The Fire Seekers

by Richard Farr

  Mom’s on a business trip—she usually is—but she manages to join us for a few days. Join me, anyway. The two of us retreat to the beach while Dad spends the time schmoozing the local politicians, making calls, filling people’s wineglasses, being irritable because for once his influence is not getting him what he wants. “Dammit,” he says, joining us briefly for some snorkeling. “I will find out how old that Disk is.”

  Over the weekend he flies to Athens, hoping to bend the ear of some bigger-league pol in the Ministry of Culture. Mom takes the opportunity to drag me to church. Dad thinks religion’s a communicable mental illness, says so as often as possible, claims church services bring him out in hives, and refuses on principle to attend any, ever. Mom’s not a believer either, or not in a formal way, but her attitude is completely different. Especially in a foreign country—Greece, Indonesia, Utah—she likes to act the benign, clipboard-carrying anthro. If you’re going to travel, Daniel, travel deep. Tourists want to experience the buildings, the food, the music. Why not experience what matters most to people? Why not experience how they worship?

  As always with her, there’s more to it than she lets on. She’s already told me about her migration from the Church of Scotland to Catholicism and back again. Tasting little chunks of Hinduism in India, Islam in Morocco, Judaism in New Jersey. A serious Buddhist phase too—staring into space for three months over a bowl of cold rice on a mountaintop in Bhutan. She accepts with good humor Dad’s sarcastic take on her spirituality: Iona, you’re a shopper. Still shopping now—so, under the disguise of Deep Travel, we walk the half mile from our hotel to the Ekklisia Agios Minas and join several hundred people in the colorful, hypnotic ritual of a Greek Orthodox service.

  The smell of stone and sweat and incense.

  The chanted liturgy.

  The strange vestments and tall black hats of the priests.

  The murmuring of the congregation, like bees.

  Mom’s whisper breaks in on my thoughts. “Something powerful going on here. Don’t you think? A kind of performance. A kind of willing the world into existence. You know what your Uncle Jimmy would say—it’s like they’re carrying on the same tradition that human beings first performed around their first fires, in Africa, ten thousand centuries ago.”

  “Jimmy’s an archaeologist, Mom. He doesn’t believe any of it either.”

  “Don’t focus on whether you believe it. Focus on how powerful it is. People think you have to believe in order to worship. Blaise Pascal said it was the other way around: you worship in order to believe.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “On the contrary, it’s brilliant. And”—her eyes are twinkling with humor—“he was a mathematician, so he must have been right. What your father and Jimmy don’t see is that it doesn’t matter whether it’s true—it feeds a hunger to have the world make sense.”

  With my parents, random bursts of philosophizing are situation normal. I’m many steps down the intelligence scale from either of them, but smart enough to worry that I’ll sound stupid if I reply, and stupid if I don’t. The temptation is to say, That’s what Dad wants too. A world that makes sense. Instead, I go for maximum bland: “Maybe people just. You know. Like getting together.”

  Mom surprises me: nods approvingly, echoes me right back. “ ‘Maybe people just like getting together.’ Yes. Could be just that. Striking, though, isn’t it? That religion is so appealing to people. So successful?”

  It’s like she’s peering into the future at that moment. Dad has not yet encountered a peculiarly intense, handsome, charismatic grad student named Julius Quinn. Nobody has heard of a movement called the Seraphim. And Quinn’s book, Anabasis—not really a book, exactly, but a religious “revelation text” with an oddly cheerful, oddly appealing spin on We’ll all be dead soon—has not yet been written.

  Religion?

  Successful?

  Oh ye Architects, as a follower of Julius Quinn might say. She has no idea.

  Dad gets back from Athens grinding his teeth, won’t say what he’s going to do next. What he does, is immediately visit the museum again several more times, alone. Then grinds his teeth a whole lot more when Mom admits to the church episode.

  “Jesus Christ, Iona.”

  “I think he was part of the point, darling, yes.”

  “Why do you want to fill the kid’s head with half-remembered Bronze Age myths?”

  “I want Daniel to understand how other people think, and live. Come to that, you seem rather fond of Bronze Age myths yourself.”

  “I study why other people believed them, back in a time when it made some kind of sense to believe them. Back when religions were plausible theories, instead of exploded ones. I don’t believe them.”

  He says it with a hint of real anger. My first glimpse of a small, deep crack in their relationship. They don’t argue over money, over politics, over me, but they have this strangely abstract difference. He sees himself as a scientist, believes that only the physical is real. Evidence, evidence, evidence. She’s a mathematician by training: And you see, Daniel, like all mathematicians, I think there must be something else, powerful and ghostly and unseen, that lies beneath the surface of the physical world. Numbers are just one of several things that don’t make sense otherwise. Your father studies the painting. And that’s fine. But I’m interested in the canvas under the paint.

  Mom’s not a mathematician now. One Friday afternoon in grad school, she worked out how you could encrypt data a million times more efficiently by using the structure of our own DNA as a matrix. (Dad’s version: one Friday afternoon in grad school, she and Dad had the idea.) She wrote the underlying code in a weekend, trash-canned a half-finished PhD thesis (“Minds, Machines, and the Information Density Limit”—don’t ask), and is now busy building “What if?” into a global monopoly.

  Part of that, she’s always on her way to a string of meetings, so she’s headed back to Seattle via Amsterdam, London, Dallas, Wherever. So, her last day on the island, the three of us hit a remote beach on the south coast. For several hours in a row, she manages to put Funding Criteria and Staffing Projections out of her head. Dad even manages to put the Disks out of his head. When we picnic right on the sand, they go all European on me and let me drink half a plastic mugful of wine. Between bites, Dad does normal-dad things: arm-wrestles me, does a pretty good imitation of the president, tells the sort of dirty joke that makes Mom go Bill, really—and teaches me to wink one eyelid without moving the other.

  After that, for the whole afternoon, we’re almost like a real family on a real vacation, swimming together in the crushed sapphires of the Libyan sea. At ten, I’m stronger in the water than either of them.

  The morning after she leaves, a package arrives at our hotel by courier.

  “Come take a look, Daniel. A new toy from your Uncle Jimmy and Auntie Lorna in Shanghai.”

  “What is it?”

  “Plan B.”

  Slowly and carefully, he unpacks what looks like a cross between a pocket calculator and a low-budget ray gun.

  “But what is it?”

  Dad has a glint in his eye. “Archaeological dating tech has been changing fast. This was bound to happen, but Jimmy and Lorna are good with gadgets, and we’ve been talking about it for years. Actually lots of people have been talking about it—we just got here first.” He mimes firing it at me. “Zap. Ten years and three months. Instant age verification.”

  I’m just young and stupid enough to take him seriously. “You can tell how old I am, just by pointing that?”

  He cracks a smile and I know I’ve been had—which isn’t funny, because it just confirms that he thinks I’m a lost cause. “Flesh and blood, no. This works only on old ceramics that contain radioactive impurities. But Lorna tested it on everything from a Ming dynasty vase to her own coffee mug, and it looks like she’s nailed the technical issues. The tricky thing was when some yahoo tried to steal the Disk recently, and the museum put it behind that armored glass. I ha
d to figure out exactly what kind of glass they used, get a perfect profile of its optical qualities, email Jimmy the deets.”

  When he slows down enough to explain what he’s planning to do—when he gives me the Plan B deets—it sounds like a practical joke. A scheme, a scam, a bit of fun. I’m too naive to be horrified by the risk he’s about to take. Too immature not to just enjoy being included.

  He positions me in a cool spot across the street from the museum, puts a rewired TV remote in my sweating palm. Then he goes in with the crowd, disguised under stubble and a sun hat. He’s even holding a guidebook, and wearing shorts, which he never does. The ray gun, or whatever, is hidden in plain sight in a camera case around his neck. Definitely Mr. Tourist this time: the sandals with white socks are a nice touch. My role, wingman in the jewelry heist, is to hang out across the street from our open-topped rental car, be inconspicuous, wait for the text that says Go.

  Simple, in theory. The button in my hand will send an infrared signal across the street. The signal will cause an electrical spark. The spark will start a small, extremely hot fire in the front passenger footwell of the car, which is parked right outside the museum’s front door. A few magnesium granules burning at over three thousand degrees on a rubber floor mat will produce a lot of thick, dark smoke, but the fire will be put out easily, after a brief fuss, and Dad will be able to emerge—after taking his measurements—and say, So sorry, so foolish of me, must have been that leaky camping stove, I am a total idiot.

  That’s in theory. In reality, let’s face it, this is amateur hour: he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. I press the button on cue. Five seconds of nothing is followed by a pathetic wisp of smoke nobody except me even notices. Then there’s more nothing—and I wait, eyes fixed on the front seat, not daring to blink.

  More nothing.

  I count to thirty, or try to. But the suspense is killer, and I’m worried that Dad’s not getting his planned distraction. Trying to keep an eye on the car, I begin to cross the street. A motorcycle, honking wildly, nearly takes me out, and if my attention weren’t on the car I’d probably learn the Greek for moron. I leap out of the way, only to be slapped sideways by the wing mirror of a swerving truck. I get my balance back, dive for safety, and arrive at the side of the car just as a second, bigger wisp of smoke turns into a small fireball. I take a step back, but then stand there, horrified, unsure what to do next. A couple of other people have stopped too, next to me.

  We watch as the passenger seat catches fire. We watch as the dashboard catches fire. We watch too, slack-jawed, as smoke starts to billow out from around the wheels. I finally get my act together and take another step back just as the entire front end of the car goes up in a rush of flame like a marshmallow at a campout.

  On my left, a woman with grocery bags has shuffled even closer than me to peer into the car. She’s blown backward, clear off her feet, probably loses her eyebrows. I stay on my feet and rush to help her, hands outstretched. Just then, a wide strip of molten dashboard comes fluttering out of the sky and drapes itself neatly across my bare left forearm.

  Cream-colored. Looks a bit like a waiter’s napkin. Except that a waiter’s napkin doesn’t bubble and hiss.

  A police officer came to school once, told us that being stabbed was not a “sharp” sensation, was more like being hit with a blunt object. The pain from the burning skin on my arm is a bit like that. Way more extreme than I could ever have imagined, but it doesn’t feel like burning at all. Doesn’t even feel hot. It feels as if there’s an invisible major-league slugger standing next to me, in the grip of a blind rage, using all his strength to smash at my arm again and again with an invisible baseball bat.

  I’d like to howl. Howling would help. But I’m distracted by the woman on the ground, who’s letting out an earsplitting, machinelike squeal that reminds me of speaker feedback at a rock concert. Ought to get her out of harm’s way. Given she’s five foot nothing and fat as a sparrow, how hard can it be? I try to be all adult and just pick her up, but to my shame I can’t do it. So without thinking, I grab her under the arms and pull. A big sticky chunk of skin rips off me like banana peel and attaches itself backward to her dress.

  The pain, which is already hovering around nine out of ten, goes off the scale. Vomit, says one part of my brain, as I look down at the raw, exposed flesh. Forget everything else: just hurl. And I do. But somehow, first, just a split second before a ten-foot petal of orange flame unfurls itself across the sidewalk, I manage to get hold of her by the wrists. My whole face crinkling in the heat, I drag her into the relative safety of a doorway.

  The next few minutes are chaos. Shouts. Panic. Multiple fire trucks, police cars, ambulances. An old Greek woman in a black peasant dress and headscarf, wailing and cursing about the upended concession cart that someone has just backed a truck into. The column of smoke is straight and thick, like the trunk of an old-growth Douglas fir back home. Must be visible miles away.

  Inside, everyone has rushed to the windows to see what’s going on. Even for adults, it turns out, the world’s greatest collection of Minoan art can’t compete with a burning car. Dad, who hears the initial commotion and thinks everything is going according to plan, has just enough time to whip out the ray gun gizmo and do his special bit of scientific vandalism. Three laser pulses, right through the glass case, vaporize three nearly invisible pits into the edge of the Disk itself.

  Nearly invisible: I’m talking thirty microns each. Way less than the width of a human hair. A second, parallel beam sniffs like a wine connoisseur at the ancient traces in the smoke.

  By the time he’s done, the police are evacuating the building. Then they get zealous, and start interviewing everyone at the front door. Dad has to double back from the exit and sling his precious gadget out of a bathroom window. He comes outside to find that the car’s a smoking, foam-drenched ruin, there are twenty-foot scorch marks on the outside of the museum itself, and I, along with several other people, am being tended by a medic on the sidewalk.

  He has no choice but to go to the clinic with me, which takes hours. After that, he has no choice but to spend another hour telling tall stories to the police. TV cops would smell something funky right away, but this is the real world, and they swallow his lame tale with barely a murmur. Lucky that they’ve never heard of him, and nobody’s looking for someone who just used a virtually unknown technology to commit an act of vandalism too small for the human eye to detect.

  “Sorry about the arm,” he remembers to say at last, as we’re leaving the police station.

  Yeah, really sorry.

  I aim for a reply that suggests the right kind of casual toughness: “I’m fine. It’s nothing.” Which is stupid—I have a serious injury that hurts like hell, and I’m not fine, and it’s not nothing. But he seems to feel I’ve let him off the hook, so he turns to more practical things. Like:

  “If your mother finds out I involved you in this, she’ll kill me. We’ll have to make something up.”

  “We already did, for the police.”

  Early that evening, as the sun goes down, we walk around the museum twice, to make sure we’re not being watched. Then find our way back to the little courtyard outside the bathroom window.

  There’s an open trash can immediately under the window. It’s a charmer: underneath a hurricane of flies, there’s a foot of greasy water, some plastic grocery bags, the festering remains of half a melon, and the even more festering remains of a foot-long, bloated, spectacularly dead Rattus norvegicus. We tip the can over, try not to breathe as the rancid slurry pours out. The rat lands on its back, as if deliberately displaying for us its burst-open guts, which sit between its cute little paws like a serving of pink scrambled egg. Next to it, nestled in a pool of gray-green slime, is the home-cobbled imager.

  Ten minutes later we’re sitting under a tree in Georgiadis Park, only steps from the scene of the crime. My arm throbs and itches. I try to scratch it through the bandage, which doesn’t work, then try
to resist scratching it, which doesn’t work either. A souvenir is forming there, a scar that in the coming weeks will fade from brown to red to pink, then stubbornly remain. A permanent ghost-white line, hairless and shiny. A reminder of the day when I made my own small contribution to understanding the Minoans.

  And the Architects.

  And the deep, ugly truth about human civilization.

  “That was a fiasco,” Dad says, mopping at his gizmo with a beach towel. “I would have felt seriously bad if you had burned down the museum.”

  “If I had burned it down?”

  “Hey, it was you who pushed the button.” For a moment, until I see the infinitesimal curl of his lip, I think he’s seriously planning to pin it on me. Had me again; not funny, again.

  “Well? Did you get anything?”

  “Working on it.” He extracts a memory card, dumps the data into an app on his phone, shades the screen with one hand. Mutters to himself, grunts, then adjusts his position and leans closer.

  Despite myself, I’m excited. My Uncle Jimmy and Auntie Lorna are way cooler than Dad, because they actually dig stuff up for a living, instead of just writing dull articles based on translated scribble. And now their clever device is going to reveal to us a secret about the past. What will it be? I try to wait patiently, finally can’t stand it any longer. “So? Which is it—three and a half thousand years? Or only a hundred?”

  He shakes his head, taps on the screen some more, frowning and looking closer.

  “Didn’t work?”

  “Oh yes, it worked.” His voice is a whisper.

  “A fake, then? Bummer.”

  He shakes his head a bit more: “No.”

  “No what?”

  “It’s too old, Daniel.”