Maybe it was gradual, maybe sudden—it was probably convulsive in the sense that the process went in fits and starts, but we began to shed our immaturities. Like sandstone riffled by water, or flint chipped into an arrowhead or a thumbknife, Kip and I were being honed. We couldn’t help it and wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to stop the process even if we were able to see it shaping us. The Hill had been so abundantly secluded that it should come as no surprise we were susceptible. At the same time, it had been home to so many sophisticated minds, fine intellects, and the hardness, the severity of the high desert, coupled with these learned presences, made for a hardness that we inherited and, so, possessed ourselves. Flint, sandstone, these seem perfect analogues. Hard but soft. Soft but hard. Hard enough to hold shape, soft enough to change it. Few children have the smarts to cherish the hideaway that’s home. Kip and I took every possible advantage of the splendid isolation that was ours, but the big bad world beyond the gate was what we always wanted.
One day Kip found me reading von Clausewitz’s massive book on the nature of war.
—What’s that for? he asked.
—It’s a book. You know, they have words, you read them?
—Smartass, he said. —I mean what class?
—It’s not for a class, it’s just for myself.
—You’re reading that for yourself?
—So what?
—Sometimes I just don’t get you, boy.
It wasn’t that I was reading outside the curriculum, but rather that Kip scoffed at anything that hinted of sociology or political science.
—Sociology is the study of the murdered and political science is the study of murderers, he said. —Knowing these people’s names and their birthdates and when they kicked the can, and reading all their drivel is not going to change the behavior of one politician, one soldier, one goddamn anybody. Men fight, Brice. It’s what they do. They need to step on one another’s heads. They need to blow each other’s brains out. You should know this by now. It gives pleasure and, besides, it’s genetic. It’s in the blood. You eat meat, don’t you?
—What does that have to do with anything?
—That meat we ate for dinner last night was from a cow that was at war with men, and the cow lost, and you ate it. There’s microbes locked in mortal combat inside your body even as we speak.
—I can’t believe what I’m hearing here.
—You know how you always wanted to get away from the Hill because the Hill was a place of war?
—We both did.
Kip ignored me, went on with —Well, do you know where you’re living now?
I said nothing. I didn’t know.
—You’re living in Morningside Heights. It has a pretty name. But you know what it is? Just another hill where they fought another battle. Washington fought right down there, right down in the street there before anybody ever thought about paving it and building buildings here.
From one war hill to another? I must have looked as if I’d seen a ghost.
—Brice, I’m not saying I like it. I’m just saying it is a fact of life and I’m coming to realize it, and I think you should, too, boy.
I argued, —Facts of life can be changed. Polio used to be a fact of life and they found a vaccine for the virus and now it is not a fact of life anymore.
—You’re just proving my point. The virus fought a war and it lost, for the time being, anyway. Some things live in harmony, don’t get me wrong. And other things don’t. All I’m saying is that sitting around in an ivory tower, or an Ivy League tower, reading this philosopher and that theoretician ain’t gonna change those basic facts.
Kip went on to do something else, whatever it might have been, and refused to acknowledge my backhanded compliment, —You’re pretty smart, boy.
In a sentimental mood I might conjure the church in Chimayó and thank its god, from time to time, for how well everything was going. No matter whether I fathomed him or not, I liked Kip. He hadn’t seen that I was infinitely his inferior—this was what I believed—and for that I could thank heaven, because whether I liked it or not, I was so deeply attached to him that my life seemed to depend on it. Was this the way friends were supposed to feel? I didn’t know.
What I did know was that I hoped things would stay just as they were and was grateful for what I had. But gods don’t always respect gratitude. Impaired by infinite age and the lassitude that must result from attending too many grievous confessions, too many greedy requests (—Oh please, God, sir, if I do this will you let me have that), not to mention a surfeit of gushy and misguided thanks—not unlike my own—they simply don’t have the holy stomach for it after a while. And for those who do, nowhere is it written they must always be grateful in turn for our gratitude. Even the lowest of the household gods, as Homer made clear and Ovid later concurred, did whatever they damn well pleased and no amount of supplication was going to alter their behavior. Kip’s job lasted not quite through October before he quit or was fired, I couldn’t decide which. The way he told the story, it sounded as if both happened with raw, spontaneous simultaneity. And so the thanks to heaven from a budding agnostic and even sometime atheist were premature.
—Didn’t belong there anyway, Kip said.
—I thought you were doing great.
—You thought wrong.
—Why didn’t you tell me?
—It’s my problem, not yours. That’s why.
I said, —But I thought we were partners in everything. You got problems, man, you tell me about it.
He shrugged and produced, from the depths of his jacket, a bottle of whiskey, —This is compliments of my former boss. I consider it severance pay.
—Remember the last time we shanghaied one of those?
Kip didn’t accept my invitation to reminiscence. We were both dejected, but he seemed out-and-out defeated. High to low, very high to very low. Yesterday he was clear-minded and strong and content. Now he was dark and frail.
He peeled the paper off the cap and uncorked the whiskey. He drank, coughed. Looked old. But edgy still. All nerves. He held out the bottle to me.
—Hold on, I said, and got glasses from the kitchen.
—You’re right, he said. —Dignity in dire straits.
—Our straits aren’t that dire, I said, and proposed a toast, —Here’s to new beginnings.
He didn’t lift his glass, nor did he lift his eyes, which were trained on his one finger that lightly drew a circle over and over around the glass lip.
—That’s redundant.
—What?
—New beginnings. It’s redundant. It’s like saying great big, great and big mean the same thing. Beginnings are always new and something new is always a beginning.
—No wonder you got fired.
—It’s called a tautology.
—You make the goddamn toast then.
He thought about it for a moment, then lifted his glass to mine, and said, —Confusion to the enemy.
Otowi bridge. And running beneath it, muddy as ever, the Rio Grande. Here is where they all crossed to go up to the Hill, before I was born. Kip’s father and mother, mine. Like the Rubicon, once crossed you can never really turn back. Or like the Lethe which, once drunk from, makes your memory dissolve and reduces you to a person without a history or a future. But then they did come back down from the Hill and crossed the Rio Grande again, my father and Kip’s and the rest of them, bringing with them their contrivance, their machine.
When the bomb was detonated down at Alamogordo, residents for hundreds of miles around knew something extraordinary had happened. Light was seen in El Paso. A blazing flash was reported in Santa Fe. Windows rattled in their frames as far away as Gallup and Silver City. Men who were part of the Project watched from arroyos and slit trenches. Up on Compañia Hill some twenty miles away, where some of the scientists had applied sunburn lotion to their faces in the predawn dark, they saw it, and they could see it from San Antonio and from up on Chupadero Peak. Wives, too, who waited
on Sawyer’s Hill behind Los Alamos could see the flash and hear the rumble. A group of guards assigned to Mockingbird Gap near Little Burro lay face down with their feet pointed toward Ground Zero, and were ordered, after the first flash, to turn and watch through an oblong chunk of welder’s glass the natural and unnatural disasters that ensued. On shortwave radio, by chance, the Voice of America played the “Star-Spangled Banner” just before the detonation. It was one of the greatest moments in history, great as in of unsurpassing enormity and consequence—some would say that what occurred that morning at Alamogordo was the greatest moment in history. The discovery of the wheel, of fire, of electricity—these were pale by comparison. It was the birth of a new religion, one in which the end of the world might be near but no repentance would provide for salvation. My father was there, near Carrizozo. Mother keeps the four-leaf clover he carried in his wallet that morning, pressed between sheets of waxed paper in the pages of her Bible. It was Robert Oppenheimer who gave the test its name of Trinity, and Oppenheimer who said later that what came to mind, as marl and hills were bathed in seething brilliance and the purple radioactive glowing cloud hung there over the desert, was a phrase from Hindu scripture, from a scene in the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu, hoping to motivate the Prince to behave dutifully, takes on his thousand-armed form and says, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Many of its makers would later memorably describe what they witnessed as the convection stem of dust chased the final cloud of smoke toward the morning star. But a man named Kenneth Bainbridge, the director of Trinity, made what is to me the most indelible and peculiarly dignified comment of the day. To Oppenheimer, after congratulating everyone in the control bunker, he said, —Now we are all sons of bitches.
Winding my way up the canyon, I admire the majesty and luminousness of the cliffs, Otowi ruins with their gray sagebrush beard across the canyon from the overlook, the many different shades of brown and white and reds of the rocks that look like vertebrae, and now I begin to notice them, the roads—here and there, which trail off from the highway—gated at their discreet entrances, with small signs warning the potential trespasser away. And then I see them, hidden or not, on mesa edges—the pastel green buildings, the labs with their supercomputers and linear accelerators, the Tech buildings, off to the right, protected by the dry moats of the deep ravines. The clusters of buildings, gray-blues and earthen reds and tans, the glistening satellite dishes and radar installations pointed to the mute blue sky, the ganglia of electrical wires, the storage tanks, the nameless and faceless buildings behind lengths and widths of fences with concertina wire curling along the crests, way over there.
I breathe in deep and think, Bainbridge was right. Sons of bitches one and all.
Autumn began, autumn passed, and winter began, 1963 into 1964. The president was assassinated. My mother telephoned me with the news. She was crying and then I was crying, too. Kip said, —What’s going on? and I said, —Kennedy’s dead, and I could hear my mother’s set on in the background, and said goodbye to her and got off and Kip and I ran from the apartment over to campus where it seemed we lived for the next few days, dazed and worried about the future, worried without really knowing what this meant, watching television in a student lounge with other students. The funeral stands in my memory more than the arrest of Oswald, his murder by Jack Ruby, or any of the other events that unfolded from the assassination. The caisson in the funeral, the cadence of the drums and sad clop of the horse’s hooves that drew the stern narrow wagon laden with its simple casket draped in the flag along the avenues of Washington, the leaders of the world who walked behind the cortège in procession, the widow and the two children, the president’s son with his small flag not quite sure of what was going on. For an event that had such impact on us all it was surely unreal, these black-and-white images on the screen, the hushed voices of the television commentators. It was pivotal. It was the true beginning of the sixties. Kip, I, everyone was in shock.
After black November there was a drifting that occurred in our lives, Kip’s and mine. Nothing happened, everything happened or began to happen.
Unravelings, words, small occasions that seemed important and important ones that seemed insignificant.
I came home one afternoon, and he was sitting on the floor of our little common room carpeted with some material whose color it would be impossible to describe, varied between yellow and gray, but seemed to have been a lima-bean green once. Beside him was a bottle. He had been reading, but the moment I walked in he shut the book quickly and sat on it so that I couldn’t see what it was.
The weights and balances of our friendship were in new throes of change. He never had the same nervous system as I. This was something I was coming to learn. He must have felt the imbalances between us. As I became more focused, he seemed distracted, but in an indescribably calculated way.
At night I had work to do, reading and taking too many notes, underlining too many passages. He’d always been reclusive, even antisocial. The year before, during dining hour back in John Jay I would sit and talk with fellow dorm residents; I would say hello to hallmates when I passed them, and though I couldn’t be called outgoing, I at least tried to make the acquaintance of various fellow students. Kip forbore such behavior. But now he seemed withdrawn beyond even that. He went out, keeping the same hours he had for those precious weeks when he was working and everything was so promising. Most of the time, I had gone to bed before he returned. It was as if he had begun to evaporate somehow. He seemed never to sleep. It was like he’d become a cat with a raven-black cat soul, one that might pride itself upon crossing your path in an alley. Or an owl, similarly wise and dangerous in the dark.
—What’d you do last night? I asked.
—Nothing.
—But like what?
—Like what? Kip glanced over my head.
—Yeah, like what.
—Like nothing is like what.
I interpreted his expression to mean, Who do you think you are, my father? So I left off, saying, —Never mind.
—Just walked around, he said, after a few minutes. Yes, so catlike, owlish, aggressive and passive, hostile and amicable by turns. —Is that all right with you, Brice?
Maybe it is true that I was becoming angry, finally, despite my admiration for my friend. Under my collegian bustle I thought I’d shrouded it well and that it was hidden, too, by the simple distance our odd, uncoincidental hours created. I was mistaken. Kip knew me as well as I knew him, and his response to my silent anger was going to be anger of a different sort.
—Well, boy? he said again. —Is that okay?
I looked out the filthy window of the room, stared at the vines climbing the brick wall of the building opposite. I felt exhaustion in my head, my back, my joints. Kip wanted to wrangle.
—You be willing to share some of that?
He lifted the bottle in my direction. I pulled it up to my lips, its glass knocked against my teeth, then, drank a little, it tasted terrible, carried it over to the corner where there was a sink, some cupboards, rattling refrigerator, old stove next to our doorless bathroom. Like some prude I began to pour whiskey down the drain.
—What the hell? and he was on me quicker and with more urgency than I’d thought possible, seemed to have sobered up in an instant, at least long enough to stop me. More agile, and much stronger than I, Kip got the bottle away from me after the briefest tussle. He was yelling and so was I. This was a new one. He tore the top two buttons off my shirt when he yanked at me from behind. I saw that when I’d struck out at him I’d managed to produce a pink streak down the left side of his forehead. He threw on his coat, had the bottle clutched with one hand under it, strode past me through the common room, his face crimson, lips white, angrier than I’d ever seen him, and I stood there helpless as I watched him open the door, but managed to get out the words, —Don’t you ever call me boy again, you hear me, man? before he turned, said, —I’ll never call you anything again, you little bastard, before slam
ming the door. Our apartment had always seemed so vulnerable to noise, to the city’s various voices that chose to creep in through every crevice, funnel up through the floorboards and into the plaster and rugs, glass and air, but for the next hours and days it would seem more impregnable and silent than was conceivable.
I picked up the book Kip had been reading. Thoreau’s Walden. Why had he hid it from me? What a grand gesture for a small cause, I thought. But then I remembered that when I’d read it a few months earlier I’d carried on about how interesting cranky old man Henry David Thoreau was with his monk’s shack and his crop of beans and his endless disdain for the idiotic concessions his fellow man would make in the pursuit of false comforts. He had attitude, the right stuff, like a nineteenth-century beatnik. I guess Kip hadn’t wanted me to see that he could learn things from me. I was swept up in sadness that afternoon. Thoreau’s best friend, Emerson, wrote in an essay that goodness had to have an edge to it, but I’m sure his own edge was never so sharp as to stab. Looking into my copy of Emerson’s essays that same night—funny, Kip had Thoreau and I Emerson, but I guess it makes a kind of sense—I discovered a passage I hadn’t read before: “I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know.”
He came back, of course, but only after allowing me to brood for half the week. He just showed up. Acted as if nothing whatever out of the ordinary had transpired. He carried a crisp brown paper sack under one arm and opened the door of the refrigerator, crouched, sniffed, said, —Jesus god, something in here’s died some awful death, rummaged around until he found the offending source, an orange blotched deep green with mold, removed it, and proceeded to empty the paper bag of its contents, bottle of fresh milk, can of coffee, packet of bologna, mustard, chocolate bars. I believe he muttered, —Goodnight, before heading to his room where he lay on his bed and fell into a heavy sleep. He hadn’t looked me in the eye, though if he had, I wouldn’t have known, since I wasn’t able to look him in the eye, either. He didn’t seem to notice that his Walden was there on the floor in the middle of the room, right where he’d left it. The book disappeared next day and, just as I’d never seen it before, I never saw it again.
Trinity Fields Page 15
