Egyptologists give one another special names. It’s one of those things we’ve always done. So John calls me Ikky (which is short for Ikhnaten) and I call him Akky (which is short for Akhenaten) and when people see the two of us together they say: “Hey! There goes Ikky and Akky.” When people find out we’re Egyptologists, they say things like: “So you guys are into all that King Tut shit, are ya?” We used to go into a long drawn out explanation about how we’re experts in the Late Egyptian period and handle a geographic region way south of Thebes and the Valley of the Kings almost on the border of the Sudan – 500 years later and 500 clicks upriver from King Tut. But nobody really cares, so now we smile and nod and say: “Ya, ya, the King Tut shit.”
I’m a specialist in temple art and Akky is doing post doc work in linguistics. He can read hieroglyphs, Demotic, Coptic, Sumerian, Ugarit, Greek, Latin, German, and I joke that he can sometimes write English if he has spell-check. I tell him he’s a cunning linguist. Sometimes the women on staff hear us talking like that and assume we’re a pair of dweebs who haven’t got a life outside the museum. When we first started, I guess their assumption would have been true. But when I met Nancy from paleontology, things turned around for me. Even Clara, the blond in charge of admissions, started complimenting me on the new clothes I was wearing and the fact that I had started shaving. As for Akky, well let’s say he still has some work to do – although, since his translation of early Demotic ledgers was featured in the museum newsletter, Lulu Ping from Victorian textiles has been giving him the eye. Not the evil eye either. And then we got the crate from Aswan.
Akky and I were so excited we couldn’t sleep the night before and stayed up poring over photos from the dig. We met at the loading dock early the next morning. Nancy had brought along coffees, so we stood on the concrete shipping bay and sipped our coffees and stamped our feet to stay awake. Nancy was happy for us. She squeezed my hand and gave me a kiss on the cheek and said I’d have to tell her all about it over dinner that evening. Then she ran off to her dinosaurs. She was helping to prepare a partial Allosaurus skeleton for exhibit and the department was on a tight schedule.
The shipment arrived at nine – an hour late. By that time our bladders were ready to burst. Neither of us wanted to be away when the truck arrived, so we crossed our legs and grimaced through the hour it took for the driver to locate the receiving door. The crate sat in the back of a cube truck, though it could easily have fit into a van. It rested on a skid and the people from Cairo bound it tightly round and round in plastic wrap. (Wrapping things up like that must come naturally to them.) It could just as easily have been a shipment of toilet paper as a crate full of 3000-year-old artifacts. The forklift operator treated it as if it were a shipment of toilet paper. Akky was so upset he even swore at the operator – the first time I’d ever heard him use a swear word in a living language.
We opened the crate in the room opposite our office. Although we were the project leads (the first time we’d ever been put in charge of anything) nevertheless everybody gathered round to watch, from the janitor and Clara right on up to the CEO and some old geezer who had just donated a wad of cash to our capital fund. Once the plastic wrap came off the crate, the first thing I noticed was the dust – it was a greyish blond colour like the dirt you find at most of the digs near the Nile. But when we split open the boards of the crate, the dust inside and covering the artifacts was a red colour like you find further into the desert. With a crowbar I lifted the first board and a plume of the red dust clouded around my head and I spluttered and asked for a glass of water. “Funny,” I thought. “Greyish/blond dust on the outside; reddish dust on the inside.” Already I was formulating theories about the origins of the artifacts.
What we were supposed to have was a selection of funerary objects from the tomb of Queen Nefertiti. We placed each one at a separate station for photographing and an initial description before we undertook a more intensive study. I was so excited I kept slapping Akky on the back and telling him to pinch me. The whole day went by in a blur, like a dream. I couldn’t remember much about the individual objects except for a ceramic vessel of some sort, probably a container for one of the Queen’s organs – brain maybe – with a lid in the shape of a jackal’s head and hieroglyph inscriptions around the base. I remember leaning in close and even brushing my finger lightly over its surface – technically a no-no but my excitement got the better of me. Only Akky saw what I did. He cast a private frown in my direction but was good enough not to draw anybody’s attention to my slip.
Nancy and I had talked about going out for dinner, but I was exhausted so we picked up some Thai take-out and went back to her place instead. A funny thing happened while we were waiting for them to call my name. Nancy saw some red on my collar and pointed to it with a pouting pretend jealousy on her face. “Is that lipstick?”
“Yeah,” I said. “From Egypt.”
She made light of it and pretended that she had been feigning jealousy, but you could tell there was at least a small piece of her jealousy that was real. When I saw the trace of hurt in her eyes, I smiled then told her about the funerary piece I’d examined, how I had leaned in close and got some of the dust on my collar, how clearly the artifacts had come from a location further inland than we had first supposed, how the soil further inland was rich in iron and so had a reddish tinge to it. What she took for lipstick must be some of that dust.
“There’s only one way to be sure.” She scraped some of the dust from my collar with a fingernail, then set it to her tongue. She screwed up her face and said “Eeuw! Definitely not lipstick.”
“Bitter?”
“Ya. A weird taste. Not sure what. Definitely dirt, but something else besides. Maybe wormwood.”
“Ikky!” The cashier called my name. I paid for dinner and we went back to Nancy’s.
I wolfed down my food and found myself feeling impatient with the way Nancy poked her chopsticks at the bits of shrimp and swirled the noodles in circles around her plate. The fact was: I wanted to get her into bed. There was something about her pouting and her jealousy that was a turn-on. There was something too about the way she wore her eye-liner, and the white diaphanous robe she wore around the apartment. I couldn’t help myself. I had to have her.
It was good. We’d been seeing each other for several months now and things were starting to click. Sometimes playful, sometimes intense, sometimes desperate, sometimes spiritual. Sometimes it even felt like we were transported beyond our bodies. But this evening I felt all these things and something more. I don’t know how to describe it. We were communing in a way we’d never felt before. And as the climax approached, a guttural sound issued from Nancy’s throat. At first it was low and indistinct, but she said it again. It almost sounded like a word, but nothing I understood.
“What’s that, Nan?” and I pushed myself back so I could see her face. Oooo! Her eyes were rolled way back in her head so you could only see the whites. She bared her teeth then drew back her lips into a snarl and howled like a wolf or a dog or something.
The next day I did something I had promised myself I’d never do – I talked to another guy about the sex I’d had with a girl.
Akky had a goofy grin on his face. “So you made Nancy howl?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Like a wolf?”
“Or something.”
He smiled. “Were you doing it doggy style?”
I smacked him on the head. “Don’t be such a twit.”
“And this word – “
“At least I think it was a word.”
“What’d it sound like?”
“I think what I heard was thepjdow.”
“Thepjdow?”
“Shhhhh. Not so loud.”
“Hmmm.” Akky scratched his head. “You know … I think I hear a basic phoneme that could be the root for “mountain.” It reminds me of something, but I just can’t place it. Something recent I’ve seen. Let me think about it for a while.”
All day we continued with our photographing – setting up timelines for describing and cleaning and authenticating each item. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon that Akky pulled me aside. He remembered where he’d come across the word. Thepjdow. He dragged me along to the funerary container with the jackal head. “There!” He pointed to the hieroglyphs at the base of the container. “Thepjdow.” He spoke with confidence. “It means ‘the one who is on his mountain’.”
“The one who is on his mountain.” I let the words roll around on my tongue as I pondered their meaning.
“It was an epithet of the jackal god, Anubis.”
“An epithet?”
“Ya. Like a royal title, say – a show of honour.”
“You mean to tell me my Nancy was summoning Anubis?”
“Ya. Ain’t it cool? I guess some people say ‘Oh God, Oh God’ and other people say ‘Anubis, Anubis.’”
“But that’s crazy. She doesn’t even know Egyptian.”
That night I didn’t even have to hint; Nan wanted it in the worst way. She wore the same white robe as on the night before, only this time she wore it cinched with a golden braid. She’d done the same thing with the eye-liner – only moreso, with exaggerated lines extending from the corners of her eyes. And that afternoon she’d gone out to have her hair dyed black and cut with bangs. After supper, she took my hand and said: “Come. Come into my chamber.” Which struck me as an odd way to put things. Normally we say things like: “Hey, wanna go to bed?” or “Hey, wanna fool around?” but “Come into my chamber?” I wasn’t sure whether it was creepy or charming.
This night was as passionate as the night before and, as on the night before, there was the low guttural “Thepjdow.” But this time there was no howling – only a yammering on and on that sounded like gibberish to me. But I had come prepared. I was carrying a small digital recorder in my pocket and before I took off my pants I reached in and switched it on.
The next morning over coffee, Akky and I listened to Nancy’s yammering.
“Definitely Late Egyptian.”
“But what’s she saying?” I asked.
“Dunno.”
“I thought you were the expert.”
“Egyptian is a dead language.”
“The cunning linguist.”
“I’ll be able to decipher it, but it’ll take a few minutes. And listen to her. She’s fluent.”
“But that’s impossible. Late Egyptian is a dead language.”
“I know, I know.”
“And besides which she’s a paleontologist.”
“I know, I know.”
“So where’d she learn to speak a dead language?”
“Dunno.”
And I drained my coffee.
As we stepped from our office and into the room with all the artifacts, I had an odd thought – more a theory than a thought. I remembered how I had run my finger through the dust on the funerary vase, how some of the dust had gotten onto my collar, how Nancy had scooped some of it off and set it to her tongue. I told Akky.
“What are you saying?” He gave me a look as if to say that he thought Scarabs were eating away at my brain. “You think Nancy picked up some Late Egyptian because she swallowed a mouthful of dirt?”
Even now I’m not sure what I was thinking. Maybe she was channeling Nefertiti or one of the queen’s maids-in-waiting. Maybe the dirt unlocked a deeply embedded genetic memory. Who knows? I’m an art historian; not a scientist.
That evening I confronted Nancy. I told her about Thepjdow and how she had been talking fluent Late Egyptian (though I held back the fact that I’d recorded us in bed and had shared it with Akky). If I didn’t know Nancy better, I’d say there was note of ridicule in her voice. She thought it was absurd. She’d flunked high school French; she wasn’t likely to do any better with Late Egyptian. And channeling? What a lot of rubbish!
“But don’t you remember?”
“Remember what?”
“Thepjdow. Don’t you remember saying Thepjdow – and all those other words?”
Nancy smiled. Things had threatened to devolve into an argument, but her smile lightened the mood.
“Besides. I’m a paleontologist. I’m your Allosaurus girl, remember?” She leapt up. “Close your eyes.”
“What?”
“Close your eyes. I have a surprise for you.”
I did as I was told. I could hear bare feet padding across the kitchen floor and into the hall, then a rustling noise in amongst the coats and bags and umbrellas, then the bare feet returning until I could feel Nan’s warm presence in front of me at the kitchen table. She pressed her moist lips to mine, and when she drew back, she told me again to keep my eyes shut. I felt a finger against my lips, rubbing back and forth, rubbing something coarse and grainy. Some of it even got onto my tongue.
“Pwa, pwa.” I spat it out.
Nancy laughed.
“That’s disgusting.”
“It’s dirt.”
“What the hell?”
“I wanted to show you how ridiculous your theory is, so I rubbed dino dirt on your lips.”
“Dino dirt?”
“I brought home my lab coat to wash – the one I’ve been wearing while I prep the Allo skull. Thought you might like a taste of early Jurassic dino dirt. See what we can get you to channel.” She laughed and clasped her hands behind my head and drew me to my feet. Soon we were in her bedroom and we embarked on another evening of amazing sex.
I don’t remember much of it. Only that a powerful feeling came over me – an urgent ravenous feeling that drove me on and on. There was also a dreamlike quality to it all, as if I was transported beyond myself or vested with heightened physical powers. And all my senses became acute – but most especially my sense of smell, as if I had descended from the tame pines of an arboreal forest into the dangerous wilds of a primeval swamp. And after I was sated, I slept.
Which is all very well except that when Nan’s alarm went off the next morning and I leapt from the bed worried that I might be late for work, I found myself confronted by unanswered questions. Like: why were the sheets drenched in blood? And where the hell was Nan?
Related posts:
Fri, Jul 18, 2008
Stories