Wyatt begins doodling on a folded piece of paper towel. “Chaos isn’t such a bad place,” he says, and he excuses himself to go to the bathroom.
On the napkin, he has drawn the hieroglyphic signs that writenun.
Chaotic waters,I translate, surprised that I can still decipher this. It could be referring to rain, or it could be referring to inundation. It can be positive, like when the Nile floods and waters the crops. Or it can be devastating, and demolish a city. Ancient Egyptians believed that the first and most necessary ingredient in the universe was chaos. It could sweep you away, but it was also the place from which all things start anew.
—
BECAUSE THEDIGHouse is not full of grad students as it would be during a true season, there is space for me. Harbi sets up a room down the hall from where I stayed fifteen years ago. When I step inside, there is a clean Disney Princess mattress on the bed frame, and a stack of folded white sheets. A flat pillow sits, thin-lipped, at the head of the bed. Someone has found me a tiny tube of toothpaste. The clothes I arrived in are folded neatly on the nightstand.
“Thank you,” I tell Harbi. I sit down as he closes the door behind himself, and run my palm over Cinderella and Prince Charming, Beauty and the Beast, Aurora and Prince Phillip, Ariel and Prince Eric. All these happily ever afters.
I snap the fitted sheet over the mattress, erasing them. A small cloud of dust rises as I make the bed, and I cough a little as I lie down and stare at the ceiling.
There’s a water mark in the shape of Ohio, and I wonder if the pipes burst at some point. When I had been here during the season, we’d trudge back to the Dig House and race to be the first to take a shower before the electricity cut out, gingerly stepping into the stall because the water was so brutally hot—you could actually see the fire when the heater turned on in the boiler. Shaving my legs had been physically painful, and I could remember waving the razor in the air to cool it down before setting it on my skin. The water spread all over the floor, so you’d have to squeegee it to the drain before relinquishing the bathroom to the next person.
Then I would sit with the pottery specialists as they sifted through buckets of curated sand, talking to the younger grad students who tried to put broken sherds together like a three-dimensional puzzle; or I’d pass time with the bone specialists going through the huge backlog of material in the magazine. Excavation is often fast, but analysis is slow.
Since there was no television, in the evenings Dumphries would do dramatic readings aloud from a Jackie Collins novel. I remember how it wasn’t until I came to Egypt for a dig with him that I began to think of him as human, rather than as a demigod. In close proximity, you couldn’t help but see someone’s eccentricities and flaws—the way Dumphries took six sugars in his morning coffee or snored loud enough to wake Osiris, or how he giggled when he read the worderectioninHollywood Wives.
When I came to Egypt each season, I’d brought the fattest books I could find, hoping to make my entertainment last. My first season was Russian lit, my second season was David Foster Wallace. In 2003, I was reading fantasy.
One afternoon, Wyatt poked his head into my room as I was lying on my bed with one of my novels. “What are you doing?” he asked.
I didn’t even let my eyes flicker from the page. “Skydiving,” I said.
“Science fiction?” he asked, looking at the cover.
“Fantasy.”
“There’s a difference?”
I didn’t answer, hoping he would just go away.
“What’s it about?” Wyatt asked, coming in and sitting on the edge of the bed.
It was a love story, but I wasn’t about to give Wyatt that weapon. “Two brothers,” I told him. “One who is raised to be a king, and one who finds outin this chapterthat he’s the true heir.” Wyatt didn’t take the hint. Instead, he plucked the book out of my hand. “Hey!”
He scrolled through it, his eyes lighting on the paragraphs I’d underlined. I always did that in books, when authors found ways to say the things I never could. “ ‘You can plan for something your whole life, and still get taken by surprise,’ ” he mused. “ ‘And you can experience an earthquake and deal with it like you were born to have the ground vanish beneath you.’ ” He cut me a glance. “I guess that’s the moral of your story. You never know.”
He had tossed the book lightly at me, but it was so thick that when it landed on my belly, I grunted. He was gone before I could ask him what he meant.
Now I don’t have any novels for diversion. I could finish reading Wyatt’s dissertation, I suppose. Given the fact that he’s just hired me, it wouldn’t be a bad idea.
I pad through the Dig House, which is dark and empty. I can hear tinny radio music in the personal living quarters of the Egyptians, and smell the faint scent of smoke. In the library, the stack of books I had set on the floor is exactly where I left them. I slide Wyatt’s bound dissertation under my arm.
“What are you doing?”
The unexpected voice makes me jump. I turn around to find Alberto staring at me, his hands in his pockets.
“Finding something to read?” I say, but even I hear the question mark in my own words, as if I’m guilty of something.
Alberto’s eyes are dark and assessing. He looks at the book tucked under my arm and then back at my face. “So you’re on the payroll now.”
“Well. Sort of. I mean, I don’t expect to get paid. That’s not why I’m here.”
Then why are you?He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t have to.
There is something unsettling about the silence he’s wrapped me in, like the unwitting fly caught in the spider’s web. I know he’s uncomfortable with me being here. I just can’t figure out why, unless it’s because he thinks I will slow down their progress.
