Mummy in the Art Museum
by Marilyn Peake

Anabelle lived in a brownstone on the Upper West Side of New York City, among the shadows. She delighted in sharp edges and the geometric designs that popped out of things. Five years old, she had a mop of thick, black, cascading curls on top of her head, long black lashes and deeply penetrating eyes.

Her mother, Bernadette Moon, avoided the term “autistic”, also “idiot savant” and “Asperger’s Syndrome”: labels suggestive of overreaction to stimuli or the coexistence of language delay and mathematical genius within one brain. Mrs. Moon interpreted her daughter as sensitive, perhaps mildly allergic to light and noise. Shielding their home from direct sunlight, silk lace curtains fell softly across every window. Television and radios were played only on a different floor from Anabelle, and mostly when she was asleep. Her toys quivered with color and shape, but didn’t beep or jingle or startle the ear.

Anabelle’s parents took her out into the city for brief periods of time in much the same way that teachers bring schoolchildren to the world on field trips. The Obelisk in Central Park transfixed the girl. She failed to notice brilliant, falling rays of sunlight when her gaze locked tightly onto the image of that ancient structure. Tall shaggy trees shook dappling shade all around her and mostly it was quiet, so the Park served as the perfect place for Anabelle Moon’s first outings. Under a stone bridge just beyond the Obelisk, musicians played, with empty hats turned upside down and plastic jugs upon the ground, hoping to collect money. The arched bridge amplified the musical notes of saxophones, violins, and horns; but Anabelle’s concentration stood steady on the Obelisk.

That pink granite structure—with its upright three-dimensional rectangle topped by a triangular pyramid—is a lesson in mathematics. It points straight up into the heavens while delivering hieroglyphics along its trunk. Measuring 71 feet in height and weighing 244 tons, the Obelisk has a long, varied history. Having entered the world around 1500 B.C. when the Egyptian Pharaoh Thutmosis III ordered its construction for a ceremony in his honor, it then served as one of two obelisks guarding the Temple of the Sun in the sacred city of Heliopolis on the Nile River. Much later, around 12 B.C., under the direction of Emperor Augustus Caesar, the Romans moved the granite pillars along the Nile River to Alexandria. In the modern year 1869, Ismail Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt, gave one of the obelisks to the United States in an attempt to energize his country’s economy. At that point in time, the colossal structure that is the Central Park Obelisk departed from its twin and traveled across the Mediterranean Sea and the storm swept Atlantic Ocean in the hold of a ship without breaking.

While Anabelle gazed upon the height and calculated the measurements of her beloved Obelisk, four bronze replicas of Roman-designed sea crabs guarded thecorners of the pillar’s base.

Copyright (c) 2008 Marilyn Peake