The Last Werewolf

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 ignore 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. Without 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. Foreglow 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.

We both knew this was a juvenile phase that would pass, or, if it became a monolithic perversion, cause trouble, choke the sexual stream, breed pestilence. For now, however, she’d looked at me in rousing collusion, yes, I know. How not? How should she, six victims deep, not know the joy of the fall beneath the Fall?

The floor’s chill had become unpleasant. I got up and took a hot shower. I wanted to go back to her clean and put my nose in her cunt, my tongue in her sweet young asshole, the cunning animal scent down there that answered the years of asking. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they loved it. But all the while and all the while and all the while the world. We couldn’t stay here. That business with the dart didn’t make sense. Grainer’s days of live specimen capture were long over. Although of course it had been Ellis, not Grainer, after Alfonse in the desert. In any case we’d have to move. Dumb to have come to Manhattan in the first place, where among the multitudes surveillance was harder to spot.

I brushed my teeth and went back into the bedroom just as she was wrapping up her call. She looked at me. We didn’t laugh, but if it was a movie that’s what the script would have settled for as a way of showing it was the kind of thing where seeing each other again after ten minutes in separate rooms was a return to the only reality that mattered.

“You’re all scrubbed,” she said.

“Maximal contrast. I want your dirt.”

“Yikes. Okay.”

I went to the bed and lay down next to her. “Tonight we can luxuriate,” I said. “Tomorrow we have things to do.”

39

PARANOIA MADE THE decisions over the next few days. We met only four times, never in the same place. She had to prep Nikolai for her absence (he was prone to quarrelling with Ambidextrous Alison, prone to interfering) and I had logistical matters to attend to. California number plates, an array of wigs, spectacles, false moustaches, centrally the procurement of a fake driving licence for and the transfer of assets worth approximately twenty million dollars to Talulla Mary Apollonia Demetriou. The po- faced spirit of political correctness put its head around the door but my girl dismissed it. Obviously I should feel whored-out or patronised, she said. Well, I don’t. I barely heard her. Even with the recent global mugging twenty million’s a minor prang in my ride. It’s walking-around money, I told her. I need more time to sort you out properly. Offshore. Swiss. This is just in case of … Yes. Well. The bad smell around the transfer of lucre was that it smacked of providing for her after my death. Neither of us could quite keep that out. Therefore we gave it its moment in the spotlight. I plan on staying alive, I said. But in case I don’t you’ll have what you need. Just promise me you’ll always buy beautiful underwear. You drive a hard bargain, she said, but okay.

However, the paranoia. I had business lawyers in Manhattan (four of my companies have their head offices here) but insisted on meeting for instruction and signatures out of town. (Such meetings are a palaver. My face is rubber masked—I’ve been Richard Nixon; Marilyn; the Wolfman—and I affect one of a dozen accents. The relevant identity’s established first by code numbers and secondly via fingerprint-recognition technology in a portable gizmo. All tiresome, and used only when there’s no alternative.) I hired a car from JFK and drove to Philadelphia. An opportunity, I deemed, to check for surveillance or pursuit. The results were uncertain. No sign of the undead, but I thought I made a couple of WOCOP agents in Philly. I left the car at the airport and took a flight to Boston, dodged around the city for twenty-four hours, then plane-hopped for three days getting increasingly dehydrated: Detroit; Indianapolis; D.C.; Philadelphia. I picked up the car, drove back to JFK and took a cab into the city.

Where I all but bumped into a vampire.

I was getting out of the cab on Fifth Avenue and he was exiting a deli, tearing the cellophane off a pack of American Spirits. The reek hit me when I was halfway out of the car. I went down on one knee on the sidewalk, an impromptu genuflection. Looked up to see him stopped in his tracks with an expression of outraged revulsion. I didn’t recognise him. Tall, long-faced, with short thick hair dyed deep purple. Skinny jeans, leather three-quarter- length coat, orange Converse boots. Humanly you’d say mid-twenties cyberpunk. I got up off my knee. For a few moments we just stood and stared at each other, gorges rising. He looked as if this was new to him, this business of how Jesus Christingly awful running into a werewolf made you feel. Manhattan, needless to say, flowed around us, honked, glimmered, flashed, steamed, whistled, whooped and subterraneanly shuddered. Eventually, shaking his head, he backed, turned, and stumbled away downtown.

“An accident, right?” Talulla said. “I mean he wasn’t following you?” We’d moved to the Waldorf Astoria, a suite overlooking Park Avenue. I was Matt Arnold again. Couldn’t rest easy in any of the aliases.

“I don’t believe he was,” I said. “I’m getting it. I’ve assumed all the vampires know about the virus. They don’t. This is one lot looking for leverage. Why am I so slow?”