On the last night that Duncan will ever see Joshua, they leave the Windsor Tap and Joshua rides them down to the wharves and the empty lot overlooking the bay. It’s a full moon and the waters seem to be lit up all the way to the bridge. In the dark places beneath the abutments, a shoal of fish spirals in shining phosphorescence. Joshua slowly smokes a cigarette, silently considers the traffic upon the bridge, the soft murmur of the waves slapping against its distant pylons and coming to them seconds later on the breeze.
Joshua shudders, then undoes his field jacket, empties the pockets into his bandanna, folds it, and places it on the seat of his bike. He drops his jeans, removes his socks, and stands there in his grayed underwear. Duncan looks at him, waiting for him to say what he’s doing.
How long do you think before he comes down, Joshua says, and gestures with his head to the sky and the stars there that have seemed to suddenly emerge one by one.
Collins?
Yeah. Collins, your daddy, all the angels.
Duncan looks instinctively toward the horizon, searching for Cygnus and Andromeda at the height of the autumn sky, the next conjunction of Columbia’s erratic rendezvous with Earth, but the stars all seem a blur tonight and he rubs at his eyes and thinks: A hundred years, it might be a hundred years before the spaceship decays and Collins’s Mylar-encased body falls like a star from its orbit.
I don’t know.
Joshua nods. I keep thinking about Jamie Minkivitz, he says. I keep thinking about Javier and the others … my friends … I can’t seem to stop thinking these days. He sighs, throws his cigarette butt out to the water, puts his long arms wide and something in his back cracks. He rolls his shoulders, stretches his head upon his neck. Too many thoughts, my man. A man isn’t made to think so much.
He sighs. I need to go on a little recon, he says, and when he grins, his teeth flash. I won’t be long. Keep the home fires burning, kiddo. His face looks lean and taut in the gray light, the skin pulled tight over his brow.
What are you doing? Duncan asks, and Joshua pauses and something comes across his face—fear? Confusion? Sadness?—and he reaches for Duncan’s hand and pulls him close. My man, he says, my man. You’re going to be a better man than me, a better man than your father. In a while this will all make sense to you. Just don’t be angry with me, okay? You’ll know that this is what I had to do, you’ll know that. He squeezes Duncan hard and then lets go.
When Joshua turns, shadows play upon his back, and as he walks toward the guardrail, Duncan’s throat tightens: Below large, rounded shoulders his back is scar tissue, the color of blackened meat. Joshua pads down the stones as if they are hard on the soles of his feet, and he might have been a child at the beach about to take a midsummer dip but for the arcs of the halogens, the cars humming over the metal dividers, the empty beer cans lining the wall, the smell of butane and gasoline exhaust, and his wound from the war.
Joshua eases himself over the edge and slips slowly down into the murky black. He begins stroking his way out into the bay: strong, fluid strokes that seem effortless. His skin glistens in the dark waters and then he is almost lost in it. He turns, and for a while floats on his back. He raises a hand and waves and the current carries him farther and farther out. Sound comes on the air, Joshua singing O au o. The lights in Sai Gon are green and red, the lamps in My Tho are bright and dim. O au o. High up and out over the bay cars hiss over the bridge; high-density sodium bulbs glitter along its length. Upon its towers airway beacons flash on and off. A foghorn blows out in the bay and the top of the water bends with shuddering parabolas of silver.
Duncan cups his hands together and shouts his name—Joshua!—once, twice, and a third time, but there is no reply. He climbs over the guardrail, races up and down the embankment, stumbling and slipping on the slick shale, hollering Joshua, Joshua, Joshua, and tears of panic come streaming down his cheeks and still Joshua does not call back to him. The waters lie unbroken but for the sharp black edges of the towers emerging from the strait, as beneath the far bridge everything churns relentlessly toward the Pacific.
On Joshua’s bike seat, wrapped in the center folds of his greasy bandanna, he has left behind the mangled bullet that had been shot through his family’s home in Brighton and six medals. Beneath the halogens, the tarnished metal gleams dully. Only later will Duncan learn that one is the Medal of Honor, one the Distinguished Service Cross, and another the Silver Star, the highest commendations a soldier can be awarded: all for uncommon valor. Another is the Purple Heart. Duncan folds them back into the cloth and holds them tightly in his hands. In Joshua’s field jacket pocket vials of doxepin, prazosin, librium, and diazepam, their seals closed, and the date on the prescription from a month before. When it grows cold, Duncan slides his arms into the jacket and zippers it to his neck so that he is lost in the size of it. He smells engine oil and Brilliantine and Old Spice; he smells Joshua’s tannic sweat.
The constellations turn slowly in their orbits: a satellite flickers at the close edge of space. It’s a full moon and Duncan can see its craters and its rippled hills, almost see where Neil Armstrong’s boot prints remain perfectly preserved, just the same as when he’d first touched its inviolate surface two decades before. On the moon nothing changes. Neil Armstrong is sitting at the bar of the Windsor Tap in his spacesuit, drinking a Budweiser, and Duncan’s father sits next to him, great wings draped over his bowed and bent shoulders and spread on the bar before them and tremoring impotently upon the scarred and burnt wood. Joshua strides barefoot on the moon, and Michael Collins waves from the window of the command module as he passes above the Sea of Tranquility at the perigee of his orbit, but Joshua pays him no mind: He is all alone and far from God. Duncan’s mother, locked in her bedroom, listens to the Magnificat on their Victrola, finishes her bottle of Old Mainline 454, and dreams of a time when she sang like Maria Callas, and somewhere out in the dark, like a spark of dimming light, Elvis sings a halting version of “Blue Moon,” and angels are falling with hundreds of dead astronauts through space and no matter their struggles never any closer to God.
Duncan sits on the bike and watches the moon track across the sky and the light bruise in the east. And still he stares out at the water, waiting. But there is nothing there. Joshua is gone. Dawn comes slowly up over the rooftops of the factory, and when the lights on the bridge wink out, one by one, Duncan walks to the twenty-four-hour diner and calls his mother to come get him and take him home.