In the culture of ancient Egypt, only the rich and the influential could afford the honor of post-mortal vivisection. The brain was removed through the nostrils and discarded. Significant organs were excised from the thoracic and abdominal cavities and given their own rituals of mummification. Only the heart might have found its place back within the protective embrace of human ribs. Significant members of the human corpus were given to a god for holding, and a goddess for protection. The gods were known as the Sons of Horus. The lungs—clearly deflated—were given to Hapi, the baboon-headed god of the north. The goddess Nephthys stood by him, protecting the organs of breath. It was Duamutef—the Jackal—who held the stomach. Not to be confused with the mortuarial god, Anubis, Duamutef was the god of the East, and beside him, Neith protected the organ of digestion. Imseti, recognizable by his pure, human features, tended to the liver, and it was Isis—the beloved wife of Osiris—who protected the bilious organ. The god, Qebehsenuef—he had his father’s beak, he had his father’s eyes—was the god of the West, and he held the complexities of the intestines. Selket, a beautiful goddess known for wearing a scorpion on her head, protected the dense convolutions of the stomach’s extensive tail. The Four Sons of Horus, the four cardinal gods, lived in a box. They were the divine ministers of the interior. The protector-goddesses stood outside of the box, like girl-group singers; they were kind, gentle, and deadly women. One of them—no doubt—knew just how to use a loaded scorpion. * Four jars of honey stand on the table top, with a bottle of Slivovice, one-quarter full. Sunlight slants and colors itself through the labor of Central European bees. It is distilled and amplified in its prism-bent passage through clean, bottled intoxication. Two glasses stand in empty, gaping silence. They are patient offspring of the bottle: sure that they’ll receive (and deliver) yet another measured dispensation of clear, fiery Slivovice. Cicadas announce the impending demise of summer. The radio is silent, now; but, Jan already knows what the news-readers have to say, and he doesn’t want to hear about Dutch bodies, Russian tanks, and Crimean mud. He listens—instead—to the love-noises of insects like an orchestra of electric castanets. He has refrained from pulling photo-albums from the closet. He says nothing of the jars on the table, and the three-quarters-empty bottle speaking in eloquent silence of its own inebriating purpose. The slow passage of a distant bus makes a dyspeptic growl, and Jan’s own stomach utters a demure, sympathetic chortle. It is hot, and the air is limp, indolent, and dense with humidity. Breathing feels too much like crying, and he isn’t interested in either of those things now. He needs to do something, however. Anything. Freeman sits across from him, dressed only in boxers, and the sheen of sweat on his own toasted-mahogany skin. He is stiff with the feline poise of a brooding Masai herdsman. It’s the blood —perhaps—of some apocryphal pharaoh that gives his skin the sheen of crushed velvet sunlight at elegant odds with Jan’s own sweaty pallor. Jan’s forearms are hairy, as if he’s spent the day shaving the parenthetical brackets out of old, dusty tomes. He wants Freeman to say something. He wants to hear Freeman’s voice. “How do you do it?” Jan asks. “How do you mourn?” “I don’t know,” Freeman says. “But it helps to have the body nearby.” “She is in Český Budějovice,” Jan says. “I have only memories from childhood, and four jars of honey from bees that now belong to a cousin I don’t really know.” “There’s no one way to mourn, Honza.” “I don’t want to do it like everyone else. My sister sickens me; my father is like a stone, though maybe it’s my mother who can squeeze tears from him if she has to. No one I’m related to mourns in the way that I want to, and I’m scared.” “Scared?” A shrug. He pours two more shots of fiery brandy into the empty, waiting glasses. “I don’t want to be a bad person, Freeman.” “And mourning will make you good?” “No. But maybe someone will see it and they will understand something.” * The north wall of King Tutankhamen’s burial chamber depicts three episodes that give concise visual narration to the boy-king’s entry into the afterlife. In the first vignette, Tutankhamen’s successor, Ay, performs the Opening of the Mouth ceremony upon the post-mortal visage of the king. Tutankhamen is dressed in the singular style of mummy-swaddles clearly establishing that he is an avatar of the god Osiris. In the second vignette—with his mouth and eyes adequately opened—Tutankhamen is escorted into the after-realm by the goddess, Nut. In the third vignette, King Tutankhamen is embraced by the god, Osiris. And so, the eternal party begins. The ritual of opening the mouth and the eyes might be seen as the stylized consecration of anthropomorphic images. The ritual was performed on statues, whole temples, and at least on the coffins, if not the inanimate remnants of the deceased. Specially-designated people used ritual tools and at least one animal limb to touch the mouth and eyes of the inanimate thing, so that the appropriate spirit might receive food and drink, while also acquiring the ability to breathe and to see. * “My grandmother invented her own cosmology,” Jan says; the burn of slivovice has begun its breakdown in his system. Its combination of sugars and alcohol and the occasional, desiccated molecule of plum, have all metabolized into chatty nostalgia. He has retrieved the one significant photo album from its place in his bedroom closet. Now, he guides Freeman through the swirling eddies and undertow-currents of memory, history, and half-remembered anecdote. Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Freeman, he feels a cloying layer of sweat where their flesh presses in warm and intoxicating contact. He was a child when his mother and his father left the city of Český Budějovice, taking his sister and himself with them. The photo album distorts time, space, and memory, however, and so he walks through the streets and squares of his childhood city in nothing but boxer shorts: giving Freeman the grand tour, leading him with the sweat and the flesh of their brushing shoulders. The cobblestones and city grit feel like cheap linoleum beneath his naked feet. Phantom cigarette stubs and shards of glass wedge between his toes and bite into his soles, but he is a ghost there, and so he feels nothing but kitchen floor tiles, grimy with discolored age, no matter how clean he’s managed to make them. Trolly-busses, cars, and Communist-throwback lorries all sound like the northeastern fringes of Rogers Park: where Sheridan Road chatters to itself with traffic sounds and voices in Russian, Polish, Bosnian, and Arabic. A bookstore asserts itself with a sign in purple neon. “On the day I was born, Czechoslovakia was trying to become something else. On that very day, someone who didn’t even exist had died. It was on the Radio Free Europe, and the whole continent heard it.” Freeman shifts and the contact breaks. Though his gaze is on the album, he can feel Freeman’s amused smile. “What…?” Perturbed and suddenly cold, Jan flinches. “My grandmother told me the story. She heard it, illegally, and hidden in a radical friend’s home. Martin Šmíd had been killed, on November 17th, at a student protest. Only he wasn’t real. He was a piece of political propaganda. I didn’t know that, at the time, because I was busy staging my own dramatic exit from within my mother’s womb.” He pauses. He has no memories of his own birth, of course, but he shudders at the idea of a real birth and a fictional, political death in close and accidental conjunction. He closes his eyes. He inhales deeply. “My grandmother told me the story, only once.” “It’s an interesting story.” “Czechoslovakia was full of interesting stories in 1989.” “And you’re a part of one of them.” “It’s not a good story. My grandmother never told me much about it. But I know her personal philosophy, and for a long time, I hated her for it. Because of what she believed—at least for herself—I always imagined that she’d passed some secret judgment on me. I was so angry, because I didn’t want anyone to share her belief: that the events happening on the day of your birth have some zodiological effect on who and what you become, because if that’s true, then I’m a fake. And if her belief was true, then why couldn’t I be an American born on the twentieth day of July in 1969? That was such a good day for an American to be born. I know—if I think like my grandmother—that the people born on that day are heroes, even if they were born in Communist Czechoslovakia.” Freeman shifts and slides one arm across Jan’s shoulders. He pulls him close, but his attention falls to the book, splayed on the table: with the shot glasses, the near-empty bottle, and the four small jars of dark, amber honey. He touches the rectangle of a photograph, beneath its protective film of plastic. One finger traces the contours of a face, and Jan feels a pang of jealousy for the dead woman staring out from the past. She’s a robust woman with something stern and unyielding in her gaze. The photographer—Jan thinks—was her nemesis, and her distrust and dislike are right there, immortalized. Burning in her gaze. And Freeman touches that gaze—now—with the tip of one finger, tracing the outline of it, the arch of those eyebrows, and then the shape of those cheeks. He is, Jan thinks, a blind man, reading Braille, and his fingertip traces the tight line of her lips, as if seeking the presence of some whisper, some profound utterance in a language he doesn’t speak very well. “She was a strong woman, I think,” Freeman says. “This photo is from 1970. My parents hadn’t even met yet. The lie of Martin Šmíd was a long way away.” Freeman shrugs and pulls Jan closer. “The lie of Martin Šmíd served an important purpose, maybe. It made people angry. It made them change things. Didn’t it?” “Maybe,” Jan says. “Then hold on to that. Maybe it’s what she was saying with that story. You were born on the day that something happened. Americans going to the moon isn’t better than that. Czechoslovakia isn’t there anymore; it became something else. Something better. And you were born during the labor pains of that new and better thing.” Jan closes his eyes. “Maybe,” he says. He feels the room, wobbling. * Herodotus wrote that when an Egyptian household suffered the death of a cat by natural causes (it was illegal to kill a cat, even by accident, and the punishment for such a crime was death) the members of any post-feline household entered a period of mourning and shaved off their eyebrows. Households in which dogs died, mourned in the manner of shaving their entire bodies, including the head. At Abydos, a part of the extensive cemetery there was set aside for dogs. Canine graves occupied a substantial amount of space near the graves of women, archers, and dwarves. * A drunken impulse has led Jan into the bathroom, and away from the existential remains of his grandmother, locked—as they are—in the pages of a photo-album and in four jars of honey like ancient and apocryphal canopic jars. “I need—“ he’d said, but didn’t finish. “Honza,” Freeman said, long moments later. “You’re going to kill yourself like that.” And he took the straight razor from Jan’s trembling grasp. “I want a ritual. I want to make a gesture to show that I am real.” And now, Jan stands in shower-spray, slick with shaving lather, as Freeman slices the burden of hair from the pale flesh of his face, his arms, chest, and legs. The sparse strands are shaved—too—from his toes, and Freeman, despite the slivovice in his blood, is steady with his hands and with the silvery blade, glinting in hard bathroom light. There is some thrill in the shaving of his private region, though Freemans fingers and Freeman’s gestures bear the incongruous and profound weight and density of a sacrament. He says nothing as he works in the needling shower spray, and Jan can see himself and Freeman as naked as some ancient barber-priest, preparing a pallid and quiet supplicant for entry into the presence of some strange, primordial god. “Rinse,” Freeman says, after a while. In Czech. Vymáchat. And Jan feels the splatter of water and dead shaving cream on his insteps and sliding down into the valleys between his toes. He wiggles them, to keep hair and little white bubbles from sticking to his flesh and collecting in the spaces where sweat and sock-lint always collect, causing him to think that lichens have grown. He is always careful to clean between his toes, because he doesn’t like the thought of lichens (or anything) growing there. It’s bad enough to be unreal in some dead grandmother’s cosmology. It’s worse, though, to host an ecosystem that thrives on sock-lint and toe-sweat. Freeman strangles the needling spray of water, after a while, and—after a while—dries Jan carefully, with the softness of a white terrycloth towel. Egyptian cotton, purchased on State Street. He leaves the bathroom, though only for a moment, and returns with a sheet. He unfurls it, wraps it around Jan’s shoulders—and around his own, as well—and escorts Jan into the bedroom. Wrapped in the sheet, they embrace one another, in bed. They lick kisses onto each other’s tongues, they touch one another. After a while, Jan sinks into the cloying depths of sleep with Freeman’s arms around him. * After the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s diminutive, slap-dash tomb, Howard Carter removed the lid of the outermost coffin and found a linen shroud covered in woven olive, willow, and other leaves, including wild celery. There were strips of papyrus, woven with sacred lotus petals and cornflowers. There was a cornflower wreath placed at the adolescent king’s head. The wreaths were delicate and well-preserved and in better condition than the mummy itself. The mummy of Tutanhkhamum presents an extensive narrative of damage: broken bones, a crushed chest, and a broken hip all attest to at least one fatal accident, and rough handling during the embalming process. Chemical reactions, most likely induced by heat and a combination of embalmer’s oils, have blackened the corpse and cracked the skin through a process of slow-carbonization. Further damage was done when Howard carter attempted to remove the burial mask and numerous gold amulets, rings, and charms from the nearly solid mass of resin-infused linen wrappings. The mummy was cut/broken into eighteen pieces. King Tutankhamun shares a tomb with two stillborn children. One of them has been identified as his daughter. * Jan emerges—slowly—from the darkness of dreams into— —sunset broken by the wavering shadow of maple leaves, and buildings across the street. He is entangled, naked, in a cloying swaddle of light bedding, sweat, and the last, fading crumbs of whatever netherworld has begun to withdraw back into the cockles of his mind. He feels a prickled twinge of shocked disquiet as one fading dream-shard flashes through his muddled recall of images, sounds, and a bizarre narrative written in the poetry of his subconscious. He is sure that he has dreamed in Czech. He spoke, he realizes, to the memories of his grandmother. “Freeman is a good man,” she’d said, draped in bee-keeper’s gauze. She’d smiled. “He will hold you,” she’d said. “I’ll watch you.” And in the incomprehensible algebra of dream logic, a scorpion perched on the crown of her head, preening. The creature had been at ease, concerned only with the fastidious gestures of improbable arthropod hygiene. Or was it vanity. It was a healthy, shiny scorpion, and surely it thought itself beautiful. “You have questions that you want answers to,” his grandmother had said, heedless to the shiny, pretty scorpion, now arranging itself comfortably. “I’ll be here, when you’re ready to ask them.” And now, even as the dream-flakes echo and shimmer in something like sunlight, they fade, leaving only vague impressions, as Jan is left—alone—in bed, covered in a sheet with his head and his feet poking out. He recalls the bottle of clear, fiery brandy in the kitchen. He remembers Freeman, shaving him: participating in a gesture not his own, an dnow, alone with city-orange streetlight on the naked pallor of his feet—his toenails almost gleaming—he untangles himself from the shroud of light bedding, sits up, looks around, and—after some half-thought—ambles into the bathroom, waters the toilet (as if it might wild without careful, urinary ministrations) and flushes. He is drawn to the scent of boiling rice. In the kitchen… …Where Freeman sits, reading pictures in the thick scrap-book left (with four jars of honey, and an empty bottle standing next to empty shot glasses) on the tabletop. He hasn’t bothered to dress. Steam wafts from a pot on the stove. Something bakes in the oven. He approaches the table, sits, and accepts a glass of cold water and a slice of cucumber from Freeman. The water is refreshing. The cucumber makes his mouth feel clean. “Do you exist now?” Freeman asks, a smile in his voice. “Are you who you want to be?” Jan nods. “You mourned,” Freeman says, quietly. “You were saying something in Czech, but it was too fast. You started crying. I thought it best to leave you to it. I’m sorry,” Freeman says, “if that was a mistake.” Jan shakes his head, dismissing the unnecessary apology. “My grandmother wore a scorpion on her head; it was such a vain creature, showing off how pretty it was, like some kind of fancy hat worn by a movie star.” “Dreams are like that,” Freeman says, sliding an arm across Jan’s shoulder. He shrugs. “I suppose if I were a scorpion, I’d be impressed with myself, too.” Jan smiles, his gaze falling to the jars of honey: four small jars with seals of wax beneath their lids. “Dinner’s almost ready,” Freeman says. “We’ll eat…and afterwards, if you don’t mind, you could tell me some more about Czechoslovakia, if you don’t mind. I’d like to know more about that fake guy who died on the day you were born.” “Martin Šmíd,” Jan says, shrugging. “But I don’t know much about him.” “Just tell me what you know,” Freeman says. “Just tell me how you feel or what you think. Tell me anything.” He pulls Jan closer and touches a kiss to the tickle of hair brushing the crest of Jan’s ear. “I like it when you talk, at night. I like the sound of your voice.” * End Certain liberties have been taken with historical and cultural fact, especially since the goddess Selkhet seems to have appeared as a Czech babička. There is a long and convoluted history (and plenty of conspiracy theories) surrounding the un-real historical figure of Martin Šmíd, including impressions of the death of Martin Šmíd, offered by one of the guys who might or might not have been accused of dying during the tumultuous, strangely…um…cryptic end of Czechoslovakia. There’s no denying the intense and harrowing human drama surrounding Czechoslovakia’s emergence from Communist rule, and yet there remain a number of unanswered questions as to what actually happened in a few cases. Conspiracy theories surrounding the phantom Martin Šmíd are also far more intelligent and elegant than the conspiracy theories surrounding the “Fake Moon Landing” gibberish that makes as much sense as a Michael Bay screenplay, without the benefit of pyrotechnics. Ancient Egyptian funerary customs and cosmology are pretty-well understood, though questions remain concerning the actual demise of King Tutankhamun and other historical figures. There are countless theories, including rather undeniable indications that Tutankhamun was killed by a chariot, or kicked by a horse, though some of his wounds are also consistent with death-by-hippopotamus. The chariot-death theory holds the most water, however, though ancient Egyptian kings liked doing all sorts of dangerous things, like hunting hippos…on foot. Other mysteries and revelations surround Egypt’s formerly-obscure and now intensely-famous boy king. Perhaps the most human of these revelations centers on his human attributes—buck teeth, a gimpy foot, and numerous incest-related maladies, since ancient Egyptian royalty was immensely inbred, even by the standards of royalty. I've finished reading Aleksandar Hemon's collection The Question of Bruno, and though this story bears little in common with the stories there, I'm rather ticked by the fact that it has vague associations with "The Sorge Spy Ring," a story (or is it an essay?) half of which is a mass of footnotes that read like fiction in and of themselves. I have to say that Hemon is now one of my all-time-favorite authors. He'd better hurry up and write another book. I need my Hemon fix. As always, thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.