by Jerry Dubs
Akila laughed, forgetting to cover her mouth this time. “What kind of mushrooms did they put in your salad?” she joked.
“I know, I know,” Tim said, smiling back at her. “I’m a little giddy with all of this.”
He looked to his left across the flower bed, the purple petals reaching for and absorbing the early afternoon sun. Beyond the planter, cars and an occasional bicycle rolled by, a moving montage of lives. The low skyline of Helwan lay beyond and above it the sapphire sky. Cloudless, it was lighter blue near the fire of the sun, darker in the distance beyond the river.
Smiling, he looked across the table, struck again by Akila’s beautiful face, especially her eyes, soulful and intelligent, yet cautious and sad.
“I am surprised to be alive, Akila. And, awfully surprised by how much pleasure I’m able to take from it. The air against my skin, the sounds of people talking in the distance, the aroma and taste of the food and all the colors and movement. And you, you are very beautiful, Akila. And you’ve been incredibly kind to me. In addition to saving my life.”
Unconsciously Akila put her hands on her lap and interlocked her fingers. No one had called her beautiful since her husband’s death. In the years immediately after his suicide she had stopped thinking of herself as a physical or emotional person. She was a doctor, a disembodied intelligence that found itself at home sitting alone and crying or in the clinic dispassionately examining and caring for strangers.
She had removed herself from friends and family, unwilling to contaminate them with her sadness or, if security forces were still watching her, to incriminate them by association.
“I’ve embarrassed you,” Tim said. “I’m sorry, Akila. I’ve gotten used to saying things honestly, not being diplomatic.” He shook his head and looked down at the table. Then grinning he looked back at Akila and said, “Addy, and then Meryt, they used to make fun of me. We’d be taking a walk and I’d stop to touch a tree trunk. Maybe the bark was rough textured with thick grooves, or it might be a palm with fraying bark, the stiff fibrous strands peeling away.
“Or,” he shrugged at her, “I’d see a beautiful woman shopping in the market or a child playing with a stick or a man cutting reeds, someone whose focus or innocence or innate harmony caught my eye and I’d pull out my sketchbook and draw them.
“I remember reading about that part of your brain that wants to harmonize with others. You know what I mean?”
Akila nodded. “Mirror neurons.”
“Right, that’s it,” he said, leaning forward. “Mirror neurons. Well, my theory is that, oh that chemical you secrete when you exercise, that makes you happy … ”
“Endorphins,” Akila said.
“Yes, endorphins.” Tim smiled at her. “I haven’t had anyone with a modern science background to talk to for so long. I’ve forgotten the language. Anyhow, I think my art training, my childhood, my genetic coding, something had programmed me to get an endorphin rush when my mirror neurons fire in response to something that is harmonious with, I don’t know, with the universe.
“You know, like people with perfect pitch can detect the slightest flatness or sharpness in a note. If someone with perfect pitch heard me sing, they’d probably start having a fit. Anyhow, I think I’m a little that way with visual harmony. Your face, the placement, shape, size and color of your eyes, the thickness and arch of your eyebrows, the curve and fullness of your lips, the little silver ring, your nose, its width and length, the shading of your skin, the color of your hair. Everything is harmonious and beautiful.”
Akila laughed. “I don’t know if you’re flirting with me or analyzing me for an art project.”
Now Tim blushed and looked away.
“I don’t think I should be this happy,” he said as their waiter approached.
Akila looked down at her lap for a moment and then said, “The espresso is very good here, especially the Condetti espresso. They make it with ice cream in it.”
Tim nodded and Akila ordered two espressos for them.
“So,” she said after a moment, “You didn’t ask to come here to talk about cats or empathic neurons or my beautiful face.” She raised her hands to frame her face with her thumbs and index fingers, vogueing and smiling.
Tim smiled in return, thankful that she had playfully accepted his compliment.
“Akila,” he said, his voice turning serious. “I was here before. Here at this restaurant. Here with you.”
The waiter returned with their coffee and as Akila drank, Tim told her about his visit to the modern world five years in their future, several months in his past.
***
“Describe my office,” Akila said when he had finished.
Tim closed his eyes. He enjoyed recalling scenes, sounds and aromas, a practice he used when he drew or painted.
“The clinic doorway is the second doorway on the left down the entrance hallway. When you enter, there are two chairs to the right of the door with a narrow wooden stand between them. On the right-hand wall there is a long, glass-fronted cabinet that contains medical supplies, things like tongue depressors, boxes of gauze, plastic gloves. On the other wall, to the left, there’s a bulletin board with posters, notes from kids looking for rides and a large calendar.
“When I was there, the calendar showed August of twenty-twenty-seven.”
He opened his eyes. Akila’s elbows were on the table, her hands flatly pressed together as if in prayer in front of her face, her thumbs extended under and supporting her chin, her nose pressing against the sides of her long index fingers.
Her eyes were studying and assessing him.
“Your desk is made of metal with a glass top. The center of it, by the chair well, is a computer screen that lifts up from the flat surface. When it does, the glass top in front of it turns into a keyboard.
“Behind the desk is a doorway that leads to examination rooms. I was only in one of them. You slid two cots together and let Maya and me sleep there.”
She shook her head.
“The desk is wrong. It’s made of wood and there’s no recessed computer. The rest of it could describe any generic clinic,” she said.
Tim shrugged. “So,” he said cheerfully, “you’ll be getting a new desk.”
He picked up the coffee cup and drank, leaving himself with a white moustache from the ice cream in the drink. As he dabbed his face, he thought of what other proofs he could offer.
“You have an assistant, an American girl named Brianna,” he said. As he formed a mental picture of her face, he saw Akila shaking her head.
“Not yet?” he asked.
“There’s no Brianna at the clinic,” Akila said.
“I’m not being very persuasive, am I?” he said. “OK,” he said, “I have one more thing, but that hasn’t happened yet. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll write three notes. I’ll have Bakr seal them and then he can give them to you. I’ll put the topic on the outside: Desk, Brianna and Car. Then, if, I mean when something happens you can open the note and see if what I wrote happened the way I said it would, the way I remember it.”
“And this will prove that you saw a purchase order for desks or that you’re in contact with someone named Brianna or ... what’s going to happen to my car? Are you going to sabotage it?” Akila asked.
Tim waved his hands in surrender. “I don’t know anything about cars. And I don’t want to say any more because you’ll think I’m influencing you. I’ll just write as much detail as I can. Eventually you’ll believe me.
“In the meantime I’ll try to be as harmless and quiet as possible. OK?”
As Akila nodded agreement Tim added, “I do have two small favors to ask. Could you make sure you have Praziquantel on hand?”
“Praziquantel? For blood flukes?”
“Yeah. You’ll need it for Maya.”
“Your daughter.”
Tim nodded. “Yes. You are going to save Maya’s life.”
He looked down into the dark brown swirl of coffee in his
cup. “Maybe that’s why I trust and like you so much.”
“What’s the other thing?” Akila asked. When Tim looked confused, she reminded him, “You said you had two favors to ask.”
“I want to volunteer to work in the Buried Pyramid. I can help with excavation, or preservation. I could give tours or polish the alabaster sarcophagus. I’ll do anything.”
“Why?”
Tim swirled the coffee and then drained the cup.
“Once I realized that I was going to survive, I started thinking about what I would do here. How I would live. I don’t have a lot of skills that would be in demand, but I do know a lot about the past, at least about the Third Dynasty.”
“So you want to be a tour guide?”
“Sure.” Tim said, his eyes darting back to his coffee cup.
Prophecies
“The river doesn’t flood anymore,” Ahmes told Tim one morning a year later as they ate breakfast in the dining room of the Blue Lotus.
Tim drizzled honey over a triangular slice of fatira, folded the thin, flat bread and lifted it carefully and quickly to his mouth. He had discovered over the past year that he missed sweets.
He and Akila regularly ate at Condetti’s where he ended each meal with their tiramisu with mascarpone cream or with fried bananas served with honey and vanilla ice cream. And he was losing a battle against a growing addiction to cream soda, which Bakr now kept stocked in the kitchen’s refrigerator.
Having regained all of his lost weight he now used long walks through the desert to keep himself from growing a paunch. Although he no longer used a cane, his right knee still gave him trouble, buckling unexpectedly for no apparent reason. Still, he walked the desert, haunting the ruins of monuments he had helped build, walking over sand that hid entrances to tunnels he had ordered dug, all the while thinking about the past.
Used to Tim’s focus, Ahmes contented himself with his own breakfast, a small bowl of cooked fava beans and cucumbers.
Swallowing the sweet syrupy bread, Tim looked up at Ahmes. “I’m sorry?”
“I said the river doesn’t flood anymore,” Ahmes mumbled around a mouthful of beans.
“No, they built a dam in Aswan.” Tim squinted his eyes as he mentally overlaid a modern map with his memory of ancient Egypt. “It is down by the first cataract, I think.”
“A dam?” Ahmes repeated, always eager to add to his English vocabulary.
“A wall to block the water.”
“Where does it go?”
“It spreads out and makes a lake behind the wall.”
“So it floods behind the wall?”
“Right. And then they open the wall a little, there are gates, doorways in it, and they let the floodwaters out slowly,” Tim explained, exhausting his knowledge of dams.
“Oh,” Ahmes said, taking another mouthful of beans.
Tim used the remains of the fatira to swipe up honey that had escaped to his plate.
“Why?” Ahmes asked.
Tim stopped chewing and stared off into the distance. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “Ask someone at the university.”
Ahmes shook his head. “I have to be careful what I ask. Sometimes I ask about things that everyone knows and they look at me funny.”
Tim shook his head, “No, it’s always OK to ask questions.”
“Tim, I asked what Israel was. Another time I asked how beetles could sing. They were talking about ...”
“John, Paul, George and Ringo,” Tim said.
Ahmes stared at him for a moment and then said, “Oh, that’s right, those are names. Like Mohammed. I asked about him once.” He sighed deeply and said, “I know that name now.”
Tim smiled and reached for his coffee cup.
Ahmes was assimilating well. He was monitoring classes at the university and had found a group of art friends. With identification papers that Bakr had acquired for him, Ahmes was now officially twenty-six-year-old Ahmes Fahmy, a nephew of Bakr. He spoke English, was fluent in Arabic and used ancient Egyptian only with Tim and with Akila, who had agreed to learn it to test its structure and syntax and to satisfy Tim.
“No classes today?” Tim asked.
Ahmes shook his head. “No. I’m meeting some friends over at the university to work on a sketch for a mural.”
“A mural?”
Ahmes scraped together a final spoonful of beans. “There are some buildings in Helwan with exposed sides. We have permission to paint murals on them. It will be just like painting the temple walls, only I’ll have spray paint.” He aimed an imaginary can of paint at Tim and pretended to spray paint at him. Then he shoveled in the spoonful of beans.
As Tim smiled at his friend, a car horn sounded from the guest house parking lot. Leaning back to look out the dining room window, Tim saw a deep blue Chevy Sonic rock to a stop. With a shiver he recognized it as the car Akila had been driving when he first met her.
Closing his eyes, Tim smiled. His first prophecy was about to come true.
***
“Bakr!” Akila called as she entered the guest house.
“He’s in the office,” Tim said. “I asked him to get the ‘Car’ envelope for you.”
Akila stopped and looked at Tim.
For the past year they had put aside talk of his belief that he had lived in ancient Egypt. She had persuaded a university friend to put Tim in contact with Tarik Bayoumi, who had known both Jean-Philippe Lauer and the disgraced Egyptian archaeologist, Muhammed Goneim, discoverer of the Buried Pyramid.
Impressed with Tim’s knowledge, if not his Arabic, Bayoumi had arranged for Tim to work as a volunteer docent at Saqqara, leading American and English tourists through the burial complex. In the following months Tim had impressed Bayoumi enough that he had asked Tim to help with minor excavations.
While he was conscientious with his work, Tim divided his attention between explaining the monuments and searching for changes in inscriptions. He had realized that he could not communicate with anyone in the past – time flowed forward only – but he could look for signs that someone in the distant past had left for him.
He had no idea who would leave signs for him, what those messages might be or if they even existed. Still he looked, hoping for some communication from his past.
“What do you mean, car?” Akila said and then immediately nodded her head. “That’s right, your prophecies.” She looked downcast for a moment and then said, “I thought maybe you had moved on, that they didn’t matter anymore.”
“This one, yes?” Bakr said, approaching Tim and Akila with one arm outstretched, an envelope in his hand.
Tim held his hands palm out, exaggerating his reluctance to touch the envelope. He nodded to Akila. “Give it to her, please, Bakr.”
Bakr shook his head to show he was not an enthusiastic participant in this. He handed the envelope to Akila and then sidled closer to see firsthand if Tim’s prophecy was correct. As Akila broke the wax seal Tim had asked her to ceremoniously place on the envelope a year earlier, Ahmes left the table and joined them.
Akila lifted the flap and reaching into the envelope pinched the paper inside. Looking at Tim’s confident face as she withdrew the paper, she said, “You know this doesn’t prove anything, even if you guessed right,” she said.
Tim just smiled broadly.
“You have a dark blue Chevy Sonic,” Akila read from the note. “It is a manual transmission. The Chevy emblem on the front of the hood is broken.” Now Akila smiled as she turned the paper for them all to see. Below Tim’s handwritten note was a drawing of the Chevy logo with a jagged line showing a break and the left side of the logo undrawn.
“You could have guessed from something I said that blue is my favorite color and Chevy Sonics are the most popular American car in Egypt,” Akila said.
Ahmes turned away and ran out the front door.
“The logo isn’t broken,” he shouted from the parking lot.
“I’m sorry, Tim,” Akila said with syrupy insincerity.
“So close … ”
“It was, so it will be,” Tim said confidently.
***
Two weeks later, Akila sat frozen at her desk in the Helwan clinic as the universe rotated slowly around her revealing a world that was impossible and frightening.
That morning on her way into work a truck in front of her had kicked a stone from the road. The pebble struck the front of her Sonic’s hood with a solid ping. She heard the sound, but hadn’t realized its importance.
When she parked at the university and started to walk to the clinic entrance, the sound of the stone stayed with her and turning slowly, dreading what she might see, she reluctantly directed her eyes to the front of her car where she saw that the Chevy logo had been broken. The left side had fallen away and it looked now exactly as Tim’s drawing had portrayed it a year earlier.
With her logical mind trying to assign the broken logo as a coincidence, she absent-mindedly collected her university mail and a morning coffee. As she sorted the mail she saw a department memo announcing that new office equipment had been purchased.
Glancing over the list she saw that her clinic office would receive a new desk. Tapping on her computer tablet, the broken Chevy logo still floating in her mind, Akila searched for a picture of the model desk that had been ordered for her.
Ice ran through her as she enlarged the picture. Placed on the market just two months earlier – a full ten months after Tim had described it – the desk matched his description exactly.
She knew that the ‘Desk’ envelope back at the Blue Lotus would include a drawing that would replicate the drawing she was looking at. A year ago Tim had drawn a desk that only now existed.
Looking up from the tablet at the sound of her clinic office door opening five minutes later, Akila saw a new student. A chilling flash of premonition had raced across her skin, quickening her breath.