taste, a fanatic.”
“Quite right,” Gabriel answered pleasantly. “At least our literary tastes are compatible. Another day we’ll check off art. Matisse but not Picasso, I presume. Whatever made you become an art therapist?”
“Another night,” I said.
“I look forward to it,” he answered, taking the hint, but he hesitated. He bowed his head, then leaned toward me and touched just with the tip of his finger the cord around my neck. “What’s this?” Carefully he pulled on the silk cord till the memory stick emerged from under my blouse. “Thom’s flash drive? I wondered what became of it.”
“It’s comforting,” I replied, feeling invaded.
“It could be useful, scientifically,” he speculated. “Thom always used his flash drive at the end of a presentation. It was where he kept his latest thoughts, his grand summary. He always had a grand summary at the end of these big meetings. Did you know that? A moment when he drew all the data together, gave it his own brilliant spin, and made his next new insight seem inevitable.”
He stopped and looked at me too hopefully.
“I gave you his briefcase. All his notes,” I said. “The memory stick is for me.” I began to feel irritated, a little vulnerable.
“But you’ve removed your wedding ring.”
I said nothing.
When Gabriel bowed his head and seemed chagrined, I remarked, “Did you say there was camping on this tour?”
He lifted his face, and his eyes twinkled in their wry and engaging way. “On the edge of the Sahara. The tents each have a small solar-powered air conditioner.”
Then, because I had not heard the terms of math uttered for three years, I asked impulsively, “Tell me again, the equation for elliptical orbits.”
“X squared over a squared plus y squared over b squared equals one,” he said, as I watched his lips speak the notation describing the orbit. Then he leaned forward, kissed me lightly on the mouth, and named a tour agency I could contact.
In the morning I made arrangements to travel and felt glad to escape the scientists. I told Gabriel good-bye in the lobby of the Marriott, though he offered to accompany me to the Cairo airport. When I saw that he wanted to kiss me farewell, I averted my eyes. I’d had enough of kissing. When I looked at him again, he had resumed an expression of friendly amusement. That afternoon I flew to Luxor, as Gabriel suggested, to take a cruise on the Upper Nile. I was glad to be traveling into the mythic past.
When I settled into the gray, wooden-slat lounging chair on the top deck of the cruise boat, I felt my entire body relax. Beyond the banks of the Nile, the landscape blazed like a mirror. I found it more comfortable to gaze down into the flowing river.
In my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, the Lower Mississippi lay to the south, while the Upper Mississippi had its headwaters in Minnesota, but in Egypt the Lower Nile fanned out in a delta to the north before emptying its waters into the Mediterranean, and the Upper Nile had its roots deep in the heart of Africa. My gaze followed a north-flowing bubble on the river. “Where are you going, and where have you been?” I muttered to the waters of the Nile surrounding the boat. Hadn’t I learned to ask those questions from a nursery rhyme while sitting in my grandmother’s lap? Unlike the muddy Mississippi, the Nile was a ribbon of glorious blue.
The water seemed to reply to me with a question I both wanted and needed to hear: Where are you going? it asked. And my answer: Nag Hammadi, though I knew it was not a stop on the tour itinerary.
It was at Nag Hammadi that the outcast books of the New Testament had been found in 1945. Learning of the existence of those rejected gospels had broken the spine of my belief in the Bible as a canon of sacred texts. Sylvia, an elderly neighbor who was also a professor of comparative religions, had enlightened me. “Robbed you!” my mother had said. “Buddha! Enlightenment! You’re nine years old! What can you possibly know of enlightenment? ‘I am the Light of the World.’ Who said that? Do you know who said that?” My skepticism about a God defined as both good and all-powerful began with my grandfather’s cancer and death and my grandmother’s heartrending grief, though it did not break her faith.
“The name Lucy derives from the word for light,” neighbor Sylvia had said. She kissed me on