The Last Werewolf (29 page)

Moonlight blotched the forest floor, maternally soothed us when we moved though it. Lu stopped once to look up and let her werewolf face take its cold balm and I saw my lover silvered in all her sinuous beauty,
the hardened breasts and fatless belly, the long deadly hands, the thin-haired muscles of thigh and calf. I shuddered at how close to giving up I’d been. Remembered Harley in the library saying, You’ve got a duty to live, same as the rest of us, with London’s snow hurrying and the whisky’s firelit gold. You love life because life’s all there is. The last two weeks, the motels, the miles on the road, Manhattan, Heathrow, all had the closed encrypted quality of a dream.
This
was the waking world, lust and hunger racing to the primal feast, my dead rapture brought back to life by the simple miracle of not having to do it alone …

Meanwhile we’d come too far too soon. A small stream broke into a steep valley, conifer-covered on its western wall (the great fresh flank of the Pacific just beyond it), mixed forest and stony outcrops on its eastern, snaked down through by a smooth, single-lane, new-smelling tarmac road, sparsely lit. Talulla stopped, breath going up in plumes. I stood behind her, wrapped my arms around her and filled my hands with her breasts and lightly bit her shoulder. She put her head back, licked my snout.
I’m smarter when I Change
, she’d said, and I could feel it in her, the deepened cunning and whetted nous. Inside the Hunger’s red din her predator was busy with angles and shadows, lines of cover, points of entry, how far a scream would carry. I’d underestimated her, in spite of myself, out of vestigial delusions of female delicacy assumed I’d have to help her through this. She knew, sensed my embarrassment. The lick was partly
It’s all right, I understand. Sweet of you. But you see what you’re dealing with now?

The house (lights on, black Lexus in the drive) was built like a chic bunker into the side of the hill, two storeys, a basement, a pool, a decked balcony running all the way round the upper floor, double garage, stone gateposts, electronic gate. Even without our advantages getting in wouldn’t be difficult. The downstairs doors were shut, granted, but it was too early in the maestro’s evening for the hi-tech lockdown his Shield 500XS Security System allowed. In the centre of the upper floor one of a pair of sliding glass doors was open, beyond which were visible an elephantine white leather couch and a plasma-screen TV with the sound down. Our friend, barefoot in Bermudas and a baby-blue rollneck fleece, reclined on the couch with the remote in one hand and his phone
in the other, channel surfing and bitching, with a monotony implying defeated acceptance of the rest of the world’s unprofessionalism, about the director.

The plan said to wait several hours. The plan was dead. Hunger and desire had unceremoniously assumed control. We felt it go, both of us, with relief.
Come what may
conferred its mantric blessing as we moved silently up the eastern slope of the valley, in a single bound each across the empty road, and on, with all lupine stealth, towards the house.

I went first. One leap got me over the gates. A second from the ground to the balcony. A third from the balcony through the open door and directly onto the couch.

Hyperbole’s a writing vice, but I stand by the claim that I gave Drew (Drew Hillyard, the papers have since informed us) quite literally the fright of his life. The Old World snob in me thinks he screamed—or rather went
maaah!
in falsetto—because he was Americanly conditioned to do so by lifelong overingestion of television and movies. A woman dumps you, you go to a bar and get drunk. Someone cuts you off on the freeway, you shout “Asshole!” and give him the finger. A werewolf appears, you scream like a six-year-old girl. These are the scripts. In any case he not only went
maaah!
in falsetto but flung both arms up in the region of his head. The remote flew from his hand and sailed across the room to clatter against a chair, leaving
America’s Next Top Model
to keep us company for the duration. Perhaps by profound survival instinct he held on to his cell phone. I reached out, relieved him of it, and while he watched crushed it in my own ample monster mitt, which spectacle elicited from him a strange nasal moan. His face crumpled or crimped as in preparation for grown-man toddler tears, but from the distension of his mouth and his filling lungs I knew another bigger scream was coming. I thought, We can’t have that.

We didn’t. Talulla’s dark lovely long-fingered hand came from behind and covered the bottom half of his face.

Y
OU’LL WANT ORDER
, sequence, categories. I sympathise. But the trinity mystery of fuckkilleat collapses distinctions, swipes aside the apparatus separating
this
from
that
and introduces with the transcendental equivalent of a Gallic shrug
a completely new form of experience
.

There was, for example, deep turf, frost-hardened, fracturing with a soft crunch underfoot. Turf? Where? We were in his living room. We moved languidly, two creatures gone into by the drift of dark water alongside us, neither river nor sea and with no opposite shore. Stars came all the way down to the horizon, nestled in the water. Which isn’t to say I don’t remember Talulla’s black-clawed thumb tearing his neck, a mastoid opening, a fan of blood and his sealed-up roars. The landscape was nowhere and it rolled out from the room. Bits of it fizzed or crumbled away to reveal the deity it belonged to, not God but one of his aspects, the great clean spirit of Predation, to whom
we
belonged, of which we contained a fragment or flame like a portion of pure joy.

We looked at each other and everything became still. Which isn’t to say the white leather couch wasn’t smeared red where his hand went hurriedly back and forth, as if waving or trying to erase something.

Between us was the shared certainty of escalation, a speeded-up version of the ticking of roller-coaster cars climbing the hill to the Big Drop.
You’re feeling this, right?
Yes. Meanwhile Drew’s life in vivid chunks like the “Previously, on—” opening of a soap: his mother’s large blond-haired head, blue-eyeshadowed and coffee-breathed, blotting out the light over his pram and coming down to him like a benign planet. His fingers’ ache stretching for the piano keys and the keys themselves clues from the time before birth. A dark-haired twelve-year-old girl biting her lip and the feeling like Christmas and birthday of his young hand creeping under the elastic of her pants her pants her actual pants, and Rheingold saying, You’ve got talent but no star quality, and he was right.
A million-page flick-book of TV images, cowboys lightsabres Coke car-chases
Friends
the Twin Towers. That dream he’d had of swimming to what he thought was the shore except it was the flat edge of the pre-Columbus earth and suddenly he was being sucked to where the ocean poured its wrecks and sharks over the rim into black empty space not even stars just nothing and then waking covered in sweat and the escort wasn’t next to him as instructed but sitting in the window seat sending a text message on her BlackBerry and the thing with women now was purely transactional probably always had been they pretended to want sex but it was always some other fucking thing and it was amazing how you could at forty-one accept that the thing with women from now on forever was just going to be transactional he would still like to have a son and teach him music.

In spite of the moon the television’s light perceptibly twitched and shivered, a blond green-eyed contestant on
America’s Next Top Model
wept glitterily, half her face obscured under the screen’s pancake of congealing blood.

Talulla turned from what she was doing and looked at me.
It’s close. Can you feel it?

Sky and water shifted or swivelled their occult constituent parts and like the solution to a visual riddle the stars yielded a new constellation describing the figure of a wolf, a diagram showing that there was no reason for us, only the certainty
of
us, and understanding this was like taking the hand that would lead us to peace. The night in the room agreed, through the drifting water and the smell of frost.

Which isn’t to say we weren’t wet with blood or that Talulla didn’t arch her back or that my hands didn’t cup her breasts or that her legs didn’t open with sly animal capitulation. I’d thought I loved her before, and so I had, the woman. But this was the monster and the monster was magnificent. I got an unmanning glimpse of the depth of my capacity for worship, drew back from it as from the edge of a cold-aired chasm. She saw that, too, and sent me,
It’s the same for me, don’t you see?

Her question turned out to be the tipping point. A second of absolute balance—then down from the fulcrum moment I went into her as her eyes rolled back and her tongue curled in martial or erotic triumph (detonating
however absurdly Dante,
And now a she-wolf came, that in her leanness / seemed racked with every kind of greediness
)—while the sudden plunge tore us out of our bodies and for an unmeasurable moment returned us to the thing that wasn’t God but the aspect of him that was ours, and in which infinitely generous archetype there was neither her nor me but only the rapture that calls you home to unity with the sweetest song and painlessly burns away the straps and buckles of the suffering self.

Bliss.

Bliss defies description, obviously, since it annihilates you, since you’re not there to experience it. You get the lead-up and the comedown, never the zenith. We went to the place. We came back—spoiled, made ruined addicts at a stroke. From now on nothing less would do. I thought: Two hundred years of ignorance; now this. And only two hundred years to repeat it in.

I love you, the moment instructed us (as Drew’s life, like the last lights off the black West, went), was for the human sphere. Here, humbled and filled with tenderness for the newly restored finiteness of arms and teeth and lips and bellies, we brought our noses close, lapped, nuzzled, paused, looked, saw into each other and knew for better or worse we’d been consecrated, not just our unholy marriage but our aloneness together in the world. A condition both of us calmly conceded might lead to complete mutual hatred. It was a great comfort to know this, to understand it, to allow all the possibilities. We felt like modest little gods ourselves, beating with fresh love for life and humble in the face of the possibilities. Would have laughed if we could.

Time had misbehaved, disguised hours as moments. I’d lost track. Unforgivably let myself unravel. Fuckkilleat came at the price of caution and control.
America’s Next Top Model
had been replaced by the
Good Morning News
. (The standard U.S. double act of paternal toupéed golfer fluffered by twentysomething L’Oréal dummy. The wigged father fucking the waxed daughter is okay as long as both maintain calculated incredulity and restrained outrage at
what’s going on out there in the world.
) Now, as if it had been caught asleep on duty, the moon woke and began sending its warning, a dragging (menstrual, for all I know) sensation in the lower body’s blood. We might have been two heavy fish on a weak line being
reeled in by an invalid—but a magical invalid, since the thin force was irresistible.

As one we left what remained of our victim (not much) and bounded like dog-food-ad dogs out of the open door and over the balcony’s rail into the collusive forest and the vapours of the waning night. My restarted inner clock said less than sixty minutes to moonset.

W
E RAN, PASSING
his spirit back and forth like teens swapping gum. Mist clung. The woods went by in a resinous blur. Half a mile from where we’d set out I caught the scent of my own piss, cut hard left, plunged with Talulla close behind through a band of fog and came in a matter of minutes to the marked tree. I went up it in a single leap and there was the pack, clipped, dew-beaded, but with contents dry and filled with the odours of civilisation. A bit of trouble with the clip cables (there’s not a product on the market built with werewolf fingers in mind) but I resisted
slashing straight through them
, and after a few moments’ patient application had them unfastened and stowed. I dropped to the ground.

Our pelt back had left us twenty minutes to spare. We lay near each other but not touching, silent recipients of Pan’s globally ignored dawn suite, a soft exhalation through turf and leaf, the whirr of small wings, the introspective clambering of beetles, the shiver of water. The world, Lula was thinking, is oozing, teeming,
crawling
with miracles. And we live in the opaque plastic bubble of television and booze. You should start keeping a journal, I sent her, but too late: The metamorphic current had caught her. Her animal receptors were frying. I reached for her but remembered
Don’t touch me
and drew back. She crawled on all fours in a loose semicircle, collapsed, curled up in a ball. Out of sight the moon set, a tiny pain, like the tearing of the last fibre holding a comically loose tooth. Talulla, foetal, jaws clamped, convulsed rhythmically, as if keeping time with something. Mucus rattled in her snout.

Again she was ahead of me. Had the opportunity to observe—which she did, sitting and catching her breath—the body-popping extravaganza of Jake Marlowe Changing Back.

“Thanks for not laughing,” I said, once I was confident language had returned.

She didn’t answer, was still inwardly returning herself. Her eyes were big and bright, murder-purified. Helping her clean herself up (the
products don’t care, address blood and guts with the same floral cheer as they would ketchup and gravy) I felt the stunned regrouping of her human aspects, the shock and disgust that here,
again
, was the grossest defilement, beyond forgiveness, beyond any kind of washing away. Very soon followed (her eyes hardened) by the knowledge that shock and disgust had already proved themselves inadequate. Six times. Now seven. Which left the fact of herself she must find a way of getting along with, since it was either this or death.
I know what you’re going through
, I wanted to say. I didn’t say it. Aside from the psychic travails she was visibly Curse-hungover. I, old lag that I am, had forgotten how it used to be, aura peeled, consciousness red-raw. You don’t want
talk
, for Christ’s sake.