Inside Straight

It was twenty minutes before those first few wasps were joined by others, and another half hour before enough of the small green bugs had gathered for Jonathan’s head to reform. His hair was plastered to his scalp with sweat and his eyes rolled back and forth, looking this way and that. When Klaus lifted the head up by the hair and set it atop the orange crate, Hive’s mouth opened and shut and opened again, but no sound escaped his lips. That came later, when enough bugs had assembled to make a throat, a set of vocal chords, and lungs. “Is he gone?” Jonathan wheezed at last. “What happened? Did you kill him?”

“I cut him, but he fled.”

“I told you Egypt was a bad idea.” The air was thick with wasps by then, crawling over one another and thrumming noisily as green chitin turned into clammy white flesh. “We could get killed, I said, remember?” His genitals took shape, small and shriveled. Arms and legs began to form. Thighs and calves, ankles and elbows, little pink toes with ugly yellow nails. His hands came last. To Klaus they looked no worse for having been severed, but Jonathan kept flexing his fingers and feeling his wrists, pinching and squeezing as if searching for a pulse. “That hurt,” he said. “That really hurt. Some of me died. Some bugs.”

“Ja.” Klaus found himself staring. “Are those…are those your same hands? Or did you make new hands from different bugs?”

“How would I know?” Jonathan’s voice grew shrill. “New bugs, old bugs…they’re bugs. Do you think they have assigned places, like for a fire drill? Maybe I should name them all and take attendance, so I’ll know which ones are tardy.” He found his undershorts and pulled them on, one leg at a time. “He tried to cut my head off,” he said, snatching up one sock. “Why me? What did I ever do to him? What if he comes back?”

“He will not come back. I frightened him away when I cut his sword in half.” Klaus nudged the severed scimitar. “See how clean and sharp the cut is? His blade is no match for mine.”

Bugsy flinched away from it. “What if he gets another sword? What if he comes back while we’re sleeping

?” He stood on one leg and yanked his sock on. “Where’s the other sock? Did he take it? Maybe that’s how he finds people, you know, like a dog. Bahir, that was Bahir, do you know how many men he’s killed? He can go anywhere. There’s no keeping him out. He killed a man in Paris, broad daylight, a Syrian general who’d defected to the West, he was eating a croissant on the Left Bank and suddenly this Bahir guy pops up behind him, removes his head, and takes it back to Damascus as a present for the Nur. It was in the news.”

“In Germany, too.” It had happened while Klaus was still at Peenemünde. He remembered hearing Doktor Fuchs and Doktor Alpers arguing about whether such teleportation was truly instantaneous.

“I have to get back to D.C.I think I left my stove on. Paper Lion, that’s all I wanted. No one ever tried to cut George Plimpton’s head off, I would have heard about it.” Jonathan snatched up a Curveball T-shirt and pulled it down over his head, but it was one of Klaus’s shirts and much too big for him—and anyway, he pulled it on backwards. HELP IS WHERE THE HEARTS ARE, declared the slogan drooping down across his spindly chest. “Why come after me? You don’t kill the press, it’s in the rules. Don’t they know the rules? Fortune’s the one with the beetle in his head, and you’re the hero with the big sword. So they come after the bug guy?”

“You blog, too. You bear witness to the world.”

“So?” Jonathan spied something. “Oh, good, my other sock.”

“So I am thinking—maybe there is something coming that they do not want the world to witness, ja?”

Jonathan looked up. His eyes got very big. “What’s the German for oh, shit?”

he said. He dropped his sock.

“Pack your things,” Klaus told him. “We are going to the temple. John must know of this. Him, and Sekhmet.”

~ ~ ~

Above, the sun blazed in the blue sky, with not a cloud in sight. Below, its twin burned bright in the still waters of the long reflecting pool that ran down the center of the hidden courtyard. Yet even with two suns, somehow the yard was cool.

In shady alcoves around its wide perimeter, the Living Gods of Egypt sat upon their thrones, listening as the argument raged on. Taweret was speaking now, the eldest of the gods resident at the New Temple, and their chief. The flesh-and-blood Taweret sat beneath a towering likeness of herself, attended by her retinue of nine dwarf priests clad in linen robes and gold collars. That flesh was gray and rubbery, her legs as thick as tree trunks, her head that of a hippopotamus, held up by a padded steel brace that kept the weight of it from snapping her neck. Jonathan had written that Taweret looked like a fugitive from Walt Disney’s Fantasia who had traded her pink tutu for a jeweled collar and a silken robe. Fortunately, the goddess did not read English.

“What is she saying?” Klaus asked Sobek.