But he is too focused on his work to notice me. There is so much heaviness; my chest is caught in a vise. I remember Brian’s voice:We’re all made up of molecules, like those electrons. If you zoom in and zoom in and zoom in, everything we do is explained by quantum mechanics.
And then I am light, I am air, I am speed, I am nothing. I brace for the impact but there isn’t any. I find myself on the other side of a mirror, pounding hard, my knocks drowned out by the steady rap of the particle accelerator. All I can hear is the banging.
Whack. Whack. Whack. And then: “Dawn?”
My eyes fly open. I am lying on a twin mattress in a room I do not recognize. I squint at my watch: 4:30A.M.
I scramble to the door and open it a crack; I’m wearing a T-shirt and underwear, since I have nothing else to sleep in. I find myself blinded by a beam of light, and for a moment, my dream comes rushing back to me.
The light switches off. It is pitch black, but I can make out the shape of Wyatt, the white of his teeth, a headlamp on his brow. “The electricity’s out,” he says. “Here.”
He pushes a spare headlamp into my hand. Immediately I am flooded with muscle memories of moving around in the dark every time the electricity failed during the dig season, which was often. I slip it onto my head, turn on the switch, and Wyatt frowns.
“You need pajamas,” he says, and he turns and walks away.
It’s cool this early in the morning, which is why we start work, as Dumphries used to say, at “the ass crack of dawn” (before looking at me and adding, “No relation.”). The Dig House feels like a voles’ burrow—dark and hushed, with scurrying in all its corners as everyone gets ready for the day. Without electricity, there’s also no water, which means no shower. I find a wet wipe in the bathroom and drag it over my face, under my arms.
By the time I get to the table, Joe is already seated. Wyatt and Alberto are deep in conversation, but when I walk in, they abruptly stop. I wonder what Wyatt has said to them about me. I wonder why Alberto lifts his cup of juice as if it is the most interesting thing in the world and refuses to look at me. “Good morning,” I say evenly, and I sit down as Mohammed Mahmoud brings food to the table that doesn’t require a stove: bread and jam, honey, cereal. No coffee, because there’s no hot water. The condiments get passed around, and I try to figure out people’s morning personalities based on how they interact. Joe is chatty and cheery; Alberto silent. Wyatt scrolls through his phone.
Suddenly, the phone rings. Wyatt answers the call, stepping away from the table. “Omar’s motorbike is broken,” he announces. “He’ll be late.”
“Who’s Omar?”
“The antiquities inspector,” Joe says.
“Per piacere, il sale?”Alberto mutters.
“He doesn’t do English till he’s caffeinated,” Joe explains. He passes me the salt, but I set it on the table somewhere between me and Alberto.
“You can’t pass salt,” I say. “It’s bad luck.”
Wyatt catches my eye and raises a brow.
I eat a piece of bread with honey, feeling too queasy to put anything else in my stomach. I have effectively begged or bullied Wyatt into letting me work at the site. But even if I manage to not make a fool of myself, so much has changed with technology that I might be completely in over my head.
“Dawn? Hello?”
When I hear his voice, I realize he’s been speaking to me. For a while. Everyone else is staring.
“We leave in five,” Wyatt says, all business. “Be ready.”
I nod, my face burning. Alberto rolls his eyes, making no move to lower his voice.“Santo cazzo Madre di Cristo,”he says, and I don’t need a translation.
Abdou, Mohammed Mahmoud, and Ahmed emerge from the annex where they live and begin to load up equipment, under the direction of Abdou, thereis—or head workman. I am wearing the same borrowed clothing I wore yesterday, the same borrowed hat. I stand awkwardly near the Land Rover, not sure what I should bring. Joe comes up beside me, handing me a pack filled with brushes, a ruler, a mirror, a flashlight, an iPad, and a portable charger. “You can use some of my stuff,” he says. He takes a militarykeffiyehand drapes it around my neck. I wind it around my nose and mouth to block out the sand.
Wyatt walks out of the Dig House and swings into the Land Rover. Abdou is driving and the back is filled with equipment. Alberto, Joe, and I follow its tracks. The sun comes over the horizon, bloodying the desert, as if the moon was massacred overnight.
—
THE TOMBS INthe necropolis look like kernels of corn, evenly spaced and lined up in a row along thegebel.The tomb of Djehutynakht sits slightly below the rest due to the infrastructure of the hill itself. As we get closer, I see the split in the rock face near the new opening, which must have prevented the other tombs from being built on the same level. Instead, the later tombs—like Djehutyhotep II’s—were dug above it on an intact ridge of stone.
Seeing it now, I wonder how we never noticed it fifteen years ago. At the same time, I know exactly why: it was buried, because of all those later tombs. Their excavation hid the entrance of this earlier tomb from view.
As we get closer, we start climbing the stone steps that are washed with sand. I viscerally remember doing this when I was here as a grad student, and every time, it felt futuristic, as if I were the last human on earth, instead of peeling back years to be part of an ancient civilization. The Land Rover has already been parked and unpacked by the time I reach the tomb. Joe has told me that the main work of this season has been excavating the shaft and shoring it up so that Wyatt and the workers can descend safely. In addition to Harbi’s family from Luxor, there are Coptic and Muslim hired men clearing debris from the shaft in a bucket brigade, passing the material from rubbermaqtaftomaqtaf. The sand they bring out of the tomb becomes part of a giant pile that two men shake through giant sifters, to make sure there’s nothing of note in the debris. “Have they found anything?” I ask Joe.
“A few barley seeds,” he says.
They’d be picked out with tweezers, and put in a Ziploc for later archaeobotanical analysis.
