Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [46]
Having barely slept the night before, she nodded off in the sun, hands folded on her chest, and was awakened, startled, hours later by her cat Buddha, who nuzzled her cheek and then bounded down off the wall into the underbrush of blackberries. Buddha boy? How she used to love watching him stalk chipmunks and mice and butterflies and then stretch out to sleep on this bluestone garden wall, smiling his gray, unperturbable smile.
“Buddy?”
Sitting up, coming back to consciousness, she remembered he was long dead and buried. Maybe a spider had brushed against her. A fieldmouse.
“Permission to go crazy?” she asked herself, climbing the knoll to the house. “Permission granted,” she answered.
She knew what lay ahead, at least in the proximate sense, at least insofar as what she herself could do about matters. There was no real choice. No number of hours or days spent sitting around in this farmhouse was going to resolve or mend the fractured thing she’d both been given and become. She telephoned her parents the next morning and told them she was going to New Mexico to find out what happened to Kip Calder. She phoned work and with apologies said she needed to take an emergency leave of absence. Family crisis. She packed a few clothes in the car, locked up the house. The dormant village of Callicoon was where the bridge crossed the Delaware from New York State over into Pennsylvania. Long ago, she’d waded halfway across with Brice in the shallow, stone-bottomed upper reaches of that river, and even now she could recall how heavy her tennis shoes were, cold and hefty in the swift flat water, and how frightened she’d felt being so far from the riverbank where her mother sat, but also how unwilling she’d been to let her father see her fear. A big brown trout had broken the surface twenty feet out toward the deeper channel and she’d screamed with excitement. To be in the river and see the fish emerge from its waters into her airy world for that briefest instant seemed terrifying, wonderful. But now she crossed the Delaware in her car and, without consulting a map—she didn’t have one and didn’t really want one—drove beyond Callicoon into Wayne County and through a hamlet prayerfully called Galilee which led her through Rileyville and on through townships with names like Dyberry and Canaan, knowing at a minimum she was headed in the right direction. She knew, too, that though this was not a dream, her truly going to Chimayó to look for Kip was nonetheless tinged by the surreal.
Was it the brilliant physicist John von Neumann who once told his brilliant colleague Richard Feynman that cultivating the concept of social irresponsibility was the first step toward becoming a happy man, or was it Feynman who said it to von Neumann—the godfather of radar, game theory, nuclear deterrence, artificial intelligence, and the superbomb, to name just a few of his progeny? Kip knew it was one or the other. Both had worked on the Hill. Each had tried to use his genius to build, as the phrase goes, the future.
But which had proved himself to be more irresponsible? Feynman in that he enjoyed playing the bongos and cracking wild jokes? Von Neumann who indulged himself in the obsessive habit, to the chagrin of Los Alamos secretaries, of peeking up women’s skirts? And how did one go about defining responsibility, anyway?
Kip remembered that both had been, yes, brilliant, and both also barbarian in their different ways. Too, he recalled one evening back at the convalescent center—not far from where Feynman and von Neumann dwelled during their days at the lab—when he and his fellow patients congregated in the rec room to watch satellite television after downing cranberry juice and angel food cake in celebration of some birthday. The resident patients chortled and coughed warmly through an episode of The Simpsons, a cartoon Kip found neither humorous nor entertaining. Yet he was the only one in that bedeviled audience to laugh, laugh hard and long, when Homer