This Magnificent Desolation Read Free

again. Julie reminds Duncan that he has no memory and that, in his made-up life, he never knows truth from fiction. Billy shakes his head at the both of them and says they’ve watched Olivia de Havilland in
Whose Baby Are You Now?
one too many times.
    But Duncan’s not so sure. He doesn’t ever remember seeing
Whose Baby Are You Now?

Chapter 2
    In the beginning, Duncan remembers the sense of cold, so strong it stilled his breath, made him feel as if a great weight were constricting his limbs and pressing upon his chest, and amidst this intense cold there was a brilliant white flash of light, stars exploding supernovae, and then falling collapsing, turning in upon themselves; and God’s voice calling to him and so much pain and longing and Duncan—not knowing what those things meant then and having no way to say what he felt—just crying, bawling, his lungs filling with the raw, harsh air that seemed to seize in his throat, and nothing to see but blinding white light.
    His mother was sitting with her knees up and apart and the room was dark about them. Through a haze of ice and mist, flickering lights swayed back and forth and Duncan was stuck between his mother’s thighs, halfway out and halfway between this world and some other. She bent herself forward so that they were looking at each other for the first time; he could just see her there high above him, so very pale,and suddenly he was calm. His mother gritted her teeth; a purple vein pulsed at her temple. He wonders how he looked to her then: calm or complacent or petulant perhaps, a stubborn little thing refusing to budge and not offering help of any kind.
    Breathe! Someone hollered and pleaded. You must breathe!
    He stared into her eyes and they were filled with pain. Fine red cobwebs of broken capillaries shot through her eyes like inkblots. Red hair lay frozen in sharp-looking crystalline angles to her head. Her body shook and her jaws trembled. Her face, drained of all color, seemed to glisten and shine. In the darkness someone shouted something about his failing heartbeat, and only then, finally, did his mother at last breathe—a great bellowing, spittle-filled cry that steamed the air before them: Son of a Bitch!
    Swaddled in a receiving blanket, Duncan watched in the darkness as they sewed her up. She went into shock as they worked on her, and as someone scrambled to plunge a hypodermic into her shuddering thigh, she turned to look at him one last time before her eyes rolled back in her head.
    Duncan watched and listened without a voice, and although he couldn’t speak, he knew it was God who had spoken to him at the first moment of his birth, just as he knew it was God’s light and music he had been born from, and now—the cold, so very cold, and the dark and his mother’s ashen blue, pain-washed face.
    Brother Canice says it was all a dream, he couldn’t possibly remember being born, that Duncan and his mother never saw each other—such a thing was impossible—and even if he could or had, God certainly didn’t speak to him. Duncan reminds him that he’s special, they all tell him he’s special because he was born the night of the storm, and Brother Canice looks at the ceiling and far away, as if he’s listening to the children tossing and struggling and moaning in their dreamsleep against the parents who abandoned them here and theiranguish like the caterwaul of distant animals, and says slowly, Oh, Duncan, you’re special all right.
    Perhaps Brother Canice was right. Perhaps it was all a dream. But that is all Duncan remembers: cold and light and pain and God’s voice calling to him, the peace he felt looking upon his mother’s face even amidst her terrible struggle, and then something akin to sleepwalking for a long, long time.
    Then into this constantly shifting gray—with the sense of things half formed and a brief flickering awareness always dimming into