RAHOTEP

The ceiling of Room 412 at Mercy General had a water stain shaped like the state of Florida. Walter Briggs had been staring at it for eleven days.

He'd had a lot of time to think about that — the Florida thing. Whether it meant something. Whether the universe, in its final communication with him, had chosen to speak through water damage and cheap acoustic tile. He'd decided it didn't mean anything. That was the universe's relationship with Walter Briggs in a nutshell, really. No hidden messages. No secret meanings. Just a stain on a ceiling that looked like a place he'd been to twice and hadn't particularly liked.

He sat with the memory of those two trips. The late afternoon humidity in Jacksonville that felt like holding wet cotton over your mouth, the air-conditioned car rentals that smelled of stale menthol and ozone, the endless flat stretches of pine scrub leading to dinners where people talked with loud, unearned confidence about real estate holdings and tax shelters. He had stood on a balcony overlooking a marina in 1974, holding a gin and tonic until the ice dissolved into warm brine, listening to a man named Henderson explain how land in Osceola County was going to triple in five years. Walter had known the man was wrong. He had known precisely where the flaw in the math lay, had traced it out on a cocktail napkin with a borrowed ballpoint pen while Henderson was in the bathroom, and then he had folded the napkin up and slipped it into his trouser pocket and said nothing when the man returned. That was always the pattern. He held the key, verified that the lock would yield, and then walked away before turning it.

He was ninety-three years old and he was dying and there was nobody in the room.

There had been a nurse named Cynthia who came every four hours and was unfailingly kind to him in that particular way that people are kind to the very old and the very alone — with a kind of careful brightness, like she was afraid the wrong word might shatter him. He appreciated Cynthia. He'd told her once that she had beautiful eyes, which she did, and she'd laughed and said Mr. Briggs you are something else and he'd thought: yes, well. That's always been the assessment.

He'd been something else his entire life. Something else than what he should have been. Something else than what everyone — teachers, women, the occasional stunned employer — had predicted he would be. 'Walter has more natural ability than any student I've encountered in thirty years of teaching'. He still remembered that. Mrs. Calloway. Eleventh grade English. She'd written it on a paper he'd dashed off the night before, half-drunk on stolen bourbon, about The Great Gatsby. He remembered thinking even then: she's right, you know. I really am something.

The paper had sat on his desk for three weeks afterward, the red ink fading slightly where the afternoon light caught it through the high windows of Oak Park High School. He had stared at those loops and arches, the firm, unfaltering strokes of a woman who had spent forty years grading the pedestrian thoughts of future insurance adjusters and hardware store managers, and he had felt the cold, familiar weight of expectation descend. It wasn't the grade that terrified him; it was the precedent. If he could write like that without trying, what would be demanded of him if he actually applied himself? What if he brought every ounce of his intelligence to bear on a blank page and found that Mrs. Calloway was wrong, that the ceiling was only three feet above his head after all?

He just never figured out what.

Three wives had tried to help him figure it out. Linda, who was patient for seven years before she wasn't. Renee, who loved him with an intensity that frightened him so thoroughly he drank himself out of the marriage in fourteen months. Carol, who was the most sensible of the three and had simply looked at him one morning over coffee — he was fifty-one, she was forty-eight — and said Walter, I think we both know this isn't going anywhere and he had said yes because she was right and because agreement was so much easier than the alternative.

He remembered the kitchen with Carol. The yellow Formica counter that had a small cigarette burn near the toaster, the quiet hum of the Westinghouse refrigerator cutting in and out, the way the November sun hit her coffee mug—a heavy beige ceramic thing she'd bought at a craft fair in Vermont before they met. There was no anger in her voice, only the flat, clean clarity of an inventory taken and closed. She had waited four years for him to finish the translation of the French political essays he'd brought home from a trip to Montreal, the ones he'd assured her would establish his reputation with the regional quarterlies. The manuscript pages were still in the second drawer of his desk, tucked behind old tax returns and half-used pads of yellow legal paper, the first three chapters polished to a diamond sheen and the remaining eight untouched.

No children. He'd thought about that more in the last eleven days than in the previous forty years combined. Not with grief exactly. More with the particular bewilderment of someone who has found a receipt for something they don't remember buying.

Outside the window it was November. The trees had gone bare and the sky was the color of old dishwater and somewhere down the hall a television was playing at a volume appropriate for the seriously hard of hearing. He could make out what sounded like a game show. The bright synthetic enthusiasm of it reached him in waves.

Walter, he thought, you really made a mess of this.

The thought arrived without particular heat. That was the strange thing about ninety-three — the regrets had all gone cool. They sat in him like stones that had been in a river a long time, smooth and heavy and without edges. He could catalog them without flinching now. The fellowship at Northwestern he'd laughed off. The novel he'd started four times and abandoned four times, each draft better than the last and therefore more frightening. The morning in 1987 when his broker had called about a small technology company in Cupertino and Walter had been hungover and distracted and had said maybe later. The look on Linda's face the last time she'd believed him about the drinking.

There was also the summer in 1968 when he'd taken a job at a small archival library in Evanston, hired to index a collection of nineteenth-century trade records. The head librarian, an elderly scholar whose knuckles were swollen with arthritis, had watched Walter work for three days before coming to stand behind his chair. You see the internal logic of the series, don't you? the old man had asked, his voice low with genuine wonder. You see where the recorder made the entries out of sequence. It takes most people five years to get the feel for these ledgers. Walter had smiled, nodded, and resigned the following Friday, leaving forty boxes of uncataloged letters on the wooden tables, because the thought of spending thirty years being the man who understood the ledgers felt like stepping into a tomb that had already been swept clean for him.

He had been, he understood now, afraid. Not of failure — failure he'd courted cheerfully his entire life. Afraid of trying. Genuinely, seriously, with everything he had. Because if you tried like that and still fell short, what did you have left? Better to hold the potential intact, like a winning lottery ticket you never cash, always worth a fortune in theory.

He almost laughed. It hurt too much to actually laugh.

The monitors beside him made their patient sounds. The Florida stain looked back at him without comment.

Ninety-three years, Walter thought. And the best thing anyone will say about you is that you had beautiful eyes.

He closed them.

— ✦ —

The light, when it came, was nothing like he expected — and Walter had expected quite a lot, having given the matter serious thought in the last eleven days. He'd cycled through the possibilities with the same restless intelligence he'd applied to everything except his own life: the tunnel, the relatives, the overwhelming peace of the near-death accounts he'd found himself reading on his phone at three in the morning when sleep wouldn't come.

What he got was simply: white. Not blinding. Not warm or cold. Just an immense, textureless white, like standing inside a cloud that had very strong opinions about itself.

And then the voices.

There were two of them. They were not speaking to him — or rather, they were speaking about him, with the mild professional tone of people reviewing a file.

...Briggs, Walter Allen. Ninety-three years, four months, eleven days...

I have him. Reintegration profile looks standard. Where's he going?

Infant placement, standard queue. There's a family in — wait.

A pause. Walter stood in the white and waited. He had the distinct impression of being a piece of luggage on a conveyor belt.

There's a flag here.

What kind of flag?

Bureaucratic. Hold on... A sound that Walter could only describe as cosmic page-turning. The infant placement has a processing error. The slot...

Can we reroute?

Already looking. There's an opening but it's — this is unusual.

How unusual?

It's not an infant.

Another pause. Longer this time.

How old?

Ten. And there are... circumstances.

Does he meet the criteria?

Technically. The soul profile is compatible. It's just —

If he meets the criteria, place him. We're backed up.

Placing.

Walter had time to think: well, this seems like someone's problem — and then the white went away.

— ✦ —

Darkness. Then sensation, arriving in pieces: the roughness of linen beneath his hands. Stone beneath that, warm from a heat source somewhere nearby. Air that smelled of something floral and something underneath it that was animal and ancient and close.

He could not move.

He understood, distantly, that this had apparently been the case for some time.

There was a sound: rhythmic, grinding. A woman humming, low and almost tuneless, with the unconscious quality of someone who doesn't know they're doing it. The sound of something being pounded in a bowl.

Okay, Walter thought. Okay. Let's think about this.

He thought about it. The inventory came slowly, each item stranger than the last. He was sitting upright. He was small — the sense of scale was all wrong, the way the world tilts when you look at it from a child's height. His hands in his lap were a child's hands.

He moved his eyes.

After — apparently — a very long time of not doing that, his eyes moved.

The room resolved. Stone walls. Torchlight guttering in a bracket to his left. A low table. A woman kneeling at the table with her back to him, working a pestle in a deep stone bowl, the source of the grinding, still humming, a loose dark braid falling between her shoulder blades.

She had not noticed.

Of course she hasn't noticed, Walter thought. The boy apparently doesn't do anything.

He looked at his hands again. Small and brown and very still in his lap. He tried to lift one. After a moment of concentrated effort that felt like moving furniture with his mind, the fingers twitched.

The woman stopped humming.

She didn't turn. She had simply gone very still, pestle suspended, her whole body listening.

Walter looked at her and thought about Florida. About Room 412. About the water stain and Cynthia's kind eyes and the game show bleeding down the hall.

Then he looked at the torchlight, and the stone walls, and his small brown hands.

Ra is satisfied, he thought, though he didn't yet know what that meant.

The woman turned.