He opens his mouth as if to say something, and then snaps it shut. “Alberto,” he calls, “I need your help.”
I hear their voices, muffled and argumentative. The only words I can make out areunqualifiedanddaily. Wyatt says, “I’m still the director.” In Italian:Avere gli occhi foderati di prosciutto.Then footsteps recede.
Ten minutes later, I am wearing a pair of Alberto’s pants. Of the archaeologists at the Dig House he is the one closest to my size, slim-hipped and only a few inches taller than I am. I belt the waist tight and roll the cuffs, and then Wyatt gives me one of his own long-sleeved cotton shirts. It’s fresh from the laundry, but it still smells like him. “Here,” he announces unceremoniously, and he dumps a pair of boots in front of me as I am still fixing the sleeves of his shirt so they don’t hang over my fingers. They are women’s boots, size eight, a perfect fit. I wonder whom they belong to, but I do not have the right to ask.
From a table near the doorway, Wyatt grabs a hat—battered, with a stiff brim that won’t bend in the incessant wind. “Take one,” he says, gesturing to the collection: panama hats and bucket hats and baseball caps with long tails to keep the sun from blistering the back of your neck. I grab a straw cowboy hat and jam it on my head, hurrying to match Wyatt’s long strides as he walks to a Land Rover that is covered in a film of grit. It feels strange to sit in the passenger seat; as a graduate student, I always had to walk. I watch Wyatt expertly shift gears as we jostle over the pitted road that leads from the Dig House into the desert.
The local office of antiquities is in Mallawi, but the main permissions are processed in Minya, so we drive back exactly the way I have come. The ride is bone-jarring, dusty, sweaty. The cracked leather seat is so hot it feels like the sun is a cat curled between us. I keep leaning forward to peel my sweaty shirt away from my body. Behind us, a billowing cloud of dirt erupts like a plume.
After about fifteen minutes of silence, I offer an olive branch. “I didn’t know if I’d find you here in August.”
“And yet here you are,” Wyatt said.
I turn my attention to the road again, unsure of where to go from there.
“Alberto and Joe seem nice.”
I once read an article about the differences between how men and women converse—how men prefer side-by-side conversation, because face-to-face feels confrontational; how women prefer talking face-to-face to read all the nonverbal cues. The article suggested broaching difficult subjects with your husband in the car, instead of over the dinner table, for this reason.
The author of this article clearly had not ridden in a Land Rover with Wyatt.
He glances at me, his wrist balanced on the steering wheel. “I’m sorry, are we doing small talk now?”
“I’m just trying to have a conversation.”
“You didn’t seem to be eager to have one earlier.”
“It’s hard for me—”
“Do you not think this is hard for me, too?” Wyatt interrupts. His words feel like knives being thrown, pinning me back against the seat.
I close my eyes. “I’m sorry.”
Even without looking, I can feel him staring at me. The air feels heavier. And then, as if someone has broken the glass of a window during an inferno, I can suddenly breathe. Wyatt is once again facing the road, his features smooth. “The reason I’m here when it’s hotter than hell is because the semester ended in May,” he says, as if half our conversation hadn’t taken place. “Then there was Ramadan, and I’ve got to excavate this tomb before classes start back up again mid-September.”
There’s additional information he isn’t sharing—maybe it has to do with funding. Maybe he can’t get any more without the proof that he has found a new tomb with an intact coffin. “You’re lucky you didn’t go into academia,” he adds. “Although I imagine social work isn’t a lark, either.”
He says it gently; it’s a peace offering. “I’m not a social worker,” I say. “I’m an end-of-life doula.”
“A…what?”
“I take care of people who are terminal.”
“So your clients are dying to meet you,” Wyatt replies.
I laugh. “You could say that. It wasn’t as huge a transition of career as I figured it would be. In a way, I’ve been studying death since I was eighteen.”
He glances at me. “Likewise,” he says frankly.
“And you? Still focused on the Book of Two Ways?”
Wyatt nods. “The translation we used to use? It fell by the wayside in 2017 with a new publication. Turns out there are mostly two independent Books of Two Ways, and even when the spells overlap, there are big variations in the text.”
Now he is talking to me not like an enemy, not like a refugee, but like a colleague. I catch my breath, feeling something I haven’t in a long while: the popping in my brain that used to happen when I listened to a stellar lecture or when I cracked a puzzle in translation.
“So the old translation was wrong.”
“Well, it wasn’tright,” Wyatt answers. “Oh! And remember how you were always livid because the Pyramid Texts that were found in the coffins were never printed in the Coffin Text publications?”
