So I turned around, because if I hadn’t even heard of whoever lived in the Peterson house, then they must not be very useful. They must not know anything. I was so shaky that that made a ton of sense. I started walking away, and my stomach felt relieved. I made it probably about two whole footsteps without thinking about Phil and then I thought about Phil.
“Ahhh fuck,” I thought, but I didn’t say it because I don’t really swear. I stopped walking. My arms and legs and everything were shaking because I was being sawed in half again and needing to go to two places at once. I was going to go home and make a list of All the Things in the Universe That Have Nothing to Do With a Person Dying Close to You but whenever I took a step towards home I felt like I was being lazy and I took another step in the opposite direction. When I stepped towards the Peterson house I felt like I was being mentally insane but not lazy and that seemed better but it felt worse. There was something inside the Peterson house and even if it wasn’t Phil maybe it was. My brain didn’t even know what it was talking about. My feet were actually walking back and forth on the edge of the stupid driveway. At least there was no one around to see me acting so moronic.
Eventually I slowly walked towards the house. I thought, maybe whoever lives there is a very nice ten-year-old boy or girl, or a few of both, and I can ask them all simple questions and get simple answers and be on my way. My finger rang the doorbell. A tall grey-haired man with giant glasses answered the door in a few seconds and I thought, “Get real, Arthur.”
“I beg your pardon,” he said.
Then I thought I said my “Get real” out loud because of how I say things out loud by accident, and I said:
“Uhhhm, sorry?”
And he said, “Can I help you?”
And I said, “Hello.”
“Hello,” he said.
My knees felt almost as confused as my brain.
“My name is Arthur Williams. Are you... Mr. Peterson?”
“Precisely.”
“Can I come inside your house and ask you a question?”
He looked at his gold watch, as if he was asking it for per-mission.
“It’s a bit of a bad time, I’m afraid.”
“Why? What time is it?”
“No, I mean I’m right in the middle of something. Would you mind coming back another time? It’s not terribly important, I hope? Boy Scouts or something like that?”
“No,” I told him. I said “It’s not important,” but I was lying—it was only about the most important thing in the world. But I could tell the only thing he was “right in the middle of” was an excuse, and that meant that he was lying first, so that meant I had to lie too. That’s how it works with grown-ups.
“Alright?” he asked.
“It’s okay I guess. Thanks.”
There I was, thanking him for making my life more terrible. I turned to leave, but he must have seen my gigantic frown and angry eyebrows before I was all the way turned around, because he said “Wait.”
I stayed where I was, with my back facing him instead of my face.
“Well, I guess I’ve got time. Okay, come on in.”
I wasn’t expecting him to change his mind like that so I felt really shaky walking into his house but I did it anyway. I took off my boots in the hall and my feet smelled really sweaty, and a lot like extra-old cheddar cheese, and that didn’t help.
“No socks?” said Mr. Peterson.
His house was small inside, smaller than the Beckhams’, and much smaller than ours. The hall was barely a hall at all it was so short, and there weren’t a lot of walls, and I felt like I could see everything in the entire house, with the kitchen on the left, a bedroom and a small bathroom on the right, and a living room up ahead. It seemed like everything important was on the bottom floor, and even though I saw stairs to the second floor, I couldn’t figure out how anything else could really fit up there. Also, everything looked a lot newer than our house did. In the kitchen the counter was cold black marble and the chairs had no decorations and were really simple looking, like I could’ve built them myself with some broomsticks. The walls inside matched the walls outside: everything was light blue with white, except the kitchen.
Even though it was a new house Mr. Peterson had it smothered in old things, so it seemed fuzzy and dusty. The walls were covered all over the place with ancient maps of the world, maps of Canada, the U.S., Russia, Africa, and other places. There were black and white photos of boats hung up everywhere, too. Tall sailing ships, army boats, the Titanic I think, a couple tiny sailboats. The photos and maps and things had all turned different shades of yellow and brown from being so old, and the house kind of smelled like a basement full of rotting wood and human saliva.
“What’s this?” I picked up a tiny rock off the shelf on my way into the house.
“Ohhh, that!” Mr. Peterson rushed over as if I was dropping it on the floor or something. He took it from my hand but held it for me to examine.
“That, is a fossil.”
“Yeah, I know. But what’s it of?”
“It’s a trilobite. Well, it’s just a portion, of course. You see the corner? I believe that’s part of the cephalon, its head if you will, and then here there’s a bit of thorax. Do you know what a trilobite looks like?”
“Obviously.”
“Well there you go.” He placed it back on the shelf exactly where it was when I picked it up, facing exactly the same way.
“How’d you get it? Because I thought they were really rare.”
“A friend. Yes, they’re very rare. Not unfindable, but rare. A friend, actually, a retired palaeontologist, gave it to me for my birthday one year.”
“Amazing. When’s your birthday?”
“May 17th.”
“That’s soon, kind of.”
“True. I suppose.”
“Mine’s December 5th.”
“Really.”
Then me and Mr. Peterson stood in the hall for a little while not knowing what to say to each other. I glanced around the house more, and felt shy, and then felt shy about feeling shy, and I was trying to figure out whether it would be rude to say “uhmmm” or not but then he told me to “make myself at home” and he went in the kitchen.
I walked into the living room and circled it in detective mode, as Mr. Peterson started to boil some water.
“Something to drink?”
“No thanks.”
“Are you hungry?”
“No. Thank you.”
“Sure?”
“Yeah.”
The thing about grown-ups is when you visit them at home, they always offer you something to eat and drink. And sometimes you just aren’t hungry, is the thing. Still, if you say no thanks they make you feel like you’re insulting them or something. Like you’re calling them something awful, almost. It’s like you’re not letting them do their job, which is being a grown-up. Also, they always tell you to make yourself at home but they never stop offering you things, which makes no sense. When I’m at home making myself at home, no one’s around, and I get things for myself and make cinnamon toast. You can’t make yourself at home and also have a waiter at the same time. And they always expect you to sit down, it seems like. I was only on the second house but I was already getting used to the plan. Come in, get offered food, sit down, spill the beans.
After I was finished looking over everything in the living room—the model ships with flappy sails and tiny ropes, the photographs of the river and people I didn’t know, papers in frames with little red stickers shaped like the sun, the collection of atlases on the small bookshelf, and the unbelievable old map of the world from way before they had discovered hundreds of countries we’ve found now—after I was finished looking it all over, I sat down in a very stiff armchair.
Mr. Peterson came o
ut of the kitchen, and his navy blue slippers slippered across the wooden floor with a scorching cup of tea. The tea made sense: the place was tidy enough, but I’d found five empty mugs sitting around with tea bags still inside. He put down his tea on the coffee table—did that make it a tea table?—and sat in an armchair that looked even stiffer than the one I was in.
“So what’s this about?” He got to the point, just like I predicted in my plan.
That was fine by me. I took out my tape recorder and put it on the tea table, and then I unzipped Phil out of my backpack and held it up like one of those special TV lawyers. It was fun to be creating a bit of a new routine.
“Exhibition A,” I told Mr. Peterson, like the exhibitionists on TV.
“Exhibit,” he corrected.
I kept my cool.
“Obviously.”
“What is it, your journal?”
“Close, but no cigar. It’s somebody’s journal. I found it in the woods.”
I realized I had forgotten to press RECORD on the tape player, so I did. I felt nonprofessional. But at least it didn’t record me saying my wrong word.
Then Mr. Peterson didn’t say anything for a little while, he just sipped his tea once and looked at me like he was trying to remember something, but the something didn’t exist. He looked confused. I expected him to say “Can I please take a look at the journal?” I hoped he’d say “I know exactly where that came from.” I dreamed he might say “Don’t worry, because that guy is still alive,” but he didn’t say any of those things.
He said, “Well it’s not mine, if that’s what you mean.”
(That’s not what I meant.)
“No,” I said, “I mean, do you have any idea where it could have come from?”
He looked like he was trying to remember what he was trying to remember.
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“Well, do you know anyone named Phil?”
“Well, yes I suppose. I had a good friend Philip in school. In college. He... passed away this year, in fact.”
My throat turned into a fist.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I squeaked.
“It’s fine,” he said. “It was a little while back.”
“How did he die?”
“He got sick. Like most people, I suppose.”
“Was he your best friend?”
“Oh... no.” He scratched the back of one hand with the other one. “No. It was a while ago.” He took a drink of his tea.
“Uhmmm,” I said.
I looked around the room again and sat up straight to make the chair hurt less.
“So have you been running around interviewing the entire city then?” Mr. Peterson asked.
“Just the entire street so far.”
“Looking for the author?”
“Looking for clues.”
“But you hope to give it back to him? To this ‘Phil,’ is it?”
My throat had a crumpled up sponge stuck in it.
“Uhmmm,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh?”
“I guess I was just wondering where it came from. How it got to our street. I mean it didn’t just appear.”
“Sure,” he said.
He took another sip of tea and scratched the floppy part of his neck, below his Adam’s apple. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like it was useless for me to be there but I didn’t want to just run away. I felt like I wasn’t even there in the first place. Maybe there was a window I could climb out of, or a trap door. I wished I was a master escapist.
Mr. Peterson folded his arms on top of his blue sweatshirt. He gave me a really quick smile, and then scratched his neck.
“What is your job?” I asked.
“I’m retired.”
“... Retired of what?” I said, because I was trying to be funny.
Mr. Peterson looked out the window. “A couple of things. I did some architecture, and some engineering later. I ended up doing a lot of both, really.”
“What did you engineer?”
He looked at me. “Do you know the Vine Street Theatre, downtown?”
“Obviously.” That theatre was actually one of my favourite buildings, if I had to like buildings. Sometimes Maxine would take me to a play there or to see a symphony, which was cool, but I never liked anything we went to see as much as I liked the gigantic chandelier that hung overtop of the audience there, which was like an upside-down wedding cake made of icicles.
“I helped build that, about thirty years ago,” he said. “I don’t know if there’s anything else you might recognize.”
“Amazing,” I said.
I thought for a moment about that building, with all the gargoyles and things on the outside, and with the pretty chandelier, and how he had helped make it.
Then I said, “So if you’re such a good architect, why did you make yourself such a regular house?”
Mr. Peterson frowned. He looked up at the light-blue ceiling. “I didn’t design it, actually.”
“Why not?”
Mr. Peterson looked back down at me again. Then he changed the subject.
“Later on I became the chief demolition engineer on some projects—”
“Demolishing engineer?”
“Precisely.”
“So you built buildings...”
Mr. Peterson nodded.
“... and then you tore them down?”
He took a quick gulp of tea.
“I suppose so.”
I was a little bit demolished. I took Phil from the table and held the corner of the pages and let them flip by really fast. I watched the page numbers flash by like an animated movie:
25, 27, 29... 35, 37... 41, 43
Just then, the tape recorder clicked off.
Mr. Peterson watched me as I popped it open, flipped the tape over and poked the door shut. I made a gigantic sigh, and hit RECORD again.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Mr. Peterson asked.
The thing about becoming a grown-up is that you forget how annoying it is to be asked by someone what you want to be when you grow up. When I was tinier I used to have answers for that stupid question. Silly answers. A fireman. A garbage man. A dolphin jockey. Pretty much anyone who got to ride on something. But it’d been a long time since I knew what I really wanted to be. Maybe forever. The most annoying thing about being asked what-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up is that you know the grown-up asking it thinks you have to grow up in order to be anything.
So I didn’t know what to say. I stared at the tape recorder which was going to hear me say whatever silly thing I was going to say. I sat there for a while thinking about it and Mr. Peterson kept looking out the window, like he was just waiting for a deer to walk by. I tried to think of something not silly, something that made sense. Then I knew I was trying too hard, and I decided to say the next exact thing that came to my brain. It was pretty silly.
“Well one time I had a dream where I drew the Leaning Tower of Pisa really big, because I could cover the real thing with my drawing, because I made it not leaning anymore.”
Mr. Peterson turned his head towards me again. His bushy eyebrows went up, and he had a small smile, like I made a joke that wasn’t quite funny enough to laugh at.
“I guess maybe, I’d like to do that,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know.”
I felt like a real live idiot.
“I see,” Mr. Peterson said. “You know, that’s got a lot to do with what I was doing, too.”
“Not really.”
“Sure it does.”
The tape recorder recorded fifteen long seconds of silence. Then, the sound of Mr. Peterson yawning.
He pointed at a big photo of some w
ar boat.
“Have you ever heard of the Philadelphia Experiment?”
“No. How come every time I say ‘Phil,’ everyone starts talking about Philadelphia?” It was not fun to be creating a routine anymore.
Mr. Peterson laughed, which was weird, but then quickly became a corpse again.
“I hadn’t thought of that. Anyhow, the Philadelphia Experiment is a strange story. A mystery. It’s widely considered to be a hoax, but anyway there were miniscule pieces of evidence, suggesting that...”
(Meanwhile my real dad had discovered the last living trilobite known to man. He hiked through the woods to this cliff to search for trilobite fossils, but after he’d been digging for five minutes, a real live trilobite scurried between his legs. He was in shock at first. But he snapped out of it, and because he had such excellent animal communication skills, he followed it, and when it noticed him, he crouched down to show it that he was friendly, and he succeeded in petting it. Then my real dad took it in and cared for it as a pet. As even more than a pet—as a friend. After three months of study he became fluent in its language of high-pitched squeals, and learned that it was actually a she, and that she had spent millenniums searching for a mate.)
“... so not only did the electromagnetic field render the ship invisible to radar, it also bent light around it, so not even the human eye...”
(My real dad trained her to scurry faster than the fastest racing car, because he knew what they were up against. There was a group of scientists who were determined to hunt down the trilobite and perform all sorts of cruel tests on her to understand how she had survived the last extinction. My real dad wasn’t going to let that happen. He built a wooden saddle chair for her back and he guided her from town to town, protecting her.)
“... the green fog returned, and instead of being visible again, apparently the ship was accidentally teleported. There was this flash of blue light and...”
(Every day was a tough day for my real dad and the trilobite. They rested in damp caves at night, one sleeping while the other kept watch. One night by the campfire, he asked the trilobite what he should name her. She asked what the point of having a name was, and he didn’t know the answer.)
“... still the legend goes that people reported seeing the ship in both Norfolk, Virginia, and Philadelphia in the same day...”
A Matter of Life and Death or Something Page 11
