None of this capacity to keep themselves in-country came without compromise. And this is where life got most complicated. The new Republic, founded in the last month of 1975, and headed by Kaysone Phomvihane, the chief of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, badly wanted Americans to live in Laos. When we pulled out of the war, leaving our Hmong allies, and open to revenge of the victorious Communists, very few of us had the interest or audacity to stay on. It was difficult, even dangerous for any American who had lived in Laos even as a neutral businessman to continue on after the fall of Saigon, but for an American who had worked with the CIA during the war, served with the Hmong in an effort to defeat the very people who now constituted the membership of the ruling party?—this was precarious ground being traveled. Wagner and Kip would take the risk. Why not? they figured. This was where they wanted to be, and the compromise asked of them was small.
To wit. Every year, in order to renew their visas, each had to write a short statement and submit it to Kaysone’s people at the local office of the foreign ministry. The statement was always the same. “I regret the actions that the United States of America took against the people of the country of Laos. I will never bear arms against the people of the country of Laos.” They believed that what they’d written here was true and represented their feelings. By compromising themselves just this far and no further they felt a perfect independence from any outside authority. They were their own state now. They were citizens of their own country.
Of course, having done this, they burned bridges. Never again could either of them be granted the security clearance necessary to serve as a pilot for the United States. That was out the window. At the same time they could imagine wholly sinister things in store for them from Kaysone if they ever refused to make their annual statement—and perhaps even if they didn’t. It was easy to imagine being detained at any moment, for no legal reason, or deported. A morals issue could be fabricated, a situation in which their ethics could be questioned, nothing was impossible.
“So, like I say, when we saw the bicycle shop wasn’t going to work, Wagner and I put our heads together and decided that we would run this tourist service. And it worked. We opened an office, hung out our shingle, and began to employ people, friends of friends, whoever wanted work. And we began to take visitors up the river to some famous caves where you could see hundreds of carved Buddha images, the Pak Ou caves that you explore by candlelight, or to take them into the interior by plane if they wanted, up to the Kuangsy waterfall where there’s this water-driven rice mill, or even over to the Plain where they could look at the solid stone jars, to ferry them around and show them how beautiful Laos was. And it was beautiful, Brice. Nothing like it have I ever seen since New Mexico. Green rolling hills punctuated by these karsts, winding rivers like endless silver snakes in these vast stretches of grass. And the people, no one like them anywhere in the world. Gentle and decent. Good working people. People who deserve so much and have got so little.”
As time passed, he tells me, Wagner became more involved in running refugees across the river to the limited freedom they might hope to find there. The long flat-bottom aluminum canoes they used to outboard up the river to the caves began now to be employed in the middle of the night, during new moon or when the sky was overcast, to transport émigrés to the far shore. Neither Wagner nor Kip went along on these nocturnal excursions—their situation was tenuous enough, they knew, and were they caught, it would be the end of everything for them—but they allowed their motormen, who had family or neighbors that sought to make passage, to use the boats, which they launched with paddles so as not to make noise.
The tourist business went better than might be expected, and the government, seeing that people were being brought in from the outside, did nothing to block their efforts. Indeed, they would fly members of the ministry from place to place when the occasion presented itself, and that same night they would come back and meet with people at a designated place, down by the river, where they’d give instructions and what money they could manage—hoping that the Thai waiting on the other bank would not confiscate everything they took with them—and hand them over into the care of their boatman, trusting that their nighttime lives would never come in contact with their days.
They walked a sharp new edge, and yet, for all the risks they now were starting to take, Kip tells me, “I can’t speak for Wagner but for me I was at a real high point in my life, like when you and I crashed that car way up on the border of Wyoming.” This is what he says, and all I can think is that Kip never did stop, he did keep going. When we first left the Hill on our way to Chimayó, and went on to Taos and onward up into Colorado, and when in my youthful imagination we continued to Montana and Canada and became cowboys and later built a noble house of stone where we were going to live as lifelong pals, it turned out that Kip made it there. Not exactly where I’d thought he would go, west not north, westward like the course of civilization rolling. I think back to my own favorite line from Kip’s Thoreau: “Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.” By then he’d become a vacuum, I could see, and was walking with more than sufficient carelessness. All that was left for him was to be filled.
Uncanny how we can anticipate the implausible. It was November, New York, a few years ago. Darker early, the lights in windows coming on along the streets. Sun cool, gusts crisp. Ginkgo nuts and yellowed leaves still clinging to their branches, but many of the other trees looking skeletal, shedding themselves for winter. Christmas was already in the air, and shop windows had been transformed from colors and themes of autumn, of Halloween and goblins, oranges and blacks, to the stock Xmas imagery of Santa and elves, reindeer and sleighs, of greens, reds, silvers. Garbage set out in molehills of dark green plastic didn’t stink so under the frost, and for that we were grateful. Out came the heavier clothes, my proven tweed jackets, mufflers, the thicker socks. Jessica would already begin to wear her gloves and hats, her sundresses and light camisoles put away for winter.
How I loved this time of year. When we ventured forth to walk through Washington Square our faces blushed in the bracing wind. I swear I could see and think more clearly at day, and slept better at night. August was but a bad dream with its weighty wet dead heat, its ruthless air-conditioning and allergy headaches, its sweating sleepless nights that give way, with cruel seamlessness, to work days marked by nothing but drear exhaustion. August, like a tightening belt around one’s head. Everyone suffering. City of sleepwalkers as the strangest of the strange come out to prowl and the murder rate soars and the streets teem with the maniac cast of a lost, dark carnival. The streets are sunk under haze, and the haze itself is sunk under wan wen of sun. Hell weather, the dog days. It is a punishment, a curse, just as late fall is a blessing, is the most prodigal, most congenial season, even preferable to spring with its mere buds and foul mud.
It was after Thanksgiving, and I was at the height of contentment. Ariel had come by and indulged me in celebrating my favorite holiday just as we had when she was a little girl, rather than a young woman who would be graduating from college, third-generation Columbian, the following year. So it had been an old-style Thanksgiving. She and I went to the parade, commented like we always did with mock scorn at the gaudy floats and mammoth balloons, elbowed each other with shameful delight when the majorette dropped her baton, and just generally misbehaved so thoroughly that Jessica had long since given up coming along with us. Then back home to feast. The celebration of Thanksgiving had become such a ritual in our urban household, it seemed left over unrevised from the folksy postwar forties, or the more desperately traditional fifties. Here was the turkey browned just right since predawn in the oven, drumsticks proud as cannon at his sides, brimming with spiced sausage stuffing. Here were bland white crumbly biscuits that collapsed when spread with butter, the floury gravy crunchy with crisps spooned from the drip pan, the sweet cranberry sauce, the unskinned buttery mashed potatoes, the musky sauerkra
ut from my mother’s old recipe . . . pork strips, salty and mushy, drowned in brine and laid beside the string beans. Ariel’s friends sat and ate with Jessica’s and mine. It had been an afternoon that left me buoyant for days on end.
The first snowfall of the season, a dusting that lay like parchment along the walks. When we went to bed, flakes here and there were trailing down through the lamplight outside the window. Jessica in my arms felt smooth and feral, her back firm against my front, both her breasts cupped in my palms, my face buried in the pale heat of her neck. The cat in a pleasant heap in the crook behind my knees, my knees pushed into the crook behind Jessica’s, our legs parallel like our lives, and the whole scene as miraculous as it was mundane, the way we lay, the way my hand moved down the plane of her belly, and how my fingers pressed inside her, the joy of growing deep into her, and the gentle delirium of orgasm. Family and home and life going along, so that, when I drifted into sleep, I might never have expected what I would find there.
The nightmare was this. Jess and I were seated on a grassy knoll and we were holding hands and facing each other and she was beautiful, her hair wafted by soft wind, a fond glow in her eyes as she gazed at me. She cherished me and I her. Nothing was spoken, but the air was charged with sex, the smell of sex—briny, lush, dense—flowed from her skin and mine. Now I looked down the hillside, all grassy—it was gradual, the slope—and at the bottom there was a glassy gray sea, perhaps a harbor. Out on this sea there were no ships, but craggy rough islands came up from the water, black and white thrusting to pinnacles, piercing upward like mineral icicles. The waves curled around their bases, no shores, white. I looked back at Jessica, her eyes nodded to left, then right. Mine looked to where hers had glanced and I was astonished to see that we were surrounded by babies in a ring, each naked and seated upright, happy children with beneficent expressions on their faces. A curious sensation of liquid warmth began in my ears and streamed from inside my head down into my neck, my heart, out through my arms to my hands and fingers and down through my torso to my hips into my genitals and on through thighs into calves and feet and toes until I was a complete fountain of heat. I looked to Jessica and she was laughing now and the babies were not laughing but smiling, boys and girls, and I too was smiling and laughing. It was life and it was funny.
This would have been the most miraculously auspicious dream but for what followed. Perspective changed. Now I was no longer inside the circle of children, but just outside. I was standing, hands at my sides, rather stiff, and I was looking at Jessica and she wore a smile still, maybe superior now, maybe more gracious and distant. I smiled back, worried, scared even. And I looked at myself—or a double of myself—across from her.
Kip.
It was Kip staring ahead at no one in particular, this is what I thought. He wasn’t looking at Jessica, and though I called his name he wasn’t willing to look at me either. He was in robes, and I had the distinct sense that his arms were missing. I wanted to ask him about his arms and opened my mouth to speak. But rather I woke up bathed in sweat, and was never able to get back to sleep the rest of the night. It crystallized into an omen, for me, and instead of seeing it as a stark private drama that played out once more my fears and guilt toward Kip—wondered what his armlessness could mean?—I took it as a warning. Of what I couldn’t say.
In the morning, I began to tell Jessica about the dream. I described the hill, the ocean, the vertical isles, and the ring of babies. She said, —What a wonderful dream, before I’d gotten to the crucial shift to Kip at the center of the circle. —I wonder what brought it on? she smiled, and so I left it at that.
Despite all attempts to forget about it, the nightmare continued to come to mind, began to inhabit me. Maybe it made such entrée by the very nature of its simplicity. Maybe a more complex dream would have been easier to forget. But whatever the reason, I found it returning at unlikely moments, while accompanying Jessica on an errand, reading a brief in court, slicing bread for breakfast toast. It became a colleague, a confrère. I would shake my head and say to myself, You again.
It is impossible to know whether the dream inspired what was to happen next—my sightings of Kip—or whether it merely marked the beginning of these occurrences, served as prologue to the waking drama of my sudden seizures when I would glance across the street and see him, manifest, alive, the living Kip tramping along, an itinerant or homeless, once as a man in a suit—which took me aback since the only suit I’d ever seen on Kip was his military uniform—another time driving a cab. Altogether I must have seen him on half a dozen occasions. Only once did I decide to cross the street and approach him. It just seemed impossible that it wasn’t Kip, and for me to continue ignoring him was ridiculous. What was I afraid of?—by this time we were both well past forty, Jess and I long married, Ariel now legally adopted. There was nothing to fear. And so I walked out into the traffic, kept one eye on him so as not to lose him in the crowd while I darted around cars. A bicyclist and I nearly collided, he shouted something over his shoulder at me but I didn’t hear him. I was intent on Kip, who lengthened the distance between us before I could reach the walk opposite, and rounded the corner into a side street. The street traversed, I began to run. Turned the corner and there he was, his back to me, just a few paces ahead. I stopped to catch my breath, gather myself. What would I say? The long slow arcing movement of his arms—surely this was Kip, I thought. And so I closed the space between us until, just at his side, I hesitated. At that very instant he turned to me with a look of apprehension clouding his face.
—What do you want? he asked.
—Nothing, I said, marveling at how much this man actually did look like Kip. —I’m sorry, I said, —I thought you were someone else. The man turned and went his way.
Somehow, something was learned, so I thought, as a result of that experience. I decided that were Kip alive, it would have to be he who reached out to me, that this would be the appropriate way in that it was he who left. I also settled on an interpretation of the dream that presumed the Kip-figure in the circle was an extension of the Brice-figure outside; both were me, within and without, and as such there was no reason to obsess about it anymore. Whenever it tried to resurface after that, I ignored it as if it were so much dross. Kip, I thought, should neither be so honored as to haunt me like a specter would an old abbey, nor so dishonored by me as to be seen as an embodiment of dread and doubt.
One thing I did allow myself to retain from the dreams and sightings was a profound belief that despite everything that spoke to the contrary, Kip was going to return one day, and when it came to pass, it would be wise of me not to turn away from him. I could fear the moment if I had to, but I could not resist it.
Kip, having heard this, says to me, “You know what’s the most peculiar from where I sit?”
Having forgotten that he was here with me, listening to what I recounted, I utter “What?” before I’m fully aware of his presence.
“It’s that there were times I thought I saw you, too. After I was invited to leave Laos, after the couple of years over there in the refugee camps, I decided to try to come back again and there were any number of places I lived. Here, Europe, Italy for a time, Spain, down in South America, then back toward Laos, Thailand, on and on. I was caught between one abandonment and another, I guess, and so I was condemned to being a permanent stranger. Talk about a man without a country, that was me. And I’d be lying if I told you there wasn’t a freedom to it. The minute I felt myself settling down, that was the moment I would pull out. So on the one hand nowhere looked like home to me, and on the other, everywhere looked like home. One of the places I tried on, like you try on clothes, was the city. I didn’t last, though. This day I swear I’d see Jessie, another day, at the edge of one of the fields in the park, walking along near Belvedere Castle or out on the Great Lawn, I was sure it was you. Maybe it even was.”
I am stunned at the thought of Kip so nearby when I’d thought him dead. Also, that he’d become a helpless e
lectron circling the atomic heart of the world, just as I once thought of myself. I say, “So you left.”
“So I left.”
“When was that? Was it three years ago?”
Kip shakes his head from side to side. “Does it matter?”
“It matters only because, I don’t know, maybe it was you I saw one of those times.”
He looks me in the eye and says, “No, it wasn’t three years ago that I was there, it wasn’t me you saw,” and I can tell at once that he is lying and that it is one of those rare mistruths whose value transcends fact. Lay aside your speculations about what might have happened if this were different, or that. This is what Kip’s small falsehood is about. Just as when we were children, I’d admired Kip for the wildness of his spirit, I find myself now in awe of such natural charity.
A cricket between the floorboards. Music of its spiky thighs rubbed together. The shutters were open and out the windows shouts rose, a few individuals, then a few more, until there were many.
—Wagner, he slurred. —Wagner, coming more and more awake from the sleep of his flu.
Wagner didn’t say anything, because Wagner was not there.
There was such an uproar and he pulled the sheet away from him and swung his legs around, planted feet on the floor, and then he stopped to listen, though the tingling in his soles—an indication of his fever—captured as much of his attention as the cries from below the open window.
—What is it? he managed to shout back. The influenza could be heard in the thickness and weakness of what he’d tried to ask. His cheeks were so cold, his forehead wet. He mumbled, then cried out with as much clarity and volume as his fluey body would allow, —What is it? Wagner?
Even the cricket desisted after that. Kip struggled with sore muscles but got up and in short steps made it across the broad room to a window looking out over the main road. His eyes worked against the blackness. He heard no further sound. He whispered the name of his colleague once, twice, three times, more times than that over the course of the next hour.
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