by Norman Lock
Knock …
In the space between two knocks, he remembers his tomb and how he would rummage there among the tokens of his life: his sword and chariot, a gold cup and plate, a stuffed falcon and a mummified dog, a ball and stick, his library of papyrus scrolls, which he read by sunlight and moonlight entering through a shaft—alms scattered liberally by Ra and Thoth.
Knock.
He opens the door and finds, standing in the hall, a Western Union boy.
“Telegram, mister,” he says, eyeing the Mummy with mistrust.
He gives the boy a coin and shuts the door. He opens the yellow envelope, removes the flimsy sheet of paper, and reads:MAKING MOVIE OF YOUR LIFE–STOP–WANT YOU AS
TECHNICAL ADVISER–STOP–GOLDEN WEST LTD LEAVES
GRAND CENTRAL–STOP–TONIGHT AT 8 O’CLOCK.
TOM LAMAY, DIRECTOR
HOLLYWOOD, CALIF.
A Meditation on Time
The Mummy lies in the close dusk behind a curtain while the train rushes toward the Land of the Dead. He does not sleep in the narrow berth in which he chooses to spend the three-day journey west. Nor can he be said to be awake. Rather, he is in a state of suspension—neither in time entirely nor wholly outside of it, for he cannot enter eternity any more than he can a mortal life.
If one remains housed in the body after death, one needs to vanquish time: the knowledge of its passing, which is, for a mummy as for any other undying thing, slow and harrowing, like the migration of a single grain of sand from one end of the desert to the other. And so the Mummy, who needs none, takes his rest, longing only for Egypt and a cigarette. He lies on his back inside the coffin of his berth, feeling himself to be one with the train, hurtling toward a simulacrum of his life, hoping to put an end to his sorrow.
The Mummy knows what time is better than any living person, or dead one—better than Einstein, whose theories he has absorbed in the same way as Spengler’s economics or Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Mooch.”
Time is shaped like a pyramid—of this he is certain. Each of us rides its apex a short distance into the future. Moment by moment, do we thus acquire a future (which is formless and not yet an aspect of time) and a past (which is the immense repository of all those who have preceded us). The dead who are rid of the body are oblivious of time and their estrangement from it. Only mummies and other forms of the undead retain an individual consciousness—narcotized by the embalmer’s art.
Time is a mummy’s tomb. Its weight and solidity are an amber from which he cannot escape, though he can see life passing like a shadow on the other side. Yet that estrangement is nothing next to this the Mummy must endure. Imagine the fly out of its amber and powerless to annoy men or please itself among its kind! To have escaped his time by the intervention of the grave robbers’ impious hands, to be dead among the living and a joke—this is the Mummy’s bitter and melancholy exile. This is why the Mummy desires nothing more than to return to Egypt and his tomb where he can sink into a waking dream—a sensory twilight easier to endure.
He arrives in Los Angeles the afternoon of the third day and is met by a man in a pearl gray suit and straw hat, whose smile is full of white teeth, between two of which is lodged a sesame seed.
“Mr. Mummy,” he says. “Welcome to the Land of Make-Believe!”
“Are you Tom LaMay?” the Mummy asks.
“Jack—his assistant and right-hand man!” His smile with its intrusive seed puts the Mummy in mind of a rat in a granary.
“You’ll be staying at the palace,” says Jack. “I’ll drive you there.”
“The palace?”
“Pharaoh’s. It’s out in the desert. You’ll have a room all your own. Here’s the script. Mr. LaMay would like you to read it before filming begins tomorrow.”
And the right-hand man of Mr. LaMay presses a thick sheaf of papers into the Mummy’s hand.
The Mummy’s Return to Memphis
The sun is not so hot as that which shone above Egypt three and a half millennia ago, when the Mummy walked the wide, palm-fringed avenues of Memphis. But in all other ways that he can see, the white-walled city that LaMay and his “artists” have caused to be here in the California desert is a perfect facsimile. How often in the distant past did the Mummy pause, here, in the broad late-afternoon shadow cast by Akhenaten’s palace’s eastern wall over the reflecting pool, to feed the carp, which rose like gold and copper birds to his hand? How many times did he attend the Pharaoh’s levee on the royal barge—just there, where the esplanade merges with the Nile’s reedy bank (which seems a painted picture)? Once a year, he journeyed from his home near the Nubian border to give an accounting of Pharaoh’s subjects under his administration.
The Mummy turns and, shading his eyes with the flat of his hand, looks out across the desert at the Giza Plateau, where the Sphinx trembles in the heat and the three pyramids stand, companionable and golden in the falling light. He gazes at them as if only miles of sand separate him from the necropolis, not a chasm of time. Suddenly, he is afraid—this living corpse, this undying dead man whose fear the embalmers drained into an iron dish together with all other feeling. Clutching the movie script, he hurries into the palace to his room, which he hopes will be narrow and dim as the familiar and consoling tomb.
Manhattan Mummy
A Photoplay
INTERIOR. A SHAFT INSIDE THE PYRAMID—NIGHT.
Reinhart, Krueger, and Dorfman make their way along a sloping shaft. They carry electric torches in whose yellow lights appear, on the stone walls, cartouches containing symbols of the Egyptian past.
INTERIOR. AT THE DOOR OF THE MUMMY’S TOMB—NIGHT.
Reinhart consults a letter, worn from repeated folding and unfolding. In extreme close-up, we see that the letter is written in German. The men are German and speak with an accent. Reinhart folds the letter and returns it to his pocket.
REINHART: Here is the tomb! We have only to force open the door and carry the sarcophagus outside to the boat. We’ll deliver it to the museum, and keep the mummy’s treasure for ourselves!
KRUEGER: Is a sarcophagus heavy?
[Reinhart shrugs his shoulders.]
DORFMAN: What will you do with your share of the money, Reinhart?
REINHART: I will buy a small Rhenish castle and invite many beautiful women to visit me there.
KRUEGER: I will buy a pig farm and raise pigs.
[A noise is heard inside the tomb.]
REINHART: What was that noise?
KRUEGER (Nervously): Maybe it was a mouse.
DORFMAN (a laugh of exceptional viciousness): Or a mummy.
REINHART: Let’s get to work! We must be far away from here before sunup.
[Reinhart opens a satchel and removes various tools.]
INTERIOR. THE MUMMY’S TOMB—NIGHT.
In the light of the electric torches, we see many fabulous treasures, which would have been buried with a man of importance during the Eighteenth Dynasty. (See Properties List.)
KRUEGER: It looks heavy to me.
REINHART: Stop your whining, Krueger, or I’ll leave you here in place of the mummy to keep the rats company!
[Dorfman laughs viciously.]
INTERIOR. THE SHAFT INSIDE THE PYRAMID—NIGHT.
Krueger and Dorfman carry the sarcophagus up the sloping passage that leads from the tomb. They labor beneath its weight. Reinhart follows with a sack stuffed with treasure.
KRUEGER (sweating profusely): I knew it would be heavy.
[Dorfman laughs with pleasure, as if at a good joke. (Of the three, Dorfman is actually the most sensitive.)]
REINHART: Dorfman, did you remember to bring the sandwiches?
EXTERIOR. THE PYRAMID—NIGHT.
The men emerge from the entrance to the pyramid, concealed by a canvas flap painted in trompe l’oeil style to look like stone, which they brought with them for the purpose. The camera should dwell—even at the risk of exasperating the audience!—on various Egyptian splendors, such as the Great Pyramid, the les
ser pyramids, the enigmatic Sphinx, the ancient constellations wheeling through the firmament, the mysterious Nile, etc. In the distance, across a moonlit desert, lies Pharaoh’s palace, glowing with an eerie light (from who knows what source!).
REINHART: Where’s the elephant?
KRUEGER: She’s eating dates. I’ll go get it.
[The inscrutable Dorfman laughs in a manner that is difficult, if not impossible, to interpret.]
EXTERIOR. THE ESPLANADE—NIGHT.
They sit inside a cabanalike affair on the elephant’s back as it crosses the esplanade toward the river, clutching the sarcophagus with its trunk.
DORFMAN (tenderly): The night is very beautiful. On such a night as this, Akhenaten held Nefertiti in his arms.
EXTERIOR. A BOAT ON THE RIVER NILE—NIGHT.
They sit on the sarcophagus while the boat moves down the Nile. There is no other sound than the soft purring of its motor. The camera lingers on the spreading wake (silvery); then the scene dissolves to the elephant standing forlornly on the riverbank.
INTERIOR. THE MESS ABOARD A FREIGHTER—DAY.
Reinhart and Dorfman play cards at a mess table. Krueger lies in a hammock, sick. Through the portholes, we see the gray ocean rise and fall. Perhaps there is a whale.
DORFMAN: You owe me one thousand marks, Reinhart.
REINHART: When we have delivered the sarcophagus to the museum, I will have a million marks!
DORFMAN (sighs with human feeling): We are in the midst of a worldwide depression. I pity those without our resourcefulness.
REINHART: I will send a whole bag of marks to my mother in Dresden.
EXTERIOR. NEW YORK HARBOR—NIGHT.
The freighter enters the harbor, which is hidden by thick fog. We hear the sound of a foghorn—lonely and sad.
INTERIOR. PILOTHOUSE—NIGHT.
The captain (a Turk or a Greek) is peering through the fog. Suddenly, we hear a fearful noise as the ship collides with a rock, or perhaps a Chinese junk bringing illegal aliens to Chinatown. The captain blows the ship’s whistle while shouting in Turkish or Greek down the speaking tube. A great storm begins with terrific thunder and lightning!
EXTERIOR. THE FREIGHTER—NIGHT.
The ship sinks. Fire is spreading on top of the ocean. Reinhart, Dorfman, and Krueger are seen in the act of drowning. Dorfman, who is the last to go under, laughs mysteriously. The mummy floats into view. The fire has burned away its bandages. Suddenly, a lightning bolt strikes the water next to the mummy and we see—in extreme close-up—its eyes open!
EXTERIOR. A BOOTLEGGERS’ LAUNCH—NIGHT.
Some bootleggers also have been in the fog, in a motor launch loaded with smuggled Canadian whiskey. Rico, the leader of the bootleggers, sees the naked mummy and throws it a rope. Helped by one or two other bootleggers, the wet mummy climbs aboard.
RICO (ironically, to the mummy): Lousy night to be outside without your pants!
[The other bootleggers laugh and drink whiskey.]
THE MUMMY (with a British accent like Basil Rathbone’s): Are you the god of the Underworld?
RICO (slapping the mummy on the back): That’s me all right!
EXTERIOR. THE DOCK—NIGHT.
The bootleggers load crates of whiskey into an ambulance.
RICO (to the mummy): We’ll drop you at the hospital on the way to our gang’s warehouse. Medical science may be able to make your face look almost human.
INTERIOR. HOSPITAL EXAMINING ROOM—NIGHT.
Dressed in a hospital gown, the mummy lies on an examining table. A perplexed doctor is listening to its chest with a stethoscope. Bored, a buxom nurse holds a tray of surgical instruments. The door is thrown open violently, and a second doctor rushes in with an X-ray.
SECOND DOCTOR: He’s stuffed with old rags!
FIRST DOCTOR (horrified): What’s that you say?!
NURSE (drops the tray and screams): It’s a mummy!
The Mummy’s Second Renunciation
Those scenes of the Mummy’s entry into the world of living men, his rescue by bootleggers, and his consignment to the hospital, where he was examined and declared a mummy, are more or less correct. But all that preceded his return to sentience (the result, perhaps, of seawater galvanized by lightning, as the movie suggests) is unknown to him. At that time, he was preoccupied by the memory of Tey’s breasts—their divine form and a mathematics to describe it. How he came to be naked and unhoused in a burning sea may well have followed the lines developed in the scenario. How else explain his arrival in Manhattan? But the ensuing scenes—the slaughter of the hospital staff, his wanderings in a labyrinth of sewers, the terrorizing of the corps de ballet, and his hideous revenge on the curator of Antiquities for the Metropolitan Museum of Art—these are fantasies, which the Mummy repudiates with all his heart. His heart remains, although it is a mummified one, incapable of beating, or love.
Mortified, the Mummy goes to the window. Gazing wistfully at the distant Giza Plateau, he yearns for the obscurity of his tomb. He thinks in the morning he will strangle Mr. LaMay and all his company if he does not leave at once—this, the gentlest of men and mummies. He has had enough of life and all those who, for a time, inhabit it as if forever. He steals from the dark palace and, mounting an elephant drowsing under a papier-mâché palm tree, rides toward his pyramid.
On the rim of the world, the pyramids stand clotted with silver. The stone lion crouches warily, confronted by its constellation in the ancient night. Each takes the other’s measure; each is a representation of the same magisterial instinct in a universe fashioned on a principle of absolute hegemony. The Mummy knows his place in it. He is one with the dead and hastens on his elephant to rejoin them—even if this tomb is a plaster replica. As he draws closer, his sempiternal weariness lightens. He will dream again of Tey—her loveliness lost in time to him—without distraction. As if sensing his rising exultancy, the elephant trumpets with a noise that shatters the lunar stillness.
The Mummy is standing before his pyramid, a somnambulist who once heard through thick walls Mark Antony weep with frustrated desire for Cleopatra, and Napoléon rage against Josephine. In a moment, he will climb again onto his stone deathbed and wait for Osiris to raise him—or for the morning, when Reinhart, Krueger, and Dorfman will break open the door of his tomb.
A Theory of Time
For Andrew Comi
1.
We ride only on the tracks that are orange with the rust of time. How else avoid those other trains crisscrossing a land notable for the variety of its features—observing schedules, answerable to purposes clearly understood by the presidents of railroad companies and their most casual passengers alike? We follow no schedules; and if there is a purpose to our endless divagation, I never knew it. (That the performances might be a figment of my or someone else’s imagination is a thought that increasingly occurs to me.) I begin to suspect that we are traveling to no purpose; that the train appeared one day on these rusted rails as if by an act of spontaneous generation such as van Leeuwenhoek claimed to have observed in his retort after the introduction of an electrical current in water.
I do not remember when I first came to be here. Perhaps I, too, unfolded suddenly like a Japanese paper flower in water—like the animalcules in van Leeuwenhoek’s laboratory. But something tells me this is not the case: memories, for one thing. I can recall a time when I was not on the train. A boyhood in a town red with brick factories and gray with smoke and dust. And later, life aboard a merchant ship, if the few impressions I have of it can be said to be a life. I seem to have been skillful with a marlin spike; to this day, I can feel in my hand its weight and the rope stiffened by salt water. Of course, they may be someone else’s memories. Who is to say that we cannot receive another’s recollections like a legacy—an unsuspected inheritance from an uncle who, until the moment when the lawyer informs us that we have come into some money or a property in Ravenna, we never knew existed?
I was the train’s brakeman. This much is certai
n. I remember it in my absent thumb, the pain of its dismemberment. We had stopped for the night in an ancient forest. I would not have been surprised to find Yggdrasil presiding over it—so Germanic the gloom, so primeval the silence. Bewitched into a moment’s carelessness, I offered up my finger to the coupling. I feel it still—the pain when finger and bone came away in the train’s iron fist. I doubt I would feel it so keenly were it someone else’s loss.
In the mirror, I appear to be a man of sixty. But mirrors lie; and on such a train as this, what treachery might not they practice? But let us say sixty, or a little less. I was a young man still when I suffered my mutilation. It has been, then, many years since I have been other than a brakeman. I was not relieved of my occupation because of my accident. I continued for a time after it—of this, too, I am sure. It was for some other reason that I ceased to be a brakeman. My own or some other’s.
I am now an assistant to the impresario. I say “an assistant,” for I cannot be certain that I am the only one in this capacity, any more than I am sure another brakeman is in the rear of the train, performing my former role. I can only assume that one is: A train must have a brakeman. He may well be asleep at this moment in one of the rear cars set aside for the brakeman—the car I once shared with the flagman, whom I never see anymore. The end of the train is not visible because of the great number of cars, or the frequent turning of the tracks, or the darkness that seems always to be at our rear. As if the train were on the edge of night. The engine and the caboose following immediately behind it are the only cars that have not been tainted yet by that unnatural dark. A premonitory darkness ranged malevolently against us. I feel it just as a gravestone might the pressure of a hand intent on robbing it of its inscription. The engineer maintains that it is only our locomotive’s coal smoke blackening the sky.
