The Last Werewolf

what she was willing to be, was effectively over. Her bigger self had gone on ahead and accepted it. These were residual emotional obligations.

“Then afterwards,” she said, lifting slightly as my finger slipped into her anus. “The big talk, the promises to myself I wasn’t ever going to do it again.”

It’ll get easier, I could have told her. It’s the story, the human story, the werewolf story, that the hard things get easier. Carry on and in a year or two you’ll be taking victims as you might grapes from a bunch.

“It’s the worst thing,” she said, turning towards me, forcing herself against my hand. “It’s the worst thing.”

We’re the worst thing, she meant. We’re the worst thing because for us the worst thing is the best thing. And it’s only the best thing for us if it’s the worst thing for someone else.

There are times when saying “I love you” is blasphemy worthy of the Devil.

“I love you,” I said.

Much later, after we’d lain for a long time listening to the rain in the dark, I felt the last barrier between us dissolve. It was as if the night’s tensile apparatus suddenly fell apart. She said: “You killed your wife, didn’t you?”

She already knew the answer. Had fucked me knowing. Was lying here with me knowing. Accommodating this, even more than accommodating her own slaughters, was the proof of having entered a new world.

“Yes,” I said.

Silence. But of cogitation, not shock. I could feel her trying to find a justifying angle—because sooner or later you’d have had to, the alternative would have been turning her, which would have felt as bad as killing her, with four hundred years for her to spend never forgiving you—then finding the unjustifiable truth: because nothing compares to killing the thing you love.

“It was good,” she said. Conclusion, not question. The insight that withers the old flower and lets the new one bloom.

“Yes.”

“Because you loved her.”

“Yes.”

And here we were at the delicate logic. I was thinking: She’ll be a much better werewolf than me. (And with this thought came the first true realisation that she was less than a fifth my age, that half her life would be lived after my death in a world beyond my imagining.) Already she had an understanding it had taken me decades to arrive at. Very soon, a year, two, I’d be struggling to keep up with her.

“Maybe you’ll kill me,” she said, pressing her hand flat against my chest. “Maybe that’s what I was hoping for.”

It had occurred to me she might want this, an exit strategy. But there was that past tense: Maybe that’s what I was hoping for. If she had wanted it she didn’t now. Or at least not cleanly.

“There’s something better than killing the one you love,” I said. I extricated myself from her embrace, gently forced her onto her back, held her wrists above her head, got on top of her, felt her bedwarm thighs softly opening. Her eyes and earrings and lips and teeth glimmered in the dark.

“Something better?”

I eased into her as she lifted her hips.

“Killing with the one you love,” I said.

It was only afterwards, when she slept (wondering what knowing the worst would feel like had been one of the things keeping her awake; now, having let it in and found room for it she surrendered to exhaustion, a blissful rapid unspooling into sleep) that I knew there would be no purpose served, indeed none, by telling her Arabella had been pregnant, and that in murdering and devouring my wife I’d also murdered and devoured the only child I’d ever have.

41

THE BIG OPEN spaces thin the American gods: Elvis, John Wayne, Marilyn, Charles Manson, JFK. Out there they’re like frail clouds tearing, nothing behind them but blue emptiness. It sends some people mad. Americans know this and gather by collective intuition on the coasts.

Life reduced to the dimensions of a car. Lack of sleep and the deepening drift of miles blurred all our categories, yielded absurd conversational segues, from Tom Cruise’s career to WOCOP genetics to Obama to the fragmentation of feminism to the history of the Hunt to the film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Meanwhile Texaco, gospel, storm clouds, scarecrows, Jack Daniels, Camel Filters (the brand divinities prove surprisingly resilient), fucking, stars, vending machines and the constantly tightening torque of the Hunger. She wanted to know everything, Harley, Jacqueline Delon, Cloquet, Ellis, Grainer, the Fifty Houses. And that was just the contemporary matter. I had two hundred years’ worth of places I’d been, people I’d met, things I’d seen. No matter how much I told her there was always more. But she wanted to talk, too. The Curse had left her memories intact but not her sense of entitlement to them. They had become unspeakable. Now here I was, apparently having the cake of my past and eating it. Her unsalved grief was for the lost familial warmth. Her mother’s clan had been large, featured Irish characters, cliched Irish in some cases, colossi of drinking and sentimentality and with the great bloodstained tapestry of Roman Catholicism to wrap everything in. The Uncles. When she was a child these men picked her up in massive sausagey hands and sat her on their shoulders amid whisky vapours and wild hair and talked fabulous nonsense. The women initiated her in gossip and the arts of masculine deflation. This had been her template for happiness. This and the deep cahoots with her long-suffering father, whose little sprite she was and who indulged her, recklessly, and who had not just heroes and gods to entertain her but black holes and comets and the precise weight of the sun. Among the Gilaley tribe Nikolai’s already negligible Greek Orthodoxy had disappeared.

“He started with capitulation,” Talulla said. “Went through the farce of converting to marry my mother. It made him smaller in her eyes, of course, though she’d never have married him without it. She held all the paradoxes, casually. Not that I can talk, the rubbish I’m still carrying around.”

“So you do believe in God?”

We were in Nebraska, south of the Middle Loup River, east of the Sand Hills. It was evening, cold, sleeting since we’d stopped for gas an hour ago. I’d seen the acned cashier give us a sidelong look. This was new. In human form I never failed to pass as simply human. Were we, together, palpably more Other?

“It’s not belief,” she said. “It’s just what you’re stuck with, the lousy furniture you can’t change. The educated me knows hell’s nothing, a fiction I happened to inherit. The other me knows I’m going there. There must be a dozen mes these days, taking turns looking the other way.”

“It’s the postmodern solution,” I said. “Controlled multiple personality disorder. Pick a fiction and allocate it an aspect of yourself.”

“But you don’t think the story in Quinn’s book’s a fiction, do you?” I’d told her what I knew, how close I’d been at Jacqueline Delon’s, the Men Who Became Wolves.

“Ridiculous, isn’t it?” I said. “Let everything else have its place in purposeless evolution but let my lot be exempt. It’s just a hangover from—” I was going to say “the days of being human,” but felt how it would bring the fact of infertility close again. “It’s just the same old shit,” I amended. “The desire to know whence we came in the hope it’ll shed light on why we’re here and where we’re going. The desire for life to mean something more than random subatomic babble.”

“And now the vampires have it,” she said. “Assuming you really think they do?”

“I really think they do.”

“I know this is crazy, but I can’t quite get over the whole vampire thing. That they really exist.”

“It’s the lameness of their having to sleep during the day. That and the not having sex.”

“They don’t?”

“They don’t. The desire goes. I mean, they’ll tell you screwing’s nothing to draining a victim but that’s always sounded desperate to me. It’s one of the reasons they hate us.”

Us. I felt the word evoke for her a tribe, a family, a kind—then the effect dissolved. A whole species gone to silvered dust.