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By Root 1574 0

been like if Kip had come back between tours of duty and believed, as he should have, that Ariel was his daughter. What kind of father would Kip have made? How differently would Ariel have turned out? What would it have been like to be friends with Brice, to watch him marry another woman, maybe have five kids instead of just the one, who wasn’t his own flesh and blood. They had made their rounds from doctor to doctor and finally discovered it was not Brice but Jessica who was barren. Harsh word, good for what it meant. She remembered Brice’s using a male word for it, impotent, just as bad, and remembered shouting, “Barren, the word is barren, unless you mean incompetent.” That wasn’t their best week together, yet, like the week itself, the crisis passed.

Jessica telephoned Brice to say goodnight and soon fell asleep not in her bed but Ariel’s. Her last image of the day was neither of daughter nor husband but rather of a young man she’d known back in the sixties who’d been terribly sure of himself. A man with long fluent hands, beautiful in his pleasures as well as his anger, eloquent in his lovemaking and in his words, softly telling her that he and she had been more than intimate that summer night in June.

—You’re going to have a child now.

She could hear his voice all these years later.

—I don’t get pregnant, she’d whispered back.

—Wait and see.

Long time ago. All the more incomprehensible that Kip would not believe his own prophecy. Would become so different and damaged a Kip that the falsehoods he concocted about Brice and Jessica were more real to him than his own true knowledge.

During his third tour in Laos, by then having abandoned America altogether, Kip told Wagner about his possible clairvoyance that one time, and Wagner said, —Everybody knows when they’ve made more than love. I remember being conceived.

—Get out of here, Kip smirked.

—You get out. Everybody remembers the moment of conception.

Kip was sitting not quite out of the rain. The Laotian morning was young. A few nodding Hmong, some Kmhmu guerrillas, and a couple specters in from Vientiane smoking expensive Camels, sat listening in a leaking thatched hootch by the muddy runway at Long Tieng.

—Let me try it from the opposite angle, Kippy. Do you think that when you die you’ll experience that moment of transition in all its glory or inglory, pain or magnificence?

Kip didn’t feel like being an amicable bodhisattva so didn’t reply.

Wagner looked around at the others gathered among his miserable audience. —Well? What do you say? You there.

A Hmong nodded.

—He agrees with me.

—He doesn’t understand you, said Kip.

—You’re wrong. He understands me better than you do.

Kip shrugged. —That’s not saying much.

—Wrong again, I think. Do you understand my question?

The Hmong nodded again, quietly.

—I think his answer is yes. Do you believe you’ll comprehend the moment of your death?

—Yeah, the man answered.

Wagner paused, then glanced at the CIA cats. —And do you remember the moment you were conceived?

They looked at one another and dragged on their cigarettes.

—What about you? to the Hmong.

The Hmong again nodded.

—I’m telling you he doesn’t understand you, Wagner.

—He does, and I think you do, too.

Jess remembered Kip’s writing her about that episode. Ariel had already been born and had forgotten, in Jessica’s estimation, the moment of her conception, if she ever perceived it in the first place. However, Kip hadn’t been long deterred by his initial doubts. By the time he penned his letter, which he sent through a friend down in Thailand toward the end of everything, months before the People’s Army declared victory and not all that long before he and Wagner went far beyond bamboo, giving up everything to live with the Lao along the Mekong’s lackadaisical waters, Kip had come around to believing in Wagner’s doctrine of instant consciousness.

She never mentioned the letter to Brice. Things had been tough enough without the inevitable commentary Kip’s absurd ideas would have provoked. War is madness, Brice would say. Kip is war. War is madness.