Altered America (21 page)

Avoid Seeing a Mouse

by James S. Dorr

              Was it the Pyramid, built by the side of the Mississippi in imitation of those in Egypt, or Memphis Tennessee's "Pink Palace" Museum?  More likely, both of these together—that and the fact that Henry Todd had just been dumped by his girlfriend, Melissa.  And, added to that, the volume of Yeats that she had given him for his birthday, her favorite poem marked:  "The Second Coming."

             
But Yeats had it backward. 
That
Henry learned later, but even then he
sensed
that the Irish Romantic was wrong in his depiction of the "rough beast," that Sphinx-like rose from the desert sand.  Its lion body and man-carven head.  As, bending to examine a case of Nubian bows, he spotted a mouse.

             
Melissa had laughed.  "You're weird, Henry," she said when he tried to point to it, the mouse having, of course, skittered well out of sight by then.  But then she paused.  She looked at him strangely—he who had taken her to the Pink Palace at her insistence that June afternoon in 1999 to see its re-opened exhibition on "Africa's Egypt," she who had a passion for Egyptology and said he ought to learn to share such interests with her—and shook her head slowly.  It wasn't even 3:00pm—his job as a freelance computer programmer, wrangling Y2K problems for an insurance company headquartered in Memphis, had recently ended—and so he had had that whole Monday free, and with its summer hours in effect the museum would be open a good two hours more, but she had asked right then that he take her home.

             
It was the usual "I don't know, Henry.  Maybe you're
too
weird—I don't mean just the mouse.  Rather, it's just that you get in these moods sometimes.  Like you see things, make connections between things that I don't think
normal
people would see.  Just like with the mouse there."

             
"What do you mean?" he had tried to protest.

             
She looked at him again in that funny way.  "I don't suppose you would know," she said, "but seeing it at an Egyptian exhibit, and at a museum where they're going to make sure that there aren't things like mice that could harm the displays.  Or maybe you
do
know and are mocking me with it.  There's a legend about an ancient Egyptian god, Ptah, the patron of artists and artisans—Rameses worshiped him—and also the original god of the dead.  Usually they have him look like a mummy in statues and paintings.  But he once saved Egypt from an invasion by the Assyrians, so the story goes, by summoning an army of
mice
that chewed up the enemy soldiers' bowstrings."

             
He winced.  He hadn't known.

             
"And where did you see
your
mouse?" Melissa continued, her tone rising.  "Under a case of bows—I mean it's spooky.  Like maybe we should stop seeing each other..."

             
And on and on, as if they hadn't had spats before, but this time she meant it.  Henry could sense that.

             
Afterwards, he did something
truly
weird, at least for him.  Going back to the insurance company, he talked to a friend that he had made there, and through him managed to cadge a ticket to the Pyramid Arena that night for a different kind of exhibition he'd seen announced in the paper Sunday:  The World Wrestling Federation's one-night-only "Raw is War."

             
He didn't like wrestling.  He thought it too violent—and not always faked, either.  Sometimes with
real
blood spilled, he, who was squeamish—hadn't there been some scandal or something, something about a person actually being killed at one of these wrestling exhibitions?

             
Perhaps it was just the evening, June 21st.  The Summer Solstice.  The air outside the huge, 32-story Pyramid's entrance still hot and humid, as it had been all day; he separating himself from the crowd inside to get a breath of air, momentarily losing his way.  Finally facing an empty meeting room with a sign: 
Ptah I
.

* * *

              He got home late that night to his apartment, high in a building not far from the river.  He opened his bedroom drapes, seeing the Pyramid small in the distance now, still lit and sparkling, the Mississippi River traffic even at night reflecting in swirls from its polished steel sides.  And he left the drapes open, a thing not normal for him to do since he didn't like lights disturbing his sleep, but rather made a point of undressing in front of the window—as if, somehow, Melissa might see what she was missing—and, thus naked, went to bed.  Laughing a little at all his foolishness, he, who disliked violence every bit as much as Melissa did, wasting his night at the wrestling matches as if, by thus turning his back on "culture," on museums and poetry, he might somehow spite her.

             
As if she would even care.

             
In his sleep, he saw a vision of Rameses—Rameses II, or rather his statue, which he had seen as a teenage boy a full twelve years before on a hot, sultry Tennessee afternoon much like this one, at the first
Wonders: The Memphis International Cultural Series
exhibition.

             
Now it came back to him, that it
was
Memphis the statue had come from, the original Memphis in Egypt, now scarcely even a ruin for tourists.  Even more came back—things he could
not
have known.  That it was the City of Ptah, as founded by the Pharaoh Menes, of special devotion to Rameses II, of
Men-neferu-Meryre
, that he in his dream saw spreading before him.  The white-buildinged funerary complex of Pepi I, its name yet to be corrupted by Greek scribes.  Its tombs.  Its temples...

             
Within its temples—he saw the one now, the
Hut-ka-Ptah
, which, in the Greek language, became
Aigyptos
—and, within, its seated, mummy-swathed form, its head shaved except for its child's single hairlock.  Its hands bare of wrappings too.

             
In the shadows, he saw a wall-carved name, not the name of Ptah, but another; a name that led to a deeper chamber, as if a seraglio within the temple-tomb... when he awoke in a pool of sweat.  Even though
his
room was air-conditioned.

             
It was more than sweat, he saw when he turned over.

             
Wet dreams, at his age!
  When he and Melissa, only that Saturday... then he remembered.  Melissa was gone now.

             
As for that other name that he had
almost
dreamed.  It seemed gone from him as well.  Yet, it occurred to him, he might find out what it was by other means.  Putting his clothes on, he ate a quick breakfast, then retraced his steps back to the Pink Palace, hoping that somewhere within its exhibit he might find a clue.  Which he did not, another weird thing happened—on his way home, when he had an urge to stop at the Memphis Zoo.  He let his urge lead him as he walked from one section to the next, penetrating as he had the temple within his dream visit.  Hoping to find—what?

             
The cage of a woman, a woman he'd
almost
dreamed?  Yet had still not met, nor even glimpsed, even though somehow the mere seeing of her name—which he
still
could not bring back to memory—had caused him to come as if he were once more the teenaged boy of twelve years earlier, fantasizing over a wall painting of an Egyptian goddess.

             
He remembered, it
had
been bare-breasted.  He'd dreamed of her then, too.  The painting, that is, at the Rameses exhibit—the breasts, one in profile, as bare as the head of Ptah. 

             
He started laughing.  Enough was enough, he thought, finding his wanderings had brought him to "Cat Country"—at least no mice there!—thinking that perhaps if he went home now he might go out later.  A couple of clubs he knew had good Delta-style blues, and even better potential for pickups.  Except that, despite the arguments they’d had, he missed Melissa.

             
And then, outside the zoo, he saw a preacher bearing a sign: 
Beware the Rapture.
 

             
"What the hell?" he muttered.

             
The preacher heard him.  "Yes," the preacher said, "beware the Rapture—the coming Millennium—unless you know in your heart that you're right with God.  That is the day that the dead will rise from their graves, some to be saved for Life Eternal, the rest to perish, and woe to ye that are unbelievers..."

             
Then, when he got home, he found a message on his answering machine.  Another job—a Y2K fix for a local department store this time, one that wanted to be sure its billing would remain accurate past December.

* * *

              The job was good for him.  Lasting just past the first week of August, it kept him busy.  It helped him forget, both the loss of Melissa and the weirdness afterwards.  But outside, around him, there were other weirdnesses.

             
People were preparing for the Millennium, not just the businesses that his work catered to, but ordinary people as well.  One man down the hall from him in his building was laying in firewood—he found out one evening when, coming home late, he found bark and twigs in the elevator.  He knew who it was; a dentist he socialized with on occasion, whose corner apartment sported a fireplace.

             
"Won't it be green?" he asked, running into him down in the lobby, another stack of wood in the man's arms.  "I mean, unless it has time to season—out in the fresh air—the wood won't burn right."  Except the dentist said that didn't matter, as long as it
was
wood. 
Something
to burn in case the heat went off.

             
Then there was the woman the floor below him, laying in flour in bulk, almost dwarfed under a twenty-pound sack of it as she explained, "So I can bake bread New Year's Eve.  In case there's no food when the computers, well you know, Mr. Todd.  When they all turn off—people will loot the supermarkets then.  Maybe even before, when they realize—that's why we all have to be prepared early."

             
Outside, the preachers.  More preachers now, especially the night of August 11 when in Europe and part of Asia there had been a total eclipse of the sun.  He had seen it on the news on TV, while over Memphis, the night was dark as pitch, the night of a new moon, the only illumination coming from the lights below in the city.

             
He opened his drapes again, seeing the Pyramid, stainless steel sides aglow.  "The third largest pyramid in the world," he had read somewhere, "thus rivaling even those of Giza."

             
That night, the dream returned; that of the city once known as "The White Walls," a half-millennium older itself than the great piles at Giza.  Of ancient Men-neferu-Meryre and, in it, its Hut-ka-Ptah.

             
This time he bypassed the statue of Ptah, noting only the implements clutched in its unwrapped hands—artisans' tools, but sharp-bladed as well—to penetrate inward.  The arrow-straight corridor.  Carved on a lintel, this time he
saw
the name.  Somehow he could read it, despite its hieroglyphs.

             
"
Sekhmet!
" he read aloud.

             
Then, within the room inside, he saw
her
.  Standing in silhouette, to be sure, in part in profile but her torso twisted so that her shoulders and one breast faced toward him—
just like in the painting!
—her head tilted back again, partly away from him, crowned with long, black hair.  Hair so heavy and twisted in multiple braids that it must be a wig.

             
Her breasts were bare, yes; more of her
almost
bare—sheathed in a narrow, sheer robe suspended by shoulder-straps, clinging to every part of her curved form down to her ankles.  Slim, cat-like, sinuous—just as the painting he'd mooned about as a teenager depicted—her buttocks strong.  Legs firm.

             
And when she spoke—
purring
.

             
"You like wrestling?" she asked first, her face still not turned to him.  "In my land, those that the Goddess loves wrestle—that is in their youth.  Then they pass on to other things..."

             
In his mind, he knew then who Sekhmet
was
, the goddess-consort of Ptah in the temple.  But a goddess in her own right, and a warrior also in time of need, her name meaning "The Powerful."