by Jodi Picoult
I glare down the dark shaft. There’s another burst of light, and a photo blinks onto the iPad screen. “Why is it taking forever?”
“Do you know how long it took Carter to clear out Tutankhamun’s tomb?” Wyatt says. “Ten years. He numbered everything. Photographed everything. Drew everything.” He smirks. “I’ve been at this for fifteen years. If anyone deserves to be impatient, it’s me.”
The tomb is still crowded—but there’s one person conspicuously missing. “Dailey,” I say, reaching into the corners of my mind for the name Joe once told me. “Why isn’t your money person here?”
I cannot imagine funding an expedition and not wanting to be present when the actual discovery is made. Wyatt’s head snaps up, and his cheeks flush. “From what I’ve been told, because of an airline workers’ strike in Italy.”
“Your benefactor’s Italian?” I ask, but before Wyatt can reply Alberto calls up to us. It is finally time to open the coffin.
We shimmy down the rope ladder in quick succession—first Wyatt, then me, then Safiya the conservator, and finally Omar. There is virtually no room in the chamber with all of us, plus half a dozen workers having an in-depth discussion with Wyatt about the best way to lift the top of the outer coffin, so the inspector offers to wait at the top of the shaft again. Sweat pours off my face and under the collar of my shirt; it is easily a hundred degrees in this tiny stone room, and the air does not move inside it. Fans to improve air circulation are, of course, forbidden. What has been a blessing for preservation makes our work a living hell.
Abdou comes up with the best plan, and the workers and Wyatt lift the massive lid of the exterior coffin and muscle it sideways. In the weak, splintery light that the wheezy generator provides, I can see an inner coffin made of cedar nested inside, much like the ones we had gazed at in the Boston MFA as graduate students. I cannot make out any of the individual markings; I can only tell that the paint is even more vibrant than that on the outer coffin.
It takes nearly an hour for the cedar lid to be removed, and it requires a human Jenga of positioning as we bunch together to make room for the wood to be gently rested on its side. Alberto darts between and around us as we jostle, so that he can continue snapping his photographs.
Wyatt wipes his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. “That was such great fun,” he says. “Let’s do it again.” He gestures to the inner coffin, and curls his fingers under the seam of the lid.
It’s not as heavy, but it is still unwieldy and there is very little space in the burial chamber for the sheer number of bodies needed to open and lift it. I am at the far end of the burial chamber, squeezed between the rock and the short end of the coffin.
When it opens, there’s no smell of death. Just resin, heady and sharp. Djehutynakht’s dessicated mummy lies on his side facing east, the shape of his body hidden beneath tight layers of linen. The light flickers over a funerary mask, and the outer layer of wrappings has been bored into by insects. The mummy is draped in a shroud with a fringed edge. Opposite him are lines of spells from the Coffin Texts, as well as a vividly painted false door through which his ba soul could come and go. The mummy is flush against the other interior wall, but above his hip and head I get a glimpse of a colorful offering frieze with sandals, jugs of wine, haunches of meat. For a moment we stand in awe, as Alberto captures our reverence with his camera.
“Right,” Safiya says, jerking us all back into motion. “Let’s get started.”
She scrambles out of the chamber and up the ladder, calling orders to workers to bring padding and ropes, which will be used to secure the mummy as the open coffins are lifted in tandem. Alberto follows her, because once everyone descends on the burial chamber to pack up the mummy for excavation into the main tomb chapel, space will be at even more of a premium.
Wyatt starts after them but turns back when he realizes I am standing with my hands lightly balanced on the wooden edge of the inner coffin, staring at Djehutynakht’s mummy.
“The answer is: I don’t know,” he says.
“What’s the question?”
“Is there a Book of Two Ways under him?”
I glance down, where a thick layer of dust lies on the interior coffin floor.
“For your information, that isn’t what I was thinking about.”
“No?” Wyatt says. “Taking mental notes for a Halloween costume, then?”
“You have to admit this is not an average Thursday,” I reply.
I look down at the funerary mask. It appears to be embellished in gold leaf, but the features are detailed—one nostril larger than the other, corners of the eyes dotted with red. They would have mirrored the features of the nomarch in a stylized way, so that his soul could recognize his mummy as part of its daily resurrection.
It makes me think of the death masks that were taken of kings and scholars and artists from the Middle Ages to the Civil War, from Henry VIII to Napoleon to Nikola Tesla, displayed at funerals and then in museums. “Have you ever heard of l’inconnue de la Seine?” Wyatt shakes his head. “She drowned in Paris, in the 1880s. Someone at the morgue made a death mask of her face, and it’s…beautiful. She looks like she fell asleep smiling, even though it was probably a suicide. She was compared to the Mona Lisa, and rich people had copies of the mask on their walls as art. In the 1960s, it was used as the face of the first CPR mannequin.”
Wyatt slips his hands into his pockets. “Irony, in a nutshell.”
“It’s pretty amazing, to think that you could go so peacefully into death.” I look down at Djehutynakht. “Do you think it worked, for him?”
“What?”
I wave my hand at the spells written on the coffin. “All of this. All the preparation. Do you think he got where he wanted to go?”
Wyatt shrugs. “I sure as hell hope so, because it was a shit ton of work to get him in here, and it’s going to be a shit ton more work to get him out.”
He turns and I hear the groan of rope as he starts to climb the ladder. I take a last look at the mummy. I know, philosophically, that the only way to learn more about the way people lived in the past is to do just this: pick apart what they believed to be their final resting place. From an academic standpoint that justifies our work. I also know that religion is what we make of it. But what if Djehutynakht—and the others—were right? What if, when the sun goes down tonight and his ba soul returns to his coffin, the corpse he needs to reunite with is gone?
What if the piece of you that’s missing is the critical one?
* * *
—
I HAVE HEARD that love and hate are two sides of the same coin, which is the only explanation I can give for why I fell so hard for Wyatt, so fast. As a grad student I’d been in a two-person race with him, trading places every now and then. I’d spent so much time trying to surpass Wyatt that it was a revelation to stand on equal ground and stop running long enough to truly see him.
He was not the persona he projected—an arrogant, quick-witted Brit used to being the smartest one in the room. That, I learned, was an act. He had nightmares that made him thrash in my arms. He was mischievous, leaving me dirty hieroglyphic messages that would steam up in the bathroom mirror when we were showering. He touched me as if I were made of gold or mist or memory.
It was hard to hide a romance from eight people living in a single small household, but we were determined. We had to work together at the wadi on the newly discovered dipinto, so we continued to snipe at each other and generally act as if we could not stand to be in close proximity, when—in fact—every time Wyatt passed me he’d slide his hand along the shallow of my spine, and when we were sitting beside each other at dinner, I’d hook my pinkie finger with his and draw his hand onto my thigh beneath the table.
When the household napped in the high heat of the afternoon, I would listen for Wyatt’s footfall outside my bedroom door. There were two
loose tiles that rocked, no matter how quietly you moved. I’d count to a hundred, and then I would follow. Sometimes I would have to sneak past Hasib, Harbi’s father, sleeping in the shade of the courtyard underneath the bright flags of laundry flapping on the line. As soon as I was outside the gates of the Dig House, I’d look down at the dust, shading my eyes from the glare of the sun. Wyatt would have left me a handful of stones in the shape of an arrow, or a line carved along the edge of the path that led to the bank of the river. I would be halfway to the Nile when I saw him waiting. Or he’d spring from a crop of corn planted by a farmer and wrap his arms around me from behind.
We stole those hours for ourselves. The sun never bothered us, even when our cheeks pinkened and our hair bleached lighter. We would walk the narrow paths between raised garden beds, kissing amidst the sharp smell of wild onions. We lay on a bed of hay, Wyatt painting me from nape to navel with a brush made of timothy, as a donkey rolled in the dust and sang for us. We would sit on the edge of the river and talk—about his father, who had managed to deplete the family fortune on a series of terrible business investments, but still insisted on sending his sons to Eton to keep up appearances; about my mother, who worked two jobs to pay off my student loans. What it would be like to see our names in print together. How it felt to get lost in time by getting lost in time.
At night, I’d count off the number of people who headed to the showers, waiting until I was second to last. Then I’d wander into the bathroom and Wyatt would follow—which wasn’t odd, because there were multiple stalls—except that we’d wind up in one together. He would lift my hips and pin me against the tile wall. Or he’d sink to the tile floor and feast on me until my own knees gave out. I remember his head thrown back in the steam; his fingers leaving bruises on my thighs. I remember being so close to him that even the water couldn’t slip between us.
* * *
—
WHEN HOWARD CARTER found the mummy of Tutankhamun and attempted to lift it out, he didn’t realize the innermost coffin was solid gold and the entire operation nearly collapsed. For Djehutnakht’s mummy, Safiya has set up a winch, positioned over the burial shaft on long wooden legs. The conservator has already removed the two coffin lids to the main tomb chamber, and has padded the mummy where it lies and bound it tightly so that it doesn’t move as the nesting-doll coffins are hauled up by local workers. From there, she will move the mummy into a wooden crate that breathes. Mummies are not unwrapped anymore, but given CT scans instead. Wyatt has teamed up with a hospital in Minya for that sometime in the future, but he’s not a physical anthropologist, so it’s not the focus of this discovery. I know that everyone equates Egyptology with mummies, but the truth is, they don’t really tell us all that much. Yes, someone died thousands of years ago. Always good to confirm. But it’s what’s underneath him in that coffin that might help us understand how Djehutynakht lived, what he believed, what he hoped for.
The tomb chapel is once again packed with people—Mostafa Awad is back, and there are antiquities directors I’ve never seen before, plus Safiya has brought a team with her to assist with the transfer of the mummy from coffin to crate. We all technically have work we could do in the tomb but this is one of those days we will be telling the story of for years to come, and Wyatt doesn’t seem inclined to order anyone back to copying texts on the walls. We mill around, listening to the call of the foreman at the winch and the coordinated shouts from the workers below as the pulley system is engaged. Inch by inch the coffins are lifted, until finally from my vantage point behind Wyatt, I can see the cedar lip of the coffin emerging from the burial shaft.
It takes the better part of the morning for the entire coffin to clear the shaft and balance beneath the winch over the hole. Three more hours for it to be gently removed from the pulleys and ropes and set on padded splints in the tomb chapel. We work past lunch, when the sun is bleaching the sand and the rock around us and the heat becomes a living thing, because no one wants to leave before seeing this through.
Finally, the wooden coffin is settled and the conservation team can do their work. They gently lift the mummy from where he rests on his side and place him on his back in the waiting crate. Like a transplant surgeon waiting for the handoff of the organ, Wyatt then takes his place at the center of the action. Alberto seems to be everywhere at once, photographing the transfer of the mummy and the golden funerary mask and the reveal of the interior coffin.
The transfer of the coffins has dislodged more limestone dust, as has the removal of the mummy. Wyatt waits impatiently for Alberto to finish documenting the inside of the narrow cedar box and then takes a clean brush from his pocket. He leans way down, stretching to reach the bottom, gently brushing away the powder to get a better look at the floorboards of the coffin, which were previously obscured by the mummy.
With a whoop of delight, he drops the brush onto the stone floor of the tomb chapel, lifts me off my feet, and swings me in a circle. I stiffen, aware that everyone in the vicinity is staring at him. At us.
But then he sets me down and I completely disregard their raised eyebrows. Because there on the bottom of Djehutynakht’s inner coffin is a wavy line of blue, a rolling stripe of black, a narrow red rectangle. Egyptology’s newest discovery is the world’s oldest version of the Book of Two Ways.
* * *
—
THE SEASON WE had a hidden relationship, Wyatt would come to my twin bed every night, and to fit we’d flatten our bodies together. I got so used to falling asleep beside him that I couldn’t do it on my own, which is why one night when he didn’t come to the shower or to my bedroom, I found myself headed to his room instead.
I collided with him in the hallway in the dark. He steadied my shoulders, dropping the comforter he carried. “Change of scenery,” he whispered.
I knew he was headed to the wadi without him saying so. There was a guard stationed there at night now, but we would tell the gaffir that we wanted to look at the inscription with glancing light, which you sometimes did after dark. Wyatt gave me a headlamp, and we struck out, two shooting stars.
Underneath the inscription, Wyatt spread the comforter and then gestured to it. “After you, my queen.”
I stretched out. “Queen?” I said. “How come I can’t be a king?”
He laughed. “Like Hatshepsut?”
She had been the daughter of Thutmose I, and became queen of Egypt when she married her half brother, Thutmose II. When he died, she acted as the reigning queen until her stepson, the baby Thutmose III, got older. But because she had all these other remarkable qualifications like bloodline and ritual training, she decided she shouldn’t limit herself. She became co-king around 1473 B.C.E., taking on male royal titles.
“She was pretty damn ambitious,” Wyatt said.
I came up on my elbows. “How come when a woman takes power it’s ambitious? And when a man does it, it’s the natural order of things?” I frowned. “Being politically motivated and being female aren’t mutually exclusive. For all we know, she was in the middle of a family crisis. Like maybe someone was threatening to take the throne from her stepson and she had to figure out how to save it. That’s just being a good mom.”
“Mommy dearest, maybe. After she died, Thutmose III smashed all her monuments and erased her name—”
“Not till it was time for his own kid, Amenhotep, to take over. Being a woman was literally the least important thing about her. She didn’t hide it. In art, she wore a nemes headdress and a male kilt and was topless—but you could still see she had breasts.”
Wyatt unbuttoned my shirt. “Do tell.”
“Even when she was a king, her name was still written as Foremost of the Noble Ladies. And all the royal texts describing her have female pronouns.”
He nuzzled my neck, tugging down my pants. “I love it when you get all feminist.”
I swatted him. “She also built Deir el-Bahari as
a huge memorial temple and she led a trading expedition to Punt that was huge—”
“You know what else is huge?”
“—but none of it had anything to do with her gender. It would be like having a female president and saying that any of her achievements were because she was a woman, not because she was a leader.”
“Hatshepsut definitely got shit done,” Wyatt said. He framed my face and kissed me.
By the time we broke apart, I was fighting for breath. “You have a problem with smart, ambitious women who get shit done?”
He rolled me on top of him, so that I straddled his body. “You know what they say,” Wyatt murmured. “Beneath every powerful woman is a very, very lucky man.”
I loved that we could fight about Egyptian kings and queens in the middle of the desert at night. I loved that I didn’t have to explain to Wyatt who Hatshepsut was. I loved the physics of our relationship: that we could argue with the same intensity that we came together. I loved how every minute with him felt like a storm, the moment before it happened.
I loved Wyatt.
I think the reason I remembered that one night so clearly was because it was the first time I admitted this to myself, and instead of feeling panic or confusion I just felt this soft, flannel blanket of right. It was like staring out your bedroom window the morning after a blizzard and seeing the hills and slopes of a landscape that seemed unrecognizable, but that you knew you could still navigate by heart.
The other reason I remembered that night was because we overslept in the morning. We yanked up the comforter and raced through the desert to get to the Dig House before anyone else could wake up. But when we stumbled into the kitchen, the five other grad students and Dumphries were already sitting at the table, tucking into their breakfast. “Thank the gods,” Dumphries said, without looking up from his coffee. “Now we can all stop pretending we don’t know you two are getting it on.”