I wasn’t sure how the weather was, nor why it mattered.
—When do you think Kip’ll be home?
—Pretty soon, I said.
I wasn’t sure at all when Kip would come home. I was never sure when Kip would come home.
—And how you doing, Brice?
—I’m doing fine, Missus.
—That’s good.
Some Western habits don’t die hard, they simply never die. Yes, I did say missus. I’m sure of it, same way I still put melk in my coffee and know the opposite of weakness is strainth. I waited for her to speak next. All this was beginning to make me a little angry with Kip. Where was he and why wasn’t he here to take care of answering all these questions his mother put to me?
—Brice?
—Yes?
—Would you tell Kip we’re looking forward to seeing him? And you, too. And his girlfriend Jessica, too.
—I’m looking forward to seeing you, too, and I’ll tell Kip what you said.
—Goodnight, Brice.
—Goodnight, I said.
It was I who got the next call, too, and though I wasn’t told what had happened, I knew something was wrong. The man wanted to locate Kip. His voice was more sour than curdled cream. There was boredom behind, or inside, his constraint. Voice of an official. Made me indignant in the same way virtuoso bureaucratic behavior still provokes me. He was an intimidator and tease, this man who called, with his dismal inquirings. Yes, I would find Kip right away. Yes, this was where he lived. No, he’s not here right now, I already told you. I already told you my name. Yes, that’s with an i not a y. Can I tell him what this is in reference to? Well, all right, his parents are coming in this afternoon and so he’s bound to show up sometime soon. Yes, that’s our address but—
Kip did turn up, not quite sure how to take this visit from the folks, on the one hand nervous that his father intended to ride him about his drifting lifestyle, on the other excited—as much as he could allow himself to be—to see Emma Inez. He had been over at Jessica’s, so I supposed but didn’t ask. He had a composite dreamy and astute look to him, difficult to describe yet nothing I hadn’t seen before.
—Some man called looking for you, I told him.
—What about? as he wandered into his room, unbuttoning his shirt to change into a relatively fresh white one.
Wasn’t sure. —How’s Jessica?
—Was it about a job?
—I don’t think so. I don’t know.
—Did the parents call?
—Last night, your mother did.
Rummaging through the chaos of clothing piled on the floor of his closet, Kip finally drew forth a tie, a wide conservative swath, and said, —She say when they’re showing?
—You’re really going to wear a tie?
—I wish you asked the guy for a name at least.
—He knew our address, I said, watching Kip knot the tie.
Nothing more was said, at least that is how I remember the day, until the police arrived and broke the news to Kip. Something of an emotional smear or haze thereafter. Kip left on the tie. To this day I am ashamed I wasn’t able to piece together the quite simple puzzle the man on the telephone had provided me. Those weeks that followed the accident were unmoored—and I cannot help but think that if I’d been discerning, I could have softened the blow. But maybe that is the worst sort of wishful thinking. We were helpless. What can I say? Jessica and I went out with Kip into the night, walking together, stopping for a drink here and there as we went, and she cried, and I came very close to crying myself, and Kip changed as he walked, got darker and darker, but never cried. Not even when the sun came up the next morning and we decided, all three—if for no other reason than to keep going for a few hours more before Kip and I faced returning to the apartment and the responsibilities that death in the family brings to the living—to take a ferry out to Liberty Island.
We somehow found the ferry, and bought passage. We were all sick during the short windy crossing. None of us had the strength or desire to take the circular stairs up into Lady Liberty’s crown, from whose vantage the downtown buildings and bridges could be seen. Instead we sat on the scant, colorless grass and watched the brown waves build their own white crowns and carry them for a little and then lose them in the muddy harbor swells.
Dear Brice, Kip wrote from New Mexico, “Dear Brice, strange it is to be here again, and to see the old place. Staying at your house, thought I could hack it at mine, but I was wrong. Your parents are being nice. Nice, listen to me, no, they’re being more than nice, they’re being family. Your mother is looking after me like a hen, and your father came with me over to the house, my house, I mean, to help me sort through things. The authorities wanted to come by to go through Dad’s papers, make sure there wasn’t anything that might breach security. As if the old man would ever break their rule about engineers not keeping notes outside the Techs. He wouldn’t even have thought to bend one, let alone break it. I started to go into a tirade over it, them combing through what’s private property, but then I remembered what it was about this place that always drove me, and you too, Brice, drove us nuts. They still think it’s 1945 here, some of them anyhow, the questions, the secrets, the poking and prying. Can you imagine these people wanting to go through Dad’s stuff? What can someone like me do? Nothing is what. So I kept quiet and I certainly didn’t let on that I managed to get his diary into a safe place. What do you think of that! I wanted to read it the other night, but I couldn’t get myself to do it. Maybe someday, who knows, it may be interesting. Instructions on how to create a neutron shower in the privacy of your own home? I doubt it. If anything, it’s probably pages of worrying about his son and wondering what he did wrong as a father to have a child like me—or is that just self-centered of me to think that? Am I just so narrow that I believe the world revolves around Kip? I don’t know. But I do know I couldn’t face reading it now. Maybe I should have handed it over, at least that way I’d know that nobody would ever see it again. But anyway, Brice, as far as possessions go there’s not much here I really want. Your mother says to put them all into storage because someday, she says, I’ll have a family of my own and I may want these heirlooms and all, but to me it’s junk, most of it, just junk. Is there anything you remember in my house you want? Give a call if there is, because I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to stay here. I go from being bad off, to getting these strange moments of feeling positive about the future. I know I am alone, and that’s bad and okay too. What does it mean when you feel like you don’t have a history? That’s how I feel. I know I do, but I can’t touch it somehow. I keep thinking Emma Inez is hiding around a corner somewhere and she is going to pop out of nowhere and say, Surprise, surprise—we’re still here, son, and we know it’s pretty harsh but we wanted to teach you a lesson in appreciation. Childish thinking, eh? Did I tell you your mom put me up in your old room, that’s where I’m sleeping. Brice, she’s kept it like some shrine, just exactly the way it was when you left. Creepy. I don’t know how well I’m dealing with all this business out here, if you want to know the truth. Or did I already say that? The stars are out the window right now, I’m looking up at them, and I think it’s new moon, real black outside. . . . Later same nite. So this is what I’m doing, I decided. Went out and walked over to Ashley Pond and thought about stuff and what I want to do is go by your mother’s advice and not think about any of this junk, there’s some money by the way, more than I thought they had, but while it’s true I wasn’t that close to them these last years I’d sure trade ten times, a thousand times the money to have them back safe and not gone, sounds soft but it’s what I’m thinking. Something like this happens to you, like I was saying, you realize how alone you really are in this world. I got you, I got Jessica, and that’s not nothing (backhanded compliment). What I have in mind to do is throw everything in storage, like your mom was saying, then come back to the city for a little while and do this. Don’t tell Jessica what I’m going to tell you, promise me or els
e. And don’t give me any shit about it either, because I don’t need that kind of thing right now and you’re my best friend, and I won’t tolerate it, all right? Okay, so this is it. I’ve decided I’m going to ask Jessica to marry me. I’m not a child anymore, and if I was a month ago, I’m not now. Of course, I want you to be best man. You are the best man, so you can be best man. Then what I got to do, what I am going to do Brice old best man Brice, and I want not to hear one word out of you about it because I just don’t, because I know what is right for me, what I want to do, and so lay off on the advice and especially the politics that are so important to your intelligentsia elitist shitfilled head, I say this knowing I like you better than any brother I would ever have had, as you know, asshole, what I intend to do is to go ahead and join the air force. I want to do something, and this is the only way that makes sense to me to do it. I know you think Vietnam is a bitch. I’m not even saying you are wrong, all right? I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is that it may be right for me. That’s all. I remember you telling me that you and I had the same blood, when I was telling you that no, we’ve got different blood in us, and maybe you’ll believe me now. So that’s it, it’s what I want to do, and if you’re my friend, you won’t say word one about it, and if you’re not my friend, you can protest and lecture till you’re blue in the face and Brice it won’t make a bit of difference. What else—not much, I suppose. All I can say is I feel strong, given the situation, and that your parents are good people, Bonnie Jean’s got a boyfriend, a nerd but all right, and I went way out of my way to tell her that her Charlie is the living end. Predict nuptials. Okay, that’s it. I miss Jessica and I miss your sorry ass every so often. Please destroy this after you’ve read it.
“Keep the faith, Kip.”
I read the letter only once, folded it, slipped it back into its pale blue envelope, then hid it at the bottom of my desk drawer. The letter gave rise to polar sentiments in me, yet incongruous as my two responses were, both directed me to bury it deep, under paper, under wraps. Not destroy it, as requested —for what reason, I couldn’t begin to guess other than that such a request was typical Kip—but rather cache it. On the one hand, the letter was precious, this private treasure that displayed Kip’s intimate fraternity with me. Here was an old, familiar voice, the voice of youthful friendship. On the other hand, the letter aroused in me rich animosity toward Kip, which made me want to get it out of my sight. Surely, the sanguine tone seemed out of place; maybe it was meant to mask deep discouragement.
I couldn’t destroy the letter, no, but neither could I fully cherish having received it. I didn’t want Jessica to marry Kip, but I did want them to be happy; I didn’t want Kip to go off to Vietnam, but I did, didn’t I?
Kip and I created our own games, as I’ve said. I still don’t care about baseball one way or the other, but I’ve always liked the quote of Yogi Berra, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Having arrived at a crossroads I decided to look both ways and, as best I could, take them.
What is conviction? It is different from a conviction. Conviction when followed with strict, unveering resolve, can lead to arrest and arrest to conviction. Convicts are sometimes convicted because they took their convictions out and did things that might seem crazy to people who did not share those convictions, or at least didn’t share them to the degree of intensity that might carry them away into action. The word comes from convictio, proof. A person who has proof can therefore believe and can be compelled by belief to act with conviction. And I began to believe, I had proof sufficient to compel me to believe, and so I took my convictions with me, and I acted upon them and with them.
Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows, says the jester Trinculo in The Tempest. In the same way Los Alamos was a motley of different temperaments, the Movement—and I capitalize the word if only to show how much it became as formulative as the Hill had been—brought me in contact with more contradictory souls in the period of several years than some might encounter in a lifetime.
Epstein was one of many who disappeared into the swirl as the Movement grew; the last time I heard about him he’d become one of the Weathermen, had slipped from radicalism into the nebulous world of pacifist terrorism. Someone told me he’d been shot and killed, someone thought he was incarcerated for having taken part in a bank holdup, an action to liberate capitalist monies to redistribute to the cause, but I discounted these latter stories, since I thought I’d have read about it somewhere or heard about it in law school. The Columbia University Independent Committee on Vietnam came into being to “unite all those who oppose the war regardless of present political affiliation.” Five hundred of us from the university marched in Washington on the seventeenth of April one year, the cherry trees white and pink in bloom below the majestic monuments of the capital, which I thought were beautiful even as our chants, twenty thousand voices strong, drowned out the spring songs of the birds overhead. At the end of that month, we sent another telegram to Ho Chi Minh: THE STUDENT LEFT WING AT COLUMBIA IS STILL A MINORITY, BUT IT IS AN UNCEASINGLY PERSISTENT GROUP AND AN INCREASINGLY VOCAL ONE AS WELL. I had no sense of being to left or right, just knew what I knew was wrong. And then came the protest of May seventh against the presence of the ROTC on campus. I was there because I’d stayed with it, got deeper and deeper into the rituals of the Movement. Rancor and keen mistrust of authority pitched themselves at the center of some minds. From others I witnessed the same conundrums I’d never reconciled back on the Hill. Calculated violence—limited and specific—to force peace to come about. It was more than I’d expected, to be in the middle of a riot. I could have stayed at its edges but for once didn’t.
I threw rocks. I threw bottles. I threw gassing canisters back at the pigs who’d launched them into our ranks. I threw fists and kicked hard as hell when they tried to get the cuffs on me. I went limp when they carried me to the wagon. I made it so that it took three of them to get me where they wanted me, and by doing that I won a small and fleeting victory by taking three of them away from their positions in the melee.
This happened when Kip was still in New Mexico, on leave from school, putting affairs in order. In the same way the death of his parents freed him to make certain decisions, to begin acting on his convictions, Kip’s absence from New York freed me to act upon mine. History is not a backdrop to our lives, I came to presume, but is an agent, interactor. It was in my hands.
Jess bailed me out. She took my arm and walked me down the street.
—It’s in the newspapers.
—Good, I said.
—Your shirt is torn, she said.
—As well it should be.
—I think you’re a fool to have done this.
—If you think I’m such a fool, why did you bail me out?
—Don’t be dense, Brice. You know I’m proud of you, too.
—You should come with me next time.
—Who’d bail you out of jail?
Gently, I removed my arm from hers and we continued along in silence. After a while, I said, —Don’t be proud of me, Jess.
—Why not?
—I don’t know exactly. Just don’t.
When he came back to the city, closeness and distance between us began an interplay. He brought presents. For me, a Hopi ceremonial sash his father had kept draped over the back of his reading chair, its strict geometric patterns woven with vegetable-dyed wools of dark green and bright red, eggplant purple and black, all on a sheep-white ground. It was long, with fringed ends, and I put it over my shoulders like a minister does his tippet. I thanked him, embraced him.
Jessica was exuberant. —Sweet Kip, she called him, presenting him an armful of irises and tulips. When he handed her a small, squarish box with white string around it tied to look like ribbon, I knew what was inside and about to happen, but didn’t know why Kip felt it necessary that I be there to witness. The ring was modest. Navajo, old, a silver band with just a bit of ornamentation to set the little oval of deep-green tur
quoise.
—I hope it’ll fit, he said, and it did fit her little finger. —My new family, he said, then, his right arm over Jessica’s shoulder, his left up over mine.
She moved in with us, some few days later, and when she did I was seized by the desire to leave. Kip argued, —This is where you live, Brice, you’re not going anywhere, we’re kin here. For her part, Jessica, whose side Kip now seldom left, was—so far as I could fathom—not less enthusiastic than he about my staying on. Once more I drifted in a wobbling ellipse around them.
It wasn’t a horrible existence, this our brief experiment in Fourierism; it had its rewards. They made me feel at home and even as I felt that they were children and I the guardian, Kip and Jess no doubt looked on me as their ward. For weeks that accumulated into a month, I basked in the reflected glow of their sexual warmth. And it was true, wasn’t it, after all, that we were kin?
Jessica took it upon herself to find me a “companion”—her word for it. She had not told Kip about my participation in the May seventh riot, or about my arrest. I saw it as an act of complicity, and withheld the story from Kip as well, in part because I didn’t want to hear his comments, in part because I saw the shared secret as a declaration of her separate intimacy with me. More and more I could see how all things might lead to Jessica. How nothing I saw didn’t have her face in it, nothing I felt failed to bring me back to thinking about her. It was another conviction, and one to resist with a far greater strength than I’d resisted my first arrest.
—I’ve got someone I want you to meet.
—I don’t want to meet anybody, I said.
—Come on, don’t be stubborn.
—Jess. You know that line, You can’t push the river?
—You’re not a river.
—And what is that supposed to mean?
—She’s really great, I promise. Her name is Marisa.
Pushable river, I said, —All right, already.
And so entered Marisa, for a time. It was true that she was great. She straddled the two subcultures of beat and hippie. She had been present when Ginsberg, Corso, and Orlovsky read to an audience of over a thousand at Columbia back in 1959. She was one of a handful of students who protested former president Truman’s presence on campus that same year, when he came to deliver a series of lectures, and I liked her for that. She was possessed of a wryness toward things around her that was endearing. She read Mexico City Blues and The Dharma Bums, she read Howl and Kaddish, and the hash was burning one night at our place, soon after Jess had made her introduction, and the incense—Marisa’s aura was the color of a patchouli blossom, she told me—too, and the room vanished behind a willowy scrim of sour-sweet smoke as Marisa intoned, “. . . who bared their brains to heaven, waltzed by, tricked us” as only words and the music of words can trick you, and made us realize how holy we were indeed and in fact, and the toke pipe went around again and though it made me cough and turn crimson I smoked with the others, tried to keep up, and though I had doubts about the value of what Marisa was reading, I listened to her read on, “who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating,” and I began to feel unleashed despite myself, and yes, sexed up and very much alive in my body, “with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,” went the poem . . . and in my delirium looked over to Kip, watched him while he lay back on the pillows, big floppy pillows Jessica’d sewed together using some old curtain fabric, and saw that they were kissing while Marisa kept reading, “whispering facts and memories and anecdotes” . . . and I thought, Brice, this is two things, this is easy on you and this is not easy on you, it’s easy because these are your two best friends on earth and not easy because you want, you’ve always wanted, to be Kip, or at least the Kip that’s kissing Jessica. And you simply cannot have her and you cannot be Kip. You must be Brice. You are Brice. For better or worse, in sickness and in health, and so it is you are married to yourself as if there were an undetectable wedding between you and yourself that occurred at your birth. And I am thinking, That is genius—isn’t it? the idea that you are married to yourself, a shotgun wedding, with your progenitor’s penis as shotgun. Then I realized that I was not thinking with my straight mind, and I came back into the room there to join the others, such as they were.
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