part of the journey. He thinks of Javier and Minkie and John Chang and of water rushing into the tunnel and of loam and shale and marl filling their mouths and he thinks of the others drowned beneath the bay and wonders where all their souls are now, whether they are looking down on him or not, and he longs to have been with them when they died.
Jo Stafford’s “There’s a Kind of Hush (All Over the World)” plays through the bar’s radio and Clay turns it up, so it becomes loud and tinny, the words and vocals stretching and distorting across the wide space of the empty bar flickering with Christmas lights: There’s a kind of hush all over the world tonight, all over the world you can hear the sounds of lovers in love. You know what I mean. Just the two of us and nobody else in sight, there’s nobody else and I’m feeling good just holding you tight. It’s the USO performers station that Clay closes the night with. Tonight it’s being broadcast from East Germany. Soon the show will end and they’ll play the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but the soldiers in the bar will already be gone.
Maggie leans her head on Joshua’s shoulder and each seems to take the weight of the other and they lean and rock to the music, but the tempo is much too fast, the horns punchy and upbeat, and Duncan imagines the bandleader snapping his fingers, and keeping pace with the song seems to exhaust his mother and Joshua, until finally they give up and adopt their own rhythm, turning slowly, decrepitly, on the dance floor. Mother’s eyes are closed. Mascara stains her eyelids and upper cheeks black. When she opens her eyes—the shocking whites of them gleaming out of those streaks of black—she stares at him and through him and he knows that she is crying.
The bar is empty now but for them and Clay pulls the mop and wash bucket from the closet and wheels it to the toilets, the plastic cast rollers squeaking across the burnished parquet. He props the bathroom door open and Duncan hears him stop, then curse—Dirty fuckers!—and begin banging with the mop around the urinals and against the stalls of the toilets, and the smell of ammonia seeps from the bathroom and out into the bar and fills Duncan’s mouth and the back of his throat. He strains to hear Jo Stafford’s voice, So listen very carefully, closer now, and you will see what I mean it isn’t a dream. The only sound that you will hear is when I whisper in your ear, I love you, I love you forever and ever, and he sips from his bottle of Coke and forces himself to smile as Mother and Joshua continue to turn around and around and around and the night’s cigarette smoke floats down from the ceiling now that Clay has turned off the fans and like a thin greasy haze settles upon the bar and the branches of the armed forces flags.
Clay swears and bangs his mop in a frenzy, against the stall walls and pipes, around the urinals and toilets, pushing the piss and puke spilled onto the floor into the gutters and drains, as if it is a job with no end, and the radio continues to play amidst the bar’s flickering, pulsing Christmas lights, There’s a kind of hush all over the world tonight, all over the world you can hear the sounds of people in love. The swinging sounds of people in love, and Clay hollering all the while: Goddamn, you dirty fuckers, God damn you!