Love Among the Particles

by Norman Lock

  He must not; for I know with certainty that my life and his are bound—whether by his sleeping or mine, his dream of me or mine of him—a metempsychosis of our two selves within the space of this grim ship.

  I leave the captain lying where he is, afraid to remove the body from the cabin’s arctic chill—afraid its life—however minimal—will end, and the body rot, and with it—me. I fetch clean sheets from the linen closet and—pitying him—a blanket. Surely, I think, a blanket cannot sabotage the machinery by which he breathes! I mean only to comfort him—this man, who loves me. He must love me to keep me with him, when everyone else has gone! Unless it is for this only that he does: to change his sheets, as is the duty of a steward. Assured of his stability, I go out into the passage and shut the cabin door behind me, because of the cold—the cold is past enduring!

  The captain’s mother lies crumpled in the chair, dead. The needles knit.

  I know the art sufficiently to continue their work. I learned to ply the needles, like others aboard ship, during the empty hours between watches, to make a sweater or a pair of socks. Why should I not take up the needles and the lengthening of the cable of black wool? The truth is, I hate the captain’s mother—the hideous sight of her—and wish her away from here. So I drag her off, shut her in the infirmary, and—sitting in her chair—take up the needles.

  The Mummy’s Bitter and Melancholy Exile

  Osiris, God of the Dead

  The Mummy is invited to speak on the radio. He is driven from his apartment house through the autumn streets, toward the broadcasting studio. He looks through the limousine window at the street cleaners sweeping the fallen leaves. The leaves are the color of old gold and rust. Of bronze and copper amulets. The limousine driver is drawn irresistibly to the face of the Mummy, which he studies in the rearview mirror with a mixture of curiosity and fear. He would like to ask the Mummy about the women of ancient Egypt. He would like very much to satisfy his curiosity concerning sexual practices in the New Kingdom. He has become something of an amateur Egyptologist since the Mummy’s discovery. He and the night porter at the Commodore discuss life in the Eighteenth Dynasty during breakfast, which they take together on Forty-second Street before going home to their rooms to sleep. Intellectually, the driver is prepared to assume a tolerant attitude toward his 3,500-year-old passenger, weeping now in the backseat for a reason he cannot guess. (The driver does not know how the leaves have moved him!) But because he saw The Mummy, with Boris Karloff, he is afraid. So he keeps a wary eye on the rearview mirror as the limousine threads its way through the dusky streets toward the studio. And when the Mummy leans forward to speak, the driver feels the hairs rise on his neck and shivers as if with cold.

  “Tell me, please—what is Chase and Sanborn?” the Mummy asks.

  “Coffee,” the driver replies; and the ordinariness of the word comforts him. He no longer looks at the Mummy in the rearview mirror. Instead, he savors the moment when, in the morning, during breakfast, he will tell the porter how he ferried the Mummy down the black Nile of the darkening streets.

  “Like Osiris,” he will tell him. “God of the Dead.”

  Clash of the Automatons

  “Welcome to The Chase and Sanborn Hour!” announces Major Bowes, moistening the microphone with a little cloud of gin and aromatic bitters. While the studio orchestra lurches into the theme of the hour, the major exhumes a handkerchief from a pocket and daubs at his lower lip, where a seed pearl of spit has formed. “Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy are with us tonight,” he continues, “and a very special guest who is exciting curiosity from the Bowery to the Bronx. I refer to none other than the Mummy!”

  “The dummy!”

  “Let’s not confuse our radio audience!” Edgar Bergen chastens the little man sitting on his knee. “There’s only one dummy on the program tonight, and that, my friend, is you!”

  “I’d rather be a dummy than a mummy,” Charlie McCarthy sneers. “Here’s six bits, Mummy; get yourself a tube of wrinkle cream on the way home.”

  The Mummy despises the hateful little man, who is squinting down his nose at him through a monocle glinting maliciously in the shadow of his high silk hat. Despises the insolence and cowardice of arrows dipped in acrimony and shot from the safety of his protector’s lap.

  “A chambermaid at the Chelsea—a dish!—told me that the Mummy cut the sheets on his bed to ribbons. Jockey shorts aren’t smart enough for his nibs.”

  The musicians guffaw.

  “Now, now, Charlie!” Bergen scolds. “Remember, he is from a different time.”

  “He is our guest, Charlie,” says the major, hiding his mirth with his hand. “A guest of Chase and Sanborn coffee.” (This last is intoned reverentially.)

  If he were once more a man of Pharaoh’s, the Mummy would dash the brains out of Charlie McCarthy’s head. But, of course, the dummy hasn’t any brains, or heart, or any other organ. He, too, is an empty granary, a desert, a vacancy, an empty tomb. Even so, he would have the head off his shoulders with a sword for his insults. But the Mummy is sitting in a room overlooking a firmament of streetlights trembling in the blackness below. It is 1934. Pharaoh is quiet as dust; he and all his princes are embalmed and swathed in bandages—those, that is, who have not been shaken roughly out of their windings by vandals and thieves.

  The Mummy thinks, I would pity him, this puppet whose will is not his own any more than mine is, if only he were not so certain of himself. His flippancy enrages me! How he pretends that he is self-sufficient and a man! Unless he believes himself to be. Perhaps he does not know that he is an emptiness, does not feel the god’s hand at his back. The dummy is no more a sovereign man than I, who spoke the wishes of Pharaoh, whose hands were extensions of Pharaoh’s hands, whose dreams were his—even those! I wish I were in my apartment, sitting in the familiar dark. I wish I were in my funerary chamber, with the companionable cricket and the scuffling mice, with no more light than a shaft of sun or moon might make.

  And for the second time that night, he weeps.

  Gong!

  Falseness of a Chambermaid

  “That Charlie McCarthy is so mean!” the chambermaid says. “I never said any such thing about the sheets!”

  The chambermaid has brought the Mummy a sleeping powder. He cannot fall to sleep because of the coffee he was given during The Chase and Sanborn Hour. He had never tasted coffee before and did not like it. It tasted like wormwood, he thought, like bitter aloe.

  “Your face isn’t so bad,” she says, looking at him with an expression he recalls having seen, thousands of years before, in the eyes of a serving girl in the house of Pharaoh. Her name he cannot remember, but her face was lovely—of this he is sure.

  “Live steam hit my brother in the face once when he was working on a boiler; it left him with marks like those,” she says, touching his cheek with her fingertips.

  The touch—light as it is—awakens in him something unfelt since the elephant hunt in the swamps of Nei. A stirring in his loins. Surprised and pleased, he smiles at the girl in gratitude.

  “I would like to tell you what I would have said on the radio, if they had not rung the gong.”

  “Oh, that major and his gong! It’s awful how he makes fun of people!”

  The Mummy opens his mouth to speak, but already the sleeping draft is coursing through his veins with the speed of an asp’s venomous kiss. His eyes close, the congestion in his loins dissolves, and once more he sleeps the sleep of the dead.

  The chambermaid takes a little scissors and pares the Mummy’s nails and snips several locks of his hair. A man has promised her one hundred dollars for them, and with it she will buy an evening gown for the New Year’s Eve party at the “21” Club.

  Snip, snip, snip.

  Where’s the harm? she says to herself.

  The Mummy’s Dream

  The Mummy Plays the Piano

  The Mummy goes to a party on Fifth Avenue. He admires the bare shoulders of the women, who are moving sear
chingly—dreamily—from room to room. How bright their eyes, how musical their laughter! Their dusky shoulders are powdered with light. He admires also these men, who inhabit their evening clothes as if they wore no other. He feels graceless and unprepossessing in his, and leans on his stick as one would a prop to keep from falling—so heavy the weight of judgment in their eyes. But in this, he is mistaken; their frank gazes are not critical, but curious. They are fascinated by anyone who is a sensation. The Mummy is that, as surely as if he had crossed the Atlantic in an airplane. But he has made a journey even more amazing: He has crossed an immeasurable gulf of time—has, in fact, arrived from the farthest shore, where life’s freshwater is tainted by the brackishness of death.

  The Mummy is drawn to the piano, where Noël Coward sits playing. Coward is also a sensation; but his fame is not so ethereal as the Mummy’s, and the glass wall between him and his admirers is made of sugar, like the saloon windows through which cowboy actors crash. The Mummy’s window is of an imperial hardness. Tempered by the occult, it admits light, looks, even handshakes (seldom, however, offered because of the unpleasant dryness of his hands)—but little to affirm, for him, life. Since his arrival in New York, he has come to understand the degree of his separation: it is for this, perhaps, that he weeps.

  Coward, whose intuitions are quick, sees in the Mummy’s face a yearning, which he interprets as the wish to play; and he makes room for the Mummy on the bench. The Mummy sits and, without a word, begins to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata because of—who knows?—the women and the particles of light sown in their hair by the prisms of the chandelier.

  The Mummy plays beautifully but with a burden of mournfulness Beethoven did not intend.

  Now it is Coward’s turn to weep because of the depth of the Mummy’s accomplishment and for the anguish of a man whose cup is charged with sorrow. He takes the Mummy by the arm. (Both, after all, are estranged from the ordinary and can commingle, if only momentarily.) He leads him as he would an injured man or a blind one onto the terrace.

  “Cigarette?” Coward asks, offering him a Gauloise from a silver case.

  The Mummy smokes and finds the toasted taste and smell delicious.

  “Now tell me how it is you can play Beethoven, on an instrument that did not exist in your time; and why, though your playing is excellent, the music is sterile and so very sad.”

  The Mummy is grateful because it is this that he wished to say on the radio and, later, to the chambermaid. But gong and sleep prevented him.

  “The dead are omniscient,” the Mummy tells him as they lean against the terrace wall and watch the automobiles sweep like fiery comets down the streets of light. “All is known to them in the place in which they live. One must not say ‘live,’ but it is a kind of living in which they dwell—not dwell—are. And in being, all knowledge is transmitted somehow through them as if they were each a radio receiving from the air everything that is able to pass from one man to another. So it was that I learned to speak the languages of men, understand their arts and subtleties—understand them without, however, feeling them; for I was, like all the dead, without emotion—that being an aspect of the human that does not survive into death. Why this should be so, I do not know, unless—feeling it—death would prove unendurable.”

  “And do you now,” Coward asks, “feel anything at all?”

  “Sadness mostly. Little else. Loneliness, which is for me the same as sorrow—is the reason for my sorrow. You cannot, being alive, know the loneliness I feel among the living.”

  “I have often been alone,” Coward says softly, his gaze sliding from the Mummy’s eyes to hide from him the remnants of a desolation felt too often.

  “Not like mine!” the Mummy says bitterly.

  Coward tosses his cigarette into space. They watch its ardent ember fall into the street below, which seems now to the Mummy like the long, wavering line of torches that lit his way to the doorway of his tomb.

  Wrath and His Terrible Yearning for Egypt

  Of all the pleasures available to him in the twentieth century, the Mummy finds cigarettes the most desirable. Its women are also desirable, but they are not for him. Women do not want a Mummy, he tells himself; and this realization—however bitter—is the truth. Women shrink from him. The chambermaid, who resurrected his desire, never again was kind. He watches her in the arms of a handsome man. The Mummy does not dance—would not dance the Lindy Hop! He considers the Lindy immodest, although he claps like the others when the band concludes. He wants to be like the others—more precisely, he wants to be thought by others as if he were like them. Which he is not—he knows this!—nor can he ever be. He is alone on earth. In each and every corner of it, were he to go there, he would be alone with himself. He has tried more than once to kill himself—with drain cleaner, rat poison, a bullet through the place where his heart used to beat. Once he threw himself out a window. But he cannot die or even seriously injure himself—this being, this thing that is already dead and well past injury.

  The band makes some other noise. Couples shamble in circles. A drunk wearing a conical hat slumps in his chair. One hour of the old year remains. The Mummy has been too steeped in time to be moved by its passing. Finishing his last Gauloise, he motions with the empty package to the cigarette girl. As she leans over her tray so that he can select another, he steals a glance at the tops of her breasts and sighs.

  “Mister, we got only American cigarettes here,” she says, mistaking the meaning of his sigh.

  He looks from the girl’s face (whose cruel and beleaguered beauty reminds him of a priestess he adored in the temple of Isis) to her tray, and his eyes fall on a package illustrated with a pyramid.

  “What’s this?” he asks.

  “Camels!” she snarls. “What’s it look like?”

  He studies the package as she walks away on the daggers of her heels. He cannot understand why the iconography of his desert country should appear in a city of skyscrapers, taxis, and potted palms. And suddenly, he feels rise up in him a powerful nostalgia—a terrible yearning—for Egypt.

  He puts money on the table, as he has seen other men do, and goes, wishing he were like Karloff’s mummy, possessed of an irresistible will, an unappeasable wrath, so that he might slay them all—all who have humiliated him since he was awakened, roughly, from his dream.

  He leaves the club as the bells begin to toll the New Year—each quickly silenced peal falling to earth like a dying bird.

  Nineteen thirty-five.

  He steps into a white night of snow.

  Transmissions from the World of the Dead

  The snow, a labyrinth—its walls, winds that buffet him.

  Steel needles tattoo his skin blue for the snow to bandage.

  The sky is white as day, white the air. It might be day and not the middle of the night; he could be walking upside down—his feet in air, although his moving, when he moves, is something other than walking, is shuffling, shambling, lurching—is what a mummy does when, by invocation or profanation, it escapes the tomb. Whitely clad, the Mummy might be that mummy now. An unraveling monster for a Saturday matinee.

  Once before, the Mummy lost himself within a seeming emptiness, inside a space without dimensions, bequeathed by a malevolent god as a curse to men. Crossing the deserts of Amora, the sand blew up suddenly in the face of the setting sun. Darkness settled over everything, but through its frayed pocket leaked a gleaming copper light. Enthralled, he looked at the swirling amber mist until he had to shut his eyes against the stinging sand and grope (the camel having lain down at last in the lee of a dune). The Mummy—a man then—went with arms in front of him until he stepped into a river—hard and sharp against his shins, like an iron blade. There, after the storm had vanished in a seam of air, he met Tey, who kept her father’s house. She was comely and modest, and her slender hand in his solaced him. He stayed to woo and marry her, according to the customs of that place.

  He oversaw the workers in her father’s field. She mo
ved within his house, calm and elegantly wrought, like the ibis. In the evening, while the wind nuzzled the river, they would walk beneath the palms and listen to the boatmen’s songs. Their happiness was brief: She was brought to the house of the dead nearly three decades before he followed her there. The sparrow, which was her soul, never came to him, though he waited for it.

  The snow slows. The wind is dropping, and he hears—not singing, but that humming heard in the silence between voices as the radio dial turns. Transmissions from the World of the Dead. He finds a door that opens and goes inside.

  The Mummy is alone inside the Empire State Building—or nearly so, for the clinking of pails and the brief cataracts and freshets of gray water on marble or porphyry are proof of an otherwise-invisible occupation. He has heard how this building towers above antiquity’s pyramids and obelisks, and he thinks that, perhaps, from the top of it he can see across the world—to Egypt!

  He rides the elevator car up—a mechanical ascent toward Horus, son of Osiris and ruler of the heavens. Perhaps now, the Mummy thinks, I will find the sparrow and will know it to be Tey, her transmigrated soul. But the sparrows are asleep elsewhere; and the observation deck is, in its Tibetan isolation and cold, possessed of the enchantments of death. The Mummy stands as if in a bowl of milk and sees neither Egypt nor the ocean, nor even the river where, two months before, he clung to a crate containing mortuary decorations prized from his tomb after the ship, which carried him into exile, had foundered.

  In the white and luminous air, he gazes at the package of cigarettes while a gravel of snow clatters softly against the pyramid, the camel, and the palm.

  A Telegram Arrives

  The Mummy sleeps late and would have gone on sleeping if a knock at the door had not wakened him. Not for refreshment does a mummy sleep, for refreshment is impossible, but to relieve awhile the tedium of incessant thought. He sits on the edge of the bed while shards of past and present circle his mind like pale vegetables in a soup stirred by a slow hand.

  Sailboats at Aswan … Osiris’s floating coffin … burning water and a smugglers’ launch … an obelisk at Memphis in whose shadow the Mummy played with a leather ball … a skyscraper in an icy shroud … the chambermaid who was kind … the cigarette girl with eyes insolent and afraid … Tey, the Mummy’s wife, whose face he can no longer recall except as a radiant haze.