Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

“Sir, that’s at the Natural History Museum across the—”

“Honey pie,” he whined to Irene, “I thought you said we were going to see the dinosaurs. We didn’t come out here all the way from Tacoma just to see some art .”

“You hush,” Irene snapped, as she took a pair of little sky-blue M-buttons from the man. She clamped her hand around Jacob’s wrist and jammed the button into his lapel.

“ Ferme la bouche ,” she said, then marched off into the Egyptian Wing.

Jacob doffed an imaginary hat. “I could be from Tacoma,” he said, mostly to himself, as he walked after her.

Normally, Irene liked to start by the mummies in the ancient Near Eastern art section, but this time she kept her back to them as she passed by the long, opposite wall, which displayed the scrolls for the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

“Can you read this?” she asked Jacob, pointing to the hieroglyphics.

He’d taken two semesters of Middle Egyptian in college, since he’d done Latin and Greek in high school and needed six “ancient language” credits for his classics major. He hardly remembered any of it, but usually Irene liked it when he ad-libbed.

“Ah yes,” he said. “This here is a pilot script for an ancient Egyptian police procedural called… let’s see here… yes. CSI: Akhetaten .”

Irene didn’t smile but ran her fingers along the English text on the glass as if she were blind and it was Braille. “‘A spell to keep the heat within the body of the deceased until resurrection. Which must be recited over the figure of a heavenly cow.’”

Jacob scratched an invisible beard. “Never have a figure of a heavenly cow when you need one, though. That’s the trouble.”

The next panel described the Hereafter. “Each of the seven gates of Osiris is monitored by an attendant, a guardian, and an announcer.”

“Well, sure. Under union rules, you can’t attend, guard, and announce without three separate contracts.”

Still no smile. “The Egyptians believed the dead lived in a Field of Peace, which they were taken to either on a ferryboat or aboard the solar bark of Ra.”

“Solar bark ?”

“It says ‘solar bark.’”

“Like a dog bark or a tree bark?”

“Unclear. And here’s a spell to — interesting — a spell to transform someone into a swallow that can travel freely between the real world and the Hereafter.”

“Yeah, but then you’re a swallow,” Jacob sighed. “Ew. It says the guardian of the third gate is the Eater of His Own Excrement. That guy better at least be getting paid scale.”

He was sure this was one of his better performances, but Irene was drifting silently into the next room. She breezed through groups of Asian tourists while Jacob found himself shuffling left, right, and left again, trying not to knock two Hasidim into the five-thousand year-old Kneeling Bull Holding a Spouted Vessel.

He caught up with her inside the enormous greenhouse that enclosed the Temple of Dendur. “Are we racing?” he asked as they crossed the moat.

“I’m looking for something,” she said. “Sorry, I don’t need the whole Jacob Show today.”

She got like this when she was in the middle of a new piece in her studio. He liked it; he missed feeling that way himself, but he understood. She was the only other person he knew who had artistic impulses. Ordinarily this made her eager to pick his brain, seeking advice and context, but she had said nothing to him at all about her recent projects, not for months. Soon she was leaning into the archway where a nineteenth-century soldier had carved his name into its gray foot: LEONARDO 1820 PS GORDE o.

“You’re looking for ancient graffiti?”

“I’m looking for something”—she sighed, then sighed again with the last bit of breath—“disappointing.”

Extending his arms in mock-heroic pride, Jacob stood in front of her. “Behold! Portrait of a Profound Disappointment. Jewish-American in Origin. Circa 2009. Oil on Skin. Meat on Bone. Tweed on Meat.”

Ignoring him, she stepped into the cool antechamber at the center of the temple. There two small children were fighting over a handful of playing cards with hieroglyphics on them and trying to match them to the ones on the walls.

“Careful! Don’t trip on the wire!” Irene cautioned the kids, as they tried to climb over and under it at the same time. The little girl stamped her feet on the tile floor and looked up at Jacob, with an accusing finger pointed at her brother.

“He’s taking all the cards!”

“Where are your parents?” Jacob asked.

“Here,” Irene said, picking a card up off the floor that the girl’s brother had dropped. “Jacob, what’s this one?”

The little girl looked glumly down at the funny golden cross.

“That’s an ankh,” Jacob explained.

“Honk!” the girl shouted.

“Ankh,” Jacob repeated. “Less h , more ank .”

“Ankh!” she tried again. Her brother chimed in, eager to see what was going on.

“It was a symbol of eternal life.”

“What’s a symbol?” the boy asked.

“It’s like a big brass disk.”

“Whaaaaaat?” the boy asked nervously.

“Go find your parents,” Jacob said, standing aside so the pair of them could rush off. “And hold on to that card. You’ll live forever!”

The children bolted around his legs, back out to the main room, and when Jacob looked back, Irene was smiling, two tears on her cheeks. Other people were trying to get into the temple now, but Jacob held a big hand out toward them and shifted his frame to block the door again. “Sorry. Private party.”

Irene turned back to the graffiti etched in the wall again: A L Corry RN 1817. She moved her hand over the carved letters, and a little dust came off on them.

“What’s going on?” he said, stepping over to her.

“You’re going to be such a good dad,” she sniffed. “I want to be around to see that.”

Don’t be ridiculous , Jacob wanted to say. In ten years we’ll all be sitting around George and Sara’s tacky living room somewhere, with their rug rats and yours all crawling up the goddamn walls, and we’ll think back on this whole year, and we’ll tell the older kids about how Aunt Irene had cancer once, and they’ll never even believe it. All this, he wanted to say.

Instead he said, “Ew. You know, procreative sex is against my religion.”

“Just be serious for a minute, would you?”

Jacob stood silently, mouth open, no words coming.

Finally he said, “If you want to be disappointed, let’s go look at the Warhols.”

They made their way out of the Temple of Dendur, bypassing the American Wing altogether and squirming through the Medieval and Greek sections on their way to the second floor Contemporary galleries. As they walked, Jacob tried to tell her about the movie he’d gone to see with Oliver the week before.

“Which movie?”

“Some stupid thing. Title from an Elvis song.”

“ Can’t Help Falling in Love ? With Stone Culligan?” her eyes lit up. “You know he tried to kill himself yesterday.”

“Who did?” Jacob asked.

“Stone Culligan! It was all over the news. He and that supermodel, Branca, broke up, and he slammed his Jet Ski into a bridge. They say he bruised his spine and he’s lucky to be alive!”

“Lucky to… you’re damn right he’s lucky to be alive. He’s got the face of the David , and he’s worth a quajillion dollars. Doesn’t even have any talent, not that that matters to this fucking planetful of philistines.”

“Keep your voice down, okay? You’re scaring people.”