THE GOD'S WIFE (2 page)

“What? What did you get?” Jonas said, trying to hold her steady.

“The lead. They picked me for the leading role in the new dance production.” She stopped spinning and held her boyfriend by his shoulders. “Jonas, they cast me as the featured dancer in ‘Aïda.’”

Rebecca bounced in place. The lead. All her career she had been waiting for this. Waterfront Dance Company, known for its cutting-edge modern and jazz dance repertoire, planned a full-length production, much like a ballet but without the pointe shoes. The choice was an odd one: “Aïda,” an old opera. A “Romeo and Juliet” would be more to Rebecca’s liking. But any lead would do.

She continued to fidget like a teenager, ignoring the middle-aged men in proper suits who shuffled by, eyes cast to the distance, trying to pretend they didn’t notice her peculiar behavior.

“And it’s not just here in Chicago,” she continued. “We are taking it to New York, Amsterdam, London and Rome … and, oh my God, Jonas, we’re taking it to Paris. Imagine that. An Iowa girl in the most glamorous city in the world.”

“You’re not making any sense at all, ‘Bec,” he said, turning a bit red as she continued to cause such confusion on the sidewalk. “Please slow down and tell it straight.”

“I’m too excited. I think I need a drink or something.” She wasn’t just excited, she was conflicted — frightened of the blackouts. But now was not the time to tell Jonas that. A drink would do her good.

He gestured with his thumb to O’Shay’s, a yuppie hangout next door. Rebecca bobbed her head in agreement. Thoughts were coming at such a rush that she hardly knew which one to settle on. Like a bird sweeping between branches, she sought a stable place to land.

He walked ahead, pulling her through the crowded pub, making way for the two of them. Jonas found stools and ran off to get drinks at the bar.

She admired his attentiveness almost as much as she enjoyed seeing his rear view in a snug pair of jeans.
Thank goodness Jonas never fell for that hip-hop style — all baggy this and baggy that ...

“Here you go,” Jonas said, pushing a chilled glass of Chardonnay in her direction, while he held a frosty mug of beer. They locked eyes as he slipped into his seat. She steadied under his gaze. His solemn, light blue irises blazed under black brows. His energy was devoted and sure, tender and unwavering. Rebecca knew fortune shone when she first found him.

“Okay, tell the story,” Jonas said grabbing for her hand. He cradled it. “With a beginning, a middle and an end.”

Jonas was an editor for a science magazine, and Rebecca knew he didn’t have the benefit of her arts background. To him “Aïda” might be something Tarzan yelled when swinging from tree to tree. He was an intelligent man, but this explanation might take a while.

“You know Randy …”

Jonas nodded, but his eyes looked doubtful.

“He’s the company artistic director.”

The eyes blinked. Right.

“He came up with the idea of a jazz-dance version of the opera ‘Aïda.’ Do you know anything about ‘Aïda’?”

Jonas pressed his lips together and shook his head. He took a long swallow of beer and waited for an explanation.

“That’s an old Giuseppe Verdi chestnut the Lyric Opera puts on every ten years or so. A few years ago, Broadway did a pop version with Tim Rice and Elton John music. Now we’re doing it as a dance. We’ve never done an evening-length piece before.” Rebecca stopped the lecture to sip some wine and let it ease her nerves as the drink warmed her stomach.

“And you’re going to be the star?” His eyes widened, and he squeezed her hand.

“You got it.” She rested her head in her other hand and tried to let the moment sink in. “Even Buckley, that awful ballet teacher, can’t stop me. I’ll be a princess, and he can kowtow to me.”

She checked herself, stopping the flow of words when she detected that burst of arrogance.
Wow, that’s the flip side of being dissed all those years in Iowa. Sometimes, I just want to shove it in their faces.

“Anyway,” she said, pushing away the last thought. “It’s about a slave girl who is really a princess — that’s me. She’s captured by the Egyptians and falls in love with the son of the Pharaoh. He’s sworn to another woman but falls in love with the slave. Well, you know how these things go.” She stopped and let out a sarcastic laugh.

“Not well,” Jonas guessed.

“Nope. She ends up dying sealed up in a tomb.”

“Don’t make them like they used to, do they?” Jonas said with a chuckle, but his eyes glittered. She could see he was eating up the star talk, loving the fact that his girlfriend was going to be toast of the town.

Jonas dropped his gaze to the floor for a few minutes until Rebecca touched his chin and lifted his face.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“You’re going to be gone so far away. I don’t want to sound clingy, but Paris, London. That’s a lot of traveling ...”

“Don’t worry. We have the Internet. I’ll chat with you every day. And Skype. I’ll call. It won’t last so very long. Maybe you can even force that magazine to give you a vacation and meet me in Paris.”

He brightened for a moment. “Maybe ...” His voice was doubtful, but his eyes glittered with hope.

She hesitated before continuing about her tour. She’d left out so much. Did he know how terrified she felt about blanking out? She danced well, she knew that. But what about the chance of wandering in a void on stage? Losing time in a performance? She’d been having these mysterious reality slips too long now, and she worried it could happen again. Look what just happened in Buckley’s class. She straightened up and took a deep, cleansing breath.

“Let’s go to Tut’s and party,” she said, determined to vanquish her negative self-talk. She finished her wine, put her feet on the ground and took Jonas’ hand. They whirled onto the street again, jumped into his red Audi and peeled off to Tut’s Dance Club on the North Side.

As she watched the skyline whiz by, she wondered if someone who had seen her space out in class would sabotage her in the role. Or what if a dancer more talented — impossible! — could take it all away? Those freakish moments of nothingness? What were they? How could she defeat them? Did she dare tell Jonas without worrying him to death?

A choice stood before her as solid as the skyscrapers they passed. Accept the dream of her life or remain trapped by a psychological problem she couldn’t even name. There was no possible way to hang on to them both. But, because secrets lived so deep in her heart, she wondered if she could let anything go.

Treading so her student’s braided papyrus sandals would not bruise a pebble on the massive sandstone steps at the entrance to Karnak temple, Neferet grabbed one of the great entrance pylons and felt her entire body trembling. Of all the times she had been here, she’d never entered via the glorious, flag-bedecked front door. Its enormous presence, guarded by sphinxes, carved depictions of storied battles and tablets detailing exploits of the gods, left her reeling.

A massive guard stalked over her way to ask her business, and she produced a scroll with Maya’s name. It was far too soon for Maya’s funeral, for the embalming process would take forty to seventy days, depending on how elaborate Pharaoh wanted to arrange it. So the community created a memorial ceremony to remember Maya’s life in the interim. It broke temple rules, but the sudden death of a God’s Wife was not the norm. Neferet, as a temple student, was invited.

“Get in there,” the beefy, smelly sentry growled, unable to read the hieroglyphs but able to see Neferet had a temple pass. “It’s already started.”

She skittered inside, unsure of where to go in the massive building, drawn by the thrumming of male voices, all pitched at a mournful key. She plunged through the mighty temple, past the tall columns painted to look like lotus flowers, past the usual chapels and niches where she studied the stories of the gods or learned hieroglyphs. She drew farther into the areas that often stood off limits to mere priestesses-in-training, slowing her steps. All the while, her senses filled with dirge-like singing and her head swam in a billow of sickly-sweet incense.

A whisk of white linen announced the end of her trek. There stood a few classmates, all with heads bowed, listening to the ceremony that celebrated Maya’s life. Neferet tried to blend in, but several students looked askance at her tardiness and shuffled away. She ended up against a wall, somewhat near the crowd but also near a group of civilian men who had gathered — but not for the purposes of a holy farewell, from the looks of their dress and chatter.

Neferet ignored them at first, attempting to sing along with the hymns she knew. She caught the attention of Nareema, her best friend from childhood, and the two wormed their way close to each other. Still, the men were within earshot. Neferet, worried about her lateness, afraid of what others thought, overwhelmed by the architecture of the inner temple, her mind scattered on a thousand things, allowed herself to alight on a few tidbits of male conversation.

“Right in the neck. That was quite the kill.”

“Makes you wonder who had it in for her.”

“I don’t think ...”

“Sure, someone made short work of her.”

Neferet whipped her head around but couldn’t determine who was talking. Nareema frowned and pointed to a place in the list of hymns.

The voices murmured on and began to sift into recognizable sounds: one sarcastic and suggestive voice, one defensive, one jocular. None of them were reverent of Maya at all. In a bolt of recognition, Maya recognized the voice of the Grand Vizier who attended her father, the Pharaoh. He always has a sarcastic sneer. He, she figured, was the one accusing someone of murdering Maya.

She did all this mental work without giving a thought to the religious service, for the hymns were some she sang nearly every day. Nareema narrowed her eyes.

“What’s the matter with you?” She gave Neferet a light stamp on her sandal. “You’re not paying attention.”

“Those men back there. Just listen. Don’t talk.”

Nareema glanced around, tossed her shoulders as if she couldn’t be bothered and faced forward again. The two girls bowed again as the priests filled the hall with frankincense and spoke of the great god Amun’s loss of an earthly wife. Maya’s body was nowhere to be seen, as it was whisked away to the embalmers. No corpses ever were left unburied or untreated in Kemet’s climate.

As the priests scurried about with their ablutions, making offerings to the hidden statue of Amun, a low voice said, “Let’s hope the next wife lasts longer.” The men all laughed
sotto voce
as Neferet felt her back and shoulders stiffen. The jocular voice, the one she was learning to hate, tossed off a few lines about how soon he would “make her his own.” The others argued with him on that score. The Vizier hushed them, admonishing them that the Pharaoh had better marriage plans than that, so they better watch their step. This God’s Wife would be well guarded.

“Want to test that?” the jocular one said. “A little wager?”

Neferet whirled around fast enough to catch sight of someone she thought she recognized from her young days in the palace. A hated young boy, always taunting her and trying to molest her. She shook her head, but the image in the crowd disappeared.

What was she getting into? What was the Vizier talking about? The Pharaoh had better plans for her? Daddy? What was he planning for her? A marriage to some far-off prince? Mother had said she should always stay a virgin, or “pure,” as she put it. However, from the sound of the unmannered group back there — a rather well-connected group if they were chatting up the Vizier — this virgin talk was nonsense. Thank goodness no one announced that Neferet was the choice for the next God’s Wife and she could still travel incognito.

She faced front again and Nareema gave her an arched eyebrow.

“You have tears in your eyes,” Nareema said. “I know you loved Maya, too.”

“Yes.” Neferet was beginning to shake from sheer nerves. “Yes, I loved her.” She hardly knew the young woman, although Maya was a stepsister. They lived apart: Maya in the harem area, Neferet in the palace. Yet, Neferet knew now that she understood much more than she ever had about Maya. She knew what Maya had lived though in her final days.

Maya enjoyed the most powerful office in the kingdom, save Pharaoh’s, and was blessed with the love of the entire nation. She would go to the Afterworld in splendor as the wife of Amun, the unknowable god. However, dodging the politics of the men of kingdom was a full-time job and a far more taxing one than dancing and offering flowers and food to Amun. She had to be crafty and wily, sexy, smart, but able to say “not a chance” at the same time when the wrong man came too close. She must be able to please Pharaoh by just reading his mind. She must follow orders but also issue some of her own to stay independent of the priests. She must be a leader but not so strong that she runs afoul of the wrong person. Maya tried to do all these things, and somehow, she failed.

Now, Neferet thought, tossing her papyrus scroll to the granite floor, it was time for a mere student to attempt it all.

“Nareema,” her eyes were bursting as the kohl ran down her cheeks. “Maya’s job was impossible.”

“Not impossible. Someone will be elected to try.”

They hugged at the window near the temple’s giant rippling linen flags. It sounded like an approaching sand-storm it was so loud. Under cover of the flag’s noise, Neferet made Nareema promise to stay close to her no matter what happened. Nareema, squinting her eyes in confusion, agreed to always be her confidante. That contract sealed, the two walked out with linked arms at the ceremony’s end.

Three men followed them down the aisles with their eyes.

#

“Rebecca, are you daydreaming or what?”

Jonas fanned her face with a cocktail napkin. She fluttered her eyelashes and stared at her surroundings. Tut’s. Nothing changed since the last few moments. The music throbbed, and the dancers heaved up and down creating giant, spiky waves. Waitresses dashed by with trays full of colorful drinks. But the last few minutes — they were gone.

Jonas stared at her, so she tried to say something. It appeared to be required.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I was just talking about that story about the illegal weapons. You know, the story about police and the crack-down on gangs?”

“Gangs?”

“Yeah, the Latin Disciples taking over another neighborhood. All the talk at work today. It seems the feds traced the guns to some Mideast arms dealers. Homeland Security, what a bunch of jokers, never saw anything. Does any of that ring a bell?”

She shook her head, looking around at the neon signs and the Egyptian-themed friezes on the wall. She tried to find one little detail that would bring back a memory of the last few moments. Nothing worked. She wondered just when her mind had been working well. Probably never; she was prone to chronic daydreaming that made her childhood years a struggle. Still, she hadn’t had episodes like this in her life.

“I spaced out,” she said, keeping her voice audible over the industrial rock noise. “The same thing happened in class today. I just went blank. Buckley said I was dancing with my hips, and the whole class was in an uproar. Hips in ballet?” She pressed her hands to the side of her face in mock horror — doing her impression of the Edvard Munch painting “The Scream.”

Jonas’ lips began to curl upward, and the worry drained from his eyes. He let out an easy laugh.

“So, I guess I spaced out again, and I really don’t remember what I’ve been thinking about.” She stopped a minute, trying to force her brain to describe her predicament to him. ”There’s spacing, but this is worse. It’s just a black void.”

“You were in a void just now?” Alarm crept back into his eyes.

“Maybe it’s just ADHD,” she said, deciding to pass it off with a wave of her hand. “I’m just a dreamy kid who never grew up.” She didn’t want this to turn into another one of Jonas’ amateur diagnoses. She was concerned that he might bring up something distressing, such as brain tumors. He was odd that way. It came from working at the medical magazine. Everyone focused on a deadly disease over there.

“Don’t fool yourself. ADHD in adults is real.” He grabbed both of her hands. “Look, if you get this black-void stuff tomorrow or anytime soon, let me know. It might be something they can diagnose.”

She forced a smile and smoothed her hair back behind her ears. Everything would be fine.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s make this an early night. I have a feeling I’m just sleep deprived.”

He leaned forward and kissed her, then inhaled as if sniffing a rare rose. Jonas Smith. A romantic man. Forget the attention gaps, this was something to concentrate on. She gave him her warmest of smiles.

#

The blackness of Jonas’ ceiling held no answers, even though she’d been staring at it for hours now. Jonas lay snoring off and on by her side, but his nocturnal noise was not the reason she couldn’t close her eyes.

The past few days replayed in her mind. It was clear she’d been having lapses of attention for a couple weeks now. Little jolts in which her mind popped out of focus and, then, in a mysterious instant, cleared. Seconds were gone. Erased. Irretrievable. Not that they were precious events. No, not at all. The end of her mother’s last long Sunday phone call from Iowa was a blur. There was that time she rode in Lucy’s car and didn’t remember how they came out of the traffic tunnel. Hubbard’s Cave — all thirteen seconds of it — slipped into the morass.

She crawled out of bed and booted up Jonas’ computer, then ran a search on ADHD. She discovered, in several long scholars’ articles, that the type of affliction Jonas jabbered about was a variant of daydreaming. The affected person would have so many thoughts going on in her mind that she would drift off inside her mind to find something much more interesting than what was happening in the outside world. This was dubbed ADHD/inattentive or ADHD without hyperactivity. Confusion troubled her. Why put the “H” in there if there’s no hyperactivity at all?

The important part stood out. In ADHD
something
passed through the brain cells. In her cases of inattention, she delved into nothingness. Darkness. Worst of all, she felt she simply had lost a small segment of life — her life. Time she’d never get back.

Then the dreams awaited, and there were nights when she woke up with no more rest than when she lay down.
I feel like I’ve gone somewhere. My brain’s taken a hike, and I can’t remember where it’s gone.

After the computer session, when she had checked out narcolepsy and found no good answers there, she tried flopping down on the mattress again and going through the motions relaxing into sleep. When she succumbed to her exhaustion, a familiar fantasy played inside her mind. She was standing in a garden with strange aromas and plants that never took root in the Midwest. Someone whispered to her about a wild stroke of luck someone bestowed on her. The stars overhead looked alien, set in twisted, pivoted arrangements of the constellations that she knew. The Big Dipper turned on its side. Orion was close to the horizon. She wandered in a daze, then two men with shaved heads came to take her by either hand. She woke up panting.

Rebecca had no idea how she got back to sleep again that night. The dozing and panicked awakenings seem endless. Over and over, she asked her divine guides what was happening to her. She even appealed to the Virgin Mary — and she wasn’t even Roman Catholic. For one second, she thought she saw a woman in her mind’s eye, but she looked nothing like Mary. She was regal, dressed in linen, eyes rimmed with thick eyeliner and sporting wings of many colors. She smiled down upon Rebecca.

Tossing from her side to her back, the fitful sleeper stared at the ceiling, hoping to force the uncertain dawn to come.

#

Neferet shuddered in the cool morning breeze, clad only in a student’s linen dress, with no cloak about her shoulders. Yesterday’s heat had dissipated overnight, and now, at dawn, she sat on a litter held by the priests, robed in colorful regalia, who assembled before the great doors of the temple at Karnak. This morning, she was to be installed as God’s Wife of Amun. The rich pageantry, so unlike the humble days of cleaning and praying at the temple, made her ready to swoon. All about her, many of the priests’ retinue held staffs with streamers in red, gold and lotus blue. They hummed a soft chant with a trance-like quality. As the rising sun focused its rays on the massive portal of the temple, she began to tremble, not from the cold but from the majesty of the moment. As a young apprentice and princess, she had been inside this inner, sacred place before. However, this time, the priests of Amun would lead her into the sanctum, the Holy of Holies. This was the small interior chamber where the stone embodiment of Amun reigned. The space opened only for the high priest and the God’s Wife. She was the elected one.