The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  “Listen to this. Listen,” she said, as if I had a choice. “The younger son needs to make money, and so he goes to the fair and challenges the wrestler, who is a complete brute, for a prizefight. Everyone says he’s insane, begs him to back out, but he won’t. Stubborn like you. The princess in the audience, probably really hot, sayzzzzzz . . .” She dragged out the word, and I heard the pages riffling, and I knew exactly what book was on her lap across the room from me, though behind my eyelids, closed under acid ice, all I saw were black fireworks. “Young gentleman, your spirits are too bold for your years. You have seen cruel proof of this man’s strength: if you saw yourself with your eyes or knew yourself with your judgment, the fear of your adventure would counsel you to a more equal enterprise. We pray you for your own sake to embrace your own safety and give over this attempt. That’s good, isn’t it? That’s what I would have said today. If I’d’ve known what you were going to do. And been able to speak that well.”

  “Does he back down?” I mumbled and picked at the dried blood on my cheekbones, then wished I hadn’t.

  “No.”

  “Does he get his ass kicked?”

  “No,” Dana admitted. “He beats the bigger guy and goes off to make his fortune. But that’s not the point.”

  “The point is,” I hurried to conclude in self-pity, “I’m not a hero, and if you had stopped me you would have saved yourself this embarrassment.”

  She was silent for a while. In my darkness, I complimented my stupid self that I had stymied her. After a bit, I heard her sigh, stand up, sit down again, more pages turning. “More? Really? Do I have to?”

  “Wait,” she said.

  Like most fifteen-year-olds (and most people), I was not delighted by Shakespeare, despite or because of my father’s indoctrination of us. The little of it I had read under duress in school had only confirmed the damage done by my family and had put me off the man forever. Most of it is a foreign language, excessively wordy, repetitive. It was either too much work to understand the characters or, alternately (since fifteeen-year-olds are programmed to produce endless reasons why they don’t like anything), too easy: those awful soliloquies where bad guys reveal their plans or good guys swoon because they’re so in love.

  “Here,” she said at last, a little victory in her voice. “Here. Now listen. You’re seventeen years old. You don’t know how to fight, but you’re brave. And suddenly, you’re in charge of real soldiers. They push you out front, tell you that you’re king, tell you to rouse them to war. You don’t know anything about anything, about men in a group. You’re a kid. You’ve been raised as everyone’s favorite little boy, sheltered, coddled by women, and suddenly men are listening to you. To Arthur. Relying on Arthur. You don’t know war. Here’s what you know: girls, school, getting in trouble. But you’re naturally a hero, even if you’re not trained yet. So now listen to yourself.”

  And she read his battle speech from Act II, Scene ii. Her voice was just deep enough an alto to pass as a teenage boy’s, and it worked. For the first time, it worked. The scene came to life for me, in my enforced darkness, and for this one moment, and then a whole afternoon, I thought Shakespeare was okay.

  “Who waits for us within, fell Englishmen?

  This Saxon pride set sail o’er Humber’s tide

  And then conjoined to Pictish treachery

  For but to cower, spent and quaking-shy,

  Portcullised fast behind the walls of York,

  As guilty lads will seek their mother’s skirts

  When older boys they vex come for revenge.

  But Arthur’s at the gate! ’Tis Britain’s fist

  That hammers now upon the shiv’ring boards.

  An English blood be thin as watery wine,

  Then sheathe we now our swords and skulk away

  With Saxon language tripping from our lips.

  You’d con th’invader’s tongue? Absit omen.

  Let’s school them then in terms of English arms,

  Decline and conjugate hard words—but hark! Chambers

  She sighs with gentle pleading that we come!

  Now wait no more to save her, nobles, in,

  And pull those Saxon arms off English skin!”

  When she finished, she said, “Listen to it again. Arthur starts out with: the enemy is a little boy hiding in York because he pissed off a bigger boy, and we’re going to kick his ass. The soldiers don’t really go for that, so you reach again and you say, ’If they conquer us, we’ll have to learn their language, and that’ll be like Latin class, which was a drag, wasn’t it? Anybody?’ Figure by now the troops are getting a little dubious about you. And then the cannons go off “—Chambers—”the battle’s going to start, and so you try one more time, last chance, and this time you nail it: York’s a babe and she wants us in her. And suddenly everyone starts to nod and grip their hilts, if you know what I mean.

  “You could do that,” Dana said softly. “That’s what I saw today. You could figure out how to be a hero when you have to. You were outnumbered, didn’t know what you were doing, and you still fought like a hero.”

  The Tragedy of Arthur was not necessarily her favorite back then, but she gave it to me that afternoon in April, in our living room, read the entire play to me. It took more than three hours, I’d guess. She patiently stopped to answer my vocabulary questions, stopped to replace the softening ice on my hardening face, stopped to make me something in the blender that I could bear to swallow, and April spring floated in and out through the open window, our mother and stepfather both late at work, our father far away in prison (no threat or irritant or better man), just me and Dana and this play, her thank-you to me for fighting for her honor.

  She read to me from her little red hardcover of The Tragedy of Arthur, a simple but nicely done 1904 edition that has managed to accrue contradictory sentimental value for several members of our family. Its Edwardian frontispiece engraving (in a very nineteenth-century style) was of Act II, Scene iv, in which Arthur (depicted in an anachronistic, late medieval suit of plate armor) hands over his shield and regalia to the Duke of Gloucester, the crucial scene in which Arthur orders the duke to swap armor with him and do battle in his colors so that Arthur can chase some Yorkish girl instead of going back to war.

  I own that 1904 edition now. I have it in front of me. It is, as they say in the used-book trade, “slightly foxed,” with two or three small stains inside the boards. The cover is slightly frayed at the bottom corners, and the spine is faded. But otherwise it’s in excellent condition.

  If curiosity has nibbled at you while reading this, you may be asking yourself why you can’t find your own copy in these easy Internet days. Where is the $285 used edition on your preferred online outlet? Where is the recent reissue by a small press looking for something quirky to win some buzz? Why is Random House bothering to publish the play with such fanfare if there was already a 1904 edition? Patience, please.

  After the publisher’s information and date, the first blank page bears an inscription in faint pencil and formal early-twenteith-century handwriting: For Arthur Donald “Don” Phillips, with the compliments of the King’s Men Dramatic Society, King’s School, Edmonton, Ontario, June 14, 1915.

  Read on for an excerpt from National Bestseller

  The Song Is You

  by Arthur Phillips

  1

  JULIAN DONAHUE’S GENERATION were the pioneers of portable headphone music, and he began carrying with him everywhere the soundtrack to his days when he was fifteen. When he was twenty-three and new to the city, he roamed the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, claimed it as his discovery, colonized it with his hours and his Walkman. He fell in love with Manhattan’s skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light—in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge’s spans—hinted at some meaning, which could be under
stood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics. Play on, Walkman, on, rewind and give me excess of it.

  Late in the evening of the day he completed his first job directing a television commercial, Julian sat in the fall air and listened to Dean Villerman on his Walkman, stared at Manhattan, and inhaled as if he’d just surfaced from a deep dive, and he had the sensation that he might never be so happy again as long as he lived. This quake of joy, inspiring and crippling, was longing, but longing for what? True love? A wife? Wealth? Music was not so specific as that. “Love” was in most of these potent songs, of course, but they—the music, the light, the season—implied more than this, because, treacherously, Julian was swelling only with longing for longing. He felt his nerves open and turn to the world like sunflowers on the beat, but this desire could not achieve release; his body strained forward, but independent of any goal, though he did not know it for many years to come, until he proved it.

  Because years later, when he had captured all that—love, wife, home, success, child—still he longed, just the same, when he listened to those same songs, now on a portable CD player, easily repeated without the moodicidal interruption of rewinding (turning spindles wheezing as batteries failed). He felt it all again. He pressed Play and longed still.

  When he was first married, Julian worried how he would feel about particular songs if his marriage should expire prematurely, in Rachel’s death or her infidelity (yes, he had imagined it before he knew it, perhaps imagined it so vividly that he caused it). And he prepared himself to lose music for Rachel, as the price of love, the ticket torn at admission: he assumed that, whether the marriage worked or not, he would never really find his way back to the music, that old songs would be sucked dry of promise or too clogged with memory.

  But no, music lasted longer than anything it inspired. After LPs, cassettes, and CDs, when matrimony was about to decay into its component elements—alimony and acrimony—the songs startled him and regained all their previous, pre-Rachel meanings, as if they had not only conjured her but then dismissed her, as if she had been entirely their illusion. He listened to the old songs again, years later on that same dark promenade, when every CD he had ever owned sat nestled in that greatest of all human inventions, the iPod, dialed up and yielding to his fingertip’s tap. The songs now offered him, in exchange for all he had lost, the sensation that there was something still to long for, still, something still approaching, and all that had gone before was merely prologue to an unimaginably profound love yet to seize him. If there was any difference now, it was only that his hunger for music had become more urgent, less a daily pleasure than a daily craving.

  Julian Donahue married in optimistic confusion, separated in pessimistic confusion, and now was wandering toward a mistrustful divorcistan, a coolly celibate land. He understood little of what had transpired between the day he said he could not live without this woman and the day when the last of her belongings (and many of his) left their home. If he forced himself to recall, he would revisit particular arguments, understand they were scaffolded by interlocking causes and built upon the unstable ruins of previous arguments. He saw that old arguments had been only partially dismantled either to mutual satisfaction or to no one’s, or to her satisfaction (perhaps feigned) and his relief, or to his satisfaction and her mounting resentment, to which he had been blind. Perhaps all of this swayed upon some swampland of preexisting incompatibility, despite mutual feelings of affection and lust all signatories probably felt back at the start. Obviously he would not downplay the role of Carlton, though it was wiser not to think about that, and he had become skilled at cutting off those fractal thoughts before they could blossom.

  The day Rachel announced her indistractible thirst for his absence, Julian was consulting his music collection, hunting for the song that would explain to him, even obliquely, the bleak atmosphere in his home, the two magnetized black boxes circling each other, attracting and repelling each other from room to room.

  “I want to play you something,” he said, kneeling in front of his CD shelves when Rachel entered behind him. “I was thinking about Carlton, and . . .”

  He must have been present for something. He recognized his dumb urge never to think about her again even as he failed to stop thinking about her, perhaps because of the energy required to stop those other thoughts. Photography still in his apartment claimed there had been Eiffel Tower kisses and golden beach sunsets; he hadn’t thrown those out yet. He had drawn her portrait a hundred times and shot eight-millimeter video of her and sometimes still watched it when he was home alone and in the mood to mope. When there were animal shows on cable, he would put on the CD of Summer Holiday and mute the TV, switching back and forth with the remote, hitting Video Input over and over: Rachel sleeps on her side, her hair fanned out behind her and her arms pushing in front of her, as if she were soaring through the sky; the polar bear rears back and with both fists double-punches straight down through the ice to reach the seal; Rachel bats a dream pest away from her face; the seal is consumed in eight bites; “—I cover the waterfront . . .”

  Lately he watched the animals more and Rachel less and sometimes felt as if all human affairs—but especially his own—could be sufficiently explained by the wily, competing coyotes and babysitting, gnu-gnawing lionesses and fascistic ants. After he was separated from Rachel and returned to the wild, he watched animal channels for hours at a time because they helped him fall asleep. Later, when he was sandbagging the new structures of mind necessary to keep pain from splashing over all his daily activity, when he could consider those years and still go to work, the animals remained. When he was able to think about his past, to consider and not just feel his pain, to calculate how thoroughly Rachel had broken and discarded him, how comprehensively they had misimagined each other, the baboons and orcas offered a certain stabilizing hope for the years ahead, and soon everything seemed explicable by animal behavior. Aggressive Teamsters on a commercial set were expressing threatened alpha status; gallery openings served to tighten group bonds for the protection of like genes. One had to be less heartbroken, since our cousin primates died from emotional trauma or recovered from it quickly. Litters in the wild of almost every species included a certain number of unfeasible offspring, starved by the mother and siblings, or just eaten by them.

  Urges that had once driven Julian—to pursue and capture shampoo models, for example—were explained and defused by animal shows. That old behavior was just what countless cheetahs did, spreading seed. More and more of life dripped down beneath him, reduced by the immutable laws and relaxed habits of the animal kingdom. Entire species went extinct; ours would, too, someday, or evolve into something unrecognizable, a higher species that would pay no more attention to our obsessively cataloged feelings than we do to the despairs of Australopithecus, and all of this vain heartbreak that we cling to as important or tragic would one day be revealed—by TV scientists—for what it is: just behavior.

  Read on for an excerpt from National Bestseller

  Prague

  by Arthur Phillips

  I.

  THE DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE RULES OF THE GAME SINCERITY, AS played late one Friday afternoon in May 1990 on the terrace of the Café Gerbeaud in Budapest, Hungary:

  1. Players (in this case, five) arrange themselves around a small café table and impatiently await their order, haphazardly recorded by a sulky and distracted waitress with amusing boots: dollhouse cups of espresso, dense blocks of cake glazed with Art Nouveau swirls of translucent caramel, skimpy sandwiches dusted red-orange with the national spice, glass thimbles of sweet or bitter or smoky liqueurs, tumblers of bubbling water ostensibly hunted and captured from virgin springs high in the Carpathian Mountains.

  2. Proceeding circularly, players make apparently sincere statements, one statement per turn. Verifiable statements of fact are inadmissible. Play proceeds accordingly for four rounds. In this case, the game would therefore consist of twenty apparently sincere statements. Interrupting
competition with discursive or disruptive conversation, or auxiliary lies, is permitted and praiseworthy.

  3. Of the four statements a player makes during the course of the game, only one is permitted to be “true” or “sincere.” The other three are “lies.” Players closely guard the identity of their true statements, the ability to simulate embarrassment, confusion, anger, shock, or pain being highly prized.

  4. Players attempt to identify which of their opponents’ statements were true. Player A guesses which statements of players B, C, D, and E were true. Player B then does the same for players A, C, D, and E, et cetera. A scoring grid is made on a crumb-dusted cocktail napkin with a monogrammed (CMG) fountain pen.

  5. Players reveal their sincere statements. A player receives one point for each of his or her lies accepted by an opponent as true and one point for each identification of an opponent’s true statement. In today’s game of five people, a perfect score would be eight: four for leading each poor sap by the nose and four more for seeing through their feeble, transparent efforts at deception.

  II.

  SINCERITY—A STAPLE AMONG CERTAIN CIRCLES OF YOUNG FOREIGNERS living in Budapest immediately following 1989–90’s hissing, flapping deflation of Communism—is coincidentally the much-admired invention of one of the five players in this very match, this very afternoon in May. Charles Gábor, when with people his own age, seems always to be the host, and at this small café table on this sunny patio he reigns confidently and serenely. He resembles an Art Deco picture of a 1920s dandy: long fingers, measured movements, smooth and gleaming panels of black hair, an audaciously collegiate tie, crisp pleated slacks of a favorite cotton twill, a humorously pointed nose, a sly half-smile, one eyebrow engineered for expressivity. Under the green and interlacing trees surrounding the terrace and nodding over the heads of tourists, resident foreigners, and the occasional Hungarian, Charles Gábor sits with four other Westerners, an unlikely group pieced together these past few weeks from parties and family references, friend-of-friend-of-friend happenstance, and (in one case, just now being introduced) sheer, scarcely tolerable intrusiveness—five people who, in normal life back home, would have been satisfied never to have known one another.