The Syme Papers (64 page)

Joe had this virtue: he wondered at nothing. The variations of Nature, of which he was a keen observer, had prepared him for any of the lesser diversities of men. I approached him with Syme’s ‘Sketch towards the construction of the magnesium lantern, dubbed by Mr Tom Jenkyns The Flu” alongside Phidy’s description:

Joe held the scribbled sketch in the palm of his hand, pinned at the top by the curl of his fingers, and lifted it to the light in his garage studio. His thick arm swelled his college sweatshirt, frayed at cuff and neck through long affection, as he set an impossibly dainty pair of gold specs across his nose, and read over Phidy’s account. He stared at it. I stared at him. He stared at me; then unlooped his specs delicately from his pink ears, and pressed his eyes shut.

‘I guess it’s your business‚’ he said.

‘I guess it is‚’ I answered. Pitt is an incorrigible mimic, and a great admirer of Men in their Trades, who get to the heart of a matter, then stop. (This has never been Pitt’s modus operandi.) Pitt cannot help himself; confesses a sneaking affection for tool-belts, boots and hammers; for drawls; for all things native and unlearned, since Pitt himself belongs best in the world of the
acquired.

‘If these fellas made one‚’ he answered at last, ‘I don’t see a reason – I can’t.’

How sweet it glinted in the sunshine of Saturday morning when Joe ‘brought it round the house’, as he said. Susie was gone with the boys, and the drive was empty. I meant to take them to their soccer matches out at Zilker, but then Joe called, so I rustled pink Susie out of her folded sleep. ‘Is it Monday yet?’ she said, in a languorous, pretty muddle, as I rattled open the curtains, and set a cup of coffee on her bedside book.
‘Not
Saturday morning‚’ she grumped, blinking, suddenly unmuddled, as I tried to rouse her. ‘Saturday morning is my morning.’

‘Drink that‚’ I said. ‘Joe’s coming round. He says it’s ready.’

‘Joe, joe, joe‚’ Susie muttered, obscurely mocking, as she swung a leg to the floor. ‘Joe joe joe joe joe. Joe. Joe. Joe joe.’

‘Joe,’ I murmured, an hour later, holding the lantern to the sunshine, and watching the cut glass cut the light. ‘Joe.’

‘Looks fine‚’ Joe said, ‘I believe.’

A square frame, edged in brass, ran up to a kind of polished steeple. I held the lantern by the ‘nod’, as Joe called it – from the sketch, he said – a rounded hook that tipped the roof. The magnesium match hung from the underside of it, that ‘thin, flammable wire trapped in a crystal prism’. The device had no bottom, so I poked my finger through to touch the match – a rough, curling strip that felt like sandpaper to the tip. ‘That’ll want replacing‚’ Joe said, ‘time to time.’ But the beauty of it all lay in the etchings, which resembled nothing so much as the rays on a child’s sun, impossibly particular, burning through the frosted glass. They had been carefully labelled in a loose script that seemed to tumble down the lines: Calliope, Cassandra, Caesar and Washington, and even Maria S., after Mrs Simmons, I supposed. Each glass panel recorded a slightly different concentration of fluvial spirits, which depended on the seasons, and the power of an eclipse.

‘To think Sam held this in his hands most of two hundred years ago; and set out with it, to look into the heart of the earth. Such an air of precision, Joe, of careful beauty. Precision, he once said,
is only one kind of abundance. Such colours, too – when the green comes off the grass. Is not the magnesium lantern glorious?’

‘Well‚’ Joe said, pressing his palms to his temples in a rather extraordinary fashion, as if to unscrew his head, ‘seeing I built it, yes. But what it’s good for, that’s nothing to do with me.’

‘I’ll show you. All we need’s a Petrie dish and a drop of methanol. Short of that a cornflake bowl and a bottle of gin. Come on, Joe – we’ll take it round the park this minute.’

Joe and I looked around the park. The sprinklers had kicked up along the football field and darkened the sheet of mud along the sewage pipe. In one endzone, a man sat on an icebox drinking; another stoked a grill. The toddlers’ pool was almost full, of legs and balloons, it seemed; two mothers lay on their bellies with their bikini tops unhooked. The sun stood on the arch of noon and looked down. ‘Pitt‚’ Joe said, squinting, smiling a blind smile, ‘I don’t think I’m drunk enough.’

I can’t tell you what fun it was, at first. By the time Susie and the boys got back Pitt had covered half of the football field down to the creek, and the grass verge of the tennis courts on the other side. His sneakers were soaked through, and stank of sock – the creek, I must say, proved particularly fruitful, rich in curious exhalations of all kinds, not to mention milk cartons, candy wraps, newspapers, orange peels, syringes, bottle tops, beer cans, and the teardrop strips of metal that open them. The knees of his chinos stuck to his skin, then peeled off, as he stretched a leg. Pitt’s elbows, likewise, bore evidence of his table manners: the creek-bank where he propped himself; the burred football field; the sprinkled lawn. The rubber tongue of one sole flapped every step, cleft from the shoe above, and chattering idly. When Aaron stepped out of the car in socks, trailing his cleats on a finger over his shoulder, and discerned his father plodding up the drive, he said, ‘Mom, who’s that bum?’

‘What’s he done with Dad?’ Ben piped.

‘Go inside, boys, and get cleaned up‚’ Susie said, in the Voice That Brooks No Dissent. ‘You too, Doug.’

I must confess that I hadn’t dreamed at first of
mapping the
results
– aiming as I did just to get the measure of Sam’s thoughts by following in his steps, not the measure of the fluvial content in Shipe Park, Austin, Texas. (That would be crazy.) It was simply a matter of knowing the way he worked. ‘Have you ever tracked a dead man’s thought down the gloomy corridors of the mind‚’ I once wrote, ‘your comprehension lit by the same shower of synapses that illuminated the passages of his brain almost two centuries before, spark for spark?’ To do that, I needed to know how his hands felt, going about their business, his knees and feet, his back. I wanted to consider the question of a hollow earth from the point of view of a man who had trod, touched, scraped, burned, measured the ground under his feet, and reduced a few acres of countryside in his clever hands to a map of numbers in his clever head.

Naturally, Pitt was – observed. A bearded
dude,
a fellow of houseless head and unfed sides, in looped and windowed raggedness attired, burst sneaks, cut jeans, asked me once what I was ‘lighting up’.

‘Fluvia‚’ Pitt replied.

‘Is that something new?’ the gentleman asked, leaning over me, and sniffing, wrinkling a long, straight nose of unexpected refinement.

‘Old‚’ Pitt said. ‘Very old.’

‘Used to be’, he muttered, ambling off, ‘we’s all shared what we scored.’

A gang of kids surrounded me once, pointing, when their football tumbled into the creek-bed. I hunched over the edge of the water, lit a dish of earth and scum dosed with gin, then struck the magnesium match, and stood back to observe the blue ‘gay faerie’ dancing on the cut glass. They said nothing, as I jotted the result in a ringed notepad. Children have a natural respect for the utterly strange, acts without reference, too alien to be assaulted. At last one of their number, obligated by a shadowy moustache, dared to clamber down, pick up the wet ball, and scat. Some of them lingered longer. They looked vaguely saddened by the whole affair,
sobered up,
after the high spirits of their game. It took a few steps
into the playing field till the rise of the creek obscured them and their tongues loosened and they cried their tireless boasts and prompts again. ‘He burning shit‚’ they said. ‘That man burning some weird shit. Man, he
burning.
You see that?’

I was lucky (I see that now) to attract a cop whose indifference to the vagaries of the world, either natural or professionally acquired, was sufficient for him to accept at face value my rather garbled account of the experiment. ‘You see‚’ I spluttered, drying my hands on my thighs, and rummaging through a stuffed wallet for a university card, ‘it is essentially a question of – those – escaped subterranean gases – that groove the internal spheres – whose occasional cracks – overlap, thereby producing an unusual concentration – of – fluvia. Thus far the theory‚’ Pitt cried, conscious, for the first time, of a desire to dissociate himself from the great Sam Syme. ‘I am, in point of fact, a
historian,
properly speaking, bent on a species of archaeological experiment – not a scientist at all, by any means.’

The cop, a light-skinned Latino chewing a toothpick, listened patiently.

‘Is that a bottle of gin?’ he said at last.

‘It is‚’ Pitt answered. ‘Purely
scientific
gin‚’ he hastened to add.

‘That’s what I always drink‚’ the cop said.
‘Scientific
gin.’

He lifted the lantern lightly with his pinkie finger, and sniffed it. ‘What I like about this job’, he muttered through locked teeth, ‘is Variety.’ He prodded the toe of his boot in the bowl of gin-spiked dirt, then scraped the sole of it carefully against a rock. He spat out his toothpick in the creek. ‘Next time‚’ he said, taking another toothpick from a matchbox in his breast pocket, ‘make sure you get a paper bag – for the bottle of gin.’

The best of it all was that it
worked.
Now let no Bunyon wilfully misunderstand me: Pitt gives no credence to concentric spheres, escaped fluvia, eclipses. He is, first and foremost, a historian of error; and has not forgot it. But he has often had occasion to note the brilliance of those devices constructed to establish erroneous theories. Human
ends,
Pitt regrets to say, rarely live up to the sophistication of their
means.
The magnesium lantern was – as
good as advertised. ‘Then we lit the match’, Phidy declared, ‘and a thin blue spirit of light appeared in the smoke and danced high or low upon the lantern’s glass walls.’ That is exactly what happened; and what a beautiful quavering glow it proved to be: composed of light, being itself opaque, free to the flow of the sunshine that shot through it. A blue ‘faerie’, as Phidy called it, spectral and spidery, spinning a fine web of reckonings against the glass.

Now. Regarding these reckonings. I won’t say they made sense. I won’t go that far. Doubtless, on the strength of them, I could construct the rumour of some eclipse – under South Lamar, let’s say, just short of 7th Street. Before I was done, I’d plotted most of Hyde Park; trooped over Speedway to Hemphill Creek and Adam’s Park by the fire station; headed south along Lamar Boulevard, somewhat more patchily, and ‘taken a flare’ (as, I believe, they used to call it) in the green lot where they sell Christmas trees in the winter (a strong, steady glow); driven to the banks of the Colorado by the old YMCA, and, there among the winos and lovers, among the late-night joggers, drawn my first real crowd, who huddled about the thin blue spirit in such easy, uncomplicated wonder that my heart warmed to the uninitiated world for the first time since undertaking this history; and after that, in a burst of fresh hope, I tracked as far as Zilker and Barton Springs, before calling it quits at last.

I had got Phidy’s description almost by heart by the end, translating the cityscape of Austin into his Virginian account, and the we of their companionship into my old solitary passion:

Only Susie’s sleep used to suffer for it, as Pitt crawled in beside her, butting his head against the small of her back, in animal companionship. ‘Cold‚’ she said, in sleepy insistence, cocooning herself in feather-bed. ‘Hands and cheeks. Both out. Don’t be so much cold.’

Pitt did not, as he says, attach any credence (a curious phrase, I have always felt, involving such a difficult
jointure
) to the map of the internal world he constructed on the strength of these readings – or, rather, to that subsection of onion-layers, cut out under the patch known as Austin, Texas. Nevertheless, such a map proved to be not only conceptually viable but practically feasible, along the lines Syme sketched out, in his first passionate discussion with Phidy, over Sunday dinner. The map
worked
because the magnesium lantern worked, produced a series of various and above all
repeatable
results over a stretch of terrain that did indeed suggest the presence in the soil of diverse concentrations of an unknown gas, of unknown origins. As Pitt discovered the second time he trod over that ‘trail of blackened turf’ to check his results.