The Equinox Drop

The equinox crowd showed up at the mine shaft around four in the afternoon, the same as they did every March and September, and I was there early with my camera to get the light before it went sideways. I'd been on Kwajalein two years by then. I came out at twenty-two for a freelance job shooting the coral quarries for a magazine that ended up killing the piece, and I just never left except for a short trip to Majuro. Rent was cheap, the work trickled in, and the drinking was reliable.

The mine shaft sits behind the jaggery market, maybe a ten minute walk past the last row of stalls. The market itself is this big open-sided shed with a tin roof that turns the whole place into an oven by noon. Rows of sugar cakes laid out on metal trays, brown and sticky, and the vendors working scoops against the trays all day so it sounds like somebody's shaking a tambourine somewhere you can't see. The shaft behind it is old and half collapsed, fenced off with a rusted iron grate somebody welded shut years ago, and twice a year the locals line up to drop coins through the bars for luck. Nobody could tell me exactly what the luck was for. Good rains, safe boats, a decent harvest of whatever grows in that soil. It didn't seem to matter. The coins went in, somebody rang a bell they kept hanging on a post, and everybody cheered.

I set up near the grate with a spot in the shade and watched them come through. Old women with coins held up like communion wafers. Kids racing each other from the market. A couple of American contractors from the base who'd heard about it from somebody and wanted a photo of themselves doing it, which, fine, that's basically my whole job. I shot maybe two hundred frames and none of them were good. That happens. Some days the light is there and the feeling isn't.

The feeling hadn't been for a while, honestly. I was twenty-four and it had been eleven months since I'd slept with anybody, which I only knew because I'd done the math one bored Sunday and then felt bad about doing the math. It wasn't that nobody was around. It was that every time somebody was around I looked at the situation like an invoice. What it would cost, what it would get me, whether I'd regret it Tuesday. That's a bad way to want things. Somewhere in the last year I'd stopped wanting things in general and started evaluating them, and the difference between those two states is the difference between a photograph and a light meter reading.

So I'm standing at the grate, coins clinking below, bell ringing, crowd shuffling past me, and I feel nothing. Completely flat. I took one more frame of a kid's hand dropping a coin and deleted it on the spot, which is a thing photographers do when they're in a mood.

That's when Bruce showed up.

I knew Bruce already, is the thing. He was twenty-six, worked at the clinic polishing the surgical knot tying boards, which is exactly as weird a job as it sounds. Medical students practice tying knots on these little boards and the boards wear out and get grimy and somebody has to make them smooth again, and on this island that somebody was Bruce. He'd moved out from Majuro a year back. We met at a bar over there when I was twenty-two and passing through for a job, and we'd been drinking buddies ever since. Once a week or so, never romantic, never anything. He knew my landlord's name and I knew his sister's birthday. That kind of friend.

Except this particular afternoon he didn't come up to me as Bruce. He came up behind me at the grate, and when I turned around he was holding up this ragged leather object I recognized immediately as the broken harmonium bellows he kept in his backpack. He'd found it in the salvage yard a year ago and carried it around for no reason anybody had ever established. He held it up like a trophy and said, in a voice I'd never heard him use before, that he was a traveling musician and his instrument had suffered a tragic accident, and did I know anyone who could repair it before the season turned.

I looked at him. I looked at the bellows. The thing had a hole in it you could put your fist through.

And I laughed. Really laughed, for the first time in I don't know how long, the kind that comes up from somewhere lower than the chest. The kid who'd dropped the last coin gave me a look like I was causing a scene, which I was.

I could have broken it right there. Could have said, Bruce, I've watched you carry that thing into three different bars and use it as a beer coaster. But something in me was standing at that grate feeling like a light meter instead of a photograph, and I thought, no. Not tonight. Tonight I want to want something, even if the something is stupid.

So I put on a face and said I wasn't from here myself. I said I was a photographer on assignment, shooting the jaggery market at night for a client in the States, and that I'd never seen a musician on the island and found that a serious gap in the local culture.

"A serious gap," he said, tucking the bellows under his arm like a wounded bird. "That's what everyone says. The local musicians are all seasonal, you understand. They come with the trade winds."

"Terrible luck for the market, then. It could use music."

"It could use a great deal of things." He looked at the grate, at the coins glinting down in the dark below it. "I'm told the luck down there compounds."

"Like interest?"

"Like yeast."

We were being completely ridiculous and both of us knew it and neither of us broke. He asked my name, since we were strangers, and I gave him one off the top of my head, Mara, because it was the first name that came and it belonged to a girl I went to school with who would never in her life come to this island. He said his name was Zeke. Zeke the traveling musician. I asked what Zeke played and he said the harmonium, mostly, and some saz, and that the saz had been lost at sea, which explained why he was carrying only the broken bellows, which he described as the heart of the harmonium, everything else being replaceable.

"Everything else being replaceable," I repeated. "That's bleak for a musician."

"It's practical for one. The heart breaks, you carry the heart. You don't carry the rest."

I had my camera up before I knew I'd raised it. I took a frame of him holding the bellows against the crowd, all those people streaming past with their coins, and when I checked the screen it was the first good picture I'd taken all day. Maybe the first good one in a month. His face was doing something halfway between a joke and a prayer and the light was coming through the tin roof of the market behind him in a long slant.

"That's a real one," I said. "For my client."

"Your client has excellent taste in broken instruments."

"My client has no idea I exist. I invoice them quarterly."

Zeke nodded like this was normal for photographers, and maybe it was. The crowd was thinning as the sun went low. Somebody had started a fire in a barrel near the market's back wall and the vendors were covering their trays with damp cloth, the day's sugar work done. The bell was still ringing every few minutes, slower now, tired hands taking shifts on the rope.

He asked if I'd seen the shaft itself, the inside, and I said it was welded shut years ago. He said that was what people were told. I said I'd been photographing this island for two years and if there were a way into that shaft, I'd have found it. He said, "You photograph. I walk around. Different professions." Then he nodded toward the back of the market, past the last stall, where there was a storage room with a door that never fully closed, and said the musicians of the region kept certain knowledge, and certain places to rest, and if Mara the photographer wanted the real story of the equinox she'd have to decide what kind of stranger she was.

The storage room door hung open about four inches, dark inside, smelling of burlap and molasses. I stood there with my camera against my chest and thought about eleven months of invoices.

I went in. The whole decision was one step over a threshold, and the room took me the way dark rooms do, all at once. Burlap sacks stacked along one wall, bags of raw sugar, a crate of empty trays. The door stayed cracked behind us four inches the way it always did, letting in a stripe of last light and the sound of the bell, still going out there, slower and slower. The air smelled of burned sugar and salt, the molasses smell cooked down to something darker, and under it the sea coming through the gaps in the tin.

"Musicians keep strange hours," Bruce said behind me. "And strange rooms."

"Zeke," I said. "If you're going to keep the name, keep the accent too. You're slipping."

He laughed, and the laugh was Bruce's, there was no getting around that, and I turned around to face him because I wanted to see his face when it stopped being funny. He was still holding the bellows. He set it down on the crate with more care than the thing deserved, and then he stood there with his hands loose at his sides, and we looked at each other like two people doing arithmetic.

"So," he said. "Mara."

"So. Zeke."

"If at any point tonight you want to be Liz again, you say so, and I'm Bruce, and we order a beer, and this never happened."

"That's the deal?"

"That's the deal. And if you want out entirely, you say Mara's tired