The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  After dessert (a wedge of chocolate cake the size of my head cragging like an Alp through a cloud of sugar-gritty whipped cream), we returned to his apartment, but instead of changing into pajamas and lying down for some blank-verse torture, we were instructed to trade our dress-up clothes for jeans and sweatshirts, and my resentments scurried back down into their hole. He filed us back outside to his elderly station wagon. We drove west, then south through the late-gathering July evening, the mosquitoes pursuing us through the night, the sound of them sharpening their beaks like sirens’ songs luring us to slap our own ears.

  He drove on through curiosity, then boredom, answering no direct questions. “Fairies have to travel farther to reach us nowadays,” he teased, while Dana and I played hot hands in the back seat until one of us smacked the other’s knuckles hard enough to produce tears. “All our skill at disproving things is like a wall we build between us and wonder. To jump that wall, you need a long running start.”

  I woke when our tires crossed from asphalt to dirt. It was totally dark: our headlights were off, and there was no moon. Far from the city, it was night in a way I have never seen since, a darkness that may no longer exist. “From now on,” he whispered, “only whisper.”

  He parked on dirt. I held the flashlight. “Down!” he hissed. “Only point it down.” From under a tarp in the back of the station wagon he pulled a machine I’d never seen before, or ever again. Wheeled, with a chimney-chute on the back, it seemed related to a snowblower, but it had huge flywheels and loose, dragging cables of various lengths fixed to its sides and top. He had red gas cans and plastic barrels, shovels, two handcarts, and a long wooden board with ropes attached to both ends.

  It is a photogenic memory: he took the flashlight in his mouth and led our stumbling little parade with the machine, wheeled it across a road and down and up a ditch, up to a fence. He cut the fence wire at one post, rolled it back to the next. Dana and I were highly excited by now, even though we were only performing manual labor by flashlight, each with our loaded cart.

  He seemed to know where he was going, around a grove of trees, along a path next to a field of corn stalks, as high as my ten-year-old waist. “From here, step only where I step. Put your feet in my footprints. We have to start in the middle.” This was now positively exalting, the opposite of daily life, our father at his best when we were at the age most receptive to his power. And we did it. It was work but it felt like something else, something higher.

  Laying the guide strings, dragging that board on ropes, doing the cutting, spreading the material, brushing over the wheel tracks and footprints, restapling the cut wire fence, sweeping our tire tracks all the way down to the road. All this took probably six or seven hours. The three of us stank of that material. On the ride home, Dana and I slept despite our questions and bewilderment. I don’t remember going upstairs to his apartment or how I woke clean in my pajamas, with my cleaned clothes folded next to the air mattress, or when the doughnuts and chocolate milk had arrived. Dana and I both suspected a dream until we saw the other’s face (although this didn’t definitively settle it, since we did still have identical dreams now and again). It was past noon.

  “It seems to me / That yet we sleep, we dream,” my father said, and Dana climbed onto his lap to hug him.

  “What did we do?” she asked.

  “The hard part is still coming,” he said. “The hard part of magic is letting it happen and not telling anyone. Anyone.”

  “You mean Mom,” I said, suspicion prickling in me at last.

  “I do mean her, but I’m not so worried about that. I mean anyone. Your friends. Anyone.”

  “Because we can get in trouble?” I asked, finally realizing the obvious.

  “Well, yes, I suppose so,” the convicted criminal gently granted only now, “but I’m not worried about that either. That’s not why the secret is important.”

  “Who cares about getting in trouble?” Dana said, braver than I, as usual. “It’s not like we committed a crime,“ she laughed.

  “I know,” I protested.

  “No, here it is.” His voice became very serious, and he had our attention. “You can’t tell anyone because that sucks the life out of what we did. All the fun, all the magic bleeds out, and it’s just an empty, stupid thing. But if we don’t tell, then we spent last night brilliantly. That’s the only difference. You decide, and you make our night what you want. Brilliant and ours. Stupid and theirs.”

  My father made no money from this exploit. He spent a fair amount of money (invested it, he would say). The equipment, the time spent in researching the site (easy road access, unelectrified fence, good visibility from the air, long distance from the farmer’s house, no dogs), the time spent in building the Machine (adapting a snowblower to cut symmetrical, tiered paths through early July corn), the slime he concocted to slather over those paths, and, of course, the fines he had to pay to that farmer near Worthington, and the community service he had to perform. And what was his payoff? Why bother? To astonish. To add to the world’s store of pprecious ossibility. To set the record crooked once and for all, so that someone’s life (some stranger’s) was not without wonder. It almost seems like a charitable act, if you subtract his ego.

  To this day, the record remains a little crooked, thanks to us. If you Google “crop circles” you will find aerial photos of our work, although ours, in 1974, was very basic, not like the overwrought ones nowadays. You can find our circle breathlessly described, and you can read the testimony of some of the first witnesses, neatly detached from any mention of subsequent facts about arrests or human involvement. You’ll find descriptions of the alien sludge (now a common occurrence at crop circles), though its actual recipe (my father’s invention) remains unpublished, as far as I know.

  He kept the clippings from the Minneapolis Star, the evening paper in those long-ago two-paper days, but it was Tuesday before our work appeared on the TV news. By then we were back at our mother’s for the week, so Dad didn’t have the pleasure of watching the WCCO coverage with us, listening to local anchor Dave Moore and seeing our faces as we slowly figured out what we had done. Instead, we were sitting next to Mom when the farmer told the reporter with absolute certainty, “There is no human machine or tool that could have done this. Stalks are bent all the same but not broken? No such tool. I cut corn for a living, so I know. And it wasn’t here last night, when I walked out before bed. To do all this in one night? You’d need fifty or a hundred people to do this, and believe me, I would have seen and heard that. I’m a light sleeper. And there’d be footprints all over the place. I’m telling you: there’s nothing. And this goop? This stuff? No, there is no animal product that smells like this. The whole thing—did you see it? It’s—I don’t know what this is—but it is damn spooky.”

  They showed the farmer walking the circle’s perimeter, kneeling down in the smooth corn trench to draw some thick salivary strands of the muck off the soil. The station’s traffic helicopter was tasked to fly over the field for aerial footage. Soon other witnesses appeared, testifying to bright lights in the sky that fateful night, and a dozen volunteer conspirators—lying or believing—enlisted in my father’s project. I don’t know what lesson I drew from watching them, back then, when I was ten, but I certainly recognize a pattern now.

  My mother watched the news with us, made fun of it without knowing we were involved, and then she walked off to cook dinner while Dana and I sat very, very quietly in the haze of our own wonder. Remember: we were ten. We knew we had done this, but we didn’t believe it. We didn’t know what we had done, but we were proud of it. “Do you believe in UFOs?” I asked her, belief and understanding all jumbled.

  My father didn’t want to make people stupider or mock stupidity or celebrate stupidity. When the farmer said, “The shape. The shape is so . . . beautiful, so . . .” and trailed off, my father was right there with him in spirit. I suspect that he wished, of all the participants in this whole enterprise, to be that farmer,
to be fooled. My father had given him (and the world) this glimpse of something hidden. He was only dissatisfied to be the giver and not the recipient.

  This may be the closest I ever felt to him. Together we had reshaped the world, changed how some people viewed life, the universe, everything. Adulthood, even more alluring to a ten-year-old, was where magic happened, thanks to this superman who was my father. We were an elite. He had chosen and trained us. The judges and jailers were my enemies, too.

  It was two weeks before he stole this feeling from me. “Say, listen, Arthur, I know how hard it is to keep secrets. And when you let one slip, you know, it can feel like it won’t go any further, or that it didn’t even really happen. You can almost make yourself believe you didn’t do it.” I immediately struggled to look as innocent as I was, which made me look spectacularly guilty. Despite my father’s history, I was not totally aware what it meant that my best friend at school, Doug Constantine, was the son of Ted Constantine, a prosecutor in the Hennepin County attorney’s office under Gary Flakne. But my father thought he knew what it meant, and he was convinced that I had boasted to my buddy, who told his father, who then contacted the law in Nobles County, who in turn had politely requested that my father pay a call at the sheriff’s office within twenty-four hours. “No one is saying you squealed on us,” he said, though my eyes stung that he was saying precisely that. “It’s just that it must have been hard not to let your pal know about this great thing.”

  My denials never moved him, I know. To his credit, even though he thought I had unbagged the cat, he wasn’t obviously angry at me. It was not going to be a big deal for him. He didn’t mind paying the fines, since he did acknowledge that the farmer (“a working man,” he said in one of his expansive friend-of-the-proletariat moments) had lost some money (though not nearly so much as he’d made from tourists paying to roam slack-jawed through our art).

  His anger would have been preferable. Being wrongly accused of anything by anyone is bad enough to a boy, and I certainly didn’t like suddenly feeling myself pushed out of my father’s magic circle. But worse was that our wonder-working was wondrously worked into something grubby. All his talk about wizards fell away. He was just a semicompetent conspirator rethinking whom in the gang he could trust, like kids on a playground reshuffling, again, who was in and who was out. My father’s confidence in me (which was the early entry ticket to adulthood) and adulthood itself (a place of wonder-working and pranksterism) now both appeared childish, petty. I wasn’t very good at articulating this anger, other than to tell Dana over and over that he was a jerk.

  “He knows it wasn’t you,” she reassured me, adjusting the troll dolls in the tabletop theater he had built her, the little black one smothering the little blond one with a tiny red pillow. “He believes you.”

  “I know,” I lied, the troll grinning mischievously in its violence, its orange hair standing erect in murderous ecstasy.

  My disappointment didn’t last. It wasn’t enough to free me permanently, and I look back now “across time’s moat” and I wish I could shake sense into that kid: “Enough,” I’d say. “That guy’s not what you want to be.” But younger selves refuse to follow older wisdom.

  For my twelfth birthday, when I was deep in an espionage fetish, he made me a high-quality Soviet passport, with my stern photo expertly installed behind Cyrillic seals and visa stamps showing my travels to North Korea, Vietnam, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. I knew that the work involved—the research, the hand stitching, the specialized glue and paints—reflected his sincere love for me. I also knew by then that love was only one element of such an extravagant gift: the rest was professional vanity and a quantity of probable felonious rehearsal.

  For my thirteenth, he gave me a baseball signed to me by my hero, Rod Carew, the Minnesota Twins’ star second baseman and, later, first baseman and a Jewish convert from Panama, easily the coolest Jew within ten thousand miles of my house. It’s not that this item was so difficult to obtain. It’s just that by the time I was thirteen, I had started to assume that anything that passed through his hands was fake. I threw the ball away.

  Later he gave Dana a sweet-sixteen present: a “consolation” driver’s license after she failed the exam twice. Since Dad was in prison when we turned sixteen, the license was made by Chuck Glassow, Dad’s college friend who, officially, owned a grocery store. We had known Chuck for years, and he used to come out for dinner with us occasionally when Dana and I spent weekends with Dad. He was a little like Dad, very well-read, but less flamboyant about it. He was taller even than my six-foot-one father. When I was twelve or so, with all my contradictory feelings about Dad and manhood simmering up to a boil, I still liked Chuck, though I was also ashamed that I thought my father lost in comparison. This diminishment of my father may have been unavoidable anyhow at that time; that’s part of being a twelve-year-old boy (as my own sons, now fifteen, continue to teach me).

  I liked how Chuck swore. It was, I see now, an affectation, like quoting Latin and Greek (which he also did); his cursing was Runy-onesque, calculated, cooked up. “She should consider blowing that attitude all the way out of her ass and lighting it on fire,” he said of one of the grumpy, antique waitresses at the Embers restaurant, and I thought he was a figure of high glamour.

  He was an especially slender man, long and thin in every direction and every limb. “Artie,” he said after he saw me talking to a neighbor, a girl my age but already quite a bit more developed. “She’s too big for you. But I’m drawn in that direction, too. My lady of the moment? She and I? A Giacometti putting it to a Botero.” I didn’t understand the references, but the line made him laugh so hard he shook. I laughed, too, of course—a twelve-year-old having a grown man crack dirty jokes for him.

  And then, a few days later, he mailed me a photograph, apparently taken in front of the Greek temple façade of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, of a grimacing, wire-thin Giacometti statue putting it to a plump Botero statue, beatific at the rear intrusion. The huge composite statue stood to the left of the grand staircase. I had never noticed it there before, remarkably.

  So I puffed my Huffy over to the museum where I found the usual sculpture to the left of the main stairs: an angel with a sword standing on a wolf, or something. Even more improbable than Glassow’s, all things considered.

  From nothing, from a passing joke that occurred to him as he said it, Glassow had made this crazy and pointless photo, implying a sculpture that never was, a collaboration and history between two artists who never met, and a ribald sense of humor in the city’s fine arts museum. He remade the world in his own taste for no other reason than that it amused him. And he shared with me the fruit of that imagination because I had laughed back when he first thought of it, though I had only laughed because he said “sticking it to.”

  Glassow was (I noted with a dash of preadolescent bitterness) what my father wanted to be but wasn’t. (Of course, it was only due to my father’s training of me that I could appreciate and admire him.)

  I remember him at Embers one weekend evening, taking coffee in the brown plastic mug and giving ten different explanations for the ten times we asked him, “Why are you wearing a tuxedo?”

  “I’m going to the casino after, but I wanted to see you kids first.”

  “There was a mix-up at the dry cleaner,” he sighed, shaking his head, breathing out smoke from his Chesterfield, a line of gray that tracked along the top edge of the red booth.

  “Ask your dad. His idea of a practical joke, saying dinner with you three was black-tie tonight.”

  His imagination inspired me and Dana to try out personalities around him. Something as mild as this game led us to put on different voices, attitudes, vocabularies, to see if, in disguise, we could sneak closer to the truth. “Baby,” said Dana like a tender mother, “baby, really, why so swank?”

  “I’m going to a ceremony, a roast for a friend who’s getting a prize for his charitable work. Couldn’t be prouder.”


  “Cut the crap, Chuck.” I tried a twelve-year-old tough guy. “What’s up?”

  Chuck accordioned his cigarette butt into the black ashtray permanently stained gray inside its crenellations. “Fact is, compadre, I’m trying to impress a broad. I’m taking her first-nighting at the opera.”

  “Come on, for real, Uncle Charles, please,” cajoled a young, young Dana, avuncularizing Glassow for the first and only time.

  And this man, whom neither of us has seen in decades, now owns a quarter of my family’s coming fortune.

  But I’m ahead of myself.

  6

  WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN, two gallants at school called Dana a dyke, and so I tried to fight them. When it was over, and my nose was broken into its current alignment, and the two bravos had triumphantly kicked me in the stomach, adding, “Arthur is a fag,” Dana, back home, set to work nursing my body and lacerated ego.

  She didn’t bother with “you were really brave” or “those guys are jerks” or “you were outnumbered” or even “thank you.” We knew all that, and we both knew the other one knew it. And she knew how small I felt, how useless, how badly I had fallen short of some idea of myself as courageous and chivalrous, and, most of all, how ashamed I was that I couldn’t destroy someone who had hurt her.

  I lay on the sofa, replaying the battle in my head, but with better results and snappier repartee. Dana brought ice in a cloth and laid it gently across my purple nose, unbloodied my cheeks with wet paper towels, dropped aspirin in my mouth, and recited, “Being your slave, what should I do but tend / Upon the hours and times of your desire?” A puff of laughter started to build in the back of my throat, despite my condition, but it struck the bones and hollows of my face and quickly retreated as my eyes crossed and flooded.