Venus on the Half-Shell

2 IT ALWAYS RAINS ON PICNICS

Making love on a picnic is nothing new. But this was on top of the head of the Sphinx of Giza.

Simon Wagstaff was not enjoying it one hundred percent. Ants, always present at any outdoor picnic anywhere, were climbing up his legs and buttocks. One had even gotten caught where nobody but Simon had any business being. It must have thought it had fallen down between the piston and cylinder of an old-fashioned automobile motor.

Simon was persevering, however. After a while, he and his fiancée rolled over and lay panting and staring up at the Egyptian sky.

“That was good, wasn’t it?” Ramona Uhuru said.

“It certainly wasn’t run of the mill,” Simon said. “Come on. We’d better get our clothes on before some tourists come up here.”

Simon stood up and put on his black Levis, baggy gray sweatshirt, and imitation camel-leather sandals. Ramona slid into her scarlet caftan and opened the picnic basket. This was full of goodies, including a bottle of Ethiopian wine: Carbonated Lion of Judah.

Simon thought about telling her about the ant. But if it was still running—or limping—around, she’d be the first to know it.

Simon was a short stocky man of thirty. He had thick curly chestnut hair, pointed ears, thick brown eyebrows, a long straight thin nose, and big brown eyes that looked ready to leak tears. He had thin lips and thick teeth which somehow became a beautiful combination when he smiled.

Ramona was also short and stocky. But she had big black sheep-dog eyes and a voice as soft as a puppy’s tail. Like the tail, it seldom quit wagging. This was all right with Simon. If she was a compulsive talker, she made up for it by not being a compulsive listener. Simon was a compulsive questioner but he didn’t ask Ramona for answers because he knew she didn’t have them. Ramona couldn’t be blamed for this. Nobody else could answer them either.

Ramona, talking about something or other, smoothed out the Navajo blanket made in Japan. Ramona had been made in Memphis (Egypt, not Tennessee), though her parents were Balinese and Kenyan.

Simon had been made during his parents’ honeymoon in Madagascar. His father was part-Greek, part-Irish Jew, a musical critic who wrote under the name of K. Kane. Everybody thought, with good reason, that the K. stood for Killer. He had married a beautiful Ojibway Indian mezzo-soprano who sang under the name of Minnehaha Langtry. The air-conditioning had broken down on their wedding night, and they attributed Simon’s shortcomings to the inclement conditions in which he had been conceived. Simon attributed them to his eight months in a plastic womb. His mother had not wanted to spoil her figure, so he had been removed from her womb and put in a cylinder connected to a machine. Simon had understood why his mother had done this. But he could not forgive her for later going on an eating jag and gaining sixty pounds. If she was going to become obese anyway, why hadn’t she kept him where he belonged?

It was, however, no day for brooding on childhood hurts. The sky was as blue as a baby’s veins, and the breeze was air-conditioning the outdoors. To the north, the reconstituted pyramids of Cheops and Chephren testified that the ancient Egyptians had really known how to put it all together. East, across the Nile, the white towers of Cairo with their TV antennas said upyours to the heavens. But they’d pay that day for their arrogance.

Below him, tourists and visitors from distant planets wandered round among the hot dog, beer, and curio stands. Among them were the giant tripods of Arcturus, sneering at the things that Terrestrials called ancient. Their oldest buildings were one hundred thousand years old, built over ruins twice that age. The Earthmen didn’t mind this because Arcturans looked so laughable when they sneered, twirling their long genitals as if they were key-chains. It was when an Arcturan praised that Earthmen became offended. The Arcturan would lift one of his tripods and spray the praisee with a liquid that smelled like rotten onions. A lot of Terrestrials had had to smile and take this, especially ministers of state. But these got what was referred to as a P.O. bonus.

Everything usually evens out.

Or so Simon Wagstaff thought on that fine day.

He picked up the guidebook and read it while drinking the wine. The guidebook said that the sphinx originated with the Egyptians. They thought of it as a creature that had a man’s face and a lion’s body. On the other hand, the Greeks, once they found out about the sphinx, made it into a creature with a woman’s head and lioness’ body. She even had women’s breasts, lovely white pink-tipped cones that must have distracted men when they should have been thinking about the answer to her question. Oedipus had ignored those obstacles to thought, which maybe didn’t say much for Oedipus. He was a little strange, married his mother, killed his father. He had answered the sphinx’s question correctly, but that hadn’t kept him out of trouble later.

And what about the sphinx’s sex life? She hung around on the road to Thebes, Greece, which was a long way from Thebes, Egypt, and from the male sphinxes. Had she been like the female black widow spider and made love to men before she devoured them?

Simon wasn’t particularly randy, but like everybody else he thought a lot about sex.

The Egyptian sphinx had massiveness and a vast antiquity. The Greek sphinx had class. The Egyptian was ponderosity and masculinity. The Greek was beauty and femaleness. Leave it to the Greeks to make something philosophical out of the merely physical of the Egyptians. The Greeks had made their sphinx a woman because she knew The Secret.

But she had found somebody who could answer her questions.

After which she killed herself.

Simon wasn’t in much danger of having to commit suicide.

Nobody ever answered his questions.

The guidebook in his hand said that the sphinx’s face was supposed to have Pharaoh Chephren’s features. The guidebook in his back pocket said that the face was that of the god Harmachis.

It did not matter which had been right. The reconstituted sphinx now bore the features of a famous movie star.

The guidebook in his hand also said that the sphinx was 189 feet long and 72 feet high. The one in his pocket said the sphinx was 172 feet long and 66 feet high. Had one of the measuring teams been drunk? Or had the editor been drunk? Or had the typesetter had financial and marital problems? Or had someone maliciously inserted the wrong information just to screw people up?

Ramona said, “You’re not listening!”

“Sorry,” Simon said. And he was. This was one of those rare moments when Ramona suddenly became aware that she was talking to herself. She was scared. People who talk to themselves are either insane, deep thinkers, lonely, or all three. She knew she wasn’t crazy or a deep thinker, so she must be lonely. And she feared loneliness worse than drowning, which was her pet horror.

Simon was lonely, too, but chiefly because he felt that the universe was being unfair in not giving answers to his questions. But now was not the time to think of himself; Ramona needed comforting.

“Listen, Ramona, here’s a love song for you.”

It was titled The Anathematic Mathematics of Love. This was one of the poems of “Count” Hippolyt Bruga, né Julius Ganz, an early 20th-century expressionist. Ben Hecht had once written a biography of him, but the only surviving copy was in the Vatican archives. Though critics considered Bruga only a minor poet, Simon loved him best of all and had composed music for many of his works.

First, though, Simon thought he should explain the references and the situation since she didn’t read anything but True Confessions and best sellers.

“Robert Browning was a great Victorian poet who married the minor poet Elizabeth Barrett,” he said.

“I know that,” Ramona said. “I’m not as dumb as you think I am. I saw The Barretts of Wimpole Street on TV last year. With Peck Burton and Marilyn Mamri. It was so sad; her father was a real bastard. He killed her pet dog just because Elizabeth ran off with Browning. Old Barrett had eyes for his own daughter, would you believe it? Well, she didn’t actually run off. She was paralyzed from the waist down, and Peck, I mean Browning, had to push her wheelchair through the streets of London while her father tried to run them down with a horse and buggy. It was the most exciting chase scene I’ve ever seen.”

“I’ll bet,” Simon said. “So you know about them. Anyway, Elizabeth wrote a series of love poems to Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese. He called her his Portuguese because she was so dark.”

“How sweet!”

“Yes. Anyway, the most famous sonnet is the one in which she enumerates the varieties of love she has for him. This inspired Bruga’s poem, though he didn’t set it in sonnet form.”

Simon sang:

“Those were Bruga’s last words,” Simon said. “He was beaten to death a minute later by an enraged wino.”

“I don’t blame him,” Ramona murmured.

“Bruga only did his best work when he was paid on the spot for his instant poetry,” Simon said. “But in this case he was improvising free. He’d invited this penniless bum up to his Greenwich Village apartment to have a few gallons of muscatel with him and his mistress. And see the thanks he got.”

“Everybody’s a critic,” Ramona said.

Simon winced. She said, “What’s the matter?”

He plucked the banjo as if it were a chicken and sang:

Feathers of sadness fluttered about them. Ramona cackled as if she had just laid an egg. It was, however, nervousness, not joy, that she proclaimed. She always got edgy when he slid into a melancholy mood.

“It’s such a glorious day,” she said. “How can you be sad when the sun is shining? You’re spoiling the picnic.”

“Sorry,” he said. “My sun is black. But you’re right. We’re lovers, and lovers should make each other happy. Here’s an old Arabian love song:

It was then that Ramona became aware that his mood came more from the outside than the inside. The breeze had died, and silence as thick and as heavy as the nativity of a mushroom in a diamond mine, or as gas passed during a prayer meeting, had fallen everywhere. The sky was clotted with clouds as black as rotten spots on a banana. Yet, only a minute before, the horizon had been as unbroken as a fake genealogy.

Simon got to his feet and put his banjo in its case. Ramona busied herself with putting plates and cups in the basket. “You can’t depend on anything,” she said, close to tears. “It never, just never, rains here in the dry season.”

“How’d those clouds get here without a wind?” Simon said.

As usual, his question was not answered.

Ramona had just folded up the blanket when the first raindrops fell. The two started across the top of the sphinx’s head toward the steps but never got to them. The drops became a solid body of water, as if the whole sky were a big decanter that some giant drunk had accidentally tipped over. They were knocked down, and the basket was torn from Ramona’s hands and sent floating over the side of the head. Ramona almost went, too, but Simon grabbed her hand and they crawled to the guard fence at the rim of the head and gripped an upright bar.

Later, Simon could recall almost nothing vividly. It was one long blur of numbed horror, of brutal heaviness of the rain, cold, teeth chattering, hands aching from squeezing the iron bar, increasing darkness, a sudden influx of people who’d fled the ground below, a vague wondering why they’d crowded onto the top of the sphinx’s head, a terrifying realization of why when a sea rolled over him, his panicked rearing upward to keep from drowning, his loosing of the bar because the water had risen to his nose, a single muffled cry from Ramona, somewhere in the smash and flurry, and then he was swimming with nowhere to go.

The case with the banjo in it floated before him. He grabbed it. It provided some buoyancy, and after he’d shucked all his clothing, he could stay afloat by hanging onto it and treading water. Once, a camel swam by him with five men battling to get onto its back. Then it went under, and the last he saw of it was one rolling eye.

Sometime later, he drifted by the tip of the Great Pyramid. Clinging to it was a woman who screamed until the rising water filled her mouth. Simon floated on by, vainly trying to comprehend that somehow so much rain had fallen that the arid land of Egypt was now over 472 feet beneath him.

And then there came the time in the darkness of night and the still almost-solid rain when he prepared to give up his waterlogged ghost and let himself sink. He was too exhausted to fight anymore, it was all over, down the drain for him.

Simon was an atheist, but he prayed to Jahweh, his father’s god, Mary, his grandmother’s favorite deity, and Gitche Manitou, his mother’s god. It couldn’t hurt.

Before he was done, he bumped into something solid. Something that was also hollow, since it boomed like a drum beneath the blows of the rain.

A few seconds afterward, the booming stopped. He was so numb that it was some time before he understood that this was because the rain had also stopped.

He groped around the object. It was coffin-shaped but far too large to be a coffin unless a dead elephant was in it. Its top was slick, and about eight inches above water. He lifted the banjo case and shoved it inward. The object dipped a little under his weight, but by placing the flats of his palms on it, he got enough friction to pull himself slowly onto the flat surface and then onto its center.

He lay there panting, face down, too cold and miserable to sleep. Despite which, he went to sleep, though his dreams were not pleasant. But then they seldom were.

When he awoke, he looked at his watch. It was 07:08. He had slept at least twelve hours, though it hadn’t been refreshing. Then, feeling warm on one side, he turned over slowly. A dog was snuggled up against him. After a while, the dog opened one eye. Simon patted it and lay back face down, his arm around it. He was hungry, which made him wonder if he wouldn’t end up having to eat the dog. Or vice versa. It was a mongrel weighing about sixty pounds to his one hundred and forty. It was probably stronger than he, and bound to be very hungry. Dogs were always hungry.

He fell asleep again and when he awoke it was night again. The dog was up, a dim yellow-brown, long-muzzled shape walking stiffly around as if it had arthritis. Simon called it to him because he didn’t want it upsetting the delicate balance. It came to him and licked his face, though whether from a need for affection or a desire to find out how he tasted, Simon did not know. Eventually, he fell asleep, waking as stiff as a piece of driftwood (or a bone long buried by a dog). But he was warm. The clouds were gone, the sun was up, and the water on the surface of the object had dried off.

For the first time, he could see it, though he still did not know what it was. It was about ten feet long and seven wide and had a transparent plastic cover.

He looked straight down into the face of a dead man.