by Jodi Picoult
A week after Brian brought up the idea of getting married over a pot roast and mashed potatoes, we sat in the waiting room. I held Meret, and Kieran sat between Brian and me. If the other people in the grotty, gray waiting room of the town hall were judging me, they had their own issues: there was a couple that didn’t look old enough to procreate, much less marry; and a woman in a sleek white suit who was holding a bouquet of sweet peas and whispering to a man old enough to be her grandfather.
Brian took one look at her and turned white. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and he bolted.
“Nice job,” Kieran said. “You scared him off.”
As it turned out, Brian had run down the street to a convenience store, because he realized that I should have flowers. He came back with a Cheeto-orange rose glued to a little plastic sign: GET WELL SOON. “It was all they had,” he apologized.
He also got me a scratch ticket.
We had agreed that we would write up something simple—vows that would make this seem a little more special than just signing a piece of paper on a Tuesday afternoon. But when it came time, Brian turned pink from his neck to the tips of his ears. “I didn’t…I didn’t think we were going to say them out loud…”
What else do you do with vows? “That’s okay,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter.”
Really, no one else’s words mattered but my own. I smiled at Kieran, who was juggling Meret in his arms while Brian and I held hands. I looked Brian in the eye and promised to honor and cherish him. When we walked out into the waiting room after the ceremony, people cheered. It was like the DMV of Love.
Afterward, we went to an Italian restaurant. We took turns going to the bathroom so that Kieran wasn’t left alone at the table. In the restroom, I took out the vows I had written but not spoken during the ceremony—in hieroglyphs, and in English. From my Yale class notes I had copied a piece of a New Kingdom poem called “The Flower Song”:
Hearing your voice is sweet as pomegranate wine!
I live but to hear it!
If I could gaze upon you with every glance,
It would be more beneficial to me than eating or drinking.
I threw them out with the towel I used when I washed my hands.
When Brian went to the bathroom, I used a dime to rub off the scratch ticket.
We didn’t win.
That night after Kieran went to bed, Brian touched me as if I were made of glass, as if moving too quickly or holding me too close would make me disappear. Afterward, while he lay on his side and stroked the parabola of my shoulder, he gave me a piece of paper.
“These are my vows,” he said.
“I thought you couldn’t write them.”
“I couldn’t speak them,” he corrected.
9x−7i>3(3x−7u)
I was used to Brian talking about scientific concepts way over my head. It didn’t look familiar, like the vector for acceleration or the theory of relativity. “Am I supposed to know what this is?”
“Solve for i.”
I sat up, letting the sheet fall away from me. I rummaged in the nightstand, where I couldn’t find a pen but did manage to unearth a crayon.
9x−7i >3(3x−7u)
9x−7i>9x−21u
“Now what?”
Brian reached over and wrote −9x on each side of the equation.
−7i>−21u
Solve for i, I thought.
Then I smiled.
i<3u
Just before I fell asleep in Brian’s arms, I asked, “Do you ever wonder if the reason your grandmother had to die, and my mother got sick, was so that we’d find each other?”
He hugged me closer, speaking against my skin. “I would have found you, no matter what.”
I had fallen asleep on my wedding night wondering what might have brought a physicist to Egypt, had my mother not died, and if Brian had to cross paths with me there. Or what might have made an Egyptologist seek out a physicist to learn more about the past.
Now, in the heat of Egypt, I pull out the burner phone that Wyatt has given me. It is almost 7:00 P.M. in Boston. The service is spotty out here in Middle Egypt, but Brian picks up on the first ring.
“Hello?” he says in the flat voice he saves for telemarketers, for phone numbers he does not recognize.
“Brian, it’s me.”
“Dawn,” he breathes. “Dawn? Are you all right? Where are you—”
“I texted Meret. I told her to tell you I was okay.” I wince, realizing how stupid this sounds. “I didn’t want you to worry.”
“Jesus Christ, Dawn. It’s been days. You said you’d be back soon…I thought you meant right away.”
I swallow. “I thought I meant that, too.”
There is a scuffle, and then quiet, as if Brian has shut himself inside a closet. “I don’t understand,” he says, his voice running the ragged edge of panic. “Please. Come home.”
I rub my temple. “I can’t, yet.”
There are tears pushing behind his words. “Is everything okay?”
My throat feels hot and swollen. If being here is right, then why does it hurt so much to listen to Brian?
There is a soft knock just as I say Yes into the phone.
The door of my room opens. “Dawn,” Wyatt says, unraveled. “What you said upstairs—” He stops, seeing the phone pressed to my ear, realizing that my response was not to him.
“Who is that?” Brian asks.
I do not take my eyes from Wyatt’s face. From the stiffness of his body, I know he has guessed who I might be talking to.
“It’s nobody,” I whisper, and Wyatt’s expression shutters.
“I have to go,” I say into the phone, but the connection has been lost.
Wyatt and I are frozen in a sick tableau, unsure of what either of us is supposed to say or do now. He came to me because he couldn’t sleep. I called Brian for the same reason.
What does that even mean?
I slide the phone under my thigh. “I was…calling home,” I tell him.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he says, with a formality that feels like the moat around a castle. He bows his head; the door closes with a click.
I was, I think.
I am.
* * *
—
WYATT IS ALREADY gone by 4:30 A.M., having left for the site to greet Mostafa and to organize the day’s work. I wonder if he slept at all.
I wonder if, like me, he was running the lines of last night’s conversation through his head.
The atmosphere is silent, but electric. The rest of us rush through our breakfast and pack our gear and hurry to the tomb. Today is the day no one wants to be late.
At the site I see Wyatt almost immediately, standing in the glow from a generator-powered lamp. He is bent over paperwork that Mostafa holds, but he looks up when he hears us all enter. “It’s about time,” he says shortly, even though we are fifteen minutes earlier than usual. He begins to bark out orders, reinforcing the jobs he outlined last night. My name is the last one he calls. “Dawn,” he says. “You’re with me.”
I give a quick nod to Mostafa and fall into step behind Wyatt, who is already moving. He doesn’t look back at me, doesn’t speak.
All business then, as though last night never happened.
But this is not the time or the place for that conversation, and anyway, I am the one who cut Wyatt off last night. If he is treating me like a research assistant, like a grad student lucky enough to be in the distant orbit of this discovery, I have no one to blame but myself.
Wyatt stops near the safety fence that has been constructed around the mouth of the shaft. Several local workmen are speaking rapidly in Arabic, pointing and arguing over the best way to secure the ends of a long rope ladder. The rungs curl into
the dark pit like the tongue of a viper. Because of the low ceiling of the tomb chapel, it isn’t possible to angle a metal ladder down the shaft, and this is the alternative. Wyatt easily climbs over the wooden barrier, bracing his hips on the inside. I watch him tug on the rope and then hook one boot and the other, heading down. When his head is level with the floor of the tomb chapel, he glances up at me. “Problem?” he asks.
I shake my head and climb over the safety fence.
I wait until the rope ladder goes slack, which means Wyatt has reached the bottom.
His voice floats up to me. “The chamber seems undisturbed,” he says.
I step onto the first rope rung, feeling it swing under my weight. I look at the two men who are holding the stakes in place. The shaft leading down to the burial chamber is about eighteen feet deep, and fairly narrow. I take a deep breath and begin to crawl beneath the surface of the earth, willing them to not let me fall.
It is like sliding down the parched throat of the world. The deeper I go, the darker it is. Wyatt’s headlamp flickers at the base of the shaft, a pinprick I’m driving toward. As the light falls away above me, I imagine the walls are contracting, that I’m being swallowed.
Maybe halfway down, the ladder slips.
I give a small shriek and grab on to the rope and feel my shoulder scrape against the shaft. Wyatt yells in Arabic, and the rope goes taut again. “Ana asif!” I hear above me—a fervent apology.
My shoulder is bleeding, I think. I don’t even have enough room to bend my arm and touch it to see.
“Dawn?” Wyatt calls.
“Yeah,” I say, my heart hammering, my palms slick. “Be right there.”
But I don’t move.
The shaft at this level is only slightly wider than my hips. What if the ladder falls completely? What if there isn’t enough air for both me and Wyatt by the time I get to the bottom? What if—
“Dawn,” Wyatt says, “I want you to listen to me.”
“All ears,” I grind out.
“Take one more step down.”
I give a tiny shake of my head, and my boot slips. I hear loose limestone rubble strike the bottom of the shaft, Wyatt curses as grit hits his face.
“Did you ever hear about Archie Hall?” he asks.
“No,” I say. I force myself to set my foot down one more rung. I wait for Wyatt to respond.
“He was one of the epigraphers for U Chicago in the sixties or seventies,” Wyatt says, as if we are chatting over coffee, instead of practically being buried alive. “Actually, I can’t believe you’ve never heard of him. What kind of Griffin are you, anyway?”
Another shaky step. “Phoenix,” I tell him. “Our mascot was the Phoenix.”
“Of course. Anyway, Hall was transcribing an inscription in a temple—Karnak, or maybe Medinet Habu, I can’t remember. Instead of climbing up and down the ladder to move it to the next spot on the wall he needed to read, he’d hold on to the top rungs and hop it horizontally, like a giant pair of stilts.”
Step. And step again. The toe of my boot nudges the stone, and some more limestone powder falls.
“Dawn?”
“Still here,” I say.
“So. Hall didn’t realize the ladder was set up on a column, and at one point when he hopped, the ladder dropped a foot.”
I pause in my climb. “Why the hell would you tell me this right now?”
“Hall broke both heels crashing through the rungs of the ladder,” he says blithely.
I feel like I’m breathing through a reed.
“What’s the punch line?” Wyatt asks.
“I don’t know.”
I take one more step, and feel his hand close over my calf. It is sure and steady and warm, and I let him guide me until I am on solid ground.
Wyatt angles his headlamp so that it doesn’t blind me. “The punch line is: What was he doing wearing his heels in the temple?”
There’s barely enough room for us to both fit. “All right?” he murmurs.
“All right,” I say.
We are pressed up against each other from chest to ankle. Awkwardly we shift until I am behind him, my front to his back. If he crouches down, there is a little more space—this is the bit that had to be reinforced with timbers over the past few days. Beyond that is the burial chamber itself, which is blocked at the end by loosely stacked limestone blocks.
“I need light,” he orders, and I do my best to shine my own headlamp in his direction as he crouches down and curls his fingers around the edge of the limestone. He grunts, and his shirt pulls tight across his shoulders as he struggles to dislodge the block. I watch his spine twist, his back flex with effort. I am just about to suggest we call up for a crowbar when the rock gives an inch. Thousands of years breathe toward us, a hot, dry gasp.
He makes a hole big enough to accommodate his own body, adjusts his headlamp, and begins to crawl through the narrow rock tunnel. I follow at his heels. Stones bite into my palms and my spine scrapes along the top of the channel. It is tight and, blessedly, short. Wyatt stops moving, filling my line of sight. “Can you see anything?” I whisper.
For a long moment, Wyatt is silent. Then he responds, the words a nod to Howard Carter, when he had first peeked into the burial chamber of Tutankhamun, and was asked the same question by Lord Carnarvon. “Yes,” he says. “Wonderful things.”
“Is there a coffin?”
He nods. “And it’s intact.”
He crawls from the tunnel into a slightly larger room of the rock-cut tomb. His headlamp illuminates the wooden box, taking up nearly all the floor space. Its surface is pale with years of lime dust. Three models sit on top of the wooden planks, equally dusty, with bright paint peeking through underneath. There seems to be a line of decorative hieroglyphs on the lid of the exterior coffin beneath the light fall of powder—symbols that justify the fifteen years of Wyatt’s search:
Djehutynakht.
* * *
—
I AM DYING to know what’s in that coffin, as is everyone else, but documenting the architecture of the tomb is the first task. Using classical methods—like the ones done when I was in grad school—would take a significant amount of time. The antiquities director gets a peek inside, and then Alberto and I swap places in the tiny tomb so that he and Wyatt can come up with a basic planimetry. Using a laser distance meter and goniometers, they draw the plan on an iPad. Alberto runs the scans while Wyatt, above, calculates the depth and orientation of the tomb on a map. For several hours, I serve as the runner between Alberto and Wyatt whenever there’s a glitch, and at the end of our work, we have a full three-dimensional reconstruction of the burial chamber. Only then can individual pieces be moved by the Egyptian conservator, Safiya, who logs and packs them to be lifted out of the burial chamber. It’s painstaking, celebratory work.
The ceiling of the burial chamber is only about 1.5 meters high. The space between the coffin and the wall of the chamber is so narrow that I’m the only one who can squeeze to the far end to see it and to brush off the limestone powder.
In addition to a lid, the exterior coffin has five sides—two long, two short, and the floor. The sides are beveled and fastened with dowels and copper ribbons; the top edges are pressed flush in a butt joint but the bottom is notched in a rabbet joint, and secured with more dowels and copper through the battens. There’s a reason it’s lasted four thousand years. The wooden box has one horizontal line of brightly painted hieroglyphs on all four sides, which gives all of Djehutynakht’s titles. The only other paint on the exterior is a pair of udjat eyes facing east, although there may well be more detailed art on the interior walls that we can’t see yet, with the inner coffin nestled tight inside. There isn’t a treasury of gold, but there are offering figures and models stacked on top of the exterior coffin. The canopic chest has fallen off a limestone shelf onto the floor.
I spend hours huddled in the back of the chamber, looking at the models—the wooden carvings of a funeral procession led by a man in a kilt and followed by three slender women carrying wine, grain, and a black-and-cream painted offering box; a large funerary boat carved from a single piece of wood, its rowers attached by pegs and its oars remarkably intact; a kitchen boat that would have sailed with an official up and down the Nile on government business. The coffin is all about Djehutynakht’s death, but these models are life as he knew it—his work and government responsibilities; the family and friends who would grieve him.
I realize with a little shock that this snapshot of Djehutynakht is no different from the clients I have now, who want to make sure they’re ready for what comes next, but also want to remember who they have been.
* * *
—
THREE DAYS AFTER the burial chamber has been opened, the models have been removed and the coffin can be opened. The local workers scamper up and down the rope ladder, setting up extension cords and lights that run from the generator outside the tomb. Its noise is deafening, and I watch Wyatt cover his ears. “My mother used to say if your left ear rings, it means someone you love is talking about you,” I shout. “If it’s your right ear, someone wishes you evil.”
“What if it’s both ears?” Wyatt asks.
I grin. “Then you have a migraine.”
We are standing at the top of the shaft, drowned out by the noise of the generator as Alberto moves around the burial chamber by himself taking photographs of the coffin from multiple angles. Omar, the inspector, trusts him enough to be there alone. His light source is a battery pack that flashes every time he takes a picture, and with each snap, the photograph instantly appears on the iPad that Wyatt holds.
