THE GOD'S WIFE (16 page)

Phillips let out a soft laugh and gazed at his notes.

“You’re assuming that there are sentient creatures just like us in this universe,” he said, his face now serious. “But the answer is we don’t know.” He turned back to the board and pointed at two equations that meant nothing to Rebecca. “If this event meets this event, there is no reason why inhabitants of one universe would not be aware of one another. Or, as Hollywood would have it, the universes collide.”

As the crowd tittered. He looked back at Rebecca.

“It’s in my book. I devoted half a chapter to it. It’s a question of some significance because it questions just what the human brain is filtering
out
in our own known universe. The alternate universe could be right here next to us, and we don’t see it because our brains won’t let us.”

Some in the audience let out a few “ooohs” at that statement. The crowd listened to his next comments with rapt silence.

A few more questions later, Rebecca and Jonas pushed through the herd to the foyer, where stacks of Phillips’ book
Time and Dimension in Alternate Universe Theory
stood piled on a table near the door. A middle-aged woman with an enormous flowered hat collected cash from eager buyers. Rebecca begged Jonas to buy her a copy, even though she knew it contained mathematical formulae as comprehensible to her as the Cyrillic alphabet. Jonas shelled out the twenty dollars and handed her the hefty volume, which she hugged to her chest.

“Oh, I can’t wait to read this tonight,” she said.

“I thought we had other plans,” Jonas said, pulling her toward him for a possessive embrace. “Don’t tell me you’ve fallen for this speaker now.”

“No, silly.” She laughed and gave him a kiss, although the bulky book was in the middle. “I fell for the ideas.”

Jonas shook his head and led her out of the lecture hall and into the warm, humid night.

#

The sky was ablaze with illuminated skyscraper windows when Rebecca pulled herself from another black, nearly dreamless sleep. Up on the fifty-sixth floor of Jonas’ spacious South Loop apartment, she often felt she was adrift in the stars. She would have luxuriated in the calm sensation had her blackout not been so unsettling. Something was missing. Something big.

She looked at the clock — three twenty-six A.M. — and rolled out of bed. She put on Jonas’ robe and made her way to the living room, which also featured a picture window lit up by city lights. She snuggled on the leather sofa and reached for the physics book she had left lying on the coffee table. She turned to the chapter on alternate universes and read for a while, yet something tugged at her. She scanned the glass-topped table and realized she had left one of her Egyptian books there, probably weeks overdue from the library. The book tantalized her with its photo of a sculpture of an elegant Egyptian woman on the cover.

She put down the physics treatise and pulled the Egyptian book toward her. The pages fell open at random to a description of the Ba and the Ka. She had studied this section on the Egyptian conception of the soul until she nearly committed the passage to memory. Sitting forward on the sofa, she drew a slow, imaginary line with her finger from the still-open physics book to the words in the other volume about the Ka. Somehow, they were connected, because she felt that familiar buzzing in her head when she traced and retraced the line. A bizarre idea popped up. Was there empty space somewhere between one universe and the other where a separated Ba lingered, pining to reunite with its Ka? The Egyptians would find the idea preposterous.

But still ...

She raised her gaze to the window and paced to the balcony door. Although wind still whipped about outside, she pried the sliding glass aside. Up in the sky, the myriad lights made up constellations of their own. She knew the real stars lay far away, hidden by the light pollution of downtown Chicago. However, the artificial lights worked some kind of magic. She stared at one beam and wondered if it held the Ka. Could she squeeze through a portal to an alternate place where her Ka waited? Would that make her whole? She stared out into space and half-asked, half-prayed. Who was she really? Why did she always feel half a person, even when she stood embraced by Jonas, whom she loved? Was her purpose to find the Ka, her twin soul?

She stepped through the doors onto the balcony, half-dreaming of what it would be like to step off the earth and fly to another space and time. Isn’t that what she did every night at rehearsal, spring from the ground to the ultimate bliss of fine art? Wasn’t this the same?

The bars of the balcony pressed cold against her exposed flesh as she began to lean into the sparkling light. What lay out there between earth and Professor Phillips’ universes beyond? She inclined farther over the edge.

She saw the familiar pair of eyes, dark and lined with kohl, hovering in the darkness. This time she called to them. She babbled, unaware of what she was saying, but she felt the presence of her Egyptian double linger by the balcony and then, just for a second, slip inside her body. It was bliss. She understood everything now: who she was, what purpose she served, how she should use her talent. It seemed to last hours, yet slipped away when she heard a voice in the distance.
Go to him,
a voice said from the dark.

“Rebecca!” Then there was nothing but Jonas: his strong arms pulling her back, shutting the door, plopping her on the couch and holding her until she returned fully to the world.

He kissed her on the neck and asked what she attempted in the middle of the night?

“The stars,” she said, still looking at that spot high in the firmament.

“But you know they are only lights. Like this.” He flipped the reading lamp on and off.

“There’s so much more.”

“No, there’s not. You could have gotten yourself killed.”

Rebecca turned to look him full in the face. Her savior, yet he didn’t understand anything. “How did you know ... about me on the balcony?” she asked, her voice failing.

“I always hear those balcony doors open. I could be deep asleep, but they wake me every time. When I noticed you were out of bed, I flew out here.”

“So smart,” she said, tracing a line along his chin around to his forehead. “I thought you might have known what I was thinking.”

Jonas put his hand to his forehead like a doctor with a bad prognosis, then grabbed her hand and held it with a firm grip.

“No one knows what you’re thinking. That’s the whole problem.”

She let out a sigh, and they curled up together on the couch and drifted into a strange and restless sleep.

“The Ba!”

Neferet sat up in bed, jolted out of sleep with a sudden need to consult Nebhotep and the holy books of the temple. Darkness still filled the room, and Ra had not even peeked over the horizon, but she grabbed a robe and some linens and made her way to the sacred pool to cleanse herself for the day.

She dreamed that her Ba, the part of her being that her religion considered part of the soul, flew about lost, like a trapped bird flitting about in a space with no windows or doors. It tried to get back to her Ka, or her physical self.
It isn’t supposed to happen.
The Ba only separates at death.
However, the dream pecked at her consciousness. Not only would it not fade away, it grew more troubling over the hour.

She dried herself and fitted a long sheath over her slender form, put on a pair of simple sandals and dumped her laundry in a basket for the servants.
Today, I look like a temple student. Maybe that’s my role for the day.
She avoided the main pylons at the huge entrance to Karnak, with its brilliant flags and banners tossing in the windy gusts. She held an arm before her face to ward off the omnipresent sand and slid into a side door on the north side of the vast temple complex where she’d be less likely to be seen. She dashed between the myriad columns, all fashioned in the shape of budding lotus blossoms, and headed for the library.

The room for sacred papyri looked a mess, piled high with scrolls of every possible state of preservation. The newer, greener scrolls sat on the bottom shelves, while dusty old things that looked as if they might crumble like stale bread perched up high. Other types of manuscripts rose all about her, from clay tablets in Akkadian, the language of international diplomacy, to pay ledgers written in hieratic script. Some documents even were incised on pottery shards.

At first, Neferet jumped back in surprise to see someone other than Nebhotep at the central desk. A lean, young baldheaded man looked up, a vacant expression in his eyes, as if he were beholding a mere servant girl. She realized that without her regalia and kohl makeup, she probably looked like any seventeen-year-old commoner. Soon enough, the man’s face showed gradual recognition. He stood and welcomed the God’s Wife. Neferet bade him to sit and return to his studies but not before she requested several scrolls dealing with the Ba, the Ka and the constituency of the soul.

The readings, deep and philosophical, got her nowhere at first. She discovered nothing about the Ba that did not have to do with death. Could the Ba have no role in life? Neferet noticed that trapped bird tapping at her sternum again and she clutched at her heart.

Halting footsteps echoed down the hall, accompanied by the staccato percussion of a cane. The sounds announced Nebhotep before he appeared at the library’s door.

“My lady,” he said, walking directly up to Neferet. “Your duties await. Where have you been?”

She realized she had forsaken the morning ministrations for Amun. Hours must have hurried by. How could she forget? She rolled up her scroll and started to stand.

“I’ll be right there,” she said. “But please, Nebhotep, there’s something I must know. I’ve been in the library all this time searching.” She grasped the old man’s gnarled knuckles with her smooth hands and peered into his weak eyes. “It’s the Ba.”

Nebhotep tossed his head back and moved away to take a scroll, an ancient one by the looks of the yellowed piece of papyrus, from a high shelf.

“This is by Ptah-Hotep, vizier to the Pharaoh Isesi. From before the time the pyramids stood gleaming on Giza’s plateau.”

Neferet gaped, for one could hardly imagine the immense age of the ancient pyramids. Yet, here Nebhotep cradled a papyrus, or a copy anyway, of words from that long-ago era.

“Tell me,” Neferet said, pulling up a chair next to the old man, full of interest.

The chief priest unrolled the papyrus, careful to preserve the brittle material from breaking, until he found the section he knew by heart. He read in a strong but cracking voice.

“The one who knows takes care of his Ba — his capacity for sublimation. He makes certain it will survive and be long lasting. Thanks to his Ba, he is happy on earth.”

He rolled the papyrus shut. His next words were his own, explaining the text.

“That is the Ba in the living. It is that which seeks the vital energy of light in life. You cannot lose your Ba in life, but you can be unable to recognize it.”

Neferet chewed on her lower lip. Had she ignored the light in her life? She didn’t feel certain. She tugged on Nebhotep’s old linen robe.

“I had a dream that the Ba, maybe my Ba, was lost somewhere and couldn’t return. It kept flying around and losing itself in the high sky. I was so worried because I couldn’t help. I just raced around unable to grab it.” She realized a tear slid along her nose and turned to wipe it away.

“A lost Ba is a bad sign,” Nebhotep agreed. “Yet I see no sign in you that you have lost contact with this most important part of your soul.” He smiled, something unusual for him, and it looked as if his face would crack into millions of pieces. “Follow the law of Ma’at: truth, honesty, justice. Your Ba will find its way home.”

Neferet hugged him, then wondered if his withered bones were able to take the stress. She thanked him and ran off to prepare for a late morning ritual for Amun. He would not mind the wait.

#

Deep inside the Holy of Holies, Neferet went through her routine, with the impassive mask of Amun looking through stone eyes at the opposite wall. She wondered if she were lost in the dark here, where only incense braziers and candlelight provided illumination. There was something missing, and she could feel the hollow in her heart. She enjoyed her role at the temple and believed her dances for Amun kept the world on an even keel, whether or not the god was watching. She followed the laws of Ma’at. Still, she lacked the sense that comes from a deep knowing of self. Could it be her role existed merely to dance, appease a stone god and be appropriate bait for the next Pharaoh? Her life must be worth more than that.

The dance ended, and she placed food near the idol. Food from which the god extracted energy (or so the priests said), leaving the outward, physical manifestation for the priests and priestesses to gobble up. She bowed and recited an impromptu prayer for the reunion of her Ka with her Ba.

As she turned to leave, she thought she saw a glint in those glassy eyes. On closer inspection, it existed as a trick of the candlelight. She remembered Nebhotep’s words as she left the chamber, “Thanks to his Ba, a person is happy on earth.” She closed the doors with a tentative touch, full of doubt and conflicted feelings about her religion, wondering just how happy she really felt right now.

Cuddled in a chair in her apartment, Rebecca immersed herself in tales of the cosmos and super-string theory. Allison called out to her. She put the physics book aside, realizing it was almost time to start helping with dinner. Not wanting to budge, she slid off the bed inch by inch and stood, stretching her aching muscles.

“It’s the phone,” Allison said. Rebecca realized she had disabled her telephone so she wouldn’t be disturbed. As she plugged it back in, she felt a little bit of relief that K.P. duty was still a while away. Cooking never thrilled her, ever since Mom threw her out of the kitchen and declared her a blight on any decent meal. She picked up the receiver expecting to hear from someone at the dance company, since opening night dangled in front of them only two days away.