new duty to perform. I wore the memory stick like a shield over my heart.
After traveling alone from New York to Paris, I joined one of the scientists whom I’ve already mentioned in passing, our old friend Gabriel Plum the Sherlockian Brit, for the second half of the journey from Paris to Cairo. From the moment I hugged him at Charles de Gaulle, I found his tweedy aroma to be unexpectedly comforting. I’d always liked Gabriel, how a certain warmth and wit shone through his dry manner. Once aloft, we chatted brightly, then settled into moments of pleasant silence, as only old friends can do. From the window of the huge jet, I was admiring the ruggedness below of the mountains forming the spine of northern Italy when Gabriel leaned over and said quietly but with a certain British briskness, “I say, Lucy, suppose we get married one day?”
I burst into laughter, thinking he was making an old-friend joke.
Unperturbed, he went on. “Why not? We’ve known each other forever.”
A tremor of grief wobbled my chin, and I bit my lower lip.
With smooth aplomb, Gabriel transitioned into a question. “Could you fly a plane this size? What’s the biggest airplane you ever flew?”
“Corporate jet,” I answered. “And you?” It pleased me to remember that Gabriel was also fascinated with flying. “What are you flying these days?” Since I’d moved from Iowa to New York, I hadn’t flown much.
“Yes,” Gabriel answered; he sighed. “Nothing hot, the new Cessna.” He reached over and squeezed my knee. “For all your playing of Penelope,” he said kindly, “Thom is a Ulysses who will never come home.”
What I liked about Gabriel—he seemed as articulate and debonair as Tony Blair, the British prime minister who sent his troops to Iraq. Gabriel was more cynical, though.
Yet he had made me laugh. That spontaneous burst had let some daylight into my dark world.
On the difficult first day in Cairo, though I was exhausted from travel, I was scheduled to speak a few words of welcome to the symposium convened to continue Thom’s work. Arriving a bit late, I walked straight to the podium. From just the corner of my eye, I caught the peripheral movement of the Egyptian host—a drapery of white robes—rising in a gesture of respect. The other scientists remained seated; they knew me well: an ordinary wife of a revered man. Determinedly, I grasped the edges of the speaker’s stand. As I looked at the ELF team, I realized again that Thom was not only absent but dead; I pressed his memory stick—my talisman—against my breastbone to give me courage to speak into that void. Should I give the memory stick to them? Make a grand splash? There had been no sign. No revelation had occurred on the road to Now.
“Because this is the year 2020,” I said to them. Then stopped. My voice brought to mind an antique china doll, plain and white—the type called a “Frozen Charlotte”—its face crazed with minute cracks in the glaze. I was breaking up. I tried to fight down my grief, but my mind reached forward in my prepared remarks to grasp their closing sentences: “‘Twenty-twenty,’ Thom used to say to me, ‘might be the Year of Clear Vision.’ May you prove him right.” Then I mumbled, mortified by my naked emotion before the scientists, “Thank you for coming to this ancient land to pursue new truths, in Thom’s name.”
To supportive applause, I left the symposium quickly and entered the hallway. My hand closed convulsively over my talisman, but I considered jerking it off. I have never understood anger directed at a person who has died, but in that moment I felt a flash of hot anger at Thom for deserting me.
Just behind my shoulder as I hurried down the corridor, I heard the Egyptian host, Pierre Saad, padding along almost noiselessly in his soft sandals behind me. “Mrs. Bergmann,” he called quietly. I hesitated.
“Mrs. Bergmann, I am so sorry. Please wait.”
I stopped but, ashamed, I could not bring myself to meet his eyes. Three years after Thom’s death, I should not have made a public display of frozen grief. With bowed head, I stared at the weave of the Egyptian’s white robe, hanging straight down like a choir robe. In a flash, I remembered how I had pulled off my Methodist robe in children’s choir and—to my parents’ horror—refused anymore to sing praises to God, after my grandfather’s death.