Red Equinox (7 page)

She sought out the ruins of her city because they seemed to speak a plain truth: that all things aged and transformed and withered and died, and that all effort and industry, however dazzling, would have its day in the sun and then fade. In this she found peace because it aligned with her own sense that in the long run the only precious things might be captured frozen moments in a chain of continual change.

Nina, her therapist, had asked her recently if she thought it was odd for a person who suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder to make a hobby of delving into the dark bowels of the city, places where not even electric light continued to flow. And Becca supposed there was some irony there. But she’d never been comfortable with painting over rot. Better to face it. Better to accept it, maybe even to revel in it and embrace what was hardest for her. Embrace the darkness and decay, and find beauty in them.

She had tried denial for a while in her teens, but it hadn’t worked out long term. Taking the headlamp from her bag and slipping it over her crown, she remembered the November day in her junior year when a UPS truck had dropped a package addressed to her on the front steps of the house on Crane Street. Catherine had been excited to watch her open it, had told her as she ran a pair of scissors across the packing tape that it would hopefully take some of the misery out of her mornings in the darker half of the year, and make it easier for her to stop missing the bus.

“What is it, a clock?” Becca had asked, knowing already that it wasn’t as she lifted the heavy object from the box. Styrofoam peanuts rained down from what looked like an opaque plastic half-moon mounted on a black base trailing a power cord.

“It’s a dawn simulator,” Catherine explained. “Not that different from an alarm clock, but it comes on gradually and fills the room with full-spectrum light. It’s supposed to prime your pineal gland before your other alarm goes off.”

Becca turned the heavy object over in her hands, skeptically. A plastic sunrise—weird. But later, standing in her room beside her Gran with the curtains drawn and watching the light slowly growing in the frosted dome, she felt a little thrill of hope; not because she believed the gadget would make much difference in her daily life, but because Catherine had thought of it, had pulled her head out of dusty tomes long enough to get on the internet and find something that
might
help, and had cared enough about her struggle to buy it for her.

“
Yehi Aur!”
Catherine proclaimed, her fingers splayed toward the corners of the room where the shadows were shrinking.

“Huh?”

The old woman looked askance at her, an eyebrow raised and a sly grin wrinkling the corners of her mouth. “
Let there be light,
dear. It’s Hebrew.”

The dawn simulator had helped a little in finishing high school, but in college she’d never taken it out of its box and reverted to oversleeping. That was when she’d started experimenting with reveling in her condition—seeking out dark places in her city and in her art, her only remaining crutches the vitamin D supplements and SSRI prescriptions, because without those she’d likely cut her wrists in the bathtub sometime in January.

She had also discovered along the way that it was easier to get out of bed when she had a goal. And today the goal was finding Django. She had already named him. Hadn’t earned his trust yet, and certainly hadn’t succeeded in rescuing him, but had named him, after one of her favorite guitarists, Django Reinhardt.

On the previous occasions, when she’d caught sight of the dog, she had been wary of spooking him with the camera. Shooting him with a flash was out of the question, but she had managed to get one decent photo. He appeared to have some German shepherd traits, probably mixed with smaller breeds.

She took a piece of dog biscuit from the front pocket of her cargo pants and ducked under a fallen steel girder, treading softly. The only urine stains on the walls were at human height and appeared dry. She’d seen no dog shit and couldn’t imagine what he ate to survive. He was a skinny thing, a real bag of bones, judging by the few glimpses and one photo she had to go on.

She had entered a long, narrow room with the ceiling mostly intact. Decrepit mechanical looms hulked in the shadows, making an obstacle course of the place. When she’d first entered the room, a few stray shafts of sunlight had cut the air and glanced off of the machinery, highlighting random bits of crusty white corrosion. But now clouds had overtaken the sun again, and the light had faded, casting the entire space into murky, indistinct gloom.

She heard a rustling from one of the corners, and turned her head to pinpoint the origin. Knowing that it could very well be a rat or a raccoon, or even a savage fisher cat, she crept closer, the dog biscuit trembling slightly between her gloved fingers.

She smelled the animal before she saw it—a pungent concoction of swamp water and breath that could only come from rotting teeth and a stomach eating itself from hunger. Knowing that no small wild animal she’d ever encountered had smelled so desperately canine, she was emboldened, and, stepping around a wide pillar, she caught sight of him, nose to a pile of rubble, mangy black and tan fur poking at odd angles between bald spots where he’d probably licked himself raw from flea infestations. One ear was split at the tip (probably from a fight), and she shuddered to think of how thin he’d look if not for the long fur.

She wished for clean water to offer him and regretted not bringing wet dog food. Even the cookie might be too much for him to digest in his emaciated state, and she had to stifle a hitching sob, had to catch and suppress it in her breast at the sight of the poor thing. He scratched and pawed at the rubble until he succeeded in unearthing a crumbled shred of dirty tin foil left behind by some vagabond or junkie. Whatever juices the treasure had once contained, their residue was surely rank by now, and she had to resist the urge to shout a command at him to drop it, as if he were already her own and would listen rather than flee.

Becca crushed the biscuit in her hand and watched the dog tear the foil with a shake of his muzzle. He lapped at the scrap, and she hoped it wasn’t coated with narcotics that had been boiled over a garbage fire.

Dropping the foil, the dog snuffled along the dirty concrete floor for a few inches, then catching either Becca’s scent or that of her offering, he looked up and locked eyes with her. His fur rose in a ridge along his spine and his tail stiffened, but his ears remained cocked forward.

She held her palm out, displaying the crushed cookie, and blew a breath down her arm to carry the taste of it to him.

He took a tentative step forward, lowering his head between his shoulder blades, but stopped a good yard away from her, uncertain.

“Hey, little guy. You’re a boy, right? You want a cookie?”

Ravenous as he was, he bided his time, waited for her next move.

Sensing that a dance had begun between them, Becca tossed a piece of the biscuit. It rolled through the dust and landed a foot from the dog’s nose.

Now it was she who waited.

The dog seized the morsel and retreated to his original position where he chewed it with a jerky crunching and swallowed it down.

“Django,”
she cooed, trying the name out for the both of them. She liked the way it sounded. He took a tentative step toward her. She held her hand out. But he wasn’t quite ready to eat from it yet.

A new smell reached her nose now, overpowering the funk of the dog, an aroma of earth and fire. It took her a moment to identify it, but then it came to her: burning sage, and with it a voice, a muted baritone echoing through the labyrinth of brick and metal and broken glass. They weren’t alone, and
damn it,
whoever he was, he was going to scare the dog off before she could finish earning his trust.

The voice grew louder—it sounded like a chant, a droning litany, and she started to think it might be more than one person. Her mind’s eye conjured a fleeting vision of robed ritualists walking in a procession through the derelict mill, carrying candles and swinging censers on chains. But then, despite the dirge-like rendition, she recognized the melody and her tense muscles relaxed. It was a song, “Dirty Water,” by the Standells.

Becca stood frozen, peering through a narrow doorway into the next room, where a jungle of hanging swathes of moth-eaten cloth obstructed her view of the singer. When she turned her gaze back on the cracked floor at her feet, the dog was gone.

“Fuck.” She retraced her steps, checking between every pillar and piece of machinery but finding no trace of the poor mutt. The singing increased in volume behind her, and now, as it moved into the room she was in, she could tell that it was a solitary voice, gravelly and tuneless. She wheeled around, prepared to give the intruder a piece of her mind, but as she drew the breath to launch a tirade, his sheer outlandish bulk silenced her.

Becca was face to face with a black-bearded giant in a green army trench coat. Several layers of frayed sweaters hung around his wrists and neck so that it was impossible to guess his true girth. He appeared to be the sort of homeless person who wears his entire wardrobe at all times. What little she could see of his skin looked African American, and the texture of his dense beard would have supported that assessment; but as with the clothes, it was impossible to tell how many layers of dirt and ashy grime the man was wearing. He might have even been white underneath. But at a glance, Becca found it difficult to focus on any one detail beyond his distracting headgear. His hair was mostly hidden beneath a golden cardboard Burger King Crown, his eyes behind a cheap pair of red-and-blue 3D glasses. In his left hand he held a smoldering bundle of burning sage tied with a red string, and in his right, a small laser pointer.

He bustled past her without acknowledgement, wreathed in smoke, still singing and waving the pungent bundle. Becca recoiled in the wake of the fumes and coughed out a lungful of the stuff before burying her nose in the crook of her arm. The man seemed to give her a shallow nod as he passed, but with his colored plastic lenses, she couldn’t tell if they’d made eye contact. She had begun to wonder if he was blind when he turned to her and said, “What up?”

Apparently a rhetorical question because he didn’t pause in his genuflections for her reply but spun on his heels in a kind of dance, the trench coat flaring out and swirling around his surprisingly graceful axis, the orange terminator line of the burning ember on the blackening leaves tracing a fiery circle in the air above his head.

He completed the revolution by landing, left leg in front, bent at the knee. From this position he pointed his right hand at the brick wall and traced a perfect pentagram with the ruby bead of the pointer. The chrome barrel poking out of his folded fingers looked like the type she’d seen at the checkout counter at pet stores for teasing cats, usually for less than three dollars.

Pointing the dot at the center of the now invisible pentagram, he broke from the Standells’ song and bellowed,
“Apos pantos kakadaiminos!”

Becca backed away from the madman into the corridor of machinery and shadow where she’d last seen the dog.

The man came up from the weird martial arts stance, surprising her with his agility (she had guessed that he might get stuck there), and proceeded along the wall to the far end of the room, where he repeated the same spin, drop, and pentagram tracing, this time ending with the cry,
“Hekas, hekas este bebeloi!”
When he rose, he stared at the wall, head cocked as if trying to discern some hidden code in the cracks and graffiti. He whispered a word that might have been
skidoo,
and dropped the laser pointer into his pocket. He stubbed the sage bundle out in a cement seam on the brick wall, and, touching his cardboard crown to keep it from tumbling off his head, turned with a bow and flourish of his trench coat and addressed her: “Milady.”

Becca couldn’t help herself; she laughed into the back of her hand to release the nervous tension before remembering how pissed she was about losing Django. When she did, she set her hand on her hip and said, “You scared my dog away, asshat.”

“Your dog? You mean that shepherd with the split ear?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Shiiit. I din’t know he belonged to nobody. Been sleeping rough like me. He belong to you? For real?”

She sighed and picked up her camera bag, hoisted the heavy thing over her shoulder, and girded herself to push past him on the way out if she had to.

“Never mind.”

“He’s not yours
yet
, is he?”

Becca shook her head. “But he needs someone to start feeding him or he won’t last long.”

“Mmmm. True dat.”

“Well, nice meeting you,” she said with a tight, sarcastic smile. “Gotta go.”

“But we
haven’t
met. Not yet. Name’s Moe Ramirez,” he said, approaching her with some of the same caution she’d shown the dog just moments ago. The similarity was so striking that she couldn’t help laughing again—it was hard to stay mad at this freak when he was stalking toward you on tiptoes. She decided to let it go. Punishing him for existing wouldn’t bring the dog back.

“Becca,” she said, not quite ready to give up her last name, although he didn’t look equipped to Google it. Then again, he did have a laser, so who could say? “What’re you doing, anyway?” she asked.

“Banishing. Cleansing.”

“Kinda figured something like that. Banishing
what
, exactly?”

“Little nasties, psychic chum in the waters of the C.U.”

“C.U.?”

“Collective Unconscious.” He squinted at her through the colored lenses. “I
see you
.” He chuckled. “And you ain’t one a them. That’s why I din’t chase yo ass outta here, you dig?”

“Not really…. One of who?”

“The cultists, that’s who. The brethren of the Starry Wisdom Church.
Wisdom
my
ass.
I got more wisdom in my teeth than those motherfuckers got in they heads all combined.” Moe cackled and Becca jumped. “S’all right, s’all right, I’m just sayin’….” He was wagging his head from side to side now, and it gave him the look of a giant insect with cardboard antennae and red and blue eyes.