“You know,” Wyatt muses. “To anyone else, the mystery would be the mummy eighteen feet under the ground. Not the woman who showed up in Egypt fifteen years late.”
I swallow. “I better get back to work.”
“No,” Wyatt says, the word striking like flint. Then he takes off his hat and grins. “I mean, I’ll put in a good word with your boss.”
Unsure of what he wants me to do, I sink down to the ground, cross-legged. He is sitting on a little folding stool, as if he’s the teacher and I’m the preschooler. “I guess this isn’t quite your usual workday,” Wyatt says.
“Yeah. And no,” I reply. “I mean, it’s not that different. The whole point of all this”—I wave toward the notched rock of the tomb—“was to prepare for a good death, right?”
“Amazing to think that’s become a cottage industry.”
“Why?” I ask. “Think of all the people who were employed building this tomb.”
“So you build twenty-first-century tombs,” Wyatt says. “They’re just not made out of rock.”
“Yeah. I suppose they’re made out of stories and conversations and relaxation techniques and wills. Obituaries. Social media passwords. Did you know that you can designate someone to cancel your social media accounts when you die so they don’t just keep telling everyone when it’s your birthday year after year?”
“This is why I’m not on Facebook.”
“I noticed,” I say, and then clap my hand over my mouth as if I could stuff the words back inside.
A smile plays along the edge of Wyatt’s mouth. “Didyou,” he murmurs.
“Everyone knows how to die,” I say, shrugging. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t use a little support.”
Wyatt glances toward the tomb again. “Let me play Devil’s advocate, though. You don’t need a death coach—”
“Doula.”
“Doula.Not any more than you need a rock-cut tomb to become one of the blessed dead. If you couldn’t afford to have texts painted in your coffin, you could borrow papyri. Did you know that I found dozens of soul houses in Middle Kingdom cemeteries, right next to graves of the poor that are basically pits in the ground—a little model of a house and a few offering vessels, maybe with an onion or a loaf of bread. The point is thatanyonecould reach the afterlife, too. All you really needed to do was live morally.”
“Nothing’s changed in four thousand years,” I tell him. “The way to have a good death is to have a good life.”
“So, Olive?” he asks quietly. “Did you?”
My mouth seems filled with ash. “I’d like to think it’s not over yet,” I say lightly.
Wyatt looks away, so that his eyes aren’t pinning me anymore. “Well, as long as someone remembers you, you never really die.” I think of the names on the calendar in my phone—the phone that doesn’t work here. The litany of the dead I run through, daily, recalling one tiny detail of each of their lives: her perfect French manicure, his collection of foreign stamps, a beloved dachshund for whom she sewed bow ties. “Djehutynakht probably started building this tomb the minute he became nomarch,” Wyatt says. “He’s lucky it was ready by the time he took his last bow.”
“Every beginning is already the start of the end,” I reply. “I sound like a fortune cookie.”
“You always did see the big picture.”
“Wyatt Armstrong. Is that acompliment?”
He slaps his hat against his thigh. A tiny cloud of dust rises between us. “You were right. About the coffin, being a microcosm of the universe.”
“I know you finally realized that. I read your dissertation.” I lean down and pick up a flat piece of rock. “But still, could you etch that in stone for me?”
Wyatt laughs. “What you were saying all those years ago—it’s just the tip of the iceberg.” He stands, reaching out his hand to pull me up. “It’s crazy to think about, isn’t it? What might have happened if you and I had been working together back then, instead of against each other?”
I let myself go there, for the span of one breath: a perfect translation of the Book of Two Ways, with imagery and text interwoven. An understanding that the way to get to the afterlife wasn’t just about the inscriptions, but also about where they were placed in relation to the deceased.
A map with two paths; a key we both crafted.
“Let me walk you back,” Wyatt says. “We’re not being paid to drink tea.”
“Whoispaying?” I ask. “Yale?”
