Trinity Fields (48 page)

This would have been the most miraculously auspicious dream but for what followed. Perspective changed. Now I was no longer inside the circle of children, but just outside. I was standing, hands at my sides, rather stiff, and I was looking at Jessica and she wore a smile still, maybe superior now, maybe more gracious and distant. I smiled back, worried, scared even. And I looked at myself—or a double of myself—across from her.

Kip.

It was Kip staring ahead at no one in particular, this is what I thought. He wasn't looking at Jessica, and though I called his name he wasn't willing to look at me either. He was in robes, and I had the distinct sense that his arms were missing. I wanted to ask him about his arms and opened my mouth to speak. But rather I woke up bathed in sweat, and was never able to get back to sleep the rest of the night. It crystallized into an omen, for me, and instead of seeing it as a stark private drama that played out once more my fears and guilt toward Kip—wondered what his armlessness could mean?—I took it as a warning. Of what I couldn't say.

In the morning, I began to tell Jessica about the dream. I described the hill, the ocean, the vertical isles, and the ring of babies. She said, —What a wonderful dream, before I'd gotten to the crucial shift to Kip at the center of the circle. —I wonder what brought it on? she smiled, and so I left it at that.

Despite all attempts to forget about it, the nightmare continued to come to mind, began to inhabit me. Maybe it made such entrée by the very nature of its simplicity. Maybe a more complex dream would have been easier to forget. But whatever the reason, I found it returning at unlikely moments, while accompanying Jessica on an errand, reading a brief in court, slicing bread for breakfast toast. It became a colleague, a confrère. I would shake my head and say to myself, You again.

It is impossible to know whether the dream inspired what was to happen next—my sightings of Kip—or whether it merely marked the beginning of these occurrences, served as prologue to the waking drama of my sudden seizures when I would glance across the street and see
him
, manifest, alive, the living Kip tramping along, an itinerant or homeless, once as a man in a suit—which took me aback since the only suit I'd ever seen on Kip was his military uniform—another time driving a cab. Altogether I must have seen him on half a dozen occasions. Only once did I decide to cross the street and approach him. It just seemed impossible that it wasn't Kip, and for me to continue ignoring him was ridiculous. What was I afraid of?—by this time we were both well past forty, Jess and I long married, Ariel now legally adopted. There was nothing to fear. And so I walked out into the traffic, kept one eye on him so as not to lose him in the crowd while I darted around cars. A bicyclist and I nearly collided, he shouted something over his shoulder at me but I didn't hear him. I was intent on Kip, who lengthened the distance between us before I could reach the walk opposite, and rounded the corner into a side street. The street traversed, I began to run. Turned the corner and there he was, his back to me, just a few paces ahead. I stopped to catch my breath, gather myself. What would I say? The long slow arcing movement of his arms—surely this was Kip, I thought. And so I closed the space between us until, just at his side, I hesitated. At that very instant he turned to me with a look of apprehension clouding his face.

—What do you want? he asked.

—Nothing, I said, marveling at how much this man actually did look like Kip. —I'm sorry, I said, —I thought you were someone else. The man turned and went his way.

Somehow, something was learned, so I thought, as a result of that experience. I decided that were Kip alive, it would have to be he who reached out to me, that this would be the appropriate way in that it was he who left. I also settled on an interpretation of the dream that presumed the Kip-figure in the circle was an extension of the Brice-figure outside; both were me, within and without, and as such there was no reason to obsess about it anymore. Whenever it tried to resurface after that, I ignored it as if it were so much dross. Kip, I thought, should neither be so honored as to haunt me like a specter would an old abbey, nor so dishonored by me as to be seen as an embodiment of dread and doubt.

One thing I did allow myself to retain from the dreams and sightings was a profound belief that despite everything that spoke to the contrary, Kip was going to return one day, and when it came to pass, it would be wise of me not to turn away from him. I could fear the moment if I had to, but I could not resist it.

Kip, having heard this, says to me, “You know what's the most peculiar from where I sit?”

Having forgotten that he was here with me, listening to what I recounted, I utter “What?” before I'm fully aware of his presence.

“It's that there were times I thought I saw you, too. After I was invited to leave Laos, after the couple of years over there in the refugee camps, I decided to try to come back again and there were any number of places I lived. Here, Europe, Italy for a time, Spain, down in South America, then back toward Laos, Thailand, on and on. I was caught between one abandonment and another, I guess, and so I was condemned to being a permanent stranger. Talk about a man without a country, that was me. And I'd be lying if I told you there wasn't a freedom to it. The minute I felt myself settling down, that was the moment I would pull out. So on the one hand nowhere looked like home to me, and on the other, everywhere looked like home. One of the places I tried on, like you try on clothes, was the city. I didn't last, though. This day I swear I'd see Jessie, another day, at the edge of one of the fields in the park, walking along near Belvedere Castle or out on the Great Lawn, I was sure it was you. Maybe it even was.”

I am stunned at the thought of Kip so nearby when I'd thought him dead. Also, that he'd become a helpless electron circling the atomic heart of the world, just as I once thought of myself. I say, “So you left.”

“So I left.”

“When was that? Was it three years ago?”

Kip shakes his head from side to side. “Does it matter?”

“It matters only because, I don't know, maybe it was you I saw one of those times.”

He looks me in the eye and says, “No, it wasn't three years ago that I was there, it wasn't me you saw,” and I can tell at once that he is lying and that it is one of those rare mistruths whose value transcends fact. Lay aside your speculations about what might have happened if this were different, or that. This is what Kip's small falsehood is about. Just as when we were children, I'd admired Kip for the wildness of his spirit, I find myself now in awe of such natural charity.

A cricket between the floorboards. Music of its spiky thighs rubbed together. The shutters were open and out the windows shouts rose, a few individuals, then a few more, until there were many.

—Wagner, he slurred. —Wagner, coming more and more awake from the sleep of his flu.

Wagner didn't say anything, because Wagner was not there.

There was such an uproar and he pulled the sheet away from him and swung his legs around, planted feet on the floor, and then he stopped to listen, though the tingling in his soles—an indication of his fever—captured as much of his attention as the cries from below the open window.

—What is it? he managed to shout back. The influenza could be heard in the thickness and weakness of what he'd tried to ask. His cheeks were so cold, his forehead wet. He mumbled, then cried out with as much clarity and volume as his fluey body would allow, —What is it? Wagner?

Even the cricket desisted after that. Kip struggled with sore muscles but got up and in short steps made it across the broad room to a window looking out over the main road. His eyes worked against the blackness. He heard no further sound. He whispered the name of his colleague once, twice, three times, more times than that over the course of the next hour.

The crowd had run along to homes in the night. Nothing more was heard. After a while, Kip returned to his bed. He sat down slowly, then lay back. Chills shook him, but nothing agitated him more than the possibility that Wagner had been caught. Please don't let him be seen, Kip prayed, shaking like a dead leaf in an autumn gust. Don't let him be captured.

In the morning, hot sun spilled into the room and made soft shapes on the floor.

—Wagner? Kip tried, as he walked down the stairs from the upper to the ground floor. —Wagner.

But Wagner was history, all over. They told him that day, and they repeated themselves, quite hysterical in their solace and support, the next day too, and the day after that. Wagner was gone, had been seized by the authorities while helping a family in their fatally desperate effort to leave this admirable country. He was gone and the several people who were trying to escape were gone with him. Nobody could say where they'd been taken, when they'd come back.

The fever left, Kip got well.

Does a person have to have a cause to explain what he's doing? I ask him.

“Wagner thought so,” says Kip.

“And what do you think?”

“I didn't think so then.”

“But what do you think now?”

“I think now that you have to have a reason for what you do. ‘What's your cause, Calder?' I can still hear those words over all the rain splashing down in the mud.”

Kip is looking down at his hands and I look at them with him, maybe as a way of avoiding what I must say next.

“So my cause, what was my cause, that's what Wagner wanted to know, and then I realized something back in the room, when I was reading this letter that was old by then, that it was too late for me to come running back—I mean, I did come back, but there was no real coming back for me.”

This is it, I am thinking, now we're coming to it, and say nothing, but wait for him to continue, which he does. “I came back as much to leave as anything else. Leave for once and for all. If I'd suspected you and she were in love before I left, I knew it for a fact the first week I was there with you.”

And I decide to leap ahead. “Jessica and I are married, Kip.”

“I know,” he says.

“You do? How?”

“Because she's written all over your face. It happens with people who live together. I see her in you and hear her, too.”

“I see.”

“Brice, I'm glad for you. All right? Since you've brought it up, may I ask how is Ariel?”

“Ariel's fine,” I say, listening to how pinched my voice has gotten just now. “Ariel's wonderful, Kip. She's a wonderful young woman.”

“Is she your only child?”

“We tried to have another. It didn't work,” I said. “Ariel's had more energy than three children all on her own anyhow. She had a way of filling the house like a gang of kids. Reminds me of someone else I know.”

That made him grin, and as he did a breeze shook the highest branches of the cottonwoods and the scads of colorful rosaries swayed where they were draped over either of Jesus's outstretched white arms, whose paint was peeling.

“Do you think it's possible for a person to change?”

“It's possible.”

Kip asks, Brice answers.

I think, this is hard, what I'm doing here is hard. Do I need to do this? And the answer from my mind to my mind, as if they were separate entities, is: Of course I do. My knees are sore, my bones are damp from the ground, my back hurts. Far cry from the child who'd vaulted drunken down here and leapt onto the low tin roof and crawled through to the nave from the dormer window that is still there, with unglassed frame and crawl space that would lead you from outside to inside. Not dead yet but these bones draw in the chill unlike times buried in the dry, dry past. And I am thinking, Brice, your friend is dying, and you're worried about your brittle bones? I am thinking, Brice, will you never change?

“I never used to think so. I always figured a person grew up a certain way and that was the way they were, you know. Like they would learn more and know more things but the basic person stayed the same underneath. But I don't think that's right anymore. You had every reason not to come here, and you came. You know how I used to call you a traitor? I don't think that's fair anymore.”

I move from inside to out. I say, “Maybe it was never fair, Kip. Did you stop to think that?”

“Don't hate me for saying this, Brice, but fair or not, that's what I used to think about you sometimes, and when I came back from Laos that first time and saw the way you were with Jessica and with Ariel, too, I thought, Man, there he is in his final flowering, the ultimate traitor incarnate, the fucking Judas of Judases. I still loved you, but I felt the knife at my back.”

When I hear those words I know that Kip will never believe he hadn't been betrayed by me. Rather than protest, I remain silent. We look each other straight in the eye.

“But I was wrong. It was Wagner, when he got caught instead of me, and when they came and asked me about him, what did I do but obfuscate in order to save myself? I was the traitor, then, too, and saw how it looked from the inside looking out. Sometimes I told myself that Wagner'd have done the same thing if the tables were turned, but I don't believe that's so. If I'd told them the truth, at least they would have taken me away too, maybe to the same place they had him, and if we were both alive still, maybe we'd have found a way out together.”

“Those are pretty substantial maybes, Kip.”

“They're pretty empty maybes is what they are.”

“From what you've told me about him, I think that Wagner would forgive you if he knew the circumstances.”

“But he doesn't and he can't. And that was what I was left with. I packed up as quietly as I could and left Laos soon after that myself. Partly because I knew my days were numbered there, partly because everywhere were reminders of my failure. It was in Nam Yao that I began to think about how I'd treated you in the past, labeled you the traitor, even though you had never really sold me down the river any more than I had Wagner.”