You know how the song goes:  “When you’re in love with a beautiful woman, it’s hard….”  That’s how I’ve always felt with Suzanne.  I try to hide it, but there are times when my insecurities emerge low in my viscera and refuse to go away.  We’ll be at a dinner party and I’ll glance across the table at her and catch her talking with another man.  She’ll be bright and animated and wholly engaged.  She’ll be that sparkling jewel I fell in love with, but she’ll be that sparkling jewel with everyone she meets.  When my insecurities are at their worst, I wonder to myself:  what if she meets another man who wants to hoard that jewel for himself as much as I do?  I tell myself that, as a matter of prudence, I should assume all men are as ill-intentioned as me.

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Mohammed had been sitting outside on a rock for about a thousand years when Youssef pushed his way from the tent to join his brother.  For nearly a hundred years, Mohammed had been waiting on the rock while Youssef deflowered virgin number seventy-two, taking her every-which-way his imagination would allow.  In the sand at his feet, Mohammed was using a stick to draw letters and figures, while he listened to the grunting and groaning, screaming and moaning, biting and panting.  Sometimes, while watching a passing caravan or grinning at the vulture who hunched and returned his grin, Mohammed would lean back and yell:  “Youssef!  Youssef!  Have you not had enough of her?”  In a way, he didn’t mind Youssef’s nonsense.  Without the sound of bombs detonating in the distance, or the burst of machine gun spray, the silence sometimes drove Mohammed to the brink of madness, so it was a relief to hear his brother’s noisy exertions.

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Egyptologists give one another special names. It’s one of those things we’ve always done. So John calls me Ikky (which is short for Ikhnaten) and I call him Akky (which is short for Akhenaten) and when people see the two of us together they say: “Hey! There goes Ikky and Akky.” When people find out we’re Egyptologists, they say things like: “So you guys are into all that King Tut shit, are ya?” We used to go into a long drawn out explanation about how we’re experts in the Late Egyptian period and handle a geographic region way south of Thebes and the Valley of the Kings almost on the border of the Sudan – 500 years later and 500 clicks upriver from King Tut. But nobody really cares, so now we smile and nod and say: “Ya, ya, the King Tut shit.”

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