The Last Werewolf

“You know?” I said.

“You’re still full. It’ll take a week at least before you’re hungry. It’s why you smoke and drink so much. The boredom of the mouth. I was watching, by the way. It seems dishonourable not to tell you now.”

Watching my feast in the hold, she meant. Dishonourable now that we were going to be friends.

“We’re not going to be friends,” I said.

“Aren’t we? I assume you’d like another drink, at least?”

She rang for service. Pate de foie gras, fresh fruit, yogurt, a selection of cured meats and cheeses, brought by a dark-skinned gold-earringed boy of perhaps thirteen dressed in crisp white pyjamas. In smiling silence he set the platter down on a low Japanese inlaid table along the wall of glass. In smiling silence he exited. Jacqueline, in a pearl-coloured silk robe (cover up; give the gentleman’s postcoital imagination fresh incentive), fixed drinks at the minimalist wet-bar. I lit a Camel.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Why did you give up the search for Quinn’s journal?”

Oh God.

“What?”

“You heard me. Quinn’s journal. Why did you give up?”

My palms needled. Forty years wasted. When I started searching for the wretched book Victoria was on the British throne and Tchaikovsky was debuting his 1812 Overture in Moscow. When I stopped George V reigned and The Waste Land was Europe’s massive tumour of enlightenment.

“Who wouldn’t have given up?” I said. “One gets tired of not finding what one’s looking for.”

“But you believed. Otherwise why bother?”

“I don’t know what I believed. I wanted answers. I wanted the story. Who doesn’t want the story? If someone had told me there was a blind and deaf one-legged washerwoman in Siberia who knew the origin of werewolves I’d have hired myself a yak and set off. There’s a period of being bothered with big questions. It doesn’t last forever.”

“I’m still bothered,” she said.

“You’re French. If you lot stopped bothering the coffee and tobacco industries would collapse.”

She chuckled. Brought me my drink, administered a light fingernails caress to my thigh, then paced silkily away to the Japanese table. She knelt and began undaintily helping herself. Veins showed in her white hands and ankles; my cock stirred in dumb irritable reflex. She wasn’t falling-in-love material but the thought of eating her was already, as from a great distance, starting to appeal.

“Werewolves are not a subject for academe,” she said, “but you know what the professors would be saying if they were. ‘Monsters die out when the collective imagination no longer needs them. Species death like this is nothing more than a shift in the aggregate psychic agenda. In ages past the beast in man was hidden in the dark, disavowed. The transparency of modern history makes that impossible: We’ve seen ourselves in the concentration camps, the gulags, the jungles, the killing fields, we’ve read ourselves in the annals of True Crime. Technology turned up the lights and now there’s no getting away from the fact: The beast is redundant. It’s been us all along.’ ”

“Yes,” I said. “I keep telling myself I’m just an outmoded idea. But you know, you find yourself ripping a child open and swallowing its heart, it’s tough not to be overwhelmed by … the concrete reality of yourself.”

Another smile. She was enjoying this. Worse, I was slightly enjoying it myself. Still, the mention of Quinn’s journal and reminder of my hot years when Meaning meant something had disturbed long-settled dust.

“And in any case,” she said, “there remain vampires. If the human psyche’s so at ease with itself why are they doing so well?”

“I don’t concern myself with vampires,” I said.

“They regard you as primitives,” she said. Then, looking away: “It’s the absence of language, naturally.”

The second drink had gone down with shameful ease. Your fucking head will freeze, moron, Harley had said. Poor Harls. Once, heartbroken by a brilliant and toxic young Bosey he’d drunk himself into a semicoma that lasted two days. When he came round and realised I’d been there the whole time, looking after him, he’d said, confusedly: My goodness, aren’t you kind? Then he’d fallen asleep again.

“Sorry,” I said, having lost Jacqueline’s thread. “Say again?”

“Werewolves can’t talk. Les vampyres think this is hilarious.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course they do.” One of the great subcurses of the Curse, this loss of speech. It’s a failure to achieve full monstrosity. Certainly it’s deeply pleasurable to open your victim’s belly with an index claw, but not as pleasurable as it would be to be able to talk to him while you did it. It’s you, Arabella had said—and animal dumbness had denied me the apotheosis of saying, Yes, it is. Purest cruelty requires that the victim knows she suffers by your free choice. It’s you. Yes, my darling, it’s me. Now, observe.

“They’re inclined to snobbery to start with,” Jacqueline said. “This business of werewolf inarticulacy is the great justification. They do have such a large body of literature.”

This has been one of the great vampiric contentions, that they constitute a civilisation: They have art, culture, division of labour, political and legal systems. There’s no lycanthropic parallel. The yeehaw explanation is we’re too busy chasing meat’n’pussy, but the truth is the language of the wer is anathema to the wulf. After a few transformations your human self starts to lose interest in books. Reading begins to give you a blood-brown headache. People describe you as laconic. Getting the sentences out feels like a giant impure labour. I’ve heard tell of howlers going decades barely uttering a word.

“Yeah,” I said to Jacqueline, as I lit another Camel, “we’re not great ones for belles-lettres.”

“Yourself excepted.”

Well, yes. Obviously I, anomalously, still can’t fucking shut up. I blew a smoke ring. “Since you’ve read the journal there’s no point my denying it,” I said.

“How do you explain it?”

“I must like a whore unpack my heart with words.”

“Of course, but why?”

“Congenital logorrhoea.”

“Jake, please. It’s so obvious.”

“And yet I don’t see it.”

She shook her head, smiling. Popped a strawberry into her mouth, chewed, swallowed. Wiped her hands on a fat napkin. “Yes, you do. You’re just embarrassed by it. You’ve held on to language because without language there’s no morality.”

“Ah, yes, I spend a lot of time considering morality, when I’m not slaughtering people and gobbling them all up.”

“I’m talking about testimony. I’m talking about bearing witness to yourself. What is this—what are the journals—if not the compulsion to tell the truth of what you are? And what is the compulsion to tell the truth if not a moral compulsion? It’s perfectly Kantian.”

She presented a peculiarly annoying attractive figure sitting there in her ivory silk robe with her legs tucked under her. “What was your phrase? ‘God’s gone, meaning too, yet aesthetic fraudulence still has the power to shame …’ Aesthetic fraudulence, notice. Telling the truth is a beautiful act even if the truth itself is ugly—and my dear man, you can’t stop caring about beauty. That is your real predicament, your real curse.”

“Fascinating the way other people see things,” I said. “But I really must be going.” I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and reached for my trousers.

“I have Quinn’s book,” she said.

There’s a distinctive aural quality to lies. This didn’t have it. It cost me some effort to hold—after the briefest hesitation—to my purpose with the trousers. I stood and pulled them on. You pull your trousers on and everything seems fractionally less desperate. Nonetheless I felt sick. You get used to no one having anything (except their flesh and blood, except their life) you could possibly want. You take your sufficiency for granted. You forget it’s contingent. You forget it’s a luxury.

“Good,” she said, observing. “I see you know I’m telling the truth. That saves us some time.”

“How did you get it?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I knew. The memory of Harley—someone