“Are you guys…arm wrestling?” she asks.
“No,” Brian replies, as if this is ridiculous. “We’re holding hands.”
Which is equally ridiculous.
All three of us start laughing, and even though I am still bleeding and my thumb is throbbing, I can’t remember the last time I have felt this good.
—
MY FIRST EXPERIENCEwith death involved a dog, a black and white springer spaniel named Dudley my parents had before I was born. Dudley wasn’t happy unless he was pressed along the length of you, his nose burrowed into your elbow or neck or belly. He was my playmate when I didn’t have anyone else, and I would string ropes of plastic pearls around his neck and clip earrings onto his long ears, dressing him up for tea parties where I served him water in a tiny, tiny cup he struggled to lap with his long pink tongue. He slept at the foot of my bed and he waited for me at the front door, his entire body shimmying like a tractor trailer going sideways when he saw the school bus pull up to the curb. I made him birthday cakes out of peanut butter and rice every year. When my father was deployed, I sobbed into his fur, so that my mother wouldn’t have to hear me. He was the kind of dog whose heart was too big for his own body, and so he continuously offered it up to me.
When I was eleven, I woke up one night to find Dudley standing in the dark on the carpet in front of the bed, just peeing. He knew better; I could see in his eyes that he didn’t even quite understand what was happening to him. I mopped up the mess and didn’t tell my mother. I knew, even then, that I probably wouldn’t like what she had to say.
She found out on her own, by stepping into a wet patch when she was putting away my laundry. When I came home from school that day, she had already taken Dudley to the vet. I burst into tears.It’s okay to be scared,my mother told me.
When we found out that he had bladder cancer and a massive tumor blocking his urethra, I asked my mother what would happen to him. I asked if I could come when she brought him back to the vet to be put to sleep. The vet did a double take when he saw me waiting in the car with Dudley. I sat in the backseat while Dudley snuggled close enough to get under my skin, and I fed him a cookie while the vet gave him a sedative. He fell asleep forever with my fingers combing through his fur.
My mother didn’t try to rush me. For once, there were no superstitions to obey. She waited until I nodded at her, and then she let the vet carry Dudley’s body inside. Instead of getting into the front seat of the car, though, she slipped into the back with me.It’s okay,she said,to be sad.
The thing about death is that we’re all terrified of it happening, and we’re devastated when it does, and we go out of our way to pretend that neither of these things is true.
—
THAT DAY, WHENI go to visit Win, she has a surprise for me. Sitting across her lap is a piece of framed Egyptian art on papyrus. “I’ve had this forever,” she says, “but I have no idea what it actually means. I just liked the guy with green skin.”
Osiris. “It’s from the Book of the Dead,” I tell her. “The Egyptians called it the Book of Going Forth by Day, which makes much more sense. It’s all about how the deceased can get to the afterlife. This painting is a reproduction of one found in the tomb of Ani, in the New Kingdom.”
The Book of Going Forth by Day contained two hundred spells, many illustrated, but tombs and papyri could curate selections, from only a few to as many as the tomb owner could afford. It was sort of like picking your favorite Bible verses to be buried with. They were written on the linen shrouds of mummies, on bandages, coffins, scarabs,shabtistatuettes, tomb walls, and papyri. Some were straightforward. Some were specific—like Spell 100, which stated that the words were to be pronounced over a certain design to be drawn on a clean unused sheet of papyrus with a powder of green clays mixed with water. Onlythencould the deceased enter Re’s solar bark in the afterlife.
“This scene is Spell 125, and it’s really famous,” I tell Win. “It’s where Ani’s heart is being weighed.”
In the image, the deceased is being led into the Hall of Two Truths to have his heart balanced on a set of scales against the feather of Ma’at—truth. This scene—Judgment Day, really—was the one spell that was never found in the Book of Two Ways. There were definitely snippets of Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts that evolved into the New Kingdom’s Weighing of the Heart, but I hadn’t stayed in the field long enough to find that connective tissue.
“Why is he green?” Win asks, tapping on Osiris’s white crown.
“He has a whole mythological history of regeneration after his death—it’s a long story. His green skin represents fertility and rebirth. He’s got a divine beard—see that curve at the bottom?—and he’s mummiform. The lady behind him is Isis—you can tell by the throne on her head. She’s Osiris’s wife, and she resurrected him after he died, and protected his heir, Horus. She also helps the dead make that transition.”
“So she’s like you.”
I laugh a little. “Well, I mean, maybe. But I have no plans to weigh your heart.”
“What happens after it’s weighed?”
“Those who are true of voice—innocent—get eternal life.”
I run my finger over the hieroglyphs, reading from right to left, the direction in which they face. The spell starts in red—it’s called a rubric—and the signs themselves are in cursive. “Spell for entering the Broad Hall…”
Win looks stunned. “You can read those?”
I touch each of the signs, translating as I go. “The red mouth is the letterr,and it meansspell.”
Suddenly I am back in a desert, grit on the nape of my neck as I carefully ink hieroglyphs onto a slippery curl of Mylar.
“The bird plus hill plus walking legs isaq,which means to enter.”
I imagine Harbi scrambling to set a ladder up for Dumphries, who is complaining about the heat like a baby. I see Wyatt standing on the other side of the tomb, his teeth flashing in a smile over the shared joke.
“The quail chick, folded cloth, circle with lines, and loaf are—wesekhet—which meansbroad hall.”
