Harris is behind the wheel. I sit shotgun so Maya and Jess can stretch out in the back and doze off. It is, after all, nine in the morning on a Saturday. The weather had dropped to the negatives overnight, and severe wind chill advisories were in full effect. Fifteen minutes outdoors this weekend and you would be frostbitten to high hell. We’re still out here, though, soldiering through an hour’s drive because we’d decided we were built different. We weren’t, not really; we had just been so eager to visit the escape room that, as Harris put it, “isn’t an escape room, it’s an experience.” Staff bonding at its finest.
The window pane beside my temple is cold. Harris’ car is ancient; between its autoparts being legal-drinking-age and the world freezing over outside, the engine will barely warm up by the time we reach the mall. “That’s not great,” Harris tells me. We listen to Latin dance music while we drive. I rotate between talking to my friends and observing the passing farmland. White, white, and more white. Snow sheets blow in from the empty cornfields and sweep across the road. “This is just like the Dust Bowl,” Harris tells me. He asks if we can switch to a rap album for the remainder of the drive. We have no objections.
A tiny vent spews tepid air over the very corner of my window, but all it does is thaw the smallest patch of condensation. I try to draw hearts in the frost. I hold my fingertip against the glass, and the chill numbs my skin. A dot is left behind, bearing the faintest lines of my fingerprint. I am here, it says. I was here. I sat here and doodled here and thought here. I drag my finger again, slower this time, and the ice on the inside of the window melts at my touch. Harris asks me to wipe the frost that blocks the side mirror. I brush at the fogginess with my scarf, but it barely budges. “Shit,” Harris tells me, “it’s straight up frost.” I put my full palm to the glass, holding it there until my hand starts to tingle, and the frost budges this time. With newfound patience, I draw on the window pane for a while as the music plays. Hearts, tiny hearts, thumbprints.
***
The four of us make it to the mall thirty-five minutes early. We kill time before our booking by strolling the top floor, mapping out our post-adventure meals and eventually circling back to the escape room. Harris is still going on about the “narrative depth” of the pharaoh’s tomb, the secrets that we could probably unlock this run if we really got into it.
The main lobby is split into three waiting rooms, a triptych tailored to each escape’s experience. There is the drawbridge to a castle, the dock of a spaceshop, and the watchful glare of pharaohs at a tomb’s archway. Horus stretches its wings across the door, awaiting the next group of (un)lucky explorers. While Jess sorts out her waiver, Maya and I settle in front of the Pharaohs’ chessboard, situated, for some reason, in the spaceship’s lobby. We spend a few minutes debating which custom piece is which, deciding that the bishop is Anubis and the obelisk is obviously the rook. I once dated a regional chess champion, I tell Maya halfway through our first round. (I clearly hadn’t picked up much skill from that relationship; Maya steals my Anubis and Osiris in less than a few turns and has me at a frantic checkmate relatively quickly.)
After admitting defeat, Jess takes my place to play our champion, and I take a moment to study the pieces. It’s a new set, clearly meant to look ancient; the figurines lean into an Antiquity aesthetic and sit atop a pleasantly modern glass checkerboard. Maya’s darker figures are a solid onyx, granite-looking, like true Egyptian sculpture would be. The opposing side is a worn bronze, hand-weathered by manufacturing and children likely dropping the pieces face-first. Jess’ queen is still on the board, and without the strategy of the game distracting me, I study her.
Nefertiti.
Time has not been kind to the Great Royal Wife. Her head is long gone, a smooth slit across her neck that exposes the cloudy plastic where blood and vein would be. There’s a jagged edge at her jugular, as if her Ka wasn’t going to be forced from its vessel without a fight. A scarab sits at the apex of her belt, poised lopsided at her pubic bone. The mounds of her breasts have lightened, carelessly caressed by players lost in thought, a sharp contrast to the aged copper of her dress. A fate certainly undue for a queen, but (unfortunately) I think inevitable for any woman’s erected likeness.
The Egyptians believed preservation of the body upon death meant the Ka would continue to thrive in the afterlife. If disturbed, the spirit would leave its remains, dissipate into nothing. Staring at this fragile plastic queen, I wonder if her life force stayed with her upon beheading, sinking claw and fang into her stiff skin, crying out to stay where it belonged. Or maybe it had long-since left her, vanished from this life and the next, an artificial soul gone from its vessel the moment her crown hit the tile floor.
Her Majesty’s hands are idle at her sides; still, frozen in time, immortalized in this newly lifeless existence of her already lifeless form. I picture her severed head discarded somewhere on the lobby floor, abandoned and out of sight behind a chair leg, the jagged edge of her throat angling her just right to still watch her body be shuffled around a checkerboard. Her almond eyes could be watching me in this very moment, as if she—as if her Ka—yearns to come home. To wear its crown again. To be again.
***
We complete the escape room with a perfectly average score. On the drive home, while Maya sleeps on Jess’ shoulder and Harris enjoys a personal karaoke session, I continue my sketches on the icy passenger window. This time, I make a baby’s foot, the way my mom taught me when I was little. The fat side of my palm squishes into the frost, then teeny tiny toes are tapped out along the curved edge with my pinkie. I’m here, this little foot says. I’m still here! I’m still sitting here and doodling here and thinking here.
The print freezes over by the time we get out of the car, embedded in the new frost and already starting to grow faint as Harris parks for the night. With the remainder of the weekend’s weather warning, it will likely remain iced over until the temperature rises just enough at dawn and the frost lets up. Until the air is cool, not cold, and can be easily wiped away by a scarf, or even just a hand.