McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [173]
I spent the morning in the darkroom, feeling lucky that my work affords me such privacy; the constant companionship of the expedition house can be hard sometimes. I was printing photographs of infant skeletons. There is an entire level of these, all laid out identically on their sides with their legs pulled into their stomachs. My pictures were of all different children, but all my pictures looked the same. Davis had cleared each tiny skull and rib cage with his breath and I wondered if that had given him any attachment to one more than another, but it seemed a rude thing to ask. I had some philosophical thoughts that I shared at lunch, on how much sadder a single child would have been and how odd that it should be like that, you feeling less with each addition. Mallick, our director, said when I’d put in a few more seasons I’d find I didn’t think of them as dead people at all, but as the bead necklace or the copper bowl or whatever else might be found with the body. Mallick’s eyes are all rimmed in red like a basset hound’s; it gives him a tragic demeanor, though he’s really quite a cheerful sort. The whole time he was speaking, Miss Jackson, his secretary, was shaking her head at me behind his back. Miss Jackson lost her husband in the trench war and her son to the flu after. She has come here specifically to be with dead people.
Ferhid carved us a cold lamb for lunch and had the mail lying under our forks. Ferhid has the profile of a film star, but a mouthful of rotted teeth. I often wish he smiled less; his mouth is a painful thing to confront while eating. We each had a letter or two, which was fair and companionable, though most of them mentioned Howard Carter’s dig, which was not. Mine was from my mother, who pretends not to miss me as unpersuasively as she can. I was kept out of the military as I’m her sole support, but it’s a role I’ve found burdensome since the war ended. Last month I wrote to her that a man must have a vocation and if nothing comes to him, then he must go looking. Today she responded by wondering if it was necessary to travel half a globe and 4500 years away. She said that Mesopotamia must be about as far from Indiana as it’s possible to get. How wonderful it must be, she said, to be so unattached that you can pick up and go anywhere and never mind the people you’ve left behind. And then she assured me she was not complaining.
Patwin read bits of the Times aloud while we had our coffee. Apparently reporters are still camped at the Tut-ankh-Amen tomb, cataloguing gold masks and lapis lazuli scarabs and ebony effigies as fast as Carter can haul them out. These Times accounts have Lord Wallis and everyone else in a spin, as if we’re playing some sort of sporting match against Carter and losing badly. Our potsherds, never mind how old they are, have become an embarrassing return on Wallis’s investment, though they were good enough before. Our skeletons are too numerous to be tasteful. I’m betting Wallis won’t be whimsical about paintings of dogs, nor will anyone else at his club.
As he read, Patwin’s tone conveyed his disapproval. He has an anarchist’s face, but is actually a French Marxist and, though he’ll tell you slavery was a necessary historical phase, shards of good clay working-class pots suit him better than golden bowls put by for the afterlife.
“We had a lovely morning in PG9,” Mallick said stoutly. PG stands for private grave and PG9 is the largest tomb we’ve found so far, four chambers in all, and never plundered, which is the really exciting bit. A woman is laid out in the second of these chambers— a priestess or a queen in a coffin of clay. There is a necklace of gold leaves, a gold ring, and several of the colored beads she once wore in her hair have fallen into her skull. The