I could see Wyatt reaching through the vast store of knowledge in his mind. “Coffin Text 47 comes closest,” he says. He starts flipping through the images Alberto has downloaded for us. His finger passes over the hieroglyphs, reading so much faster than I ever could, until he finds the text in question on a photo of the inner coffin’s western-facing wall:“As for any god, any spirit of any dead person who shall oppose themselves against these dignities of yours…they shall be crushed as the confederates of Terrible of Face. Your seat shall be spacious within the disk. You shall measure in the scales like Thoth. Your reputation shall be recognized by He who is in his Disk as that of a god who is beside him. You shall eat bread in the Broad Hall. You shall be given meals just like Re, by those in charge of the storehouses of Heliopolis. Your heart belongs to you. It shall not be stolen by the guardians of the roads…Raise yourself to life forever!”
The deceased, weighing his own heart. The immortal result of a passing grade: keeping company with Re. The Broad Hall of Two Truths. Heliopolis—beneath the neighborhood now closest to the Cairo Airport, and the chief cult place of Re. It’s all there, the ingredients of what will become Spell 125 in the New Kingdom. But until now, there hasn’t been an image in the Middle Kingdom to connect the two.
I lean down to find the placement of the actual text inside the coffin and notice something strange. I can match a string of the hieratic, but it’s bisected by a split in the cedar that isn’t reproduced on the iPad image of the text. “Where’s the break in the wood?”
Wyatt tilts his head, baffled. His eyes scan the coffin, narrowing. “The spell’s duplicated onbothsides of the coffin.”
“Is that normal? To repeat?”
“Sometimes,” he says. “In this case, it could be intentional. The Hall ofTwoTruths.”
From where we are on the scaffolding, we are just too far away to accurately read it. I scroll through Alberto’s photos for the opposite wall, and look for Coffin Text 47. Wyatt and I hold our iPads side by side, so that we can read the matching spells on both the eastern- and western-facing walls.
Except they don’t quite match.
As for any god, any spirit of any dead person who shall do evil against your soul…you are justified within the Hall of Two Truths. You are pure! You are pure! You are pure! You are pure! Your purity is the purity of He who is in his Disk. No evil can happen to you in the land, in this Hall of Two Truths, because you know the names of the gods who are in it. Raise yourself to life forever!
“Thisone’s almost verbatim Spell 125 of the Book of the Dead, except it’s in the second person, like the rest of the Coffin Texts—”
“Wyatt,” I interrupt. “Look.” Using the tip of a pencil to reach, I point to the spot on the eastern-facing wall where this spell is painted, and then the board directly opposite it. I imagine the mummy as he was found, lying on his side. If you drew a line from one spell to the other, it would most likely have passed through Djehutynakht’s heart.
If I ever wanted proof of how inextricably linked text and location on the coffin were, this is it.
“Dawn,” Wyatt says. “I think we just found the missing link.”
—
NOT LONG AFTERour relationship was outed by Dumphries, Wyatt and I were tangled together in my twin bed one late afternoon. He was naked, the fan cooling the sweat on his spine, his profile obscured by that tangled beacon of hair. The sun gleamed at the window, a peeping Tom. This was the time of day when everyone else in the house usually napped, and Wyatt had drifted off after making love. For some reason, I couldn’t fall asleep. I sketched my finger over his shoulder as if I were drawing a map of the world where I wanted to live.
We had come together like a conflagration, as usual, like there was not enough time and we had a terrible need to consume each other. My bra was looped around the base of the fan, where Wyatt had thrown it. His pants were caught in the bedding. One of his shoes was upside down.
My mother would have said that’s bad luck; that it needed to be turned right side up. But I couldn’t do that without pulling away from him.
Wyatt mumbled something, swatting at his neck, then catching my hand with his own. “Let me be, wench, you’re going to kill me.” He rolled over, his eyes slitted, a smile already playing at his lips. “But what a way to go.”
“Wench?” I pinned him to the mattress. “You misogynist pig.”
He reached for me, pulling me closer. “Talk dirty to me.”
My laugh was caught between us, passed back and forth in a kiss. Wyatt flipped me onto my back and licked my throat. My skin cooled as it dried, as he traced a trail down the middle of me.
At first, we didn’t hear the knock on the door. Then, when we did, Wyatt yelled out to whoever was on the other side of it. “Piss off…”
“Dawn.” Dumphries’s voice was grave.
I looked at Wyatt and grabbed his shirt from the floor. Pulling it on so that it fell to my thighs, I waited for him to wrap himself in the sheets, and then opened the door.
“There’s been a message,” Dumphries said.
Back then, I didn’t have a cellphone with international coverage. Very few people did, but Dumphries was one of them. It was the emergency number we all left for our families at home. He held out the phone. “You should call your mother.”
He left me with the phone, with Wyatt. When the door closed, I dialed the country code and my home phone number. While I waited for the connection to be made, I stared at Wyatt’s upside-down shoe.
Wyatt curled himself around me as I sat on the edge of the bed, his arm around my waist, as if he knew in advance that I was going to need something to anchor me. “Mom?” I said.
When she started to talk, when she told me about the cancer, I went still. I thought maybe if I stopped moving, I could stem the flow of words. But they kept coming:ovarian…hospice…weeks.
I don’t know if Wyatt could hear her speaking, but he knew something was very, very wrong. I felt his fingers thread with mine, squeeze.
