Scarab: When He Loomed

• Scarab: Between Cairo and Rome
• Scarab: An Awfully Big Adventure

Alain Frechette

Jacqueline recoiled at her father's declaration. How could she have brought his death? She then measured how rudely he intended it. He said it with no more accusation that noting that she brought him a double burger rather than a single but that mildness may have more to do with his fatal weakness. She trusted this would be his last day, one whose dwindling already retreated from the windowsill as though the sun did not want to see another man pass from this earth, let alone a god.

The nearly dead exuded an odor like nothing else Jacqueline had ever smelled. It was not the smell of death; unique perfume myriad centuries had bred the living to escape. The smell of the dying is more pitiable because humans are tribal and need comfort in their last hours. It was far from a pleasant aroma. You would not seek it out, daubing it behind ears to attract a mate, but it was not revolting. It was not the urine and feces leaking into obscured plastic bags, though that was present. It emanated from her father's skin, some last signal before degrading entirely.

"You told me to come," she said. "You sent the beetles."

The sound of his breathing, or the machines breathing for him, overwhelmed Jacqueline. She imagined them inflating him as though bellows, giving him enough air that he could waste some on his next words.

"Only one now."

This was not a question.

"Houdini, yeah," she said. His clouded eyes looked at her. He looked older than he had any right, but she reconsidered that thought the moment she had it. He was an Egyptian god. He looked far younger than a man of millennia. (She did not know how birth worked for gods. She also knew that she would never ask Wick or Mica to clarify.)

The machines pumped him with more breath, but she didn't see the point in making him waste it with a useless question.

"It is an escape artist, that's why," she answered. "I wish you could have pinned a little note to its coat to let me know not to drop it in the toilet."

He raised an eyebrow, then managed a surprisingly genuine smile. For a flash, she remembered how he had looked when she was tiny, when he loomed. She gazed at him with faint comprehension that he was someone who ought to love her. In his smile now, she couldn't feel that he did. She didn't love him, that was certain, nor did she feel obligated to it. Sympathize, maybe, but not love.

He closed his eyes again and lay still. She did not worry that had passed so quickly, with such anticlimax. The machines did not slow their functioning, so he remained alive.

Jacqueline felt the urge to ask him when he would die. Not because his continued life was inconvenient, but to sate her curiosity. If anyone knew the time of their death -- and a man who summoned her via insect did seem to fit the description -- it would be a god of the Underworld. Anubis, she could ask this. She could not reconcile that the jackal-headed god was the one before her, the man with a colostomy bag and amber bottles filled with different pills.

He was gray. Gray skin, gray hair, gray tongue when it slipped between gray lips to wet them for one of the last times it would.

He looked like a photograph of her memory, the negative left to fade in the sun until even her father's edges seemed indistinct. She hadn't hoped much for the death of a god, but she had dearly wished that it did not seem so disgustingly mortal.

The machines changed some tempo that meant nothing to Jacqueline -- they did not speed up or grow shrill with fatal urgency -- but Stacy toddled in to shoo Jacqueline back to Wick and Mica.

Her companions sat in silence on the day bed; Wick's a contented neutrality, Mica's nervous.

Mica jumped up, at first only standing before her as though to say something, then pulling her back to join them on the daybed, setting Jacqueline between them.

Mica sat again, hands on her lap as though trying to appear prim and patient. Jacqueline guessed much roiled within the steward. Excitement to be in the den of a god -- a boon to any witch, surely. Dread being close to death again. Anxiety at not being a pest. Beneath these all, concern for Jacqueline's emotional state, which came as a slight surprise to the god's daughter.

Wick held none of these emotions. Or, at least, the way these might play over his features remained inscrutable to Jacqueline. Whatever problems she might have with Mica -- and these seemed a hazy memory of a life before they entered her father's home ten minutes before -- the steward was never hard to read.

"What did he say?" demanded Mica. "I mean, we heard his saying something to you, but we were respectful enough to remain on this bed and not eavesdrop."

Jacqueline looked to Wick.

"I told her to remain seated," he added. "I was willing to hold her here if needed, but she gave me no cause yet."

Jacqueline nodded, her assumption about Mica reaffirmed.

"He said that I had brought his death."

"That isn't nice," said the steward, almost to herself.

"He did not seem bothered by it, though you are the only things I have brought." Jacqueline glared at them both. "Neither of you are allowed to kill my father. Illness is doing that well enough on its own."

"We have no intention of harming your father," answered Wick for them both, "if not the least because I cannot be confident that murdering a god -- even a deathly ill one -- wouldn't constitute a grave sin in need of celestial retribution."

"It could be a mercy killing," Jacqueline mused aloud.

Mica took this comment for something idle, but Wick held Jacqueline's hand with discomfiting warmth. "You won't do that again."

The way he said this, she had no question that he knew perfectly what she had done to -- or for -- her mother. She had no interest in agreeing or disagreeing with this invasion, something he had no right to know about, so she ignored it. If she could not have the sanctity of her mind around supernatural people, she didn't see why she would ever keep their company after this chore finished.

They sat a long moment together, Jacqueline nervous about what more either of her companions would say to her. She suspected she shed secrets to them the way one loses skin flakes and hair, unnoticed but persistently and without reprieve.

Stacy stepped back into the room and said, "I gave him something to make him more comfortable."

Jacqueline knew well what drug would accomplish this, an opiate, likely morphine. He would not wake up anytime soon. How dare she only get minutes after a day of driving to find the way.

Jacqueline also knew that, if Stacy had an opiate, she would have to have naloxone, a drug that could immediately counteract an overdose. It would not be a comforting transition. Her father would be slammed back to reality from the soft pink clouds above a poppy field. The shock of that alone might kill him. At best, it would make him sublimely miserable before his inevitable death.

Could this be what he wanted from her? Not the pleasant passing away, but the penance shot to his arm would bring? She did not want to ease him out of this life, but more than that, she did not want to punch him out of the world.

"I need to know what something he said meant."

"You didn't ask him when he said it?" To Stacy, this was a forgivable sin, but a sin, nevertheless. They were operating on thin margins of time right now. Anything that needed to be said or asked should be without hesitation. "What was it?"

"That she brought his death," Mica said before Jacqueline decided to allow this caring stranger into any more of her confidence than necessary.

Stacy gave an expression as though she had bit into a lemon. "You know, when people are passing, they say all sorts of things. Don't let it bother you. He probably didn't know what he was saying, whatever you think that ought to mean."

Stacy was sincere in her sympathy, but it couldn't bring Jacqueline an ounce of relief. "Will he wake up?"

The bluntness of this soured Stacy's expression again. Did she think Jacqueline was calling her skills into question?

"Yeah, it's not much. He needed a rest. He'll be up in a little bit." She looked at each of them in turn. "Do you guys want to order out some food? You must be hungry."

Jacqueline protested that they had eaten a little while ago, only to be surprised when Wick contradicted her before Mica could open her mouth, as she would.

"Dining would be wise."

In a bureau in the living room, Stacy pulled out twenty takeout menus with options from American to Zimbabwean. Did these menus belong to the nurse? Had she claimed a corner of her father's life for her convenience, or was her father a connoisseur of ordering out?

"Egyptian food, right?" Jacqueline asked. It was not so much inquiring after Wick's food preferences -- she had yet to see him eat any. She knew that, in these menus, there was a correct answer among the more numerous wrong. It was unavoidable that what she would choose would serve as his last meal. Wouldn't this be the respectful choice for the occasion? She hoped that this affair had not exhausted him, that he wouldn't rather have a chicken parm sub.

"Your father really shouldn't eat anything," said Stacy.

"What could the harm be?" asked Jacqueline, her eyes severe.

Stacy nodded, conceding the point but not approving it. She returned to check on Jacqueline's father, who seemed no more conscious or in need of her care now.

"Yes," Wick said. "I can direct you to what would best suit the occasion of the rite. Mica will, of course, conduct it."

Mica cycled through surprise, horror, and overwhelmed before landing on what Jacqueline suspected might be a barely restrained delight.

"Just to be completely clear, you want me to conduct a funerary rite for a god?"

Wick confirmed. "Jacqueline and I are the children of gods. It would not be seemly. Issues of etiquette do not burden you."

Mica did a little dance that abused some propriety or other. Had she ever felt burdened by etiquette?

"Why are you so happy?"

Mica managed to stop wiggling, but Jacqueline could see the urge was no less. She tried still to find the sobriety this occasion better demanded.

"Imagine you are an artist, barely more than a doodler in the grand scheme. Then you as told that the Sistine Chapel had been accidentally whitewashed, and you are handed markers," she said. "For a witch, this is major street cred and one fuckton of a challenge."

Jacqueline tried not to see the steward's point, but it was a struggle not to cede a little to Mica's enthusiasm for an unsavory task.

Wick checked the menu, making occultic marks in the margins of what she needed to order. Mica dashed back to the daybed to consult her Codex.

"When did you know we would need Mica?" asked Jacqueline once she was out of earshot. "Or a witch, at least?"

"I didn't," said Wick, not looking up from his task. It seemed to Jacqueline as though he wanted half the restaurant. "We followed a path none could see. She was a part of that and had been put to the likeliest use."

"Our quest could have stopped by the restaurant on the way here to save on the delivery fee, you know."

Wick studied her. "Then it would not have been the journey we needed."

"How much of this did you know in advance?"

Wick scratched his temple. "I held some guesses. This was among them, a likelier one, but it would be a lie to suggest it neared the top."

"So, my having to conduct a funeral ritual for my absent father didn't top your list? Care to share what you thought was likelier?"

Wick did not, Jacqueline saw in the tightness of his lips, but he also would because she had asked so directly and because she was allowing the perfume of grief into her lungs despite herself.

"We would arrive. Anubis would greet us at the door, seeming not a second older than when last you saw him. He would offer some words holding only meaning to you, and then would" -- his eyes grew unfocused, looking into a distance that was only a China hutch containing some Hummel figurines. "The way of gods is never simple for us. The soberest of them has too much of the trickster in them. They may hold a dire secret and need your help that instant, but they cannot keep themselves from evasion."

"You do that too."

Wick gave a wan smile. "It is a poor habit to have picked up."

Jacqueline sat back in a chair, crossing her arms over her stomach as though it ached. "You didn't think he was dying, then."

"I considered that one of the likelier outcomes. Not that he wasn't going to be dead, but that he wasn't dying."

After their shared day, she couldn't help but see it. "You didn't think he would be ailing. You assumed her would puff up like a phoenix or something."

"It is not unprecedented."

"And it's easier, right?" Jacqueline considered her question as though someone had asked it of her. "I saw my mother die -- you know this somehow. I helped her to die. I don't regret that. It was an inevitability we were exhausted at having postponed." She sighed, still finding tears edging the recollection. "It was a long death, a real one where there isn't an illusion of recovery. She looked worse at the end, my mother, but also more alive. She was going to die that day. We both knew it since I was going to make sure of it. She wasn't giving up, though, and it made her fuller. Do you see what I mean?"

"Your father has given up."

"I don't know. I honestly don't know him. I look at that body, so frail, and I see little pieces of me, my nose and the shape of my eyes. I see a nearly dead man. Show me the god in him, please."

Wick shook his head, and she knew that he couldn't. "The god is there in the man, burning like a lump of exhausted coal. It flared when he saw you by his bedside, but it is lower now, nearly doused."

"And when he dies?" She felt she should call him by his godly title, but that would relinquish some iota of disbelief. She then considered using the name by which his mother had known him but found that more sacred. "He is a man. I cannot see divinity, this glow, whatever it is. A man is dying there. You can't show me the god in him, but what happens then? Hasn't he existed since...? I'm not big on my mythology, but let's say at least five thousand years? I get that there isn't a ton of call for gods of the underworld at this point, but what then?"

"I don't know."

This was the most incredible thing he had said. "How can you not know? You came to me. You brought me here. Why don't you know what happens when he dies? Doesn't the world need what he does?"

"Did you?"

She gripped herself more tightly. "Did I need what he did? What did he do for me? Impregnated my mom and left?"

"Did you need a father?"

Jacqueline shrugged, having fielded this question enough. "It never did me much harm not to have one. I had my mother, and I had myself."

"Perhaps that will be how the world feels, no longer having Anubis."

Jacqueline could feel her pulse in her fingers, her first and overdue alert that she had dug her nails into her sides through the fabric of her clothing. She felt overdressed, silly for having changed only to sit near her father's failing body for a few minutes, then talk about him everywhere he was not, treating him as an object of discussion but not a subject worth joining the conversation.

"I don't want him to die," she said.

"I wouldn't think differently."

"I needed to say that. For the world, yes, but I do not revel in the idea that I will no longer have a parent."

He lay his hand on her knee. She looked at it as she might a cat who had leaped there when no one told her there might be a cat, then she gazed her questions at Wick. But it was soothing, if uncharacteristic, and she allowed it to continue.

"Did you hope for him? That he would come back and be a father to you?"

"Only in a little kid way for a few years. Whenever my mom would have a bad breakup -- and she had a few of those -- I thought about what it would be like if my father came back. He didn't. I didn't hate him or miss him. He was something neutral in my life that I did not have any reason to consider much." She allowed herself a few deep breaths before continuing, unsure where this would lead her. "I'll be like an orphan, won't I?"

She could see he was unsure whether to take this as gallows' humor. To be fair, neither was she.

"You do not have anyone else?"

She gave a little laugh without humor. "I have plenty of people who would disagree with my urge to tell you that I don't. Not just cousins and the like."

"On your mother's side."

Now, she laughed honestly and held a hand to her mouth to stop it from erupting further. "I must have godly cousins! Where the hell are they?" she joked, scanning the room as though for dry land. She frowned. "No, really. Where are they? Why are we here? Shouldn't a throng attend my father, being plied with frankincense or... I'm not sure what is appropriate. Why is it just us? Where is his" -- her mind spun her vocabulary around until she found the term -- "pantheon?"

"To the god, his death may be no more pressing than a boil being lanced," Wick said. "Or one must consider that they preceded him."

"Then I'll be glad never to have to deal with one of them."

Wick called the restaurant from the phone in the kitchen, his deep voice soothing as it read off items whose deliciousness seemed present even in their names.

Mica returned then, looking down at her book instead of either of them. She dropped it onto the table, stroking it as though she could physically pull from it answers it resisted giving.

"What about Stacy?" asked Jacqueline.

"Hm?" Mica frowned, apparently not understanding.

"We need to conduct this ceremony you are finding. How are we going to get her to leave us alone?"

"Hey, Stace," Mica shouted into the living room. "That's Anubis in that bed. The Egyptian God of the Underworld."

"Oh, I'm aware."

Jacqueline was so startled that she almost tipped from her chair and banged her elbow to stop falling.

"Yeah, I thought you might be." Mica approached the pass-through for the kitchen. "Do you want to help us in his transition ritual?"

The nurse returned to them but kept her reverent eyes on the sleeping god in the other room. "He was always good to me. It's the job, helping them pass." She wrinkled her nose, sad affection there. "I'm gonna make some sweet tea. Any of you want some before you start?"

Mica asked for a glass and said Jacqueline would have some as well.

"How could she know that?" Jacqueline asked though she did not bother directing the question at anyone.

"Death opens doors in human minds," said Wick, passing the nurse. "Most see it only a few times in their lives. Some do not see it even when it is their own death. Nurses, more than most people, watch the dying until that moment when they go where most can never follow. They develop an awareness beyond what they tell others."

"So, Stacy the Nurse is cosmically attuned because people die around her so much?'

Mica nodded. "Not the optimal way of getting it, but yeah, that was my guess. I'm not sure she'll remember this for what it was after, but she knows your dad."