The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [12]
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 our circle, in 1974, was very basic, not like the overwrought ones nowadays. You can find our creation breathlessly described, and you can read the testimony of some of the first witnesses, neatly detached from any mention of subsequent 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of the alien sludge (now a common occurrence at crop circles), though its actual recipe (my father’s invention) remains unpublished, as far as I know.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 smooth corn trench to draw some thick salivary strands of the muck off the soil. The station’s traffic helicopter was tasked to fly over the field for aerial footage. Soon other witnesses appeared, testifying to bright lights in the sky that fateful night, and a dozen volunteer conspirators—lying or believing—enlisted in my father’s project. I don’t know what lesson I drew from watching them, back when I was ten, but I certainly recognize a pattern now.
My mother watched the news with us, made fun of it without knowing we were involved, and then she walked off to cook dinner while Dana and I sat very, very quietly in the haze of our own wonder. Remember: we were ten. We knew we had done this, but we didn’t believe it. We didn’t know what we had done, but we were proud of it. “Do you believe in UFOs?” I asked her, belief and understanding all jumbled.
My father didn’t want to make people stupider or mock stupidity or celebrate stupidity. When the farmer said, “The shape. The shape is so … beautiful, so …” and trailed off, my father was right there with him in spirit. I suspect that he wished, of all the participants in this whole enterprise, to be that farmer, to be fooled. My father had given him (and the world) this glimpse of something hidden. He was only dissatisfied to be the giver and not the recipient.
This may be the closest I ever felt to him. Together we had reshaped the world, changed how some people viewed life, the universe, everything. Adulthood, ever more alluring to a ten-year-old, was where magic happened, thanks to this superman who was my father. We were an elite. He had chosen and trained us. The judges and jailers were my enemies, too.
It was two weeks before he stole this feeling from me. “Say, listen, Arthur, I know how hard it is to keep secrets. And when you let one slip, you know, it can feel like it won’t go any further, or that it didn’t even really happen. You can almost make yourself believe you didn’t do it.” I immediately struggled to look as innocent as I was, which made me look spectacularly guilty. Despite my father’s history, I was not totally aware what it meant that my best friend at school, Doug Constantine, was the son of Ted Constantine, a prosecutor in the Hennepin County attorney