The Last Werewolf (24 page)

Six human victims, I counted. Few enough for each to be still a raw perfume, ghost-traces in the involved and generous scent of her cunt, on the hot flower of her breath. She’d tell me in her own time, we both knew. For now it was the draped obscenity. My own wailing dead in disbelief at the broken agreement had been churned back into the hurrying blood. Only the spirit of Arabella remained still, fixed me with—

Like this?

Yes, just like that. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.

We found ways. This is the story, the human story, the werewolf story, the
life
story: One finds ways. Kissing, slowly, was one. Though dark-haired and dark-eyed she was fair-skinned, a sensuous contrast that required continual reapprehension.
All
of her required this (or rather all of my desire did), repeatedness, over again–ness. The beauty spot by her lip was one of a dozen or so scattered over her body. My new constellations. There was no performance, no pornography, just complete conversion to the religion of each other, that erotic equalisation that mocks distinction between the sacred and the profane, that at a stroke anarchises the body’s moral world. All her parents’ love and spoiling were there in her parted thighs’ sly confidence. She knew the measure of her riches.
The wolf had first raped then made her larger, forced on her in addition to the human gifts nauseous exemption from the moral city’s ordinances and limits. You accepted the wolf and grew, or you rejected it and died. She’d had the soft toys and pink bedroom as a little girl, the ballet aspirations, the pony fixations. These had flared and mutated, books, a smart mouth, finding the balance between sophistication and sluttiness, a little material greed, the headache of being sufficiently pretty so that politicisation was a sulkily performed chore, then work, business and the daily shifting survival strategies that made the freshman small-hours ethical arguments quaint. All this was still there, dwarfed under the dark arch of the monster. The challenge was to find the devious bloody-mindedness to keep both, who she used to be and what she was now.

Fucking (the word “lovemaking” offered itself, with some legitimacy) let clairvoyance thrash about a bit between us: Here I was looking out from behind her eyes when she was eight, sitting on a back stoop twittered over by leaf shadows and stinging from some giant injustice. There she was behind mine in the sunlit library—
WEREWULF
—at Herne House. Here was a glowering sky over a dark field with a solitary Dutch barn. Here a car showroom, light bouncing off too much glass. Here Harley lighting the evening fire and saying, Well that’s just fucking
non
sense. Here her feet poking out of glittering bath foam, toenails like a little family of rubies. We lived a handful of each other’s moments, or imagined we did. Coming, I gripped the soft warm hair above her nape and stared at her. She stared back. Her eyes had the cold omniscience, her cunt the hot. Her open mouth moved very slightly, a barely perceptible shape of affirmation. This and the beauty spot did for whatever Tantric resolve I was holding on to. A first climax of total dissolution, as into God or void—then the return, the humble reassertion of fingerprints, scalp, knees, tongue, heart, brain. You forgot sex could do this, cast the divine fragment back into the divine whole for a moment, then reel it out again, razed, beatified.

So the six carnal hours had passed.

But passed they had. Now we lay on the bed like starfish. It’s one of the Platonic forms, lying with someone on a hotel bed after transcendent sex. Outside, Manhattan was chillily sunlit under a blue March sky.
Somewhere back down the hours it had rained. We’d been aware of it, as one harmless animal going about its business might be aware of another harmless animal doing the same. Now the air had a rinsed optimism. To be resisted, my realist warned, because already the future was groping, like a temporarily blinded giant, towards us.

“It’s the Irish Talulla,” she said. “Not the Chocktaw one. My mom’s family came over in the 1880s. Not that it makes a difference. It’s still a god-awful mouthful.”

“Demetriou” from her Greek father, Nikolai, who’d come to the U.S. as a physics postgrad in ’67, got sidetracked by the counterculture, barely scraped his MSc at Columbia and nearly died of a mysterious stomach infection on a trip to Mexico in 1973. He’d survived, however, and emerged traumatised, presumably into readiness for love, since less than six months out of hospital he met, fell for and married Colleen Gilaley, heiress to the not inconsiderable pile represented by
her
father’s four delis and three diners spread over Manhattan and Brooklyn, a familial empire into which Nikolai was grudgingly (and unproductively) absorbed. In 1975 (Ford in the White House,
Jaws
in movie theatres, Saigon fallen, the Khmer Rouge overrunning Cambodia,
Humboldt’s Gift
on the highbrow shelves,
Shogun
on the low) Colleen gave birth to what would be the Demetrious’ only child, a girl, Talulla Mary Apollonia, now thirty-four, divorcée, werewolf.

“It happened to me in California,” she said, speaking out of the qualitatively different silence that had formed after the nomenclatural explanation. (It happened to me in California. We were talking about “it,” now. This was how it would be, I realised, these early hours would display gentle schizophrenia, the multiple realities of what there was to talk about, of what we
were
.) “Last summer. My decree absolute had come through and I’d taken a trip out there to visit a couple of old UCLA friends in Palm Springs. Allegedly to celebrate my new singledom. In fact I felt like shit. Sad and washed-up and ugly and sexually dead.” The divorce had been precipitated by the discovery that her ex, Richard, a high-school teacher and aspirant novelist, had been having an affair with the deputy head’s secretary. You know, Talulla had said, if it had been some nineteen-year-old twinkie with pneumatic tits I could have come out of it with a bit of
dignity. I pity you, Richard, I really do. But this woman was
forty-seven
. You can imagine what a boost
that
gave me.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I got sick of things in Palm Springs and took a rental car out to Joshua Tree to lick my wounds. I stayed in a little cabana motel out on Route 62, hiked in the park during the day, drank tequila with the kids running the motel in the evening. It was a comfort, the desert. I think, by the way, we should order up some Cuervo, don’t you? I’m getting the feeling this is the calm before the storm, though
what
storm I don’t know.”

Lycanthropy had done things for her, licensed tangentiality, sanctioned intuition, loosened and altogether sexed-up the intelligence. She’d graduated with a degree in English and what turned out to be an insufficient interest in journalism. She started the career, but without much conviction, and after a couple of years drifted into helping run the Gilaley business. The education remained, humoured as a hopeless putz by the smut and savvy of her American trade self. I rang down for the Cuervo, half a dozen fresh limes, worried for the thousandth time Harley’s IDs were rotten, that my flight out of Heathrow had tripped a switch, that Grainer and Ellis were already hip to “Bill Morris” over at the Plaza, bunked up in luxury with his new howler squeeze.

“Then, one night,” she went on, “I wandered into the horror movie. I think it might have been the dumbest sequence of actions I’ve ever performed. For a start, I was driving alone at night in the desert. Off the main road too. I’d been out to Lake Havasu for the day and was determined to get back to my motel without the tedium of 62 West. It wasn’t late. Naturally the moon was up. Naturally the car broke down.”

The Cuervo and limes arrived. I found shot glasses in the suite’s bar and set us up. These, I knew, were the high-octane minutes, days, weeks, when anything she does can pluck the phallic string. Watching her toss back the shot. The pale female throat and her soft hair fallen back to reveal the flushed ears with their pearl studs. And this is nothing,
wulf
said. You wait. You just fucking
wait
.

“The horror movie’s always there,” she continued. “Just needs certain conditions to firm up. Mainly human stupidity. You’re driving around thinking the big thing is your poor broken heart and then suddenly the
car dies and everything around you says, er, no, honey, the big thing is you’re all alone out here and your phone’s not getting a signal and you haven’t seen another car in over an hour and in any case this is America so the last thing you should be hoping for is another car to come along. Hit me again.”

I poured two more shots. Again the toss back, the taut throat, the breasts’ uplift, the pearls.

“You could have been dumb and ugly,” I said, as she wiped her mouth with her hand.

“So could you.”

“If we both were that would’ve been okay. It’s inequity causes the trouble.”

“What if I’d been smart and ugly?”

“Initially excruciating but better in the long run. Dumb and pretty I’d have ended up killing you. Or more likely you me. Anyway go on. You’d broken down in the middle of nowhere.”

She put the glass on the bedside table and lay on her side, propped on one elbow, facing me. We were over the first miraculous wave, her eyes conceded. Now a soberer relief, and the first shadows of realism. “I’d passed a one-horse town two or three miles down the road,” she said. “A diner, a store, a handful of houses. I was pretty sure I’d seen a garage, too. At the very least there’d be a phone. I’d call Triple A and that would be that. So I walked. I must have gone about half a mile when the helicopter appeared.”

I was studying her hand, enjoying the thought of its history, relishing in the inane way one must in these beginnings the bare fact that it was hers. Full-fleshed with long unpainted nails. She wore a big opal ring on her middle finger. When she’d touched her clit, with healthy deft modern American entitlement, the sight of this ringed finger slipping with cunning purpose through the soft dark hair of her mons had almost finished me.

“It came up about fifty yards away, I guess out of a ravine. I thought it must be the police because of the searchlight. Obviously these were your WOCOP guys.”

“The Hunt.”

“Right. Well, anyway, it happened incredibly fast. I could tell they were chasing someone, something, but I couldn’t see what. It was bizarre standing there with suddenly no category to put the experience in. That’s
why
I just stood there, like an idiot. Then the searchlight swung and blinded me and suddenly—out of nowhere—the werewolf hit me.”

I thought back to the file I’d seen. Had the report mentioned a witness? It had not. Thank God.

“You’d hardly call it being bitten. More a scrape of the teeth. He really just ran me over. The claws did the real damage. I remember thinking, even in the split-second it took: Jesus, werewolves exist. You’d think you’d be stunned, wouldn’t you? But I wasn’t. I guess, you know, you see something enough times in the movies … I got one big gash on my chest and one on my cheek. It was so sudden, like a huge firework went off in my face. Then he was gone. I’ve never seen anything move that fast.
Had
never seen, I mean. These days I’m pretty quick myself.”

I almost said: We’ll see how fast soon enough, but didn’t. It would have left us both uneasy.

“Then it was over,” she continued. “The chopper was gone and there I was all alone in total silence again. I walked about twenty paces, in shock I suppose. Then I found the dart.”

“What dart?”

“For the werewolf, but they’d hit me. In the calf. A tranquilizer, presumably, since a moment later I was out like a light.”

“Did you keep it?”

“That would’ve been the smart thing, wouldn’t it? But you find something sticking in you like that you pluck it out and toss it. Or you do if you’re stupid. If you’re me.”

Darting? This is the Hunt. They don’t dart, they kill. They
behead
. Alfonse Mackar was one of Ellis’s. Grainer had been in Canada looking for Wolfgang. Was there anything in the file about darting for capture? If there was I didn’t remember it.

“I don’t know how long I was out,” she said. “When I woke up it was still dark but the moon was higher. I wasn’t quite where I remembered lying down, either. Must have crawled, I guess. I went back to the road and walked the two miles to Arlette. I seriously thought I’d died and this
was the afterlife. By the time I got to the town the wounds had already started to heal. By the next morning there was nothing, no sign of any injury at all. But you know how all that works. Actually I do still get a slight pain in my chest sometimes. As if there’s a splinter in there. God, that tequila’s gone to the tips of my toes.”

A moment in which Manhattan quietened and turned its glittering consciousness on us. I felt the dimensions of the hotel room, the streets outside and the frayed edges of the metropolis unravelling into freeways and the newly hopeful country’s vast distances. And here we were on the bed together, warm as a pot of sunlit honey. With a very slight effort I could have settled wholly into peace. But now we’d gone through the first layer of sex all the wretched questions throbbed.

“The infection,” she said, with mild telepathy. “Why me, now, after you’re saying, what, a hundred and fifty years?”

Build a fortress. Guards. An army of dogs. Victims brought in, paid, tricked. We’d never have to leave. I sketched this and other fantasies, felt the tingle of futility, heard the world’s forces like a billion-piece orchestra tuning up. Why in God’s name were they darting Alfonse Mackar?

“I don’t know,” I answered. “My information’s WOCOP information. They’re the authority, or were. Transmission’s supposed to have been stopped by a virus, which means either the bug’s died or you’re immune. Anything special I should know about you medically?”

“Nothing. I get hay fever and I’m allergic to almonds. Otherwise, nada.”

“There’s got to be something. Anyway it’s not the priority. The priority is … Well, there are several.”

“Not yet, please. Hit me again.”

I had the long-overdue confrontation with myself in the bathroom while she made phone calls. (Three years ago her mother had died of bowel cancer and Talulla had taken on running the business ostensibly with—latterly instead of—her father. Until “it” happened. Two months after Turning she’d hired a general manager, Ambidextrous Alison, to cut herself loose.) “Honey, just ig
nore
him,” I could hear her saying, presumably of meddlesome Nikolai. “I’ve told him he’s out of it. He does it because he knows it pisses you off.” I lay naked on the bathroom floor. Cold marble and the starry light of inset halogens. Things had caught up
with me. Chiefly the completeness of my reversal. The universe, I said, demands some sort of deal, so you make one. In my case to live without love. With
out
love. A hundred and sixty-seven years. Was it ridiculous to speak of love now? No, it wasn’t. Or only in that it’s always ridiculous—on Wittgensteinian grounds—to speak of love. Everything was the same and everything had changed. Outside the city and the voluble traffic and the millions of human eyes and talking mouths and crafty habituated hands testified: The accidental epic of ordinariness goes on. A godless universe of flailing contingency—now with the hilarious difference of not being in it alone. (Suddenly I missed Harley, guiltily.) Courtesy of shared specieshood—indeed sole species representation—we’d skipped the phase of incredulous delight and gone straight to entrenched addiction. It wasn’t a choice. I was for her, she for me.
Wulf
married us, blessed us, wrapped his arms around us like a stinking whisky-priest. What did I write of Arabella? “We would have killed together and we would have
shone.
” Yes, and the warmth of that shining lay upon me now like an afterglow.
Fore
glow rather, since it came back through time from a future rich with murder. Talulla had looked at me when I pushed my cock into her cunt, had looked at me, I say, and sensed something of Arabella, whose spirit lived in me, whose ghost looked out through my eyes, had detected this presence and understood as she lifted her pale hips in slow and complete and victorious compliance that the betrayal whether I liked it or not of course deepened my pleasure, sold me wholly into the new female ownership, pissed on the altar, shat on the grave, dug up and defiled the beloved body in exquisite fully conscious sacrilege under the laws of Eros.