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 toupeed golfer fluffered by twentysomething L’Oreal 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.
45
WE 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.
I bagged up the cleaning accoutrements and kicked earth over where she’d vomited last night. Rucksack on, final idiot-check of the site. Short of the fading odour of werewolf piss there wasn’t a sign we’d been here.
An hour later, fog-damp, meat-heavy, we were back at the car. My calves ached. Talulla was shivering. The vehicle’s interior was a tremendous comfort when the doors thunked shut. This is another of the purposes of civilisation, so that you can get in a car and close the door and be surrounded by technology- studded vinyl and drive away in conditioned air. I dropped the bin-liner (a DNA conundrum, should anyone ever find it) in a rest-stop Dumpster en route to San Francisco and replaced the number plates in an empty lay-by a little farther up the road. Two hours after that, having returned the Toyota in the city, we boarded an Amtrak bound for
