The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel by Arthur Phillips

task, I didn’t either (a) in my fantasy, demand to be relieved from my duty, or (b) in reality, stop fantasizing about punitive tedium.
    Still I went on with my odd assignment, explaining the plot and premise of
Hogan’s Heroes
and
Gilligan’s Island
to the great man. (“The
conceit
and
argument,
” he would correct me.) He quite liked these shows, evidence to me even then of his limited brilliance. I demonstrated how to peel a Band-Aid when I cut my hand (and thus distracted myself just enough to prevent tears). I would send Shakespeare back to his own time with cures for the plague, explanations of electricity, suggestions for telephones. Later, the fantasy improved when I began to fuck with the Bard. “Some genius,” I scoffed, after I told him to cross the street only on a red light and he was crushed by a truck.
    More pop psychology: the writer writes to create a world he can control and manipulate because he finds himself stymied by what the rest of you so blithely call “reality.” Yes, possibly.
    The fourth and final inscription on the inside cover of the 1904 edition—
For Arthur, from Dana
—brought the book into my possession, but that was several years later.

7
     
    F OR D ANA’S THIRTEENTH BIRTHDAY —the day before my own—our father gave her the 1904 edition (with the same rules still in force) and a framed poster: an old Morris column ad for a 1930s London stage production of
Shakespeare’s Tragedy of King Arthur
starring Errol Flynn as Arthur and Nigel Bruce as Gloucester. Danaloved it and claimed never to be able to read the play again without picturing Flynn as the ne’er-do-well king. “Inspired casting,” she used to say. The poster hung above her bed. Don’t rush to Google that one.
    Dana and I were, obviously, not identical twins but, as the family phrase had it, we were “something more than fraternal.” Our resemblance was not magical enough, not nearly, to fool anyone, to let us engage in Disneyish trickery against parents or teachers; nor did we even share enough of a vocal similarity before puberty to lure telephone Romeos into embarrassment. Still, thirty-eight or thirty-nine minutes her junior, I found her waiting for me in Abbott Northwestern’s delivery room, and if I depict her as waiting impatiently for me to emerge from our mother, as the clock swung past midnight on April 22, I don’t think it’s really too fanciful. Thirty-eight or thirty-nine minutes was the longest we’d been apart for months, since the moment we two ova had snuggled into place together (one of us cheating the rules, luging down our fallopian chute as the gates slipped shut behind us), and thirty-eight or thirty-nine minutes was the longest we were ever apart for some years to come. Bathed, fed, bedded down together, nursery schools through primary school (every year in the same rooms, at my mother’s request), we literally were never away from each other for more than a few minutes until we had our own friends in third or fourth grade. Even then—me playing baseball in some boy’s yard, her playing dolls in some girl’s rec room—there was a feeling that the separate time was in some way a research project
for
the other. I was experiencing baseball for her. Even if—practicing with a team after school—I wasn’t literally thinking of Dana, I was somehow gathering everything in to give to her: the weather, the plays, the feeling of a badly hit ball stinging my arms, the homoerotic towel whippery of the locker room. Even if I didn’t end up telling her everything, or anything, I stored it for her, lived it for her, and she knew it was all there if she wanted to ask.
    I used to think of us as essentially identical if physically dissimilar. There was something beneath the surface that matched more closely than other people ever felt. Not everyone could see it, but for some (I’m thinking of Margaret Wheeler; I’ll come back to her), we wereliterally interchangeable. I recall, when we were