Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [20]
“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