The Lady Who Remembered Michael Jackson

I have never been particularly impressed by ghosts.

This may sound an odd confession coming from a man who has spent a considerable portion of his adult life investigating them, but I have always thought that the majority of alleged hauntings are rather badly organised affairs. A door creaks, a candle goes out, somebody sees a shadow in a corridor, and suddenly an eighteenth-century duke is apparently attempting to communicate with the living.

I blame draughts.

And occasionally plumbing.

The genuinely interesting manifestations are much quieter. They do not rattle chains. They do not throw crockery. They do not moan beneath the floorboards at three o'clock in the morning.

They leave evidence in the wrong century.

That was why, in the autumn of 1991, I found myself on an aeroplane to Chicago to investigate what was, on the surface of it, one of the most preposterous cases I had ever encountered.

The case concerned an Egyptian woman - or so they said - who had been dead for approximately three thousand years.

And Michael Jackson.

I should explain.

A photograph had been sent to me in Cumbria by an American acquaintance. It showed a limestone head of a woman in the Egyptian collection of the Field Museum of Natural History. She was from the New Kingdom, probably somewhere between the middle and later part of the Eighteenth Dynasty, although the precise dating was not entirely settled. She had the elaborate wig of a woman of considerable status - or so they said -, a decorative band across her forehead, and the serene, slightly enigmatic expression which Egyptian sculptors achieved with such extraordinary consistency.

Her identity was unknown.

There was no inscription naming her.

No royal title.

No cartouche.

No reason whatsoever to suppose that she had been anyone particularly famous.

And yet I could not look at the photograph without thinking of Michael Jackson.

I stared at it for perhaps five minutes.

Then I took off my spectacles.

I cleaned them.

I put them back on.

I stared again.

The resemblance was not exact. I want to be clear about that. Anyone who claims that an ancient Egyptian sculpture is literally a perfect portrait of Michael Jackson is either exaggerating or in urgent need of an optician.

But there was something there.

The eyes.

The cheekbones.

The long, narrow face.

The lips.

The peculiar combination of delicacy and severity.

And, rather unhelpfully, the damaged nose.

I turned the photograph upside down.

It did not improve matters.

I turned it sideways.

It became worse.

I remember putting the photograph down and saying aloud:

"Oh, dear."

The man who had sent it had written only:

You will want to see this.

He was right.

I wanted to see it very badly.

Within two days I had booked a flight to Chicago.

I told myself that I was going to investigate a question of iconography and historical perception.

This was true.

It was simply not the whole truth.

The other possibility, which I was reluctant even to articulate, was considerably more absurd.

Was Michael Jackson a time traveller?

I did not believe it.

But I had learned long ago that there is a considerable difference between believing something and being sufficiently curious to investigate it.

I arrived in Chicago on a cold afternoon.

The Field Museum impressed me immediately, although I confess that I have always preferred smaller museums where one can contemplate an object without having to cross half a continent of carpeting first.

The Egyptian galleries, however, were extraordinary.

There is something about Egyptian antiquity which makes ordinary museums feel inadequate. One walks among objects which have survived kings, invasions, religions, languages, dynasties and entire civilisations, and one begins to feel that modernity is rather a temporary arrangement.

The limestone head had been part of the museum's Egyptian collection for many years. It belonged to the Edward E. Ayer Collection and was catalogued as FMNH 31713.

The museum had placed it on public display around 1988, in its Egyptian exhibits, notably the Inside Ancient Egypt installation.

That detail interested me.

I was there only a few years after the head had become readily visible to the public.

And Michael Jackson's fascination with Egypt was becoming increasingly conspicuous.

I was beginning to suspect that the chronology might be more interesting than the resemblance.

I was introduced to an Egyptian Egyptologist named Dr Nadia El-Masri.

I shall say at once that she was dangerous.

Not professionally.

Personally.

I knew it within approximately thirty seconds.

She was young, in her early thirties, with dark hair, intelligent eyes and the calm expression of someone who had spent years explaining to enthusiastic Westerners that not every Egyptian woman carved in stone was Nefertiti.

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

Then she looked at the photograph I had brought.

"You came because of the resemblance," she said.

"Partly."

"You think she looks like Michael Jackson."

"I think she looks remarkably like Michael Jackson."

She folded her arms.

"You have travelled from England to Chicago to tell me that."

"I have travelled from England to Chicago to investigate whether there is more to it than that."

"Such as?"

I hesitated.

She smiled.

"Go on."

"Time travel."

She stared at me.

Then she laughed.

It was the first thing about her that I found irresistible.

"You are serious."

"I am always serious when discussing absurdities."

"That is an unfortunate habit."

"One of several."

She looked again at the photograph.

"You know that this is not actually a portrait of a known person."

"Yes."

"And you know that this is a portrait of a woman.”

"Madam, I have not mistaken an Egyptian noblewoman for a pop singer."

"No queen. No princess. No Nefertiti."

"I know."

"Then why are you interested?"

I looked at the photograph.

"I am merely investigating the rather more troublesome possibility that the pop singer may have mistaken himself for her. Because she seems to know him."

Nadia's smile disappeared.

"Know whom?"

"Michael Jackson."

She stared at me for several seconds.

Then she laughed again.

This time I joined her.

That was how our investigation began.

The sculpture was considerably more unsettling in person.

Photographs can deceive.

Three-dimensional objects are less forgiving.

I stood before the effigy and examined the head from every angle permitted by the display.

She was beautiful.

There was no other word for it.

Her face had been carved with extraordinary delicacy. The surviving surface showed traces of the original workmanship, and the damage to the nose somehow intensified the resemblance I had noticed in the photograph.

Nadia stood beside me.

"Well?"

I asked.

"Well what?"

"Do you see it?"

"Yes."

"You admit it?"

"I am an Egyptologist, not a liar."

"Excellent."

"But that doesn't mean anything."

"Unfortunately, I agree."

She looked at me.

"You're disappointed."

"Deeply."

"Why?"

"Because I had hoped for a more interesting problem."

"You travelled thousands of miles to investigate a coincidence."

"I have travelled farther for worse reasons."

"What is the worst reason?"

"Love."

She raised an eyebrow.

I regretted the answer immediately.

"That sounded rather autobiographical."

"It was."

She smiled.

"Perhaps you're not as serious as you pretend, Mr…"

“Monday, Timothy Monday”.

"Perhaps."

I looked back at the woman.

There was something about her expression.

Something almost familiar.

Not merely Michael Jackson.

Something else.

I could not explain it.

And I have always distrusted things which I cannot explain.

For the next several days, Nadia helped me examine everything connected with the object.

We looked at its provenance.

We examined photographs.

We consulted catalogue records.

We discussed its dating.

We examined comparable New Kingdom sculpture.

We considered whether the resemblance could simply be the result of recurring human facial proportions.

That was, in fact, the most sensible explanation.

Human faces are not infinitely variable.

There are only so many ways to arrange eyes, cheekbones, noses, mouths and jaws.

Given enough people and enough centuries, similar faces must recur.

The mathematical probability of resemblance between two individuals separated by three thousand years is not zero.

Quite the contrary.

There are billions of human faces.

History is full of accidental doubles.

I knew this.

Nadia knew this.

We both knew this.

But there was still something uncomfortable about the particular resemblance.

I asked whether anyone at the museum had noticed it before.

"Probably," Nadia said.

"Probably?"

"You must understand that museums are full of people making strange comparisons."

"Such as?"

"Napoleon. Elvis. Winston Churchill. Abraham Lincoln."

"Anyone compared to Michael Jackson?"

"Not that I know of."

That interested me.

"When was the resemblance first noticed?"

"I don't know."

"Can we find out?"

She smiled.

"You are enjoying this."

"I am beginning to."

"You are impossible."

"I have been told."

One evening we stayed at the museum after closing.

The galleries were almost completely silent.

There is something extraordinary about an empty museum at night.

Objects which appear perfectly ordinary during the day become strangely intimate when there is nobody else present.

The Egyptian heads seemed to watch us.

The statues seemed less like exhibits and more like inhabitants.

We stood together before the limestone woman.

Nadia said:

"Do you really believe Michael Jackson travelled backwards through time?"

"No."

She laughed.

"You said that very quickly."

"Because the obvious answer is no."

"And the less obvious answer?"

I considered it.

"I don't know."

"That's dangerous."

"Curiosity usually is."

She looked at the sculpture.

"Perhaps he saw her somewhere."

"Perhaps."

"Perhaps in a photograph."

"Possibly."

"Perhaps he visited the museum."

"That is certainly possible."

"But then the resemblance remains unexplained."

"Not necessarily."

"How so?"

I turned to her.

"Perhaps he was inspired by ancient Egyptian art."

"That would explain his interest in Egypt."

"Yes."

"But not why she looks like him."

"Unless the resemblance existed first."

Nadia was silent.

I continued.

"Perhaps he saw the face and recognised something."

"Recognised what?"

"That is the question."

She looked at me.

"You really think faces can be remembered across time?"

"I think human beings remember things they cannot always explain."

"That's psychology."

"Perhaps."

"And not archaeology."

"I am not an archaeologist."

"What are you?"

"Philologist."

She smiled.

"Of course."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you would rather invent a theory about time than admit that two people happen to have similar faces."

"That is a gross misrepresentation."

"Is it?"

"Yes."

She stepped closer.

"Prove it."

I did not.

Instead, she kissed me.

It was brief.

Warm.

Unexpected.

And thoroughly inconvenient.

When she stepped away, I discovered that I had completely forgotten what we had been discussing.

"Good heavens," I said.

She laughed.

"You look shocked."

"I am."

"Why?"

"I had prepared myself intellectually for temporal anomalies."

"And not for women?"

"Not Egyptian women."

She smiled.

"Perhaps that is your real mystery."

I shall not pretend that my investigation remained purely scholarly after that.

It did not.

Nadia and I began seeing each other outside the museum.

Chicago in those days seemed wonderfully mysterious to me.

We ate in small restaurants.

We drank wine.

We argued about Egypt.

We argued about Britain.

We argued about whether Americans understood irony.

Nadia maintained that the British had invented irony because they were afraid of direct emotional expression.

I told her the Egyptians had invented understatement because otherwise they would never survive their archaeologists.

She laughed.

I fell rather hopelessly in love with her.

I did not tell her.

She knew.

Women generally know these things long before men.

The investigation continued.

And then, quite unexpectedly, we found something.

It was not a hieroglyph.

It was not a secret inscription.

It was not a hidden chamber.

It was a handwritten note.

The note had been found among old museum documentation connected with the object.

It was written on modern paper.

It was undated.

It had no signature.

It contained one sentence:

She has seen him before.

I read it several times.

Nadia stood beside me.

"That's rather dramatic," she said.

"Yes."

"Do you know who wrote it?"

"No."

"Can you identify the handwriting?"

"Not yet."

"Could it have been a joke?"

"Certainly."

"A curator?"

"Possibly."

"A visitor?"

"Perhaps."

"Someone referring to Michael Jackson?"

"Possibly."

She looked at me.

"You're enjoying this far too much."

"Not at all."

"You are."

"I am terrified."

She smiled.

"Good."

The note changed the character of the investigation.

Until then, I had been investigating a resemblance.

Now I was investigating a statement.

Someone had looked at this ancient Egyptian woman and written that she had seen him before.

The wording was strange.

If someone had simply meant that the woman resembled Michael Jackson, why not

write:

She looks like Michael Jackson.

Instead, they had written:

She has seen him before.

It implied memory.

Encounter.

Recognition.

Knowledge.

But of course, it might have meant nothing.

Human beings write ridiculous things in museum archives.

I myself have written ridiculous things in museum archives.

The rational explanation remained overwhelming.

Michael Jackson was not a time traveller.

He was a twentieth-century American musician.

The Egyptian woman was an ancient Egyptian woman.

They were separated by roughly three thousand years.

End of story.

Except that it wasn't.

One afternoon Nadia found an older photograph of the sculpture.

We placed it beside the modern photograph.

I studied them.

Something bothered me.

"The eyes."

"What about them?"

"The lighting."

She looked.

I pointed to the left eye.

"In this photograph it appears darker."

"And?"

"And in the newer photograph it appears lighter."

"Different lighting."

"Yes."

"Different angle."

"Yes."

"So?"

"Nothing."

She looked at me.

"You're disappointed."

"Again."

"You were hoping the statue had moved."

"Naturally."

"Why?"

"Because that would be evidence."

"Evidence of what?"

"That something impossible had happened."

She shook her head.

"You want the impossible to be true."

"No."

She looked at me.

"Don't you?"

I thought about it.

"Perhaps."

"Why?"

"Because the world is rather dull if everything extraordinary has an ordinary explanation."

She smiled.

"That is the most English thing you have said since I met you."

"I am Northern Irish."

"Even worse."

The final incident occurred during a thunderstorm.

I remember the night precisely because of the sound.

Rain struck the museum windows.

The galleries were dark.

Nadia and I were alone. 

Again.

We stood before the limestone head.

Lightning illuminated the room.

For an instant I saw something in the glass.

A reflection.

A man standing behind us.

Tall.

Thin.

Dark trousers.

White shirt.

Black jacket.

A single glove.

I turned.

Nobody was there.

I looked back at the case.

The reflection had disappeared.

"Nadia."

She was staring at the glass.

"You saw him."

It was not a question.

"Yes."

"Who was it?"

I swallowed.

"I don't know."

She looked frightened.

I had never seen her frightened before.

Then the lights returned.

The gallery was ordinary again.

The woman was stone.

The glass was empty.

There was no explanation.

We searched the room.

Nothing.

We checked the corridors.

Nothing.

We examined the CCTV recordings available at the time.

Nothing.

There was no evidence whatsoever.

And yet both of us had seen the same figure.

Or believed we had.

That distinction became very important to me afterwards.

I left Chicago two days later.

Nadia came to the airport.

Neither of us knew what would happen afterwards.

We embraced.

"You still think he was a time traveller?" she asked directly.

"No."

She smiled.

"Good."

"I think something much worse."

"What?"

"I think we don't understand time."

She laughed softly.

"That is not a scientific conclusion."

"No."

"What is it?"

"An honest one."

She kissed me.

"Goodbye, Tim."

"Not goodbye."

"Then what?"

I smiled.

"Until the next century."

She laughed.

"You really are impossible."

"I’m rather easier to persuade than you might imagine."

I continued to think about the case for years.

I kept the photographs.

I kept my notes.

I kept a copy of the mysterious sentence.

I never published anything.

I could not.

A respectable scholar cannot write:

I believe Michael Jackson may have travelled backwards through time and appeared in an ancient Egyptian sculpture.

One would lose one's reputation.

Possibly one's trousers.

Nevertheless, I developed several theories.

The first was the obvious one.

Coincidence.

The human face repeats itself.

The resemblance was striking but not inexplicable.

The second theory was psychological.

Perhaps Michael Jackson, consciously or unconsciously, was influenced by ancient

Egyptian representations of beauty.

He had a fascination with Egypt.

He later appeared in Remember the Time, surrounded by imagery from ancient Egypt.

Perhaps he had seen this very sculpture.

The chronology even permitted it.

The head had gone on public display around 1988.

He could theoretically have encountered it before the 1990s.

Perhaps the sculpture had inspired something in him.

But that still did not explain why he looked like her.

The third theory was genetic.

That is rather less romantic.

Perhaps some ancient Egyptian ancestor had contributed to the enormous and unknowable genealogical web from which Jackson ultimately emerged.

Three thousand years is a very long time.

Human populations migrate.

Families mix.

Genes travel.

Faces survive.

Perhaps some feature of this woman's lineage appeared again in Michael Jackson.

That would be astonishing, but not supernatural.

The fourth theory was artistic.

Perhaps the resemblance was not between two people at all.

Perhaps both had been shaped by the same cultural ideal.

The Egyptian sculptor had carved a face according to one conception of beauty.

Jackson, consciously or otherwise, had come to embody something similar.

The resemblance might therefore have been cultural rather than biological.

And then there was the fifth theory.

The one I never discussed publicly.

Perhaps time is not a line.

Perhaps it is not even a river.

Perhaps it is a landscape.

Perhaps events do not simply happen and disappear.

Perhaps they leave impressions.

A face might appear before its owner is born.

A melody might be heard before its composer writes it.

A phrase might be remembered before it is spoken.

Perhaps Michael Jackson had not travelled to ancient Egypt.

Perhaps some part of him had simply arrived there first.

I realise how absurd this sounds.

I am perfectly aware of it.

But I have always maintained that absurdity is not the same thing as impossibility.

Years later, I found among my papers another copy of the museum photograph.

I had almost forgotten the case.

Nadia and I had remained in occasional correspondence, although distance and life

gradually did what they always do. She became a distinguished Egyptologist.

I remained, more or less, myself.

I still thought of her.

Occasionally.

More often than occasionally.

The photograph arrived on my desk unexpectedly.

To be honest, I could no longer remember when it had been given to me.

I picked it up carefully, almost reverently.

For the first time in years, I noticed something I had missed.

The woman's expression.

There was the faintest suggestion of amusement in it.

Not a smile.

Not quite.

But something.

I turned the photograph over.

On the back was a handwritten sentence.

Four words.

You were looking backwards.

I knew the handwriting.

It was Nadia's.

I telephoned her.

She answered, and for a moment there was silence. Then I heard the unmistakable note of surprise in her voice.

"Tim?"

"I hope I'm not disturbing you."

"Good heavens. No. I just—" She laughed softly. "I wasn't expecting to hear from you.

Not after all these years."

"Nor was I expecting to telephone you."

There was another pause.

"Then what has happened?"

"I found your note."

She was silent.

"You found what?"

"On the back of the photograph."

I could almost hear her smile.

"I knew you'd notice eventually."

"Notice what?"

"The direction."

"What direction?"

"You spent the entire time looking at the statue as though the question was whether Michael Jackson had travelled backwards."

I was silent.

She continued.

"Perhaps you had it backwards."

I remember sitting very still.

"You mean he travelled forwards?"

"No."

"Then what?"

She laughed.

I could almost see her face.

"I think you should come back to Egypt."

Perhaps I should have.

Perhaps that is another mistake.

As for Michael Jackson, I remain undecided.

I cannot say I believe he was a time traveller.

Not literally.

But I no longer find the idea quite as ridiculous as I once did.

The ancient woman at the Field Museum remains anonymous.

We do not know her name.

We do not know her biography.

We do not know whom she loved.

We do not know what she feared.

We do not know what she saw.

And yet, three thousand years after she was carved, people look at her and see someone they know.

That alone is extraordinary.

Perhaps that is what the Egyptians understood better than we do.

A portrait is not merely a representation of the dead.

It is a conversation between the dead and the living.

The woman in that case has survived because someone, three thousand years ago, decided that her face deserved to endure.

And then, three thousand years later, another face appeared.

A face belonging to a musician who would become one of the most recognisable men on earth.

Perhaps the resemblance is coincidence.

Perhaps it is cultural memory.

Perhaps it is genetics.

Perhaps Michael saw the sculpture and unconsciously recognised himself.

Perhaps the ancient woman somehow saw him first.

Or perhaps, in some obscure fold of time which neither archaeology nor physics has yet taught us how to describe, they were never entirely separate.

I have one final piece of evidence.

I do not know whether it is evidence at all.

It is simply something I remember.

That night in the museum, when the lightning flashed and I saw the reflection of a tall man standing behind us, I turned immediately.

There was nobody there.

But when I looked back at the sculpture, the woman's expression seemed different.

She looked almost amused.

Almost as if she had known that I would come.

Almost as if she had been waiting.

And that is why I have never been able to dismiss the case entirely.

Not because I believe Michael was a time traveller.

But because, for one brief moment in a darkened Egyptian gallery in Chicago, I had the

extraordinary sensation that the past was not behind me at all.

It was looking directly at me.

And smiling.

I have spent most of my life studying words.

Words change.

Meanings drift.

Translations deceive.

Languages disappear and return in altered forms.

The same is true, I suspect, of faces.

Perhaps the human face is another language.

Perhaps we occasionally recognise something in a stranger because some part of us has encountered it before.

Perhaps Michael recognised that ancient Egyptian woman.

Perhaps she recognised him.

And perhaps neither of them had any idea why.

I still possess the photograph.

I keep it among my papers.

Every now and then, when I am feeling particularly foolish, I take it out and look at it.

I always end up asking the same question.

Was Michael a time traveller?

My answer remains:

Probably not.

But then, I have learned something rather important about mysteries.

The most dangerous answer is not yes.

It is probably.

Because probably leaves the door open.

And I have always been rather good at opening doors.

Even when I ought to leave them shut.