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
“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
“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
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,
“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
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.
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
“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
