by Jodi Picoult
The best-known publication of the tomb was from 1894, by Percy Newberry. Working under him to create the drawings were Marcus Blackden, and seventeen-year-old Howard Carter—long before his own discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. But there were errors in the Newberry publication—bits that were incomplete and inaccuracies that only became evident if you were standing in front of the actual wall, like Wyatt and I were. It was our job, that season, to find and record those mistakes, so that Dumphries could publish a corrected version.
It was early morning in the tomb, and the air was already stagnant and blistering. Mohammed and Ahmed, two of the Egyptians we had working with us that season, were using the total station to mark elevation points. The first-year grad student was sitting outside the tomb, sorting broken potsherds into types: bowls and cups, bread molds, jars, and anything unusual—like a piece with a stamp on it. I had brushed off the surface of the statue-hauling scene I was working on and had finished the daily struggle to affix the Mylar to the rock wall surface with masking tape. Mylar was an entire level of hell, as far as I was concerned. In the heat, it got gooey and limp; in the winter, it grew hard and stiff. The thinner it was, the worse it held up in this kind of heat—but the thicker it was, the harder it was to see through in order to trace the hieroglyphs. It wasn’t particularly efficient, but it was all we had at the time—a way of taking a three-dimensional inscription on the wall and putting it onto two-dimensional paper.
I glanced over at Wyatt talking to Mostafa, the antiquities inspector. Mostafa had expressed an interest in learning hieroglyphs, and Wyatt was endlessly accommodating, drawing in the dust of the tomb floor or finding a sign on the wall. “This one, that looks like a touchdown?” Wyatt tested.
I glanced over, surprised he knew the word from an American sport.
He had drawn the biliteral sign for ka, the part of the soul that has to do with what’s handed down from generation to generation. While Mostafa tried to remember that, I turned my attention back to the wall.
Harbi was holding a large mirror to shine the light from the entrance of the tomb to fall from left to right over the area of text I was studying. When tracing, you had to pretend that light was coming from the upper left at a forty-five-degree angle, and if the hieroglyph happened to be in sunken relief, you’d draw a shadow line, slightly thicker.
I lifted my Sharpie from the Mylar, squinting at a detail I couldn’t quite see.
“Harbi,” I said, “can you get me a little more light here?”
He was young and wiry and strong, wrestling with the large mirror to try to direct the light where I needed it. But given the placement of that particular sign, he couldn’t shine it close enough.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said. I hopped off the ladder I was standing on and rummaged in my bag for my small mirror. “Aim up here,” I told Harbi, pointing to a spot above my head on the wall. I held up the hand mirror, catching the stream of light he directed that way, and bounced it down to the sign I wanted to scrutinize.
“This one’s my favorite,” Wyatt was saying.
He pointed to the sign he had sketched into the dirt:
Mostafa frowned. “A pistol?”
“In a matter of speaking,” Wyatt said. “Think more…below the belt.”
“It is a phallus?”
“Yes. As a preposition, it means in front of.”
Of course it did, I mused.
“There’s a bit in the Coffin Texts where the deceased talk about each part of themselves, from their fingers to their toes to their ears to their phallus, and each part is a different god.” Wyatt pointed to the symbol in the dirt. “I’d call mine Re. Because it, too, would be resurrected nightly.”
I tweaked the little hand mirror so that a beam of light struck Wyatt directly in his eye. He winced, holding up his palm to block it.
“Hey, Wyatt?” I said sweetly. “You planning on working today?”
He stood, wiping the dust off his hands. “Lesson time is over, my friend,” he said to Mostafa. “I’ve got to earn my keep.” He scuffed out the picture he’d drawn with one boot, and then walked underneath the ladder I was perched on.
“I can’t believe you did that!” I said.
“Taught Mostafa a hieroglyph?” he said innocently.
“No…you just walked under the ladder.”
“Let me guess. Another superstition from your Irish mother.” He rummaged for a Sharpie in his own bag. “What should I do to keep the whole tomb from falling down around me, then?”
“My mom would say you should walk through the ladder again, backward. Or cross your fingers and keep them crossed till you see a dog.”
“A dog…?” He shook his head. “I’ll just take my chances and live on the edge.” He spread one hand over a section of Mylar and began to trace hieroglyphs he could reach from his spot on the ground. “The only superstition my family ever adhered to was to not leave a finger of brandy in the decanter. You have to finish it. But I don’t know if that was superstition or alcoholism.”
“My mother has so many of them.”
“What’s the oddest one?”
I thought for a moment. “Don’t put your feet on the table, because it’s where God’s face is.”
“On the table?”
“Allegedly. And if you give someone a handkerchief as a gift, it means the recipient’s life will be full of sadness,” I added. “Oh. And breaking dishes is lucky.”
He turned to me. “Did you break a lot of dishes?”
I noticed that the light Harbi had been trying so hard to catch for me touched Wyatt’s hair effortlessly, like a benediction. “Yeah.”
“Then maybe she was just trying to make you feel better. I’m told mothers are supposed to do that.”
I glanced at him, but there was enough bitterness in his tone to suggest that his own mother might not have been very kind. The Wyatt I knew was a titled white guy with all the privilege in the world; maybe his mother had forgotten to pick him up from cricket practice once.
And yet as soon as I thought that, I felt embarrassed.
Before I could question whether Wyatt might deserve more than my usual scorn, we were interrupted by Dumphries. “Hello, my chickens,” he said. “How’s our colossus?”
I came down from the ladder and stood beside him. Wyatt joined us, and we all looked at the image of the tremendous statue of Djehutyhotep II being hauled. It had been much more impressive, once. In 1890, the inscription was damaged—all the hieroglyphs to the left had been hacked out. There was also graffiti scrawled over other parts of the text—Coptic, from people who had lived in the tombs, and Greek, from ancient tourists. Our job was basically to replicate this image, with all its scarring from age and erosion and mankind, and to hypothesize about missing pieces. In the Middle Kingdom, autobiographical inscriptions were pretty straightforward, but there was always a weird turn of phrase or grammar that was time-consuming and hard to translate, that required reference books and publications. In those cases, two heads were better than one.
That’s why Dumphries had assigned us both to the task.
He clapped us both on our shoulders. “So let it be written, so let it be done,” he joked, quoting Ramesses II from the movie version of The Ten Commandments. “Which as you know is complete bullshit.”
He wandered off to check on the others as Wyatt and I climbed back into position. “So,” Wyatt said drily, “did you know the Cecil B. DeMille movie used this scene of the colossus as a reference?”
Dumphries had told us that fact at least twenty times in the two weeks we’d been here. “Why no,” I said, deadpan. “That’s totally news to me.”
Dumphries loved to talk about everything that the movie got wrong. The film made it seem like when a pharaoh said something was law, no questions were asked. But Egyptians were big on tribunals. Even when a pharaoh was p
resumed assassinated, like Ramesses III, an independent panel of judges was set up and everyone had to be interviewed before a sentence could be meted out to his murderer.
I was working on sketching the overseer, who stood on the actual statue, directing those who were hauling it.
“Did you ever see The Ten Commandments?” I asked Wyatt.
“Every Easter,” he replied.
“They got this part wrong. The overseer wasn’t holding a whip. He’s clapping. Look.”
All of a sudden Wyatt was scaling the opposite side of the ladder. He traced a finger over the hieroglyphs beside the overseer. “Words spoken: keeping time for the soldiers by…can’t read that bit…Djehutyhotep, beloved of the king.” He met my eyes. “He’s the DJ.”
“Dropping that sick beat.” I laughed.
“DJ Hutyhotep,” Wyatt said. “Whassup, Deir el-Bersha! Lemme see some hands in the air!” He leaped off the ladder, pointing to the men who were hauling the colossus. “That’s not all Cecil DeMille cocked up. The guys dragging this thing aren’t enslaved. There’s a missing part, an inscription, that says it was hauled by three troupes of recruits, along with the sculptors and quarrymen who carved it.”
“Yeah, but Charlton Heston had to be in the shot,” I said, and just then I lost my balance.
I would have crashed onto the stone floor, but somehow Wyatt was there, and we collapsed together in a heap. He rolled, taking the brunt of the fall, his arms tight around me.
In this tomb where time had stopped, it might have well been just the two of us, suspended. His hands flexed on my shoulders and I could see actual fear in his eyes—not for himself, but for me. “Are you all right?” he murmured, and pressed against the length of him, I could feel his voice better than I could hear it.
Was I?
Then he grunted beneath my weight, and I rolled off him. “Thanks for breaking my fall,” I said.
“Thanks for breaking my knee.” He flexed the joint and stood. “And here I thought I was supposed to have the shit luck.”
Somehow, we had managed to tear off the Mylar as we tumbled to the ground. I groaned, thinking of what a pain it would be to hang it again in just the right position. But with the Mylar removed, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the beauty of the art: the rich red skin of those hauling the statue, the faded yellows of the stone figure, the turquoise faience necklace of the domineering nomarch walking behind, the delicate pleated white of his robe. “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” I murmured, quoting Shelley.
Wyatt settled beside me, staring up at it. “Wrong colossus,” he said.
I knew that. Shelley had written his poem about the massive model of Ramesses II. “Yeah,” I conceded, “but same basic idea.”
Wyatt was quiet for a moment. “I think that Djehutyhotep would be delighted to know that four thousand years later, we’re talking about him. Just by our saying his name, he lives on. I mean, look.” He waved his arm around the tomb. “The names, the deeds, the autobiographical texts all over the place—that’s because tombs were meant to be visited. That’s how memories get preserved.” Wyatt looked at me. “It’s why we want to publish, isn’t it?”
I shook my head. “You think we’ll be immortalized? Two insignificant grad students who are a footnote in one of Dumphries’s papers?”
Wyatt laughed. “I won’t forget you, Olive. No matter how hard I may try.”
I punched his shoulder. “That’s not the same as being remembered.”
He smiled at me. “Isn’t it?”
* * *
—
I DO NOT know how many hours pass while I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor, reading Wyatt’s dissertation. The sun has sunk so low that my eyes burn, trying to find enough light to read. There are lamps, but I don’t want to get up to turn one on. I’m too afraid that all this will disappear; that I will wake up in Boston and this will be only the filmy soap left from the bubble of a dream.
Although the Coffin Texts do not say that the coffin is the microcosm of the Underworld, the arrangement of texts shouts this (McDowell, 2001), I read.
Spell 1029, the first spell of the Book of Two Ways, describes the rising sun: Trembling befalls the eastern horizon of the sky at the voice of Nut. For Re does she clear the ways before the Great One, Osiris, when Re perambulates the Netherworld. Raise yourself, O Re!
I close my eyes, seeing in quick succession a series of memories: Harbi peeling an orange in the front yard; my own hands and nails, brown with dust; the unlikely relief of hot tea on a blistering day. The ache in my arches after a day on my feet. The tail of a white scarf floating behind me on a bicycle. I am riding the handlebars, Wyatt is pedaling.
Nut is the sky goddess, the mother of Osiris. The Underworld is also in her body; the coffin can be Nut, and thus the mummy in her womb becomes Osiris.
I remember the way the moon sat on the sill of my window, watching me sleep. The scrape of sand underneath my bare thighs. The purr of my bedroom fan, wheezing to life after a power outage. The sound of his breathing.
The term raise yourself signifies specifically what a mummy does—as in awaken—so here Re is a mummy; here Re is the deceased in the coffin.
When we were here during the season, there was always so much dust and sand that every night, I would rinse my eyes out with a saline wash, and blink to find the world new again. That’s what it feels like now, to read the explanation of the theories I never got to prove.
“My God.”
I look up, straining in the near dark to see. Wyatt looks just like I remember. Older, but only in breadth of his shoulders, the lines that fan from the edges of his eyes. All the remaining light in the room is drawn to his hair, still gilded, a crown for a prince.
“I didn’t believe it when Harbi told me,” he says.
I get to my feet, still holding his dissertation. Between us, I feel a shifting wall, as if we are magnets with like poles that keep us at a fixed distance. And I also feel what it could be like if one of those poles flipped.
Wyatt isn’t smiling, and neither am I. I lift my chin. “You once told me you’d do anything for me,” I say.
“Dawn—”
“I want to work here,” I interrupt. “I want to finish what I started.”
Life asked death, “Why do people love me but hate you?”
Death responded, “Because you are a beautiful lie and I am a painful truth.”
—Unknown
WHEN I GET home, Brian is waiting. He stares at me as if I am a hallucination, and then he approaches me cautiously—the way you would move toward a feral animal or someone whose world has gone to pieces around her. He folds me tightly into his arms. “Jesus Christ, Dawn,” he says, his voice shaking. “I thought you were gone for good.”
Slowly, my arms come up to embrace him. My eyes drift closed. I actively shove away the memories that rise, and force myself to only see forward.
What if it’s that easy to start fresh? I remember how, when Meret was little, she had a toy that was an enclosed tablet of tiny metal filings that could be moved with a magnetic pencil. After drawing whatever it was she wanted to draw, she could pull a lever and all the filings fell to the bottom of the tablet, making a blank slate. But after a few months of use, there were hazy black shadows of former pictures she’d drawn caught in the very fibers of the toy. Even as she created pictures over them, I could see the ghosts of her imagination.
“Dawn,” Brian says. An apology, a beginning.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” It’s too raw. Maybe one day, but this is not that day.
He nods, slipping his hands into his pockets. It’s something he does when he is nervous. “Are you…all right?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” I try to say this lightly, but the reply sinks like fog, making it harde
r to see.
“This is my fault.”
I don’t correct him. If it wasn’t for what he did, or didn’t do, I would never have left in the first place.
“Is Meret—”
“She’s in her room.” I head to the staircase, but Brian’s voice tugs at me. “She doesn’t know. I didn’t want to scare her.”
I pivot. This, I suppose, was either meant to protect Meret, or meant to protect Brian. No matter what, it’s an unexpected gift right now.
Meret’s bedroom always surprises me. Although it has been years since we decorated it for a baby girl, I still expect to see it in pinks and yellows, with a wallpaper border of dancing hippos. Sometimes when I am sorting through the laundry now and see her brightly colored bras, I am startled by them, because just yesterday I was folding onesies printed with ladybugs, cotton dresses with tutus built in.
Although she’s a teenager now, her walls aren’t covered with Sia or 21 Savage. She has a vintage Adolphe Millot insect graphic and overblown photos of microscopic onion epidermal cells and elodea root. Meret has wanted to be a scientist like her father since he helped her make her first baking soda volcano in the kitchen sink at age four.
The lights are on in her room, and she is asleep on top of the covers. A book—Lab Girl—is on the floor, where it’s tumbled out of her hands. I set it on the nightstand and go to turn off the lamp, but she stirs, blinking up at me. “You’re back,” she whispers. I wonder what Brian did tell her. If she heard us arguing, before I left.
I pull back the covers so she can crawl into bed. Her pajama top rides up, exposing a plump roll at the waistband of the bottoms. I bite my lip—she hates how she looks, which is a function not just of being fourteen but also of being the daughter of two parents who are thin. I spy something purple balled up in the trash can—it’s the shirt that I bought her for her birthday. When she unwrapped it, Meret had plastered a smile on her face, but I saw her finger the label, Junior XXL. Mom, she had said, I’m not that huge. I felt terrible. But wouldn’t it have been worse if I’d gotten her a size down, and it was too small?
