Vital Signs (8 page)

The Nile could have flooded and drowned us then, the pharaoh might have proclaimed higher taxes, the gods might have asked for greater human sacrifices, and I, gratefully, might have been spared the humiliation of my modernity
.

“I am Mustafa,” said our guide, and I felt something between him and Anna instantly. He was an average-looking man: glasses, black moustache, a soft, not muscular build. He shook our hands, and I noticed he held Anna’s longer than mine. “Where are you from?” he asked her.

“Canada,” she said, then realized from his look that this was not enough. “I was born in Istanbul.”

He stared at her harder. “Of course, of course, I see. But I thought you were one of us!”

I needed to fuck my wife then more than I had in several years.

As the sun roasted my neck pink, Mustafa told us about the king who had died having left no sons to rule. His daughter, Hatshepsut, took the throne despite her sex and ruled Egypt with imagination and determination. Mustafa showed us where she was depicted in carvings and paintings as a male figure, and where her stepson later defiled her image. I felt Mustafa was talking only to Anna, so I retreated into the shadows to listen, while my wife politely nodded her head, again and again. She looked
fascinated, and occasionally brushed her hands along the stone to touch what seemed like the manifestation of Mustafa’s words.

He taught us how to read hieroglyphics, which I had once, long ago, studied. But there, in front of the Obelisk of Ramses II, I felt as though I was finally learning the craft I had been practising for more than twenty years. I knew the symbols for “make” and “life,” and could just about make out the subtle prayers of the scribes for their king and queen or deity. But I had believed that a hieroglyph existed more independently than Mustafa was suggesting. He taught us how to read ideograms and cartouches, to decipher the depictions of battles in the carvings by reading them like a story. I saw the interdependence, noticed how “make” and “life” were only part of a refined, intricate narrative, and the signs became truly meaningful for the first time.

“There, there, you see there.” Mustafa pointed to a panel depicting a boat being carried by soldiers. “Some colour remains, beautiful colour.”

I tried to read the other panels in front of me, but my memory of the alphabet was poor. Ankh and Horus’s eye stood out consistently. I comforted myself with them as I strode before the artisans chronicled in the midst of their daily activities—weaving, making pottery, and the paramount fetching of water. Kings were displayed with their enemies below them, and slaves on either side fanning them. Oxen were powerful and cherished. These signs were the yield, merge, and deer crossing warnings of
their time. Yield to the King. Merge with the progress of civilization. Honour the beast of burden.

“But slaves … slaves,” I muttered. “All of this built by slaves.”

Mustafa stopped in his tracks and looked at me. He raised his forefinger and wagged it as though I’d blasphemed. “No,” he said coldly. “Let me assure you: they were not slaves. That is a wrong impression. They were prisoners, captives from enemy nations, yes, but they were workers, paid for their work with food and homes. This is something you have wrong.” Perhaps he, as an Egyptian, knew the truth. Who was I to say? But I couldn’t get the idea of forced labour from my head.

“Look, look there, you see?” said Mustafa, pulling me away from a panel where I had been examining an image of an ox and cart, and pointing upward. “Hatshepsut and the god of fertility, you see, see there?” I looked to where he pointed, and he pulled me in closer. He rubbed his hand along the wall, and finally I saw what he wanted me to see: the god of fertility’s erect penis was pointing straight at the female pharaoh, and through the sunlight and dust motes and shadow of stone, it was mocking me. “The god Min is often symbolized by an ox—a bull,” Mustafa added and took out his solar laser pointer and shone it on a shaded panel above our heads. His pointer traced a beast in the field; next to it stood Min, brandishing a thunderbolt.

Later that day, on the west bank of the Nile—the bank of the setting sun, the bank of dusk and the twilight of life,
where the Pharaohs built their tombs to wait out eternity—Mustafa took us to Hatshepsut’s temple. He seemed obsessed with this female pharaoh. Built into the east face of the mountain that barricaded the Valley of the Kings from the Nile, the temple was the spot where I have felt the hottest in my life. Mustafa described, again mostly for Anna, how Hatshepsut built the temple here because she planned to link it with her tomb, which was being built, simultaneously, on the other side of the mountain. But the rock proved impossible to tunnel through, even for the Egyptians, and the mountain now stood forever between the female king and her temple. How disappointed she must have been upon her death, Mustafa said.

Anna smiled at him, knowingly, as I took a step back.

In our hotel that afternoon, as I rode Anna like Min rode his ox, I could not stop blathering about how much I loved her.

When we returned home after two weeks, we were tanned, relaxed and intimate. I held her hand on the
plane. We smiled at the memory of what had gone on between us, in the hotel room and, particularly, in the desert tent. I felt I could, once more, be forever under this woman’s spell.

We were met at the Toronto airport by Fred, with his hair cut shorter than it had ever been before. He seemed older than eighteen, like a man who had serious business on his mind. He was about to start university in the autumn and was already determined to go to medical school. He barely looked at us when we emerged through the sliding doors from Arrivals.

“There’s some news,” he said.

I felt Anna’s body go rigid, as if all the ease the sun had given her had retracted, and in that instant we snapped back into atrophy.

In a bed in Cairo, the touch of your thigh on my cock transformed it. Midas fingers, Midas lips, Midas cunt
.

Sasha had taken drugs and was in the hospital.

At her bedside in the emergency ward, seeing my daughter unconscious and gaunt, yet still more beautiful than when we’d left her, I knew that what I’d touched in Egypt was gone. “I’m staying here for the night,” Anna said, and her voice pushed me into a back corridor of our marriage, where I would remain long after Sasha’s recovery the next day.

Two weeks later, in the park behind the DesignAge office, the blonde hair would snag me; a cliché bait for a
man whose whole life had been defined by his preference for dark hair, brown eyes, long legs. I was a man, who at the age of forty-nine, became the prisoner of a short, bosomy woman in her thirties with green eyes that made a laughingstock of emeralds.

I am skittish around the machines in the house—the dishwasher, the dryer, even the blender—anything that Anna focusses her attention on. My stomach clenches at the sound of an appliance, as though holding in something that is the last of all that is mine alone.

Even so, Anna seems less intent on the whir and spin of things than she is on building piles of objects around our house. There is a pile of letters, junk mail she has refused to throw out, on the kitchen counter beside the telephone. A pile of hats has grown on the floor of our bedroom near her dresser drawers. I hadn’t considered how she might look after the operation, but clearly she has and is preparing for it.

The recovery time in hospital after the surgery is four to six days, the first days in intensive care. The home recovery period ranges from three to six weeks, “if the surgery isn’t complicated.” Doctors like Gottlieb must say these things to cover themselves against potential fuckups. Anna is obviously planning long into this recovery period and so must I.

A pile of novels is growing beside our bed. It’s comprised of authors I haven’t known her to read before: Jane Austen, Herman Melville, and, oddly, Jack Kerouac—as though she’s revisiting some thread of her MA studies that isn’t yet apparent to me. If I weave that thread through the things she says, will I be able to decode what is going on in her head? Still, there are other piles that seem to have no significance to the past or to how she will spend her recovery time.

One I discovered yesterday, outside, at the back of the house where she normally has potted plants, gardening tools and bags of soil for her flower garden (which often fails in this sandy terrain). There a pile of cookware has grown: saucepans, griddles, frying pans, kettles, soup pots, a wok. I hadn’t realized we owned so many pots, and when I went to the cupboard below the kitchen counter, I saw that all that was left in it was one small stainless steel saucepan that might be sufficient to boil an egg.

Another pile is growing in the living room next to the television. This consists of every lifestyle magazine and journal that has been brought into our home over the years as renovations, beautifying facelifts and spring
cleaning were contemplated:
Architectural Digest, House and Garden, Redbook, Farm Beautiful
. A pile of suggestions for all that has never come true. There is a tall pile next to that one of
Maclean’s, Harper’s, Glamour
and
Modern Dance
. What for? There might be a pattern if I try to link these titles, or link the piles—magazines, pots, hats … There is yet another in the bathroom, which disturbs me most of all: a pile of items that must have been on the shelf for years, accumulated not only by Anna but also by our daughters. On the floor, near the toilet, the pile begins with a rubber contraceptive diaphragm stuffed with several individual packets of condoms to help keep its shape and firmness; three pink contraceptive pill dial dispensers rest against the dome of the diaphragm. On top of the dispensers are two pregnancy detection sticks, and on top of those are balanced two tubes of spermicide.

I want to understand the meaning she is building out of the detritus of our lives.

She is sitting on the porch again, in the Algonquin chair that I have thought makes her look like an old lady. She does not look old now; in fact, she looks younger today than she has in many years. It is I who am old; she has only grown old beside me, on account of me. But she has abandoned even that now and her eyes are as fresh as a teenager’s.

I would come home late and lie, and act fatigued from work and take a shower; later in bed, I would take you to assuage my guilt, or argue with you to disable my conscience
.

The day is cloudy, the air is close and almost adhesive. There are countless blackflies and mosquitoes, but she doesn’t seem to mind, or even notice. If I stand behind her like this, for long enough, will her silhouette offer up an answer?

“Bugs aren’t too much for you?” I ask, as I sit down in the Algonquin chair next to her. I hate these chairs. Why did we ever think they suited us and should adorn our porch? Why on earth do we have a porch? Why aren’t we on a hot hilltop looking out over a raging sea? How could a porch ever represent the life we are meant to be living?

I swat away a deer fly.

“Mmm?” she asks, looking over at me. She hasn’t heard or perhaps hasn’t understood. It’s not important.

“You’ve been clearing out, I see.”

She nods, and I’m happy I’ve remembered the right way to talk to her.

“Things you don’t need.”

She nods again.

“And things you will.”

Her third nod comes with a smile. We’ve both got the hang of this.

Kingfishers. Birds in the oak trees in front of the house titter and spring from one branch to the next and crows land in the corn field that edges the driveway. The world before us is flapping, gliding, and my head begins to spin.

“In the wintertime,” she says, and the one, two, three of her fingers accompanies the words. She has control of them. She stops and breathes deeply, “the sea is,” then three fingers on her other hand, “not so rocky,” more breathing, one, two, three, “nausea not dizzy,” she says. And something in this convinces me that she has heard my thoughts, knows what is going on inside me. I can never keep up with her.

She releases another deep breath, and with it: “This sea and the Baltic are different. I straddled the Baltic. It was summer. The crests of the waves were so high they knocked me over into the tiptoeing ships across the top like tiny pinafores—”