The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [124]
Verre says the forensics battery is now an all-clear. I honestly can’t believe there’s anything to doubt here. Do you still? I think it is impossible that a forger could fool all these tests.
That smug certainty of modern science’s all-seeing eye, that conviction that there is no human ingenuity still to come: this gives me some faith in the falseness of the otherwise disorienting forensics report.
I will only assert that there is always a way to fool a test. That the most complex tests are being fooled right now by someone who hasn’t been caught yet. The good forgers, recall, will never be known. Peter Bryce said as much to me: “I suppose by definition I only catch bad forgers, don’t I?” Tomorrow’s tests will catch today’s master criminal, just as today’s scientist feels safe mocking yesterday’s master criminal. There has always been erroneous, arrogant certainty on the part of some technicians that they could never be tricked by artistry. Always has been; always will be. I don’t know how my father did it, but he did it. If I’m the only one who can see it, that doesn’t make me wrong. He did it.
Arthur, the more I think about it, the more I admire your tenacity in double-checking every possible explanation of your good fortune. I can understand—if I were holding a lottery ticket such as yours—the overpowering sense of disbelief.
45
PETRA CAME TO ME, shaking and wet from the snow, and she let me wrap a blanket around her and hold her, the first time in weeks. She said nothing, just stood there and let me hold her, and I knew everything was going to be fine.
And then she stepped away from me, said she had just come from her doctor. She was pregnant. She had only meant to punish Dana, she said, maybe more, and Dana never wanted a baby and Petra did, and maybe she had felt something else about me last summer and fall, but it didn’t matter now, not at all. She wanted the child, and she wanted to leave Minneapolis and go home to her own family in a different city in a different country, and she had come to say goodbye and tell me this news, but she expected and wanted me to do nothing about it.
“But I love you. That’s not nothing. No poetry, Petra. No lies. Just: I love you and I want us to take this gift and be happy. The end.”
“That seems possible to you?”
I laughed in my certainty. “Yes. Wait. Don’t you see? This fixes everything. It’s authenticating.” God help me, that was the first word that came to mind, and I can picture (I can’t stop picturing, unfortunately) Petra’s face in response. “My kids, our baby: you’ll see. We can put this all together. The pieces all fit. It’s a great thing, a great start to a great story. You have to trust me. Stay. Trust me. I’ll take care of everything.” I tried to hold her again, but she stepped away, shedding the blanket and me.
“You’re wrong.”
“But you’re not—you’re not indifferent to me?” I asked hopefully, though even as I said it, the expression before me was projected back over the faces, the poses, the images of our nights together, and they changed, recolored by how she was now, passion becoming indifference, wonder becoming regret, love becoming hate, shame smearing a gritty film over all of it. “What are we going to tell Dana?”
“That’s not really your problem, is it?” she said, with a look of bottomless disgust.
“I’ll tell her,” I said. “Tomorrow. After her matinee. I’ll pick her up at the theater. You can come if you want, or I’ll do it alone.”
She left me in the dark apartment, watching the snow come down, my father’s ghost still snoring in the back bedroom. I sat alone on the couch. There was no more wine. That feeling of a con being revealed—the nausea and instant aging and fury and shame and humiliation: I tried to imagine learning that your brother has impregnated your girlfriend.
DATE: Tue, 8 Dec 2009 21:51:08 -0600