What the Sphinx Knows

The hotel room in Cairo smelled of stale cigarettes and the desert wind that slipped through the cracks of the air conditioning unit. Sarah lay on the bed watching Marcus, who sat at the desk with his back to her, that familiar curve of his spine illuminated only by the glow of his iPhone screen. They hadn't spoken in three days—not really. Not since the fight in the taxi from the airport.

'I'm just checking emails,' he'd said then, and now he was saying it again, his voice tight with something that might have been guilt or might have been exhaustion. Sarah didn't ask which. She'd stopped asking anything months ago.

Her charging cable lay on the nightstand like a dead snake, its white casing frayed where it bent, exposing the copper inside. She'd ordered a replacement three times. Each time, Marcus had forgotten to click buy. The cable was them, she thought—exposed wires held together by nothing but habit and the fear of letting go.

Tomorrow they would visit the Great Sphinx. Sarah had read about it in the guidebook she'd purchased in a moment of optimism, back when she'd thought this trip might save them. The sphinx had guarded its secrets for forty-five centuries. It had watched empires rise and fall, had borne the weight of pharaohs' dreams and conquerors' contempt. It knew something about patience. About the particular silence that comes from watching humans destroy themselves over and over.

Marcus turned from the desk finally, his face washed blue in the phone's light. 'You're still awake?'

Sarah looked at the cable, at him, at the ceiling where the water stains mapped constellations she didn't recognize. 'I'm thinking about riddles,' she said.

'What riddles?'

The ones that have no answer. The ones that eat you alive while you pretend they don't exist. 'Nothing,' she said. 'Go to sleep.'

In the morning, they would stand before the stone creature and Marcus would take photographs, his iPhone raised between himself and something ancient and knowing, and Sarah would wonder how many others had stood there before them, how many marriages had died in the shadow of something built to last forever, and how the sphinx must have learned not to care, not about them, not about any of it, not anymore.