It did not matter which had been right. The reconstituted sphinx now bore the features of a famous movie star.
The guidebook in his hand also said that the sphinx was 189 feet long and 72 feet high. The one in his pocket said the sphinx was 172 feet long and 66 feet high. Had one of the measuring teams been drunk? Or had the editor been drunk? Or had the typesetter had financial and marital problems? Or had someone maliciously inserted the wrong information just to screw people up?
Ramona said, “You’re not listening!”
“Sorry,” Simon said. And he was. This was one of those rare moments when Ramona suddenly became aware that she was talking to herself. She was scared. People who talk to themselves are either insane, deep thinkers, lonely, or all three. She knew she wasn’t crazy or a deep thinker, so she must be lonely. And she feared loneliness worse than drowning, which was her pet horror.
Simon was lonely, too, but chiefly because he felt that the universe was being unfair in not giving answers to his questions. But now was not the time to think of himself; Ramona needed comforting.
“Listen, Ramona, here’s a love song for you.”
It was titled The Anathematic Mathematics of Love. This was one of the poems of “Count” Hippolyt Bruga, né Julius Ganz, an early 20th-century expressionist. Ben Hecht had once written a biography of him, but the only surviving copy was in the Vatican archives. Though critics considered Bruga only a minor poet, Simon loved him best of all and had composed music for many of his works.
First, though, Simon thought he should explain the references and the situation since she didn’t read anything but True Confessions and best sellers.
“Robert Browning was a great Victorian poet who married the minor poet Elizabeth Barrett,” he said.
“I know that,” Ramona said. “I’m not as dumb as you think I am. I saw The Barretts of Wimpole Street on TV last year. With Peck Burton and Marilyn Mamri. It was so sad; her father was a real bastard. He killed her pet dog just because Elizabeth ran off with Browning. Old Barrett had eyes for his own daughter, would you believe it? Well, she didn’t actually run off. She was paralyzed from the waist down, and Peck, I mean Browning, had to push her wheelchair through the streets of London while her father tried to run them down with a horse and buggy. It was the most exciting chase scene I’ve ever seen.”
“I’ll bet,” Simon said. “So you know about them. Anyway, Elizabeth wrote a series of love poems to Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese. He called her his Portuguese because she was so dark.”
“How sweet!”
“Yes. Anyway, the most famous sonnet is the one in which she enumerates the varieties of love she has for him. This inspired Bruga’s poem, though he didn’t set it in sonnet form.”
Simon sang:
“Those were Bruga’s last words,” Simon said. “He was beaten to death a minute later by an enraged wino.”
“I don’t blame him,” Ramona murmured.
“Bruga only did his best work when he was paid on the spot for his instant poetry,” Simon said. “But in this case he was improvising free. He’d invited this penniless bum up to his Greenwich Village apartment to have a few gallons of muscatel with him and his mistress. And see the thanks he got.”
“Everybody’s a critic,” Ramona said.
Simon winced. She said, “What’s the matter?”
He plucked the banjo as if it were a chicken and sang:
Feathers of sadness fluttered about them. Ramona cackled as if she had just laid an egg. It was, however, nervousness, not joy, that she proclaimed. She always got edgy when he slid into a melancholy mood.
“It’s such a glorious day,” she said. “How can you be sad when the sun is shining? You’re spoiling the picnic.”
“Sorry,” he said. “My sun is black. But you’re right. We’re lovers, and lovers should make each other happy. Here’s an old Arabian love song:
It was then that Ramona became aware that his mood came more from the outside than the inside. The breeze had died, and silence as thick and as heavy as the nativity of a mushroom in a diamond mine, or as gas passed during a prayer meeting, had fallen everywhere. The sky was clotted with clouds as black as rotten spots on a banana. Yet, only a minute before, the horizon had been as unbroken as a fake genealogy.
Simon got to his feet and put his banjo in its case. Ramona busied herself with putting plates and cups in the basket. “You can’t depend on anything,” she said, close to tears. “It never, just never, rains here in the dry season.”
“How’d those clouds get here without a wind?” Simon said.
As usual, his question was not answered.
Ramona had just folded up the blanket when the first raindrops fell. The two started across the top of the sphinx’s head toward the steps but never got to them. The drops became a solid body of water, as if the whole sky were a big decanter that some giant drunk had accidentally tipped over. They were knocked down, and the basket was torn from Ramona’s hands and sent floating over the side of the head. Ramona almost went, too, but Simon grabbed her hand and they crawled to the guard fence at the rim of the head and gripped an upright bar.
Later, Simon could recall almost nothing vividly. It was one long blur of numbed horror, of brutal heaviness of the rain, cold, teeth chattering, hands aching from squeezing the iron bar, increasing darkness, a sudden influx of people who’d fled the ground below, a vague wondering why they’d crowded onto the top of the sphinx’s head, a terrifying realization of why when a sea rolled over him, his panicked rearing upward to keep from drowning, his loosing of the bar because the water had risen to his nose, a single muffled cry from Ramona, somewhere in the smash and flurry, and then he was swimming with nowhere to go.
The case with the banjo in it floated before him. He grabbed it. It provided some buoyancy, and after he’d shucked all his clothing, he could stay afloat by hanging onto it and treading water. Once, a camel swam by him with five men battling to get onto its back. Then it went under, and the last he saw of it was one rolling eye.
Sometime later, he drifted by the tip of the Great Pyramid. Clinging to it was a woman who screamed until the rising water filled her mouth. Simon floated on by, vainly trying to comprehend that somehow so much rain had fallen that the arid land of Egypt was now over 472 feet beneath him.
And then there came the time in the darkness of night and the still almost-solid rain when he prepared to give up his waterlogged ghost and let himself sink. He was too exhausted to fight anymore, it was all over, down the drain for him.