McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  Colman stood rooted and wordless. He knew precisely what was required of him—each and every one of the arcane tomes had made it clear there was a verbal sigil, a password, a phrase that need be spoken to gain access to the holiest of holies—but he had no idea what that open sesame might be. The Gardyloo of Ecstatic Entrance. Wordless, Colman looked beseechingly at the counterman.

  He may have said, “Uh . . .”

  “Please make your selection from the menu,” said the man behind the counter, who wore a classic saffron robe and a small squared-off cardboard hat. Colman remembered a film clip of The Andrews Sisters singing “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” wearing just such “garrison caps.” The counterman pointed to the black-on-yellow signage suspended above the gleaming deck. Colman pondered the choices:

  THE OXEN ARE SLOW, BUT THE EARTH IS PATIENT

  CHANCE FAVORS THE PREPARED MIND

  IT TAKES A HEAP O’LIVIN’TO MAKE A HOUSE A HOME

  DEATH COMES WITHOUT THE THUMPING OF DRUMS

  I LIKE YOUR ENERGY

  THE AVALANCHE HAS ALREADY STARTED; IT’S TOO LATE

  FOR THE PEBBLES TO VOTE

  EVERY CLOUD HAS A SILVER LINING

  DON’T LOOK BACK. SOMETHING MAY BE GAINING ON YOU

  YES, LIFE IS HARD; BUT IF IT WERE EASY, EVERYBODY WOULD BE DOING IT

  LIFE IS A FOUNTAIN

  TRUST IN ALLAH, BUT TIE YOUR CAMEL

  THE BARKING DOG DOES NO HARM TO THE MOON

  THE MAN WHO BURNS HIS MOUTH ON HOT MILK

  BLOWS ON HIS ICE CREAM

  NO ONE GETS OUT OF CHILDHOOD ALIVE

  SO NEAR, AND YET SO FAR

  MAN IS COAGULATED SMOKE FORMED BY HUMAN PREDESTINATION . . .

  DUE TO RETURN TO THAT STATE FROM WHICH IT ORIGINATED

  French fries are à la carte.

  Colman drew a deep, painful breath. To get to this point, and to blow it because of a few words . . . unthinkable. His mind raced. There were deep thoughts he could call up from a philosophy base on the laptop, the aphorisms and rubrics of six thousand years of human existence, but it was only one of them, only one—like a prime number—that would stand alone and open to him the portals of wisdom; only one that would be accepted by this gatekeeper of Universal Oneness; only one unknown core jot of heart-meat that would serve at this moment.

  He tried to buy himself a cæsura: he said to the saffron-robed counterman, “Uh . . . one of the those . . . ‘Life is a fountain’? I know that one; you’ve got to be kidding, right? ‘Life is a fountain...’”

  The counterman looked at him with shock. “Life isn’t a fountain?”

  Colman stared at him. He wasn’t amused.

  “Just fooling,” the counterman said, with a huge smile. “We always toss in an old gag, just to mix it up with the Eternal Verities. Life should be a bit of a giggle, a little vaudeville, whaddaya think?”

  Colman was nonplussed. He was devoid of plus. He tried to buy another moment: “So, uh, what’s your name?”

  “I’ll be serving you. My name’s Lou.”

  “Lou. What are you, a holy man, a monk from some nearby lamasery? You look a little familiar to me.”

  Lou chuckled softly again, as if he were long used to the notoriety and had come to grips with it. “Oh, heck no, I’m not a holy man; you probably recognize me from a bubble gum card. I used to play a little ball. Last name’s Boudreau.” Colman asked him how to spell that, and he did, and Colman went to his rucksack, dropped on one of the tables, and he pulled out the laptop and did a Google search for the name Lou Boudreau.

  He read what came up on the screen.

  He looked at what he had read on the screen for a long time. Then he went back to the counter.

  “You were the player-manager of the World Champion 1948 Cleveland Indians. Shortstop. 152 games, 560 at bats, 199 hits, 116 runs. You were the all-time franchise leader with a .355 batting average, slugging and on-base percentages, and a .987 OPS! What are you doing here, for gawdsakes?!”

  Boudreau removed the little paper hat, scratched at his hair for a moment, sighed, and said, “Rhadamanthus carries a grudge.”

  Colman stared dumbly. Zeus had three sons. One of them was Rhadamanthus, originally a judge in the afterlife, assigned the venue of the Elysian plain, which was considered a very nice neighborhood. But sometime between Homer and Virgil, flame-haired Rhadamanthus got reassigned to Tartarus, listed in all the auto club triptychs as Hell. Strict judge of the dead. No sin goes unpunished. From which the word “rhadamanthine” bespeaks inflexibility.

  “What did you do to honk him off?”

  “I went with Bearden instead of Bob Lemon in the first game of the series against the Boston Braves. We lost one to nothing. Apparently he had a wad down on the game.”

  A slim black man, quite young, wearing a saffron robe and cardboard garrison cap, came out of the back. Lou aimed a thumb at him. “Larry Doby, left fielder. First Negro to play in the American League.” Doby smiled, gave a little salute, and said to Colman, “Figure it out yet?”

  Colman shook his head.

  “Well, good luck.” Then, in Latin, he added, “ Difficilia quae pulchra.” Colman had no idea what that meant, but Doby seemed to wish him well with the words. He said Thank you.

  Lou pointed toward the rear. “That’s our drive-thru attendant, Joe Gordon, great second baseman. Third baseman Ken Keltner on the grill with our catcher, Jim Hegan; Bob Feller’s working maintenance just till his arm gets right again, but Lemon and Steve Gromek’ll be handling the night shift. And our fry guy is none other than the legendary Leroy ‘Satchel’ Paige . . . hey, Satch, say hello to the new kid!”

  Lifting the metal lattice basket out of the deep fryer filled with sizzling vegetable oil, Satchel Paige knocked the basket half-full of potatoes against the edge of the tub to shake away excess drippings, and grinned hugely at Colman. “You see mine up there?” he said, cocking his head toward the signage of wise sayings. Colman nodded and smiled back.

  “Well,” said Lou Boudreau, saffron-robed counterman shortstop manager of the 1948 World Series champion Cleveland Indians, who had apparently really pissed off Rhadamanthus, “are you ready to order?”

  Time had run out. Colman knew this was it. Whatever he said next would be either the gate pass or the bum’s rush. He considered the choices on the menu, trying to pick one that spoke to his gut. It had to be one of them.

  His mind raced. It had to be one of them.

  He paused. It was the moment of the cortical-thalamic pause. Why did it have to be one of them?

  Life wasn’t a fountain.

  There was only one thing to say to God, if one were at the Gate. At the Core, the Nexus, the Center, the Eternal Portal. Only one thing that made sense, whether this was God or just a minimum-wage, part-time employee. Colman straightened, unfurrowed his brow, and spoke the only words that would provide entrance if one were confronting God. He said to Lou Boudreau:

  “Let me talk to the Head Jew.”

  The peppy little shortstop grinned and nodded and said, “May I super-size that for you?”

  Private Grave 9

  KAREN JOY FOWLER

  Every week Massoud takes our trash out and buries it. Yesterday’s was chicken bones, orange peels, a tin that cherries had come in and another for peas, a comb I sat on and broke, two prints I overexposed, and several dicarded drafts of Mallick’s letter to Lord Wallis about our progress, Meanwhile, at G4 and G5, two bone hairpins and seven clay shards were unrearthed, one of which was painted with some sort of dog, or so Davis says, though I would have guessed a lion. There was more in orther sectors, but too recent-anythin Roman or later is still trash as far as we are concerned. G4 and G5 are along the deep cut and we pull our oldest stuff from them.

  I spent the morning in the darkroom, feeling lucky that my work affords me such privacy; the constant companionship of the expedition house can be hard sometimes. I was printing photographs of infant skeletons. There is an entire level of these, all laid out identi
cally on their sides with their legs pulled into their stomachs. My pictures were of all different children, but all my pictures looked the same. Davis had cleared each tiny skull and rib cage with his breath and I wondered if that had given him any attachment to one more than another, but it seemed a rude thing to ask. I had some philosophical thoughts that I shared at lunch, on how much sadder a single child would have been and how odd that it should be like that, you feeling less with each addition. Mallick, our director, said when I’d put in a few more seasons I’d find I didn’t think of them as dead people at all, but as the bead necklace or the copper bowl or whatever else might be found with the body. Mallick’s eyes are all rimmed in red like a basset hound’s; it gives him a tragic demeanor, though he’s really quite a cheerful sort. The whole time he was speaking, Miss Jackson, his secretary, was shaking her head at me behind his back. Miss Jackson lost her husband in the trench war and her son to the flu after. She has come here specifically to be with dead people.

  Ferhid carved us a cold lamb for lunch and had the mail lying under our forks. Ferhid has the profile of a film star, but a mouthful of rotted teeth. I often wish he smiled less; his mouth is a painful thing to confront while eating. We each had a letter or two, which was fair and companionable, though most of them mentioned Howard Carter’s dig, which was not. Mine was from my mother, who pretends not to miss me as unpersuasively as she can. I was kept out of the military as I’m her sole support, but it’s a role I’ve found burdensome since the war ended. Last month I wrote to her that a man must have a vocation and if nothing comes to him, then he must go looking. Today she responded by wondering if it was necessary to travel half a globe and 4500 years away. She said that Mesopotamia must be about as far from Indiana as it’s possible to get. How wonderful it must be, she said, to be so unattached that you can pick up and go anywhere and never mind the people you’ve left behind. And then she assured me she was not complaining.

  Patwin read bits of the Times aloud while we had our coffee. Apparently reporters are still camped at the Tut-ankh-Amen tomb, cataloguing gold masks and lapis lazuli scarabs and ebony effigies as fast as Carter can haul them out. These Times accounts have Lord Wallis and everyone else in a spin, as if we’re playing some sort of sporting match against Carter and losing badly. Our potsherds, never mind how old they are, have become an embarrassing return on Wallis’s investment, though they were good enough before. Our skeletons are too numerous to be tasteful. I’m betting Wallis won’t be whimsical about paintings of dogs, nor will anyone else at his club.

  As he read, Patwin’s tone conveyed his disapproval. He has an anarchist’s face, but is actually a French Marxist and, though he’ll tell you slavery was a necessary historical phase, shards of good clay working-class pots suit him better than golden bowls put by for the afterlife.

  “We had a lovely morning in PG9,” Mallick said stoutly. PG stands for private grave and PG9 is the largest tomb we’ve found so far, four chambers in all, and never plundered, which is the really exciting bit. A woman is laid out in the second of these chambers— a priestess or a queen in a coffin of clay. There is a necklace of gold leaves, a gold ring, and several of the colored beads she once wore in her hair have fallen into her skull. The bodies of seven other women kneel about her. There are two groomsmen and two oxen and a musician with what I imagine, when we’ve reconstructed the missing bits, will be a lyre. Once upon a time Wallis would have been entirely content with this. A royal tomb. A sleeping priestess. But that was before Carter began to swim in golden sarcophagi.

  I took her picture that afternoon, but two days passed before I developed it.

  Another American, a girl from Rapid City, had come to visit us at the expedition house. Her name was Emily Whitfield and she was a cousin of Mallick’s wife or a second cousin or some such thing, some relative Mallick found impossible to send away. She was twenty-nine years old, which is two years younger than I, unremarkable looking, with short black hair and blue eyes. Because of our similar ages there’d been some mild teasing before she arrived. “High time you met the right girl,” Mallick had said, but the minute I saw Miss Whitfield I knew she wasn’t that. I’ve never known if I believe in love at first sight, but I’ve had a fair amount of experience with the opposite.

  Patwin had not looked forward to Miss Whitfield’s visit, despite the obvious appeal of a new face in a confined set. “She will need to be taken everywhere and her feelings will often be hurt by one thing or another,” Patwin had predicted. Patwin prided himself on knowing women, although when that would have happened I really could not say. “She’ll find it all very dirty and our facilities insupportable. She’ll never have stood before.” And then Patwin had a coughing fit; it was such a rude thing to have said in Miss Jackson’s presence.

  But Miss Whitfield was proving entirely game. Davis took her to see the baby skeletons and he said she made no comment, lit an unmoved cigarette. She was actually an authoress and quite successful, according to Mallick, who learned it from his wife. Five books so far, books in which people are killed in clever and unusual ways, murderers unmasked by people even cleverer. She was about to set a book at a dig such as ours; it’s why she’d come. Mallick told me to take her along and show her the tomb, so she was there when I took my picture. I pointed out an arresting detail or two—the way the workmen chant as they haul the rubble out of the chamber, the rags they tie around their heads, their seeping eyes. She didn’t seem terribly interested.

  We brought the smell of sweat and flesh with us into the tomb. Most people would have instinctively known to whisper. Not Miss Whitfield. “I thought it would be grander,” she said when we were inside the second chamber. “I didn’t picture mud.” She lifted a hand to her hair and when she lowered it again there was a streak of dust running from the hairline down her temple. It gave her a friendlier, franker look, but like Mallick’s eyes, this proved deceiving. What she really wanted to know was whether there were tensions in the expedition house. “You all live so cheek-to-jowl. It must drive you crazy sometimes. There must be little, annoying habits that send you right around the bend.”

  “Actually things go very smoothly,” I told her. “Sorry to disappoint.” I set up for the picture. I dragged a stool over and stood on it. Miss Whitfield was at my elbow. Davis was in a corner of the chamber on his knees, pouring wax and covering it with cloth. Bits of shell and stone had been found there in a pattern; when the wax dried he would lift them out without disturbing their placement.

  Miss Whitfield softened her voice so he wouldn’t hear her. She was so close I could smell the cigarette smoke lingering on her skin. “But if you did murder someone,” she said, “would it more likely be Mr. Patwin or Mr. Davis?” She might have been asking this at the exact moment I got my shot. Afterward she looked closely at the priestess’s skull. “I hear Tut-ankh-Amen’s skull was bashed in at the back,” she said.

  Later that night Patwin complained that I was blocking his light while he tried to read. I told him it was interesting that he thought the light belonged to him. I said, That’s an interesting point of view for a Marxist to take, and I saw Miss Whitfield pull out her notebook to write the whole thing down.

  A cylindrical seal was found on the bier and Davis deciphered a name from it. Tu-api, along with a designation for a highborn woman. A princess, not a priestess, then. We also found a golden amulet, carved in the shape of a goat standing on its hind legs. There’d been a second goat, a matching partner, but that one was crushed beyond mending. Pictures of all the ornaments had to be finished in a rush and sent off to Lord Wallis. The goat is really lovely and my photograph showed it well; no one need feel apologetic for that find.

  But best of all were the stones and shells that Davis had been excavating. Mallick believed there’d once been a wooden box with pictures pressed into its sides. The box had disintegrated and the two sides fallen together, but Davis was slowly putting them to rights. One side showed scenes from ordinary life. There was a banquet with
guests and musicians, farmers with wood on their backs, oxen and sheep. The second side was all armies, prisoners of war, chariots, men with weapons. Before and After, Miss Jackson called it, but Mallick called it Peace and War to clarify that it represented two parts of a cycle, and not a sequence, that peace would follow war as well as precede it. The artist must have been remarkable as the people were quite detailed, down to the sorry look on the prisoners’ faces.

  Patwin criticized me for taking more pictures of Tu-api than of the kneeling girls or the poor musician. Tu-api, he guessed, had the good fortune to die of natural causes. He said that I must fight the bourgeois impulse to care more about the princess than about the slave. It would be even harder, he conceded, now that the princess had a name.

  “Does he always lecture at you like that?” Miss Whitfield asked.

  Because I was busy developing pictures of golden goats and verdigris bowls, because we’d already sent Lord Wallis plenty of photographs of skeletons, I left my shot of Tu-api untouched for a couple of days. It was late at night when I put it through the wash and hung it up. I didn’t look at it closely until the following morning. In my photograph, Tu-api had a face. This wasn’t part of the picture exactly, but a cloudy, ghostly spot superimposed over the skull. It made my skin crawl up the back of my neck and I took it to the dig to show the others. It was a hot day and the air so dry it stung to breathe. I found Mallick, Davis, and Miss Jackson all together in the third chamber.

  They were not as unnerved as I was. A human face is an easy thing to find, Davis pointed out, in the paint on a ceiling, the grain in a wooden board. “I once saw the face of God in the clouds,” Miss Jackson agreed. “I know how that sounds, but it was sharp and perfect, like a Michelangelo. Sober and very beautiful. Thin Chinese sort of beard. I got down on my knees and watched until it melted and blew away.”

  This sudden display of fancy from solid, cylindrical Miss Jackson obviously embarrassed Mallick. He came over scholarly in response, with his dry voice and those sad eyes. “I’ve heard of places where bodies are naturally preserved right down to the facial expression,” he said. “In the Arctic ice, for example. At very high altitudes. I’ve always thought those discoveries must be rather grim.”