"What am I?" I said. I dropped the beets.
(The Haymakers still send me tribute every three hundred years: uranium juke boxes, fake books from all parts of the universe?with performance rights granted, since they know I like to gig on the acousticals Johnny gave me in Giza?music boxes with their songs transposed to Larmor frequencies, and so on. Three hundred years is a long time on Sanduleak, but for most of my galaxy, it’s a blink; Johnny and the boys are tremendously grateful to me, even though I really had no choice in the matter, and if I had, frankly, I wouldn’t have helped them.
I know that must sound pretty crass, given that the Italians were using Abu’s head for rifle practice during World War II, among other indignities that Ylemic Lord had to suffer during his captivity. Still, I thought of myself as an individual being for most of the time I was in the Milky Way. I didn’t think that the Sphinx was of any importance whatever! Deluded as that may be, I think you could call it a mitigating circumstance: not guilty by reason of insanity, Your Honor. I was looking out for Number One, so I thought, as if there were any.)
22. I’m You
"You are Abu al-Hawl," Nora said, "the Father of Terror, Rahorakhty, Sun God of the Two Horizons, and I am Queen of Punt, the land of incense, the land of purified desire. Gypsy is my servitor. Shaman is a foul grave robber. Abu al-Hawl, thou knowest everything. Abu al-Hawl, Soul of the Great Sphinx, Ka, I invoke you."
Nora was looking straight at me, but I could not believe that it was me she was talking to. She was talking through me, as if I were a phone tube. Behind her I saw Shaman laughing so hard he had to support himself against the glass door. "Tell the boy what you like to do in water closets, oh corpulent Queen of Punt." He made for us, stumbling and guffawing. He placed himself between us, one hand on the sneeze guard, the other on Nora’s bloody shoulder. Gypsy rose. "Tell him how you have to watch water swirl in toilets or sinks or maelstroms, wherever water goes down, oh Queen of the WC."
"You call it a toilet," Nora said. I couldn’t see her face now. Shaman was in the way. "You think that makes it something profane. I tell you Shaman, whatever is, is an effulgence of Abu al-Hawl, whose home is Sanduleak and the stars, but who dwells in all thoughts and all things. All that swirls, swirls down to him. Feces and incense are one to him. Who shuts himself off from one shuts himself off from all."
Shaman spun to face me. "I’m you," he said, "I’m you, I’m you," and the old feeling returned: a dumb, helpless beast, I was, stroked and prodded by my master.
"Remember, Mel," Nora said. "Remember the desert. It wasn’t New Mexico, Mel. It wasn’t New anything. It was Egypt, Mel, not a day or two ago, but five thousand years ago." Gypsy worked the ersatz flesh down his snake’s flank and moved toward us, his hard, small eyes fixed on Shaman.
I blinked and strained for a thought that seemed just beyond my reach. I had seen pyramids in the sand, Nubian slaves, teams of men laying massive ashlars, granite facing stones, on jagged tiers of limestone. It had been somewhere between Albuquerque and Espanola, not far from Saqqarah, somewhere around Abu Sir, Cairo or Santa Fe…
"I’m you," Shaman said. Gypsy’s ichor-dripping, black maw yawned behind him. I smelled the stink of Gypsy’s breath. I had seen Chephren on Route 25, whose face was just like mine, just like the Sphinx’s. And everything historians and archeologists had written about the El Giza Sphinx was wrong. I remembered?But how??King Chephren had not fashioned the face of Abu al-Hawl to resemble his own. It was just the opposite!
Gypsy was closing his teeth together with Shaman in the middle, but I overturned the salad bar, tumbling steam trays of soup, shattering bowls and jetting forks, knives, and spoons into Gypsy’s tongue and palate, or what passed for tongue and palate. Shaman, wet with Gypsy, laughed. "I’m you!" he was saying. "I’m you! I’m you!" Nora cowered away from him, from me. Gypsy fell back.
Yes, it was I, the Sphinx who had fashioned Chephren in his, in my likeness?not the other way round?just as I had fashioned Mel, and a million other emanations of my Ka, the sacred Ka of Abu al-Hawl.
I had everything I needed there: maps, music, food, sanitary facilities, amusing art works on the walls. In the gift shop there were games, books, trifles aplenty, even T-shirts with my own likeness?weathered countenance, sandblasted by a myriad storms, pecked by shells from MP 40’s, jimmied block from ashlar and jammed with concrete in dullard "restorations"?cum space hat, in day-glo pink. Enough truck for my long passage beyond the realm of the living. At the rear of the main funerary chamber were twin rows of sacred fountains, one beyond the sign of "MEN," one beyond the sign of "WOMEN," swirling water eternally present at the touch of a silvered lever, the symbol of the devotion of Isis for Osiris, or of the Queen of Punt for Me. I had entered the Stream, neutral hydrogen smeared by tidal forces across two hundred thousand light-years between the Magellanic Clouds and the Milky Way.
Wherever My gaze falls, if the soil be fertile?this is what I realized?beings spring up in My likeness. Their thoughts are but foam on the waves of My mind. Each little creature is a door into Me. Seeking Me, they seek their true self. Invoking My name, they will come home in Me.
Come, then, Queen of Punt, ring my loins, receive My pollen. I will open into you. I crawled toward Nora over Gypsy’s slithering hulk. Shaman was pinned underneath him. "I’m you!" he pleaded in a tinny, squeezed voice. Nora opened her flower around me like Ganesha’s shakti. Lo, I destroy you from inside. "Bodies aren’t important," she moaned. Mine is the maelstrom you have sought. I swirled into her. You could not hold Me on Sanduleak. You could not detain Me in the Magellanics. My life is greater than that.
Gypsy coughed and spat black blood. Shaman struggled out from under him. "You’re still down there, still in Giza, still on Earth," Shaman told me. "I’m you. I stopped you there, Abu al-Hawl. I’m you. I held you as a man holds a morsel with his fork, then cuts and eats. I’m you. This being here is a flake of your dried flesh, a leaf trembling in your wind. I’m you. This being here is Mel, little Mel, will-less Mel, the hitchhiker through New Mexico?I’m you?through whom my pipeline has been laid. I speak to you, Sphinx, as one shouts through a cavern to a man buried in stone. You are not here."
The sun burned my back. Desert afternoon. I was seated in a huge limestone ditch. Between my paws, where Tuthmosis’s stela used to rise, tiny creatures teemed. They stared up at me, and I felt the pressure of their dreams against my stone skin. I had pressed my dreams into Tuthmosis (now Shaman) two thousand years before: Uncover Me, Noble One. Remove the sand that girdles and swallows Me. I shall make you king. He had dug me out, I made him Pharaoh, then he betrayed me, anchored me to this claustrophobic world by the very power I had dreamed into him. Now his stela was gone, its ground defiled by vulgar feet, but Tuthmosis still lived.