ZENOBIA WAS JUST OVER three years old when I left.
I remember the night clearly. I woke up from a dream. I had been standing before Anubis, holding my heart in my hand, bloody and dripping. He prepared the scales, holding the feather against which my heart would be weighed, while the slathering, long-fanged, doglike creature squatted at his feet, ready to devour my heart. We were in the desert, like the eastern desert outside Aswan, and in the distance, the realm of coming into being, just over the edge of the horizon, a light was shining, a suffused glow like the rising sun. But the sun was already in the sky. When I looked back to Anubis, he had transformed into a much larger figure, broad shouldered and clutching an ankh in one hand, in his other hand, outstretched, my heart. It was Seth, defender of Egypt. I turned and ran away from him, toward the light on the horizon, but as I started up the first dune the sky went dark and the dune stretched on upward into the sky like a towering mountain.
It was a damp November night in San Francisco, much like the weather in London. The rain was lightly tamping on the windows, I remember because the sound woke me from my dream. Helen lay at my side, curled tightly in the sheets and blanket, her face shadowed from the pale streetlight through the window. I had one hand resting on her waist, moving slightly with her breathing. When I awoke I could still smell the burnt, salty air of the western desert, the Sahara, mixed with the delicate shades of vanilla and sandalwood, the smell of my wife. I shifted closer to her, to see her face in the shadow of the curtain. Her breath slipped through her slightly parted lips, her face relaxed, her eyelids smooth. Helen’s book lay open on the night table, the clean lines marred only by a single underlining, a few lines that she marked deeply with pencil:
Mozart lies somewhere in a pauper’s pit, a communal grave in Vienna. His own wife was unable to find his body the day after he died.
I slipped out of bed and walked down the short hall to Zenobia’s room. She lay curled in her crib, much in the same position as Helen. She clutched her blankets tightly, but her face was soft and calm. On the nightstand was a New Kingdom amulet, inscribed with a crocodile and a short spell to protect a child from bad dreams and sickness: Spell for a knot for a child, a fledgling: Are you hot in the nest? Are you burning in the bush? Your mother is not with you? Lay still, child, and know that you are always safe in your father’s house!
I gathered her up in my arms, her warm body nestling into my neck and chest with barely a murmur. Even then she was solid, the weight of her was surprising, the density of her small form. I carried her back into our room and stood at the edge of the bed looking down at my wife as she slept. Something about her shape, the rounded curve of her back, the hands clutched in front of her face, the form of the draped sheets, struck me deeply, and I shivered, holding Zenobia, my daughter, curled against me, like lead in my arms.
I lay Zenobia down next to her mother, her arms seeking out and finding Helen’s neck and clutching there, burrowing her forehead into her mother’s chest. The depression that Helen made in the bed made a shallow crater that Zenobia slipped easily into, the gentle circumference of her form. I was standing on the outside, somehow free from the pull. I wasn’t standing on the floor anymore, or in that house in California, or anywhere on earth, anywhere that I could recognize. I was on a vast, endless grid, the horizon curving out of sight; I could feel the mass of my wife and child, their gravity softly curling the line of space downward. I was on the edge of a spinning galaxy, moving at terrifying speeds, where all the universe seems to be moving past one fixed point, the point of reference, the way to measure time. It was the two of them, Helen moving her head slightly to accommodate this new body, her cheek nestling on Zenobia’s tousled head. But there was another pull, coming from the dark space over the horizon.
When I looked at those two sleeping forms, their dear shapes that I can draw in the air with my fingertips even now, as I watched them breathe I felt for my heart in my chest and what I found was a dark rock, a pyramid of stone.
I went into the kitchen to have a glass of water. The water was ice cold and metallic in my mouth. I set the glass in the sink, quietly, and stared at the dull shine of the fixtures for a few moments, gripping the counter. Through the window the staggered peaks of the rooftops of North Beach fell away to the low sections of San Francisco and the sea. The rain had ceased and the moon hung just above a layer of low clouds moving like a gentle stream. I felt the moon’s cold light on my hands and face. I heard a furtive scuttle on the floor and when I turned a fat beetle scurried across the square of moonlight etched on the linoleum.
The truth is I could see it even then, that night, in the drops of water that beaded on the window; the forming image of it, the abstraction, the symbol, delicately positioned. This body is my only tomb, this mind the black land, the only fertile ground.