not unfeeling. It is all I have left to wish.
Even at this last, I am haunted by a wish. If I could only it begins. If I could only have done—something. Could have imagined her more, imagined her better, transcended this poor flesh: done justice to her. To her, in her individuality distinct from my desire. But I could not, cannot now, and never will. I know this now: there is no justice of this kind. Imagination fails. The mystery refuses. In the very attempt I betrayed her again.
Still I wish. I wish they had not brought me back. That I could have resurrected her. I wish I could be done with wishing. I wish for the impossible. I wish for sleep.
I wish for this to end.
I GROW IMPATIENT . Why has the power not failed? I find myself listening, knowing that days must pass before the ship arrives and I hear anyone attempting entry. Yet I am vigilant, my nerves on edge. And though I ought to laugh at thinking I have nerves at all, I rise, and on legs gone stiff with cold I go to watch outside my door.
The corridor is empty, and silent as the grave. I can no longer bring myself to sit here with so much silence at my back. I have closed the door and locked it, but even so, as the minutes pass I can hardly keep myself from turning. In the distance I imagine small sounds: a ticking of cold metal, a creak, a scratching at the limit of my hearing. I imagine them. I imagine them again.
I can no longer convince myself. It is too distinct now, even in the distance. I hear hammering. Steel strikes repeatedly on steel. How can they be here so soon? They cannot be, I tell myself: no vehicle can have brought them; the laws of physics, gravity and inertia all forbid it. But though these things are certain I can find no comfort there. The hammering continues, and now a shriek of metal excoriates the air. Its echoes fade. Silence falls again.
I hear my fingers tapping on the keys, and nothing more.
I have imagined it. They cannot be here.
Above the tapping of the keys, a muffled sound grows nearer, dull, persistent, nearer and still nearer, until unmistakably it is here. I cannot bring myself to turn, and with my attention riveted upon these words, with the frantic motion of my hands, I struggle to forestall what already has arrived. But these words and hands already have betrayed me. I hear it stop outside my door and in the silence I know , finally, that I am not alone. The worst is not yet come.
Beyond any doubt, beyond all imagining, at my back I hear a solid blow. And then another. And I do not need to imagine, because I know the sound. In a moment that teeters on the edge of eternity I know : this is the sound of someone knocking, knocking, knocking at my door, the sound of one hand I know better than any in this world.
It is the sound of my Eurydike returning. I need only look behind me. I need only turn to find you standing there.
IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS
T hat there were tombs, great tombs, left undiscovered in the Valley of the Kings, I could not doubt. Long study in the chronicles of Egypt, where history lapses, time and again, into silence, had convinced me: some gaps in the record were not accident. The singular lack of artifacts from a particular period—I will not tell you which—the hush of the chroniclers—the break in the lineage of the Kings: even from a time five thousand years ago when one might think the silences of history outweighed the words, this silence: it spoke to me, insistently, of something withheld. It haunted me, as if out of that silence came a voice I could not hear, and it spoke only to me. But each attempt I made to trace the lineage, each name, each face, each line of evidence I pursued, all, when I traced them back to a certain decade in the Upper Nile, all vanished—cut off, as if the earth itself had swallowed them down.
There was a King: my conviction on this point is unshakable. But nothing I have culled from the
Even at this last, I am haunted by a wish. If I could only it begins. If I could only have done—something. Could have imagined her more, imagined her better, transcended this poor flesh: done justice to her. To her, in her individuality distinct from my desire. But I could not, cannot now, and never will. I know this now: there is no justice of this kind. Imagination fails. The mystery refuses. In the very attempt I betrayed her again.
Still I wish. I wish they had not brought me back. That I could have resurrected her. I wish I could be done with wishing. I wish for the impossible. I wish for sleep.
I wish for this to end.
I GROW IMPATIENT . Why has the power not failed? I find myself listening, knowing that days must pass before the ship arrives and I hear anyone attempting entry. Yet I am vigilant, my nerves on edge. And though I ought to laugh at thinking I have nerves at all, I rise, and on legs gone stiff with cold I go to watch outside my door.
The corridor is empty, and silent as the grave. I can no longer bring myself to sit here with so much silence at my back. I have closed the door and locked it, but even so, as the minutes pass I can hardly keep myself from turning. In the distance I imagine small sounds: a ticking of cold metal, a creak, a scratching at the limit of my hearing. I imagine them. I imagine them again.
I can no longer convince myself. It is too distinct now, even in the distance. I hear hammering. Steel strikes repeatedly on steel. How can they be here so soon? They cannot be, I tell myself: no vehicle can have brought them; the laws of physics, gravity and inertia all forbid it. But though these things are certain I can find no comfort there. The hammering continues, and now a shriek of metal excoriates the air. Its echoes fade. Silence falls again.
I hear my fingers tapping on the keys, and nothing more.
I have imagined it. They cannot be here.
Above the tapping of the keys, a muffled sound grows nearer, dull, persistent, nearer and still nearer, until unmistakably it is here. I cannot bring myself to turn, and with my attention riveted upon these words, with the frantic motion of my hands, I struggle to forestall what already has arrived. But these words and hands already have betrayed me. I hear it stop outside my door and in the silence I know , finally, that I am not alone. The worst is not yet come.
Beyond any doubt, beyond all imagining, at my back I hear a solid blow. And then another. And I do not need to imagine, because I know the sound. In a moment that teeters on the edge of eternity I know : this is the sound of someone knocking, knocking, knocking at my door, the sound of one hand I know better than any in this world.
It is the sound of my Eurydike returning. I need only look behind me. I need only turn to find you standing there.
IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS
T hat there were tombs, great tombs, left undiscovered in the Valley of the Kings, I could not doubt. Long study in the chronicles of Egypt, where history lapses, time and again, into silence, had convinced me: some gaps in the record were not accident. The singular lack of artifacts from a particular period—I will not tell you which—the hush of the chroniclers—the break in the lineage of the Kings: even from a time five thousand years ago when one might think the silences of history outweighed the words, this silence: it spoke to me, insistently, of something withheld. It haunted me, as if out of that silence came a voice I could not hear, and it spoke only to me. But each attempt I made to trace the lineage, each name, each face, each line of evidence I pursued, all, when I traced them back to a certain decade in the Upper Nile, all vanished—cut off, as if the earth itself had swallowed them down.
There was a King: my conviction on this point is unshakable. But nothing I have culled from the
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