Authors: Douglas Wynne
Darius Marlowe was used to dreaming in the language of numbers: square roots, prime integers, angstroms, and Ohms. But on the morning of September 17th he awoke from a dream of smoots.
In October 1958, members of the MIT fraternity Lambda Chi Alpha carried a young pledge dressed in black clothes and black gloves across the Harvard Bridge from MIT to Boston, laying him down at five foot, seven inch intervals (his height) and marking his progress with chalk followed by paint so that he, one Oliver R. Smoot, could be used as a unit of measurement. To this day the bridge bears painted markers every ten smoots, beginning with an arrow pointing toward MIT on the Boston side of the bridge and the indicator: 364.4 SMOOTS + 1 EAR.
Whether the 1958 fraternity brothers selected the subject of the prank with preternatural insight into his destiny, or the ninety-minute prank itself fixed the course of his life, it should be noted that Mr. Smoot went on to become the chairman of the American National Standards Institute and the president of the International Organization for Standardization, and Google now offers the smoot as a unit of measurement in their calculator, maps, and Google Earth tools.
The marks are repainted each semester, and when the bridge was renovated in the 1980s, the Cambridge Police department requested that the marks be maintained, as they had come to rely on them for identifying the locations of accidents on the bridge.
Darius Marlowe was as familiar with the marks and their legend as any MIT student. He had walked over them countless times in waking life, and recognized them in the nascent hours of the 17th as he tossed and turned, winding himself in his dirty bed sheets in a double dorm room on the fourth floor of Fairborz Maseeh Hall while his roommate snored.
Darius was dreaming of the pharaoh again, the black man, the faceless messenger who had introduced himself in other dreams as Nereus Charobim. In the dream Darius stood among the muddy reeds on the riverbank and watched the rain-lashed waters rushing and churning like the Mississippi in flood, carrying flotsam out to sea: a clapboard shed, a metallic blue car (desperate, prying fingers behind a slice of submerged window), a drowning Doberman, and a bicycle.
Darius tracked the quick progress of these objects past the Community Boathouse where a fleet of Mercury keelboats rocked and strained against their tethers on the overwhelmed bank, toward a tattered mass of whirling black cloud downriver, from which sinuous, ashen tentacles and sheets of black water whipped around in rising spirals.
The scene was washed in a cacophony of noise—wind and screams—but the pharaoh’s voice was loud and clear above the din, speaking, not shouting, Darius’s name, commanding that he turn his attention to the object in the palm of his hand. A key on a ring; the ornament on that ring a silver oval reflecting the storm-diffused September sun up at Darius’s face, washing his dark, heavy brow with its flickering light. Was it a signal mirror that he was supposed to use to send an S-O-S, he wondered, in the logic of the dream?
No. The unmistakable face of Nereus Charobim now stared at him from the little mirror, features distorted as if sketched by a shaking hand or seen through a ragged glaze of Vaseline.
“I have prepared a room for you in the Gryphon Tower,” Charobim said. “Cross the bridge and join me. I have work for you.”
The face faded from the oval, the silver faded to onyx, and a green digital number glowed from the little window in Darius’s hand: 182.2 S.
A measurement in smoots.
Darius woke up tangled in sweaty sheets. He gazed around the room, expecting to see the pharaoh standing among the stacks of books and piles of dirty laundry. The only other body was his detested roommate, Mitchel, an acne-scarred robotics geek from Pennsylvania who either thought Darius couldn’t hear him when he jerked off or didn’t care if he could. Bottles of Mountain Dew lay in and around the too small trash basket beside Mitchel’s desk, evidence of a late-night study binge.
Darius sat up and put his feet on the cold floor. He let the reality of his surroundings sink in and felt disappointment swirling around the drain of another morning. He needed to piss, needed to step into his slippers and head to the dirty bathroom, but he held it in and focused on the gossamer-thin threads of the dream, combing through them gently, so as not to break them with the crude tool of his intellect. What had the number been? A weight on a digital scale? A time on a clock? No. It had been a mile marker on a road. No… a marker in smoots!
The elation of remembrance was shattered by the absurdity of the notion that the messenger of the gods would communicate to him in such nonsense. The idea was surely a product of his tired imagination. And yet, what would it hurt him to check? 182.2 S. He saw the number in his mind’s eye, as if it were emblazoned on his forehead, and its specificity soothed him. He didn’t even need to write it down to remember it, and he smiled as the little joke began to dawn on him. Maybe the black pharaoh had a sense of humor after all.
As the shackles of sleep fell away, he moved to the bathroom, emptied his bladder, and brushed his teeth without losing sight of the number. He took a handful of water from the tap in his cupped hand, rinsed his mouth, and met his own eyes in the dusty mirror. He smiled at his reflection. There had been a mirror in the dream, and a promise.
Less than ten minutes later, dressed in jeans, a brown suede jacket, and a scarf, he walked out of the front doors of Fariborz Maseeh Hall and trotted down the steps. The cold morning air invigorated him as it stung his cheeks. He dug his hands into his pockets, turned right past the chapel, and stepped onto Mass Ave.
The street bustled with the usual book-laden students and neon-clad joggers amid the buses, bikes, and cars. A quarter of a mile on, he realized that the bank of the Charles River across the street was congested with a crowd of onlookers, blue lights flashing in the gaps between them as they milled around near the new tide line. The Mass Ave Bridge wasn’t as high above the river as it had once been. What had never been a bridge worthy of a suicide attempt was now too low to allow more than the passage of kayaks underneath. And yet, as he drew nearer, it became apparent that someone had been drowned. Maybe the victim had capsized a small boat, an inexperienced operator in a rental.
The flashers turned out to be an EMT truck, beyond which a police boat was bobbing on the gray water, twenty yards out. The bridge wasn’t closed; and, while there were a couple of officers in police windbreakers out on the footpath with walkie-talkies, traffic was moving to the Back Bay side, albeit sluggishly, as drivers strained to catch a glimpse of the tragedy. Darius succumbed to the same curiosity. He watched for a break in traffic and jogged across the street to the back of the crowd, where bystanders were searching their phones and making speculative chit-chat with strangers. One man had a young girl seated upon his shoulders, her cheeks rosy beneath a yellow knit hat. Darius sidled through the crowd until he had a better view of the boat.
It wasn’t just morbid fascination drawing him closer. He felt a compelling sense that whatever had happened here was linked to his dream, that there was personal significance in the tragedy, and that, if he were observant enough, providence would put him in the right place at the right time to interpret it. This sense had been growing in his waking life over the past month, a feeling that not only were his dreams a conduit for messages from the master, but that even everyday reality had taken on a dreamlike quality rife with coded symbolism and cabalistic significance. Perhaps the patterns had always been there, but he’d been too distracted and unfocused to see them. Perhaps the initiation he was undergoing each night had removed a filter and attuned his consciousness to the rich, synchronistic alphanumeric soup that all modern people waded through without the ability to read it. Or maybe he had been set on a path that consistently put him in the right place at the right time to see it.
Here was another confirmation: the police boat drifted sideways in the water at his approach, granting him a clear view of a large white 23 at the back of the hull. He thrilled at the sight. That number was a key to a door that he would arrive at one day. It had been appearing to him daily, hinting at some titanic truth, teasing like a harlot, flashing like a beacon, leading him on toward revelation.
Darius took a pocket-sized marble notebook from his jacket and flipped it open to a clean page. With a pen plucked from his jeans he scribbled the latest entry: “9/17 Police boat trolling for body near Mass Ave Bridge—23.”
A pair of scuba divers broke the surface with an unmasked face between them; a doughy white visage with weedy black curls clinging to the forehead. The crowd gasped almost in unison at the sight, and those at the back pressed forward. The man with the little girl finally seemed to awaken to the fact of what he was doing. Darius saw him reach up to cover her eyes with his cupped hand as he turned and headed back toward the street.
Darius moved in closer, stepping into the gaps left by those with weak stomachs and minds. He didn’t think he recognized the drowned man, but it was hard to be certain from this distance. The divers were passing the body to a burly officer perched on a diving platform at the stern of the vessel, and now Darius could see that the corpse was wearing an unusual accessory: a bicycle security chain coated in translucent red vinyl wrapped and locked around his knees.
He lingered until his intuition told him there would be no more revelations here. It was time to get ahead of the dispersing crowd if he wanted to cross the bridge mostly unaccompanied.
Turning his back on the scene, he felt a thrill of empowerment, an inarticulate
knowing
that this was somehow for him, a performance for an audience of one. The feeling grew with each step, each meter, as he passed the broad-brushed markings on the sidewalk. 50 SMOOTS. The wind picked up on the open water, and his scarf trilled against his ear. 100 SMOOTS. A cloud of starlings burst from a tree on the far bank of the river and wheeled through the sky, a secret alphabet written against the clouds in the geometry of their ink-black choreography. This too, was meant to speak to him in a language he teetered on the brink of deciphering.
The hairs on his arms pricked up beneath his jacket sleeves. The sense of power and portent swelled with each step he took. In the middle of the bridge, he found confirmation. At the 182.2 mark he came to the place where the original pranksters (and every freshman who had come after and preserved their markings) had set down not a number, but a slogan, “HALFWAY TO HELL” with an arrow pointing back toward MIT.
He stood on the letters and looked away from the college, away from the police vehicles and the dispersing crowd. He gazed across the choppy water toward Back Bay and Kenmore Square, toward the neon Citgo pyramid near Fenway Park, and ran his fingers along the underside of the pale green metal railing until they found something stuck there: a metal object in a wad of gum. He peeled the object free and folded it into his palm. He had lingered only for a moment, and now, walking on toward the other bank, he looked down at the treasure in his palm. It was a key on a ring with a diamond shaped tag inlaid with the name and unit number of his destination:
FENWAY
TOWERS
72
Darius Marlowe reached the Back Bay side of Mass Ave with a spring in his step.
Becca had last seen the dog she’d begun thinking of as “Django” in a tunnel beneath an abandoned textile factory in Cambridge. Today she was going back for him. The factory was a favorite site for her little band of urbex friends, and she had already milked it for most of the decent shots she was likely to get, but she brought her camera anyway, because she thought,
you never know.
What she didn’t bring was a partner. In fact, she didn’t even tell Rafael she was going back to the mill. Reckless? Sure, but he was stubborn about safety protocols and wouldn’t take no for an answer. She figured there was no point in telling him if she didn’t want an argument and an uninvited escort.
The dog had come within arm’s reach on her last visit, but he was skittish. She didn’t know how she knew it, but she felt sure that if he scented or heard anyone other than her, he wouldn’t allow himself to be seen at all…
if
he was still haunting the place. So she went alone.
The mill was a huddle of loosely connected ruins in red brick beside the river. Twin stacks that hadn’t belched smoke in decades loomed over a rusting water tank atop the main structure, above grids of shattered windows. Most of the graffiti was old and faded, except for the metallic paint, which caught enough light even on an overcast day like today to render well in photos. The weeds were prolific, and Becca had used them to great effect in infrared sets; but today they presented nothing she hadn’t captured already. She kept her camera in her bag as she ducked under the barbed wire and made her way along the well-trodden paths to her favored entrance: a brick archway before which lay a rotting wooden door.
Here were long rooms that still housed moldering spools of green and blue thread piled high like mounds of plague-ravaged corpses, and rows of rusting machines, their rollers clogged with crumbling asbestos tiles. The long halls were illuminated from collapsed ceilings. Passing through them on her way to the deeper, darker chambers, Becca tuned her ears to the flutter and chirp of birds nesting atop unmoored pillars and in the corners of roofless brick walls.
Last time, she’d seen the dog on one of the sublevels, in a utility tunnel that connected the main factory to an outbuilding. Eventually she would make her way down there by the light of her headlamp. For now, she paused only to put on her trusty leather work gloves. Every surface in a place like this was rife with tetanus.
She walked over tangled branches and under slopes of collapsing corrugated metal, her Doc Martens crunching on broken glass and chalky tile shards. Her breathing deepened and slowed with each step. There had always been something soothing to her about decaying places, something peaceful in their absolute abandonment. These failed structures existed in a realm beyond effort and ambition, beyond maintenance and manicure. In contrast, the self-conscious facades of high-rent shops on Newbury Street where she worked in the gallery often threatened to suffocate her with their pretense that life could be beautified and preserved indefinitely, that order and tidiness were some kind of natural state, and that the chaotic and rustic, the rough edges of art, were only beautiful by contrast to the austere and immaculate and could only be acknowledged when safely contained within the protective foursquare boundary of a frame.