Sunrise on the Mediterranean Read Online Free PDF Page B

other. We always had in the past.
    Of course, I’d always been someone else in the past. Never nameless, never in my own skin. Never before like now.
    As the afternoon floated by, silence settled on the temple. The priests took a siesta, the singers went to write more verses
     about Dagon, the sun drifted in on motes above me. While I rested in preparation for my journey out of here, I revisited the
     journey that had gotten me in here.
    Just twenty-four hours ago I had been lying with my sister, Cammy, on her bed in the Hurghada Hilton. I’d realized pretty
     quickly that she would never really believe that I had time-traveled or traded bodies with RaEmhetepet, that sadistic ancient
     Egyptian priestess.
    Could I blame Cammy for her skepticism? Would I have believed her if she had come to me with the same story? Even with the
     questions I raised, which seemed to me to be facts that couldn’t be interpreted any other way, she had alternative explanations.
    According to Cammy, I had been kidnapped two years ago. Doctors said that the trauma of the experience had changed my eye
     color, from (my) green to (RaEm’s) brown. Then “I” had refused to leave Egypt and had moved in with an Egyptian playboy no
     one had ever heard of: Phaemon.
    Except I, as in me, had heard of Phaemon before. That had been the name of RaEm’s lover in ancient Egypt. A lover who had
     gone missing and was presumed murdered, a man born on the twenty-third of Phamenoth, just like RaEm, Cheftu, and me. A person
     chosen by destiny—or what-ever—to time-travel. Had he traveled, trading with someone else’s body? If so, who? If not, then
     why had the rest of us played a two-year cosmic game of musical bodies and he hadn’t?
    Sometimes I had the feeling I was seeing only half of the big picture. The feeling grew every time I woke up in another world.
     My glance fell on the merman. A very different world.
    After we had traded bodies, it had taken months before “I”—that is, RaEm—was recovered enough to speak, and then she spoke
     only gibberish. One night in July of 1995, she’d crept out of her hospital room. The next day she’d been found almost dead
     at the Karnak Temple in Luxor.
    Better than that, she’d been found by a bunch of tourists, which resulted in lurid headlines in Egypt. AMBASSADOR’S DAUGHTER ATTEMPTS SUICIDE OVER MIDDLE EAST PEACE, DRUG OVERDOSE FOR PRIVILEGED AMERICAN, SPOILED U.S. SLUT DISGRACES
     FAMILY … the slant of the story really depended on the politics at origin.
    The second year, RaEm had settled down. She’d divided her time, or rather my time, among various functions in Cairo with boyfriend
     Phaemon and watching television. RaEm had become a TV junkie. She watched the tube incessantly, a habit from her time in the
     hospital. She would watch anything from Greek soap operas to dubbed Discovery Channel programs. Anything at all, until the
     wee hours of the morning. She never turned off Sky TV, Cammy said.
    Based on what I knew from inhabiting her body for a year, RaEm wasn’t inquisitive enough or intelligent enough to be interested
     in anything outside herself, even something as inactive as watching TV. Then again, all I had were her nonemotional memories.
     Maybe she just needed to be in a different century to appreciate living? Cammy said she’d also been “well-known” in Cairo.
     By a lot of men.
    My father must have wanted to kill her. I knew I certainly did—in two years she’d done an impressive amount of damage to my
     relationships with my parents, my sister, my advertising clients, and the U.S. government. Apparently RaEm had obliterated
     a lifetime of my good behavior in two years of her being herself in my body. I eyed my body nervously. I hoped she hadn’t
     caught anything… .
    More priests came in, jarring my thoughts back to the present. They’d found the next verses to the Dagon song. I wondered
     how long I, as a supernatural girlfriend of Dagon and divine bargaining