The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel

  “He was very patient about it, evidently,” my mother told me. “He seemed to think it was reasonable. I would have been furious with you, but somehow he just smiled through it all.”

  “I really did this?”

  The counselor spoke quietly to me on the bus seat, trying to winkle some clue out of me, and I can imagine, but not remember, his expression of mingled doubt and concern. If this persistent man, standing laughing to himself on the corner in the August heat, wasn’t the kid’s father, what sort of criminality was he up to? And if he was the father, what was wrong with this annoying fat kid? And why wasn’t the dad shouting, settling this through force of will and parental entitlement?

  “You held out all the way to the police coming,” my mother laughed. “I think you only gave in then because you were afraid they were coming for you.”

  The police car arrived, and I glumly descended at last, forty-five minutes into this ordeal, took my father’s hand, and walked off with him for ice cream.

  What was I thinking? I honestly remember none of this incident, and if it hadn’t been my mom—the least imaginative and fanciful member of my family—recounting it, I might have said she was trying her hand at fiction. But she was telling it straight. The most direct interpretation: I didn’t want him to be my father. I must have been so angry with him for the divorce, so ashamed of his imprisonments, so jealous of his relationship with my sister that fantasy’s appeal outmuscled reality’s prerogatives. Or, since I can’t remember a traumatic emotion, maybe it was all in fun. Maybe I was trying to play a misguided game with him, something I thought he’d enjoy. Maybe I was trying to impress him with my ability to re-create the world or myself. Maybe I already understood enough of what made him tick that I was imitating him. If so, by the time the police came, I would have known that I, like him, wasn’t good enough to do it forever. I may have stepped off the bus preparing for my first arrest, another Arthur Phillips off to serve time for failures in fantasizing.

  Perhaps it was aggressive, a challenge to him to keep up. If he was so good at this sort of thing, I may have been dimly thinking, then I would be as good or better, and I deserved his respect as much as Dana did, or Shakespeare (who, by the time I was nine, had become a bullying, noxious presence). And, in this interpretation, his patient and friendly insistence that he was my father, his loving explanation to the mildly amused cops, his purchase of ice cream for me nevertheless, his general portrayal of a “father” (albeit one who didn’t discipline me for this irresponsible charade) was his victory: he had portrayed a dad more convincingly than I had portrayed an attempted-kidnapping victim.

  5

  BUT IF IN FACT that is how I felt one summer day at age nine, it was not permanent. Disappointment and separation were halting and uneven processes, shuffling back and forth like over-Thorazined mental patients. If I was resistant to my father’s gravity at age nine, he could, without much evident trouble, draw me back in before I was ten. I am a writer of stories, trained to think in terms of a character’s emotional “arc,” but my real-life, untidy path resembles not an arc but a failed rocket program, liftoff followed by repeated crashes back onto the launchpad, short orbital flights followed by long groundings, until, far off in the future, escape velocity is finally achieved and deep space collects me.

  But not yet.

  After the bus incident, he was still able to induce wonder, to preach wonder, and I could still love, listen, and gaze at this star, my sister’s hand in mine, my eyes on my father.

  When we were ten, we started spending weekends with him in his studio apartment on Lake Street, above the bookbinder where his friend Chuck Glassow had found him a job. He’d been out of jail for more than a year, had stuck to his probation requirements, and seemed to have become a reasonably normal divorced guy. Our mother was more than willing to enjoy weekends alone with her new husband.

  We slept on an air mattress and, at bedtime, he would read to us: Alexandre Dumas or Arthur Conan Doyle if things went my way, Shakespeare if they didn’t. One June Friday the evening’s soporific, to Dana’s pleasure, was decided based on the date: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It did the trick for me quite quickly (especially as there was no baseball game on the radio that night), since I’m with Samuel Pepys on this one: “The most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.”

  But I must have fought off sleep until at least Act II, Scene i (and that’s due to Dad’s vocal prowess), because I remember the conversation that followed from my father’s reading of the line “And I serve the fairy queen, / To dew her orbs upon the green.” Dana asked what that meant, and Dad described “fairy rings”—little dark circles that appear in grass, which in Shakespeare’s nature-rich youth in green Warwickshire would have been a source of mystery and wonder mingled with fear. I may have mentioned that it sounded like a dull childhood if some rotting grass was a highlight, but I was nevertheless spun back under his spell, Elizabethan England greening in my imagination.

  Now, some future moments flow from this spring: (1) My sister’s dreadful college punk band, for which she “played” bass, the Fairy Rings (better than her other, earlier effort, Discomfort Women); (2) my eventual career as a novelist, possibly, since we were lying down, drowsy, in the drabbest conceivable space, and my father—who did have a way with his vocal effects and vocabulary—was extolling the greatness of anyone who adds to the world’s store of wonder and magic, disorder, confusion, possibility, “the wizards.” If he had been trying to hypnotize me for life ahead, it wouldn’t have been much different. (On the other hand, if I’d ended up a urologist, I would now point elsewhere for the first seeds of my adult splendor, I suppose); and (3) the very odd weeks that followed, the pinnacle of my love for the three of us as a team, culminating, however, in Dad’s arrest and plea bargain, fines, and community service down in farmy Nobles County, Minnesota.

  He said something along these lines (I am reconstructing thirty-five-year-old conversations to the best of my ability; they are almost certainly inaccurate): “In those days, you walked outside your house, or twenty minutes outside of London, and you were in an endless forest, as magical and terrifying as you can imagine. Wonders were in the grass, mysteries. Something invisible was trying to communicate with you, frighten you, charm you, maybe steal from you, or help you, lead you to riches or just laugh at you. Now, boring, boring, we know there aren’t grotesque fairies out there. We cut down those forests to prove it. We know what causes twenty varieties of discolorations of the turf. We have so many facts, and with them we can cut down anything.”

  I agreed wholeheartedly: Dad, forests, adventure, wonder, Dana, and I versus prisons, bulldozers, boring people, facts. That seemed precisely to explain the world.

  The following two weekends he asked for us again, and our mother continued to be improbably generous in sharing us, considering his performance as a first husband and her full, inarguable custody. But my mother’s way of judging people was her own, and she never hesitated to let him be a father when he could. She didn’t hold her or our repeated disappointments against him. “That’s the way he is. Don’t expect anything else,” I heard her say more than once, though decades spun by before I could consistently follow that advice.

  He took us out to an extremely nice dinner two Saturdays later, at the Normandy Hotel, a Minneapolis fixture back then. The gift certificate he used to pay for the meal (without incident) is tinted in retrospect with a shading of doubtful authenticity. “The gift of a lady friend,” he claimed as provenance, a forged girlfriend vouching for a forged voucher. (The “lady friends” of those years when he was out of prison were often referred to but never produced, and, before I understood that they never existed, they may have inspired in me another strange unilateral competitiveness with my father. My subsequent compulsive behavior toward women, I can admit now, may have been an effort to show him and the world that I was not a forger. And there, just there! I wonder, replaying that meal, whether life really works like this: if
he had thought of some other explanation for the gift certificate, or said nothing at all, would everything have ended differently today?)

  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. His face in the rearview said, “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, with my cleaned clothes folded next to the air mattress, or when the doughnuts and chocolate milk had arrived. Dana and I both suspected a dream until we saw the other’s face (although this didn’t definitively settle it, since we did still have identical dreams now and again). It was past noon.

  “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 precious possibility. 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 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’s office under Gary Flakne. But my father thought he knew what it meant, and he was convinced that I had boasted to my buddy, who told his father, who then contacted the law in Nobles County, who in turn had politely requested that my father pay a call at the sheriff’s office within twenty-four hours. “No one is saying you squealed on us,” he said, though my eyes stung that he was saying precisely that. “It’s just that it must have been hard not to let your pal know about this great thing.”