McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [177]
Miss Whitfield was too tired to eat. Ferhid took her untouched plate back to the kitchen, where he dropped knives and slammed pots onto tables to communicate his disapproval until Mallick went out to mollify him.
Before the light went, and when there was no one else about, I slipped away and took six more pictures of Tu-api. I developed them that night, quietly so that no one would hear me up and about. None of the new ones showed her face. I took another print off my original exposure and her face didn’t show up there either. Perhaps this should have persuaded me that the image was not to be trusted, was a fault of the paper and therefore unreal. Instead it had the opposite effect. I was more than ever persuaded in the event, which had proved so singular and so intimate. Tu-api had shown her face only once and only to me.
“I have a bone to pick with you.” Patwin caught me as I came out of the bathroom. “You’re always riding me about my politics.” Patwin didn’t often use the sort of English idioms these two sentences contained so I imagined he was merely repeating what some more native speaker had said to him and I imagined I knew who that would be. I was outraged by the collusion, but also by the sentiment.
“You must be joking,” I said. “The way you lecture me . . .”
“Live and let live is all I’m saying.” And he brushed by without another word.
I passed Davis on the way to my bedroom. “That really hurt when I fell,” he said. “I may have cracked a bone.”
“I didn’t laugh as hard as Patwin did,” I told him.
Miss Whitfield asked us all what it was about a dig that we liked. We were sitting in the courtyard in the middle of the expedition house and only Mallick was missing, trapped in town by a heavy rain that had turned the roads to mud. The air outside was washed and wonderful and the sky an ocean of cool, gray clouds. Davis and Miss Jackson were playing a game on a stone board more than four thousand years old. Four thousand years ago they would have played with colored stones, but they were making do with buttons. Seven such boards had been found in Tu-api’s tomb and the rules were inscribed in cuneiform though not in our dig, but back in Egypt at Carter’s. This same game had been played as far away as India. Ferhid was a demon at it.
“Not the fleas,” Patwin said. He was scratching at his ankles.
“Not the dust.” That was Miss Jackson.
“Not the way the workmen smell,” I said.
“Not the way you smell,” Patwin added. And then placatingly, “Not the way I smell.”
“I like a routine,” Davis told her. “I actually enjoy picky, painstaking work. And, of course, I like a puzzle. I like to put things together, guess what they mean.”
“I like that it’s backwards.” Miss Jackson won a free turn and then a second. All six of her buttons were on the board now. “You dig down from the surface and you move backwards in time as you go. Have you ever wanted, desperately wanted, to go backwards in time?”
“Yes, of course,” Miss Whitfield said. “Erase your mistakes, the stupid things you say without thinking.”
“I like the monotony of it.” Patwin had his eyes closed and his face turned up to the cool sky. “Day after day after day with nothing at all but your own thoughts. You begin to think things that surprise you.”
Davis bumped one of Miss Jackson’s buttons back to the beginning. “There you go backwards in time,” he said, but Miss Jackson was speaking too, only quieter so it took a moment longer to hear. “You have to be in love with the dead to like a dig,” she said. She took two of her buttons off the board in a single turn and bumped one of Davis’s. A third button occupied a safe square, leaving Davis no move.
He shook his fist at her, smiling. “You are a lucky woman,” he said.
“Do you know how many bodies we’ve found on this site?” Miss Jackson asked Miss Whitfield. “Almost two thousand. And every single one of those left someone behind, begging their gods to undo