Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [89]
Two Wagnerisms combined to bring Kip to this decision. The first was Um einen Gegenstand zu kennen, muss ich zwar nicht seine externen—aber ich muss alle seine internen Eigenschaften kennen. As with Kip’s couple dozen phrases memorized in Lao and Vietnamese back during lulls in the war, words learned in the interest of killing time rather than Pathet Lao soldiers, this German fragment had no adjuncts in his memory. It was a stand-alone, just as Kip himself had so often been, and as he wanted Delfino not to be. He knew what the passage meant but couldn’t recall who had written or said it. In order to know an object, I must know not its external but all its internal qualities.
He fired up his small gas stove, put on the coffeepot. He lit a rare cigarette. He sat at his new-old table on his new-old chair and ate one of the oatmeal cookies that Sarah had given him, wrapped in a napkin, after dinner last night. The second Wagnerism was even simpler than the first. It came in the form of a Sufi precept—the primary of Sufi truths, in fact. All souls are in exile from their maker and are born longing to return and lose themselves in that birthsoul, despite how nourished or confused they may be by mortal attractions. Wagner had cherished the Sufi journey of souls back to the locus of beginnings more than any other idea in any other religion.
Standing over the slim dead body of a Vietcong insurgent deep in-country near Ban Pak Mène, in the last year of the war, Wagner had asked Kip if he ever noticed how the dying tend to curl themselves into the fetal position. As if in preparation to be reborn. No, Kip never noticed before Wagner drew it to his attention that faraway Laotian afternoon, amid the greens and reds, on one of their few personal sorties undertaken on foot from Luang Prabang rather than in the air.
—It’s all about pilgrimage, man, Wagner remarked. —We just think we’re walking forward. What we’re really doing is walking back to where we started every time we take a step. Like with everything fucking else, Einstein had it right. Light bends, time bends. Check it out. I’m staring at the back of my head, no matter where I look. So are you.
Coffee always smelled like life, preamble to the day. Was it any wonder everybody was addicted to it? Kip thought, stubbing out the half-smoked cigarette on the bottom of his shoe and dropping the butt into his pants cuff. How would he tell Delfino of his intention to join him? After all, hadn’t he already promised that he’d pass along to the family news of this gambit?
—You’ve been to Wat Xieng Khwan, near Vientiane. We were there together, remember that big Buddha statue thirty feet tall with the four arms made it look like a spider? Four heads facing every direction at the same time, with six Buddhas in lotus position on the heads of the four Buddhas, and more stone Buddhas atop those, and all surrounded by more Buddhas, a hundred stone Buddhas… . Wagner was coming in loud and clear this morning—less, it seemed, from within Kip’s head than from some distance without. Kip asked him, Is it a good idea for me to go to Dripping Spring with Delfino Montoya? Isn’t it a way of looking at World War Two from its altruistic, damnable birth down in the Jornada by staring dead straight into the teeth of Vietnam, finally? None of what Kip was proposing to do was any harder than learning to ride a bike, or jumping like some tiger through a ring of fire. The more difficult part would be to convince Delfino to allow him, an outsider and the son of one of the minds that had consigned the older man to a life of exile, to participate, however lamely, in his act of retribution.
Delfino was down in the barn with Carl and Marcos. They were saddling a new horse, of the kind Marcos called a no-history—not a puke, just unknown to them. And it looked as if Delfino got to be the one to give her a go.
“Might just be a dullard,” Marcos encouraged him.
“Or else the horse