by Jodi Picoult
Standing outside in the blistering sun, Wyatt reaches for my hand. Stop fidgeting, he says. You’re going to make it worse.
“Above the feathers are phonetic signs that say the same thing.”
His hand is warm. He digs a needle beneath the pad of my thumb, rooting for the splinter. There is a bead of blood on my thumb. Wyatt lifts the wound to his mouth and sucks it away. He doesn’t take his eyes off mine.
I stare down at the bandage from this morning’s knife injury, as if it has started bleeding fresh.
Win interrupts my reverie. “You are wasted as a death doula,” she says. “You could be teaching college classes!”
I shake my head, smiling. “I’ll be a lot more useful to you this way than I would be as a professor.”
“Do more!” She gestures toward another part of the painting, where a table behind Osiris has the names of the gods of the tribunal, and the hieroglyphs are in retrograde—they face to the right, but are read from left to right, in reverse, like some other religious spells from the Coffin Texts and the Book of Two Ways. “This part is the negative confession,” I tell Win. “The deceased denies forty-two ways he might have screwed up in life.” I point out the red arms with the palms facing down, the sign for negation, and the sparrow—which the Egyptians called ‘the bad bird,’ and which was a determinative for wrongdoing. I did no wrong. I did not tell lies. I didn’t fornicate with the fornicator.
“And here I thought the Egyptians were so sexually progressive.”
“Well, they were okay with premarital sex,” I say. “There’s no word for virgin in Ancient Egyptian.”
“How egalitarian.”
“Yeah, but there were conditions. You couldn’t have sex with someone married. Infidelity was grounds for divorce.”
“So that was the deal breaker,” Win muses. She flattens her hand on the edge of the artwork, tracing the border. “Would it be one for you?”
For a moment, I wonder how she has seen past the façade I’ve presented, to know so much about my private life. I haven’t even told her Brian’s name.
“I think there are lots of ways to be unfaithful that don’t involve fornicating with the fornicator,” Win murmurs, before I can even respond.
“That’s why there are forty-one other negative confessions,” I reply.
Win sets the frame down beside her on the couch. “So that was it? You said your confessions and you got through to the next round?”
“No. You said four times: I am pure, I am pure, I am pure, I am pure. And then you had to be given a lot of detailed knowledge, like how to answer the floor about the names of your feet before it would let you walk across it, and the titles of the doors in another room. There were instructions about what to wear during the judgment, too, and what to offer and where and to whom. But if you did all that, and answered all the questions right, and had a heart lighter than the feather of truth, and you were nice to the really snarky Divine Ferryman who transported all the souls, you could wind up in the Field of Offerings, where you were given back everything you’d left behind—your loved ones, your pets, your backyard. Your souvenirs. The view from your favorite window. Everything that brought you joy during your life, but for eternity.”
“That sounds…nice,” Win says. She traces Osiris’s crown. “What about the people whose heart was heavy?”
“They got eaten by a monster that was part crocodile, part hippo, and part lion.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“No, not for another couple thousand years,” I say.
Win stands. I automatically catalog how steady she is on her feet, how frail her arm looks as she braces against the side of the couch. “So, Dawn Edelstein,” she says, “a lot of people go through an Egypt stage as kids, and build pyramids out of blocks and wrap their little brothers up in toilet paper as mummies. But something tells me you never grew out of that. Are you going to tell me why you know all this?”
“I used to be an Egyptologist, in another life.”
Win’s eyes narrow. I get the sense she is taking stock of me just as thoroughly as I am taking stock of her, and for a moment I wonder which of us is in charge. “Do you believe in other lives?” she asks.
I picture Wyatt walking away from me, the heat rippling through the air to make him seem like a mirage, a figment of my imagination.
“I want to,” I say.
IN MY DREAM, Brian is trying to open the door to a parallel universe. In a gleaming lab, he sets up his experiment. He is going to send a beam of subatomic particles down a tunnel, past a giant magnet, into a wall. If he does it correctly, some of those particles will become mirror images of themselves, and will go right through the wall, proving that there’s a shadow world cozied up beside the one we live in.
I see him flip the switch of the particle accelerator. I am close enough to notice his square-cut nails, the scar on his thumb from when he hit it with a hammer putting together Meret’s big-girl bed. Then the knocking starts, like the metallic heartbeat of an MRI machine. I feel an enormous pressure, a thunderstorm caught in my ribs, and suddenly I realize why I am close enough to witness all this: I am trapped in that beam of particles. Wait, I try to tell Brian. There’s been a mistake.
But he is too focused on his work to notice me. There is so much heaviness; my chest is caught in a vise. I remember Brian’s voice: We’re all made up of molecules, like those electrons. If you zoom in and zoom in and zoom in, everything we do is explained by quantum mechanics.
And then I am light, I am air, I am speed, I am nothing. I brace for the impact but there isn’t any. I find myself on the other side of a mirror, pounding hard, my knocks drowned out by the steady rap of the particle accelerator. All I can hear is the banging.
Whack. Whack. Whack. And then: “Dawn?”
My eyes fly open. I am lying on a twin mattress in a room I do not recognize. I squint at my watch: 4:30 A.M.
I scramble to the door and open it a crack; I’m wearing a T-shirt and underwear, since I have nothing else to sleep in. I find myself blinded by a beam of light, and for a moment, my dream comes rushing back to me.
The light switches off. It is pitch black, but I can make out the shape of Wyatt, the white of his teeth, a headlamp on his brow. “The electricity’s out,” he says. “Here.”
He pushes a spare headlamp into my hand. Immediately I am flooded with muscle memories of moving around in the dark every time the electricity failed during the dig season, which was often. I slip it onto my head, turn on the switch, and Wyatt frowns.
“You need pajamas,” he says, and he turns and walks away.
It’s cool this early in the morning, which is why we start work, as Dumphries used to say, at “the ass crack of dawn” (before looking at me and adding, “No relation.”). The Dig House feels like a voles’ burrow—dark and hushed, with scurrying in all its corners as everyone gets ready for the day. Without electricity, there’s also no water, which means no shower. I find a wet wipe in the bathroom and drag it over my face, under my arms.
By the time I get to the table, Joe is already seated. Wyatt and Alberto are deep in conversation, but when I walk in, they abruptly stop. I wonder what Wyatt has said to them about me. I wonder why Alberto lifts his cup of juice as if it is the most interesting thing in the world and refuses to look at me. “Good morning,” I say evenly, and I sit down as Mohammed Mahmoud brings food to the table that doesn’t require a stove: bread and jam, honey, cereal. No coffee, because there’s no hot water. The condiments get passed around, and I try to figure out people’s morning personalities based on how they interact. Joe is chatty and cheery; Alberto silent. Wyatt scrolls through his phone.
Suddenly, the phone rings. Wyatt answers the call, stepping away from the table. “Omar’s motorbike is broken,” he announces. “He’ll be late.”
“Who’s Omar?”
“The antiquities inspector,” Joe says.
“Per piacere, il sale?” Alberto mutters.
“He doesn’t do English till he’s caffeinated,” Joe explains. He passes me the salt, but I set it on the table somewhere between me and Alberto.
“You can’t pass salt,” I say. “It’s bad luck.”
Wyatt catches my eye and raises a brow.
I eat a piece of bread with honey, feeling too queasy to put anything else in my stomach. I have effectively begged or bullied Wyatt into letting me work at the site. But even if I manage to not make a fool of myself, so much has changed with technology that I might be completely in over my head.
“Dawn? Hello?”
When I hear his voice, I realize he’s been speaking to me. For a while. Everyone else is staring.
“We leave in five,” Wyatt says, all business. “Be ready.”
I nod, my face burning. Alberto rolls his eyes, making no move to lower his voice. “Santo cazzo Madre di Cristo,” he says, and I don’t need a translation.
Abdou, Mohammed Mahmoud, and Ahmed emerge from the annex where they live and begin to load up equipment, under the direction of Abdou, the reis—or head workman. I am wearing the same borrowed clothing I wore yesterday, the same borrowed hat. I stand awkwardly near the Land Rover, not sure what I should bring. Joe comes up beside me, handing me a pack filled with brushes, a ruler, a mirror, a flashlight, an iPad, and a portable charger. “You can use some of my stuff,” he says. He takes a military keffiyeh and drapes it around my neck. I wind it around my nose and mouth to block out the sand.
Wyatt walks out of the Dig House and swings into the Land Rover. Abdou is driving and the back is filled with equipment. Alberto, Joe, and I follow its tracks. The sun comes over the horizon, bloodying the desert, as if the moon was massacred overnight.
* * *
—
THE TOMBS IN the necropolis look like kernels of corn, evenly spaced and lined up in a row along the gebel. The tomb of Djehutynakht sits slightly below the rest due to the infrastructure of the hill itself. As we get closer, I see the split in the rock face near the new opening, which must have prevented the other tombs from being built on the same level. Instead, the later tombs—like Djehutyhotep II’s—were dug above it on an intact ridge of stone.
Seeing it now, I wonder how we never noticed it fifteen years ago. At the same time, I know exactly why: it was buried, because of all those later tombs. Their excavation hid the entrance of this earlier tomb from view.
As we get closer, we start climbing the stone steps that are washed with sand. I viscerally remember doing this when I was here as a grad student, and every time, it felt futuristic, as if I were the last human on earth, instead of peeling back years to be part of an ancient civilization. The Land Rover has already been parked and unpacked by the time I reach the tomb. Joe has told me that the main work of this season has been excavating the shaft and shoring it up so that Wyatt and the workers can descend safely. In addition to Harbi’s family from Luxor, there are Coptic and Muslim hired men clearing debris from the shaft in a bucket brigade, passing the material from rubber maqtaf to maqtaf. The sand they bring out of the tomb becomes part of a giant pile that two men shake through giant sifters, to make sure there’s nothing of note in the debris. “Have they found anything?” I ask Joe.
“A few barley seeds,” he says.
They’d be picked out with tweezers, and put in a Ziploc for later archaeobotanical analysis.
Wyatt calls to Joe from inside the tomb. “The boss beckons,” he says, and he flashes me an apologetic grin as he leaves me behind. I stop at the entrance to the tomb, suddenly close enough to see the hieroglyphs.
I touch my fingertips gently to the lintel, and stumble through the transliteration of the text.
Nomarch of the Hare nome, Djehutynakht.
The last datable hieroglyphic inscription was written by a Nubian priest visiting Philae in 394 B.C.E., because even when the Byzantine emperor closed all the temples, he still let the Nubians come worship Isis. Then the entire language was forgotten for fifteen hundred years—until the Rosetta stone was found in 1799. Written in demotic, hieroglyphs, and Greek, it’s an incredibly boring text about tax benefits and temple priests—but because it bore the same message in three languages, it provided the code needed to crack the meaning of Ancient Egyptian writing. In 1822, Jean-François Champollion published the first translation of hieroglyphs.
What he must have felt, being able to step into history and understand what was being said four thousand years ago…well, it’s how it feels right now, to hold my hand up to carvings in stone, just like the artist who had set them there, wondering who would read them in the future.
The tomb is a hive of activity. I slip inside, staring around at the brightly painted walls. This is what people never understand about Egyptology—when a tomb is left untouched for thousands of years in a desert, it’s not found bleached and faded and crumbling. It can be just as vibrant as the day it was sealed, if it is preserved well. The blood reds, the aqua blues, the mustards, the creamy whites—it takes my breath away.
One full wall is a hunting scene. There are fish in a cobalt pond, and more in a delicately wrought net. Hippos frolic in the water and on the shore, a lion is eating a gazelle as two crocodiles mate. There are ibises in the bush and geese flying overhead. Djehutynakht and his wife are off to one side; he’s holding a throw stick—a boomerang-shaped piece of wood used for hunting. Turning, I step closer to another scene—this one with harpists and lute players, women clapping a beat, men dancing, and a dwarf spinning on his head to entertain them. Beside this are women spinning and weaving, picking and pressing grapes for wine, grinding grain between stones and baking bread in molds. To the far right are two donkeys rolling in dust, beside a yuyu dog, with its long tail and greyhound body. There’s another scene with fighting—soldiers with shields and arrows, vanquished dead enemies with blood pouring from their foreheads. There’s an elaborately painted false door for the ba soul to come and go.
The wall closest to the tomb shaft opening is a depiction of the offerings being carted in for Djehutynakht, and a scribe recording them on his scroll. The peret kheru—the offering formula—runs the length of the array of foods and gifts. Djehutynakht stands in all his glory in a garden of lotuses beneath a portico with faux painted granite pillars, with servants holding the nomarch’s sandals and his parasol. Beside him are his wife, three daughters, and two sons. One holds a fat basenji with a bell on its collar. Rusty, I try to make heads or tails of the hieroglyphs, murmuring to myself.
A noble and mayor…something…one whom the god loves, overseer of the eastern foreign lands, true of voice, Djehutynakht, son of Teti.
“smr-nswt,” I hear behind me. Wyatt is standing with his hands in his pockets, watching me stagger through the transliteration. “Friend of the king,” he deciphers. “It’s pretty amazing, right?”
I nod. “I remember seeing some of these themes before in other tombs at this necropolis.”
“Well, it’s like when you move to the suburbs and everyone has the same furniture because they’re all keeping up with the Joneses.”
“Or the Boston Djehutynakhts,” I suggest.
He laughs. “Ready to earn your keep?”
He’s already moving through the tomb, expecting me to follow. My eyes land on a hieroglyph beside Djehutynakht’s wife, Kem.
mry. Beloved.
“You’ll be making a paleography of the hieroglyphs near the burial shaft. They’ve been blocked by debris until now,” Wyatt tells me. He turns to Alberto, who is setting up his camera equipment. “She’s got Joe’s iPad; can you send her the photographs?”
“Already done,” Alberto says, his voice clipped.
I wonder again why he was so friendly when we first met, and now is formal and stiff.
Wyatt is alre
ady opening up the iPad and scrolling through photographs from different angles of the wall of the tomb in front of me. He unclips the Apple pencil and traces one of the hieroglyphs, just like he showed me yesterday in the Dig House. “After you finish, Alberto will digitally create a 3D model of the wall, with your drawings included. Don’t forget to save your work.”
Again, I’m amazed at how much has changed since I was last working in a tomb at Deir el-Bersha. In 2003, after we traced on Mylar, we would photocopy the drawing on a slightly reduced scale, and then correct all our mistakes by checking the black and white copy against the actual inscription. It took several seasons to finish a single inscription, and Wyatt and I had to compare notes to make sure our art was correct: What do you think might be in this damage? What do you think is the shape of this sign? To have the iPad, where a tracing can be immediately corrected, is a gift.
I wedge myself into a narrow space between the wall and Abdou, who is speaking in Arabic to a worker inside the tomb shaft who hefts one of the rubber baskets full of debris. “Any questions, ask Alberto,” Wyatt says.
I make a mental note to not have any questions.
Abdou edges past me to climb down the ladder into the shaft. A moment later, I hear him calling for the Mudir. “Duty calls,” Wyatt says. He sets a foot on the first rung of the ladder, turning back to me at the last minute. “Make sure you notate where each inscription is in the whole of the tomb,” he instructs, and he disappears into the tomb shaft.
Wyatt never cared about the location and placement of inscriptions before, in relation to the entirety of the tomb. It’s another reminder that now, he’s signed on to my theories.
I touch the tip of the digital pencil to the iPad screen and watch a black line materialize. When it’s too thick, I can redo it with the touch of a button. I enlarge the photographs to the point of graininess, and begin to etch pixel by pixel.
