The wolf prowled again last night. The same telltale signs—mud on boots, blood in tooth glass. Each day I get a little closer to feeling his ravenous need.
I ask my wife if she heard me when I came in last night. She pretends not to hear the question.
This is what I remember of last night’s dream.
Rain. I am walking in a forest on all fours like a wild animal over ground covered with pine needles and damp moss. Small animals and birds scatter and shriek at my fearful step. I am hungry. It is my calling to be perpetually hungry. Later (somewhere the loss of time), I have a fight with another animal who threatens to tear out my heart. I am, it appears, the more determined to survive. When the fight is done I grieve over the death of my enemy, heartbroken at what I have lost. Hunger its own master, I stuff down the remains.
Today, while I am lecturing on “Religion and the Family,” the fang on the right slips out. A girl in the back row runs from the room screaming. The rest of the class continues taking notes.
In my dream, the woman without a face flies out the window to her death. “It is not me,” I call after her. “You’ve made a mistake.”
I have written down in a notebook the means of his destruction, which is traditional and permits some sense of honor in this vile career. Our fates are in the same hand.
Goldie Tress has not been at the college for the past three days, which leads to grim speculation. I value her as never before, enamored after the fact—an aspect of the curse, I suspect—with the ones I destroy.
An emergency session with my therapist, Roper. He refuses to believe my nightmares have corresponding manifest reality. “The beast in you, which is in all of us, walks only in your dreams,” he says in the voice of authority.
I ask him to explain the fresh mud on my boots each morning. He makes as usual an evasive answer, turning the question back to me. It is how he handles the inexplicable, a man with a frail sense of mystery.
“Maybe you think I put it there myself.”
“Do me this consideration. Put the boots to your nose one morning and tell me what you sense.”
In the past the wolf has never shown himself except in minor ways to the doctor’s eyes.
Briefly, willed by the doctor’s skepticism, the wolf makes a sudden full appearance, shattering the room with his howl, blowing the doctor from his chair.
“Bravo’” he says smiling when he collects himself, “I’d be much surprised if we ever hear from this wolf again.”
A strange old man with a heavy foreign accent is waiting for me in the living room when I come home. He identifies himself as an insurance investigator but after a few minutes of conversation it is clear that he is something else. Dr. Von Elfant, he calls himself. I know the name from the books of lycanthropic lore. He is a wolf hunter, one of the most famous and successful of that breed. We exchange ironic insinuations. “That is a fine looking wolf beard you have,” he says.
“It is the bane of those closest to me,” I return. “You ought to see it at night when its true colors come out.”
“I half come have way around the world for just that purpose,” says my learned enemy.
These remarks are thrown out from opposite sides of the room, an indication of mutual respect. There is no question of friendship. In these duels, it is death to indicate the slightest self-doubt.
A neighbor complains in an anonymous note pushed under the door that there is howling at night coming from our apartment. It will have to stop, says the note or the police will be called. Animals are not allowed in these apartments. I howl and scratch at the walls, sensitive to hostile criticism. Later my wife goes over to apologize for my behavior.
Swatches of coarse matted hair appear on the palms of my hands. When I show them to Roper as evidence of my affliction he shakes his leonine head. “Your hands have entered into the obsession,” he says, “are now complicit with the ducts of the face. You go to great lengths, don’t you, to prove yourself right and the rest of us wrong.” It is an insight, though of no special relevance to my case. Of all the people I am close to, only my mortal enemy, Von Elfant, has not shut his eyes to me.
Von Elfant. Von Elfant, the master wolf hunter of our day, is dead. “The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack.” His eyes and tongue ripped out, says the report, the victim of some wild animal. “lf you weren’t so wolf-headed,” says my wife, “you’d apply for his job at the Sorbonne before others get wind of the opening.”
Goldie Tress is alive. She returns to school with a large bandage covering the right side of her face. When she sees me, slinking off, she lets out an audible groan. Our eyes slide away from each other in guilty embarrassment.
The wolf hair like some silken metal rips the blade of the razor this morning. My image growls back at me in the glass. The beast has survived the night in my face, fangs and all. After breakfast he subsides and I go into school to teach my classes. I give them a test, writing the questions on the blackboard so as not to startle them with my fangs, which hang heavy in my jaw. I long, while they write their lies, to spring out at them and rip their heads from their shoulders.
It strikes me at lunch that I am beginning to feel his feelings as my own. We are becoming, for better and worse—the worse, thinks the wolf, the better—one and the same. “I must talk to you,” Goldie whispers out of the injured side of her face. I run away, but she follows, follows me to the Men’s Room, to the Student Cafeteria, to the parking lot. “Come into my car with me,” she calls. “You’re inviting trouble,” I say, shout at her from where I crouch in secret, a snarl in my throat. “I forgive you, dear heart,” she calls back. “That’s all I wanted to say.” She drives off, leaving me to the furtive necessity of my calling.
ao wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!
I write in my notebook: “Wolf redeemed, released, by uncurse of love.”
My wife has a stainless steel door erected for her room, set inside the first door, which is a heavy mahogany. “It is not against you,” she says. “Last night something or someone tried to force his way in.”
When I walk in the streets disguised in my academic suit, stray dogs follow me and bark.
“What a handsome beaver,” the lady says. “Such texture.”
A picnic lunch with Goldie in the park. My hunger unabatable.
“You don’t believe that I forgive you, do you?” she asks as I wolf down the cold chicken she has brought, bones and all.
“Yes’m,” says the wolf with ambiguous cunning. Language, he thinks, is merely another shadow in an insubstantial world, the putative intention behind words, a shadow in itself.
“What if I kissed you?” says the unbandaged voice. “Would that convince you?”
Still hungry, I gnaw on the Navajo blanket she has brought for us to sit on while we eat. I eat the buffalo on the blanket, hair and all. She takes a movie of me while I eat, wanting, she says, to show me to myself.
I AM DAMNED, I growl at her wordlessly, THERE IS NO HOPE.
“If you think you can frighten me by growling and showing your teeth, you don’t know what kind of woman I am.” Tilting her head back to receive a kiss or a bite.
The man in and the beast out, the beast in and the man out, are merely variations on the same reality. Each day I become more monstrous, he or I. I teach my classes in a lightweight plastic mask. No one appears to notice.
Roper has decided to drop me from his rolls. “My competence extends only to the human,” he says.
Seven Ways to Destroy the Wolf*
1. By fire.
1. By ice.
2. By drowning (in his own fluid or in the tears of a maiden).
3. By a silver bullet through the back of the head.
4. By overwhelming and unsought kindness.
5. By a wooden stake driven through the heart.
6. By the unknown. (Lore has it that each case has its own unique resolution.)
* To be used in emergencies only.
An un
seasonal snow, two inches fallen last night, the last flesh of winter. The tracks of an unidentified large animal are discovered in the courtyard of our apartment building. Rumors abound. The super’s wife comes to the door with the official explanation. The prints are a trick to frighten the tenants and were made by some teenaged thugs in the employ of the former superintendent.
“And what about the deaths reported?” I ask.
“No one lives forever,” she says.
At dinner my wife announces that she has something important to tell me. “Promise me you won’t be angry when I tell you,” she says. I can’t promise that in advance. She locks herself in her room which now has three doors and says that she has reported me to the police in an anonymous letter.
Feeling the nerve ends of the hair breathe under the skin as they come to life, I rake at the outer door with my teeth and claws.
“I didn’t have to tell you,” she says. “Think of it that way. If I didn’t tell you, you wouldn’t know they were coming here at any moment to take you away.”
The wolf lives on roots and berries and the stems of wildflowers, a vegetarian against nature. In exile, his appetite pales.
The wolf lives on roots and berries and the stems of wildflowers, a vegetarian in extremus. In exile, his appetite pales.
A child comes up to him in his makeshift lair. “You a wolf, man, or a person?”
“What do you think?”
“Man, I don’t want to hurt your feelings none so I’m not going to say. But you got big teeth, man.” He sticks his hand in the wolf’s mouth. “Wow! Them teeth real?”
He has not had his teeth in anything solid for four whole days.
Without appetite, he eats like a bird. Strength is down. He is the bare wolf of his former self without even the saving grace of occasional murderous desire. When he sees the wolf hunters with their torches and red shirts pass in procession outside his lair, his secret hope is that they will catch the beast and put an end to uncertainty. He suffers the damnation of human ambivalence.
It is as the hunted that one comes to understand the moral esthetic of the hunter.
Someone or something touches my face tenderly during the night while I sleep. Is it a dream? Unearned affection excites deep throated howls of rage. Even if my condition is the result of a curse, I am now a wolf by choice. By nature. OWWWWWWW WWWWWWWWWWW! And yet not the same savage wolf I was.
The human lady comes almost every day to sweep the bones and feathers from my lair. She brings me hot soup in a jar and consonants of comfort. “Let me love you,” she pleads in human language and without.
It is not my nature. What I am, the nature that is not mine, is beyond my inhuman capacity to sustain. The wolf is out and I am in. We are one, though duplicitous as anything inhuman and human must be.
My life is insupportable. Injured last night in a fight with two dogs for which I had no heart, merely a savage act to sustain. This morning I can barely walk on all fours. Guilt is the last human vestige to die away.
This will be my last report. “My kiss,” says human lady, “may be the very thing you need to redeem an otherwise blighted existence. “
I howl to frighten her off. () It has no ring. A dying sound. As if my nature has gone out of fashion.
“It’s you who are afraid of me,” she says, getting down on all fours and crawling toward me, howling in a hollow human voice. “Let me love you,” she says with boring persistence.
The wolf laughs.
“Monster,” she screams at him, baring her teeth.
He receives the cutting edge of her kiss. Love changes him (or doesn’t). “I am the killer,” he announces in human voice. The wolf stiffens from the pain, howls a last long heartbreaking cry. Even the hunters, for whom death is only the last step in a familiar mechanical process, are touched in some way by the cry.
“He is in critical though satisfactory condition,” the first hunter says.
“We’ve done what we’ve come to do,” says the second hunter, “and now we can go home to our loved ones.”
“We’ll take his papers back with us,” says the third, suppressing a mild howl, “and let his story be known so that others might avoid his fate.”
I sigh in my sleep, a recorder of silent voices, as the sun begins to rise mercurially in the distance, revising the landscape of the night.
Disguises
The baby that was is not the baby that is. It has come to that. Life, he is aggrieved to report, has gotten out of hand. Everyone seems to have forgotten the way it has been, the way it is supposed to be. The baby that is is an interloper, a baby-come-lately. The true baby, though no longer what he was, is no friend to the new arrangement.
There are characters in this narrative for whom the former baby feels not the slightest responsibility, the imposter baby being a prime example.
“Why do you pretend to be me?” the original says to the imposter when no one is listening. The imposter has no answer to that, seems dumbfounded by the question.
“I’m on to your game, kid,” says the original. “You’re not going to get away with it for long.”
When the father picks up the imposter and says, “How’s my baby?” the original laughs bitterly to himself, amazed by such misperception.
What he needs, he decides, relying as he must on his own counsel, is the restoration of his lost persona, a return to the climate of his faded glories. The idea grows in him, blossoms. Working late at night in his study, he develops a mask that resembles himself as he was.
He will keep the disguise out of sight until a reasonable occasion for its employment arrives. In the meantime, he will pretend to accept the unthinkable terms of the present arrangement. He will even play on occasion with the usurper (anything to divert suspicion) with the kindness and deference he used to reserve for the imaginary.
Sometimes his impatience with pretense, the other’s and his own, gets the better of the baby’s resolve.
“My rabbit, my car, my robot, my G.I. Joe,” says the usurper. “lt’s not yours,” says our story’s hero.
“It’s not yours,” says the usurper, either in echo or in assertion. “I hate liars,” says the former baby, storming off in an unconstrained display of disgust.
The imposter suffers this slight as if it were a painful fall, calling out the other’s name repeatedly in complaint.
“How many times do I have to tell you?” someone big says, picking up the imposter for a whole raft of unearned embraces.
Why can’t he keep his mouth shut? thinks the true baby and he would say it out loud if he weren’t trying to keep a low profile. He wishes one or the other of them—the other his first choice –would disappear.
Indignity follows indignity. The true baby’s own long-forgotten imaginary grandma (reported dead in an early edition of the New York Times) comes to play with the imposter. Perhaps passing away has undone her powers of sight, the true baby thinks, wanting to put the best possible interpretation on unforgivable betrayal. Is there no one left to tell the real from the false?
Some lip service is given by those of the household to his prerogatives, but in fact they have been stripped from him. He is barely allowed to call his old thoughts and feelings his own. While the evening sleeps, he plans his comeback. While his parents are out at a local movie, the true baby puts on the mask of his former self and slips out of the house.
He walks a long distance, six or eight blocks, crossing the streets he has mandate to cross and some others where the area of his authority is undefined, when a tapping on the window catches his attention. A familiar woman he can’t remember having seen before invites him in. If it is soup she has to offer, he has promised himself to refuse.
The question of soup doesn’t come up. In fact, for a while, there is nothing of sustenance offered him except a few heartfelt compliments and a kiss or two on the forehead, “What a big baby,” the woman tends to say in admiration. She offers to put him to bed in the largest crib in the house so that he
might be “full of beans” the next morning.
He wouldn’t mind, he says, being full of beans this evening, depending of course on what kind of beans they were.
“I assume,” the woman says, “that when you say beans you’re talking metaphorically.”
She marches him into the kitchen and sets him up in a cramped high chair. She has, she reports, a refrigerator full of leftovers. A metal bib (perhaps only stiff plastic) is tied around his neck, vitiating an otherwise delicate appetite.
The lady serves him a plate of metaphoric beans, which the masked figure picks over disconsolately.
“Would you like me to help you?” she asks.
He nods by mistake, a momentary confusion of signals. Before he can correct his error, a shovelful of leftovers arrives unwanted at lips’ door.
The food refuses to be swallowed and the woman breaks into tears. “What have I done wrong?” she asks. “Why do you hate me?”
The former baby protests that he has been misunderstood, that his feelings about the woman and the food are separate and distinct, to be confused at the peril of the confuser.
“What can I do that will make you happy?” she asks. “Is there anything?”
The baby-in-disguise is escaping the high chair when the husband makes an imposing entrance. “What’s all the noise, for God’s sake?” he asks.
The woman gives him a somewhat biased version of the preceding events.
“You don’t know how to handle him,” says the husband.
“What this baby needs is a little discipline in his life.”
“If you were home more often,” she says, “maybe he’d be getting what he needs.”
They shout a few things back and forth. At some point the husband carries the baby-in-disguise upstairs and puts him to bed. “I’m putting you to bed without your dinner.” he says, “because you were bad and didn’t eat it. That’s the kind of discipline you are going to get in this house.”
The next morning, after the husband is gone, the woman tells the former baby a secret. “My husband hasn’t the slightest interest in babies,” she says. “Now that’s not right, is it?”
The Return of Service Page 11