First Man (7 page)

After all these years, the echo of my father’s typewriter had finally been silenced.

One year after that chance meeting in Park Hall, I surprised Lily with plane tickets to Egypt. Cairo was everything I had remembered, and through Lily’s eyes, the ancient city was young again.

In those first blissful days, I blamed the dark circles surrounding Lily’s eyes on the whirlwind schedule of activity she insisted on. She forced me out of bed when the sun had scarcely risen, begging me to show her every corner of the city from the pyramids choked with tourists to the tiny shops only locals knew existed.

On the third day, she begged me to take her into the tombs. It took an hour on the phone, calling in favors and selectively dropping my father’s name, but I managed to secure us entrance to one of the lesser viewed tombs.

Our guide walked a few paces ahead, the wide beam of his flashlight cutting through the inky darkness. He offered scattered commentary, drawing our attention to carvings and hieroglyphs, but, for the most part, he remained silent.

The constant chatter that Lily had been bubbling with since we arrived dried up the moment she stepped across the threshold of the tomb. The heavy stone blocks had a way of swallowing your voice. Even a whisper sounded too loud with countless tons of stone surrounding you.

Lily stopped to examine one of the walls, the stone worn smooth by time. “It’s just like you said,” she whispered, sounding more like she was talking to herself than for my benefit.

The walls pressed against us, the stone worn by the touch of two millennia of slaves and priests, grave-robbers and scholars. So far underground, the air was cool, but it was far from being a refreshing respite from the relentless sun. The air tasted stale, like dust and death and all the things I’d spent the last year trying to forget.

I wanted to grab Lily’s arm and drag her back up the path, back out into the heat and light and life. Instead, I followed silently as the walked along the narrow corridor, shining her flashlight on the carvings in the walls, my presence all but forgotten.

We had been living out of a hotel room for seventeen days when I discovered her secret, though if I really wanted to admit the truth, some part of me had known for months. History had a way of repeating itself on the unwary, and, however my unconscious mind might have been trying to jar me to awareness, it wasn’t enough to keep the realization from stunning me.

I came back to the room earlier than expected from having lunch with a former classmate of mine. Lucas had followed the academic track I’d been bound for when I left and had a comfortable professorship teaching Art History. Lucas had caught the travel bug himself and he’d been spending his summers hopping around the world to wherever he could afford a flight to.

I unlocked the door to the suite we had rented, expecting to see Lily waiting, but the room was empty. A hasty note was left on the bed -
“At the market, back by two!
” it read in Lily’s neat hand.

With an hour to kill, I settled down on the bed, reaching blindly for the book resting on the nightstand and knocking Lily’s makeup bag to the floor.

“Dammit,” I growled as I hurried to pick up the various bottles and potions that seemed to go hand in hand with womanhood these days. Most of the bag had spilled, but when I went to shove the mascaras and eyeshadows back into its depths, I noticed two bright red pill bottles.

Pandora’s undoing was a box, and mine was inside two little red bottles inside a bag covered in sunflowers.

With trembling hands, I turned them over and stared at the labels. Tramadol. Hydromorphone.

And as abruptly as it had stopped, I could hear the tap tap tap of that typewriter start up again.

I sat there, staring uncomprehendingly at the bottles in my hand, turning over every moment we’d had together again and again. Bit by bit, the pieces began to fall into place.

The trip. I’d been so eager to finally have the chance to show Lily my world that I hadn’t questioned her insistence that we trade in our return tickets for an open-ended fare.

“We’ll come back when we get bored with the old world,” she had said. “Or maybe we won’t come back at all!” She had laughed, and I had written it off as her usual exuberance for life.

Then we arrived, and, from the moment the plane touched down, Lily was a whirlwind of activity. Every moment from dawn to dusk was planned as Lily raced through the city, trying to cram every sight and experience into our time here. “Slow down,” I’d told her, pulling her back into bed when she tried to start our day at 6AM, “This city has been around for thousands of years. It will wait a few more hours.”

She had tensed in my arms for a moment before extricating herself from the bed. “Egypt might be able to wait, but I can’t.” And we were off for another day.

It was almost laughable. The historian didn’t notice history repeating itself right under his nose. I thought I had escaped this time. The endless tapping of the typewriter keys rang in my ears.

Just like before, I loved someone who was running from death. And I knew how that race ended.

Lily walked in with a bag of figs in her hands and a smile on her face. The smile faded when she saw the bottles in my hands.

“How long?” I demanded, my voice cracking on the words.

Calmly, Lily put the fruit down on the table and sat own next to me.

“Since you left,” she answered. She didn’t try to hide the bitterness from her voice.

“Six months? You kept this from me for that long?”

Lily continued as though I hadn’t spoken. “I wanted to hate you for leaving me to deal with it all alone, but then you came back, and I just wanted things to be like they were before.” She wasn’t crying. I wished she was. Even hysteria would have been better than this. . . resignation.

I sat, frozen into speechlessness. “I don’t know if I can go through this again,” I whispered, almost to myself.

“You promised you wouldn’t leave.”

I nodded. “I know. I won’t.”

Lily rose from the bed and crossed the room to retrieve her suitcase. I watched as she pulled out the battered metal box that held my old journal and the bottles of oil. We had long since emptied the Frankincense, so there was only one bottle remaining.

Lily opened the box, unwinding the length of black silk that hid the bottle. Slowly, she unscrewed the lid, releasing the bitter scent of the oil.

“I know why you didn’t tell me what it was used for, but you forgot how good a researcher I am,” she said softly. “What I can’t understand is why you have it in the first place.” She poured a puddle of the sand colored oil into her palm. “What the desert tribes did with this wasn’t quite as pretty as the Frankincense.”

“I wrote a paper of the funeral rites of the tribes of rural Egypt when I was an undergraduate.” I sank onto the bed beside her. “I bought a bottle every year after that to pour over my father’s grave. It’s stupid, but he would have liked it.”

“It’s not stupid.” Lily’s voice was little more than breath. “Will you do that for me?”

“Lily.” Something in her eyes that night terrified me, and with the mask of denial finally torn from my eyes, I saw the lost weight and dizzy spells as far more than jet leg and over-exertion. “Don’t.”

“We’ve been carefully not talking about what’s becoming more and more obvious each day. I didn’t tell you because I wanted to spend my last months living, not dying.”

“How long?” I asked again.

“Six months,” Lily said, echoing my earlier words. “I’m right at the expiration date,” she added, chuckling darkly at her own gallows humor. “It could be any time.”

It had all been there if I had looked, but I had liked the blindness. After so long of being sick of the world, I had found someone who wouldn’t let me wallow in cynicism, and I didn’t want to face the world without her.

I took the bottle from her and slowly removed the flimsy white dress she had been wearing. I poured the oil into my hands, longing for the warm spice of Frankincense and only smelling the bitterness of Myrrh. I massaged the oil into her skin, trying to think of anything but its true purpose.

“Tell me about the tombs, Adam.” Her voice was a bare whisper, but I heard it just the same.

Her quiet plea hung in the air until I finally spoke, trying and failing to keep the strain from my voice. “My shoes echoed on the stone steps. Even after studying ancient history for years, it was hard to believe that the steps I was walking on had been cut into the rock three millennia ago. Nothing could prepare me for the dampness of the air, the closeness of the walls. The hieroglyphs were beautiful.” The tenseness had drained out of Lily’s muscles, and her breathing had slowed as an exhausted sleep claimed her. “I don’t even remember what they said, just that they were ancient and I loved them for it.”

Ten minutes of scrubbing with scalding water and sandalwood soap, and I could still smell the Myrrh on my fingers. Using a force of will I had stopped believing I possessed years ago, I looked at my reflection. Squinting in the too-bright florescent light was a man staring down thirty, a man who would soon be seeing the first strands of grey in his dark hair, a man who spent half of his life running from nothing.

After University, I had never lived in the same city for longer than three months until I came to Egypt. Even here, it had barely taken a year for my perpetual urge to move on to overpower my love of the city. Then I met Lily, and I lost myself in her normalcy, her easy smile, her grey eyes. She believed there was a man behind the sarcasm, and she had wanted to understand him.

So did I.

ENDING