Hunger of the Wolf

by Stephen Marche

  I took the letter.

  “It says they gave you a contract before the interview.”

  “I didn’t sign it,” I said.

  “They say you promised to sign it. But it doesn’t really matter, you understand? They can sue us until we bleed, for fun.”

  I made some gesture of outrage, but he stopped me.

  “It’s irrelevant,” he said. He held up the letter. The letter was money. Who is stupid enough to fight with money?

  My story was dead. Hope wasn’t far behind. What means or reason could I swagger up for staying in New York now? There was enough begging space on my Visa for another two months’ rent, maybe. Even worse, a digital advertising firm I had been writing for occasionally had offered me a permanent job—a terrific, well-paying job as a copywriter—in Toronto, and to refuse might be the act of a crazy person rather than somebody charmingly obsessed with New York City. The crisis was coming, one way or another. What was the point of all the Wylie papers, my rented basement archive of a family that craved nothing more than to be forgotten forever? Poppy Wylie was my own private celebrity; the Wylies were a private secret. And what is that worth? Everyone has one of those. A new hunger began to creep into my guts. My wife had been right—no one can earn a place in the money anymore.

  *

  By the time I turned up in SoHo, Kate had already redecorated. Interior design was her mode of protest against the injustices of the universe and the inscrutability of fate. The living room had been wallpapered with a sepia-washed scene of Brazilian beach-bathers, the carpet was blue shag foam bearing aloft the elegant, floating furniture. I selected a recliner with lifelike horseheads for armrests, comfortable in a Mongol way.

  “Everything in this room used to be local,” she said. “Manhattan designers. Locally sourced. Now everything’s from as far away as I could manage. Isn’t that silly?”

  “I love the carpet,” I said. Rich women with their fabrics are like bikers with their tattoos—always looking for a chance to discuss the finer details.

  “I ordered the blue from Lagos. The wallpaper’s from São Paolo. The lamps are from London. All the best lamps come from Northern Europe.”

  “I like it here,” I said. Then added in a splurge of confidence, “The Standard gave me the kill fee for my piece on Poppy today.”

  She thought about it. “I bet Leo taught her how to block it.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe she knew herself. Anyway, I’ve been paid for my silence. And I’ll never be able to write about it. Not ever.”

  “Maybe a novel?” she suggested.

  I stroked the mane of the armrest horse to calm the beast, steady its youthful wildness. My story was now mere space on my laptop that I wouldn’t bother to clear out for its insignificance: one-sixteenth the memory of a song. The chair made me want raw flesh. “I think we should drink brandy,” I said.

  She rose, walked to the bar, and returned with two vase-sized snifters, alighting near me on the floor, her legs tucked under her knees, a middle-aged siren on invisible rocks about to sing.

  “He sent a ‘Dear Kate’ text,” she said. “Divorced by text message. I wonder if that will be something I can tell my grandchildren.”

  “It probably won’t happen to that many people.”

  Her initial burst of laughter petered out timidly. “He should have at least told Sigma.”

  “Sigma doesn’t know?”

  Sarcasm staticked her voice, a ragged leak of maternal anguish. “I can’t bear to tell her. The story’s too embarrassing. Daddy left Mommy. A kid might understand that. But Sigma can’t yet understand a text saying ‘You should know, I’m with Poppy.’”

  “That was all it said?”

  She nodded. “We had an old-fashioned marriage while it lasted. With our own lives. Everybody knew.”

  I was supposed to say something, anything, a word for our mutual dignity, a glance at a beggar instead of handing over a coin, but I had nothing. I had not even a glance to offer.

  “Now we’ll have a rather traditional divorce. I suppose I was just a rung on some ladder.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  The brandy stung her nose and she hacked at the alcohol on her throat. “Isn’t it supposed to be the villains in melodramas who drink brandy?”

  “I mean, how is he going to survive? He barely knows her.”

  Her smile poured out shadowy elixir. “What, you think he’ll miss his friends?” She laced the last word with all the ghosts of friends she couldn’t have because of her money and all the friends she had only because of her money. Then she cheered up. “Marrying money is the oldest job in the world. I guess it’s good that men are doing it now.”

  *

  Nothing seems to be able to cure me of the belief that life is happening elsewhere. In Kate’s living room, as we spotted the haven of drunkenness, and the winds began to drift in that direction, even then, at that moment, I wanted to talk to Leo. Leo has the gift of making others forget his failings, maybe because he forgets them so easily himself—a prestidigitation of conscience. Kate longed for him, too, I could tell. That night envy bound us more tightly than love ever could. In the luxurious appointments of a grand house in the most prosperous city known to human history, we lounged on the latest furniture with excellent brandy, considering our comparative poverty. Together we stared into the chasm between ourselves and the real money, the money that enables the fulfillment that eludes ordinary life. I left before I tried another sort of fulfillment.

  I was glad of the night’s emptiness as I stumbled out the door. The twin mysteries were crucifixion then: How do we ever live with people? How do we ever abandon them? I walked home, or rather I walked back to my place between the home I was too good for and the home I had broken and the home I craved. I knew my way and could not be more lost.

  The vestibule of the house on Larchmount Crescent had no space for art, not even for a mirror, just a small table for keys and an awkward closet, but the narrow passage was a haven for Ben Wylie. He was a weekender at Hamilton College, which meant that on Monday mornings, the other boys lay in wait at the gates to chuck snowballs at him as the chauffeur opened the limo doors, and on Friday evenings the chauffeur drove him alone through the early winter nights back to shadowy Larchmount Crescent, with its flitting servants and its warmed-up dinners under the half glow of television. In the vestibule, he was not at school, not at home, safe in the refuge of in-between.

  On the night of his thirteenth birthday, Ben arrived home to find his mother waiting for him there, curled on the staircase in a scarlet dress. He had hoped his mother would come home for his birthday. She took his coat, teasing the fringe of his shoulder-length hair with a curious, tender judgment, and then amazed him. “Your father wants to speak to you,” she said.

  What could have brought his father home? Death? Disease? Had someone at the school called to tell his father that he was a mediocre student? That the other boys were rough with him? Had the business collapsed? Were they poor now? His mother piloted him into the dining room, where George sat, hands crossed like an undertaker preparing to discuss the bill, at the wide oak dinner table where they almost never ate dinner together. A brown manila envelope crouched by his elbow.

  His parents left him with the envelope and waited in the garden while Ben learned that he was born to a lonelier fate than money.

  To my heir, Ben, whom I love,

  I may as well say it straight. You and I are wolves. Once a month, during the full moon, I become a gray timber wolf. After three days, I wake up as a man again, with no memory of the experience. I know how strange that must sound. When I was about your age, my father took me down into the basement and showed me. It will be shocking for you when you see the same change in me, I know. My hope is that I can spare you the horror of ignorance at least.

  You’re awfully young to have to deal with these problems. I don’t want this letter to frighten you. There’s no reason to be frightened. There is pain in becoming a bea
st. There is also an ecstasy. To me, the saddest moment is the ache following the retransformation, when I wake up and I’m human again. After the terror and after the violence comes the loneliness. I’ve spent my life trying to cure that loneliness. Sometimes it goes away of its own accord. Sometimes under the loveliness of your mother’s music, it doesn’t seem to matter. But it’s never away for long.

  My cure for loneliness has been the search for others like us. My dad only knew about Uncle Max. You might remember Max because he showed up at your grandfather’s funeral. Dad told me that he never met a werewolf outside of the family, though he’d had his suspicions. He believed that Lyndon Johnson was a wolf. He believed Hermann Goering was. He opened up to me all that he believed, all that he had sussed out of his little reading because he was not that big a reader of books though he read every newspaper he could get his hands on. He believed that Lord Wellesley, the former governor of India and the Duke of Wellington’s brother, was a werewolf, but he was only guessing that after reading a series of biographies. He named a bunch of other names, from every walk of life, and I’ve run all those guesses down, and there was nothing to any of them. He may have wanted to please me. Or maybe he dreamed them up because he was consorting with a lot of lords and so on, who could trace their families back by millennia, and finding werewolves at key moments in history made him feel grander. I don’t really know.

  I have spent my life searching. The business has taken care of itself. I discovered a simple truth about business, which might serve you well later: Hire good people and leave them alone. I discovered it more or less by accident. Lee wouldn’t let me turn WylieCorp into a holding company. The deals he was finding were just too sweet and, for various reasons, I felt I owed him a chance to see out his vision. You will have to make your own decisions. Just let me say that opportunities are not inherited. When Lee goes, you should probably structure the shares around income-bearing properties. Just my opinion.

  My search has taken me to every corner of the earth. To Peru, to Catalonia, to the Gobi Desert, to Nigeria, to Oman, to Baffin Island, to Delhi, the Middle East, behind the Iron Curtain. I’m going to tell you what I know.

  There are two references to werewolves in antiquity that matter. The first comes from the very first work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, dated about 1700 BC. In a list of the men that the goddess of love has destroyed, there’s this:

  You loved a shepherd, a herdsman,

  Who endlessly put up cakes for you,

  And every day slaughtered kids for you.

  You struck him, turned him into a wolf.

  His own boys drove him away,

  And his dogs tore his hide to bits.

  The other important reference comes from Ovid, a poet who lived around the time of Christ. His poetry collection, The Metamorphoses, described King Lycaon of Arcadia, which was an idyllic country in central Turkey. At a banquet in honor of Zeus, King Lycaon butchered his own son and cooked him into a dish for the god to eat. In his rage, Zeus transformed Lycaon into a werewolf:

  My thunderbolt struck the king’s house to ruins,

  And he, wild master, ran like beast to field

  Crying his terror which cannot utter words

  But howls in fear, his foaming lips and jaws,

  Quick with the thought of blood, harry the sheep.

  His cloak turned into bristling hair, his arms

  Were forelegs of a wolf, yet he resembled

  Himself, what he had been—the violent

  Gray hair, face, eyes, the ceaseless, restless state

  Of drunken tyranny and hopeless hate.

  It’s hard to tell whether the werewolf is a victim or a monster, isn’t it? For many years I had a recurring dream, though it has lessened since I met your mother. In this dream I cannot tell whether I am chasing or being chased, I am just a running wolf. And that seems to be the same as in Gilgamesh and Ovid: Are we outlaws? Or are we poor shepherds?

  The earliest records of werewolves were written by a French historian named Giraldus Cambrensis. He never doubted that encounters with werewolves were real.

  Is such an animal to be called a brute or a man? A rational animal appears to be far above the level of a brute; but who will venture to assign a quadruped, which inclines to the earth, and is not a laughing animal, to the species of a man? Again, if anyone should slay this animal, would he be called a homicide?

  I have always been surprised by how much compassion the commentators feel for men like us. Nonetheless, our inclusion among the human race has not always been a given. The most famous werewolf in France was a young man named Jean Grenier, who lived in the sixteenth century. He confessed to killing more than fifty children. The president, or judge of the case, refused to believe that Grenier was a lycanthrope: “The president went on to say that lycanthropy and kuanthropy were mere hallucinations, and that the change of shape existed only in the disorganized brain of the insane, consequently it was not a crime that could be punished.” The president sentenced the boy to life within the local monastery. He did not enjoy his subsequent life. He began by gorging on a bloody heap of offal and ended without being able to look anyone in the face. He died at twenty years of age.

  There are dozens of other legitimate records. I honestly don’t know what to make of most of them. They may be something. They may be nothing. I followed every trace, every rumor, into the Amazon, into Haiti, into Malaysia, the Côte d’Ivoire, the Congo, up the Zambezi, and down the Mississippi. The stories would lead me to some place, to the woods where children had seen a werewolf centuries before, to a hill where townsfolk had supposedly hung a wolfman, to a dark prairie where a hunter had been eaten alive by our kind. Always the same question came to me when I got where I was going: What had I been expecting? What had I been looking for? There were just places. Woods, a hill, a prairie. I found no insight, only landscape.

  The medical records are even less satisfying, though they’re much clearer. The condition of lycanthropy has been well documented. In the second century AD the Greek physician Marcellus of Side saw dozens of lycanthropes. The prescribed treatment was bleeding to the point of fainting. That seemed to be the cure for pretty much everything back then. In modern medical literature, roughly fifty cases have been reported, although this number may be low because patients receive the diagnosis only after having passed through a period where they believe they are wolves, which means that only patients who have a moment of clarity, becoming capable of identifying their symptoms, appear on the record. I think it’s safe to say that many more of these poor fellows simply remain in the delusion that they are wolves. Many others cannot remember what they became.

  There are variations of lycanthropy, too. An interesting one, recently reported, is the case of the patient who believes he can turn others into wolves. The coexistence of lycanthropy and Cotard’s syndrome has also been reported in more than three instances. Cotard’s syndrome is a disease in which the patient believes that he is already dead and thus is immortal. It’s a nihilistic delusion, and it can even go so far as the delusion that the flesh is rotting off the patient’s bones, rendering him invulnerable. In these cases, the lycanthropy comes as a punishment from God, as externalized sexual expression, as inferiority complex, as a form of identification with a despised aggressor, as the expression of primitive id-instincts, as an evasion of feelings of guilt. None of this applies to you or me, of course. They’re not wolves, these people. They just think they are. Still, you may find their stories interesting and/or valuable at some time in the future.

  I met several wolf-raised children. I thought they might help me understand the fusion of the human and the wild. A girl in Azerbaijan disappeared from her home for twenty-one days when she was four years old. She told her rescuers that she had been cared for by wolves who fed her and kept her warm. Anthropologists have verified her story, but when I spoke with her, she had been telling it for so long, to so many strangers, that the story had spun itself into a myth she told
herself, so it was useless.

  Shamdeo, the wolfboy of India, was not useless. Mother Teresa was caring for him in Calcutta when I met him, but the poor fellow had been discovered living among wolves outside Sultanpur in the Punjab. I spent an hour with him. He had sharpened his teeth on bones. He lurked in the corners, in the shadows. He was suspicious of everyone but the priest who took care of him. There was something of us in the dark-eyed boy but he would never say what. I realized that, even if he knew, he couldn’t tell me whatever it was I wanted to know. I gave up searching after Shamdeo. He was as close as I was ever going to get, and it was nowhere. At least I could set up a small house and an annuity for the poor fellow.

  There’s one more incident it’s my duty to tell you about. I’m not sure what it means but I’m sure it means something, and maybe you’ll figure it out someday. Maybe some piece of the puzzle will fall into your hands that never fell into mine. It concerns your sister. You may or may not remember her adoption. Your sister’s biological father was a man named Pi-Lin, a Chinese official. Her adoption came shortly after your grandfather died, and before I began my investigations into our condition. We were still in Alberta after your grandfather’s funeral. The caretaker came over with the message. It was extraordinary. A man I had met only once before was asking me to bring your mother to Hong Kong immediately. We flew out the next day. A very nervous middleman took us by junk into Victoria Harbor. Pi-Lin met us in the harbor, leaping into our boat. He had a baby in his arms. That was your sister.

  Something terrible was about to happen to him, but he wouldn’t be more specific. He was to be “reeducated.” I asked him whether he would ever come back. He said that it would be sensible to assume that he was already dead. He showed me his delicate short-fingered hands and asked me if I thought they would survive a season making pig iron. I didn’t know what to say. He told us your sister’s name, which sounded like “Poppy” to us, and Pi-Lin smiled and said Poppy would be a fine name for her. He took one last look at his daughter in your mother’s arms, and said, “It’s just painted skin.” Then he boarded his boat and disappeared into the Cultural Revolution.