by Jerry Dubs
The woman came closer and leaned to look at Maya. She brushed the back of a finger across the girl’s cheek. “She’s so pretty. And she’s ill? What are her symptoms?” she asked.
“She’s feverish and has stomach pain,” he started to answer. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, shaking his head. “If you could please give me a ride to Cairo, to a clinic.”
“Does she have diarrhea? Is there blood in her urine?” the woman persisted, leaning even closer to Maya.
Imhotep felt a thrill of fear pass over him. “How could you know that? Who are you?” He thought of the cut padlock and the opened door. Stepping back he turned and looked over his shoulder, then turned again, taking in the road and the desert and the parking lot entrance.
“Oh my,” the woman said, studying Imhotep. She brought her hands together flatly as if in prayer and raised them to her mouth. Looking down she thought for a moment. Finally she said, “I didn’t think you’d be taking your daughter to a doctor in the middle of the night unless there was something more wrong with her than a tummy ache and a fever. I’m sorry if I frightened you.”
Smiling, she reached out her arms for the girl. “May I?”
Imhotep backed away. “No, I think I’d rather hold her.”
The woman shook her head. “I can’t believe this is happening and that I’ve made a mess of it. Oh, well, let me start over. My name is Akila.” She paused and looked at Imhotep as if he might recognize the name. When he didn’t respond, she continued, “Doctor Akila Kalthoum. No relation to Umm, I took her name after my husband ... well, you’ll find out.” She smiled and looked at Imhotep as if they were sharing a joke.
“You’re a doctor?” he said, astonished at the serendipity of encountering the person he needed to find in the middle of the night on an empty road.
“Yes, at the clinic at Helwan University, just across the river. And you are?”
“I’m Tim Hope,” he answered, trying on the name he had surrendered seventeen years ago.
Akila offered her hand. “Pleased to meet you, Tim Hope. Now let’s get you to the clinic and we’ll see what’s wrong with Maya.”
They shook hands, Akila rubbing her thumb familiarly over the top of Tim’s hand. Tim disengaged his hand and looked past Akila to the car.
As he settled warily in the passenger seat with his daughter, Tim’s mood, already fearful, turned sour as he replayed the conversation in his mind and realized that the doctor had known Maya’s name even though he had never spoken it.
Helwan University
“It’s an American car, a Sonic. Do you like it?” Akila asked as she drove south along the Nile.
“It’s nice,” Tim said reflexively and then added, “I thought everything would be electric by now.”
“Nope,” Akila said. “We still have oil and you Americans are still burning it like crazy.”
She felt Tim looking at her. She glanced at him, puzzled and then nodded her head slowly and smiled. “Oh, how do I know you’re American? Well, there’s your name. If you were British you’d introduce yourself as Timothy, not Tim. And your accent. Definitely not British or Australian. And I don’t think you’re Egyptian even though you do look very authentic and native, with your tan and bare feet and galabia, except that galabias went out of style five years ago.”
Smiling to herself she turned her attention back to the road. “You’re very suspicious, Tim. You don’t need to be. I promise,” she said, turning her smile at him. “Here’s our road,” she said, turning the wheel to ease onto Al Marazeek Bridge Road.
Tim found himself studying her as she drove. She was about his age, perhaps forty. She wore a long, traditional scarf that covered her head and looped around under her chin to drape over her right shoulder. It was gray with a darker geometric pattern that looked like reeds; its border was edged with short, knotted fringes of light gray.
She had full eyebrows as black as the hair that he could see pushing against the front of the scarf. Her almond-shaped eyes were deep brown, the upper and lower lashes dark and full. He thought that her nose, narrower than those of the women he had been surrounded by for the last fifteen years, was elegant and strong. Her cheek bones were delicate, giving her face a graceful symmetry that framed beautifully proportioned lips above a strong, gently rounded chin.
A small, silver ring pierced the right corner of her full, bottom lip.
Struck by her beauty, Tim wished that he had his pencils and sketchbook – a real sketchbook with wire binding and pure white paper, fine grained, able to hold delicate shadings.
Aware that he had been staring at her, Tim shifted his glance to look out the window at the dark fields, their boundaries marked by lines of palm trees. He was looking south, away from the glow of Helwan’s lights across the river. There were few enough houses off in the distance that he could imagine that their lights were camp fires. And the fields, dark, silent and flat, were unchanged from five thousand years ago.
When he turned back to Akila he saw that she was studying him now, assessing him with a contented smile, her eyes alight with happiness. She turned her attention back to the road as they approached the bridge, a brutal-looking structure with thick columns holding it above the Nile. The trusses overhead were thick steel beams and Tim found himself distracted by the engineering and stress distribution.
As they crossed the river, the tires thrumming on the uneven bridge deck and metal beams angling across his field of vision, Tim was overwhelmed by the reality of being in the modern world again and he felt a stab of anxiety as he worried about being able to return to Meryt.
“Don’t worry,” Akila said, misreading his anxiety, “they drove tanks across this bridge during the uprising.”
“Uprising?”
“The Arab Spring. That what you Americans called it. Of course our ‘spring’ lasted several years.”
Tim shook his head. “I’ve been away from newspapers and television,” he said as he shifted Maya to his other arm and watched the dark road ahead of them.
Akila took the first exit on the east side of the river, curving around to Kornish Al Nile. “Just a few more minutes,” she said when Maya moaned lightly.
“Has much changed?” Tim asked as he rocked his daughter gently. “With the uprising?”
Akila shook her head sadly. “This is Egypt, Tim. Nothing really changes. Mubarak was overthrown, some other powerful man became president. He tried to fire the generals. The generals decided they didn’t want to be fired so they replaced him with one of their own, a general who called himself ‘protector of the people.’
“Meanwhile the people he was ‘protecting’ protested, so he had his soldiers shoot into the crowds. American politicians decided that the general was their best bet so they described the massacres as the birthing of a new democracy. The bloodshed, your president said, was an unfortunate part of the process.
“After enough of the protest leaders were killed, beaten or imprisoned, pretend elections were held.” She paused and Tim saw her grip tighten on the steering wheel. “Sorry,” she said, “I haven’t talked about this for awhile. I thought ... ” She blinked her eyes heavily and sighed.
“So elections were held. Your politicians cheered our ‘democratic’ election of the general who was the only name on the ballot. The power struggle ended, prices stabilized. The students, hungry and exhausted, returned to their classes, the markets remained free of suicide bombers and life went on with a different angry old man in charge.”
Tim nodded. It wasn’t just Egypt, it was every modern country.
What had John Lennon sung, he thought, ‘Keep you doped with religion, sex and TV.’
There was only so much energy the poor and the protesters could summon to fight their rulers. Whether the rulers were backed by guns or by billionaire campaign donors made little difference to what happened to the common people. They were still treated as insignificant laborers whose small earnings were siphoned away to pay for the limousines and private jets an
d banquets the ruling class wanted.
And flowers might stop a tank once, if enough people were watching, but, in the end, men in suits would always crush a rebellion because the first rule of power was to retain it.
He thought of Djoser.
He had been an absolute monarch who held the life of all of his subjects in his hands, but his ambition had been small, confined to the Two Lands and to the Eternal Field of Reeds. He would never have understood the unconscionable greed shown by men of the twenty-first century as they squeezed the lifeblood from the poor, making their impoverished lives even more miserable, so the wealthy could amass more riches than they could ever spend.
Djoser, who certainly had lived comfortably, had been more concerned about his ka and its eternal comfort than about earthly riches. But there were no six-hundred-horsepower Rolls Royces or diamond-encrusted wristwatches or hundred-thousand-dollar ampules of wine to tempt him, Tim mused.
He tried to picture Djoser as someone like Gordon Gekko from the movie ‘Wall Street,’ but failed. Djoser’s spirit had been too magnanimous. He had been too generous by nature, too aware of the commonality he shared with every other person in the Two Lands.
Looking down at his daughter, Tim sighed. Her life might be shorter in ancient Egypt, but it would be a more intense experience – a hard crusted loaf of bread, made of freshly ground wheat, kneaded and shaped by loving hands and baked in a wood-fired, stone oven, instead of plastic-wrapped, empty, white bread.
He was willing to trade the conveniences and speed of modern life for the fullness and leisure of life in the Two Lands. What is the point in being able to move more quickly from one irrelevant appointment to another, he thought.
Akila turned the car onto Omar Ibn Abd El-Aziz.
“We’re in Helwan now,” she said. “A few blocks ahead we’ll make another turn and then we’ll be there. We’ll get little Maya fixed up, Tim.”
Casually, as if from long practice, she reached over and squeezed his arm in reassurance.
The familiarity of her gesture terrified Tim. Amid a rush of adrenaline his mind churned, trying to reconcile the difference between Akila’s composure and his alarm. Just then the car passed under one of the few working street lights and Tim was suddenly confronted by his own reflection in the side window of the car. He saw a frightened face floating against a rapidly moving backdrop of harsh, rectangular buildings sliced by dark alleyways and surrounded by the irregular angles of parked cars, trucks and vans.
He didn’t belong in this world anymore.
Closing his eyes he held his sick daughter close and hoped that all would be well.
***
The university entrance was marked by a soaring stone sculpture, eight tall columns arranged in a square. High overhead the columns curved slightly at their top to form four archways, themselves forming a tight square.
Despite his mood, Tim found himself attracted to them.
“We like to stack stone,” Akila said, saying aloud what Tim was thinking. He quickly looked over at her and caught a smile sliding across her face, as if they were sharing an old joke.
“Almost there,” she said lightly, turning down a narrow street. She parked and slid out of her seat.
Tim sat for a moment, realizing that he had just taken a car ride, something he hadn’t done for seventeen years and thought that he would never do again. He had gotten into the car without any misgivings and rolled, as if by magic, through the desert and across the river to a modern medical clinic. It had been so easy to slide back into the modern world.
He thought of Meryt’s accusation that he had missed this life.
I should have brought her with me, he thought. She would be fascinated by the new world. But she couldn’t have lived here. She would be a transplanted flower, unable to take root in this alien world. Her initial delight would soon give way to longing and then ...
He was startled out of his reverie by a knock on the window.
“Tim?” Akila said.
He shook his head and looked at the car window. Akila was standing there with an eager smile on her face. She reached down and opened the car door. Without thinking, Tim handed Maya to her and then swung his legs out of the car.
***
Akila slid an ID card through a scanner and then pushed open the door to the clinic.
Dim hallway lights brightened automatically as she, Tim and Maya entered the building. Turning to her right, Akila said, “This way. It’s the second door on the left.”
Carrying Maya, Akila walked with long, confident strides down the hallway. Unused to hurrying, Tim had to quicken his pace to keep up with her. He saw that unlike the other doorways in the hallway, the second doorway was open and light spilled from it.
“Is the clinic open all night?” he asked.
Akila shook her head. “Technically it is ‘open’ twenty-four hours, but we don’t have funding to staff it all the time. I have unpaid interns here when I’m not. If someone needs help, they ring a buzzer by the door where we came in. The intern lets them in and, if they need to, they call me. I live off campus, but just a few blocks away.”
They reached the doorway and Akila said, “Brianna?”
A young girl, her black hair pulled back in a short ponytail, was seated at a glass-topped metal desk across the room. She looked up from a textbook. She was dusky skinned, possibly Egyptian, but with green eyes. Her mouth was small, her lips thin.
Seeing Akila, she smiled and said, “Hi, Dr. Kalthoum.” She started to say something more, but Akila interrupted her.
“We have an unexpected patient, Brianna. This is Tim Hope. And this is his daughter, Maya.”
Brianna had a habit of mouthing the words others were speaking. She did it now and Tim felt another chill of fear as he watched her silently mouth Maya’s name as Akila spoke it.
“Hello,” Brianna said, standing and closing her textbook. She looked at Akila, her thin eyebrows lowered in puzzlement. Tim, who was standing behind Akila, couldn’t see the doctor’s face as she mouthed something to the intern.
Brianna nodded and then said, “Would you like some coffee or a soda?”
Tim shook his head, “No, I want to stay here with Maya.”
“No problem,” Brianna said as she came out from behind the desk. “I’ll go get it. You can stay here. So?” She waited a beat and then said, “Coffee, tea or a cold soda? We have cream soda,” she said hopefully, then stopped and blushed. She glanced at Akila and then lowered her eyes. Looking back up at Tim she said, “The students drink us out of Pepsi and Mountain Dew, they really like the Dew. It’s the caffeine. But we might have some of that, too. I mean ... ”
Akila interrupted her gently. “Brianna is a little flustered at being a hostess, Tim. Usually our patients just help themselves.”
Tim glanced at Akila and then turned to Brianna, who was smiling awkwardly.
Years ago he had practically been addicted to cream soda. Did Akila and Brianna know that? It was getting difficult for him to keep chalking things up to coincidence or good luck. But a cream soda did sound delicious. Unbeckoned, the sugary taste, the fizzing bubbles and the vanilla aroma of the cream soda filled his mind.
He closed his eyes and, determined not to add any strength to the temptations of the modern world, he forced himself to say, “Just a glass of water, please.”
Brianna nodded and turned to walk down the hallway.
When Tim turned back to Akila he saw that the doctor had seated herself and was holding Maya in her arms, cooing at her and ignoring Tim.
Tim looked around the small room, trying to find a clue to all the coincidences, to make sense of everything that had happened since he had passed through the tomb wall to the twenty-first century.
A pair of uncomfortable looking plastic chairs bracketed a narrow wooden table which held a few magazines. A folded newspaper lay on one of the chairs. The wall to his right was lined with a long bureau that had a series of glass doors. The shelves were filled wi
th medical supplies – large boxes of tape and gauze, a cardboard container with a picture of sterile gloves on the side, a glass canister with tongue depressors, several pump bottles of hand soap and other containers, the identity of their contents concealed by Arabic labels.
The wall to his left was covered by a bulletin board on which were pinned business cards, flyers advertising health services and preventive inoculations, requests for rides to distant towns, invitations for roommates, concert posters, ads selling furniture and a large calendar.
He turned back to Akila. “Can I hold her while you examine her?” he asked.
“She’s sleeping,” Akila whispered, her eyes studying Maya’s face. “Once Brianna gets back, she and I will take her back to an exam room and poke and prod her,” she said. “I promise that she’ll be OK with us, but you are welcome to come along. In fact, I think you should come with us, but I’ll warn you that I’ll need to draw some blood.”
Tim nodded. “Thank you.” He tried to put his misgivings aside so he could focus on getting help for Maya and then returning to his own land and time as quickly as possible.
“I’m sorry if I’m stressed out. There was another little boy in my town. He had the same symptoms. He died,” Tim said.
“I’m so sorry. It’s hard to see children suffer.” After a moment she said, “I’ll check her blood and take a look at her urine and stool. I’m sure we’ll be able to diagnose what’s wrong and fix her up.”
Tim suddenly remembered the mushy white grains he had found in the bowl that had held Prince Nebmakhet’s urine.
“The other boy, we never got a proper doctor to him. I was one of the group who tried to care for him.” He waited for her to scold him for not getting a doctor for the other child, but Akila merely waited for him to continue.
“I collected his urine in a bowl and noticed, after some had evaporated, that there were white things, like grains of rice, only much smaller, on the side of the bowl. It was covered with them.” He looked down. “I didn’t know what they meant and we couldn’t ... there wasn’t time.”
