It had been built to the tastes of my friend, Ronald Montgomery, who had the wealth to indulge in all his tastes, and the imagination for those tastes to be unique. Perhaps it was the availability of everything money could buy that had turned his tastes more…unorthodox…over the years. That money makes us jaded, makes us lose our perspectives, is no new observation.
We had gone to school together; it was there, in fact, that I came under the thrall of his undeniable charisma. When I married, my wife gradually helped me break that hold. She had never liked Monty. I felt glad actually, relieved, when I began to assert my independence from him. He had moved to the west coast. But then came his visit, a brief stay. Now here I was…returning from a long trip to the Egypt I had always ached to visit. A trip sponsored by my friend, Ronald Montgomery.
Four strong men lowered the crate down from the truck and struggled it inside as Monty came out to embrace me. His arm around my shoulders, he gestured at the sweaty workers. “Like slaves moving one of the blocks at Giza, huh? Your timing couldn’t be better, Tim…did you remember that tomorrow is my birthday?”
Monty walked behind the men, craning his neck to observe their passage. He turned to me again and grinned. “Who would have thought the Valley of the Kings had any surprises left, huh, Tim?”
I nodded. “Who’d have thought that there was a tunnel so deep under Thebes? The deepest chamber recorded in the valley…”
“No one would have thought to look for it before, in the monkey cemetery of all places. But you see, Tim? You got me my treasure and I got you in the history books. Hey, I think you still owe me.”
I must confess I winced inside. I wanted to meet my obligation and escape back to my own life. “Well, they weren’t that happy to have the mummy taken. And National Geographic wanted to be there when it was unwrapped.”
“The authorities weren’t too unhappy to take my money, and I have more of that than National Geographic does! They know it’s in good hands here in my esteemed collection. And I did sponsor the excavation, after all. If people are nice I’ll let them borrow it for study. Besides, there were other baboon mummies in the chamber.”
“But this one was so…big. For a baboon. And its coffin.” I wagged my head.
“I don’t suppose any amount of money could have made them part with that, hm? Solid gold, like Tut-ankh-Amen’s inner coffin…”
“For a baboon! I know they were sacred, and high-ranking baboons received better burials than lower grade baboons, but Christ, you’ve seen the pictures! All they can say is that this monkey must have been a symbolic representation of the god Hapi.”
“Selected, no doubt, for its unusual size, as you’ve pointed out. Hey, gentlemen, easy there!”
* * *
Monty had been walking fine when I arrived, but by the time we had the mummy unpacked and on the table he had prepared for it, he was using his cane to support himself. When he was excited or upset, I knew, his equilibrium seemed to falter. It was his worsening MS that had kept him from joining me at the excavation; in the past, we had been a team on some of his expeditions, his adventures. And on many he had gone without me. The relics—no, the trophies—of these adventures decorated the lab around us, and abounded even more in the study just beyond.
“Hey,” I said half-jokingly, “I’m a little jet-lagged, Monty. You’re not really going to start unwrapping your birthday present now, are you?”
“You can go nap or freshen up if you’d like, Tim, but I’ve been waiting months for this, and everything’s set to begin. I don’t need your help, but…”
I sighed, shrugged. I didn’t contest him…just like the old me.
And so we began undoing the careful and reverent work that had been done atop another laboratory table, fifteen-hundred years before the birth of Christ. That was not only the time when conspicuous pyramids were passed up in favor of the hidden tombs in the Valley of the Kings (to protect the interred from grave robbers such as ourselves), but it was when the Egyptians further perfected the art of preservation. These advances were increasingly reflected in the body we now labored over. The remains were fully swathed in linen, this covered in a glassy-black, hardened gum. The resin was so hard in places that Monty had to chisel at it, but he had anticipated this. In other places he was able to simply unwind the wrappings as I gently elevated the dry form.
While I held the baboon up in gloved hands, I glanced around at the lab. On a shelf there were several human infants pickled in a yellowish solution, perhaps formaldehyde. The infants were pathetically deformed, but their deformities were well preserved…
Monty was impatient but he wasn’t sloppy; we worked slowly and carefully, and recorded our progress with frequent photographs. Two video cameras were mounted on tripods. By the time we took our first break it had become dark, and while Monty pored over the photos I had mailed him of the baboon’s sarcophagus and the inner gold coffin, I wandered into the adjacent study to pour myself a little scotch.
Some of Monty’s trophies I was familiar with, others were a surprising revelation. Earlier, he had briefly pointed out some of his newer acquisitions, like a proud kid showing off a collection of baseball cards. The only difference between men and boys is the perversity of their obsessions.
Whether it had anything to do with being born in the early hours of All Saints’ Day, I don’t know, but Monty’s obsession was death. Rather—Death. Our desperate fear of it, which inspires us to rebel against its domination.
Monty was very afraid to die. He had never told me—it was self-evident. Wasn’t it this fear of obliteration that had driven others to manufacture mummies in the first place, that kept the practice of embalming alive in our time? Monty’s acute fear had made his spirit as twisted and shriveled as the flesh of the bizarre audience now ringing me.
An Egyptian mummy had long been his desire, and he had had to settle for that of an animal, but he had done well in other lands with less restrictions. In a lighted case on one wall were several shrunken heads of the Jivaro Indians, long laces dangling from their sewn lips. There was a larger smoked head, of a Maori, its face covered in elaborate engraved tattoos. A full Maori mummy resided in a large cabinet, in the customary seated position, its face hideously contorted. A kneeling Peruvian mummy, with her hair thick and intact but her face like a loose human mask of dried clay, mostly broken apart. A skeletal body, barely crusted in skin, from the Aleutian Islands. Bodies like gnarled root things dug out from under huge trees, bodies like papier-mache. An international congress of the dead.
One of Monty’s more recent finds filled a large glass case in a corner, dimly and reverently lit: a bearded female midget that might have been a Neanderthal but that she was attired in a cute red dress which showed off her furry upper chest and complemented her uneasily attractive curves. This was “The Ugliest Woman in the World,” Julia Pastrana, made famous as a sideshow attraction before and after death. And still. When does a museum become a sideshow?
Superbly preserved as she was, her simian face seemed to glare at me.
With her on a pedestal was her tiny infant son, similarly hirsute. Monty had acquired the mummy Madonna and child from a collector in Norway. They were the most touching and pitiful exhibit in the whole depressing mini-museum. I felt ashamed for even looking.
In the dark living room beyond the study entrance, a jack-o’-lantern glowed. Monty’s boyish sense of fun, but it was an irreverent thing to look at, surrounded as I was by these kidnaped ancient beings. I remembered Monty once telling me how the Celts had started the custom by placing glowing coals inside hollow turnips, in order to ward off the spirits of the dead on Halloween night, when they were given to roaming.