The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [212]
He returned to his theme as I tore into a tenderloin of pork covered in apples and cream: the world’s vanishing faith in wonder, in relation to the vanishing natural world, and in inverse proportion to its growing store of dubiously valuable scientific knowledge. Dana was rapt, I recall. I remember watching her watch him, and I began to be aware of how he looked at me slightly less often than at her when he spoke. I suspected I was getting less of his eye, which in turn made me mad, so I looked up less often from my food, which led him to address the only child who was showing any interest in him, so by the end, he didn’t look at me at all. I was already able to make others fulfill my own worst fears.
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,