The Valley of the Kings

I trudged through the blasting sand all swaddled up like a mummy, even had my face covered but what’s to see out here? From an approaching shadow I knew I was coming upon one of the lesser tombs, those thrown up by the poor from stones that had been rejected by the quarry bosses. Scratching about with the hands of the blind I found an entry facing away from the storm and pushed my way down the  ramp. 

Unwrapping my head at last I was surprised to find it dark, and when I torched up I saw that it hadn’t been used. Someone had been preparing it, though. It was already fitted with lighting fixtures. There was even a generator. Again I was surprised when the thing just ripped into action when I gave the starter a pull. There was the expected shrill of a motor laboring against a buildup of sand. 

I didn’t bother lighting the place. I’d explore it all tomorrow. Just now I fell down in a dead faint right then and there and finally slept after several days, I don’t know how many, several though, several. I heard things, saw things. There were dreams of my dead wife wailing over the pieces of our children, hands and feet hidden in cupboards, of the Japanese who’d been caught out and quickly jumped up from the couch and shot everyone down, just like that, it was amazing. The whole meeting falling down dead. Why did he spare me? I really had no sense of it. I was just as guilty …

Then there was a sound. Someone … perhaps mine host. 

He came forward quickly, leaping for me. I simply rolled away and the idiot bashed against the wall. It was Ed. Of course it was Ed.

“What are you doing?” I demanded.

“I’m here for my revenge,” he said matter of factly – well, everything he said was rather matter of fact through his vox. Ed was as mad as the desert. He’d followed me for years.

“You’re always here for your revenge,” I told him. I was tired of telling him this. How many times did I have to remind him?  I’d rehearse our story again and again, sometimes adding needless details, which he enjoyed; he always clapped his hands at these little bits of new furniture to our tawdry little scene together back in Cairo. The woman. He called her his wife. She wasn’t. In fact she’d been mine for quite a while, years. I finally got rid of her by making such a case of myself that she asked me to leave. That was my first experience of finding my own way without resources. I pushed a shopping cart around and stopped off at various friends’. Most of them told me to jolly well fuck off, they’d had enough. Leonard finally took me in. He was my last resort. I hated him; everybody hated his ass, he was going to die, and he was making a great fuss of it. He had his TV blasting, as usual. Without even a greeting he told me that great Alviso was dead. He’d been discovered in his bath, head back, eyes burnt out from looking at the sun, yet he was smiling, smiling. I can see the plush lips, the way they crooked up to one side when he smiled, something of a snarl to it, nasty, conceited and feral. I’d gotten bored with the man long ago. But it’s not necessary to tell all this. It is Ed we’re considering here. Just now he was standing up and dusting off his foolish clothes, leather from head to foot, and I bet he still wore a dozen fragile gold chains around his neck, and of course the ever present motorbike helmet, and his lower face was veiled to cover his blasted jaw.  

“Ed,” I sighed. “I had hoped to find a friend here.”

His vox whizzed out what remained of a programmed laugh. Obviously not his choice; it was the only one remaining. He’d been out here a long time. 

I sat down against the opposite wall. The lights were up now. He’d turned them on when he came in, I suppose. 

“I broke into your gallery,” he said. “I saw your girls, your trophies. Penelope was there, too.”

“She wanted it,” I told him. Told him for the nth time. “Would you like to hear an account of this?”

“Please.”

“Ed. This is a desperate land, Ed. Boys like you … how can there be boys like you still after all this?”

“I’m older than you are.”

“No one is older than I am.” 

“She came to you,” he urged me. “Let’s have it. Let’s have it.”

Again I told him. It was before the plague, before everything, the old world in all its stinking, brazen glory. She’d come to me in high Renaissance drag. Even had her hair colored, and the cosmetic surgery had completely healed so that she now appeared even younger than she’d been when I last saw her  … that was … well, in Nova Burbank, I think, where we’d met in the first place … Ah, those nights of love, her easy Levantine residence in flesh, nay, she was one with it, she was flesh all through and she dripped with sex. If only she weren’t so mad. At the  end there she was thoroughly gone. She knew it. That’s why she came to me. 

“Make me like her,” she said, stroking the marble flesh of my Cosima, the one commissioned by the Great Man himself. Her hand played over the small breasts, the coils of hair I’d wrought so lovingly and left off polishing sooner than the rest so they’d retain the look of my model’s own course tresses. She really wasn’t so much lovely as … Oh, striking, I suppose. That’s how you describe a woman who would be ugly if she weren’t so magnetic. True of Penelope as well. Can you imagine her with Ed, though? A force like that made to fit his bricked in religion. His little house must fall at last, as I’m sure it did. She’d run out on the fool  and he blamed me. “You ruined her. You ruin everyone with your sorcery.”

I had her undress and marveled again at her body. 

“What was her body like?” Ed pressed.

“Oh, you missed something there, Ed. You were such a poor, wasted looking animal beside her. Even in that sackcloth you all wore she was still a beauty. Your Priest saw it. The way the pig watched her, the way his eyes always slid away after her when she passed by his dais. You say he married you.”

“We were married!” his vox crazed. 

“So he could have at her, you poor fish!”

“It is the Law.”

“How convenient the Law is for priests.”

“Shut up!” he slapped at his thighs, raising dust.

I leaned my head back against the ancient stone. Yes, that day, that last day. As I raised up the Circling Fire and let it race through me, empowering my hands finally, as I touched her heat once more, one last time, her hair, her throat, her breasts even smaller than Cosima’s yet with more prominent nipples, and a stubble from the hair she must wax off each day. I’d love to run my tongue over it when we were younger, loved the feel of her nipples firming up against my lips, her belly, soft and warm and full of her (she was firmly centered there as one should be), and there was the plunge of the flesh into her deep navel, hair surrounding that as well, or it had then, and her bush, her opening thighs, ah! I loved the way her thighs locked around my head when I kissed her in the secret place, and later pressed against my own and pushed rhythmically as I plunged into her … My hands remembered her warmth even as it slowly fled, as her soft, rose and olive toned flesh went blue white, went hard and chill to the touch, died slowly under the Fire. Strange that the Fire would make such a cold thing of a woman, of anyone who wanted the cold for the sake of … of what? What?