“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 thoughtIwas 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’tit?”
—
IDO NOTknow 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 termraise yourselfsignifies specifically what a mummy does—as in awaken—so here Reisa mummy; here Reisthe 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—”
