The Book of the Dead (28 page)

“The mummy is a volunteer,” she repeats. “Surely there are other mummies.”

“Not like this,” Chet says, and feels his stomach drop at the possibility of a shortage. Still, though, there is plenty left.

Chet listens from his room, his monogrammed robe tightly tied at the waist. Miss Klein’s hair is sometimes sticky. She smiles at breakfast. She dresses in her black, and goes into the office, and she takes dictation from Chet’s father who shows no sign of ceasing speaking.

One day, Chet looks at a letter and discovers that she’s not taking dictation at all. She’s writing a romance, a page at a time, sealing it into envelopes, and posting it to the far corners of the world.

All Chet wants is to have the mummy to himself, to gorge on its sweetness, but he is forced to take what the mummy gives him, a tiny piece here and there, crumbled on a breakfast biscuit. A lick occasionally at the corner of the mouth, the humorously quirked mouth, so dear and yet so cruel. Sometimes he hears the mummy moan, but never when he’s with it. Only Miss Klein makes the mummy cry out. Only the mummy makes Miss Klein gasp.

Neither Miss Klein nor Chet pretend interest in anything but the thing they share.

Chet looks at men dressed in their waistcoats as he strolls home from the factory. He looks at tight vests and at cuff buttons. He looks at wrists and forearms. He thinks about the mummy, and he swallows. The mellified man. Mellified woman. Mellified neither and both.

He looks at the sharp slant of the mummy’s jaw, the thin and wiry arms he sometimes sees laced around Miss Klein. He looks at the mummy and imagines it wearing a properly starched and pressed shirt, the vest buttoned. He finds another loose button on his own shirt, and tugs it impatiently into the crystal dish where he keeps all the unspooling buttons.

Sometimes he sees a man looking at him from across the park. He can smell honey wherever he goes, but when he looks back, at dark eyes, at a well-brushed hat, he thinks of the mummy at home. He can’t let go.

“Conversion,” says Chet’s father. “Bones to nougat. Blood to honey. We’re all sugar in the end,” he says, “you and me both, old boy, old boy,” and Chet twitches his collar studs out in annoyance. The company’s doing well. This is a white tie evening.

Bit-U-Men bars are shipping from side to side of the states, and the mummy sits peacefully in the chair at the end of the room, dressed in the usual bandages, white silk, this time, with beaded fringe. Part of the mummy is missing. The left arm. The other arm is decked in bangles, fat gilded things. Each bandaged finger wears a ring. The mummy’s mouth is revealed now, painted red. The lips are plump and drenched, and in the mummy’s mouth, there is the sweetest syrup.

Sometimes, the mummy stands up. Sometimes the mummy sings a line or two in a language no one living speaks. Chet knows what it means, though, he does. He sympathizes.

I was lonely in the dark.

There is a brass band. There is a trumpet. There is Miss Klein sitting beside the mummy, decked in cobalt silk, a string of ever-living scarab beetles around her throat, a gift from the mummy.

Here is Miss Klein sitting beside the mummy, leaning over to whisper to the mummy, adjusting the mummy’s diamond headband. Here is the mummy sweetening the punch with a drop of honey here, and one there, until Chet rushes over, and stops the mummy from giving the milk away for free.

It’s 1928, then ‘29.

Chet’s father spontaneously combusts while sitting on a train in Belgium. He bursts into flame, and runs out into the aisle, arms pinwheeling, skin shivering like paper rising up from a fire. No one can explain it, but Chet knows. Miss Klein knows. They look at the mummy. The mummy is quiet, but the mummy is often quiet. The mummy only shrugs.

“I was lonely in the dark,” says the mummy at last, sipping at hot tea, “but the dark was where I belonged. I don’t make the rules of religion. I gave my heart away and I’ll never find it, a honey heart in honey jar. Mr. Savor was there when the rock was pried up. He offered me passage to a new country.”

Chet imagines his father tromping into the tomb slightly behind the archeologists he’s bribed on candy earnings. He imagines his father running fingers over the drawings instructing him not to touch the sarcophagus. A drawing of bees. A drawing of honey dripping from a comb. A drawing, no doubt, of something else, of punishments promised for those who’d thieve from the dead. But Chet knows the kind of man his father was, and he imagines his father moving the wrappings aside, convinced of his sway over sugar.

It’s 1932.

It’s in the papers. Hart Crane, son of a candyman, who sometimes signs his name Heart, and whose name was once Harold, kills himself jumping off the back of a boat, and Chet Savor’s poems aren’t worth publishing anyway. He’s stopped writing villanelles. One morning the mummy unexpectedly kisses him and he feels its sharp teeth on his tongue. He jerks back, but for a moment, he wants to lean in and have it over with.

The mummy reads a book in the upstairs library, an old book in a leather binding:

“That mummy is medicinal, the Arabian Doctor Haly delivereth and divers confirm; but of the particular uses thereof, there is much discrepancy of opinion. While Hofmannus prescribes the same to epileptics, Johan de Muralto commends the use thereof to gouty persons; Bacon likewise extols it as a stiptic: and Junkenius considers it of efficacy to resolve coagulated blood. Meanwhile, we hardly applaud Francis the First, of France, who always carried Mummia with him as a panacea against all disorders; and were the efficacy thereof more clearly made out, scarce conceive the use thereof allowable in physic, exceeding the barbarities of Cambyses and turning old heroes unto unworthy potions. Shall Egypt lend out her ancients unto chirurgeons and apothecaries, and Cheops and Psammiticus be weighed unto us for drugs? Shall we eat of Chamnes and Amosis in electuaries and pills, and be cured by cannibal mixtures? “

The mummy looks up, eyes black and wet as ever. The mummy has only one hand with two fingers left. The mummy is earless and missing slices of the rest of its body. The mummy doesn’t mind. This body has been around a long time.

1938, 1941. Airplanes over Europe. Marching. Guns. Sugar rationed, but in Chicago, there is one place to find sweetness.

The Bit-U-Men bars with the
Unique Flavor and the Marvelous Name
sell and sell, to children and to soldiers, to housewives and to workers, to teachers and to Army medics in their kits. The mummy has one leg, and now none. Miss Klein carries the mummy up the marble staircase. Miss Klein stretches beside the mummy, and the mummy unwraps. Miss Klein unbraids her hair, puts out her tongue, licks gently at the mummy, and the mummy arches, eaten. Miss Klein is still Miss Klein, though when she goes with Chet to fancy dress balls in Chicago, she spins around the floor, her hair pinned with scarabs, her dress emerald green, and some men tell him they envy him his wife, and others look at him too long.

Chet walks in the park, looking at the men and longing for a flavor other than simple syrup. He walks the halls in his slippers, to hear the moans from outside the bedroom door.

He longs hopelessly for salt, for spice, to bury his face in someone with a pounding heart. At night, he sees Miss Klein walking in the long hallway of their house, her silk robe sweeping the floor, her hair loose. He feels the mummy waiting, and sometimes he looks into the room where the mummy sleeps, a small bundle beneath bedsheets. He thinks about its heart, preserved in a jar of honey, given away to someone long dead, and then he thinks about his own heart. He feels it swelling, swelling, with a love that has never made sense.

All over the country, the bars stick in teeth, press against gums, pull out fillings.

Chet touches his stomach and finds it rounded. He pats his pockets. There are no wonders in them, no pulverized lemon, no candied cricket. The factory is all Bit-U-Men Bars now, and the things his father brought, the sweetmeats from secret stashes, the fenugreek seeds and the balls of Turkish Delight are stale in their jars. The newsreels are salutes and stars.

It’s 1943. On the radio, a voice talks about orchestrated hell.

Chet climbs the stairs in his wonderful house and finds Miss Klein taking dictation. The mummy and Miss Klein look at him, and he stands there a moment, in the doorway, before he sighs and turns away. In the bathroom, he finds first one silver hair, and then another. In his chest, he finds a cluster of silver just over his heart, threads unraveled from a spun sugar machine. In the factory, Bit-U-Men bars flip from their conveyors, and into their wrappings, winding themselves up, tightly bound and safe for future generations. Twenty-four bars in each box, each box sealed perfectly for shipping, each box full of bits of the mummy and the world the mummy came from.

In the bellies of dead American soldiers in the jungles of the Pacific Front, there are bits of mellified man, slowly dissolving. In Germany, a bar is smuggled into a camp, and analyzed. A new experiment is done, a quiet death in a tank of honey. Everything that has ever been thought of in the history of horrible is tried again.

Then it’s 1945, and the commander eats a slice of newly mellified man, a prisoner converted into confection, and feels nothingness surge through him, the casual curse of a volunteer. He raises his pistol to his temple, and pulls the trigger.

The soldiers come home. All around the country there’s a craving, a sweet tooth. All around the country, babies are conceived, a generation born in fear of the lonely dark. Babies fill maternity wards, and ticker tape mixes with candy wrappers, men returning from the war, factories filling again, cars spinning down the roads and women in yellow dresses unwrapping bars full of unbearable sweetness.

The mummy gives the company its hollow chest. It gives its crackling spine.

Chet Savor stoops to pick up a button and feels something unbuttoning deep in his body, a ping in his ribcage. He goes to the doctor, who listens with a stethoscope and recommends less drink, less meat, less everything. In the park he watches a returning soldier embracing his bride. Savor’s Sweets supplied the war effort with sugar, but Chet never fought. He claimed injuries preexisting. Now he has regret.

Miss Klein, naked but for her scarab beetles, braids her hair, and twists it on top of her head, extends a long leg and rolls her stockings up it, inch by inch. The mummy watches her, and says “Now unwrap.”

She unrolls her stockings, unpins her hair, and brings the mummy a sip of hot milk. After a moment, she kisses the mummy on the mouth, and the mummy kisses back.

The 1950’s are glass jars full of Technicolor jawbreakers, glittering colored candy, bars dipped in chocolate and filled with marshmallow nothing. Children look skeptically at the Bit-U-Men, and the label changes, to look more fetching, less worrying. Black bits in a golden field. Children begin to feel they are eating ashes, when they want to eat red dye. Bit-U-Men bars sit stale in candy counters.

It’s 1961. The Bit-U-Men brand becomes an uncertainty, despite the bees on the label, now dancing, despite the eye on the label, now winking. Chet hires an advertising company, and attempts to make it into a beach-blanket staple, a singing teenager with a guitar, a bunch of girls in bathing suits, all giddily twirling around a Bit-U-Men like it’s a campfire. Chet sits morosely in a corner watching the teenagers shimmy in the center of a pile of shipped-in sand. The boy with the guitar eats a bite of the bar, and Chet observes as mellified joy fills him. Chet watches the boy, his tanned skin, his white teeth, and considers saving him from a life of sugar.

The boy turns to Chet and says “Can I help you? Aren’t you Old Mr. Savor?”

Miss Klein carries the mummy wrapped in a warm blanket. It is only a head and throat now.

Chet Savor dies of a heart attack, his buttons bursting and flying off into the sky, each one turning as it goes into something with wings. There is a small swarm of locusts, but it isn’t long before they die too, falling into the streets where cars crush their wings. Chet Savor’s last words, written in a dark brown ink, are
I was lonely in the dark.

The mummy smiles, but says nothing. Chet Savor’s pen has been left on his desk next to a dry jar of the ink called Mummy Brown.

Miss Klein attends the funeral. The mummy wears black wrappings and travels in a handbag. The mourners think she’s lost her mind with grief when she holds the handbag to her lips and whispers to it. She is still tall and thin, and her hair, now striped with silver and gold, is twisted into complicated patterns. Her mouth is covered in red lipstick. Her dress, beneath the black, is a red silk slip embroidered with hieroglyphs.

“Of use,” says the mummy when they return home, up the marble staircase, into the marble bathroom where Miss Klein washes honey from her fingers.

“You
have
been of use,” says Miss Klein.

“Sweetness doesn’t last forever. Other things do. That ink,” says the mummy. “What is it made of?”

“They don’t make it anymore,” says Miss Klein. “His father used it too. Nothing lasts forever.”

She unwraps the mummy, and looks at the mummy’s smooth, sleek face.

“I’m lonely,” says the mummy. “I want to see the world.”

Shira Klein inhales, exhales.

“The world isn’t so much,” she says, and for the first time in forty years, her voice wobbles.

“I’m not so much either,” says the mummy. “I’ve been in Chicago a long time. Come see the world with me.”

Miss Klein looks at the label on the ink bottle. She nods. She takes out a small notebook and writes down the name of the company. She dials an international operator in London, and connects with C. Roberson’s Color Makers.

Miss Klein dresses in a traveling suit, and takes an airplane to Rome. The mummy, now gone below the lips, travels with her, in a soft bag made of snakeskin and lined in silk.

“I loved the light,” the mummy whispers, over and over throughout the flight. Shira Klein feeds it as she did long ago, this time a mixture of hot water and whiskey administered with her finger, a drop at a time.