A Thousand Doors

by J. T. Ellison

  Our daily diet is simple. A lot of ful medames and falafel, flatbread and hummus. All of it washed down with bottled water or juice and lots of strong, cardamom-laced coffee. I long for fresh vegetables, but it isn’t safe to eat them except at bigger hotels.

  But these things don’t matter because we’re not here for the food or even Egypt’s vibrant city life. We’re here to immerse ourselves in the past, and every morning, as we arrive at the site, I feel a sense of excitement, even though I know it’s unlikely that anything of real significance will be found.

  This is most days in archaeology, if I’m honest. There’s a lot of prep work. Careful surveys and calibrations made. Areas measured and organized in grids so that we don’t miss anything. And lots and lots of repetitive digging and sifting of dirt.

  The truth is that excavation archaeology is lots of tedious dirty work interspersed with some fantastic moments that you feed on for weeks, or even months or years, until you make another discovery.

  The very first time I found something, I was so elated. It was a broken piece from a glazed pot, and I soon uncovered its matching parts nearby. Unearthing that small shard was so satisfying. I can remember how my hands shook as I pulled it from the ground. You live for these amazing moments. We haven’t had many of them at this site, or at least not enough for Richard.

  We’ve been working for over an hour before he shows up. He comes later than we do every day, the privilege of being in charge, his arrival heralded by music blasting from an ancient boom box he insists on bringing. I wouldn’t mind so much if his musical tastes hadn’t shuddered to a halt in the disco era. “If he plays ‘Stayin’ Alive’ one more time, he won’t be alive much longer,” Patrick says as we hear the Land Rover, and Richard’s favorite soundtrack, approaching.

  He parks near our cars and jams his desert hat on his head before striding toward us, boom box in tow. He sets it down and dons some gloves. “Is this as far as you’ve gotten?” he says, looking down at me and Patrick, both hard at work with pickax and shovel in one of the outlying trenches. We are over five feet down and sweating. “Pick up the pace.”

  “Like we’re ditchdiggers,” I mutter to Patrick. He nods grimly, his face dripping sweat and red despite the wide-brimmed canvas hat with caping that he always wears. Of all of us, he’s most at risk, because he’s a redheaded Irishman, with skin so milky white that it fries to a crisp under the relentless sun. He slathers sunscreen on himself but still has patches of reddened, peeling skin. We’ve got a couple of canopies set up over other sections but haven’t moved one to this spot yet.

  “I’m glad to see that you’re actually doing some work today.” Richard’s voice carries over his music, but this time he’s snapping at Jenny, who’s in the midst of bagging some shards. She stiffens but doesn’t respond. A few days ago, Richard caught her texting and went ballistic. “You’re not paid to sit on your damned arse,” he yelled. “Get off that mobile and do some work!”

  No one said anything, even though she was only taking a well-earned break. Richard is the great Egyptologist, and no one dares to contradict him.

  I’d heard about his reputation for being frank. I think he’s built a career cultivating the image of himself as a straight-shooting, outspoken adventurer. His British version of Indiana Jones helps him raise funding, especially in non-archaeological circles. Of course, this behavior is acceptable only for him. None of us can speak as bluntly; like most bullies, he can’t handle it. He’s a great critic of other people’s work, but he can’t abide being critiqued himself. Lenor once dared to mention that he’d missed a spot when he was cleaning a small vase, and he retaliated by making her recheck every artifact already cataloged since she had “superior sight.”

  He saves most of his wit and all of his charm for the public; we rarely see his jovial side. I never imagined he’d be so autocratic, but it’s his behavior toward women that makes me tense whenever I see him.

  The first time he touched me, I thought it was an accident. We were down in one of the tombs in Luxor, my first visit to the great Valley of the Kings, and his hand grazed my breast, lingering long enough to be uncomfortable, but short enough that I questioned my own perception. The place was crowded with tourists, but he didn’t care if people saw, actually using the number of people as a cover, which shows you his brazenness.

  He does this with all his female subordinates. I know now that he looked as much at our photos as he did our field experience when he selected this team. All attractive young women, and there were four females when we started. Marie, a graduate student from California, left after two weeks. She wouldn’t say why, but now I’m convinced it was because of Richard. Of course, he brought on Khaled and Patrick, too—perhaps he included them so he can’t be accused of the very favoritism he shows. All I know is that he doesn’t touch the men, nothing more than the occasional manly clap on the shoulder or a hearty handshake. They don’t say anything about his groping, even though they’ve witnessed it. None of us say anything, and that is because of his prestige in our field.

  “Watch what you’re doing there,” he calls now, my stomach dropping as he climbs down into the trench with me and Patrick. “It’s too much—you’ve got to have a lighter touch when you dig.” It’s absurd. If anyone is being too rough it’s Patrick, who outweighs me by a good thirty pounds at least, but I hide my indignation, trying to hand over the shovel so Richard can demonstrate.

  He shakes his head. “No, no, you have to get the feel of it.” He steps behind me, reaching around to put his hands over mine on the shovel, his body close and hot against me, his groin pressed tight against my backside.

  Patrick shoots me a sympathetic look and clears his throat. “Richard, what do you think of this?” An attempt to distract him, but our boss doesn’t budge.

  “Just a minute, Patrick,” Richard says without looking, rubbing my shoulder with his free hand. “Relax, you’re too tight—you’ll strain something.”

  Bile rises in my throat and I swallow it down as he makes me lift the shovel and dig into the limestone and sand at my feet. “That’s it, you’re doing well,” Richard says, his breath hot against my ear. After a minute that feels like an hour, he releases me with one of his characteristic barking laughs. “You can’t rely on that pretty face forever.”

  He steps away, and I wonder if he could feel my body trembling. My free hand balls into a fist, and all I want to do is swing the shovel as hard as I can and silence his stupid laugh. I think Patrick sees it in my face, because he quickly steps between us. Richard is oblivious, climbing the ladder up and out, going in search of other prey. I hear him lecturing Lenor next.

  It’s barely eight o’clock, but I think I smelled booze on his breath. Perhaps it’s just oozing from his pores. He’s been drinking really heavily for the last few weeks, and he’s a nasty drunk.

  “Did you want to work in Egypt because you’re a blonde?” he said to me one evening, apropos of nothing except that I’d quietly evaded an advance. “I’m sure you get more attention here than you do in the States.”

  His insult notwithstanding, it’s true that I get more looks here than anywhere else I’ve traveled. I’m tall, blond, and blue-eyed, which means that I can’t easily blend in anywhere except Germany and Scandinavia. Perhaps I should have studied Nordic cultures. Certainly, as I’m standing in this 120-degree heat, I wonder why I hadn’t found the study of cold cultures more appealing.

  Richard likes my hair; he told me so. It’s typical of him to think it’s okay to comment on women’s appearances, but he’s certainly not alone in that. I’ve dealt with sexism before—it’s not like these incidents are rare or limited to academia. You get used to dealing with it if you’re a woman. It becomes something like second nature to watch out and ward off unwanted male attention. I couldn’t begin to count the number of clumsy passes at parties, or the inappropriate comments. Once, on an early morning commuter train, a
conductor singled me out, demanding, “Why aren’t you smiling? Let’s see a smile from you.” I was the only woman in the carriage, and he didn’t ask this of any of the other passengers, the men left undisturbed in their half-awake states. Only I was required to be “on” for this man, to smile for him if I wanted my ticket punched.

  I pause to wipe my brow and climb out of the trench to get a bottle of water. Richard is examining something nearby, frowning at whatever Khaled is holding. I notice Jenny is standing behind them, using Khaled as a wall between her and Richard.

  It doesn’t help that our dig has not been going particularly well. Of course we all hoped it would yield more, perhaps an important tomb, but so far it’s been little but a cache of relatively insignificant artifacts.

  Worse, it took Richard much longer than expected to secure the permits and permissions needed for the excavation, and that’s put us behind. We should be gone from here by now.

  We all celebrated with champagne at the house when he announced that the final government clearance had come. That was also the night that Richard insisted on dancing with each of the female students, telling Patrick to turn up the music on the radio. It was an Egyptian station, and the singing was accompanied by the rhythmic beat of drums. “This is Nubian folk music,” he said, springing up from the couch. “You’ve got to move to it.” He grabbed my hand, pulling me up to join him and whirling me around and around before releasing me to do the same with Jenny. I tensed when his hand snaked around the lowest part of my back, slipping for a moment under my shirt, but I shifted him off without saying anything. There was a lot of alcohol flowing—the champagne as well as six-packs of Stella.

  It was much less excusable some weeks later when he walked in on me in the shower. Fieldwork is so dirty, and no matter how much my body might ache, at the end of a long day I really like to clean off the grime. I’d latched the bathroom door, but it jiggles loose if tugged on hard enough. I was standing there, trying to rinse off under the tepid spray, when he burst in. The shower has a clear glass enclosure, so he could see me fully. He stopped in the doorway, staring open-mouthed, while I stared back in shock, trying to cover my nakedness with my hands, before I found the presence of mind to cry, “Get out!” He retreated backward, mumbling, “Sorry, I didn’t realize you were in here,” finally averting his gaze as he pulled the door closed behind him.

  I’ve heard from Jenny and Lenor that he’s done this to them, too. Walking in on them bathing or dressing. Touching them in intimate or inappropriate places, but most of it done in ways that make it hard to challenge.

  In this Richard isn’t alone, and he’s not the first threatening, boorish man that any of us have encountered.

  His clumsy groping could even seem penny-ante and something fairly easy to rebuff if it weren’t for the power he wields. We don’t challenge him because we’re afraid to—his recommendation could make or break our futures. There’s a glut of archaeologists and too few faculty positions. I’m not the only one here hoping to parlay this experience into a job offer at a university back in the States.

  And he’s skillful enough that most of his behavior is hard to challenge. Down in the tomb, for instance, his hand moved from my breast to my elbow, as if all along he’d been intending to direct me closer to the painting running along the walls and up onto the ceiling, all of it still vivid and vibrant though it was thousands of years old. And as Richard identified the different gods and goddesses and explained the journey to the afterlife that the art depicted, I could feel my heart racing for another reason, as enamored as I’d been the first time I ever heard him speak.

  It had been during an East Coast lecture circuit back when I was an undergrad, and I vividly recall how I stood in the back for over two hours, part of the standing-room-only crowd, completely rapt as he spun stories about his most famous digs that were as exciting as any thriller.

  I can’t reconcile my respect and admiration for this man who’d been my idol with his moments of wildly inappropriate behavior. At first it was easier to assume that I’d misread the situation and his touch was inadvertent. Until there were just too many of these times to excuse. As a species, humans have a hard time holding two wildly disparate opinions of the same person––we want clear demarcations between good and evil. It’s difficult to accept that someone can be both a genius and a predator.

  I got back to digging, trying to channel my anger into the work, letting it give me energy. I pretend that I’m shoveling snow, trying to remember winter, lost in what now seems like a delightful memory of freezing, when my shovel suddenly sinks farther into the ground than it should, and I hear a strange noise. It’s a weird thunk, like a melon splitting, and I don’t feel the distinctive arm-ache of shovel hitting rock. I stop, my focus fully back in the boiling hot present, and heft the shovel, which seems harder to pull up. I sink it again, and again there’s that distinct, strange sound, and this time the handle of the shovel moves, just a little, in my hands, appearing to slip into the ground. I haul it out again, and lean the shovel against the dirt wall, before crouching down and impatiently brushing away the crumbling sand and rock to see what I’ve hit. It’s a gash, a jagged opening. I stifle a cry, gloved hand flying to my mouth. Patrick doesn’t notice. He’s busy wielding the pickaxe, his back to me. I don’t want to say anything until I’m sure—I certainly don’t want to risk Richard’s wrath—but if this is what I think it is, then there’ll be no containing it, and all too soon it won’t be my discovery alone.

  I grab the shovel again and wield it as tenderly as if tapping a spoon against crème brûlée. The gap widens, like an eggshell cracking, and I pause to brush the debris away again before continuing. I go on like this for a few precious minutes, until the opening is wider than my arm. I know this because I can’t resist kneeling down and sticking my hand into the hole. Oddly, I have no fear of what I might touch, the way I ordinarily would when reaching blindly. All I feel is elation, because I know, even before I’ve swept the cavity, my hand brushing the still air without hitting sides or bottom, I know that this is what we’ve been waiting and hoping to find. A tomb.

  “Mia? What is it? What have you found?” Patrick’s excited voice shatters the silence, and then everyone is there at once, hanging along the ledge, as I scramble to my feet and Richard practically leaps down the short ladder, yelling that he alone can join us in the trench. He pushes roughly past me as if I’m nothing more than a sheep in the way, like the flocks that always seem to block local roads when we’re in a hurry. This indifferent touch is as insulting as the last one; I’m at once livid and protective. This is my find—mine, not his.

  He kneels by the crevice like I did, dipping his hand into the opening like a thirsty man lowering a bucket into a well, before he thinks to pull out his smartphone and use the flashlight feature to peer into the cavity. Without looking up, he calls, “Quick, Khaled, get me the torch from my Jeep.”

  Khaled sprints off without a word, back quicker than one would think possible in this heat, and he goes to pass it down himself, but Patrick wrestles it from him at the side of the tomb. I’m the one who hands Richard the flashlight, which he takes without a glance. Lenor is already snapping photos, recording the discovery. Everyone wants to be part of this moment.

  “It’s a burial chamber,” Richard announces after a minute, and my heart leaps again. This makes all the hard work worth it, this moment. “There’s at least one set of remains in there; I can see it.”

  He gets to his feet and he’s grinning ear to ear, a wide boyish smile that we’ve rarely seen, and in his gleaming eyes I see something that is also akin to relief. This is unlikely to be a major find, but it’s something. The dig won’t have been in vain.

  We spend the remainder of the day taking turns working in the trench, Richard carefully expanding the opening at its widest point, while the rest of us work along the edges. It’s slow and painstaking. As archaeologists, we’re always a
ware that what we do is destructive, and we move with the deliberation we’ve all been taught, which is at odds with the excitement practically crackling in the air, like heat lightning.

  None of us notice that the sun has climbed to its highest point in the sky until Richard finally takes a break, fetching a kerchief from his pocket to mop the sweat dripping from his face. That’s contagious, like a yawn. I’m aware, suddenly, that I’m also dripping, sweat flowing down every part of my body like the branches of a river.

  “We need to quit for the day,” Richard says, but I shake my head.

  “No, not yet.” I haven’t dared to contradict him before, the euphoria over my find responsible for my bravado, and I cringe immediately after, bracing myself for a sharp rebuttal.

  But he doesn’t react. “We can’t—we risk heatstroke,” he says, with a nod toward Patrick, who is looking even paler than usual, his breathing the heavy panting of a dog in summer.

  “Plus, we need to save some energy to celebrate,” Richard adds, which brings a cheer from the others.

  We’ll have dinner at one of Luxor’s finer restaurants, just like we did after our first day at the dig, when our energy and hopes were also riding high. There will be lots of tourists milling about, and undoubtedly some of them will want to snap photos with our group, just like they did last time. Lenor and Jenny are already discussing what they’ve got that’s both clean and nice enough to wear. The others are gathering up the equipment, shutting down for the day and moving toward the cars, but I don’t want to leave, not yet. I’m waiting for Richard to climb out of the trench so I can be alone once more to savor this moment.

  But he’s waiting for me to go, waving me toward the ladder with a courtesy that I’d have found suspect at any other time, but the look on his face is compassionate, not leering. “I remember my first time,” he says in a conspiratorial tone. “It’s an incredible feeling, isn’t it?”