Chapter 37

Genesis 39:21–23

Darkness, and a strange damp cool in the midst of the heat, captive to the sounds of the shadows and the movements of men who carried swords and crossed in and out, marking the passage of days by their comings and goings. The new prisoner, it was whispered, had been an important member of an important household. Some scandal had brought him here, some betrayal. He had been brought in late one night on order of the captain of the guard and, though foreign, was apparently a proper citizen of Kemet rather than a common slave. There were no official charges, simply an order that he was to be kept at the royal prison. The guards, who were used to dealing with sensitive and confidential crimes, did not ask for details.

Mostly, the prisoner sat alone, staring sightlessly into the shadows. He did not make any trouble, although most of the prisoners who came here were men of reasonable enough breeding (or at least exposure to it) not to make much trouble. They were usually those who had the misfortune to be accused of crimes in high places, of intrigues or embezzlements, and there were rarely more than a handful of them in the central cell where they remained until their fates were decided. Some would be released back into the world, cleared of their crimes (or with friends powerful enough to secure the repayment of their debts), while others were taken away to other places, unknown places.

Only the very highest forms of betrayal—plotting against the king or the state—were likely to face the possibility of execution. Life was honored here in Kemet, but those who would risk catastrophically unbalancing the delicate fabric of ma’at, or the government that held it in place, could not be left free or, in some cases, alive.

It was not at all clear, therefore, what crimes this foreigner had committed. One or two of the other prisoners thought at first that he looked familiar but could not quite place where they might have seen him. The unshaven stubble around his jaw was growing by the day into a new dark beard, and his shaven head had sprung up rich, curling shoots across his scalp. It was as though his very flesh had already begun to forget him—shifting away from the face of Sasobek, steward of Potiphar (the man, he eventually heard, who was now the vizier of all Kemet) to the face of an unknown desert man, an anonymous Asiatic of no family or name. In his captivity, he was powerless to hide it.

And so the days passed, and no one came either to absolve or confirm whatever accusations had brought him there. He was a foreigner clothed in the simplest dress of Kemet, a free man who had become a servant who had become a prisoner, belonging to no household, and no country, and no people.

He had fallen between all distinctions, belonging to no one at all.

At first, he believed that Potiphar would come for him, just as he had once believed his father would come. Djeseret would speak to her husband, or he would speak to her—and she would weep and repent, unable to stand what she had done to the man she had once cared for, perhaps more than any other. Perhaps a certain amount of time had to pass, the proper days or weeks of observance, and then someone would be sent. He would be told there had been a mistake, a misunderstanding, that time had passed and there was no shame in returning to his former position of influence and belonging.

But even as he clung to the lingering memories of Potiphar’s house, his changing appearance carried him steadily toward his new reality, as if in revelation of the person he now was, and paying no heed to his dwindling hope, or his wishing, or his dreams.

Yes, the dreams, the dreams that came in the darkness were confused jumbles of flashes and snatches of words that he couldn’t understand—the broken vision of his life, the distorted monsters of a future he could not see. He would wake in the same darkness that had lulled him to sleep, feeling no change, no transition from sleeping to waking or night to morning. Where once his dreams had been the transport of a bright future or whispered insights from the troubles of his days, it was as if even his dreams no longer knew how to make sense of so senseless a life.

Once he dreamt of his father and saw his father’s worn, weary face and wondrous white beard, but he awoke in Kemet, and he was still alone, and still no one came for him. No one had ever come for him. Who would come? He was nothing, no one—not a son, not a brother, not even a slave.

As the days drew on, and his hair grew, and his flesh lost its bronzed strength, he began to drowse to pass the time. And as he began to drowse, no longer coiled so tightly in his own anger or submerged into a grief beyond despair, different dreams began to come, dreams that allowed him to slip gently between sleeping and waking, like a crocodile floating in the River. He smiled as he, who had been called Sasobek, thought of it. The dreams came in washes of sound and sensation but few images—he would find himself surrounded entirely by landscapes or splashes of color, bright and indistinct. The dreams were warm, like sun on the sand, and they let him drift, unbothered.

It was in those dreams that the words began to come.

At first, they came only in snatches and in a voice he did not recognize—hardly a voice at all, more like a passing thought or a whisper drifting in from a word spoken to someone else. The first time, he was standing in the desert, far beyond the borders of the Black Land, looking out toward the horizon, and he heard a word that he recognized as the identity that he had been given before he came to Kemet—

Joseph—

He awakened, still hearing the echo of his name.

And the name came back to him again, always in that in-between moment of sleepiness, where he was not quite conscious but somehow not fully asleep, and somewhere else—somewhere amidst the colors, in the splash of desert landscape where he could stay without fearing the nightmarish collision of images and sounds that came from the deeper dreams.

And then, early one morning, he heard the words he had read with his father and then with Potiphar.

Joseph, Joseph—

He was standing in the desert, looking out over an empty, windswept plain, and he heard the narrative that he surely should have known by now, down to his deepest core.

—my name is Jehovah, and I have heard you, and have come down to deliver you.

He stirred, surfacing again into consciousness. He was not sure whose voice it was, for it was not a voice that he knew, but it was one that brought him a strange, calm comfort, like the sound of a forgotten friend. He was also quite sure, as he thought about it, that it was the same voice that had spoken out his name before. He realized that he felt oddly comforted to know that someone else in the universe, whether in his own mind or not, would still call him Joseph.

From that day on, he no longer introduced himself to the new prisoners that drifted in and out of his cell as Sasobek, Son-of-the-Crocodile. He told them that his name was Joseph. And instead of just asking their names, he began asking about their homes, their people, and the worlds they had left behind. There was another steward, and a servant from the king’s court, and a scribe accused of thieving from his master. They were with him only a few days, though, before the missing items were recovered, and the scribe was released, and the steward was quietly sold off to another household, and the servant was taken away to work in the fields.

But Joseph remained behind.

There were days when criminal activity appeared to have dwindled in the upper echelons of society, and the prison grew quiet. Joseph, who had still received no direct sentence one way or another, was left to himself. He did not provoke much attention from the guards beyond the occasional suspicious glance from the new ones, who seemed curious as to why he had been kept there without any seeming resolution. But with the appointment of a new vizier, the more senior guards explained, it was easy for prisoners like this one to slip through the bureaucratic cracks. Since the foreigner caused them no trouble, they caused none for him either.

Joseph began to drowse again during the day, and the dreams returned, though now the bright colors of the horizon had faded, blurring, the way a fresh gray morning hovers over water. He stood within the mists, turning, looking up and around, but he did not know where to go. So he began to walk—effortlessly, moving through the mist over soft, solid ground but at times losing sight of even his own hands stretched out in front of him.

It was when he awoke from the first misting dream that he heard the voice distinctly. The voice did not pass through his ears, and there was no particular sound or timbre that would identify it as male or female, but it seemed friendly. He was blinking himself awake from his wanderings, wondering what had happened to the bright colors of the desert, when he heard it.

You’re not there anymore, said the Voice.

Joseph paused, not aware that he had intended to respond to his own half-thought question. But the response had come with such swiftness that Joseph nearly looked around the shadows to see what invisible old meddler had interjected himself into his private contemplation. He paused and then, as if not really meaning to, asked—

Not where?

Not there, said the Voice. Do you understand?

Joseph didn’t especially understand.

You remembered your name, said the Voice. That’s a good beginning.

Thank you, thought Joseph, feeling a little strange.

You’re welcome, said the Voice.

And so began their acquaintance. Joseph could not seem to summon the Voice according to his own will, and sometimes it became very quiet, especially if he was stewing about Djeseret, or when he suddenly saw a flash of his terrible brothers or his father, and he started working himself into silent, frothing anger over the injustice of his situation.

Sometimes, though, it did speak to him right then, though usually without words, especially when the weary weight of his own frustration began to gape and give way, chasm-like, to a sinking, bottomless despair, hollowed out through fear. At those times, he felt the Voice come and sit beside him. It usually didn’t say anything, but he was glad to have the company.

And so, day by day, he began to make friends with the Voice. It most often spoke to him as he woke from his dreams and was always willing to talk as he lay awake in the deepest hours of the night. When he had been Sasobek and was first shut into the prison, he would have brushed the Voice away, finding it an aggravating annoyance and certain it was nothing more than the frenzied workings of an aggrieved mind. But he had been in the darkness long enough that he was not quick to dismiss any company that came to him, and he knew the darkness well enough to know that the Voice was a pleasant respite from the shadows.

One day, almost jokingly, he asked, Are you trapped here too?

Of course not, said the Voice. I’m here because you are.

And how long will I be here? Joseph wanted to know, but the Voice said nothing more.

Another day, Joseph asked, Why did you call me Joseph?

Because that’s your name, the Voice said, as if Joseph ought to know.

It was about that time, when Joseph began to feel as though the Voice were waking him up from a long and strange night of dreams and he had begun to come to himself again, that the keeper of the prison began to notice how this mysterious prisoner was developing a way of bringing out an ease and comfort of confidence among his fellows. Several times the keeper had overheard prisoners who growled staunch denials of their guilt open up to this quiet foreigner, confessing household intrigues and pressures that had driven them to become involved in whatever entanglement had landed them in prison. Other times, prisoners had continued ardently to insist upon their innocence until the man—Joseph, he called himself, a proper foreign name to go with his bearded countenance—had a private word with the keeper and assured him that he was quite sure the accused was indeed innocent, or unfairly burdened by pressures, or truly quite bad.

And thus far, Joseph had not been proven wrong about the character of his fellow prisoners. It was as if all who came into contact with the man seemed to blossom open under his presence, from the most taciturn scribe to the most obstinate and nervous courtier. The keeper knew that this man had been none other than the steward to Potiphar, when Potiphar was still the captain of the royal guard; he knew that no clear accusation had been brought against him and that his case, from all appearances, was either sufficiently open ended or so secret as to warrant no written record. So at last he sent word to the office of the vizier, inquiring about the prisoner and whether he were, in a word, dangerous. Not long afterward (which was most unusual for a reply from the vizier), he received word that while the vizier had reviewed the case and was unable to take any legal action on account of the prisoner’s lack of defense, if the keeper were so inclined, the vizier himself would highly recommend the man’s abilities and even allow for his release, provided he remained, for legal purposes, under the keeper’s care.

The keeper grunted at the reply. He knew the new vizier had a reputation for being careful to avoid any hint of abusing his power. It seemed that the poor former steward would require a pardon from the king himself to have his case resolved.

And so, one quiet afternoon, the keeper approached Joseph. An inspection of the royal prison was coming up, to be conducted by none other than the vizier himself, and the keeper wanted Joseph’s help in getting everything organized and prepared. The keeper would move Joseph out of the cell, and he could have a small sleeping space set up close to where the guards stayed.

Joseph eagerly agreed to all of this. At last, he would see Potiphar again, and surely—surely—Potiphar would remember him.

That first night, as Joseph lay outside the cell for the first time since the fateful day of Potiphar’s banquet, he wondered for a brief, startled moment if this meant that the Voice was going to leave him now.

I’m still here, came the reply. Go to sleep.

So Joseph slept, and he dreamed and found himself once more in the desert, standing beneath the open night sky. As he stood gazing up at a moon the color of linen, a cascade of words came whispering out of the stars, words from texts he had read before but now blending together, spinning into a new text he had never before read, only he wasn’t reading it so much as being enfolded within it, surrounded and filled and tumbled by the words.

This is the beginning of the Book of Breathings—it was Potiphar’s voice, reading from one of his sacred scrolls—which Isis made for her brother Osiris, to make his soul live, to make his body live, to restore him anew.

How many times had he read through those words—practicing his new language or seeking alongside his priestly master for the secrets hidden within the text—of the woman who raised the man back to life, of the initiate who found a way to approach the gods, of the steps undertaken to return to the presence of the divine.

And then came the words he had read along with the story of Isis and Osiris, the sojourn into the stars that he had read as a child in the desert. Finding there was greater happiness and peace and rest for me—and it was his father’s voice—I sought for the blessings of the fathers . . .

Justified!—that was the voice, once more, of Potiphar the priest—Thou art pure, thy heart is pure, cleansed is thy front with washing, thy back with cleansing water . . .

Abraham—now the god called out, with his words transmitted through the voice of his father, Jacob—Abraham, behold, my name is Jehovah, and I have heard you, and have come down to deliver you, and to take you away from your father’s house, and from all your kinsfolk, into a strange land which you know not of . . .

Thou enterest by the great purification, the Breathings text instructed, and now it was Djeseret’s voice, and her eyes and her touch that reached out—with which the two Ma’ats have washed thee—two women, Isis and Nephtys, life and its passing (I am Nephtys, she had said, I am Nephtys), for it was through life and death that the soul was bathed and renewed and prepared to ascend beyond, to begin again, to remember itself, re-member itself, draw body and spirit back together, and fuse into an eternally restored identity—

Behold, Abraham was promised, I will lead you by my hand, and I will take you, to put upon you my name, even the Priesthood of your father, and my power will be over you—

Thou breathest henceforth for time and eternity—washed and re-membered and brought to remembrance, and now the voice was his own, reading from his master’s scroll—Amon comes to thee bearing the breath of life—a soul restored to itself, the breath of life received through a sacred kiss—he causes thee to breathe and come upon the earth—the Breathings text was triumphant now, the moment of sacred creation and re-creation had come—

My son, my son—the god had called Abraham his son—behold I will show you all these. And he put his hands on my eyes, and I saw those things which his hands had made—the sun and moon and stars, the earth and women and men and all things that are and were and would yet be, all were one and all were his, and the voice was his own, as the dream had been his own of the sun and moon and stars and the way he had been carried up into the heavens—

I dwell in the midst of them all; I now, therefore, have come down to you to declare to you the works which my hands have made, wherein my wisdom excels them all, for I rule in the heavens above, and in the earth beneath—

Horus embraces thy body—this was the promise of Potiphar’s text, the purpose for the restoration of the breath, a body raised in life to reunite with its spirit, fusing once more into its full identity—and deifies thy spirit in the manner of the gods—raised out of the earth and up into the horizon, fusing with Ra and the Light-of-All-That-Is as the sun passes back up out of the womb of the stars and the soul rises out of its washings to ascend alongside—

Abraham—that calm, familiar voice, that was now not quite his and not quite his father’s—you are one of them, you were chosen before you were born—and you will be a blessing to your seed after you, that in their hands they will bear this ministry and Priesthood to all nations—

And Joseph, son of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham, opened his eyes.

The soul of Ra is giving life to thy soul, he heard, thy soul breathes, and he sat up, rising out of the swirling words and the shadows. He breathed slowly, and deeply, and deliberately, staring into the dazzling darkness, and turned and looked toward where the keeper of the prison stood, his arms crossed, his bowed head nodding, listening to the low whisper of a guard who had just come on duty.

Then the keeper of the prison looked toward him.

And Joseph learned that Potiphar was not coming.

All the court that day was abuzz with the news—the vizier’s wife had, at last, borne her husband a son, and the child was strong and healthy and well, and the great man and all his household were in mourning.

Ben-oni, Joseph thought, Son-of-Pain—that was the name his own mother had given his brother as her life bled away, but his father had shaken his head. No, he said, no. Ben-jamin. Son-of-My-Right-Hand.

His mother too had carried life and death within her body to bring a child into the world—Isis and Nephtys, Sun and Stars, Time and All Eternity.

I am Nephtys, Djeseret had said, and he lowered his head at the news and closed his eyes at the feeling that welled between sorrow and reverence.

And now you are Isis, he thought. Life-bringer. Light-bringer. I am come to myself again.

For it was in the prison that he remembered. And it was she who had brought him there.