Jeffrey Kabot

Kids Flying Kites

I met Kathy the day after my brother’s funeral. I was there, again, in the

cemetery, glancing around at the various headstones with their generic epitaphs

(“she will be missed,” “we loved him so…”), but mostly just staring at the ground in

a contemplative vapidity. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand anything,

really. Eighteen years old in Vietnam, just a kid. When he got back he and I would

have a drink, I’d told him in a letter. We’d go to the bar and have a good time, like

brothers should, I’d said. Now he’s dead, six feet under the earth before me, with

his eyes probably rolled back and looking inside his skull, surprised because there’s

nothing there. It was raining. My cigarette went out. The angels stared at me with

a sorrowful awe. The expressions on their perfect little faces seemed to say, why

so sad? God loves us all. Well if God truly loved my brother, he would have sent me

instead of an innocent child to that fucking place. And if God truly loved me, my

brother wouldn’t have killed himself with a gun in his mouth. Boom. And he just fell

over in spasms, like a chicken with its head cut off, or a deer that’s been hit by a

car, one of his squadmates explained to me. No one knew exactly why.

That’s when I first saw Kathy. She was walking through one of the aisles with

a flower and placed it, along with an opened bottle of coca-cola, a record, and a

copy of the New York Times before one of the graves. She kneeled and closed her

eyes. The rain died down. I lit another cigarette and watched this girl. There was

just something about her that I couldn’t define. It wasn’t in the way she looked; she

was remarkably pretty, but I’ve seen plenty pretty girls in my day. It wasn’t in the

way she dressed; though her colorful and complicated outfits were always in a way

magnificent and amusing at the same time and I would remember how her long
winter overcoats flowed over her and seemed to triple her small size. It was in the

way she carried herself. It was in the way her hair rustled delicately as the wind

winnowed its way through. It was in the way her eyelids trembled softly when a

raindrop would strike her cheek. Her presence conveyed comfort, warmth, and

brightness. There was life and color in every one of her footsteps and I felt sure

that marigolds and bougainvilleas grew behind her wherever she would--

“Isn’t it funny how it’s always raining every time you visit the cemetery?” she

said aloud. I saw no one around so I assumed it was directed to me.

“Just like in the movies, right?”

“Life is like a movie,” she said, turning around, smiling. “Or at least, one

should try to live that way. Every day should be exciting: quit your job, buy a gun,

fall in love, lose your love—EXPLOSION!” She laughed like flowers blooming.

The rain had stopped. We were sitting at a table outside a café sipping tea in

the crisp October air. Kathy pulled out a long elegant cigarette. Her mother was a

traveling musician. She played the violin and the ukulele and the accordion and a

whole bunch of other instruments Kathy had been too young to remember what

they were called. Her father was a chiropractor. He could fix anything, she

explained, blue-white smoke curling from her thin lips and sighing forever upward.

Anything.

“I remember one time (I was nine) my father came home from the office and

he said ‘Kathy I think it’s time for you to experience art.’ So he took me to the opera

(I was nine!) and they were performing Oedipus Rex. I was so fascinated by the

whole thing and paid attention as best as a little girl could. I thought about what it

must be like to kill someone and about liars and kings and fortune-tellers and gods.

I thought about what it would be like to not know who your real parents and
brothers and sisters are and about how dreadful it must be to be blind. I realized I

could never lie because hiding the truth from someone is one of the most terrible

things one can do. I realized that the day I can no longer see the world and all its

color anymore is the day that I die. But most of all I realized how wonderful and

amazing my father was for teaching me all of these things and for giving me the gift

of awe.”

One night, nine years ago, my brother and I were in the piano room. He was

practicing his handwriting and I was reading a book apathetically. Each page

seemed more trivial than the last until I was sure the words I was glancing at

weren’t even in English. I sighed and started playing a few notes on the piano. I

didn’t play piano, but practiced clarinet until high school and knew a bit about

music: just enough to push a few keys and fashion a cute little melody or two. After

a few moments my brother put down his pencil and came over to watch. He stood

next to me and stared as I continued messing around pushing some cool-sounding

chords that I couldn’t name in a pattern. He exclaimed “Wow! I didn’t know you

could play!” I stopped and was about to tell him that I had no idea what I was doing

when he cheered “no, no! Play more!” I made-up another vague little tune while he

smiled and spun about. I smiled too. “Here, sit down. Let me teach you how to

play,” I offered. “Play these three keys like this.” A4, D5, F5. He hesitated and

pressed them cautiously and out of rhythm. “No, like this,” I indicated and played

them again. A4, D5, F5. “Good. Okay now these three.” G4, C5, E5. “Yea! Like

that! Okay now:” B4, D5, G5. “Try that one again in the correct rhythm— yes! Okay

last one.” F4, A4, C5. “Nice!” Okay now do them all in a row, each pattern four

times. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. Like

that.” His face glowed as his fingers danced over the keys and the room filled with
warm vibrations which floated from the piano like all the colors at a hot air balloon

festival. “Here, I’ll join you,” I laughed and began painting a bright and delicate

melody over his lush background. He radiated with light and waves of giddiness

and bliss washed over the room. I wanted to stay there, at that private festival of

colors and sounds which represented all the innocence of childhood and all the

beauty of companionship. We continued playing throughout the night, the same

playful simple happy pattern with the same playful fleeting happy melody. My

brother became obsessed with the piano. Every time I would visit he would insist

on playing for me. “Listen! I made a song! Want to hear?” and I came to expect a

private concert on every occasion. “Was it good?” he would ask. “Wonderful,” I

would say, my brother never failed to astonish me. I would always remember him as

the most beautifully skillful piano player I have ever heard. And I would always

remember the night I taught him how to play.

No one knew why my brother killed himself. But I knew why. It was because

he had no capacity in his soul for destruction. He didn’t belong there. There were

no pianos in Vietnam.

I blinked and started to cry.

“I’m certain that when your brother died, all he could hear was breathtaking

piano music. And I know for sure that it wasn’t his favorite Mozart, the most pristine

Bach or Tchaikovsky. It was the song that the two of you played then. The song

made up by two kids who didn’t know how to play but played anyway.” She put out

her cigarette, sipped her tea, and lit another. “You know, you’re a very lush

person.”

I lit one too and quietly watched the ember burn for a bit. “Can I ask you

about the coca-cola and paper and such back there?” I said, after a while.
 She laughed and smiled. “I like to surprise my parents with gifts when I visit

them. My mother loved the blues, especially Robert Johnson. I remember when I

was three if I couldn’t sleep my mother would put on blues records and howl away.

Later she grew to like jazz and the first time I heard Miles Davis I begged and

begged until my parents finally got me a trumpet. Many a lonely evening I’ve spent

making up songs and wondering if my mother would have liked them. My father

read the Times every day. He would devour every piece of information he could

find. He loved to discuss society and philosophy and the arts and would try to

cultivate my little mind with diversity and ideas which were probably purposefully

too complex for me. I can remember him and my mother smoking cigarettes and

sipping coca-cola and rum, debating and meditating on countless topics which I was

too young to understand. They would talk for hours in the study and they didn’t

know but I would stay up and listen to them, my ear against the bedroom floor. I

didn’t care that I didn’t understand, I just wanted to hear them talking. I just

wanted to feel like I was there. When I was sixteen I discovered that my father had

been an amateur writer and among his notes on various scholarly topics was an

unfinished draft for a novel.”

“What’s it about?” the fire glowed dully.

“It’s about a boy and a girl in the 1800s who meet at a lake year after year

while their families stay at their summer homes. All summer, they go to the hills

next to the lake and fly kites together in the sun. The description is powerfully

enigmatic. The outlines of everything blur and everything becomes part of

everything else. They swim and fly at the same time and their kites turn into

animals and clouds and the grass grows like it forgot that it was a tree. The sun

and the summer will stay here forever, as long as we just keep flying our kites, they
decide. Then the civil war begins, and their families, being on opposite sides of the

battle, no longer meet. That’s where it stops, and abruptly. I absolutely love this

story. The premise is just so beautiful to me, with the innocence of children torn

apart by the coldness of war. I intend to finish it someday, when I can think of the

proper way to end it.”

“I’m sure you’ll find the right ending.”

A week later we were walking through the park at night under the clear

October sky. The lampposts gave the greenery a quiet golden luster. The frigid

ghost of my brother continued haunted my thoughts fleetingly, but around Kathy I

felt an uneasy inner calm that I couldn’t yet quite figure out and I stayed near her to

keep the dolor of my brother’s death from taking me over. We talked about music

and literature. We traded titles of favorite books and shared ideas and beliefs.

Kathy was wearing another one of her long overcoats and a pair of big noticeable

boots that made funny sounds with each step she took.

Suddenly she turned around, aglow, and said, “You know what I’m going to

do right now? I’m going to run over to that big pile of leaves over there and jump in

and see how deep within I can lose myself and if you want to you can come with me

but if not that’s okay.”

For just a fraction of a second I hesitated, before dashing off after her.

Flowers and trees and grass rushed by in a blur of green and gold and a million

thoughts raced through my mind like the world was ending. I thought about the

smile on a face of the guys who drive ice cream trucks when they stop and play

their jingle, and how a small boy’s eyes might grow as wide as the big balloon in his

little hand. I thought about how a mother would tuck her children in at night, or how

a baby might cry when he can’t find his stuffed giraffe. I imagined how a lost dog
might lick its owner after having been found and how a little girl might laugh on a

trampoline in spring time. I thought about how a father might cry after learning his

son died in an accident, or how a boy might cry after learning his father died in the

war. I thought about how an old man walking down the road with nowhere to go

might just keep walking and I thought how a widow must feel at the funeral of her

only child.

All these things and more went through my head and my emotions throbbed

and my heart ached as the world swept by and suddenly I was diving headfirst into

an ocean of rusty orange leaves. Kathy was concealed save her small little nose

and her electrifying smile and her flashing green eyes. I found her hand and we lay

in the leaves together and watched as the stars fell from the sky one by one, like

soldiers going to battle, or kids flying kites.