The Wild

by Whitley Strieber

  Was that entirely an animal sound?

  He realized that it was literally frantic to escape, that its problem, very simply, was boredom. It was made for the woods, this creature, it belonged in secret and limitless spaces. But where were they? The woods that weren't being logged out were dying of acid rain. It belonged nowhere, this North American timber wolf. The animal was part of the past. Its last place was a cage in the middle of a zoo in the middle of a city totally beyond its understanding.

  What did it understand? It understood how to snatch trout from streams, how to eat voles and gophers, how to bring down deer and moose. Did it also understand how to turn a key?

  There was something about this creature, though, that Bob knew with crystal certainty could not be destroyed.

  "It's beautiful," Cindy said. She had come beside him. He felt what Monica would call "inadequate."

  "I wish I was some kind of an activist. I'd like to come in here and free all of these animals."

  "Kill them, you mean?"

  "Free them."

  "To release them into the city is the same thing as killing them. Even in the wild, most of these animals would die."

  The wolf remembers, though, the long shadows of evening and the darting movements of the muskrat. "You're so controlled. I think you're overcontrolled. What if they made it, all of them, even the sloth and the anteater."

  "The anteater's cage is empty. I guess it's dead."

  "What about giraffes? What if I found them all an apartment? They could live in comfort then, no crowds, no cages."

  "Who'd pay the rent?"

  "A secret zoo. Admission fifty dollars. Worth it to see a hippo cooking breakfast and a full-grown moose grazing the shag rug in the bedroom."

  "I want to be together later. When Celeste takes Kevin and Joseph to the movies."

  "I thought he and Joey were fighting."

  "No. Now Dashiel and Kim are fighting. The rest of the class has suspended hostilities, pending the outcome."

  The wolf turned and stood directly before Bob, lowering its head as if it wished it could ram itself into his belly. It growled—not a little, throaty sound, but a big noise.

  It was magnificent, it had the whole wild in it.

  Down the row of cages the baboon sat, its mouth lolling opened, its head resting against the bars, its eyes in Africa. The wolf paced and barked, and Bob knew that it was begging for freedom.

  No, begging for forgiveness. "It's just their fate," Cindy said, trying to be kind to him, "they ended up here."

  Bob thought. What if it isn't that way at all? The man-wolf knows. . . . "I'm no good today," he said aloud. "I didn't sleep. I don't want to go to Atlanta."

  She was hugging her shoulders, watching the wolf. "It is us it's reacting to. There's no doubt about it."

  "I'm scared. Maybe it's telling me not to fly. It's a portent."

  She shook her head as if trying to dislodge a gnat from her ear. "No, it—" The wolf threw itself against the bars, growling and yapping, dragging its teeth on the iron with a clacking sound. Cindy stepped back. Bob's impulse was to throw his arms around the wolf, to kiss it, to caress it. He had kissed his dog Moe when he was a boy, had put his arms around Moe, and he remembered Moe's smell, that musty dogginess, the fetor of his breath. Moe had been ground to wreckage beneath the wheels of the school bus. The bus had let Bob off. As it pulled out, there had been a crunch, a thud, a canine scream, and the bus had rumbled away with Moe's tail fluttering out from under the fender. Bob had been left with his dog, its jaw torn back, gabbling against the street, making noises like wet paper being dropped from a height. Moe was a pulsating shambles, save for one rear leg, which was running furiously. There was nobody around, it was a block to home, and Moe was dying. Bob had screamed while Moe popped and spluttered.

  Bob ran through the lush neighborhood, which had become a moonscape of empty houses and houses that would not answer the door. He had gotten home to find his own house also empty. He had called his father at the office. "Moe can't live, Bobby," his father had said. "You take my shotgun down and help him out of his misery."

  Then there was a twelve-year-old boy, his eyes soaked with tears, rushing down the hot, empty street with a big old Remington held at port arms, who aimed the gun at the flapping puddle on the street, and shot, sending up a great splash of blood from the body of his beloved. The boy then turned the shotgun on himself, only to find that his toe could not—by an act of the goodness of God— reach the trigger. He looked down the smoking barrel into his deepest, truest wish. At last, dragging the gun, he made his way home.

  The agony of that experience reasserted itself. Was the wolf rabid, sick, would it be taken up to the pound and gassed, ending its life in the ultimate prison, a chamber so small it would have to be stuffed in, with the gas hissing from the jet in the back? "Cindy, I am leaving this zoo. If you and Kevin want to stay, you can."

  She knew him too well to abandon him. "Let's go to a coffee shop and get some lunch," she said.

  Their son was not unwilling to leave. Bob usually did not dare to look at his drawings, and yet these were the very opposite of violent. He had rendered a portrait not of the tapir but of the wolf, a full face, eerie with knowing. "It practically posed. It was staring at you, Dad. Do you think it knows you love wolves?"

  "I don't know."

  Kevin took his father's and mother's hands, and they went out into the streets of the strange old city. "I wish we were in the country," Kevin said.

  "Not when your dad has to travel on Sunday night. It makes things too hectic for him."

  He thought of their rented house up in Ulster County, of Mount Tucker jutting up behind it, and the loons calling on the lake and the doves, and the occasional scream when something captured something on the mountainside.

  Once he had watched a fox eating a small rabbit. The fox had torn out its bowels and was lapping at them while the rabbit shrieked. Or, another time, he had seen a rat taken by a red hawk. The rat knew what it was to be torn to pieces while being lifted into the happy sky.

  Sometimes, warm in bed in his apartment, his wife sleeping beside him, his son in the next room, he thought he was close to a secret of incredible importance, the secret of why life was so involved with suffering, the secret the north wind said when it roared through the snowy pines, the secret of the fire in the plains, burning because it had to bum, the dog dying because it had tried to bite a rolling wheel, or the secret the great timber wolf had dreamed as it succumbed to the zoo hunter's numbing dart. But then something would happen, his own body would go urgent or something, and thoughts of secrets would come to an end.

  "Would you like a hamburger, Kevin?"

  "Fine, Mom."

  Bob didn't want hamburgers. He wanted to take his family to the Plaza, and dine in the Palm Court on finger sandwiches, followed by enormous slices of cake and strong, black coffee. He wanted to do this while listening to a Vivaldi concerto played by the Palm Court String Quartet. And perhaps to start with, a champagne cocktail. Furthermore he wanted to spend the rest of the afternoon in a movie, any movie as long as it was gaudy and loud, and he also wanted to float out of himself across the sky of the city, to float above the towers, off farther and farther, until the last sound from below whimpered out, and he could see stars in the middle of the day.

  He would let go the mystic chain, and fall then. But he would not end up back on Fifth Avenue, not at all. He would not fall back into the world but out of it. He would fall past the moon, past Neptune, past Arcturus and the Milky Way, fall past stars and galaxies with names like NC-2376, and past those without names, past them all, until he thudded softly against the purple velvet side of the universe.

  Then what would he do? Dig through? Maybe that was not such a good idea. Perhaps there was another universe on the other side, maybe worse than this one, a universe where no truth is real, where the child's ball on the grass is a killing boulder, or all of fate is concealed in the toe of a shoe.

&n
bsp; Maybe that's what the quasars that stand sentinel at the end of the universe are all about—they are the spots where people like Socrates and Christ dug through; they are windows into bright and terrible wisdom. They are warnings.

  Sometimes Bob agreed with the quantum theorists, that the world was a knack of chosen possibilities, nothing more substantial than that. Man's true model was not Macbeth, not Othello, not even Gregor Samsa, but rather Puck the fairy, magical and insubstantial and so dangerous.

  "Bob—watch out! Honest to God, I never saw anybody so willing to walk in front of buses. What do you think the bus drivers are—gods? One of these days one of them'll be blinking and he won't see you in time to put on his brakes."

  "Let's not go to a coffee shop. Let's go to the Palm Court."

  "I'm wearing sandals, Bob."

  "Champagne cocktails. Dancing to the music of Vivaldi."

  "We can't afford it. The American Express bill remains unpaid."

  "Let's have some fun for once."

  She never let him down about things like this, The Palm Court it was, and Kevin got a Roy Rogers, she got white wine, and Bob finally settled on a Vodka Sunrise. He assembled a banquet for himself, managing to find goose with fresh snow peas, but no broiled wolf, frog legs, though, but no dog.

  The music was gentle, persistently civilized, and Bob managed to sustain the illusions you need to enjoy food. You cannot think of the way hogs knock against the walls of the slaughterhouses, or of the chickens scrabbling down chutes lined with knives. As he ate he thought he could feel the world turning, exposing each part of itself to the sun, so that the light could sustain it. The engine of life labors so hard, but why? Nothing survives, yet everything tries. Worms on the end of fishing lines struggle through hells beyond imagination, slowly drowning, impaled, while monsters loom at them. Fish in creels take hours and hours to die, and you make them live a little longer so that they'll be good and fresh at the end of the day, a cheerful sight frying in the skillet.

  What eats us? We can't understand it any more than the chicken can understand Frank Perdue. There is something out there.

  "Coffee, sir?"

  "I'd like to see the dessert cart."

  Cindy luxuriated. Kevin's eyes lit up when the glorious tray was brought over, its perfections of sugar and flour and cream enough to make any boy feel suddenly quite cheerful.

  When they came out of the Palm Court, it was nearly three o'clock. The sky had changed. Long, dark clouds rushed down from the north.

  Cindy called Celeste. They would not go home, they would go to a movie and take Kevin with them.

  The Ambassadors, a Merchant-Ivory picture based on the James novel, was playing at the Plaza Theater. In the dark of that theater, Bob felt delicious, immense relief. He closed his eyes and listened to the music, and made the words part of the music, and imagined that he was Henry James, and had succeeded in his creative life.

  That night Cindy asked him to come to bed naked, and she caressed him expertly, her fingers very slow. Even after all these years, the intimacy of her touch still made him shudder with embarrassed delight. He had not had many lovers before her, just one, as a matter of fact, with whom he had slept four times when he lived in London. There was another who had shared a single bed with him for a year, but without making love. It was the Catholic boyhood that had ruined his fun. When he made love, he still sometimes smelled the smoke of Father O'Reilly's cigar drifting through the confessional screen.

  When he slept, draped across her, his chest half on her lap, while she read propped up against the head of the bed, he dreamed of a wide, empty walk. There were pizza crusts and popcorn boxes blowing, and on both sides of the walk there were cages, most of them alive with movement. A gibbon brachiated endlessly back and forth across a thirty-foot span, leopards paced, deer snorted, a weasel moved sinuously about, chimpanzees stared into the dark. The wolf watched him.

  If you listened when the wind blew through its hair, you could hear the rustling of the whole forest. It came soundlessly out of its cage, drifting between the bars like fog. Bob didn't have to wait for instructions, he was familiar enough with the logic of dreams to start running at once.

  Inwardly he was calm. He knew that this was a dream. He was not running through Central Park being chased by a breeze that had become a wolf. He was in bed.

  The trees swept past him, their great trunks dimly lit by the antique pathside lamps. As he ran he found that he was moving along just above the surface of the path, almost as if he was about to fly like the wolf of his childhood dream.

  There was nothing behind him now, nothing but the long expanse of the Literary Walk, so elegant at night, as if waiting for the return of the civilization that had created it. It was a windy night and the trees sighed and tossed their heads. No voice sounded, no radio blared. The park was empty.

  The fear had left the dream, to be replaced by a sense of wonder. He had never been in the park in the middle of the night. Being here now filled him with sweet unease. Anybody he met would be dangerous, and yet it was also dark and he could hide. He could be the wraith in the shadows, the one who stalked the midnight lovers, the predator. He could be the one they all feared, the one who kept the park empty at this hour.

  He slowed down. The wolf was gone. The dream became a stroll between dark pillars of trees. One part of him was searching for symbols; he sought the sense of his dream. Its landscape seemed connected to some obscure inner resurrection.

  The wolf burst upon him, its paws outstretched, its teeth bared, its eyes dark beneath the hood of its brows. He fell back, hands out, kicking, pushing, and was swept along as if in water. He tumbled between the trunks of two trees. Then he gathered himself up, feeling the wolf right at his heels. Somewhere in his mind the voice of Walter Cronkite explained that wolves are shy and do not generally harm human beings. But the voice did not connect with the empirical reality. He tried to run but now he could not. He blew instead as a detached leaf blows, soaring past the crowns of the trees, high into the sky. Around the park the buildings glimmered, a wall of gleaming fortresses. Below and behind him the wolf rose amid flashes, as if its claws sparked against the air.

  The higher he flew, the harder it got to continue. Finally he felt himself begin to fall. He did not fall fast—in fact he could control it enough to avoid trees. The wolf, though, had not lost control of itself at all. Its whole attention was fixed on Bob, who lusted to reach the ground where he could run again. But he fell as softly as a bit of thread on the whipping air. Growing increasingly desperate, he kicked like a swimmer. He felt the breath of the wolf on his back, heard its urgent little cries as it closed the distance between them.

  Then his feet touched the ground. He was in the Sheep Meadow, running as fast as he could. A woman was running beside him, Cindy, calling to him in a shrill voice. He could not quite hear her, but he had the impression that if he could, her words would help.

  The wolf snapped. A flash of white shot through Bob's brain and he tripped, falling head over heels in the rich grass. Then the wolf was upon him. Its claws melted his flesh with a puff of blue smoke and a hiss.

  Then the jaws opened, and began to work the flesh off his bones. He became a mass of conscious agony. He could see the red, pulsating walls of the wolf's esophagus, could feel the sizzling acid of its stomach. He commenced a grim kneading suffocation. Then he began to dissolve. He became softer and softer until he seeped through the walls of the wolf's organs and began to race through its body, his blood screaming in its hot, quiet blood. He was the living victim of the night, sacrificed to the life of another.

  Then he was seeing through the wolf's eyes, hearing the great rustling, banging, honking, shouting, roaring city all around, and smelling waves of odors that were like bridges of leaves and memories, the smell of dark, sick gardens, and most of all the smell of people and metal bars.

  He was moving through the night in the body of the wolf when Cindy came into the center of his dream, her face stre
aked with tears, her hands on his wolf head, her voice begging, and this time the words made sense.

  "Oh, God, honey, please wake up!"

  By degrees, he obeyed the words. His wolf body fell away, smells turned back into sights, then the whole park seemed to melt. The trees flowed down like great candles, the grass shriveled into a pale Canon sheet, the cliffs of buildings became a cliff of pillows. Cynthia sat with his head cradled in her lap. He could smell sweat, his and hers. The bedroom light shone softly in his eyes.

  "Cindy?"

  "Thank God! Honey, it's all right. It's me. You're all right."

  He grunted; his throat was so sore he could barely talk. "I'm sorry," was all he managed to say. There was terror in her eyes. He reached up, caressed her face, feeling her warm, tear-wet cheek.

  "I couldn't wake you up!"

  "I'm sorry. Truly, Cindy. I wanted to wake up, believe me I did."

  He got up and on wobbly legs went into the bathroom. When he drank he felt a thirst like fire and drank more. Again and again he drank. Finally, gasping, he leaned over the sink and splashed his face with more water. He coughed. Cindy came in and put her arm around him.

  The thing was, he could still feel himself inside the wolf. Somewhere in the night they were running together. Maybe they would always be together, running like this, running for the end of the universe.

  Cindy turned him around and enfolded him in her arms. He kissed her, and her response was hungry at first. Then she sighed. She caressed him, a sad, almost apologetic gesture. "It's three o'clock in the morning," she said. "Let's try and get some sleep."

  Chapter Two

  SOME YEARS BEFORE, ROBERT AND CINDY DUKE HAD tried to vacation on an island in the Carribbean. It was a beautiful island, its interior lush with waterfalls and orchids, its beaches chalk white, its -lagoons as clear as air and swarming with colorful fish.