The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [213]
“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