The ladder Harbi sets up comes crashing down, and as I block it from falling on me with my hand, a piece of wood slivers into my skin.
“The two ostrich feathers,,are the two truths.”
Standing outside in the blistering sun, Wyatt reaches for my hand.Stop fidgeting,he says.You’re going to make it worse.
“Above the feathers are phonetic signs that say the same thing.”
His hand is warm. He digs a needle beneath the pad of my thumb, rooting for the splinter. There is a bead of blood on my thumb. Wyatt lifts the wound to his mouth and sucks it away. He doesn’t take his eyes off mine.
I stare down at the bandage from this morning’s knife injury, as if it has started bleeding fresh.
Win interrupts my reverie. “You arewastedas a death doula,” she says. “You could be teaching college classes!”
I shake my head, smiling. “I’ll be a lot more useful to you this way than I would be as a professor.”
“Do more!” She gestures toward another part of the painting, where a table behind Osiris has the names of the gods of the tribunal, and the hieroglyphs are in retrograde—they face to the right, but are read from left to right, in reverse, like some other religious spells from the Coffin Texts and the Book of Two Ways. “This part is the negative confession,” I tell Win. “The deceased denies forty-two ways he might have screwed up in life.” I point out the red arms with the palms facing down, the sign for negation, and the sparrow—which the Egyptians called ‘the bad bird,’ and which was a determinative for wrongdoing.I did no wrong.I did not tell lies.I didn’t fornicate with the fornicator.
“And here I thought the Egyptians were so sexually progressive.”
“Well, they were okay with premarital sex,” I say. “There’s no word for virgin in Ancient Egyptian.”
“How egalitarian.”
“Yeah, but there were conditions. You couldn’t have sex with someone married. Infidelity was grounds for divorce.”
“So that was the deal breaker,” Win muses. She flattens her hand on the edge of the artwork, tracing the border. “Would it be one for you?”
For a moment, I wonder how she has seen past the façade I’ve presented, to know so much about my private life. I haven’t even told her Brian’s name.
“I think there are lots of ways to be unfaithful that don’t involve fornicating with the fornicator,” Win murmurs, before I can even respond.
“That’s why there are forty-one other negative confessions,” I reply.
Win sets the frame down beside her on the couch. “So that was it? You said your confessions and you got through to the next round?”
“No. You said four times:I am pure, I am pure, I am pure, I am pure.And then you had to be given a lot of detailed knowledge, like how to answer the floor about the names of your feet before it would let you walk across it, and the titles of the doors in another room. There were instructions about what to wear during the judgment, too, and what to offer and where and to whom. But if you did all that, and answered all the questions right, and had a heart lighter than the feather of truth, and you were nice to the really snarky Divine Ferryman who transported all the souls, you could wind up in the Field of Offerings, where you were given back everything you’d left behind—your loved ones, your pets, your backyard. Your souvenirs. The view from your favorite window. Everything that brought you joy during your life, but for eternity.”
“That sounds…nice,” Win says. She traces Osiris’s crown. “What about the people whose heart was heavy?”
“They got eaten by a monster that was part crocodile, part hippo, and part lion.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“No, not for another couple thousand years,” I say.
Win stands. I automatically catalog how steady she is on her feet, how frail her arm looks as she braces against the side of the couch. “So, Dawn Edelstein,” she says, “a lot of people go through an Egypt stage as kids, and build pyramids out of blocks and wrap their little brothers up in toilet paper as mummies. But something tells me you never grew out of that. Are you going to tell mewhyyou know all this?”
“I used to be an Egyptologist, in another life.”
Win’s eyes narrow. I get the sense she is taking stock of me just as thoroughly as I am taking stock of her, and for a moment I wonder which of us is in charge. “Do youbelievein other lives?” she asks.
I picture Wyatt walking away from me, the heat rippling through the air to make him seem like a mirage, a figment of my imagination.
“I want to,” I say.
IN MY DREAM,Brian is trying to open the door to a parallel universe. In a gleaming lab, he sets up his experiment. He is going to send a beam of subatomic particles down a tunnel, past a giant magnet, into a wall. If he does it correctly, some of those particles will become mirror images of themselves, and will go right through the wall, proving that there’s a shadow world cozied up beside the one we live in.
I see him flip the switch of the particle accelerator. I am close enough to notice his square-cut nails, the scar on his thumb from when he hit it with a hammer putting together Meret’s big-girl bed. Then the knocking starts, like the metallic heartbeat of an MRI machine. I feel an enormous pressure, a thunderstorm caught in my ribs, and suddenly I realize why I am close enough to witness all this: I am trapped in that beam of particles.Wait,I try to tell Brian.There’s been a mistake.
