Lycanthropia

Because days are brighter in the Great Pyramid of Giza, nights are darker. When one goes there for a midnight picnic, as the Dark Child and I did some months ago, one should carry a very strong flashlight with plenty of batteries. Night has a way of overwhelming electricity in the Great Pyramid, swallowing it in enormous chunks and devouring the light it generates. Absent a number of very powerful batteries, the only illumination penetrating to the Queen’s Chamber originates 8.6 light years past from a star called Sirius, or Alpha Canis Majoris. That lone star, desiring a pack, gazes down into the room like a stray yard dog awaiting the kindness of a stranger.

For our midnight banquet the Dark Child roasted a brace of quail, stole wild strawberries from a merchant’s garden, drew a honeycomb from the carcass of a lion and bartered kisses for Belgian milk chocolate in a seedy alley near our hotel. I purchased two bottles of Clairette de Die, Tradition, a wine made in the Cave de l’Union des Jeunes Viticulteurs Récoltants from a black market wine cellar; its owner, a man whose onyx mustaches curled upward at the ends and lent him the illusion of smiling, also sold me a dozen robust dry cells for my flashlight. “With this wine and these batteries,” he told me, “you need never fear the darkness.”

So we drank a half-bottle on our climb up the Ascending Passage, before the Dark Child made us small and we walked the ancient way through to the chamber. There, with all the artificial lighting gone and the torch extinguished, we stared at Sirius and let its pale glow flood our consciousness. So, we learned, it is not the full moon that spurs wolves to howl, but the Dog Star instead. Half blind, the Dark Child embraced me and flooded my face with damp kisses. “Save me from the watchdog,” she murmured. Later, she dripped honey into my mouth from her fingertips and I colored her face with melted chocolate and licked it clean. The Dog Star drifted off the edge of the horizon and we tossed it quail bones and sang to it from an ancient hymnal.

It was then, during our singing, that we discovered the bronze jackal.

I saw it first, but thought it was an optical illusion, a trick of light played on me by the absence of the Dog Star. Then the Dark Child cocked her elfin head and said, “Has the star entered this room?” She pointed to a constant pinprick twinkle in the ziggurat-shaped niche at the far end of the chamber. We dared into the darkness and turned our torch on the offending glimmer, and when it glared off the enameled bronze jackal, the Dark Child caught her breath. “Look, Anubis!” she said. “The Dog Star has come to earth!” I knew better, but held my tongue, and instead examined the hieroglyphs painted across the jackal’s shoulders: Secret Names of all the gods. “This is a very, very powerful jackal,” I told the Dark Child. “It wants to leave here. It wants us to take it home.”

“We won’t get it past the guards at the entrance,” the Dark Child argued. “And even if we do, we’ll never get it out of the country.”

“We will if it wants to go,” I replied.

“We don’t need the risk,” said the Dark Child. “Let’s leave it here.”

We tried, but the bronze jackal would not be abandoned. He followed us down the Ascending Passage on our descent, then slipped behind the guards as they searched our picnic basket for contraband. By skulking in the shadows at an even lope, he beat us to our hotel room and had installed himself in a far corner when we arrived. The Dark Child gasped and crossed herself when she happened on him. “How’d he do this?” she asked. “How’d he arrive here before us?”

“He’s a pet,” I told her. “Your pet. There’s no discouraging him.”

When she learned the bronze jackal was her pet, the Dark Child’s demeanor changed considerably; she flung her arms around his neck and hugged him close, as a young girl might squeeze a plush toy. “He feels cool to the touch,” she said. “And warm at the same time. Like gold.” During her embrace, the jackal seemed to be grinning, but my remembrance might be tainted by my imagination. More likely he remained motionless, like the bronze figure he was supposed to be.

It was the last night of our vacation, and we sat on the hotel balcony, looking out on the Nile, listening for the sounds of ibises and frogs. At 3:30 the full moon rose blood-red and huge on the horizon and we retired to our room’s canopied bed and made desperate love. Our coming together was savage and extreme, and once, with sweat and saliva dripping from her chin, the Dark Child interrupted our tryst and demanded, “Say my name. Say my name in Latin.”

“Your name is Proserpina,” I whispered.

She wanted more: “Say my name in Greek.”

“You are Persephone,” I said.

She moved atop me slightly and enlightenment opened between her thighs. This would be the real test: “Say my name in Egyptian.”

I took her hair in my hands and pulled her face to mine. We kissed. Her teeth split my lip and the coppery taste of blood passed between us like punctuation. She pulled away and held me at arms length: “Say my name in Egyptian!”

“You have no name in Egyptian. You are simply the Dark Child in Egypt. You have no identity here,” I said evenly, though she knew it troubled me.

She tossed her head and laughed wildly; then she licked my neck and bit me — hard — and laughed again when I did not acknowledge the pain. “I own you,” she chortled.

“Your turn,” I said. “Say my name.”

“No,” she refused.

I slipped her grasp and shifted my body and suddenly she was beneath me and I controlled the source of her illumination. The slightest fear flickered in her jackal’s eyes and tugged at the corners of her jackal’s mouth. I knew I had her. “Say my name,” I demanded.

“You are Anubis. You are a jackal. You collect the dead and take them to judgment,” she said.

I stared at her mouth and watched the words leave her lips, fly past me and drift toward the ceiling, where they formed incomprehensible sentences.

“You are Anubis. You are cunning and cruel,” said the Dark Child. “But you can be gentle and wise. You collect the dead and carry them away to eternal judges.”

The Dark Child hid her eyes with the back of her hand. “You are Anubis,” she said. “You judge no one. Not even me. You simply carry away the dead and weigh their deeds on the scales of good and evil.”

“It’s my job,” I said, lamely.

“Yes,” said the Dark Child. All the while the bronze jackal cocked his oversized ears and listened carefully.

∞

At sunrise we went back onto the balcony and watched mists evaporate over the Nile. Then we packed for our trip home. The Dark Child changed the bronze jackal into a small ceramic figurine, like those one buys for a few dollars in a souvenir shop, and we carried the priceless artifact through customs without incident. In America her magic failed (as it always does), but the bronze jackal had tricks of his own, and when we entered our home he was there already, sitting placidly in a corner near the glass wall overlooking the budding Appalachians. When we were done unpacking Zoey (for that is the Dark Child’s name in America) stood beside him with her hand on his head and stared out at the gray afternoon. He might have been a real dog for the way she treated him.

I knew what she was thinking: In a few days she’d have to go, and for months I’d be left alone, though not so alone as I had been before the bronze jackal sniffed us out. Zoey knew it, and her heart was torn, but spring and mother beckoned. There was nothing she could do about it — nothing either of us could do about it. We were joined in an eternal yin and yang ballet that alternated between fulness and deprivation, darkness and light, serenity and chaos.

That night, whispering in our own familiar bed, we could hear the bronze jackal’s toenails clicking on the linoleum as he paced back and forth, thinking Egyptian thoughts. He was restless, and I feared homesickness for the pyramids and the Dog Star might get the best of him. But once he grasped the mechanics of the doorknob and was able to come and go as he nocturnally pleased, he was fine. In fact, he left the house after midnight and returned just as dawn was ascending, chilly and gray, over the eastern horizon. Zoey found scraps of a rabbit carcass scattered across the kitchen, and she wept and scolded the bronze jackal while cleaning the room.

“You’ll make new rabbits,” I soothed.

“I will,” said Zoey. “And you’ll take them away. Why must you take everything away? Why can’t things live forever? Then there’d be no leaving and returning.”

“It’s my —” I started, but Zoey clapped her hand over my mouth and clipped short the rest of the sentence.

“If you say it’s your job one more time, I’m going to scream, I tell you,” she warned.

Thunderstorms — the first harbingers of spring — were developing in the West; tomorrow Zoey would be gone.

“What about the jackal?” Zoey asked. “Will I take him with me?”

I shook my head no. “He’ll stay here,” I said. “He’ll finish things left undone and mitigate cruelty on the earth.”

“And he’ll whisper my names in your ear when you start to forget me,” Zoey added.

“I never forget you,” I confessed. “Not for a second.”

∞

That night we performed our eternal ritual: I stained her tongue, the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet with pomegranate seed. Then we made very gentle, goodbye love until sunrise. The bronze jackal had brought new corpses into the house overnight, but I arose before Zoey and spirited them away. I took coffee and breakfast into the bedroom and we made small talk and chanted endearments. The room was scented with a mixture of my sweat and her Shalimar, an aroma that would eviscerate me in her absence. Eventually I’d move to another room and sleep on the narrow cot and leave the space only to work. But for the first few days of her absence, I’d need even the slightest reminder of her as a promise and a prayer.

Once Zoey was gone and spring bloomed in earnest, the bronze jackal’s range expanded until he could circumnavigate the globe in an evening. His tastes grew more and more exotic, and I started finding scraps of things I could not define in the kitchen.

And another thing happened. In addition to the Secret Names of the gods scrawled across his shoulders, new glyphs began appearing like gunmetal tattoos along the bronze jackal’s spine. These were disturbing, symbols of modern man’s technological death machines. Most prominent were those representing biologic and atomic weaponry. By osmosis, the bronze jackal was absorbing killing techniques that had once been alien to him, and the more they permeated him, the broader grew his leer. It was then I learned his English names: Sometimes he was Genocide; more often he was Apocalypse.

“Maybe then we’ll get a little rest, boy,” I told him one evening.

I wandered the earth, reaping souls. In Iraq I took American marines, Iraqi insurgents and civilians by the score, grandfathers, women, children, infants — it made no difference to me. I simply loaded them up and carried them away. In Ethiopia I found victims of AIDS and victims of the e-bola virus and victims of starvation. There were thousands in China, dead of old age or accident. They were murdered in America, or dead of heart attacks, killed in auto accidents: I scooped them up and carted them to judgment. Death reigned everywhere. In Europe, in Asia, in South America: It was my job. Load them up. Take them away.

But now I performed my duties in the absence of Life, so the work was hollow and tedious and hurt me in ways I cannot divulge. All around me, wherever I turned, everything was death.

Some mornings the bronze jackal made himself flesh and sat with me on the narrow bed. We said nothing to one another. Just sat and waited. I scratched behind his oversized ears. He listened, hearing the far away sounds of the world’s end.

On the morning she left, Zoey, the Dark Child, touched my lips with her fingertips and said softly, “You are Anubis. You are my only love. We are wed for eternity.” Tears stained my face at the corners of my eyes and remain there until this day.

Next autumn, if there is a next autumn, she’ll return and brush them away.

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