Harold had difficulty focusing when he got into work the next day and started on his next project, translating what looked to be more about death and taxes, stuff governments cared about even four thousand years ago. He waded through it but he kept thinking about the poem’s distinction between “rod” and “cylinder,” and about the fact that the poem seemed to start each stanza with a possible reference, not to penis, but to vagina:
Princess Peaceful Life -- female, anyway, and what straight male wouldn’t equate a peaceful life with a piece of pussy?
The blind eye -- he’d never heard it called that before, but that wasn’t to say it couldn’t have been a sly reference six thousand years ago. Or in present-day Egypt, for that matter; he didn’t keep up with modern colloquialisms.
Flood of life -- the thing is, Harold thought, the Nile brought the medium for life but wasn’t the source of seed, just as the vagina produced a water-based medium for helping sperm on its way but didn’t produce the actual sperm. So, it could reference male ejaculate -- which would be most likely in most cultures in the past four or five thousand years -- or, if the tablet really was as old as it seemed, it could be referencing female ejaculate, evidence of the tail end of a matriarchal society in that region. Were that so, it would be a groundbreaking discovery.
Harold wrote down his thoughts on the tablet, watched as the tablet translated it to standard English type, Times New Roman font. He gave up on his current task and checked his messages to find an e-mail waiting from his manager.
All: thermoluminescence dating in -- over five thousand years old. Egyptian government recalling all related artifacts. Looks like we’re off the job unless they decide to share the workload. -Dr DR
Harold sighed. He was really disappointed. Stuck with death and taxes again. He looked at the time and decided on an early lunch.
When he didn’t see Wendy at the break room he rolled himself a little further down the walkway, past cubicles and coworkers, to Wendy’s desk. He looked at her tidy afro, her professional attire, and grumbled to himself about objectifying her in his dream last night.
Then he knocked on the frame of her cubicle. She turned around and smiled at him. She was wearing makeup again. Harold couldn’t decide whether or not he liked it, then told himself that his opinion didn’t matter. They were both professionals.
“You see the e-mail from DeReal?” Harold asked her.
She nodded, “I’m disappointed.”
“Me, too. I was thinking about going downstairs to look at the artifacts today before they ship them out. Want to go with me?”
“I do,” said Peter, poking his head up from the other side of the cubicle divider, “Can I come on your date?”
Wendy rolled her eyes, “Three’s a crowd, Peter.”
“Hey, thanks for saying yes. Let me grab my coat.”
Wendy and Harold looked at each other.
“Thanks for dinner last night,” Wendy said in a quiet voice.
“My pleasure,” Harold said. He wheeled backwards and turned toward the elevators. “I’ll meet you two there.”
His face was flaming, he was sure. He was attracted to her and that was unusual, not because of anything about her, but because he hadn’t been attracted to anyone for a long time. Years, even. Possibly decades.
He’d long ago accepted that he was asexual. His parents, bless them, had stopped asking for grandkids once he’d been diagnosed with diabetes. In a way, the disease made his life easier; he didn’t have to feel bad about failing anyone, not his parents, not the pretty girls who flirted with him, not society at large. Whether it was the bawdiness of the text, or the camaraderie that comes from knowing your friend is with you against your enemies, or the crazy dreams, he was attracted to Wendy and he was utterly confused by it.
* * * *
The Repository was dense with boxes, crates, and objects, carefully catalogued and stored on shelves or in flat drawers. The Egyptian section of the Oriental Institute was huge, over forty-thousand pieces of antiquity, almost as much as the museum in Egypt, itself.
Harold was glad Roger Apnal was at the desk. The other guy, Pierce Rednit, would happily find any reason to deny admittance and was smart enough to be able to do so. Roger, though, was an old friend of Harold’s, dating back to college. And Roger definitely had a crush on Wendy. Harold was relieved to discover he wasn’t jealous when Roger paid particular attention to her and helped her put on the white examination gloves.
“Hey,” said Peter, “you gonna help me?”
“Help yourself, smartass,” said Roger, “But if you don’t get rid of that gum first you aren’t going anywhere near anything in here. Listen, it’s all been taken to the back for packing.”
When Roger lifted the countertop to allow them access, Harold wheeled through first and turned right, passing row upon row of tiers of shelves. Every time he came down here he felt like he was in some sort of holy place, even if seventy-five percent of the stuff was tax- and death-related. The place was quiet and lights were dim, limited-spectrum bulbs to reduce light-based deterioration. He felt like the front guard, on alert for danger as he escorted Wendy to something that belonged to her.
* * * *
The packing crates were neatly stacked to one side, the artifacts and paperwork on a table on the other side, a few very large amphorae on the floor, and a pile of packing material in the middle. Beyond the open area was the garage door that opened onto a loading dock. Once Pierce was back from his lunch break, he and Roger would carefully enact their little choreographed packing dance. As much as he disliked Pierce’s control-freak personality, Harold had to admit it was useful for things like perfectly packing priceless objects.
Harold braked a little ways from the table, feeling like Wendy ought to be the first to look over the artifacts. He couldn’t get last night’s dream out of his head.
He watched her and Peter walk down the hallway formed by the wall on one side and the stacks on the other. Wendy looked like a modern-day queen. Peter looked like a shambling giant. If Pierce had been there, Harold thought, there was no way Peter would have been admitted. In fact, in some bizarre display of aggression, Peter pushed by her to get to the table of artifacts first. He seized the tablet like a prize and turned it over, perhaps looking for more glyphs on the other side.
Wendy didn’t react to his rudeness. She and Harold didn’t want to look at the tablet, anyway. She looked over the group of objects, as though surveying her kingdom, and gently extracted a stone cylinder. Harold’s dick grew hard as he watched her caress and examine it, grew harder yet when he realized the thing was about the same length and girth as his own member. So the cylinder was a rod, a phallus, yes, but maybe also something else, in the way that a word can mean many things, a thing can have multiple purposes.
She turned the phallus over, examined the flat butt of it, and looked at Harold. He wheeled himself over to look at it with her. There was a pattern carved into relief, intricate enough to be inscrutable. Harold felt adrenaline kick in and his heart beat faster, things he usually tried to avoid as a diabetic, since it would end up raising his blood sugar levels. Over the years he’d learned to not worry about it, since that just made the effects worse. He simply held out a hand, wordlessly asking for a chance to hold the cylinder.
Wendy held it out to him. The moment he touched it he felt electrified. He couldn’t let go. Random thoughts raced through his head -- a live electric wire will throw you off; so many words for penis and so few for vagina; guns, germs and steel but also cock-worship; we are not civilized; Wendy is Princess Peaceful Life -- and then he wasn’t himself. He went backwards, or sideways, or something, and stood up, putting minimal weight on the pad protecting his tibia and fibula, still grasping his end of the phallus. Phallus and brand. Synonyms for “brand” flashed through his mind (seal, mark, sign, stamp. . .), somewhere in the back, but Harold was mostly aware that he wasn’t fully in control of his own body.
He raised his eyes from the phallus to Wendy’s face. It had changed. It was wilder, younger, older, and, as he watched, it seemed to shift in and out of focus, as though his eyes were trying to see past some sort of shroud or overlay of extra atoms.
Peter’s voice, seemingly very far away, muttered, “Hey, get a room, you two.”
Wendy was still holding on to the other end of phallus, the rounded end, the end that was not meant to brand but to penetrate. Harold pulled on his end. She didn’t let go, just took a step forward to keep her balance. She looked up at him, eyes wide in innocence and terror for a split second, before they acquired a sultry, half-hooded look. Harold found he knew what was about to happen and he was both sorry that neither of them had the opportunity to say “no” if they wanted to, and also eager to experience it with her.
“Hey, I don’t think you’re supposed to make Egyptian artifacts glow red, you idiots,” Peter said. Harold laughed and, after a moment, so did Wendy. Wendy tugged on the phallus a little and Harold realized he could let go of it now. She turned the stone object to grip its base and she pointed the rounded end at Peter.
“The eye is blind
Stone made to wait;
The phallus
Which brands one’s fate.”
Peter was still, not literally stone, but definitely waiting. Harold laughed again. Wendy turned to him. He stopped laughing. He was in the presence of someone that made him feel small, despite being taller than her. Someone who was more real than he was, someone worthy of worship, and not in the sense of objectification. He was acutely aware of everything about Wendy that made her herself. The phallus/brand took all those unique characteristics and made them more.
With his newfound abilities, with the weight and heartache of his disease at bay, Harold knelt at Wendy’s feet.
* * * *
“We shall make do with the materials available,” Wendy said. But at the same time she spoke in a different language, full of soft, sibilant sounds and susurrations. Overlaid atop that was the same sentence but multiple translations: “We work with what we have;” “I will use what is here;” “I accept these things for my work.” Harold’s mind accepted these layers of meaning as whole things, waiting to parse them later.
“Command me,” Harold said, but his mouth uttered those same soft consonants, a language he’d never heard, a precursor to Ancient Egypt’s tongue. Again, the alternate translations flashed through his brain: “I am yours;” “Tell me what to do;” “You control my body.”
The lurid aspects of the prehistoric language, its multiple, unsubtle meanings, nearly made him choke with a sensual, sexual need. He thought he might die if Wendy didn’t command him to fuck her, fuck something, even the phallus or Peter, if that’s what she wanted.
“Arrange it so we may recline,” she said. Harold let the cacophony of meaning subside before rising and turning to eye the pile of packing material: bubble wrap, straw, styrofoam peanuts, and tape. He swallowed the uncertainty rising in the back of his throat and limped to the pile. A small part of him was thinking, “This is not what should happen when people are taken over by ancient magic. The phallus/brand should just be able to transform this into a bed or something.” He looked around, trying to get creative, and his gaze fell on his wheelchair.
“Wouldst Thou accept this substitute?” Harold asked his mistress. The multiple translations echoed through his head but he was able to hear her reply, “Yes.” He turned to look at her and saw that she was naked from the waist down. Her mons was hidden beneath a sharp triangle of hair. A small part of him wanted to tell her to drop the phallus and run. The rest of him admired her beauty and grace as she moved and turned and reclined in the wheelchair.
Wendy’s ass perched precariously on the edge of the wheelchair’s seat. She leaned back and spread her legs. Harold’s gaze was glued to the glimpse of the pink folds of her lips. Her pussy was dripping wet; in the time it took for Harold to walk to her and kneel again there was a small puddle. It grew larger as he watched it, clean and gleaming on the floor.
“Watch, slave,” Wendy commanded. Harold lifted his eyes to see Wendy part the lips to her vagina with one hand and insert the phallus with the other. Her orgasm was instant and wild, electricity crackled at the tips of her hair and the water of life gushed out, splashing Harold’s knees. He couldn’t breathe. His own orgasm, trapped in his trousers and underwear, was the strongest he’d ever had, the most masculine, and it didn’t even come close to what he was witnessing.
She pulled the phallus out only to plunge it in again, releasing another flood, then another, with each insweep of the stone member. The small part of Harold that was still trying to resist the whirlwind of ancient magic began to freak out. Everything suddenly seemed very wrong. She wasn’t a large person, she couldn’t keep divesting herself of that much liquid without hurting herself. For his part, Harold was hard again, ready to cum if she demanded it. But she didn’t. Bathed in a red glow that made her dark skin bronze, she was in her own world of ecstasy, unaware of him or anything else around them.
Wendy’s non-verbal cries began to grow weaker. It seemed to Harold that she was going to fuck herself into mummification.
The moment she managed to whisper, “Help Us,” Harold leapt forward amid the susurrations and the layered intent and grabbed the phallus from her hand. She wasn’t strong enough to resist him, even as she clawed after it, whimpering her desire to impale herself yet again.
He looked at the phallus in his hand, the thing calling forth the Nile from Wendy’s goddess-like body. The base glowed a hot red and he knew what he needed to do. He scrabbled at his shirt with his free hand, tearing buttons free, and pressed the brand to his chest, on the right, above the nipple. The pain brought another orgasm, even stronger than the last, and he fell back, unconscious.
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