Trinity Fields (19 page)

We kept going. We both worked hard in our different ways. He worked days, worked nights. I don't know how he managed. We'd read our way through Western Civilization during our first year, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, the required classics, and had felt the same intimidation as our classmates, buried under the course load, worried about deadlines and writing papers, pulling all-nighters and discovering what five, six, seven cups of coffee can do to your mind and stomach.
The Iliad
, the Roman Empire, the Goths, Genghis Khan, epics of discord, governments lusting to rule the world, nethermen long gone to their graves—we were learning about wars other than the great one of our parents, and for the first time in my life I'd begun to see that the world was history, not just the dead and gone world of centuries past, but the world our mothers and fathers had lived in and shaped, and our own world, this very one we were breathing in now, it was history too. I can remember one night walking across campus, having read about Plato's cave, and looking up at the moon, which often you couldn't see well because of all the ambient light cast upward by the city, but which happened to be clear and full, and I remember thinking, My god, Plato looked at that same moon. And Euripides and Sophocles. It was such a revelation for me. And now, during this second year, I told myself I was going to learn everything I could. Not because I wanted to be a good boy, or get good grades. How can it be admitted in a way that doesn't sound maudlin? I simply wanted to
know
. I took courses in anthropology, economics, nineteenth-century American history. I sensed everything was valuable, and in anticipation of classes that weren't even offered to us, I began doing my own sort of extracurricular work, reading political science texts.

Maybe it was gradual, maybe sudden—it was probably convulsive in the sense that the process went in fits and starts, but we began to shed our immaturities. Like sandstone riffled by water, or flint chipped into an arrowhead or a thumbknife, Kip and I were being honed. We couldn't help it and wouldn't necessarily have wanted to stop the process even if we were able to see it shaping us. The Hill had been so abundantly secluded that it should come as no surprise we were susceptible. At the same time, it had been home to so many sophisticated minds, fine intellects, and the hardness, the severity of the high desert, coupled with these learned presences, made for a hardness that we inherited and, so, possessed ourselves. Flint, sandstone, these seem perfect analogues. Hard but soft. Soft but hard. Hard enough to hold shape, soft enough to change it. Few children have the smarts to cherish the hideaway that's home. Kip and I took every possible advantage of the splendid isolation that was ours, but the big bad world beyond the gate was what we always wanted.

One day Kip found me reading von Clausewitz's massive book on the nature of war.

—What's that for? he asked.

—It's a book. You know, they have words, you read them?

—Smartass, he said. —I mean what class?

—It's not for a class, it's just for myself.

—You're reading
that
for yourself?

—So what?

—Sometimes I just don't get you, boy.

It wasn't that I was reading outside the curriculum, but rather that Kip scoffed at anything that hinted of sociology or political science.

—Sociology is the study of the murdered and political science is the study of murderers, he said. —Knowing these people's names and their birthdates and when they kicked the can, and reading all their drivel is not going to change the behavior of one politician, one soldier, one goddamn anybody. Men fight, Brice. It's what they do. They need to step on one another's heads. They need to blow each other's brains out. You should know this by now. It gives pleasure and, besides, it's genetic. It's in the blood. You eat meat, don't you?

—What does that have to do with anything?

—That meat we ate for dinner last night was from a cow that was at war with men, and the cow lost, and you ate it. There's microbes locked in mortal combat inside your body even as we speak.

—I can't believe what I'm hearing here.

—You know how you always wanted to get away from the Hill because the Hill was a place of war?

—We both did.

Kip ignored me, went on with —Well, do you know where you're living now?

I said nothing. I didn't know.

—You're living in Morningside Heights. It has a pretty name. But you know what it is? Just another hill where they fought another battle. Washington fought right down there, right down in the street there before anybody ever thought about paving it and building buildings here.

From one war hill to another? I must have looked as if I'd seen a ghost.

—Brice, I'm not saying I like it. I'm just saying it is a fact of life and I'm coming to realize it, and I think you should, too, boy.

I argued, —Facts of life can be changed. Polio used to be a fact of life and they found a vaccine for the virus and now it is not a fact of life anymore.

—You're just proving my point. The virus fought a war and it lost, for the time being, anyway. Some things live in harmony, don't get me wrong. And other things don't. All I'm saying is that sitting around in an ivory tower, or an Ivy League tower, reading this philosopher and that theoretician ain't gonna change those basic facts.

Kip went on to do something else, whatever it might have been, and refused to acknowledge my backhanded compliment, —You're pretty smart, boy.

In a sentimental mood I might conjure the church in Chimayó and thank its god, from time to time, for how well everything was going. No matter whether I fathomed him or not, I liked Kip. He hadn't seen that I was infinitely his inferior—this was what I believed—and for that I could thank heaven, because whether I liked it or not, I was so deeply attached to him that my life seemed to depend on it. Was this the way friends were supposed to feel? I didn't know.

What I did know was that I hoped things would stay just as they were and was grateful for what I had. But gods don't always respect gratitude. Impaired by infinite age and the lassitude that must result from attending too many grievous confessions, too many greedy requests (—Oh please, God, sir, if I do
this
will you let me have
that
), not to mention a surfeit of gushy and misguided thanks—not unlike my own—they simply don't have the holy stomach for it after a while. And for those who do, nowhere is it written they must always be grateful in turn for our gratitude. Even the lowest of the household gods, as Homer made clear and Ovid later concurred, did whatever they damn well pleased and no amount of supplication was going to alter their behavior. Kip's job lasted not quite through October before he quit or was fired, I couldn't decide which. The way he told the story, it sounded as if both happened with raw, spontaneous simultaneity. And so the thanks to heaven from a budding agnostic and even sometime atheist were premature.

—Didn't belong there anyway, Kip said.

—I thought you were doing great.

—You thought wrong.

—Why didn't you tell me?

—It's my problem, not yours. That's why.

I said, —But I thought we were partners in everything. You got problems, man, you tell me about it.

He shrugged and produced, from the depths of his jacket, a bottle of whiskey, —This is compliments of my former boss. I consider it severance pay.

—Remember the last time we shanghaied one of those?

Kip didn't accept my invitation to reminiscence. We were both dejected, but he seemed out-and-out defeated. High to low, very high to very low. Yesterday he was clear-minded and strong and content. Now he was dark and frail.

He peeled the paper off the cap and uncorked the whiskey. He drank, coughed. Looked old. But edgy still. All nerves. He held out the bottle to me.

—Hold on, I said, and got glasses from the kitchen.

—You're right, he said. —Dignity in dire straits.

—Our straits aren't that dire, I said, and proposed a toast, —Here's to new beginnings.

He didn't lift his glass, nor did he lift his eyes, which were trained on his one finger that lightly drew a circle over and over around the glass lip.

—That's redundant.

—What?

—New beginnings. It's redundant. It's like saying great big, great and big mean the same thing. Beginnings are always new and something new is always a beginning.

—No wonder you got fired.

—It's called a tautology.

—You make the goddamn toast then.

He thought about it for a moment, then lifted his glass to mine, and said, —Confusion to the enemy.

Otowi bridge. And running beneath it, muddy as ever, the Rio Grande. Here is where they all crossed to go up to the Hill, before I was born. Kip's father and mother, mine. Like the Rubicon, once crossed you can never really turn back. Or like the Lethe which, once drunk from, makes your memory dissolve and reduces you to a person without a history or a future. But then they did come back down from the Hill and crossed the Rio Grande again, my father and Kip's and the rest of them, bringing with them their contrivance, their machine.

When the bomb was detonated down at Alamogordo, residents for hundreds of miles around knew something extraordinary had happened. Light was seen in El Paso. A blazing flash was reported in Santa Fe. Windows rattled in their frames as far away as Gallup and Silver City. Men who were part of the Project watched from arroyos and slit trenches. Up on Compañia Hill some twenty miles away, where some of the scientists had applied sunburn lotion to their faces in the predawn dark, they saw it, and they could see it from San Antonio and from up on Chupadero Peak. Wives, too, who waited on Sawyer's Hill behind Los Alamos could see the flash and hear the rumble. A group of guards assigned to Mockingbird Gap near Little Burro lay face down with their feet pointed toward Ground Zero, and were ordered, after the first flash, to turn and watch through an oblong chunk of welder's glass the natural and unnatural disasters that ensued. On shortwave radio, by chance, the Voice of America played the “Star-Spangled Banner” just before the detonation. It was one of the greatest moments in history, great as in
of unsurpassing enormity and consequence
—some would say that what occurred that morning at Alamogordo was
the
greatest moment in history. The discovery of the wheel, of fire, of electricity—these were pale by comparison. It was the birth of a new religion, one in which the end of the world might be near but no repentance would provide for salvation. My father was there, near Carrizozo. Mother keeps the four-leaf clover he carried in his wallet that morning, pressed between sheets of waxed paper in the pages of her Bible. It was Robert Oppenheimer who gave the test its name of Trinity, and Oppenheimer who said later that what came to mind, as marl and hills were bathed in seething brilliance and the purple radioactive glowing cloud hung there over the desert, was a phrase from Hindu scripture, from a scene in the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu, hoping to motivate the Prince to behave dutifully, takes on his thousand-armed form and says, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Many of its makers would later memorably describe what they witnessed as the convection stem of dust chased the final cloud of smoke toward the morning star. But a man named Kenneth Bainbridge, the director of Trinity, made what is to me the most indelible and peculiarly dignified comment of the day. To Oppenheimer, after congratulating everyone in the control bunker, he said, —Now we are all sons of bitches.

Winding my way up the canyon, I admire the majesty and luminousness of the cliffs, Otowi ruins with their gray sagebrush beard across the canyon from the overlook, the many different shades of brown and white and reds of the rocks that look like vertebrae, and now I begin to notice them, the roads—here and there, which trail off from the highway—gated at their discreet entrances, with small signs warning the potential trespasser away. And then I see them, hidden or not, on mesa edges—the pastel green buildings, the labs with their supercomputers and linear accelerators, the Tech buildings, off to the right, protected by the dry moats of the deep ravines. The clusters of buildings, gray-blues and earthen reds and tans, the glistening satellite dishes and radar installations pointed to the mute blue sky, the ganglia of electrical wires, the storage tanks, the nameless and faceless buildings behind lengths and widths of fences with concertina wire curling along the crests, way over there.

I breathe in deep and think, Bainbridge was right. Sons of bitches one and all.

Autumn began, autumn passed, and winter began, 1963 into 1964. The president was assassinated. My mother telephoned me with the news. She was crying and then I was crying, too. Kip said, —What's going on? and I said, —Kennedy's dead, and I could hear my mother's set on in the background, and said goodbye to her and got off and Kip and I ran from the apartment over to campus where it seemed we lived for the next few days, dazed and worried about the future, worried without really knowing what this meant, watching television in a student lounge with other students. The funeral stands in my memory more than the arrest of Oswald, his murder by Jack Ruby, or any of the other events that unfolded from the assassination. The caisson in the funeral, the cadence of the drums and sad clop of the horse's hooves that drew the stern narrow wagon laden with its simple casket draped in the flag along the avenues of Washington, the leaders of the world who walked behind the cortège in procession, the widow and the two children, the president's son with his small flag not quite sure of what was going on. For an event that had such impact on us all it was surely unreal, these black-and-white images on the screen, the hushed voices of the television commentators. It was pivotal. It was the true beginning of the sixties. Kip, I, everyone was in shock.