The sun burned my back. Desert afternoon. I was seated in a huge limestone ditch. Between my paws, where Tuthmosis’s stela used to rise, tiny creatures teemed. They stared up at me, and I felt the pressure of their dreams against my stone skin. I had pressed my dreams into Tuthmosis (now Shaman) two thousand years before: Uncover Me, Noble One. Remove the sand that girdles and swallows Me. I shall make you king. He had dug me out, I made him Pharaoh, then he betrayed me, anchored me to this claustrophobic world by the very power I had dreamed into him. Now his stela was gone, its ground defiled by vulgar feet, but Tuthmosis still lived.
He was speaking to me in a mosquito’s voice, from an impossible distance: “I speak to you, Sphinx, as one shouts through a cavern to a man buried in stone. You are not here.” Little people shuffled, jabbered, clicked and flashed in the shadow of my headdress. For the thousandth time, I perceived, Tuthmosis had changed his name. Like snake skins or like locusts’ hulls clinging emptily to the barks of trees, his old names polluted history. Now he was “Shaman.”
“I’m you,” Shaman said. A huge block rumbled and fell from my shoulder. The tourists scattered. “Sanduleak couldn’t hold you, but Earth will. I will. You are not in the Stream, Great One. You are in the desert near Nazlet El-Semman. Gypsy and Nora are the grave robbers, not I. They want to take you back to Gypsy’s galaxy, Abu al-Hawl, but you are so happy in the sand! You are so happy to be my sun, my blood, my radiance, my eternal source! The little brown man in the starship humping Nora is Mel, not you! It’s Mel, and the child he is making in her is a pitiable monster, a monster, Great One, and not the child of your Mind, not the vehicle of your mind seed, not the vessel of your radiance. This was a mirage. I am that. Tuthmosis is that. Shaman is your vessel. I’m you.”
I felt heavy, very heavy. I had no desire to move. I was being slowly drained. Perhaps that was good. Perhaps it would lighten me. I scanned the crowd of little people skirting the chunks fractured from the fallen limestone. They were hysterically running east toward the tourist buses. Only one person remained at the site of the ancient stela. With great difficulty I focused on the small man between my paws. He was wearing a T-shirt with my image in day-glo pink, and behind that, the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren in blue. He wore Bermuda shorts and a pith helmet. There was a camera hanging by a thong over one shoulder and a canteen over the other. In one hand he held a shopping bag that said “Nefertiti Bazaar.”
Large wraparound sunglasses covered his eyes and part of his forehead and nose. He peeled them from his face, and I saw the brow, one brow arching over both eyes. “Well,” he shouted, “it’s been a year, just like I told you, and here I am, Melly-belly. Don’t time fly!”
24. Not the Memphis in Tennessee
“Looks like you’ve got a little dandruff there.” Izzy scattered slivers of limestone with a playful kick. “And one of us could use a shave. But my cork held, didn’t it, bubeleh, in spite of all the bad-mouthing from various cosmic adventurers I could mention?”
He took a few snapshots of me?Click, flash!?mopped his forehead, downed a swig of water. The suck and gurgle of the water smacking back into the canteen when he pulled it from his lips. The distant murmurs of tourists huddling back as soldiers herded them with batons. Millennia whispering by: sand, wind, sun. . . .
“So, you like it here or what? Sarvadhuka’s going nuts in the novelty shops and brothels. I told him he doesn’t get a disease or induce any pregnancies?Izzovision?so now he’s taken out all the stops, if you’ll excuse the expression. He got so burned when he found out that the Memphis I promised him nooky in wasn’t the one in Tennessee, I felt I had to share some information, to make it up to him.