Van Jorgen went into the next room, a modest-sized library with a table, chair, and reading lamp at its center. Beneath each of the several windows was a case of specimens, collections from Freyn’s studies over the years. Most of them were unremarkable objects: shells, pottery shards, a few glass bangles that were over a thousand years old but the like of which could be found in the collection of any antiquities enthusiast anywhere. Another case held rock and mineral specimens: a great bubbling chunk of malachite, a polished orb of rose quartz, some others that were not labeled.
In one corner of this case was a piece that looked like a tree branch made of stone. The main trunk of it was as thick as a carrot and about a foot long, with three short auxiliary branches at one end. It sparkled even in the dim light of the library. Van Jorgen felt a pain in his chest and realized that his heart was racing, that he was breathing too quickly, and he forced himself to slow down.
He tested the top of the case and found it unlocked. Back in the drawing room he could hear Freyn and his daughter still locked in rapt conversation. Lifting the glass, he touched the strange object. He had expected a shock of some sort, but felt only a curious fluid roughness, as though the rock sighed at his touch. He closed his eyes and walked his fingertips along the length of the branched object, exploring each dip and turn in its structure.
“Papa!” said Effie. “You mustn’t touch those things.”
She was at his side, taking hold of his arm, but Van Jorgen did not move his fingers. Freyn approached and Van Jorgen looked up, feeling like a dog who has been caught with some prized scrap of offal and knows it is about to be stolen. Freyn smiled at him and patted Effie’s shoulder.
“I see you’ve found the fulgurite, sir. A very rare specimen purchased at a market in Egypt, during my student days. The Bedouins sometimes discover them in the desert after a windstorm. This,” he said, indicating a small hole at one end, “is where a bolt of lightning struck the sand, and all around it the sand fused into glass.”
Effie made another flustered appeal to her father to release the fulgurite, but Van Jorgen was barely listening. All he could think was that the insides of his own maimed lungs must look something like this: crystalline, brittle. He lifted the fulgurite with the utmost care and cradled it in his palms. Freyn seemed to have forgotten the fulgurite entirely. He was shifting his weight back and forth between his feet, and gazing at the ceiling with a rapturous look.
“Do you know,” he said, “you should come with me to Egypt when I go next month. Both of you,” he said, in breathless excitement, glancing at Effie’s stunned face but charging on nonetheless. “I need her there as my assistant, and I’m sure she would not consent to go without you. As a chaperone, that is. And surely you would enjoy seeing the country, sir.”
Van Jorgen frowned. He was loath to accept anything from the man who was going to steal his daughter, worse yet such an expensive gift. He was not taken in for a moment by talk of a chaperone. While propriety certainly required it, a fitter person could be found to accompany Effie. But he looked at the fulgurite and was enchanted. The thought of going to Egypt, the place that produced such marvels, had a heady appeal that subsumed even his pride. He imagined within the desert a forest of fulgurites, their branched arms reaching toward the sky, beckoning the lightning down like a multitude of snakes beseeching their charmer. When he left Freyn’s house that night, the fulgurite, wrapped in silk pillowcases and carefully placed in a crate, was with him.
* * *
—
The next month was a flurry of plans and packing. Freyn booked their passage for the two-week journey to Alexandria. He went to town with Effie and Greta to purchase the clothes Effie would need—sturdy boots and light cotton skirts, only a single layer over pantaloons. It was all packed into trunks, labeled and strapped and carried off to the shipping yard.
Van Jorgen eschewed such mundane tasks, waved away Freyn’s offer to buy him a new suit, and did not leave the house until the day of their departure, when he, Effie, and Freyn rode together to the dock. In that time he built a box for the fulgurite, velvet-lined, made of oak, and once he had packed his treasure into it he refused to relinquish it.
The sea journey was long but uneventful. They arrived in Alexandria at night, and set out the next morning for the oasis at Siwa. There they collected workers and supplies, and began the arduous journey toward the dig site, a week’s trek through empty desert, traveling in a caravan. Freyn kept his map close, guarded jealously and consulted often, though it was unlikely that anyone would follow them. Most archaeologists believed that even the Valley of the Kings was exhausted at this point, and the Western Desert—well, it was a wasteland, impossible that anything of worth would be uncovered there. And yet Freyn was convinced otherwise. He stopped to take measurements and make calculations, and finally they found their camp.
* * *
—
The spot Freyn indicated looked to Effie no different from any of the land they had passed through; there was nothing but sand in every direction, rolling dunes that were fiercely golden in the day, then purple and gray in the evening. As soon as the party had pitched their tents, clustered around the six great water tanks that had made up the bulk of their freight, Freyn sent a small group of workers back toward Siwa for more water, a process that would have to be repeated every few days for as long as they remained in the desert.
The environment was as inhospitable as one could imagine—desiccated, mercilessly hot, and scoured over by sand-bearing winds—but Effie loved it. During their first nights in camp she would creep away from the tents while everyone else slept, and sit looking out at the horizon, where the hunched backs of the sand dunes rose up against the thickly sewn stars. Her father, too, flourished in the desert. During the day the hot air seemed to soften his glassed lungs, to render them slightly more pliant, and his breathing easier, and though he was still only a shadow of the man she remembered from her childhood, it was heartening to see him walking around the camp without stopping every few paces to catch his breath.
The diggers began their work. Even with Freyn’s map, the location was not precise, and they had several hundred empty hectares of sand to investigate. The men set to work with shovels, loading the sand into boxes and dragging it aside. For the first few days, Effie sat in her stifling tent and listened to their grunts and clangings, to the songs they sang to keep themselves going. They worked from before sunup until ten o’clock in the morning, when the heat became too intense to tolerate and they retreated to the tents. They ate their lunch and slept, and took up their work again at five o’clock, working until eleven by the light of kerosene lamps. But Effie’s curiosity would not allow her to sit aside for long, and soon she was outside in even the fiercest heat, standing with Freyn as he searched again through the notes she had taken from the collection, hoping to find some new information. They had left their old roles at home, and instead of treating her like a secretary he now spoke to her as a dear and trusted companion, seeking her opinion on his smallest decisions, even arguing with her on occasion in full confidence that she would consider his points and argue back.
But months passed without any sign of a find. Every few days a team of camel drivers returned with more barrels of water; every two weeks they brought food. Freyn made sure the diggers were well fed and well paid, but it did not mollify them. Curses replaced singing as their daily accompaniment. Effie did not have to speak their language to know what they said about Freyn: that he was mad, their work pointless. The strain showed in Freyn’s face each afternoon as they sat down for lunch, worry that he would be thought a fool, that he would lose his post at the museum, that he would have to go home without a return on his investors’ backing. The sun had bleached his fair hair white, turned his face and neck a livid pink, and after a year in the desert he had developed a nervous habit of running his hands frequently across his face to brush away traces of sand,
all of which made him look slightly crazed. Effie still believed in his genius as surely as she had that first day in his office, but she wondered sometimes if his intellect might outrun his strength.
* * *
—
As they entered their second year at the dig site, the sun grew fiercer. Work had to be stopped by nine and could not be resumed until sunset. In the intense heat Van Jorgen was freed of the lethargy that overtook the rest of the party, feeling instead a vitality as shimmering as the air that hovered over the sand. He was able to walk long distances for the first time in years, and was glad to be free of the camp, where Freyn’s prattling irritated him and Effie’s doting affection for the man troubled his heart. Saddled with oiled leather bags of water, Van Jorgen roamed the dunes in the hottest hours of the day, flouting sun-sickness and the disorienting mutability of the desert landscape. There were no cacti, no rocks, only hills and gullies and curves of sand that changed daily. After Effie had failed to dissuade him from these ramblings, she convinced Freyn to erect a flagpole with a red flag, so that her father might have some landmark by which to find his way home.
Van Jorgen liked the exercise, the feeling of his limbs moving again as limbs ought to. The walks were difficult, his feet sinking into the sand, but he cherished the burning of muscles that had been dormant for years. He had long since abandoned the clothes he arrived in and had started dressing like a Bedouin, wearing long cotton tunics and head wraps that allowed the desert heat to flow off of him, and he had taken to carrying the fulgurite with him. Far from the camp, he took it from its box and held it as he walked. Now and then he felt a twinge in his fingers, and with it a slight earthward twitch of the fulgurite. At times he spoke to it, softly and soothingly, as though it were a favored pet or a fretful child. He walked as long as he could, until evening came on and the heat of the desert began to fade, leaving him breathless and pained.
At night he lay awake in his canvas tent, sometimes for hours, listening to the wind beat against the tent flaps and watching it bulge the walls. The fulgurite rested on his chest, rising and lowering with the motion of his breath, and he ran his fingers over its whorls and depressions, along the three short branches, across the opening that had, for one-millionth of a second, held a bolt of lightning.
One day Van Jorgen returned to camp at sunset and noticed that there was no one at the excavation pit. The workers were sitting cross-legged outside their tents, talking in low voices with great intensity. He went to Freyn’s tent, heard Freyn and Effie speaking inside, and instead of entering stood still, listening. He could see the two of them faintly through a gap in the canvas walls of the tent, Freyn sitting on his bed with his head in his hands, Effie at his side, trying her best to soothe him. Even with her sunburned face, her grave expression, Van Jorgen was struck by how handsome she was. He could barely recall her mother’s face, so much time having passed since her death, and so little in their marriage. Effie had such vibrancy, such beauty and self-possession, that he could not believe she was his child. She isn’t, he thought. She’s the child of a man who died in a steel mill back before the start of the war. And see how she flourishes. He had watched her beside Freyn, beside the workers at the excavation pit, shovel in hand, digging with them on the worst days, giving whatever strength she had not because one more pair of hands made much difference, but because her belief could stand in for Freyn’s when it faltered. She turned to Freyn now, took his hands in hers, and kissed them.
“I tried to offer the workers credit,” Freyn said. “A share of the find. There’s no more money.”
“We’ll find something. I’ll go back to Alexandria if I have to, send some telegrams home.”
Freyn breathed slowly, his eyes squeezed shut as though he were afraid to open them. “It’s pointless,” he said. “Who would back me now? We’ll have to leave in a month, if not before.”
Van Jorgen turned away, closing his own eyes, their voices still filtering to him through the tent walls. He could see what would happen from here. Freyn would be disgraced, impoverished, a laughingstock; he might become unhinged. Effie would try her best to help him, but he would succumb to such depression that eventually, at her father’s gentle coaxing, she would abandon him. And then she would be free again, free to care for Van Jorgen for as long as he could maintain his tenuous place in the world of the living. It shamed him to take such joy in the prospect—and yet, he asked himself, was she not better off under his care than wedded to a madman?
* * *
—
The next day Van Jorgen woke early, before the blush of light colored the night sky. The workers had not even emerged from their tents, and the air was still cold and clear, but he was overcome with restlessness and could not bring himself to sit still, much less sleep. He took the fulgurite and his water bags, and started slowly into the desert.
In the past he had always kept track of the camp’s location, but now he cleared his mind entirely and walked without thinking, basking in the growing light and heat, until he saw that the sky was being quenched by inky clouds. In the two years they had been in the desert, what little rain they had seen had been intense but momentary; the thunderheads above seemed to portend a larger storm. Soon the horizon was strewn with forks of lightning, strobing silver light scattering across the sand. There was no rain yet, but the wind had picked up, spraying him with grit. He wrapped the end of his turban around his face, rendering himself blind but shielding his eyes from the sand, and continued walking.
Van Jorgen moved toward the lightning, until he believed he could feel the heat shift minutely with each flash. The air all around him was charged; if he were to draw his finger along the sand he thought it might light like a match. The fulgurite felt alive in his hands; at times it nearly jerked him off his feet with its eagerness to move forward. The surface of the glass seemed to crawl and shudder a few seconds after each flash of lightning, as though the lightning and the glass were engaged in a call-and-response. The white light of the flashes cut through his cotton shroud into his eyes. He was breathing quickly, panting. Beneath his feet the sand felt as though it had softened into flour; it was almost impossible not to stumble, but the fulgurite tugged him along. Then, suddenly, it stopped. It still quivered with energy, but it did not pull him. Van Jorgen turned a slow circle, arms stretched to their limits to urge the fulgurite onward, but it did not move. Its surface sang with electricity, and the lightning seemed to be flashing around him now instead of ahead of him, all the glory of the heavens coursing earthward in short bursts. He turned in a circle, twice, three times, sinking to the ankles in cool, restless sand.
Setting the fulgurite carefully on the ground before him, Van Jorgen got to his knees. Without eyes and without a voice, what do I have left? he thought. He plunged his hands into the sand as though he were sitting atop a great stream. The rain began to fall. The first drops evaporated in midair, virga drunk by the parched atmosphere, but soon thick, warm gobbets of water pelted his back. Van Jorgen dug with his fingers into sand that was soaked for the first time in years, until the hole he had created held his whole torso. He sifted the sand through his fingers, rubbed the grains of it across his palms, but he found nothing. As he worked the storm dissipated, until the sun shone harshly on him again, and he became aware of a voice faintly calling his name. He unwound the turban from his eyes, and a moment later, Freyn appeared over the edge of a nearby dune. He ran to Van Jorgen’s side and sat down heavily in the sand. Van Jorgen handed him one of the water bags, and Freyn drank.
“Effie was worried about you, with the storm,” he said. “In tears, if you can believe it. I told her I would look for you.”
Van Jorgen nodded, keenly aware of the hole in the sand, the fulgurite, wondering when Freyn would notice either, how he could explain them. He pressed his dry tongue against the roof of his mouth. The easiest distraction would be to mention the imminent failure of the expedition. There were
plenty of reasons he could present to Freyn for leaving immediately, reasons that could be cloaked as concern for Effie and himself. Other explorers had searched for much longer, it was true, but not under such conditions, a hundred miles from the nearest source of water. One day something would go wrong; the water bearers would not come, there would be a sandstorm too intense, and then the desert would swallow them all. Better to give up. Better for Freyn to salvage what was left of his reputation and go home.
Freyn had meshed his fingers together and sat looking at them where they rested in his lap. His hands trembled, and Van Jorgen could see that a blister had torn loose from Freyn’s thumb, leaving a large, raw wound there.
“She never cries, does she?” said Freyn. “I’m sure I have never seen her cry before. Even though…well. I’ve failed her, and so you, too. Two years I’ve tortured all of us in this place, and for nothing. How foolish, to think life could go on like this.”
Van Jorgen turned his gaze back to the sand at his feet, but his mind was not so easily cleared. The look of despair on Freyn’s face was not unfamiliar to him. Freyn had clearly believed with all his heart that whatever dream he saved himself for all these years, like a virgin bride, would reward him by promptly coming true. The younger man could be Van Jorgen years back, living in blissful ignorance of the pain of the world, only to have it pour over him in a molten wave. Van Jorgen found himself wishing viciously that Freyn would begin to weep, so that there would be some proof that he was weak, unworthy of the treasure he sought. But when he looked up again and caught Freyn’s gaze, the young man only laughed bitterly and handed Van Jorgen a fistful of sand.
All the Names They Used for God Page 5
