SAMUEL RAFAEL BARBER / AN ANNOUNCEMENT FROM PRESIDENT LEE PAXSON, AS ANNOTATED BY AN ANONYMOUS MEMBER OF THE DEPARTMENT OF EGYPTOLOGY AND CIRCULATED THROUGH ITS LISTSERV
Dear fellow members of the Princeton Community: I write to share the wonderful news that, while the artifacts in question await installation in the British Museum1, Professor Martin Pegg2 has won the prestigious Archaeologist of the Year award3 presented by Contemporary Archaeology magazine for his discovery of a sarcophagus in Cairo containing the remains of a few children thought to have been sacrificed to the god Moloch. Please join me in congratulating Martin!
1. The sarcophagus will now be taken to the Museum of London’s archive for analysis by its independent charity company. Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s disgraced former antiquities chief, held a press conference last week calling for the sarcophagus’s immediate return alongside a personal apology from the British Prime Minister and American President lest he “make their lives a living hell” if they refuse “my reasonable demands.” These include a revival of his panned History Channel reality television show “Chasing Mummies: The Amazing Adventures of Zahi Hawass,” and a recommitment to his clothing lines, which until recently were sold at Harrod’s department store in London. Products ranged from Stetsons resembling the hat worn by Harrison Ford in the Indiana Jones franchise to a somewhat broader catalogue of clothing which seeks, in the language of catalogue copy, to “harken back to Egypt’s golden age of discovery in the early 20th century” through rugged khakis, denim shirts, and carefully worn leather jackets. “Having plundered my homeland during the barbaric expansion of imperialism—rationalized under the duplicitous values espoused by the so-called Enlightenment, which was really more like an Endarkenment—your universities and your companies, at the behest of your so-called elected officials, are now plundering my bank account for my refusal to facilitate your thievery of our culture. This will not stand.” Near the end of the press conference, when asked about the string of suspicious deaths among Professor Pegg’s team in recent months, the Egyptian chuckled before expressing concern that, “Martin still seems to misunderstand the nature of this conflict.”↩
2. Of course, Martin was not alone in his discovery of the coffin. The co-lead of a thirteen-month dig undertaken in tandem with the University of Bonn and the University of Liverpool, he is, however, both the principal architect of the excavation as well as the sole surviving member of the team originally comprised of nineteen men and eleven women.↩
3. Following a social media controversy regarding this year’s recipient, the sponsoring magazine has released a statement from Pegg seeking to (in the words of a public relations firm hired to conduct damage control) “rectify confusions” and “clarify things.” Given our esteemed President’s telling refusal to provide this crucial context himself, Professor Pegg’s narrative reads, in its entirety, as follows:
Tensions had been running high for quite some time. There was but a month left before we exhausted our funding, and everyone was concerned they’d been misled. This or that graduate student could be heard—on smoke breaks, during the lunch hour, in those dwindling embers of the night between the emptying of the last beer bottle and the subsuming of the last frigid body within the last toasty sleeping bag—complaining over the phone to parents and spouses and friends that the whole endeavor was a lemon. A wrinkly, stinky lemon. When the sarcophagus was retrieved and opened, well, everything changed. Jubilation was the order of the day. Of course, we hadn’t taken any notice of the mysterious glyph carved into each side of the coffin.
Before he and the others passed, our mathematician didn’t get a look at the symbol, and our linguist hadn’t adequate time for research in those terrifying hours before consumption. Given that the international community has been solicited to help decipher the symbol for the past year to no avail, it seems that the source of what sensationalist media have termed “Pegg’s Plague” might elude human understanding. Of course, bad faith actors—international and domestic—have not only made much ado about nothing regarding this so-called “existential horror of unprecedented proportions,” but have also misidentified who deserves credit and who deserves blame for our discovery. The best of plans sometimes prove inadequate and the best of mentors sometimes disappoint their pupils, though I realize this will make little sense without context. I really ought to start at the beginning. Not the very beginning, of course. My childhood was exceptionally happy, and so exceptionally boring.
We’d been originally tasked, of course, with verifying that the dig site did, in fact, correspond with a particular episode only obliquely mentioned during Moses’s journey in The Book of Exodus. You are surely all familiar with the controversies arising from Exodus’s confounding historical inaccuracies when juxtaposed with the established archeological record, as well as the complete and utter lack of any historical evidence of Hebrew slaves in Egypt. Following the creation of Israel, archeologists not unlike ourselves were among the very most enthusiastic international observers. They understood the tremendous access and opportunity to find proof of Moses’s courageous escape from oppression, as well as the eternally significant covenant offered by our Lord. They did not understand the long-term apartheid state ramifications for the Palestinian people. I know Bibi won’t like me saying this. His whispered words of affirmation—and promises of additional compensation should our findings prove usable as a deflection from his corruption trial—through the telephone, as I drifted off to sleep during the arduous days of the dig, meant everything to me. But I’m my own man, and I call balls and strikes like I seem them, as any baseball umpire or archeologist should.
And yet, not one Semitic pot from this period has been discovered in Egypt during the past seventy years of persistent exploration. Well, we sought to change all that. It goes without saying that many generous donors have continued funding excavations and research even in the absence of any proof whatsoever. Although their lawyers have warned me from further association of any kind, I value my principles too highly to not credit Hobby Lobby in particular for providing the bulk of the funding for our dig. I suggest regulators extend their current investigation of the company’s illicit antiquity smuggling operation in The United States of America v. Approximately Four Hundred Fifty (450) Ancient Cuneiform Tablets; and Approximately Three Thousand (3,000) Ancient-Clay Bullae far beyond Hobby Lobby’s dealings with ISIS and adjacent groups in Iraq. You might scoff, and Hobby Lobby might send cease and desist after cease and desist to my lawyers each and every time I mention their involvement in an interview or social media post, but without their help—or their contacts in the United Arab Emirates, for that matter—I could never have done it. The truth matters above all. And the truth is I could never have won this fantastic award without Bibi, or Hobby Lobby, or Professor Roger Simmons, in whose memory I dedicate this apologia.
Having ostensibly determined the location of an ancient campsite from Moses’s excursion far beneath the grounds of a noodle shop following the translation of an obscure geographic reference from The Book of Leviticus (Leviticus 15: 19-20 I believe it was), we began our work some two years ago. This much you know. The first months were slow going. An unusually relentless rainy season led to delay after delay, and the owner of the noodle shop—originally so accommodating, having offered us a discount on the already absurdly cheap lunch specials for the entirety of our crew—became annoyed that our equipment was eliminating half of his parking lot’s available spaces, to say nothing of how our materials and construction signage seemed to be signaling to potential customers that the restaurant was closed for renovation. Though he did not speak English and only a few of our team spoke Arabic, he took to harassing our women with crude gestures and vile pantomiming. Further specificity is unfit for print. Suffice it to say that this one man is not intended to represent the whole Egyptian people, but my absolute honesty on this and all points is of the utmost importance in maintaining my credibility, given the story to come.
Our dig began under less than auspicious circumstances and conditions quickly grew worse. The rain led to a massive influx of mosquitoes, which harassed us day and night. In no time at all, our camp was ravaged with malaria and dengue fever, despite the drug regimen to which we were all required to adhere prior to our arrival. Our accountant hadn’t budgeted for this degree of concurrent sickness, and we feared we lacked the results and resources to successfully apply for permits extending our project. The locals we had hired and my co-lead, Professor Roger Simmons, fell ill as well.
By this time, some nine months had elapsed, and we’d managed to excavate a mere thirty meters, a fraction of our goal of seventy. That the rock was far denser than expected certainly didn’t help (requiring the ordering of several obscure drill bits and the attending delays) and we suddenly began wondering if an entirely different approach was needed.
Contrary to my advice, Roger had taken to ignoring calls from Hobby Lobby by this point. In short, I was becoming concerned that I would not recover as quickly from this reputational blight as I had from The Acapulco Scandal. Given the stakes of failure—given the indignities and grotesqueries levied by the noodle shop owner day after day—Roger and I were able to swallow our pride and secretly revise our plans. Although he was quite feverish during this period, I really must insist that Roger was in complete control of his critical faculties. I really have no choice but to insist that this prestigious award is a direct consequence of his extralegal ingenuity, not mine.
Contrary to the terms of our contract with the proprietor of the noodle shop, we suddenly began drilling at a diagonal. The engineers assured us during our original preparations that it was perfectly reasonable to form a sort of L, drilling seventy meters straight down before then drilling horizontally a further ten meters so as to reach the referenced secret chamber. The eschewing of this minimally-invasive plan for a far riskier venture was certainly all Simmons’s idea. I believe it was Simmons who instructed the engineers to withhold their revised calculations and remain mum on the subject to the others. We were certainly imperiling the business’s foundation. Considering the myriad complexities not superficially evident when examining the impact of this decision out of context, I ask that you reserve judgment as to my own guilt until you have reached the conclusion of this sheepish record. Over the course of numerous collaborations throughout my illustrious career, I’ve learned modesty, learned when to share credit. While I do believe my contributions are primarily responsible for the advancements of knowledge celebrated by this award, I humbly suggest that Roger’s contributions are those which have gotten us into this mess. And that were it not for his questionable decision-making, Roger would be the one making this public statement, Roger would be the one petitioning various foreign governments for political asylum.
The next month saw the gradual recovery of those who had been ill while the illegal drilling continued apace. Once we had burrowed a further thirty meters and remote sensors detected a cavern in the approximate region we had expected, even Roger returned to his usual boisterous self.
But the least resilient among us never quite recovered from these crises of faith, even as their health improved. Senior members of the team understood that, as long as we avoided disaster in the collapse of the chamber or the destruction of the noodle shop, the endeavor could be framed just so on our résumés. We could parlay a few recovered artifacts into slight pay bumps. A disappointment to be sure, but a recoverable one. Our grad students were less certain. Can we blame them? Well, we can, and so we do, you and I. But it is not entirely their fault that misrepresentation and intellectual posturing afflict the soul of our field not unlike the plague which cannibalizes the souls of everyone with whom it comes into contact, necessitating the grounding of all flights in and out of Egypt and the closing of all borders within Europe and Northern Africa over these past six months.
Roger was in many ways their teacher, their mentor, their guide. To be perfectly frank, I always looked up to Roger myself, as influential as he was to the early days of my intellectual development. He was my undergraduate mentor and my graduate mentor and my friend. To this day I really must insist that the blame for the events I’m about to narrate resides entirely upon the narrow shoulders of our fearless leader Professor Roger Simmons of Liverpool, who was definitely the brains of the operation. If he’s the brains, then I’m the brawn, the looks. I carry heavy things across my broad shoulders and sweet talk investors and department chairs and bureaucrats of foreign countries, heads of state, even, as the situation dictates. It’s Roger who conspired against the state of Egypt, Roger who betrayed Bibi’s trust, Roger who is responsible for the estimated 160,000—and growing—re-animated corpses who’ve reclaimed every mall in the region, shuffling from one Apple store to the next, one Levi’s store to the next.
And, well, if you’re left unconvinced by this, in the absence of his ability to testify, I really must reiterate that the blame be partially shared by the grad students whose persistent moping and complaining as we dug closer and closer to the chamber didn’t help one bit. The grad students assuredly jinxed us to a far greater extent than even the malevolent curse performed in the dead of night by the proprietor of the noodle shop, which he has since claimed was necessary in order to preserve the cultural heritage of the region in the face of centuries of Western imperialism. Which is certainly a fair point.
The chamber was ultimately found to be about ten meters wide and five meters in height. The coffin was quite heavy and required the strength of four men to remove— Johnson, Estevez, Gamal, and Salah, as you all know, by now. They were taken first, after all, ranting and raving that locusts roamed beneath their skin and within their ears, leading to their puncturing of ear drums with sticks and knives before the eventual self-immolation in our nightly campfire. Al Jazeera was right, I believe, in reporting that these four lost their minds within a half hour of their contribution to this prestigious prize I now metaphorically hold in these hands of mine, if not literally hold in these hands of mine, due to the legal implications, due to the international quarantine. Roger and the rest were much less careful than they should have been. This is an essential takeaway.
I am not exactly sure how much of this has been publicized, so forgive me if any of this is common knowledge. In contrast to the immediacy with which the first wave of infection and death was corrupted, those who had only briefly touched the coffin or the fragments of bone from its corpses were dead within the next thirty-six hours. Each of these poor twenty-three souls became convinced that they were dying of thirst, and that their blood had turned to water. Their final hours were deeply upsetting. On this we can find common ground.
I understand that in his last moments, Roger used his dying breaths to scrawl a message in his own blood upon the wall of his motel room attesting to his culpability. I understand that it read thusly: “I, Roger Simmons, professor emeritus of classical archeology at the University of Liverpool, am to be solely blamed for the unfortunate discovery of the sarcophagus in Cairo containing the remains of a few children thought to have been sacrificed to the god Moloch following the distasteful and fraudulent revision of our dig, for which I am also solely deserving of blame, depending on your general attitude regarding graduate students. I really must insist that Martin, my dear friend and brightest pupil, played only the smallest of parts in the disreputable aspects of our project, while playing only the largest parts in all reputable aspects of our project. I insist that he be allowed to keep his job regardless of the extent to which the plague from which I am dying at this very moment—here, alone in a locked room whose only key remains in my pocket—spreads across the globe. I understand the consequences of my actions and ask that others not violate my memory by disbelieving my confession or otherwise scrutinizing the situation any further.”
I understand that graphology analysis has suggested that the message in question does not at all resemble Simmons’s script, however I really must insist that we mitigate paranoid thinking and its implications in remembering that the painting of a single finger is bound to leave a different record than when we utilize an entire hand to grasp and use a writing implement, to say nothing of the impact of his madness upon the calligraphy. To allow one’s mind—even for but a moment!—to consider the likelihood of some vast conspiracy is to indulge in despicable anti-Semitism on par with the Soros-bashing Russian bots infecting twitter. Such uncouth thinking remains beneath contempt.
In any case, I suggest we respect the wishes of the dead and leave things as they lie. After all, I’ve provided thorough documentation proving that, at the moment in question, I was across town recuperating from the extraordinary strain of the dig with the help of hashish, as prescribed by my physician. These tragic developments took place outside the scope of my influence, unfortunately. Besides, while it is true that I remain on good terms with the ever-gracious Betsy Berns Korn and her wonderful organization, Glenn Kessler over at the Washington Post has already assigned the dreaded four Pinocchios to the claim within the ProPublica investigative report that AIPAC hired me to plant forged pots at the originally-planned dig site, and an obscene—albeit more than justified—three Pinocchios to the claim that AIPAC has been taking care of loose ends ever since. The mere fact of my willingness to even broach these discredited accusations is as much a testament to my extreme innocence as any air-tight alibi, though it should be said that among all air-tight alibis, mine has both the most air and tightness.
In any case, I fear it would be a gross violation of my mentor’s memory to investigate the situation any further. I have been absolutely forthcoming about every single aspect of this situation. Other than Roger—whose room was locked from the inside with the only key found within a pant pocket moments after the exceedingly traumatized clerk discovered his corpse the next morning, I must now sadly remind you all—I do not believe any of the twenty-two in this second wave of infection and death lived long enough to record their experiences or otherwise contradict the account I am now offering. Tragic.
Apart from Mr. Kessler, the media has been thoroughly uncharitable to me ever since that video of the zombies looting and vandalizing that mall Starbucks went viral. With the opportunity provided to me through this statement, I can now thank the op-ed page of the New York Times and Mr. Stephens, in particular, for his unflinching words of support during this tumultuous time as the twitter mob conducts its latest lynching. Perhaps it goes without saying, but cancel culture has run amok yet again.
Perhaps this too goes without saying, but of the four team members to have survived the second wave of infection and death, the other three have all since perished in independent freak accidents, and I have an alibi for each. Just in case you were wondering. I was in rehab during Molly’s car accident, working late at the office during Ross’s accidental autoerotic asphyxiation, and at my parents’ place for a Sunday dinner when Professor Espinal tripped into that jet engine.
I apologize for my absence from the public sphere these past months. Considering the pending UN investigation, I have been advised by my lawyer, Bibi’s lawyer, and the legal team of AIPAC to remain at the American embassy in Cairo until further notice and to avoid making public statements whenever possible. We certainly hope you understand.↩
Before he and the others passed, our mathematician didn’t get a look at the symbol, and our linguist hadn’t adequate time for research in those terrifying hours before consumption. Given that the international community has been solicited to help decipher the symbol for the past year to no avail, it seems that the source of what sensationalist media have termed “Pegg’s Plague” might elude human understanding. Of course, bad faith actors—international and domestic—have not only made much ado about nothing regarding this so-called “existential horror of unprecedented proportions,” but have also misidentified who deserves credit and who deserves blame for our discovery. The best of plans sometimes prove inadequate and the best of mentors sometimes disappoint their pupils, though I realize this will make little sense without context. I really ought to start at the beginning. Not the very beginning, of course. My childhood was exceptionally happy, and so exceptionally boring.
We’d been originally tasked, of course, with verifying that the dig site did, in fact, correspond with a particular episode only obliquely mentioned during Moses’s journey in The Book of Exodus. You are surely all familiar with the controversies arising from Exodus’s confounding historical inaccuracies when juxtaposed with the established archeological record, as well as the complete and utter lack of any historical evidence of Hebrew slaves in Egypt. Following the creation of Israel, archeologists not unlike ourselves were among the very most enthusiastic international observers. They understood the tremendous access and opportunity to find proof of Moses’s courageous escape from oppression, as well as the eternally significant covenant offered by our Lord. They did not understand the long-term apartheid state ramifications for the Palestinian people. I know Bibi won’t like me saying this. His whispered words of affirmation—and promises of additional compensation should our findings prove usable as a deflection from his corruption trial—through the telephone, as I drifted off to sleep during the arduous days of the dig, meant everything to me. But I’m my own man, and I call balls and strikes like I seem them, as any baseball umpire or archeologist should.
And yet, not one Semitic pot from this period has been discovered in Egypt during the past seventy years of persistent exploration. Well, we sought to change all that. It goes without saying that many generous donors have continued funding excavations and research even in the absence of any proof whatsoever. Although their lawyers have warned me from further association of any kind, I value my principles too highly to not credit Hobby Lobby in particular for providing the bulk of the funding for our dig. I suggest regulators extend their current investigation of the company’s illicit antiquity smuggling operation in The United States of America v. Approximately Four Hundred Fifty (450) Ancient Cuneiform Tablets; and Approximately Three Thousand (3,000) Ancient-Clay Bullae far beyond Hobby Lobby’s dealings with ISIS and adjacent groups in Iraq. You might scoff, and Hobby Lobby might send cease and desist after cease and desist to my lawyers each and every time I mention their involvement in an interview or social media post, but without their help—or their contacts in the United Arab Emirates, for that matter—I could never have done it. The truth matters above all. And the truth is I could never have won this fantastic award without Bibi, or Hobby Lobby, or Professor Roger Simmons, in whose memory I dedicate this apologia.
Having ostensibly determined the location of an ancient campsite from Moses’s excursion far beneath the grounds of a noodle shop following the translation of an obscure geographic reference from The Book of Leviticus (Leviticus 15: 19-20 I believe it was), we began our work some two years ago. This much you know. The first months were slow going. An unusually relentless rainy season led to delay after delay, and the owner of the noodle shop—originally so accommodating, having offered us a discount on the already absurdly cheap lunch specials for the entirety of our crew—became annoyed that our equipment was eliminating half of his parking lot’s available spaces, to say nothing of how our materials and construction signage seemed to be signaling to potential customers that the restaurant was closed for renovation. Though he did not speak English and only a few of our team spoke Arabic, he took to harassing our women with crude gestures and vile pantomiming. Further specificity is unfit for print. Suffice it to say that this one man is not intended to represent the whole Egyptian people, but my absolute honesty on this and all points is of the utmost importance in maintaining my credibility, given the story to come.
Our dig began under less than auspicious circumstances and conditions quickly grew worse. The rain led to a massive influx of mosquitoes, which harassed us day and night. In no time at all, our camp was ravaged with malaria and dengue fever, despite the drug regimen to which we were all required to adhere prior to our arrival. Our accountant hadn’t budgeted for this degree of concurrent sickness, and we feared we lacked the results and resources to successfully apply for permits extending our project. The locals we had hired and my co-lead, Professor Roger Simmons, fell ill as well.
By this time, some nine months had elapsed, and we’d managed to excavate a mere thirty meters, a fraction of our goal of seventy. That the rock was far denser than expected certainly didn’t help (requiring the ordering of several obscure drill bits and the attending delays) and we suddenly began wondering if an entirely different approach was needed.
Contrary to my advice, Roger had taken to ignoring calls from Hobby Lobby by this point. In short, I was becoming concerned that I would not recover as quickly from this reputational blight as I had from The Acapulco Scandal. Given the stakes of failure—given the indignities and grotesqueries levied by the noodle shop owner day after day—Roger and I were able to swallow our pride and secretly revise our plans. Although he was quite feverish during this period, I really must insist that Roger was in complete control of his critical faculties. I really have no choice but to insist that this prestigious award is a direct consequence of his extralegal ingenuity, not mine.
Contrary to the terms of our contract with the proprietor of the noodle shop, we suddenly began drilling at a diagonal. The engineers assured us during our original preparations that it was perfectly reasonable to form a sort of L, drilling seventy meters straight down before then drilling horizontally a further ten meters so as to reach the referenced secret chamber. The eschewing of this minimally-invasive plan for a far riskier venture was certainly all Simmons’s idea. I believe it was Simmons who instructed the engineers to withhold their revised calculations and remain mum on the subject to the others. We were certainly imperiling the business’s foundation. Considering the myriad complexities not superficially evident when examining the impact of this decision out of context, I ask that you reserve judgment as to my own guilt until you have reached the conclusion of this sheepish record. Over the course of numerous collaborations throughout my illustrious career, I’ve learned modesty, learned when to share credit. While I do believe my contributions are primarily responsible for the advancements of knowledge celebrated by this award, I humbly suggest that Roger’s contributions are those which have gotten us into this mess. And that were it not for his questionable decision-making, Roger would be the one making this public statement, Roger would be the one petitioning various foreign governments for political asylum.
The next month saw the gradual recovery of those who had been ill while the illegal drilling continued apace. Once we had burrowed a further thirty meters and remote sensors detected a cavern in the approximate region we had expected, even Roger returned to his usual boisterous self.
But the least resilient among us never quite recovered from these crises of faith, even as their health improved. Senior members of the team understood that, as long as we avoided disaster in the collapse of the chamber or the destruction of the noodle shop, the endeavor could be framed just so on our résumés. We could parlay a few recovered artifacts into slight pay bumps. A disappointment to be sure, but a recoverable one. Our grad students were less certain. Can we blame them? Well, we can, and so we do, you and I. But it is not entirely their fault that misrepresentation and intellectual posturing afflict the soul of our field not unlike the plague which cannibalizes the souls of everyone with whom it comes into contact, necessitating the grounding of all flights in and out of Egypt and the closing of all borders within Europe and Northern Africa over these past six months.
Roger was in many ways their teacher, their mentor, their guide. To be perfectly frank, I always looked up to Roger myself, as influential as he was to the early days of my intellectual development. He was my undergraduate mentor and my graduate mentor and my friend. To this day I really must insist that the blame for the events I’m about to narrate resides entirely upon the narrow shoulders of our fearless leader Professor Roger Simmons of Liverpool, who was definitely the brains of the operation. If he’s the brains, then I’m the brawn, the looks. I carry heavy things across my broad shoulders and sweet talk investors and department chairs and bureaucrats of foreign countries, heads of state, even, as the situation dictates. It’s Roger who conspired against the state of Egypt, Roger who betrayed Bibi’s trust, Roger who is responsible for the estimated 160,000—and growing—re-animated corpses who’ve reclaimed every mall in the region, shuffling from one Apple store to the next, one Levi’s store to the next.
And, well, if you’re left unconvinced by this, in the absence of his ability to testify, I really must reiterate that the blame be partially shared by the grad students whose persistent moping and complaining as we dug closer and closer to the chamber didn’t help one bit. The grad students assuredly jinxed us to a far greater extent than even the malevolent curse performed in the dead of night by the proprietor of the noodle shop, which he has since claimed was necessary in order to preserve the cultural heritage of the region in the face of centuries of Western imperialism. Which is certainly a fair point.
The chamber was ultimately found to be about ten meters wide and five meters in height. The coffin was quite heavy and required the strength of four men to remove— Johnson, Estevez, Gamal, and Salah, as you all know, by now. They were taken first, after all, ranting and raving that locusts roamed beneath their skin and within their ears, leading to their puncturing of ear drums with sticks and knives before the eventual self-immolation in our nightly campfire. Al Jazeera was right, I believe, in reporting that these four lost their minds within a half hour of their contribution to this prestigious prize I now metaphorically hold in these hands of mine, if not literally hold in these hands of mine, due to the legal implications, due to the international quarantine. Roger and the rest were much less careful than they should have been. This is an essential takeaway.
I am not exactly sure how much of this has been publicized, so forgive me if any of this is common knowledge. In contrast to the immediacy with which the first wave of infection and death was corrupted, those who had only briefly touched the coffin or the fragments of bone from its corpses were dead within the next thirty-six hours. Each of these poor twenty-three souls became convinced that they were dying of thirst, and that their blood had turned to water. Their final hours were deeply upsetting. On this we can find common ground.
I understand that in his last moments, Roger used his dying breaths to scrawl a message in his own blood upon the wall of his motel room attesting to his culpability. I understand that it read thusly: “I, Roger Simmons, professor emeritus of classical archeology at the University of Liverpool, am to be solely blamed for the unfortunate discovery of the sarcophagus in Cairo containing the remains of a few children thought to have been sacrificed to the god Moloch following the distasteful and fraudulent revision of our dig, for which I am also solely deserving of blame, depending on your general attitude regarding graduate students. I really must insist that Martin, my dear friend and brightest pupil, played only the smallest of parts in the disreputable aspects of our project, while playing only the largest parts in all reputable aspects of our project. I insist that he be allowed to keep his job regardless of the extent to which the plague from which I am dying at this very moment—here, alone in a locked room whose only key remains in my pocket—spreads across the globe. I understand the consequences of my actions and ask that others not violate my memory by disbelieving my confession or otherwise scrutinizing the situation any further.”
I understand that graphology analysis has suggested that the message in question does not at all resemble Simmons’s script, however I really must insist that we mitigate paranoid thinking and its implications in remembering that the painting of a single finger is bound to leave a different record than when we utilize an entire hand to grasp and use a writing implement, to say nothing of the impact of his madness upon the calligraphy. To allow one’s mind—even for but a moment!—to consider the likelihood of some vast conspiracy is to indulge in despicable anti-Semitism on par with the Soros-bashing Russian bots infecting twitter. Such uncouth thinking remains beneath contempt.
In any case, I suggest we respect the wishes of the dead and leave things as they lie. After all, I’ve provided thorough documentation proving that, at the moment in question, I was across town recuperating from the extraordinary strain of the dig with the help of hashish, as prescribed by my physician. These tragic developments took place outside the scope of my influence, unfortunately. Besides, while it is true that I remain on good terms with the ever-gracious Betsy Berns Korn and her wonderful organization, Glenn Kessler over at the Washington Post has already assigned the dreaded four Pinocchios to the claim within the ProPublica investigative report that AIPAC hired me to plant forged pots at the originally-planned dig site, and an obscene—albeit more than justified—three Pinocchios to the claim that AIPAC has been taking care of loose ends ever since. The mere fact of my willingness to even broach these discredited accusations is as much a testament to my extreme innocence as any air-tight alibi, though it should be said that among all air-tight alibis, mine has both the most air and tightness.
In any case, I fear it would be a gross violation of my mentor’s memory to investigate the situation any further. I have been absolutely forthcoming about every single aspect of this situation. Other than Roger—whose room was locked from the inside with the only key found within a pant pocket moments after the exceedingly traumatized clerk discovered his corpse the next morning, I must now sadly remind you all—I do not believe any of the twenty-two in this second wave of infection and death lived long enough to record their experiences or otherwise contradict the account I am now offering. Tragic.
Apart from Mr. Kessler, the media has been thoroughly uncharitable to me ever since that video of the zombies looting and vandalizing that mall Starbucks went viral. With the opportunity provided to me through this statement, I can now thank the op-ed page of the New York Times and Mr. Stephens, in particular, for his unflinching words of support during this tumultuous time as the twitter mob conducts its latest lynching. Perhaps it goes without saying, but cancel culture has run amok yet again.
Perhaps this too goes without saying, but of the four team members to have survived the second wave of infection and death, the other three have all since perished in independent freak accidents, and I have an alibi for each. Just in case you were wondering. I was in rehab during Molly’s car accident, working late at the office during Ross’s accidental autoerotic asphyxiation, and at my parents’ place for a Sunday dinner when Professor Espinal tripped into that jet engine.
I apologize for my absence from the public sphere these past months. Considering the pending UN investigation, I have been advised by my lawyer, Bibi’s lawyer, and the legal team of AIPAC to remain at the American embassy in Cairo until further notice and to avoid making public statements whenever possible. We certainly hope you understand.↩
Samuel Rafael Barber is 0.00000001253133% of the population and the author of the chapbook Thousands of Shredded Scraps of Paper Located across Five Landfills, That if Pieced Together Form a Message (The Cupboard, 2019). A PhD candidate in English and literary arts at the University of Denver, his fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from DIAGRAM, Normal School, Passages North, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, Tampa Review, and elsewhere. According to life expectancy tables, he will live another 51.2 years.