Ariel's Crossing (6 page)

She pictured herself setting out pencils and smoothing flat the sheet of heavy paper on her homework table. Her cat, a Russian blue named Buddha, arched his back on the windowsill, then chattered at the wretched pigeons huddled together, shivering in their shabby feathers on a ledge across the street. She pictured her young face, tongue caught at the corner of her mouth, as she began her drawing of ornate granite pediments, eyes glancing up, focusing, down, re-focusing. She couldn’t resist adding one of those poor birds, beak tucked into its breast against the storm. Knowing her teacher would disapprove, she remembered adding another, a companion. Then others, pigeons with impromptu feathers and plump breasts, stroked with her quickening pencil. The building started to disappear beneath its growing menagerie of pigeons, but the birds were there, weren’t they, clinging to the narrow ledge, part of the personality of the facade? This was faith, wasn’t it? A faithful interpretation of the building out her window.

Ironic that just this year she’d had that drawing framed as a reminder of unassuming rebelliousness. Whenever she looked at it hung on her adult wall, she could clearly hear the teacher’s chiding voice—she’d been right to assume it wouldn’t meet with approval—dismissing the girl’s shy if precocious contention that birds gave the sketch relative scale.

What exquisite dissidence, she thought. A quality her parents had always cultivated rather than censured. Something precious she wanted never to lose. Something more useful now than ever.

She resurrected with equal ease Brice’s own rebellious nature. For one, his refusal to celebrate Christmas.

—Look at this, calling her over to that same childhood window. —Look at them down there dragging home their dead Christmas trees. It’s delusional.

—Delusional, Ariel mugged.

—You know why Santa’s suit is red? Because the Coca-Cola advertising department decided sixty, seventy years ago that red matched the color of their product logo during holiday ad campaigns.

Another myth smashed to smithereens. She nodded.

—Isn’t a pine tree better off in the woods than propped up in somebody’s apartment and gaudied with mountains of tinsel and goofy ornaments?

She didn’t disagree then or even lately, nor did she complain about working side by side with her parents in the soup kitchens over the holidays. Charity volunteering was still trademark Ariel come December. A familiar way of shirking society even as she contributed to its unfortunates.

Not a bad life. She remembered her beloved little Buddha, as alleywise as any cat from the animal shelter over in Kip’s Bay Remembered her bedroom wall shelved with books, many of them twice read, thrice—some children’s books but mostly history and science, novels and poetry, biographies of Mary Shelley and Madame Curie and Harry Truman (whom her grandfather once met). As the older Ariel gazed back at herself, she framed what she saw much the same way she’d framed that drawing of transgressive birds. With an eye toward making the past inspire the present.

Brice had never been less than a complete father. How could she even consider another? Those Christmas revelers bearing trees years ago down the snowy streets were gone, never to be seen again. Her foundling cat lay buried under a stone cairn in the yard of their upstate farmhouse. Some things you didn’t miss, others you would always miss. Either way, your story went on with or without your consent. As an only child, hadn’t she always been furnished with a generous private imagination and felt sufficiently nourished by her books, her drawings and penciled stories, her friendship with her parents, that she rarely if ever perceived her life as defective in any way? Damned if it was any different now.

The boys had left and taken their toy boat with them. She awakened as if from a dream. The evening breeze was scented with new flowers and, she could swear, the bay brine of tidal rivers. She carried Kip’s ledger and envelope back to her East Village apartment and found a box in which to store them. Tying the bundle with dental floss—wasteful, but she had no string in the house and was driven by a deeper urgency to finish its entombment than she cared to contemplate—she placed it behind an obsolete encyclopedia on the top shelf of her tallest bookcase. She burned a votive candle and sat cross-legged on the floor. When the flame guttered, she swore off thinking about faith, fathers, and the risky weight of unknown ancestries.

Every curve, every rise and dip of earth out in the pueblolands of Pojoaque and San Ildefonso, every flat and vista returned like an old confrere to feverish Kip Calder, who rode with Sarah and Marcos in the Jeep while some country singer on the radio carried on about love lost and love regained. He winced at the music but was mesmerized by the careening world beyond the windows.

If visual memories could be judged with the exactitude of musical perfect pitch, Kip’s recall of the various shades of sand and brush as he squinted over his right shoulder toward Black Mesa was so clear that he could name the notes with his back turned to the piano. Sarah noticed that the man who sat beside her seemed to anticipate where to look and when. She was intrigued that he’d begun to stare out toward the north after they passed Arroyo San Antonia, and let out an involuntary moan when this butte, known to San Ildefonsoans as Tunyo, the Orphan Mesa, came into view. As sacred as it was starkly conspicuous on the wind-flattened plain, Black Mesa—the mesa of the abandoned—was a landmark that had fascinated Kip as a boy. His father told him a giant named Savayo once lived there and was set on devouring all the children of San Ildefonso pueblo until a local cacique slaughtered him in an explosion of flaming blood and lava. He wanted to tell Sarah the story but couldn’t, of course, and still hide from her his intimacy with the area. Besides, he figured that she, who wasn’t that much older than he was, already knew the legend from her own father.

When they descended toward Otowi and the greener river-fed lands clotted with cottonwoods, he flinched at the grandeur of the brown Rio Grande rolling between its silty banks. And as they left the river to begin their ascent to the crescent plateaus of Los Alamos, Kip studied the shadows up in the columnar cliffs on whose mesas Anasazi men and women, a thousand years deader than he himself was presently to be, had crouched to look out over this fossil-dust floor.

Kip was shivering. Yellow pine and mean-ass purple spidery ocotillos and weatherworn cliff dwellings covered with petroglyphs superimposed themselves on his eye and memory. His teeth chattered like a shaken sack of dice.

Ki-pki-pkip.

Marcos took off his jacket and gentled the garment over the man’s shoulders. Sure hoped he would make it.

Ki-pki-pkip-ki.

Everything in the world was conflicting, yet everything was in harmony. The beauty of this difficult place was inspiring, as was the curious sweetness of his approaching doom. He felt Sarah taking him in, peripherally observing him, and sensed that she did so not out of idle curiosity but true humane concern.

Ki-pki-pkip… .

Which had the odd effect of making him more wary. Were he to perish, Kip was persuaded that the way to do so had been shown him long ago by the spiritual man he’d mentioned in his letter to Ariel—would she ever read those words?—a fellow pilot named Wagner who had simply etherized into the mystery of absence. Captured by the Pathet Lao, he’d been taken into the darkness of Nowheresville for, as they said back in those days,
reeducation.
Wagner was educated beyond any such punishments, so they probably offed him, as well they should have, given how dangerous was his enthusiasm. What a terrorful, punishing fate he must have met—though Kip never knew for sure—far from home, at the hands of an avenging military. At least Kip found himself among strangers who were friendly and didn’t mind that he hated this kitschy cortege music on the radio. Some song about an achy breaky heart. With two bony fingers he reached to turn it off.

Calder was being driven to his birthplace to die, on the same road he had taken when he left the Hill years ago, paradox of paradoxes—though there was no other road into or out of the place, not really. This was okay, he thought.

“This is all right,” he said aloud.

“What, William?”

“He said he’s all right,” ventured Marcos.

Was as it should be. He was becoming marl, and just as eroded as these pale canyon walls.

“We’re almost there.”

Yes oh yes, all of it interlocking, Los Alamos the nucleus and Kip one of its elliptical charged particles, circling and circling it, himself a small systemic domino effect, his own cells metastasizing, ingesting other cells of his within the tiny heavy-water basin he’d become, mercuried and mercurial, inside and out.

So why did Kip suddenly feel his former ambivalence about ever seeing Ariel now tip toward a desire to survive long enough to meet her? She who had every right never to do more than curse him from a great remove. His daughter with that awful name Ariel, that atrocious boy’s name, or else a sprite’s, an angel’s—but a name unfit for sprites and angels, too. Something imported from Shakespeare because, years ago, it was said that Robert Oppenheimer loved
The Tempest,
written within a year or so of the Spaniards’ founding of Santa Fe—the oldest capital in North America—a fact that would have intrigued a man obsessed by connectivity. 1609 was it? Oppie had thought of Los Alamos as being similar to Prospero’s island, beyond the natural conditions of the world, a sorcerer’s lab where alchemical experiments were the daily mortal magic. Where politics of good and evil were manifestly understood. Where positives and negatives, contemplated as physics systems, made themselves known in the most thoroughly vicious manner. Where a person could see what was happening in the valley below the mesa and make a precise if blunt choice regarding matters moral and immoral.

Time passed in rich anonymity, cruelly blank dullness. The remembrances triggered by seeing all those burdened geographies of his childhood began to evaporate. Sarah was speaking. She was telling Kip that she’d prefer to take him to the hospital instead of the convalescent center, but he refused, cleaving to his suicide covenant.

“I can’t make you, but if you change your mind—”

“No hospital,” he said as they pulled into the parking lot of the center. He shook his head, hoping perhaps to dislodge Ariel and the atom bomb from his thoughts. His legs gave way under his feathery weight when he stepped out of the Jeep. My god, how fucking sick he felt. He was borne aloft by many hands. He heard as if from a great distance worried voices before he blacked out.

Time seemed to fold like batter before Kip sensed hard light pouring down through a window, falling across his blanketed body, illuminating the room itself where other men seemed to be in beds, too. Old geezers and a thin fellow who was young but wore the same pall as the rest. A symphony of coughs punctuated by an occasional groan. Kip couldn’t for the life of him remember how he got here.

He was offered an intravenous drip but turned it down, if only to test his rights. Within the same hour he relented because he was too parched to hold out any longer. He was not the courageous philosopher his venerable friend Wagner had proved to be, so he signed a document agreeing to the drip feed. They sponge-bathed him, got him into a quieter room. Lying in his new bed, dressed in a generic polyester gown and pajama bottoms of no known color, Kip remembered who he was. The unworthy beneficiary of Sarah Montoya who’d probably pulled strings to get him admitted, a poor and worthless wastrel.

Phrases floated of their own accord across his dreaming mind. The term
mad pact
was involuntarily happening within him.
Mutual assured destruction pact
in Pentagonese, the lingua franca of the fighting man’s command. It was something resurrected from the Cold War, the aftermath of the nuclear one his father helped brainstorm—
that
was a real honey, too, was it not, as wars and brainstorms go? Well, it was not. Yet this
mad-pact-brainstorming
Kip was suffering in his sweaty bedclothes vivid visions of somber conspicuous beauty. White phosphorous haze billowing up from the Rousseau jungles where they dumped it to mark Charlie targets for big Thunderchiefs and Phantoms. Boiling Day-Glo tangerine clouds edged in black, belying the deaths that had gone down beneath them. Some of those deaths, brought on by Kip himself in river crannies and realms so green they made you weep for joy, he remembered far too well. Deaths of boys who were bonemeal now and relegated to the same history heap as Hirohito and hell’s own Hitler himself. Sure, he was mixing up his wars. But at the end of the day weren’t they all the same? Was it possible only war and worms were immortal? Kip was not thinking clearly but he couldn’t stop his mind from marching on. His old visions named their own time and place to race across the petrochemical skies of his consciousness, and there was little—no, there was nothing—he could do about it.

How did Sarah Montoya divine this particular abyss into which her salvage, her guest, her appalling acquaintance who was now at least temporarily her patient, stared, with eyes closed and voice muttering? Because she had seen variations on the theme before in these rooms scented by pungent soaps and decaying unopened roses. After all, many brave children from the Hill served in the conflicts that followed the one that brought Los Alamos into being. These people had traditionally been patriots. From Tech 18 geniuses to dirtpoor youths from the pueblos who fought before they had the right to vote. Many landed here, crippled, disabled, on their last legs—Hill people soon to be laid beneath the hill.

She discovered documents not terribly well hidden in Kip’s shoe and clothing. William Calder, the license read. She asked Carl, down at Rancho Pajarito that night, if he knew any Calders. He mulled it over before saying he recalled somebody up at the lab was named Calder, but never knew the man. So, was this William fellow going to make it? her husband asked.

Had Kip not rebounded, they would have been forced to arrange his transfer to the hospital, which he’d have tried though surely failed to spurn. Since he’d been born at the first hospital erected in Los Alamos, fate would thus have brought him full circle. But his road curved elsewhere.