He marches up the stairs, and into the office files. He flicks until he finds a card with Miss Klein’s address neatly typed, the first version care of her father, that one crossed out, and the new one typed below it, a rooming house for unmarried, respectable women. He stares at the card for a long time. He opens a book kept in the shelf beside his father’s desk, takes out a bottle resting in a carved cave in its bindings, and drinks a slug of Canadian whiskey.
He wipes his mouth, stows the contraband back in its safe, and goes out into the freezing wilds of Chicago to search for hothouse flowers.
Miss Klein is in her room, unwrapping the mummy, gently. It’s dripped a little, where it’s warmed against her body. She’s marched back down the stairs to the kitchen and fetched a pot of boiling water for tea, and now the mummy has had some through a small opening in the bandages, lapping like a kitten fed with a dropper.
“Sanctuary,” Miss Klein keeps repeating to herself. She’s not at all sure what she’s done. “Respect for the dead.”
But that is not quite what this is. Dead isn’t this. She considers feeling anxious, then decides that anxious is beside the point. Her heart pounds. Her skin feels prickled. Her mouth waters. Her fingers are sticky.
The mummy’s skin, crystallized in the cold, warms nearer to the radiator, and becomes pliant. The mummy is like a grape, or a balloon full of syrup. There is something brittle about it, but it’s the sort of brittle that anyone would know needs sucking.
“I was swimming in honey,” says the mummy. “I ate only honey, until I was made of it. My heart was with me, kept in a jar of honey. But that, I gave away long ago.”
“To whom did you give it?” Miss Klein asks, but the mummy will not say. “Is it in a museum, or is it still underground?”
The mummy is half-unwrapped now, parts of its flesh visible, smooth and glowing, seeping with sweetness.
“I was lonely,” says the mummy. “I came to be of use.”
It beckons Miss Klein. “Unwrap yourself,” it says.
Shira Klein flushes. She’s never taken off her clothing in front of anyone but her sisters. A drop of honey runs down her throat, left from where the mummy was resting.
Miss Klein unbuttons the same long black dress she wore to her father’s funeral. She stands barefoot, dressed in her only concession to modernity, a set of the thinnest triangles of black silk, each of them embroidered with flowers. They were a trousseau at one point, and she hand stitched their borders in preparation for a marriage.
The mummy is recumbent and careless.
The mummy offers itself to the tip of Miss Klein’s tongue.
Five flights below, Chet Savor waits, clutching a bundle of funereal lilies.
“To be of use,” he murmurs to himself. “Seeking employment.”
But Miss Klein refuses to come down. She does not respond to the bell. Chet is forced to leave the lilies as a delivery. He scrawls a note in his lovely pen. It bleeds brown ink onto the paper.
“Dearest,” the note says. Chet stalls. “Dearest.”
He underlines it twice, Dearest, and adds three exclamation points. The pinched woman at the desk looks at him.
“I hope you don’t imagine Miss Klein to be that sort.”
“Of course not,” he says. There’s something odd in him, something he doesn’t understand. He feels shaky. “They’re not for Miss Klein. They’re for her friend. The one staying with her.”
The woman looks harder at him, and sniffs the air. “This is not that sort of establishment,” she says. “Single ladies only. You, sir, would do well to rinse your mouth of whiskey, before you encounter anyone else who might report you for public disorder. You might also do well to button the top of your shirt.”
Chet feels for the buttons, but they’re gone.
The rooming house woman smashes the lilies and the love note into a wastebin.
He flees into the street, and as he stands, trying to imagine which of the windows might belong to Miss Klein, he hears a cry of rapture coming from the building, a singing spiral of bliss. He can’t tell which window it comes from. He stands helpless in the ice storm, looking up, hearing again and again, the cry, the moan, the gasping delight of someone in the thrall of someone else.
“What in heaven’s name did you think I meant, Chet?” his father says in exasperation. He’s just off the train, scarcely taken off his coat, not even unloaded his cases full of candies, and he’s already demanded to see the mummy. “What’ve you done with my mummy? I told you to be wary when you opened it.”
“Miss Klein took it,” Chet says, and bites his inner cheeks savagely. He tastes blood. It helps, a little. “She’s been out sick for a week, and I’ve been to her rooming house over and over again, with no success.”
“Well, you’ll have to fetch it back. The mummy’s a volunteer, you know. It came to be of use.”
Chet wants to strangle his father. “Of use,” he says. “What use can you mean? Did you hire it to be my secretary? It didn’t care to be. Miss Klein’s absconded with it and taken it off to her den of sin.”
“Miss Klein is incapable of sin,” says Chet’s father calmly. “As for the mummy, it’s mellified man. Old technique. Not usually found in Egypt, but the mummy tells me this is the ticket. It drank honey, ate honey, nothing but honey for a year before it died. It’s body mellified. It became honey, bones and blood and all.”
Chet thinks woefully of the sounds he’s heard coming out of Miss Klein’s window.
Chet’s father smacks his lips.
“Said that the last few weeks before it died, everything tasted sweet, and it nearly ate its own fingers. I’ll tell you, Chet, it cost me dear to get that mummy out of the country, but it’s worth its weight in whatever you got. Grind it up and it’s medicinal. A little dash into batter, and it’s the sweetest thing you ever tasted. Secret ingredients. It’s a fortune waiting to happen. We’re making a new candy bar. The mummy’s an ingredient. I sampled a little in Cairo. I’m too old for more, but the memory of it will last me. It wasn’t cheap, no, it wasn’t, but who needs cheap? Besides, the mummy wanted to leave town.”
“Whatever the mummy is,” Chet says, “The mummy isn’t mellified man. The mummy’s a woman.”
“How do you know? Have you checked?” asks Chet’s father, and raises an eyebrow at Chet, who has to look away.
The mummy is the sweetest thing, the dearest thing, and the mummy is in the possession of Miss Klein. There is only one thing to do. He doesn’t like it, but it will serve.
“Your secretary,” he says to his father.
“Miss Klein,” his father says. “Miss Klein, the lovely, the competent, the proper.”
“Shira Klein,” Chet counters. “She’s unmarried.”
“That’s true,” says Chet’s father. “By choice, as I understand it. Miss Klein is a real find.”
“I’ve decided to marry her,” Chet says.
His father looks at him. “I should have known.”
“She’ll do it,” says Chet, though there is an urgency inside him, a panic that she won’t. But the mummy won’t like it at the rooming house. The mummy will be cold.
“She’ll have to agree,” says Chet’s father. “And that isn’t likely. Tell her, though, that she’ll have to bring my mummy back. She can’t keep it locked up in the dark. That’s where I found it, in the dark, calling out that it was looking for light.”
And for just a moment, Chet’s father looks quite unlike himself. There’s a question in his cheekbone, a shifting tic. Chet looks at his dad. His dad looks back.
“How is mother? How is she finding India?” Chet asks, attempting to shame him.
“You can try your luck,” Chet’s father says. “You can try your luck, Chet. Maybe an old man wasn’t what that mummy was looking for. But I doubt it will be looking for you either.”
Chet’s father pops a green lolly into his mouth and sucks at it, ruminating. When he removes it, Chet sees that it contains a little insect o
f some kind, an earwig, stuck there like a ancient in amber.
Chet leaves his dad’s office and goes back to drafting his official letter, in which he reports Miss Klein to her rooming house for having a male visitor in her rooms. He encloses cigar ash and a rumpled shirt, procured from his own closet. He signs it “Anon.” and waits.
He is still waiting when Miss Klein comes down the five flights of stairs, her suitcase in one hand, the mummy in the other, curled into the crook of her arm. Miss Klein looks at Chet.
“I got your proposal,” she says. “It seems convenient at best, irritating at worst. I’ll still work at the factory. We’ll have separate rooms, of course.”
“Of course,” says Chet.
“If it’s no bother,” says the mummy, crooning, lolling against Miss Klein’s shoulder, “I’d like a hot drink. It’s cold here, and I’m crystallizing. I’ve been very cold in Chicago. Perhaps a fire? Perhaps a laprobe?”
Miss Klein turns her head, and Chet looks at Miss Klein’s cheekbone as she runs her tongue along a slice of the mummy’s jawline. Miss Klein is looking sleek. Her hair shines, and her skin glows.
The mummy moans, and Chet moans too. They drive directly to the courthouse. Miss Klein wears a wreath of white flowers. The mummy witnesses the wedding.
“I was lonely,” says the mummy. “I was in the dark, for a long, long time. They say the dead don’t dream, but I dreamed of this. I have a higher purpose.”
The mummy stirs its finger in a cup of boiling tea, and then offers it to Miss Klein to lick at until part of the fingertip is gone. It unwraps a bit more of its finger, and casually crumbles it into a dish. Miss Klein, her hair unbound, eats it.
The mummy looks at her and smiles beneath its wrappings.
The place where the bandages meet the mouth is always damp.
The oldest – and most splendid – traditions!
You’ll love BIT-U-MEN, a crunchy-munchy sweet treat!
Conveniently cut into pieces for sharing,
This treasure of a bar is the chewiest, mouth-meltiest confection,
perfect for young and old!
Almonds, nougat, honey, and special ingredients.
Squares of wax paper, cut precisely to fit, drifting from the wrapping section, along with labels, inked and drying. Orange and blue. Swooping letters. A picture of a hive, a border of bees. An eye lined in kohl, discreetly placed on the back.
The candy itself is vat-mixed, poured onto cold slabs, and then into molds, hot squares solidifying, soft but slightly resistant, texturally similar to a shoulderblade kissed through a chiffon dress. The bars are pale white-gold in color, peppered throughout with black.
“Bit-U-Men is an inaccurate name,” says Miss Klein, who has been doing research. “A mistranslation of mummification methods. The Arabic word for bitumen is mumiya. People thought it meant bitumen and mummy were the same thing. They thought bitumen was medicinal, and then they mistook it for medicine made of ground up mummy.”
She glances up from her book.
“I’m not saying they’re medicinal,” Chet says. He licks his fingertip where it’s touched one of the new candy bars. “I’m saying they’re commercial. Or my dad’s saying that.”
Miss Klein looks at him, her lips tight. “If people knew,” she says.
“People don’t need to know,” Chet says, and he sticks his finger wholly in his mouth. “Special ingredients. And the mummy is a volunteer.”
He can feel the remains of a Bit-U-Men square dissolving on his tongue. He’s brought a small jar of mellified man to the office, meant to shake into the batter for the new shipment of bars, but he’s already taken an entire greedy spoonful and eaten it in secret, door closed, his hands shaking.
Miss Klein sighs.
“The mummy is a volunteer,” she repeats. “Surely there are other mummies.”
“Not like this,” Chet says, and feels his stomach drop at the possibility of a shortage. Still, though, there is plenty left.
Chet listens from his room, his monogrammed robe tightly tied at the waist. Miss Klein’s hair is sometimes sticky. She smiles at breakfast. She dresses in her black, and goes into the office, and she takes dictation from Chet’s father who shows no sign of ceasing speaking.
One day, Chet looks at a letter and discovers that she’s not taking dictation at all. She’s writing a romance, a page at a time, sealing it into envelopes, and posting it to the far corners of the world.
All Chet wants is to have the mummy to himself, to gorge on its sweetness, but he is forced to take what the mummy gives him, a tiny piece here and there, crumbled on a breakfast biscuit. A lick occasionally at the corner of the mouth, the humorously quirked mouth, so dear and yet so cruel. Sometimes he hears the mummy moan, but never when he’s with it. Only Miss Klein makes the mummy cry out. Only the mummy makes Miss Klein gasp.
Neither Miss Klein nor Chet pretend interest in anything but the thing they share.
Chet looks at men dressed in their waistcoats as he strolls home from the factory. He looks at tight vests and at cuff buttons. He looks at wrists and forearms. He thinks about the mummy, and he swallows. The mellified man. Mellified woman. Mellified neither and both.
He looks at the sharp slant of the mummy’s jaw, the thin and wiry arms he sometimes sees laced around Miss Klein. He looks at the mummy and imagines it wearing a properly starched and pressed shirt, the vest buttoned. He finds another loose button on his own shirt, and tugs it impatiently into the crystal dish where he keeps all the unspooling buttons.
Sometimes he sees a man looking at him from across the park. He can smell honey wherever he goes, but when he looks back, at dark eyes, at a well-brushed hat, he thinks of the mummy at home. He can’t let go.
“Conversion,” says Chet’s father. “Bones to nougat. Blood to honey. We’re all sugar in the end,” he says, “you and me both, old boy, old boy,” and Chet twitches his collar studs out in annoyance. The company’s doing well. This is a white tie evening.
Bit-U-Men bars are shipping from side to side of the states, and the mummy sits peacefully in the chair at the end of the room, dressed in the usual bandages, white silk, this time, with beaded fringe. Part of the mummy is missing. The left arm. The other arm is decked in bangles, fat gilded things. Each bandaged finger wears a ring. The mummy’s mouth is revealed now, painted red. The lips are plump and drenched, and in the mummy’s mouth, there is the sweetest syrup.
Sometimes, the mummy stands up. Sometimes the mummy sings a line or two in a language no one living speaks. Chet knows what it means, though, he does. He sympathizes.
I was lonely in the dark.
There is a brass band. There is a trumpet. There is Miss Klein sitting beside the mummy, decked in cobalt silk, a string of ever-living scarab beetles around her throat, a gift from the mummy.
Here is Miss Klein sitting beside the mummy, leaning over to whisper to the mummy, adjusting the mummy’s diamond headband. Here is the mummy sweetening the punch with a drop of honey here, and one there, until Chet rushes over, and stops the mummy from giving the milk away for free.
It’s 1928, then ‘29.
Chet’s father spontaneously combusts while sitting on a train in Belgium. He bursts into flame, and runs out into the aisle, arms pinwheeling, skin shivering like paper rising up from a fire. No one can explain it, but Chet knows. Miss Klein knows. They look at the mummy. The mummy is quiet, but the mummy is often quiet. The mummy only shrugs.
“I was lonely in the dark,” says the mummy at last, sipping at hot tea, “but the dark was where I belonged. I don’t make the rules of religion. I gave my heart away and I’ll never find it, a honey heart in honey jar. Mr. Savor was there when the rock was pried up. He offered me passage to a new country.”
Chet imagines his father tromping into the tomb slightly behind the archeologists he’s bribed on candy earnings. He imagines his father running fingers over the drawings instructing him not to touch the sarcophagus. A drawing of bees. A drawi
ng of honey dripping from a comb. A drawing, no doubt, of something else, of punishments promised for those who’d thieve from the dead. But Chet knows the kind of man his father was, and he imagines his father moving the wrappings aside, convinced of his sway over sugar.
It’s 1932.
It’s in the papers. Hart Crane, son of a candyman, who sometimes signs his name Heart, and whose name was once Harold, kills himself jumping off the back of a boat, and Chet Savor’s poems aren’t worth publishing anyway. He’s stopped writing villanelles. One morning the mummy unexpectedly kisses him and he feels its sharp teeth on his tongue. He jerks back, but for a moment, he wants to lean in and have it over with.
The mummy reads a book in the upstairs library, an old book in a leather binding:
“That mummy is medicinal, the Arabian Doctor Haly delivereth and divers confirm; but of the particular uses thereof, there is much discrepancy of opinion. While Hofmannus prescribes the same to epileptics, Johan de Muralto commends the use thereof to gouty persons; Bacon likewise extols it as a stiptic: and Junkenius considers it of efficacy to resolve coagulated blood. Meanwhile, we hardly applaud Francis the First, of France, who always carried Mummia with him as a panacea against all disorders; and were the efficacy thereof more clearly made out, scarce conceive the use thereof allowable in physic, exceeding the barbarities of Cambyses and turning old heroes unto unworthy potions. Shall Egypt lend out her ancients unto chirurgeons and apothecaries, and Cheops and Psammiticus be weighed unto us for drugs? Shall we eat of Chamnes and Amosis in electuaries and pills, and be cured by cannibal mixtures? “
The mummy looks up, eyes black and wet as ever. The mummy has only one hand with two fingers left. The mummy is earless and missing slices of the rest of its body. The mummy doesn’t mind. This body has been around a long time.
1938, 1941. Airplanes over Europe. Marching. Guns. Sugar rationed, but in Chicago, there is one place to find sweetness.
The Book of the Dead Page 27
