An Obvious Enchantment

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by Tucker Malarkey


  Ingrid took Templeton’s photo from her folder. “He’s sixty, you know. This was taken on his birthday.”

  Maggie lowered her glasses to the bridge of her nose and held the photo to the light. “How unlike him to announce it. He must be enjoying himself.”

  “I don’t think he’s coming back.”

  Maggie smiled.

  “Do you?”

  “I try not to anticipate the man.”

  “I think he needs help.”

  “He would never ask if he did.”

  Ingrid glanced at his door.

  “One always hopes that he is faring well,” Maggie said. “And he usually is.”

  “Do you mind if I sit in his office for a while?”

  “Of course not. Go mess up his papers some more.”

  Ingrid sat in Templeton’s chair and swiveled around. It had been almost six years since she had first entered the war zone of his office to ask if he would be her advisor. What she had known of him at that time was as minimal as his presence at the university. She had chosen him after reading one essay.

  “So you want me to be your advisor,” he had said from behind a desk littered with papers, piles facing north, south, east and west. “You have come here with full knowledge that I have given up on advising. Why?”

  “I think I could learn from you.”

  “Hmm,” Templeton stalled. He pushed some papers around on his desk, as if looking for a way to discourage her. “Information has become the focus of our time. Maybe you’re too young to have noticed.”

  “No, I’ve noticed.” What she noticed was the lines in his face. She stared at the creases radiating from his eyes, the furrowed habit of compassion.

  “Unfortunately,” he was saying, “noticing isn’t enough. Some chaotic sea threatens to drown me, because, it seems, I have neglected to build the necessary irrigation channels and harbors; file cabinets to hide it, drawers to make it disappear. I am looking for assistance, if you have any suggestions . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Ingrid wrinkled her forehead and smiled. “Sorry.”

  “Well, it’s a dangerous business. As a culture, we have allowed our once fertile soil to become so saturated with information that we must reject new rainfall, letting it run off willy-nilly down streets, through yards, collecting in leaf-cluttered gutters, upending the shallow-rooted foliage and weakening the deeply rooted so that the once straight trees that stretched for the sun lean and sometimes fall.” Templeton stopped and closed his eyes as if to shield them from the vision.

  “It’s an apocalyptic picture,” she said. What she was imagining was bad city planning, but she could see that Templeton saw something worse.

  Templeton lowered his eyes. “As Thomas Eliot asked—Where is the knowledge that is lost in information? Where is the wisdom that is lost in knowledge?” He picked up his phone and stabbed a button. “Mags! It’s as cold as a tomb in here. My blood has stopped circulating. Help me out with some tea here, Mags.” He hung up the phone. “Come and see me in a week.”

  Ingrid had returned the next day and, when Templeton refused to talk to her, the day after that. She was fairly sure he had slept in his chair. He wore a loden coat and a woolen hat over his rumpled office clothes. Piles of paper had been dispatched from his desk and were now scattered around the room. He was leaning over a map. Next to the map was a drawing of what looked like a piece of jewelry, a decorative disk hanging from a chain. Ingrid cleared a chair and sat down.

  “What’s that?” she pointed at the drawing.

  “That,” Templeton pronounced, “is my Holy Grail. One can have faith in something that may or may not exist.” He tapped the drawing with his pipe. “What do you see here?”

  Ingrid looked again at the disk. “Stars. Maybe some kind of constellation.”

  “In the ninth century, jewelry had a practical purpose. The Arab traders of the Sahara made a compass from these amulets. They drew maps of the stars, showing the way to water. The amulets passed from generation to generation, between families and tribes, because water in the desert was like God.” Templeton smoothed his hands over the map and became absorbed with the details of the upper left corner.

  “Do you know how vague borders really are? Kenya wanted a little more of the north country earlier this century, so they had mapmakers redraw their borders. One year Kenya got a little more of Somalia. By the time Somalia noticed, it was official. Why bother with the hullabaloo of regular channels?”

  Templeton wrapped his coat more tightly around him. Moving like a much older man, he lowered himself into his chair. “So here you are again. Why, my girl, have you chosen this field? Looking at you, I’m not quite sure it hasn’t chosen you.”

  “Why?” Ingrid challenged. “What do you see?”

  “Barring alterations, what I saw the first, second, third and now fourth time you’ve come to my office. An attractive young lady with an overly severe hairstyle and unobtrusive clothing, on the gloomy side, I might add. You seem to favor flat shoes, and is it my imagination, or do you walk tentatively? A foot injury perhaps? No makeup save for a little lip color now and then.” Templeton put his elbows on the desk and leaned into a pile of paper, as if to see her more clearly. “What’s most interesting is that your physical attributes remain in focus only until you speak. Then your seriousness and your self-possession take over and a fellow realizes you are not here to be looked at, that you mean business. I find myself wondering what that business is.”

  Ingrid countered his offensive by leaning forward in her chair. “How did this come to be your business?”

  “Me?” Templeton laughed. “Who knows. The story changes.”

  “What story, your story?”

  “All stories.”

  “I want to know about yours.”

  “Oh, dear.” Templeton emptied a packet of orange powder into a glass of water, where it sank to the bottom of the glass. He paled, as if the question had knocked the wind out of him. She watched him recede from her, pulling back until even his eyes had lost their focus. The shallowness of his breath made her wonder about his health. She wondered too why, in the face of his duress, she did not withdraw the question.

  They sat in silence until he finally returned, leaning forward to stir the mixture with the end of his pen. “Well, I was in England,” he said, “a country mired in its past. All great civilizations”—he paused and looked at the ceiling—“and there have been thirty-four to date, die. Some are mercifully brief in their final stanzas. They don’t drivel on, trying to rehash old rhymes or match new ones in the old style. They simply end. Gone are the days of quick endings. England has outlived herself, and because death is no longer acceptable in the modern world, she has been kept alive by artificial means. I found her depressing, so I left. It has become a culture of manners, the substance long since eroded. Are you writing this down?”

  “No.”

  “I see, you’re sketching something. Is it me?”

  “No.”

  “Good. The problem with England is that no one really converses anymore. As a young man I had to hunt for decent conversation.” Templeton’s fingers were in the air, working like castanets. “Chit chat chit chat. They are magnificent at chitchat. Like Chinese water torture. True dialogue transforms. We must work at it. No one seems to understand that, even in these hallowed halls.”

  “So you left England,” she pressed. “Did you have a family?”

  Templeton drank half of the orange liquid and dabbed his mouth with a handkerchief. “Awful stuff.”

  “You’re trying to change the subject.”

  “The subject?”

  “You. I’m asking because there’s absolutely no biographical material on you anywhere.”

  “And this is important?”

  “Yes, to me.”

  “I fail to see how it matters if I had a family or how my career formed.”

  “You’re going to be my advisor. I think a little information is within bounds. You’ve be
en asking me questions of a non-advisorial nature.”

  “I don’t remember consenting to being your advisor. Anyhow, it’s how I think that should be of interest to you, not my personal history.”

  “I just want to know how you got here.”

  “You’d have better luck at Pompeii or Giza. Living human archaeology is deceptively hard, as the subject is in a constant state of change.”

  Ingrid looked at her watch. “I’ve got to go.”

  “We’re finished, are we?” Templeton seemed both relieved and disappointed.

  “No. We’re not.”

  She returned to his office after her class. Outside the door, she put on lipstick, then wiped it off with the back of her hand.

  “So you’re determined,” he said when she entered. This time she began with her elbows on his desk.

  “Maybe.”

  “And you’ve got more lipstick on the back of your hand than you have on your lips.” Ingrid blushed and stared at the mauve smear on her hand. “You’re not sure you want to be a girl, is that it? Well, if you’re not sure of that, how can you be sure of things less fundamental. Me, for instance.”

  “I just had a feeling.”

  “Expand, please.”

  “You seem to do things your way. And your work has . . . reverence. You come at things from unexpected angles. You don’t simplify anything, nor do you claim absolute authority—like some people here.” Ingrid paused. “I want to see what you’ve seen.”

  He was studying her with an unnerving focus. “This much you should know,” he began. “The principal way I differ from my colleagues is that I see history not as a matter of facts but as a matter of meanings. We imagine facts as solid objects, totems with some kind of magic. They assume a life of their own and the relationship we create between them becomes a mixture of science and art. But there is always the artist. Man or woman, child or adult, among the living or the dead, facts began somewhere, with someone.” The words swirled around Ingrid’s mind like music. Inside, she felt a quiet elation.

  “There is a seed,” he was saying. “I am involved in the search for that seed. My current research involves the seed of Islam in Africa, which is not the seed we have been shown. It was planted much earlier, with roots deeper and more intertwined. But I am contesting what has become a fact. Facts sneak up on you. No one thinks of them as stealthy, and that’s how they win. You know Abraham?”

  “The Abraham who married Sarah?”

  “Who could not initially conceive. Abraham married a second time, to a black woman, Hagar, who promptly gave him a son, Ishmael. Sarah conceived soon thereafter and brought Isaac into the world. At which point she had her husband banish his second wife and son. Hagar and Ishmael settled in what is now known as Mecca and spawned the Arab people. Sarah and Abraham stayed in Palestine and ushered in the Jews. Do you know what I’m thinking?”

  Ingrid shook her head and waited.

  “What I’m thinking is, perhaps the African blood was there from the start. Perhaps the mother of what was to become Islam was an African.” Templeton chuckled and banged his shoe with his cane. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m just listening.”

  “Listening to me rant.”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s a start, my girl. If this sort of thing doesn’t drive you away and you have the necessary resolve, you might be in for the long haul.”

  “I think I’d like to be.”

  Templeton leaned forward. With his elbows on his knees, he clasped his hands together and studied the crooked apse his fingers made. “Trouble is, I don’t know why you’d like to be. If we’re to work together, I need to see it. Even if just for a moment.”

  Ingrid almost smiled. “That’s a problem, I’m afraid.” She held up her hand with its lipstick smear. “I’m not sure what I want you to see.”

  “Ah! She has a sense of humor. I was beginning to wonder. Well, then, you must help me see.”

  Ingrid swallowed some of the pills Templeton kept around for his malarial aches, and when the meeting reconvened, she stood more steadily at the head of the table. The throbbing in her ankle had subsided and she felt generally more relaxed. Dr. Reed had tilted his chair back and was balancing on the two rear legs. He looked more relaxed, too. There were red spots in his cheeks. Maybe his phone call had been good news. Maybe he’d had a nip of brandy and a couple of pain pills of his own. “So, Ingrid,” he said. “You’re looking to put together some continental theories on the evolution of monotheistic cultures in Africa, taking the work you’ve already done in Egypt and expanding it to the East Coast of Africa, perhaps doing some comparative analysis between Christianity and Islam and a little African tribal culture as well?”

  Ingrid almost smiled. “Thank you, Dr. Reed.” The man was a soft-spined saint.

  “I’m sorry if the argument eludes me,” Dr. Blackburn’s lips curved upward in what might have been a smile. Then, as he spoke, they flattened and came apart like a poorly sewn seam. “What is it you’re proposing to do on the Swahili Coast for a month? Why not camp out in Templeton’s office? It’s much cheaper.”

  Ingrid sipped water from the cup Dr. Reed had pushed in front of her. “Outside what I’ve just proposed, I want to see what Professor Templeton has found. Compare notes. I think it might be useful for him to have some fresh eyes on material he’s been saturated in for months.”

  “And it’s your fresh eyes he needs?”

  “I think he would benefit from another colleague’s input. I’m quite sure he’s uncovered something.”

  “Knowing Nick, it was a bui-bui.” Blackburn turned to Dr. Reed. “Come on, Jeb. Run interference, will you? We don’t even know where the man is. We can’t fund a wild-goose chase for a man who has made it his modus operandi to lose perspective.”

  Dr. Reed cleared his throat and smiled at Ingrid respectfully, indicating that, were he able, he would spare her the present unpleasantness. “I need to ask you candidly, Ingrid, if your reasons for traveling to Kenya are personal or professional.”

  Ingrid assumed an expression she had seen on her professor countless times. It was, she hoped, a calm and somewhat bemused expression intended to puzzle but not insult. Her eyes traveled the room purposefully, resting somewhere above Dr. Araji’s head. She shifted her weight to her bad foot and the pain came shooting back. Instead of wincing, she dropped her eyes to the table, pressing her fingertips onto the mahogany finish and making smudges on the polished surface. Her fingertips were white with strain. “Gentlemen, Dr. Templeton is my advisor. We haven’t heard from him in two months. He has survived his own odysseys before, I know. I also know his last letter sounded, in parts, delusional. If he is delusional, I want to be the first to know because I tend to take him seriously. He has not asked me to come, but I think he needs a witness. I think he’s found something. If you think anything of his life or his work, you’ll consider letting me go.”

  The room filled with the inaudible sounds of discomfort. A back straightened, papers moved. A pen tapped. Ingrid drew in her breath. “I’m confident that his research, however acquired, will help us understand why Islam found such fertile ground in Africa.” She lifted an upturned palm in front of her, a movement that caught all eyes. How desperate they were for something to chew. She allowed her hand to float to her right, indicating an enormous framed map of ancient civilizations that hung on the wall. “Africa, with its primarily oral tradition, may have a history we do not know. It has not shared some of its greatest secrets with the rest of the world.” Ingrid dropped her hand to her side. “But maybe, just maybe, because Templeton walks the line between worlds, Africa has decided to share its stories with him.”

  Dr. Araji, who had remained silent throughout the course of the interview, put his pipe in his pocket and rose. “Gentlemen, I think there are a few interesting ideas here, as diffuse as they are at the moment. I vote in support of Ms. Holtz’s trip, necessitating funding for airfare and one month’s research. It’
s not an expensive country. Ms. Holtz has already proven herself to be an exceptional scholar. And Dr. Reed, as you’re well aware, it’s not an unpopular area of research for some of the department’s supporters.”

  Dr. Blackburn sighed loudly and visored his eyes with his hand. Dr. Reed’s square glasses reflected the overhead lights as he glanced up at Ingrid. She could see he wanted the meeting to end. “Very well,” he said. “Academia needs whatever passion comes its way. Come by the office Monday, Ingrid. Cynthia will have the paperwork.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  Father

  After locking up her office, Ingrid made a painful trek across campus to the physics department. The walkways were covered with colorless leaves, sodden from days of rain. Though they worked at the same university, it was unusual for her to see her father more than once a month. The past few years they had seen less and less of each other. They were both busy; weekly dinners had become monthly dinners. Her father had been relieved when Ingrid assured him that the decrease in contact was not a mortal blow to her social life. “Cut from the same cloth, you and I,” he told her. “Too many other things to think about. Things, things and more things.”

  Her father was one of the few men at the university paid to think about things. Some days, between pacing and talking into the tape recorder, he tinkered with pencils or made folds in paper. She could see him now as she approached the old physics building, backlit as he paced back and forth in front of his office window on the second floor, like a rare animal in a drab, gray zoo.

  Her father was notorious for a number of reasons, one being the fact that he’d been struck by lightning as a distinguished young doctoral student. He was newly married and it was summertime. He and his wife, Harriet, and his best friend, Jack, were walking by the lake discussing teaching jobs on the West Coast. California was still an academic frontier then, and Jack was all for trailblazing. “They’ve got money and we’ve got to tell them what to do with it.” He wanted to get up and go, temper those rootless radical Californians with the sensible sobriety of a few stalwart midwesterners, take California the way they had taken Michigan. Jack was still single, it was easy enough for him to get up and go. Harriet was trying to talk him out of it. She was four months pregnant. Just wait a year or two, she told him. We’ll come with you. They sat under a tree and watched a white band of rain move toward them from across the lake. The sudden summer storms of the Midwest. The heady electricity. Harriet said, “You don’t get these in California, Jack.”

 

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