Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [19]
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