First Man (2 page)

Let me die here
, they whispered
.

The disease granted both of us a reprieve in the end. He did not fall into a coma. There was no frantic trip to the Cairo Hospital or months of convalescence. He simply slipped away during the night. I knew what had made my father the man he was had departed before I even opened my eyes that morning.

For the first time in nearly a year, the keyboard was still.

In the days that followed, as I was shuffled around by the well meaning but socially stunted scholars my father worked with, I comforted myself with those pages. I sifted through the boxes with the same reverence my father used in a dig. I uncovered hundreds of pages, each sentence meticulously researched.
The Funerary Rites of Nomadic Desert Tribes
,
Medical Practices of 3rd Century BCE Greece
, forty-two pages about grafitti on the Coluseeum. It was as though he had spent year trying to outrun the disease that was slowly killing him. In the end, it caught him, and I was left with nothing more than a few boxes of scattered documents and journals.

I was shipped back to England, to grey skies and rain and boarding school. The professors didn’t know what to make of me back in those days. I was far from being the only quiet boy content to bury my nose in a book, but I was the only one who steadfastly refused to stay locked up in the dormitories and the classrooms.

I’d use any spare moment as an excuse to slip away from the crowds and din of my classmates. England was a far cry from the arid lands I’d spent my childhood exploring, but in the forest surrounding our school I found a crumbling stone wall. In actuality, it couldn’t have been more than a hundred years old, if that, but I let myself imagine it had been constructed a thousand years ago, Celtic tribesmen stacking the stones to protect themselves from the Roman invaders.

I whiled away many afternoons sitting on the damp ground by that wall. The stretch of days seemed endless at first. I kept my grades high and kept to myself, and somehow in between those rain-soaked days I grew up.

When I had stepped through those heavy oak doors as a grief-stricken, culture-shocked boy, I wanted nothing more than to count down the days of my sentence in those dreary halls. Instead, as I grew up, I found myself caught in the same trappings of academia that had ensnared my father.

I studied endlessly and set myself towards finishing as many of my father’s papers as I was able. I even succeeded in getting a few published back in those days. They were heavy, scholarly journals that no one outside of academia would have heard of, let alone read.

I looked up from those pages and I was an adult, packing the last four years of my life into a trunk and traveling to another stately marble hall in the same grey country, my adolescent desires of disappearing back into the sands forgotten, at least for a time.

It could have ended there. I could have done my four years in Oxford, collected a few graduate degrees, and ended up with a comfortable professorship. I could have looked fondly back at my youth wandering the world beside my father. I might have married a sensible British woman, an academic of course, perhaps a literature professor. I’d live out my days in a quiet house with a garden and tell my children stories of when their father ran around the pyramids as a boy.

That’s how it could have ended.

Instead, the wanderlust returned. Like an itch I could never quite reach, it gnawed at my senses. I shoved it into the back of my mind, locking it up like I was hiding a dirty secret in a cupboard. For four years of university and two years of graduate study, I turned myself into someone that sand-covered boy wouldn’t have recognized. With a first–class degree in my hand, I stared down at the potential 50 years of sameness, and something within me snapped.

I packed up my flat, shoving six years of post boarding school life into storage and stowing the few things that mattered into the worn suitcases that had once followed my father across the globe.

And I wandered. I was 23 years old and I had no ties beyond a handful of friends back in England. I retraced the steps of my past, visiting the historic sites and tourist traps. I lost myself in women, staring into green eyes, brown eyes, blue eyes.

Above all, I let myself get lost in the world. On the streets of Cairo or the bazaars of Istanbul, I was just another nameless traveller, another face blending into the crowd. Bit by bit, the pieces of that small boy watching his father unearth fragments of history crumbled.

I wasn’t lost in the world. I was simply lost, but like any traveller navigating a new place, I didn’t notice that I had lost my path until all the familiar landmarks had disappeared from my site. By that point, there was nowhere left to go but forward.

PART ONE

NEW WORLD

“W
here to this time, mate?” Edwin Pamphilos’ melodic accent, a strange mixture of British and Greek, echoed in my ear with the tinny quality transcontinental connections always had.

“America. Atlanta,” I replied. After what felt like a lifetime of crossing every ancient land I could buy a plane ticket to, I was going somewhere truly foreign to me.

“You finally ran out of Old World, so you had to start on the New, eh?”

“It was time for-”

“-Another bloody change. I’ve heard it every few months for the last four years.”

Four years. In the course of history, four years was an eyeblink, but emperors had risen to power and fallen from favor in less time. Four years of nonstop travel had been enough to replace the wide-eyed traveller in me with a sharp-tongued cynic. I was bored with the world at the ripe old age of 27, and I hated that fact about myself.

I heard rustling over the line and imagined Edwin rifling through the mounds of ungraded essays, photocopies, and assorted educational trappings that covered his desk. I had chided him for his messiness at Oxford. A decade later, I had become him, at least in one respect.

“I take it from your lack of comment, the Ovid conference went well?” I said, segueing my friend into a more comfortable topic.

When Edwin continued, I could hear the glee in his voice. “As if a conference about the Old Man could be anything but! Harrison had a lovely little paper on Ovid in the 1990s, and of course your contribution was very well received.
Banquet of the Senses
, indeed. No wonder all the women in field seem to think you’re some ruddy rock star.”

“Hardly.”

Edwin snorted. “If you’d actually come to one of these conferences more often than once a decade, they might realize you’re - What was it you said to that hot little graduate student that was fawning all over you at the last time you graced Corpus Christi with your presence? ‘I’m just a guy.’”

“Keep your hands off those coeds or I might be forced to give Elene a call,” I said.

I could feel Edwin’s shudder two thousand miles away. “Don’t even joke about that, Adam! You know how Greek women are. . . and Italian women, and Spanish women, and now American women.”

“Edwin, I have to go. I’ll give you a call later.”

He sighed, and when he spoke again, he couldn’t keep the “disapproving older brother” tone from his voice. “Be sure that ‘later’ doesn’t end up being six months from now when you decide to move to Morocco or something. Be well, Adam.”

“And you.”

Atlanta was
young.

After growing accustomed to cites over a millennia old, a city less than two and a half centuries old was a welcome change. The Antebellum houses that had escaped Sherman’s wrath, along with the scores of replicas, captivated me almost as much as the temples of Greece and Rome had. I wandered through the historic district of Peachtree Heights and was shocked to find myself marveling at the architecture, having in the past fallen to the pretensions of my profession. Neoclassical wasn’t quite such an insult after all.

Unable to resist the comedic value of the Classics department of the University of Georgia existing on their Athens campus, I set off for the school. Like it or not, I was an academic and my first days in any city began with a visit to the local university. Stadium sized lecture halls made slipping into a few classes unnoticed relatively simple. Whatever the topic, I found immeasurable comfort in these academic orations.

Typical of American academia, Park Hall was a stately brick building. Thick pillars stood like sentinels around the heavy wooden doors. Inside, it smelled like every other academic building, old wood and the vaguely citrus scent of floor polish. Tucked in the free space in the English building, the Classics department seemed to almost be an afterthought. Not many people still seemed interested in losing themselves in dusty relics anymore. Pity.