Together, they trudged uphill. Justly wary of the packet, the mummy trailed a few respectful paces behind. “You plan to use that to confound the Great Tempter?"
"That is my plan, if I have one,” said Occhietti, “although I might be better-advised to put this back and jump into that nice clean river."
"I have no further guidance for you,” the mummy realized. “I don't know what to tell you about this situation. It's entirely beyond me."
Occhietti tramped on. “That's all right, Djoser. We're both beyond that now."
Embarrassed, the mummy caught up with him, then stuck one dry finger through his unaccustomed collar. “You see, Achille, I was born in the youth of the world. We never lived as you people do. Your world is much older than my world."
"You've come along this far,” said Occhietti kindly. “Why not tag along to see how things turn out?"
"My own life ended so long ago,” the mummy confessed. “Like all us Egyptians, I longed to hold on to my life, to remain the mortal man I once was.... But the passage of time.... Even in the afterlife, the passage of time erased my being, bit by bit."
Occhietti had nothing to say.
"When time passed, the first things to leave me,” said the mummy thoughtfully, “were the things I always thought were most important to me, such as ... my cunning use of right-angled triangles in constructing master blueprints. Every technical skill that I had grasped with such effort? That all went like the dew!
"Then I remembered the things that had touched my heart, yet often seemed so small or accidental, like ... the sunrise. One beautiful sunrise after a night with three dancing girls."
"There were three?” said Occhietti, pausing for a breath. It was a rather steep climb to his mansion. He generally took a chauffeured company car.
"I'm sure that I cherished all three of those girls, but all I remember is my regret when I refused the fourth one."
"Yes,” said Occhietti, who was a man of the world, “I can understand that."
"As my afterlife stretched on inside my quiet, well-engineered tomb,” intoned the mummy, “I rehearsed all my hates and resentments. But those dark feelings had no power to bind me. Then I gloated over certain bad things I did, that I had gotten away with. But that seemed so feeble and childish.... Finally I was reduced to pondering the good things I had done in my life. Because those were much fewer, and easy to catalog.
"The last things I recalled from my lifespan, the final core of my human experience on Earth, were the kind, good, decent things I'd done, that I was punished for. Not good things I was rewarded and praised for doing. Not even good things I'd done without any thought of reward. Finally, at my last, I recalled the good things I'd done, things that I knew were right to do, and which brought me torment. When I was punished as a sinner for my acts that were righteous. Those were the moral gestures of my life that truly seemed to matter."
As if conjured by the mummy's dark meditations, a sphinx arrived on the scene. This sphinx, restless, agitated, was padding rapidly up the narrow, hilly street, lurking behind the two of them, as big as a minibus. She was stalking them: silent as death on her hooked and padded paws.
Her woman's nostrils flared. She had smelled that humble package Occhietti carried. The all-pervading reek of bloodshed.
Occhietti turned. “Shoo! Go on, scat!"
The sphinx opened her fanged mouth to ask her lethal riddle, but Occhietti hastily tucked the Grail under one suited armpit and clamped both his hands over his ears. Frustrated, the sphinx skulked away.
They trudged on toward Occhietti's morbid rendezvous with destiny. “I know what the Sphinx was going to ask you,” the mummy offered. “Because I know her question."
Occhietti nodded. “Mmmph."
"Her riddle sounds simple. This is it: ‘How can Mut be Sekhmet?’”
"What was that, Djoser? Is that really the riddle of the Sphinx? I don't know anything about that."
"Yes, and that's why the Sphinx would have eaten you, if you had hearkened unto her."
Occhietti walked on stoically. He would be home in just a few moments, and confronting the horrid, hair-raising climax of his life. Could it possibly matter what some mere Sphinx had said? He was about to confront Satan himself!
Still, Occhietti was an engineer, so curiosity naturally gnawed at him.
"All right, Djoser, tell me: how can Mut be Sekhmet?"
"That's the part I myself never understood,” said the Egyptian. “Not while I lived, anyway. Because Mut, as every decent man knows, is the serene Consort of Amun and the merciful Queen of Heaven. Whereas Sekhmet is the lion-headed Goddess of Vengeance whose wanton mouth drips blood.
"Day and night, black and white, were less different than Mut and Sekhmet! Yet, year by year, I saw the goddesses blending their aspects! The priests were sneaky about that work: they kept eliding and conflating the most basic theological issues.... Until one day, exhausted by my work of building Pyramids ... I went into the temple of Mut to beg divine forgiveness for a crime ... you know the kind of crime I mean, some practical sin that was necessary on the job ... and behold: Mut really was Sekhmet."
"I'm sorry to hear about all that,” Occhietti told him. And he was sincere in his sympathy, for the mummy's ancient voice had broken with emotion.
"So: the proper answer to the Sphinx, when she asks you, ‘How can Mut be Sekhmet?’ is: ‘Time has passed, and that doesn't matter anymore.’ Then she would flee from you. Or: if you wanted to be truly cruel to her, you could say to the poor Sphinx, ‘Oh, your Sekhmet and Mut, your Mut or Sekhmet, they never mattered in the first place, and neither do you.’ Then she would explode into dust."
The mummy stopped in his tracks. His seamed face was wrinkled in pain. “Look at me, look, I'm weeping! These are human tears, as only the living can weep!"
"You took that ancient pagan quibble pretty badly, Djoser."
"I did! It broke my heart! I'd committed evil while intending only the best! I died soon after that. I died, and I knew that I must be food for that demon hippopotamus. So, I went through my afterlife's trials—I knew all about them, of course, because the briefing in the Book of the Dead was thorough—and they tossed my broken, sinner's heart onto that balance beam of divine justice, and that beam fell over like a stone."
"That is truly a dirty shame,” said Occhietti. “There is no question that life is unfair. And it seems, by my recent experiences, that death is even more unfair than life. I should have guessed that.” He sighed.
"Then they brought in a different feather of justice,” said the mummy. “Some ‘feather’ that was! That feather was carved from black basalt and it was big as a crocodile. It seemed that we engineers, we royal servants of the God-King, didn't have to put up with literal moral feathers. Oh no! If that cross-eyed imbecile whose knees were knocking was a sacred God-King, well—then we were all off the hook! The fix was in all the time! Even the Gods were on the take!"
There was no time left for Djoser's further confidences, for they had reached the ornate double gates of Occhietti's mansion.
Normally his faithful dog was there to greet him, baring Doberman fangs fit to scare Cerberus, but alas, the dog was mortal, and the dog was dead.
However, Occhietti's bride was still among the living, and so were her numerous relatives. Ofelia's birthday was her signal chance to break all her relations out of mothballs.
They were all there, clustered in his wife's garden in the cheery living sunshine, her true-blue Turinese Savoyard Piedmontese Old Money Rich, chastely sipping fizzy mineral water—Cesare and Luisa, Emanuele and Francesca, Great-Aunt Lucia, Raffaela, his sister-in-law Ottavia ... a storm of cheek-kisses now: Eusabia, Prospero, Carla and Allesandra, Mauro, Cinzia, their little Agostino looking miserable, as befitted an eight-year-old stuffed into proper clothes.... Some company wives had also taken the trouble to drop by, which was kind of them, as Ofelia had never understood his work.
His work was Ofelia's greatest rival. She had serenely o
verlooked the models, the secretaries, the weekend jaunts to summits on small Adriatic islands, even the occasional misplaced scrap of incendiary lingerie—but Ofelia hated his work. Because she knew that his work mattered to him far more than she had ever mattered.
Ofelia swanned up to him. She had surely been worried about his absence on her birthday, and might have hissed some little wifely scolding, but instead she stared in delight at his ugly and graceless new suit. “Oh Achille, bel figa! How handsome you look!"
"Happy birthday, my treasure."
"I was afraid you were working!"
"I had to put a few urgent matters into order, yes.” He nodded his head at the suit-clad mummy. “But I'm here for your celebration. Look, what lovely weather, for my consort's special day."
No one would have called Ofelia Occhietti a witch, although she was a necromancer's wife. The two of them never spoke one word about the supernatural. Still, when Ofelia stood close by, in the cloud of Chanel #5 she had deployed for decades, Occhietti could feel the mighty power of her Turinese respectability closing over him in a dense, protective spell.
Occhietti had spent the night in Hell, and was doomed to confront Satan himself in broad daylight, and yet, for Ofelia, these matters were irrelevant.
So they did not exist. Therefore, it had just been a bad night for him, bad dreams, with indigestion. He had not fed any blood to the undead; that deep cut in his wrist was a mere accidental nick, not even an attempt at suicide. He had not received any commission from the undead Lord of Turin to combat Satan. Decent people never did such things.
He was attending his wife's birthday party. Everyone here was polite and well brought up.
Maybe his dog was not even dead. No, his beloved dog was dead, all right. A necromancer had to work hard to raise the dead; death never went away when politely overlooked.
"Amore,” Ofelia said to him—she never called him that, except when she needed something—"there's such a nice young man here, Giulia's boy ... You do remember my Giulia."
"Of course I do,” said Occhietti, who remembered about a thousand Giulias.
"He is just graduated, he's so well-bred, and has such bright ideas.... He's one of ours, the Good People. I think he needs a little help, Achille.... Maybe a word of career advice, the company, you know...."
"Yes! Fine! We're always on the lookout for fresh talent. Point him out to me."
Ofelia, who would never commit an act so vulgar as pointing, gave one meaningful flicker of her eyes. Occhietti knew the worst instantly.
There he was. Satan was standing there, under the roses of a whitewashed pergola, sipping spumante.
Satan was a young and handsome Turinese in a modishly cut suit. Magic was boiling off of him in sizzling waves, like the summer sunlight off molten tar.
Digging deep within himself, Occhietti found the courage to speak to his wife in a normal tone. “I'll be sure to have a word with that young man."
"That would be so helpful! I'm sure he's meant to go far. And one other thing. Amore—that ugly Libyan banker! Did you have to bring that nasty man to my birthday party? You know I never trusted him, Achille."
Occhietti glanced across the garden at the seam-faced, impassive mummy, who was pretending to circulate among the guests. The mummy could pass for a living human being when he put his mind to it, but his heart clearly wasn't in the effort today.
In point of fact Djoser's heart was in Turin's distant Egyptian Museum, inside a canopic jar.
"My treasure, I know that foreign financier is not a welcome guest under your roof. I apologize for that—I had to bring him here. We've just settled some important business matters. They're done! I'm through with him! After this day, you'll never see him again!"
Ochietti knew he was doomed: the awful sight of Satan, standing there, brimming with infernal glee, was proof of that. But he was still alive, a mortal man, and therefore capable of moral action.
He clung to that. He could do his wife a kindness. It was her birthday. He could do one good thing, a fine thing, at whatever cost to himself. “My darling, I work too much, and I know that. I've neglected you, and I overlooked you. But ... after this beautiful day, with this sunshine, life will be different for us."
"'Different,’ Achille? Whatever do you mean?"
Occhietti stared at Satan, who had conjured a cloud of flying vermin from the nooks and crannies of Ofelia's garden. Bluebottle flies, little moths, lacewings, aphids.... Lucifer smiled brightly. The Tempter crooked a finger.
"I meant this as my big birthday surprise for you,” Occhietti improvised, for the certainty of imminent damnation had loosened his tongue. “But, I promise ... that I'll put all my business behind me."
"You mean—you leave your work? You never leave Turin."
"But I will! We will! We have the daughter in London, the daughter in San Francisco.... Two beautiful cities, beautiful girls who made fine marriages.... You and I, we should spend time with the grandchildren! Even the daughter who keeps moving from Lyon to Prague.... It's time we helped her settle down. She was just sowing wild oats! There's nothing so wrong with our little black sheep, when life's all said and done!"
Tears of startled joy brightened his wife's eyes. “Do you mean that, Achille? You truly mean that?"
"Of course I mean it!” he lied cheerfully. “We'll rent out the house here! We'll pick out a fine new travel wardrobe for you.... A woman only gets so many golden years! Starting from tomorrow, you'll enjoy every day!"
"You're not joking? You know I don't understand your silly jokes, sometimes."
"Would I joke with you on your birthday, precious? Tomorrow morning! Try me! Come to my room and wake me!"
He accepted an overjoyed hug. Then he fled.
After a frantic search, he found Djoser lurking in his bedroom, alone and somberly watching the television.
"A fantastic thing, television,” said Djoser, staring at a soap ad. “I just can't get over this. What a miracle this is!"
"You fled from Satan, like I did?"
"Oh, your Tempter is here to destroy all you built,” shrugged the mummy. “But I built the Pyramids—I'd like to see him break those.” Djoser reached to the bedroom floor and picked up a discarded garment. “Do you see this thing?"
"Yes, that is my night robe. So?"
"Your robe is black. This morning, when you were wearing this night-robe in Hell, it was white. Your robe was the purest, snowy white Egyptian cotton."
Occhietti said nothing.
"Your robe has magically appeared here, from where you abandoned it, there in Hell. As you can see, your robe is black. It is black, and the Prince of Darkness has entered your garden. You are beyond my help.” The mummy sighed. “So I am leaving."
"Leaving?"
"Yes. I'm beyond all use, I'm done."
"Where will you go, Djoser?"
"Back into my glass case inside the Egyptian museum. That's where I was, before you saw fit to invoke me. And before you say anything—no, it's not that bad, being in there. Sure, the tourists gawk at me, but was I any better off in my sarcophagus? Mortality has its benefits, Achille. I can promise you, it does."
The mummy stared at the flickering television, then gazed out the window at the sky. “It is of some interest to be among the living ... but after a few millennia, time has to tire a man. All those consequences, all those weighty moral decisions! Suns rising and setting, days flying off the calendar—that fever of life, it's so hectic! It annoys me. It's beneath me! I want my death back. I want the dignity of being dead, Achille. I want to be one with God! Because, as Nietzsche pointed out here in Turin, God is Dead. And so am I."
This was the longest outburst Occhietti had ever heard from the mummy. Occhietti did not argue. What Djoser said was logical and rational. It also had the strength of conviction.
"That's a long journey to the Other Side,” he told the mummy. “I hope you can find some use for this."
He handed over his company's platinum credit card.
The mummy stared at the potent card in wonderment. “You'll get into trouble for giving me this."
"I'm sure that it's trouble for me,” Occhietti told him, “yet it's also the right thing to do."
"That's the gesture of a real Italian gentleman,” said the mummy thoughtfully. “That truly showed some sprezzatura dash.” Without further fuss, he began to vaporize.
Occhietti left his bedroom for the garden, where Satan was charming the guests.
Satan looked very Turinese, for he was the androgynous angel who topped that hellish pile of boulders in the Piazza Statuto. Satan looked like a Belle Arte knockoff of one of Leonardo da Vinci's epicene studio models. He was disgusting.
Furthermore, to judge by the way he was busily indoctrinating the guests, Satan was a technology wonk, a tiresome geek who never shut up.
"The triple bottom line!” declared Satan, waving his hands. “The inconvenient truth is, as a civilization, we have to tick off every box on the sustainability to-do list. I wouldn't call myself an expert—but any modern post-industrialist surely needs to memorize the Three Main Components and the Four System Conditions of the Natural Step. And, of course, the Ten Guiding Principles to One-Planet Living. I trust you've read the World Wildlife Fund's Three Forms of Solidarity?"
None of the guests responded—they were more than a little bewildered—but this reaction encouraged Lucifer. “If you expect our Alpine bioregion to escape a massive systemic overhang and a catastrophic eco-crash,” he chanted, “so that you can still name and properly number the birds and beasts in this garden.... Then you had better get a handle on the Copenhagen Agenda's Ten Principles for Sustainable City Governance! And for those of you in education—education is the key to the future, as we all know!—I would strongly recommend the Sustainable Schools Network with its Framework of Eight Doorways. That analysis is the result of deep thought by some smart, dedicated activists! Although it can't compare in systemic comprehensibility with the Ten Hannover Principles."
Seeing no further use in avoiding the inevitable, Occhietti steeled himself. He confronted the Tempter. “What did you do with your wings?"
FSF, August-September 2009 Page 27