Demon Box

Jacky smiled and raised his brows.

“The crowds finally got so big the Egyptian government put a wall around the place and charged twenty-five piastres at the turnstile. The apparition immediately stopped appearing.”

“Far out,” I say. “I wouldn’t have stood for it either. Not when they’re getting fifty piastres a head to look at those empty bull coffins.”

October 28, Monday. Jacky finally lands a room in Cairo. I go in with him and check at the KLM office. I can get a plane out this coming Thursday morning, or Monday night November 4. I tell the coiffed Dutchess to book me on the Thursday morn flight.

Now that he’s been accepted back into metropolitan civilization, Jacky wants to stay another week. “Why not take a room with me in Cairo? Wait and catch the November fourth flight? See some belly boogie? That way you could spend Halloween night at the tombs.”

I tell him I’d rather spend the eve with the kids in Oregon, passing out popcorn balls to mummies in rubber masks. He shrugs. “Whatever. But do you think Thursday gives you enough time to find—to finish your pieces?”

I appreciated his mid-sentence alteration. I would have been forced to concede it was highly unlikely that I will be able to “find it” by Thursday, or by Monday for that matter. The closer I’ve looked the less I’ve seen. The pyramid disappears within itself as you approach it. The longer you look the more your theories become dwarfed by the blunt actuality of the puzzle.

I walk the ruins around the Giza plateau largely unaccosted now. I have learned a trick of bending down to pick up a rock as soon as I detect an approaching hustle. I then examine it through the little sighting lens on my engineer’s compass, and the hustlers back off respectfully. “Shh. Observe. The Yankee doctor has found a clue. Observe the manner he thoughtfully scratch his great bald puzzle piece.”

Little do they know. I’m just drifting. Peter O’Toole crossing the desert on his camel, watching his shadow ripple hypnotically over the sand. Omar Sharif rides up from behind and swats him with his camel crop. What?

You were drifting.

Oh, no! I was thinking.

I was—

You were drifting.

After a solitary supper I shuffle back to my cabana. I can’t rest or write. Rest from what? Write what? I have less an idea of what I’m looking for than when I left Oregon a month ago. My poke’s about played out and the cards have been cold or crooked, like that Marag and his five-pound fake map.

And my ace in the hole? The Murine bottle that I had promised myself to use should all else fail? Out of the question. As Muldoon Greggor expressed it, “I wouldn’t want to try to divine its secret with acid. Soon as your armor was blasted away, these watchmen and hustlers would crawl all over you. They wouldn’t leave anything but a dry husk.”

I do have one of those five hash fingers left. That’s safer. Perhaps, if I could get a place on the back side in one of those tombs, under the stars in sight of the Sphinx… bound to afford more inspiration than this cinderblock cell. So I gather my paraphernalia and strike out into the night.

It’s late. The road is empty of cabs. The sentries nod me past. The searchlights and speakers of the evening’s Sound and Light are shut away in their tombs and bolt-locked, but there’s plenty of illumination: the moon heralded new by that Ramadan cannon two weeks ago is now nearing full; the Great Pyramid shines mournfully under it for lack of anything better to do.

On the moony slope I find the seat where we were brought by Muldoon that first night. There’s more wind than I thought. I roll a page from my notebook and light it with my last match. I didn’t twist it tight enough and it flares up but I’m determined to get one hit, sucking so frantically at the hookah mouth tube that I’m unaware I have company.

“Good evening, Mr. D’bree.”

I see his little face glittering so close that I think at first it’s the flame itself. Hash sparks fly everywhere.

“You have trouble with hubble-bubble this good evening?” I tell him not anymore, no. With the last flicker we both can see the bowl is empty. I toss the ash into darkness. He tells me he is most sorry, but to come, follow him, for a more nicer smoke than hubble-bubble. Does he mean a joint? This hash and hookah business is very ritzy but a joint would be nice…

Marag takes me to one of the tombs down the slope where the limestone plateau just begins to drop away toward the village. There is a faint rectangle of light hissing from the tomb’s door; Marag stops me with a feathery hand on my arm before we get too close.

“This is my friend,” he whispers. “A young desert boy but already guard this corner. Very good position! Still, he is not at ease, it is not his home. You got hashish?”

“You’re not gonna mix it with tobacco? I don’t smoke, and cigarettes hit me harsh.”