Ark

by K. B. Kofoed

  Stephie liked hanging out in town, using the Raftworks as a base of operations. At fourteen, her primary interests were the trendy shops on South Street, favorite gathering places for the youth of Philadelphia, but today her Dad was making her help clean out files while he worked at his Macintosh.

  By noon Stephie was sitting in a heap of old drawings. She was supposed to simply trash them, but she found the materials fascinating. Being a pack rat like her Dad, she found it nearly impossible to throw out things without examining them first.

  Near the bottom of the pile she found a manila folder. In it were notes and drawings that looked important. She mulled over the drawings, trying to decide whether her Dad really wanted them kept or not.

  Stephanie had already aroused Jim’s ire more than once for insisting that some of the old drawings were “cool” and should be saved, but on the off chance that Jim had overlooked them, she brought the folder to him.

  “Do you want to throw these out, too, Daddy?” she said sweetly.

  Jim didn’t like working through the weekends, and he was already in a bad mood. He sat at his Macintosh computer puzzling over a difficult layout for a local magazine. “Aw, come on, Stephie,” he said. “Can’t you just do what you’re told?”

  “I am,” she said, “but these drawings look important.”

  Jim looked up from his screen and punched a few keys on the keyboard. “Jeeez,” he said, recognizing the drawings immediately. “These drawings are older than you are. I did them before you were born.”

  Stephanie considered her father’s words for a moment, then her eyes widened. “Really?” she said. “What are they?”

  “The Ark of the Covenant.”

  “From the Bible?” she exclaimed. “Why did you draw them?”

  “I don’t have time to explain it now, Stephie,” said Jim. “It’s a long story.”

  “Tell me,” she insisted.

  “Later please, Steph, I have to work now, and so do you. I want all that crap out of here in half an hour,” said Jim. “I’ll keep these, though,” he added, forcing a smile as he put them aside. “Thanks for bringing them to me.”

  Stephanie beamed. Her hunch had been right. Satisfied that she’d been a help, she went back to work.

  That night Jim took the drawings home to show Kas. He knew they would remind her of happy times. Their years of marriage had been steady and true. Together they’d watched nearly all their friends get divorced and had nearly done so themselves on two occasions, but somehow the deep trust and understanding that they shared seemed to be enough to see them through. Their only real problem had been that of maintaining friendships with their fragmented community of close friends.

  Kas’s mother had passed away four years before and the sale of the old homestead had given Jim and Kas the financial security necessary to buy the Raftworks and pay off the mortgage on their home. Still, the loss was almost too much for her and she was on antidepressants. Jim was always looking for a way to make her smile. The ark drawings would certainly do the trick. When he and Stephie arrived home Kas wasn’t there, nor was anything warm in the oven.

  Stephie warmed up some lasagna and she and her father ate quietly at the kitchen table, trying to figure out what had happened to Kas.

  “She didn’t even feed the cat,” observed Stephie. “He almost ate me alive when I walked in.”

  Almost on cue the phone rang. It was Kas calling from the airport. Stephie handed her father the phone. Starved, she continued eating her lasagna while she listened to her father’s side of the conversation.

  “What? Airport? What are you doing there? I didn’t get that. What’s wrong with the pay phone? Slater? Dan Slater from school? Great. Yeah, tell him I can’t wait to see him. Okay, watch traffic. See ya soon.”

  Jim Wilson and Dan Slater had been roomies in college. In their sophomore year they chose to share an apartment and got along well. “Through thick and thin,” as Dan put it. But after graduation the two went separate ways, Jim to an early marriage that only lasted a year and Dan to the Air Force. Since then he had worked for AT&T as a microwave technician in Fort Collins, Colorado. Jim had only seen Dan twice since college, so he welcomed the impromptu visit. An hour after the phone call Kas and Dan arrived.

  Jim gave Dan a bear hug the minute he saw him.

  “Still in one piece, I see, ol’ hoss,” said Dan, looking Jim over from head to toe.

  “You’re the same,” Jim replied. “Damned glad to see you. How long can you stay?”

  “I have a meeting Monday morning at the convention center in town, then I have to catch an afternoon flight.”

  “That at least gives us a day to visit.”

  They didn’t waste time. Seeing Stephanie all grown up astonished Dan. “Lemesee ... last time I saw you ...”

  “Too long ago,” said Jim. “Come on. Take off your coat and sit down.”

  Dan headed toward the sofa in the living room. “This is the same sofa you had in your apartment in West Philly, isn’t it?” he said, picking up the manila folder Jim brought home. Its contents, the drawings of the ark, spilled out all over the cushions.

  “Sorry,” said Dan, picking up the sketches. “Hey, what are these?”

  “Some old drawings,” replied Jim, taking the drawings from him. “Not important.”

  Dan protested. “Whoa! Let’s see those. You do them?”

  Jim nodded. “Maybe twenty years ago, for a friend. Won a fifty dollar bet with them, but never collected.”

  “What? The guy stiffed you?”

  Jim smiled. “Naw. Like I said, it’s not important. Say, Dan, you must be hungry. Heat you up some lasagna? It’s great. Kas’s specialty. Or do you want to go out?”

  Dan laughed. “To tell you the truth. I’ve been thinking about Pat’s Steaks every week since I left Philly. Feel like taking a drive?”

  Jim looked at his wife and daughter. “Stephie? Kas?” he said happily, “Wanna come?”

  Having just eaten, Stephie declined, and Kas shook her head. “I’m not up for Pat’s. I’ll just have the lasagna and a salad.”

  “Okay, then.” Jim smiled at Dan. “Let’s do it.”

  The drive to Pat’s took almost an hour, most of it spent behind a crane that was righting an eighteen-wheeler that had spilled its load of potatoes all over I-95, but Jim and Dan didn’t mind as they discussed their recent histories. When they returned Dan got comfortable on the sofa again and soon the Wilson’s black cat made himself at home in his lap. Before long the two of them fell asleep in spite of Jim’s attempts to keep the conversation rolling. Kas woke Dan up so she could make up the sofa bed. When she was done she tossed a pillow to him. “There’s an extra toothbrush in the hall closet if you need one and you know where the refrigerator is.” She snatched up the cat and went to bed.

  Dan settled back into the sofa bed, but now he was awake. He reached over and picked up the manila folder and opened it.

  #

  Sunday morning Kas and Stephanie went to the Episcopal church down the block. Sometimes Jim would go too, but he generally fell asleep, and the last time he’d decided to go with them was a disaster. A case of diarrhea sent him running home in the middle of the sermon. Jim’s religious beliefs, like his bowels, were a private matter. He rarely joined conversations about religion and described himself as open minded. Privately, on one or two occasions, he’d claimed to believe in God, but he never elaborated. To him, owning his own business meant that Sundays were his only real day off. Even so, he would often use it to catch up on work. Those Sundays he called “Monday, Part A.” But with Dan visiting, even though he was behind on a project he felt he had a good excuse to kick back a little.

  Dan awoke to the smell of bacon. His back hurt a bit from a hard crease in the middle of the sofa bed. He folded the sheets and put the sofa back together, then walked stiffly to the smoke-filled kitchen where he found Jim whistling in his bathrobe and poking at a frying pan with a spatula.

  “Glad I wo
ke up before you torched the place, bro,” said Dan. “Need a fire extinguisher?”

  “How do you like your eggs?” asked Jim.

  “As an ingredient in cakes,” said Dan. “I’ll just have some bacon and toast and coffee, if you’ll point the way.”

  Jim explained that Kas and Stephie had gone to church.

  “Jeez, I didn’t hear them leave,” said Dan. “You don’t go?”

  “Not much,” said Jim. “Sometimes I go to hear Steph sing in the choir.”

  “How does she sound? Good?”

  Jim laughed. “Never actually heard her. Kas says she did once, but it was because she came in too soon with a Hallelujah.”

  “Well, you’re not supposed to hear ’em, right? Say,” he said, sitting down at the kitchen table, “speaking of church, I noticed the word cubit on those drawings on the coffee table.”

  “Oh,” laughed Jim, “those are old. I made them for a friend at least twenty years ago at the old Raftworks.”

  “I was looking them last night,” said Dan. “They look like mechanical drawings, but the measurements were in cubits.”

  “That’s true,” replied Jim, pouring two cups of coffee. “Those are sketches I made. Do you recognize the object?”

  “Not really.”

  Jim gave Dan his bacon and toast, then retrieved the ark drawings from the coffee table. “It’s just a box of wood overlaid with gold inside and out,” said Jim as he handed Dan the folder.

  “And what are these?” said Dan, pointing to the wings that adorned the top of the box.

  “Flat pieces of gold, joined to the lid of the box. They’re fashioned to resemble angels.”

  “Is the lid made of wood too?”

  “No, it’s solid gold.”

  Wait a minute,” said Dan. “Is this the Ark of the Covenant?”

  “Yup,” said Jim. “I think it is.”

  “But I saw it in that movie, Raiders, you know- and it didn’t look like this. The angels on top were like sculpture.”

  “Yeah, I saw the movie,” said Jim, sitting down across from his friend, “but I did my drawings from the Bible. I didn’t have any idea what the thing might look like. I just drew it up from reading the description in the Bible.”

  “That right?” said Dan, pondering the image.

  Jim leafed through the folder and found a Xerox of the passage from the Bible that described the ark. “Read it,” he said. “See what you think. Does it sound like the angels, cherubim, are sculpture?”

  Dan read the passage and examined the drawing more closely. “How big is a cubit, anyway?”

  “In inches, between eighteen and twenty-two. The length of a person’s forearm.”

  “Seems rather imprecise,” said Dan.

  Jim stirred his coffee absent-mindedly as he looked at his drawing. “I did some research back when I made them, and I’ve read some more stuff since then. I’ve decided that the ark probably measured thirty-one and a half inches by fifty-two and a half inches. Maybe fifty inches tall, including those wings. That’s based on the Egyptian royal cubit, which was twenty-one inches. People say the standard at the time was the Babylonian cubit of eighteen inches, but the Hebrews were from Egypt, right? They worked for the Egyptians as slaves, so I think it’s fair to say that they took Egyptian tools with them when they made their Exodus. What difference would it make what size it was?”

  “Maybe a lot.”

  “How so?”

  “That’s a loaded one,” said Dan, scratching his ear. “If you’re talking radio waves. Whether you know it or not this is a simple resonator: twin surfaces of gold, boxing a finite space. The space could correspond to a wavelength. Change the size of the box and you change the wavelength.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Jim. “You’re saying this thing has electrical properties? Like a radio?”

  Dan nodded. “In a way. If ... I repeat, IF ... the ark is made of wood...” Dan stopped himself. “What kind of wood?”

  “Acacia.”

  “Interesting. Acacia used to be used to make wooden tone-arms because it’s non-resonant. It doesn’t vibrate.”

  “So?”

  Dan smiled. “This is weird. You have here a box of acacia and it’s got two layers of gold, except on the top.”

  “It has a solid gold lid with the beaten gold cherubim.”

  “Still, only one surface of gold on the top.”

  “Yeah, a real thick surface,” said Jim with a laugh.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Dan, staring unsmiling at the drawings. “This really is interesting.”

  “All right,” said Jim. “Why?”

  Dan sat back and looked at Jim, cradling his coffee in both hands. “This thing is, at least diagrammatically, a microwave resonator which might have had enormous power. Assuming a microwave signal was around to drive the thing, this box would gather up that signal and form a power spike inside the box, but because there’s only one surface of gold on top of the thing, the power spike would mostly come out of the top.”

  Jim stared at Dan. “In English, please?”

  “It would resonate a signal and project it up through the lid, but these cherubim would reflect the signal as a power spike. Because they are curved, they would act like parabola, focusing dishes that would cause the energy to gather into one spot.” He pointed to the drawing that showed the profile of the ark. His finger came to rest above the lid and between the two angels. “It would focus here. Considering the size, the thing would burn the air. Probably make a vortex of bright light.”

  “Really?” said Jim. “That’s exactly the way the thing was supposed to work. The way it was described in the Bible.”

  “Get out,” said Dan.

  “I’m not shitting you. That’s exactly where there was supposed to be a bright light and, well, wait a minute.” Jim went to the bookshelf and pulled out a small black leather Bible with a crimson edge and a thin purple ribbon hanging out of it. He flipped to Exodus and read aloud: “Here you go. Exodus, 15. ‘And thou shalt see me. Above the Mercy Seat and between the two Cherubim. As a bright light shall thou see me. From there will I speak to thee and give thee my commandments for all Israel.’” Jim looked up from the page. “But how could it speak?”

  “Modulate the signal,” said Dan. “The vortex would act like a speaker, I’d guess.”

  #

  Jim thought over his conversation with Dan. His own knowledge of electronics was limited, but he knew Dan was a natural mechanic, always seeming to know how things worked. Now, with Monday morning upon him and deadlines to be met, Jim had driven Dan to the hotel and was on his way to the studio as fast as possible. He still couldn’t get their conversation out of his mind. In just a few sentences, Dan had managed to answer some fundamental questions that had lingered in Jim’s brain for twenty years. As Jim navigated his station wagon toward South Philadelphia he tuned the radio to WMMR. Jim’s radio had been permanently tuned to that station for twenty years, except when he wanted a traffic report. Stairway to Heaven was playing, perhaps for the billionth time. He remembered first hearing that album many years ago. It was Gene who had explained the Zep to him. “People like a little bitch in their music these days.”

  As Jim thought back to the early 70’s he remembered his friendship with Gene vividly. Gene the mysterious, the enigmatic. The straight man. The scientist. He could be discussing traffic one minute, then in the next breath he’d be discussing the finer points of quantum mechanics, usually over Jim’s head. Over everybody’s, really. When they last talked about the Ark of the Covenant, Gene was pondering the possibility of rebuilding the ark using modern materials. It would certainly be cheaper. Even if the cherubim were made of relatively thin sheets of gold, to follow the original plan would cost a fortune. However, that led to a central question. Could you compromise the plans? Where does one step aside and ignore the Word of God?

  Dan had told him about little resonating cavities in the guts of microwave receivers, little gi
lded aluminum boxes designed to trap microwave transmissions.

  “The mind never forgets a question,” Gene used to say. “One day someone will unlock this thing, but meanwhile, as a Jew, I don’t want to risk the anger of whoever is on the other end.” Gene had said it all when he asked, “What if it works?” Jim had wondered about the mystery of the Ark of the Covenant for twenty years. Now, finally, he had some answers, but they only led to more questions.

  When Jim entered the Raftworks, Lou was on the phone. Lou didn’t seem pleased, handing Jim the phone and saying, “Here, Susan, let me put Jim on. He’s the man in charge of this thing.”

  From that moment until he arrived home that night Jim didn’t think of the ark once. The day for shooting the board members had arrived. The upper staff of the Montel Corporation was waiting, ready to pose for their annual report pics. Jim loved board work. He loved to design, but he dreaded directing CEO’s and reassuring them that they looked great. Of course they wouldn’t, and he’d have to retouch the images on his Macintosh. To add another wrinkle to the day, the digital camera went dead and the shoot had to stop until the photographer could charge it up.

  Arriving home after eight that night, Jim fell into his sofa like a sack of apples. When Kas asked about his day, he only managed to groan something about the pain behind his left eye. Within a minute Kas was at his side with two aspirin and a glass of milk.

  “Here,” she said. “Dan called. Around seven. Said he was at the airport hotel and would be around for a few days on business. He left his phone number. Oh … and Gene, Gene Henson, from long ago?” she added. “He called, too, just a few minutes after Dan.”

  “Gene?” said Jim, opening one bloodshot eye. “Get out! What did he want?”

  “He didn’t say, but he left a number. It’s on the fridge.”

  “That’s weird,” said Jim.

  “I thought so, too.”

  “Anything to eat?” asked Jim as he felt his stomach growl.