The Diviners

by Rick Moody

  “Lay off. I want to watch the end,” Lois says.

  “Checking the scores.” He exhales deeply. “Anyways, how can you have a show that’s supposedly about werewolves and you don’t have any werewolves in it?”

  “If you’d be patient, you’d probably get what you want.”

  When the show comes back from the break, it’s one of those transitional sequences that is mainly a teaser for the ongoing serial narrative, namely, a sequence of Bob Gallace and Clay Goldberg talking on the phone as the light dwindles. Bob is calling Clay because he’s worried. He’s in his little house in Norwalk, and his kids are out in the yard, throwing a football, and he’s got the game on, and he’s whispering.

  “Clay,” he says, “I’m feeling really fatigued today. I just feel like . . . well, I don’t know what I feel like. I feel like I can barely stand up without . . . without fainting or something. You feel okay?”

  “I feel okay, partner, I sure do. I can give you the once-over before the moon crests, if that’ll help. Running a fever?”

  “I am, Clay. Nothing serious yet, but it’s a little bit of a fever. And I’m just incredibly thirsty, you know. I just can’t stop drinking. You don’t think I have that wasting disease or anything, do you? I mean, it’s not like —”

  “Creutzfeldt-Jakob? I think that’s a big stretch, Bob. I think our . . . our particular genetic differences might protect us from stuff like that, and anyway, the incubation period on human spongiform encephalopathy is ten years. Talk to me about it when you’re on Social Security, okay? In the meantime, be sure to hydrate.”

  Bob cradles the hands-free receiver. He’s pacing in the living room nervously, and while he is pacing it comes over him, the convulsion. The kids are visible through the window, throwing the football, and the football spirals in slow motion in the shot while a shank of mammalian fur trembles in one corner of it, and a long, desperate howl freezes everything.

  “Excellent!” says Arnie.

  Thaddeus Griffin, screen actor, turns on the show in the middle, just in time to see Bob Gallace suddenly overcome by supernatural transformation, and the cannabis he just smoked is so powerful, so much stronger than it was when, long ago, he was a teenage doper wannabe, that he’s not sure if he can watch this show without freaking out a little bit. It’s a bad idea to watch these shows without anyone else around. Like if you are smoking a lot of pot, for example. Like if you are a guy whose wife has just moved back in with her parents, or say you are a guy who has pretty much walked out on his producer’s job and who is just waiting around to go make some piece-of-shit movie in Morocco, it’s a bad idea for you to be buying dope on the street, where you could be photographed doing so by some tabloid. Bad idea. There’s something about that image of the wolf’s fur coat that’s so freaky, and Thaddeus starts to feel like, what does he feel like, he just feels really high, and he quickly changes the channel; he has to remember not to watch this fucking show, it’s too fucking scary, definitely he should not be watching it when he’s . . . so he changes to some reality thing; there are these people, and they are, where are they, they’re on some island, and they all look like they need to . . . they look so skanky, like they really need to bathe, and the guys all have these beards and everything, it’s like, uh, actually the guys kind of look like werewolves, if you really want to know the truth, and suddenly Thaddeus is kind of worried that maybe one of them is a werewolf, maybe that one guy, maybe he’s . . . He flips the channel back to the Werewolves, but he can’t even stand a minute of the thing, can’t stand it, but if he doesn’t watch it, then he’s just thinking about it, which is even worse than watching it, in a way, and now there’s some, uh, some black kid going to . . . he’s going to a keg party or something, nothing so bad, it’s just a party, see? It’s just a party, it’s nothing to get so freaked out about. But soon Thaddeus starts feeling like something really horrible is going to happen to the black kid, and soon there’s going to be that kind of music, you know, dissonant chords and stuff, and you know, and he can’t take it, he thinks the whole thing is just really freaky, and he shuts off the television because his breathing has become erratic, it’s all about his hyperventilations, if he can just get his breathing to settle down, then he won’t go on with this thinking that he’s, um, he just doesn’t even want to think it, but he’s looking at his arms, and his arms are incredibly hairy, his arms are all covered with this fur, he never really noticed it before, and if it weren’t for the perfect blond locks that the colorist gives him, wait a second, it looks like it must have got darker, he thinks it’s getting darker, the hair on his arms, and he tries to calm himself down, and he thinks he should call someone, maybe he could call his wife and tell her, and his stomach is bothering him, and maybe that’s the first sign, maybe stomach pain is the first sign, and he could call Annabel, he should call someone, come on, don’t be ridiculous, he’s just being ridiculous, but no, it’s not ridiculous, it’s incredibly serious. Nothing has ever been more serious. He starts peeling off layers, feels better if he takes off some clothes, his skin just needs to breathe a little bit, that’s it, his skin needs to breathe, it’s like everything is constricting, so he takes off his sweatshirt, it’s like a three-hundred-dollar sweatshirt, but he takes it off, drops it on the floor, and he takes off his T-shirt, that’s a lot better, things are better when he is not wearing a shirt, and then he takes off his jeans, and this is okay, at least for a moment it’s okay, until the panic, and he’s looking at himself, in the recessed entertainment den of his over- or underdecorated apartment, and there is no other conclusion, there is no other way to think about it. Yes, he is even more hairy than he was just a few minutes ago, he’s almost sure of it, and there’s the stomach pain, and he feels like he’s almost doubled over with the stomach pain, and he takes off his socks, because a man should never appear anywhere, not even in the privacy of his own home, in Y-front briefs and dark socks. The question must now be asked, there is no avoiding the question: Is mine the body of a werewolf? Has Thaddeus gone from being an actor in action films, highly regarded action films, to being a werewolf? Is this the fitting and karmic end of an actor in action films who has been prone to infidelity, like that singer who was unfaithful, and his wife waited until he was soaking in the tub one day and then she brought in scalding water and dumped it on him? At once, Thaddeus strips off his Y-front briefs, and now he’s nature in all its glory, he’s the animal in the human animal. Five hundred stations of cable and a hundred more radio stations, and even cable Internet hookup, joystick, and gaming options, and he cannot be distracted from thinking that there is definitely some kind of wolf taking over in him, because he is hairy everywhere, he is lupine, hair all over his back, all over his nipples, and the fur on him is thicker than it ever was, and he is going to need what a wolf needs, he’s going to need sides of raw beef, and he’s going to need woman flesh, and he’s going to have to go out tomorrow and have the whole wolf hide waxed off of his body, because, you know, he can’t show up on a movie set in Morocco looking like a wolf or he never will be able to work in the business again. Maybe if he showers he can calm down somehow. He’s not a wolf. Just go take a shower and put on some Yanni or something, one of the cable radio stations will have Yanni, all Yanni all the time, maybe there’s that video of Yanni playing, that always calms him down, when no one is around, he can put on Yanni and wait for the cannabis to wear off, Yanni will have the proper effect. The swelling repetitions of pan flute will move through him, and the lycanthropy will fade. When the sun comes up tomorrow it will all have been some horrible mistake.

  Felicia has forbidden her strong-headed son Bennett Adams from going to the party at the Burns residence. Because of the trouble with Edwin. But that’s not the kind of forbidding that’s going to keep any teenager from doing exactly what he means to do. Felicia has to go out “to work,” or that’s what she tells Edwin and the kids, and there’s a van waiting at the curb, driven by Rose Liggett, also a werewolf, and it takes Felicia int
o the woods, where she will meet the thirty-five other members of the pack. The boys are left behind to finish the washing up, and Edwin is slumbering in Felicia’s bed, moaning in pain. Vern, who might have a little touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder, is lining up the flatware on the countertop in the kitchen, the knives with the knives, the spoons with the spoons. He doesn’t even see when his brother goes right out the front door.

  Bennett telephones for a cab on the corner, and he gets in the taxi, spending money from his part-time job at the sporting-goods store at the mall in New Rochelle. He ditches the taxi on the road a block over from the Burnses’ house. He’s going to walk in the front door as if he’s come from the wilderness or as if he’s the hero from a Maupassant story, which he sort of is. He comes from New York, not from Connecticut, he comes from the disadvantaged part of Westchester County, but he can put on a good masquerade, and he’s putting one on now, having dressed up in the wardrobe of the kids of Fairfield Academy, featuring the threads of J. Crew and Banana Republic. He passes between the antebellum columns of the Burns residence, and then he crosses the imperial threshold. Inside, the kids are hanging off of every piece of furniture, and the music is blasting, the kind of music that occurs only at the parties of television shows.

  Meanwhile, back among the audience, in the Park Avenue apartment of Madison McDowell’s parents, who, like the Burnses, are away for the night, Madison tells Zimri Enderby that she doesn’t know why they can get so much right on television, things that the movies can never get right anymore, like discomfort and awkwardness between people, and the long, slow development of characters, the ups and downs of long-term relationships, but they can never get the music right. Zimri doesn’t know much about it, since he was never allowed to go to parties as a kid, except parties where they served ginger ale and there was bingo and sing-alongs. He doesn’t know what the music should sound like. Zimri is sitting on the floor, so he can get closer to the television, and Madison is touched by the fact that he is on the floor and still wearing his impeccably polished loafers. Her cell phone rings, and she looks at the number, and she realizes that it’s the Vanderbilts calling. They always call during The Werewolves of Fairfield County. The Vanderbilts are just really pissed that this stuff is happening, that there are these shows, you know, that are just, like, really popular, and they have nothing to do with this popularity, mainly because the producer is, like, such a bitch. The Vanderbilts could really give her some phat ideas about guest stars, like models and recording artists who should definitely be on the show, but Madison doesn’t answer the cell phone, she just flings the phone across the room and then she tumbles back into the middle of the story.

  Bennett Adams sees Merry Burns coming down the stairs! A blessing is promised in the moment, because Merry sees him, and he sees her, and the contagion of desiring passes back and forth like in a closed-circuit diagram. Everyone sees them seeing each other, and we see them seeing each other. Everybody knows better than to get in the way of that binding of gazes. There’s a hurtling movement to the episode, to the way that two beautiful teenagers draw near to each other. And there’s some witty repartee, as when Bennett says that he’s especially thankful this year that her parents have gone out to some cocktail party, and Merry says she’s thankful that they thoughtlessly “left the liquor cabinet open, wow, how did that happen?” She also tells him that the teacher from school, Ms. Carter, who was supposed to chaperone, called and said that she’d had a medical emergency and wouldn’t be able to fulfill her obligations. When this banter is over, the two of them are dancing to some slow ballad, and their heads are on each other’s shoulders, and it’s adorable, and Madison McDowell and Zimri Enderby, like so many other watchers of the program, are almost convinced that the episode is going to have a happy ending. It’s almost like Bennett Adams is not going to have to agonize for the rest of this ominous school holiday. Maybe he can forget about the drug cartel that left Edwin for dead on a street corner, and the legacy of his own absent father, and the money problems faced by his mother, and other forces too dark for him to understand yet. Merry Burns takes him by the hand, and they head up the stairs.

  Madison slides down onto the floor, in her silk pants, and she rows herself across the floor to where Zimri sits, and she tells him that he’s sexy for a guy from Utah, and then they fall into their own forbidden embraces, during another commercial break. Before the break is over, he has lifted her up off the floor, so that she won’t get her pants any dustier, to carry her down the hall to the bedroom.

  If Annabel’s mother, the psychologist, has a view on sexuality as depicted on television, it’s that the excessive saccharine of this sexuality is bound to create expectations, and not just among young people, who are almost honor bound to expect that when they finally get naked with their friends the earth will tremble or there will be the sounds of rockets going off in their ears or they will feel an overwhelming and intoxicating love, more addictive than heroin, and this love feeling, called forth by the commingling of bodily fluids, will never take leave of them, until death comes for them. The male characters on television, of course, are noteworthy for abandoning the girl characters. This is one of the guarantees on television these days. The male is often a cad. Whereas no feminine protagonist can possibly be wanton, nor can any girl toy with the male affections, according to the psychologist, and that’s according to some sort of misguided affirmative action, and perhaps it’s not the worst thing. Even the adults, according to the psychologist, are at risk in viewing these sexual encounters. It’s possible that they may feel a faint trace of jealousy about the long decades of adult sexuality, which are generally of muted and gentler tones. What television needs, according to Deborah the psychologist, is more sex, not less. Lots and lots and lots of sex, but sexuality that is resplendent in its many hues, not just this young man chasing the young woman up the stairs, and then getting into bed and pulling the covers up, and then banging away in missionary position. What television needs is bad sex, it needs premature ejaculations, and women forgiving men for premature ejaculations, and it needs impotence, lots and lots of impotence, it needs dry vaginas, it needs lubricants, it needs Viagra, it needs pornography as a marital aid, and it needs other performance enhancers, vibrators, perhaps dildos. Entire episodes devoted to these things. How often does a dildo get mentioned on television? Surely the Southern Baptist Leadership Conference wouldn’t begrudge the FCC a dildo or two? Nobody is hurt by a dildo, unless it’s boys using them on themselves without adequate preparation, or groups of girls using those two-headed jobs without knowing how.

  “Shut up, Mom,” Maximillian says to his mother.

  The camera picks up a pair of house cats in the Burns household. The cats just happen to be in the room with the two young lovers, and the cats are fighting, as house cats will do, one batting the other around the head. The cats freeze, dash just out of the shot and then back into it. We hear the breathy importunities of Merry Burns on the bed, and then we hear something else. We hear something very different; we hear something almost animal. . . .

  “I knew it,” Annabel says. “It’s because he’s black. Everyone else gets to have sex on this show, but he doesn’t get to have sex just because he’s black. There’s never a shot of just black characters in a store or anything or discussing politics. They’re always the mutants.”

  “Annabel!” Max says, who, though he is a strident critic of television culture and its seductions, is the one paying the closest attention. The Reverend Duffy, who has been known to use The Werewolves of Fairfield County in his sermons, is soundly sleeping. And Tyrone, who has said not a word about what’s going on, has been concentrating on the book in his hands. “Anyway, Edwin is black and he’s not a werewolf.”

  Not yet, anyway.

  The transformation, one of the things that initially set apart The Werewolves of Fairfield County from other programs, is by now so predictable that it’s difficult to bring anything new to it. The transformation of man int
o wolf, here in the fourth season, is just digital nonsense. The same makeup morphing through the same predictable stages. And yet each season, Christine Katz, the producer of The Werewolves of Fairfield County, has tried to hold in reserve a little improvement in the matter of the transformation. The hard-core fans of the program know to wait for the razzle-dazzle of this moment of improved metamorphosis. Sunday, during the Thanksgiving episode, it turns out, is the day of something new. So: Bennett Adams, just like his mother, Felicia, is a werewolf, and it is the moment of orgasm that has brought it out in him. The uninformed viewer will perhaps not be certain it’s an orgasm, but still. The scene is powerful, it’s almost garish, the way he arches up off the reclining, sweetly moaning body of Merry Burns and stretches up his arms, because it’s his virginity that he’s casting off, too, his innocence, and of course the irony of the moment of any deflowering is that the body always knows what it’s doing, it knows and loves the moment of its new awareness, as if it has always known; the body loves its animal exhibitions, and this is especially true of poor Bennett Adams, who is not only knowing and loving the animal aspect of his splattering seed, but just as he comes, the bristles of fur seem to burst out on his face instantly, not gradually, as in all the traditional werewolf programming of the fifties and sixties, but immediately. And that’s the great new effect in this episode. His cry is his own voice and the voice of the wolf simultaneously. The one is an aspect of the other, and then, again immediately, his shirt, his preppy polo shirt, which he’s still wearing at the commencement of the love scene, the polo shirt that his mother actually ironed for him, shreds like confetti, and you can see the threads hanging off of him, others flying out into the room. His old body is a piñata giving way to the new. He knows that something awful has happened, that he is not just a boy who has known the inside of a girl, and he knows, all at once, that he’s a thing, not a boy but a thing, and as a thing he should flee, and that the proper place for all animals is in the state of nature’s wildness, which is not in some mansion somewhere just up the street from where Martha Moxley used to live. He doesn’t even have his pants on, of course, he has nothing on, but he’s a wolf, and nakedness is not a shameful thing to a werewolf, and he goes bounding off the bed and down the stairs and into the thick of the party, which at this somewhat late hour has given way to intoxicated lassitude. It’s not the giddy carnival that we usually see depicted on television but is, rather, a lazy, fumbling, inert affair where boys who are too drunk to perform make passes at girls who are too drunk to refuse, and the werewolf bounds past all of them, and the few who are awake or alert enough to understand that they have just seen something supernatural rub their eyes, looking, nonetheless, unsurprised.