Article and Art by William Compton
I’m sixteen with the type of backache only a museum can give you. I’m in the black-painted Egyptian gallery. The most crowded display horribly bores me. Some stale, new discovery. I need to stare into the old mummy’s cloth face. It calls to me in an unknown language. Art belongs here, but apparently so does this dead body. I usually can’t stand to look. Today, I have to stare, all alone, into its dead face.
I vividly remember a relaxed clearing of my mind right before an evil shudder runs from the crown of my skull through the joints of my toes. Not quite like walking into a cold patch in a graveyard. More like if the cold patch walked into you. I stumble away from the mummy as my body turns icy cold, grabbing my family’s hands to pull them away, dropping them to pull on my coat. I suddenly feel faint and burning hot. But I can’t get my coat off before the foreign shivering washes back over me. I’ve never felt this way before. My parents know me to feverishly beg to go to school and to play practice after. They look truly worried when I plead to leave the museum right then, leaving the Van Gogh unseen. But they take me to the car, dragging me as my vision tunnels. The less I see, the more I hear. A groaning in my head focuses into words. Ancient words spoken by a gasping voice, crackling with disuse. My body fights a parasite stronger than any flu until we pass over the threshold of the museum.
Right then, the feeling disappears. Not when I rest and not when I eat. Not when I metabolize a pill. Stories of possession and ancient curses come flooding to my mind: the spirit attacking me can’t leave the museum where it lies. And I’ve never felt that way again: neither the mummy’s call, nor the ghostly flush, nor my body’s fighting answer. I was evidence-minded then, but the mummy made me a kooky spiritualist that day in the museum when it tried to possess me. My love for my life makes remembering the mummy terrifying. I wonder if it almost stole my body from me. If we almost switched, locking me behind bandages and wraps, freeing an eldritch evil onto the world.
Maybe it did take my body. Maybe I left myself behind in that black-painted Egyptian gallery. The soul that my mother gave me abandoned, made spiteful, searching for a new vessel how the mummy searched for me. Are any of us our own original soul? Isn’t it convenient to think that we start and end as the very same person? But the mummy didn’t. A man isn’t himself once he’s made a mummy, entombed behind glass.
I look up the mummy as I write my piece. The sight of its cocooned death brings green tea back to the top of my throat. Brings an old sickness temporarily to me. I wonder if it can finish its job through the screen. I wonder if it already found another young man to become.
But I find that his name is Ka-i-nefer. And they computer-reconstructed his face. He has smile lines and a downward canthal tilt. Our noses are surprisingly similar. And he really is just a man. A man that lived and loved. It’s not his fault that they put his body behind glass. That they unearthed him in the first place.
It’s just sad when you remember each mummy was once man. When he’s a man instead of a mummy, I can’t blame him or hate him or fear him. I find myself feeling love for him.
I don’t know this man, but maybe he’d like to know me.
It’s strange but logical: I’m less afraid that he did possess me than that he didn’t. If he’s not in me, maybe he was really trying to steal me. Or worse: maybe he’s still stuck there behind glass. And if he’s in me, he must be content to live my life and write my stories. I’m so much better than I was at sixteen. If he’s with me, then he made me better. If he made me better, I’m happy to have him stay.
This is the life we lead, but is it ours? It seems impossible that the same soul could nestle in my mother's arms and wrestle with my crush on wrinkled sheets. The indomitable human soul is the breath that resonates over bottle necks. When I sing, it’s really my Grampa’s voice. Maybe we’re a thousand different people, from one challenge to the next. A swirl of souls.
Maybe we’re all possessed by someone or another. And maybe possessed is not replaced, maybe it’s assisted. Maybe it’s accompanied.
Maybe Ka-i-nefer just wanted to join me. To swirl around as the second soul inside me.
Come along with me to burn easily in the hot sun!
To relish burnt, cold showers. To shiver from the burn on my skin.
Come along for the end of the world!
We inoculated her with this disease already. We’ll see what we learn.
To sing country lullabies with my Papa and rap Cardi with my friends.
To drive with the windows down on a summer night.
Na-i-nefer, please leave your glass cage behind.
To swim in the river and smoke in the trees.
Na-i-nefer, come laugh with me.