by Brock Clarke
My aunt’s phone hummed again. She took it out of her purse, glanced at it, returned it to her purse, then took one final long look at the ruins, and said, “Lost civilizations are fundamentally groups of people who just didn’t try very hard.”
And then we moved on into the rest of the museum.
87.
Because that’s what it was: a museum. We found a set of stairs, spiral stairs, that led us away from the ruins into a room that was full of suits of armor, also behind glass, with signs in English telling us who wore the armor, and when, and how each subsequent kind of armor marked an improvement over the next oldest kind of armor, leading up to the present-day body armor. Other than us and the armor, that room was empty. But the next room was full of people, schoolchildren mostly, and also cannons. Hundreds of cannons, some the size of toys, some full sized and very real looking. The cannons were lined up on either side of the room, and the children were having a good time standing between the rows of cannons and making concussive noises with their mouths, some of the children pretending to be shot and dead. My aunt, and then I, stepped over a couple of their pretend corpses on the way to the next room.
The next room was full of guns. Machine guns, shotguns, hunting rifles, rifles with bayonets attached, military handguns, and more ancient and less practical pistols with bejeweled grips. All these weapons were either in glass cases or mounted on the walls. This room was full of children, too. These children seemed the same age as the others, but these children were more subdued than those in the cannon room. There was an almost religious hush in the room as the children, hands clasped in front of them or behind their backs, peered at the guns on the walls and underneath the glass.
“What are all these children doing here?” I asked my aunt. She was walking ahead of me and said over her shoulder in her loud happy way, “They’re learning about the civilizations that tried very hard.”
88.
Knives and swords. The next room was full of knives and swords. Here we stopped. There was a large display case in the middle of the room. The case was, like the one holding the guns, covered with glass, and underneath the glass on what looked like a bed of velvet were maybe twenty of the most beautiful knives. Some of them were sharp and straight, like daggers, and some of them were curved, like miniature scimitars, but all their handles were encrusted with stones—rubies, emeralds, diamonds—and gleamed expensively under the glass.
My aunt tapped the glass with her right forefinger, and immediately a man came over to us. He was clearly a museum employee: he was wearing a green uniform and a name tag that said carl. Carl was young, in his twenties, and tall, stoop shouldered. His hair was red and covered his head like a wispy bowl. He seemed to be sizing up my aunt. Finally, he said in English, “You mustn’t touch the glass. That’s inappropriate.”
My aunt grinned wolfishly, I think in response to what he’d said. I’m guessing her least favorite words were “that’s inappropriate,” the way Dawn’s were “all right.” She responded in what I supposed was Danish, rapid-fire Danish, and Carl seemed surprised. I couldn’t tell if he was surprised by the fact that she’d spoken Danish or by what she’d said in that language. He took a step back, then straightened his shoulders, took a step forward.
“Excuse me!” a woman’s voice called out in English. I looked to my right. There was a woman, about my aunt’s age. She was built like a bulldog, short, squat, with a bulldog’s many-folded face. But she was wearing the sleek, fashionable, weather-appropriate gear that the bicyclists had been wearing. And so I judged her Danish. Although her English was perfect. And it occurred to me to wonder why, if she was Danish and in a Danish museum, she was speaking English. And if this was a Danish museum, why were all the signs in English, too? And why was Carl speaking in that language?
“I want my Indian war club,” she said in English to Carl. “It has bear claws, you bash people with it.” The woman’s voice sounded as though she was a smoker. She raised both hands above her hand, clasped them, and then in a jerking motion made menacing gestures with her imaginary club. “They told me it was here.”
“Check with Indigenous Peoples,” Carl said. “It wouldn’t be here, in Blades. That would be inappropriate. Miss, keep your hands off the glass.” This last he said to my aunt, whose hands, I noticed, were still, or once again, on the glass. I mean, both of them were on the glass, not the palms, not the fingers, just the fingertips, and with them she was putting some definite pressure on the glass. I know this because when she removed her fingers, the finger marks were visible on the glass, and they seemed to beat there, like a pulse, for a moment or two, before disappearing.
Aunt Beatrice said something to Carl in Danish again, and then smiled again, showing the space where her tooth should have been. I could tell that Carl had just noticed it, because he took another step back and sort of cocked his head, as though to get a better glimpse of the tooth that wasn’t there.
“Are you sure you don’t know where my Indian war club is?” said the woman to Carl, who turned away from my aunt and back toward the woman. Her hands were still clasped above her head and her rain jacket revealed a white strip of her thick belly, and I wondered if Carl had noticed it, if he would have thought it inappropriate. “Indigenous Peoples,” he said again, pointing toward another room. The woman said something under her breath and then walked away, grumbling, and a few moments later I could hear her voice from another room, explaining, “You bash people with it. Like this.”
89.
By this time, I’d completely forgotten that my aunt and my father had had sex. I would not forget it forever, but I’d forgotten it for now. Because for every moment in which my aunt told me something that had happened in her past, there was another that made me forget the past because I was too busy wondering what was happening in our present and what might yet happen in our future.
90.
Carl turned back to us. My aunt was behind me, but I could tell from Carl’s expression that her hands were on the glass again.
“Schtop day! ” he said. At least, that’s what it sounded like to me. But I was pretty sure he was telling her in Danish to stop it. I turned to face Aunt Beatrice, and she was smiling broadly, so broadly that I wondered if it hurt her mouth, her face.
“I’m sorry,” she said brightly in English, “but I don’t speak Danish!” And I noticed, in any case, that her hands were still on the glass. “Such beautiful knives!” she said, and she removed her right forefinger from the glass and then tapped it again.
91.
Carl. For the rest of my life, whenever I meet a person in charge who refuses to recognize or admit that he is not actually in charge, I will think of that person as Carl. But then, I suspect my aunt’s life had been full of such people, and they had had many names and that she’d made them. That is, that they had not been a Carl until she had made them, or revealed them to be, a Carl.
92.
Carl opened his mouth—to speak, I suppose, but nothing came out of it. I wondered if he didn’t know what to say or what language to say it in. He closed his mouth, gave my aunt a knowing, superior look, then dropped his right hand to his belt. Hitched to his belt was not a knife or a gun, but a walkie-talkie. He unhitched it, raised it to his mouth.
And then from another room came a roaring sound, a roaring sound that got steadily louder and louder, and I turned toward it, and so did Carl, and so, I imagine, did pretty much everyone else in that room and possibly the whole museum. The roaring was that loud. It was not a series of roars, with pauses in between, but one roar, sustained. It sounded like a bear’s roar, which was apt since a moment later the woman who’d been looking for the Indian club with which you bashed things came running out of Indigenous Peoples into Blades. She was holding, above her head, a club, an enormous dark wooden club with a thin handle and a fat barrel, and the barrel was studded with bear claws. The woman ran right up to Carl, poor Carl, who was now holding his walkie-talkie in front of him, like a shield. The wo
man roared, right in his face, and I could see her teeth, and she had all of them, and they were yellowed, and she roared and shook her club and she shook it and I saw her arms jiggle in her sleek rain jacket, and then she stopped roaring and lowered her club and presented it to Carl so that, it seemed, he might have a better look at it, and said hoarsely, “This is what I was talking about. How you could not know about this Indian war club?” And then she leaned closer to Carl and said in a confidential way, although loud enough for at least me to hear it, “Do you know where the parking lot is? I don’t know where I left my car.”
I turned away from the woman and toward where my aunt had been and saw her walking briskly away. I trotted after her, past the guns, the cannons, the armor, through the cellar, past the ruins of whatever lost civilization, through that wooden door and out into the world again. To my surprise, the woman from the museum was standing there in a parking lot to the right of the door. She wasn’t holding the Indian war club anymore. Instead, she was holding her purse in front of her with her left hand, like an old lady certain she was about to be robbed. In her right hand was a lit cigarette. She saw us and raised the cigarette to her mouth, and her folded cheeks collapsed as she drew powerfully on the cigarette, smoked the whole thing down, then flicked it onto the parking lot.
“You shouldn’t roar like that in a museum,” Aunt Beatrice said to the woman, and I was surprised by how prim she sounded.
The woman nodded. “It was inappropriate,” she said, and then they both laughed.
After the laugh, I expected them to embrace—they seemed clearly to be old friends, the kind who finished each other’s thoughts and sentences—but they didn’t. Instead, the woman frowned, creating folds within her face folds, and said to my aunt, “Admiral, are you ill?”
“Yes,” Aunt Beatrice said in that unconvincingly pathetic way she’d said back in Boston that an old lady likes to be escorted into the airport. Although it was true: she didn’t look good—still very tan but also, somehow, pale and diminished, like one of the brightly painted buildings that were being rained on.
The woman looked at me and then said, “Should I trust her, Calvin?” It made me feel pleased and bold that this woman knew my name even though I still didn’t know hers. “Probably not,” I admitted, and my aunt laughed barkingly, which made me happy even though it didn’t seem to have the same effect on the woman, who was still frowning.
“Clear sailing?” the woman asked, and I recognized the words from the phone call I’d gotten in the middle of the night after my mother’s funeral and after the Otises had woken me up while shooting the skunk.
Now it was my aunt’s turn to frown. “Dansk,” she said to the woman, and then they began talking in another language. I assumed it was Danish. It sounded like the language my aunt had been speaking earlier, to Carl, and also like Swedish but even slurrier. The day before, in Sweden, I’d felt helpless in the face of a language I didn’t understand. Now, I felt frustrated. Because clearly, they were speaking Danish because they didn’t want me to understand what they were saying. The conversation was animated, too, even frantic, as though the two of them couldn’t swallow and spit the vowels and consonants fast enough.
93.
It may seem as though there were no difference between not understanding Swedish one day and not understanding Danish the next. But I felt helpless one day and frustrated the next, and that is a difference. That is progress. As John Calvin himself said, “No one can travel so far that he does not make some progress each day. So let us never give up.”
94.
I took out my phone. It is common knowledge that this is one of the main functions of the cell phone: to give you something to do when you have nothing else to do or when other people are doing something and haven’t invited you to be a part of it.
Aunt Beatrice and her friend had very definitely not invited me to be a part of their conversation. I began touching my phone randomly, resentfully. But there was nothing on the phone I was interested in. Bored, bored, I felt like a child again, when I was either bored by reading John Calvin or when I was bored when I wasn’t reading John Calvin and then made the mistake of telling my mother, and she’d said, If you’re so bored, why don’t you read some John Calvin? Stop being bored, I told myself. Stop being a child. Grow up! Grow up! I fiddled with my phone some more and noticed under Tools a function I’d never used. Record. I touched the word with my index finger, and my phone began recording Aunt Beatrice and her friend’s conversation. As it recorded, I held my phone out in front of me, pointed in their direction, and pretended to read something long and important on it until, finally, there was a pause in the conversation. I’d seen this happen with the Otises in the middle of their dusk-time fights, when they would pause as though trying to decide whether to keep on fighting or to forgive, if not forget.
And then the woman said one last thing in Danish and then, in English, added, “You never got a new tooth.” My aunt smiled, giving proof that she never did get one.
“New teeth are expensive,” my aunt said.
“You weren’t waiting for me to pay for it,” the woman said, and she was smiling again now, too.
“Well,” my aunt said, “you were the one who knocked it out.”
And then I stopped recording. Now, at least, I knew who had knocked out my aunt’s tooth, but before I could learn when and why, a car alarm went off, and my aunt and I turned in the direction of the noise and saw the car, a dark blue BMW, its headlights flashing, and also saw a cyclist lying on the street, the bike still between his legs, the front wheel still spinning. He must have been riding past the car when the alarm went off, must have been so startled that he’d fallen off his bike. The man got up, noticed that the back wheel of his bike had been damaged in the fall, and then bent over and noticed a rip at the knee in his expensive-looking pants, and then he began kicking the car’s passenger’s-side door. Other cyclists gathered around, cheering the man on, and the whole scene was as mob-like and tribal as any of my father’s high school football games. Then the alarm quit and the crowd dispersed, and the man pushed his broken bike away, and when we turned back to the woman, she was gone.
95.
The woman’s disappearance seemed to make my aunt happy. She began to walk so quickly and so happily that she might as well have been skipping. “Wrong Way Connie!” she said, clapping her hands.
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“I don’t mean to brag,” my aunt said, bragging, “but we were the best rare metals and antiquities thieves in all of northern Europe. Never caught. Never suspected. Partners in crime! Best friends! Wrong Way Connie!” she repeated. “Because she makes people—”
“Look the wrong way,” I finished for her, and my aunt clapped her hands again. Of course I knew she was talking about the woman who’d just disappeared. Aunt Beatrice then patted her pocketbook, and of course I knew one of those beautiful knives was in there, that my aunt had stolen it when Wrong Way Connie had distracted Carl with her Indian club, and I was afraid Aunt Beatrice was going to pull out the knife and show it to me right there, only blocks away from the museum she’d just stolen it from, and to distract her from that I said, “But where did Wrong Way Connie get that club?”
“Oh, there are always Indian clubs lying around that museum. No one keeps track of them, so obsessed are they with their shiny suits of armor and cannons and guns and . . .” And then she patted her purse again.
“And why did she knock out your tooth?” I asked, not expecting an immediate answer and in fact not getting one. My aunt continued walking, in the opposite direction from which we’d come earlier, although her pace had slowed and her breathing was labored, jagged, as though it were getting caught on something sharp on the way from her lungs to her mouth. And I thought about what Connie had said about Aunt Beatrice looking ill. And then my aunt said, breathing hard, “I’d really like to sit quietly in a church right now, Calvin.”
So we found a church and sat in it
quietly. There were no parishioners in the church. They were no tourists in it either. It was not the kind of church you’d seek out: it was not baroque or simple enough to satisfy those who valued either of those things. I believe the church was Lutheran. Martin Luther: John Calvin’s more famous rival. It made me feel seditious just sitting there. The church was made of dark wood and dark stone, and it was quiet and cold, and the only people inside the church besides my aunt and me were two old women and an old man, shuffling around, shelving hymnals in the pew pockets, and whispering to one another as they walked up and down the aisles. It was like a library for people who believed in God.