“Not even for a squeeze? A peek at her little cunnie?”
And now she places the man with the tattoos, the brooding photo on the back of the book, The Revolution. Jeremy. Miriam’s husband. Her uncle. His eyes are wide with barely controlled rage. “Don’t touch her, Puck.”
“Supposing I do?”
“I’ll touch you back.” He cocks his arm and the wolves inked there seem to crouch, readying to leap.
The giant—so still until now, seeming a part of the cave, a stalagmite mounded over thousands of years of dripping from some poisonous source—comes alive and steps between Puck and Jeremy—her uncle? can she really think of him like that?—who appears suddenly so small.
* * *
In that moment, halfway down the basement steps and ready to bolt back up them, Patrick did not know that sixteen years ago, a homeless man crashed onto the trail and tackled and bit his mother as she was hiking John Muir Woods—a man who turned out to be an unmedicated lycan—the sort of encounter that these days happened so rarely, like a grizzly attack, but when it did happen ended up highlighted in the news and played into everyone’s worst fears and set off two days’ worth of television interviews and newspaper editorials about stricter regulation and enforcement.
Nor did Patrick know that his parents divorced because of it, that her infection became more divisive to their marriage than politics or religion, that Volpexx spiraled her into a gray-skinned, sour-stomach depression, that she once swept Patrick’s cereal bowl off the table and hurled his milk glass against the wall because he wouldn’t stop whining, that she eventually decided life would be easier and safer for him if she just went away. But she was better now. Still infected, of course, but better mentally, able to manage her urges and transform only in contained circumstances, so that she knew it was safe for Patrick. She wouldn’t have ever let him come otherwise.
He did not know, either, that the man she has been seeing for the past two years is a physician, that he was infected with lobos when treating a patient who, in a fevered delirium, bit him, that his mother met him in an Internet chat room for lycan singles, that they have fallen in love and that he freed her from Volpexx by falsely reporting her blood tests.
That comes later.
After Patrick races from the house in Juniper Creek and kicks through the snowy woods and leaps into his Jeep and slams the gas and drives for hours, directionless, not going anywhere, just moving, hurrying away from what he has discovered, checking the rearview constantly as if worried what might race out of the shadows behind him, until his heart stops pounding and his balled-up muscles loosen and his eyes shutter with exhaustion and he pulls into a truck stop where sleep finally drags a black bag over his head.
After he wakes with his face against the steering wheel, after he drives home, the inside of his windshield glazed with the frost of his breath, he finds his mother waiting for him on the living room couch. She wears a sweatshirt and jeans and her face is weirdly absent of makeup, puffy and unfamiliar, splotchy with bruises.
It is a struggle to keep from shaking. “You don’t look good,” he finally says.
“That’s how I always look.” Without the makeup, she meant. Without the mask. “You don’t look so good yourself.” She tries to smile and he tries to smile back.
“I didn’t sleep much.”
“I don’t imagine you did.” Her face seems to crease and pale. She pats the cushion next to her and tells him to come, come sit, she’ll explain everything.
He skips school. It would be impossible to concentrate. It would be impossible to look anyone in the eye. It would be impossible to make his way through the swarm of bodies, to suffer through droning lectures and math quizzes and a lunchtime conversation with Max when he has lost, in the space of a few hours, all sense of who he is.
He spends the morning with his mother and the afternoon alone. He goes for a drive, and the rumble of the engine makes his entire body shake and a bitter taste fills his mouth like week-old coffee. The sun sets so early these days. In Old Mountain, in the deepening gloom, he passes a construction site for yet another new development. Trucks with generators and hydraulic lifts spotlight the frames of half-built homes and cast skeletal shadows. Everyone is working overtime, chasing the final days of November.
In the middle of town rises a cinder cone called Lava Butte. At the last minute, he yanks the wheel and heads up the road that curls around and around to the summit, because what the hell, when you needed perspective, you were supposed to go up high, right? The road hasn’t been plowed and his wheels slip and scud over the ice pack.
He parks and sits on the hood of the Jeep and watches the sun die and the moon rise and the stars blink to life. Below him the city glimmers like a pond reflecting the sky above, making this butte an island looking over the drowned.
His mother, when he asked what it felt like to transform, gave him a smile with a troubling quiver. It feels good, she said. Not the first few times. The first few times you wake up with a suck of air, naked and blue lipped and curled up in a ball and covered in bruises and scratches and blinking confusedly in the morning sun. You feel hungover, unsure of what’s happened, of where you’ve been, what you’ve done. And then—snap—a memory from the night before.
But later, when you’ve gained control, later it feels like being a child again, which is the only time you’re ever truly alive, unrestrained, driven by hunger.
Below him, in the near distance, he can see the construction site, glowing blue like an underwater city. He can hear the distant rumble of tractors and payloaders, the whine of circular saws and clatter of hammers and shouts of foremen and beep of back-up alarms. Yet another subdivision. The town looks less like itself every day. The town Max grew up in—that his father grew up in, and his grandfather before them both—is a new kind of creature that has condos in place of mills, roundabouts instead of intersections, white and Mexican and Asian and black and lycan. Everything is getting eaten up and spit out differently. Patrick sees for the first time how small Max is, how impossible his resistance to change.
Patrick isn’t much for reading, let alone the plays his English teacher is always shoving down their throats, but the last guy they read, whatever his name was, was all right. No annoying symbolism and pointed pushy message, just a bunch of smart-asses saying things that made his head spin, like: “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.” A line he streaked a highlighter through.
His phone buzzes and he rushes to check it, hoping for a message from his father, whom he still hasn’t heard from. No luck. It’s Max.
His thumb hesitates over the phone. The wind is cold and blustery, as high up as he is, and for a moment he wonders if he’ll go spinning away, as light as a leaf. He opens the message. “Hunting season,” it reads. “Be ready at dawn. Will pick you up.”
Chapter 25
NEAL’S DAUGHTER HAS sunk unkindly into middle age. She looks as old as if not older than his wife. Her face, at one time more a fleshy moon, has grown sharply defined. She is beginning to go gray, the gray standing out so brightly against hair that is otherwise the glossy black of a gun barrel. He notices this most on weekends, the only time he is home to see her rise from bed, usually in the early afternoon, dragging herself to the kitchen to make coffee. Her eyes are dark craters. Her back hunched. Moving like a thing half-alive.
Every now and then he will come down hard on her, usually at his wife’s behest. “We are supporting you,” he will tell her, “and you need to support us. You need to contribute to the household.” She will cry and through her tears tell him how hard it is, how terrible she feels. He will comb his fingers through her hair and say, “There, there,” and she will dab her eyes and wipe her nose with a shirtsleeve and promise to do better. And she will.
He is always working, his wife is always working, and while they are gone Sridavi will make their beds, vacuum the carpets, scrub the coffee grounds and red wine blotches
from the counters—and then, after a week or two, her room, and the rest of the house, will slip into the disrepair that is her standard. The coffee table has ghostly rings on it, like raindrops in a mud puddle. Unfolded laundry remains piled in the hamper. Crumbs spot the carpet. Mildew crawls along the corners of the shower. When doing yard work, she will leave the lawn half-mowed, a pile of branches trimmed but not bundled, everything unfinished, as she goes inside to get a drink of water and then forgets.
Sometimes, when he is on the phone with his friend Keith, when they are talking about prions, about the possibility of an inoculation, Neal will grow weary and distracted and interrupt the conversation to ask about Keith’s boy. “Is he the same? Is he like Sridavi? Lazy and unmanageable, sneaking away at night and sleeping all hours of the day?” But Keith always says, no, no, his boy’s a pretty good shit. And Neal is happy for him, he is, but another part of him wishes the boy were a problem. Then he could write off his daughter’s affliction as a product of her age instead of this disease. Something she might grow out of.
Sometimes, when he comes home from the lab, he has no energy to do anything but watch television with a plate of cold food in his lap. Usually he flips to the History or Discovery Channel and watches shows about evil dictators, Sasquatch and Loch Ness, the predictions of Nostradamus, what the world will look like after the people are wiped out by a disease that eats its way through the population or an asteroid that comes flaming out of the sky. He particularly loves the shows about haunted castles, houses, caves, catacombs.
He remembers one episode about a suburban home in Pennsylvania. A family moved in, and soon after, strange things began to happen. The lights would flicker and dim. The windows would open and close. A glass of water would drag across the table and shatter on the floor. One night, when the parents were reading in the living room, the couch turned over and the windows blasted open and from them came a wailing, like the noise of banshees. And another time, in the bathroom, the father noticed the paint bubbling and when he pressed his finger to it, it popped and bled. Soon after that, they brought in a psychic, a large black woman in a purple muumuu named Madam Serena, thinking she might identify a demon or an Indian burial ground.
Instead she claimed the haunting came from the daughter, a teenager, black haired, black fingernailed, dosed up on medication for her depression. She was possessed by a darkness that had in turn possessed their home. “She is devouring you,” Madam Serena said.
When Neal sits in the living room illuminated by the flickering light of the television, when he sees the vomit-splattered toilet bowl and hears the moans coming from his daughter’s room and faces the stiff, cold silence of his wife in bed, he, too, feels as though his daughter is slowly devouring him, devouring them all.
He isn’t sure what to blame, the drugs or the disease. Sometimes the drugs seem like the disease. He remembers a story his amah told him when he was a boy. He would help her in the kitchen, standing on a chair so that he could reach the counter—blending spices, mashing peas and potatoes, sculpting samosas—and she would tell him fairy tales about tigers and rupees, asses and elephants, magic fiddles, broken pots, the boy with the moon on his forehead and a star on his chin.
One of these stories was about a village that hired a snake to kill a troublesome jackal that ate babies and stole treasure and kept everyone awake at night with its cackling. The snake spread its jaws wide and ate the jackal whole, and for many minutes its wriggling form could be seen surging its way down the snake’s throat and distending its belly, where it at last went still. The snake then curled up and slept in the village square and digested the jackal and around it the villagers danced for many days in celebration, and eventually their stomping feet and jangly music woke the snake, which turned to them to satisfy its renewed hunger. In this way one beast replaced another. That is how he feels about his daughter.
Lycans used to take a high dosage of quaaludes—labeled Wolfsbane. Then, in the eighties, Volpexx hit the market, a chemical cocktail of antipsychotics and benzodiazepines / sedative-hypnotics. Over the years the formula has undergone many changes, but in its current form, the pills—taken twice daily, as round and white as miniature moons—are a stiff blend of 20 mg haloperidol and 4 mg lorazepam laced with silver. The drug is mandatory and available free to all registered lycans. There is no limit on the number of refills—there is only the demand that a patient test positive during the monthly blood test or face imprisonment. All one needs is an excuse—a bottle of pills misplaced—and a new prescription is filled.
Most people would not want to take more pills. Most people find the drug imprisoning, deadening, a denial of self. But his daughter is not most people. She takes Volpexx with Robitussin and NyQuil. She takes it with weed, with Red Bull, with Sudafed and Benadryl. She pops it and snorts it. Sometimes her skin seems so thin, as transparent as cellophane, that he can see her pulse in her veins from across the room. And sometimes she cries for no reason at all, cries for hours on end, her tears like dark rivers.
Neal does not mention this—not even when Augustus asks about his daughter—at the Deerstalker Golf Club outside of Eugene. “She’s good,” he says, and Augustus says, “Good. That’s good.” The day is damp and gray, the grass still heavy with last night’s rain, soaking their shoes and slowing their balls and giving the men a good excuse for their frequent slices and mulligans. Chase wears jeans and a Windbreaker, Neal and Augustus slacks and sweaters. They drive a golf cart along the slick asphalt path—the tires spitting, the clubs rattling when they round a corner—and behind them follows another cart carrying a two-man security detail.
At the eighth hole, a par five that doglegs left, Augustus and Chase both end up blasting away with their fat-headed drivers and hooking into the woods. Neal opts instead for a five iron, takes a few practice swings, and then gently thwacks his ball in a long, curving arc that comes to a rolling stop right where the fairway elbows.
Chase whistles appreciatively. “A real golfer.”
“Used to be.”
“What’s your handicap?”
“My handicap is golf.” He pats his stomach. “And ice cream.”
A quiet joke. In response Chase laughs a little too loudly. This is, Neal suspects, because of the Volpexx. More than an hour ago, when they met in the parking lot, Neal removed from his trunk a carton packed with one hundred bottles, each rattling with one hundred pills. He ordered them shipped to his campus office, instead of the lab, charging them to his discretionary fund.
Immediately Chase pulled a jackknife from his pocket and slashed open the box and popped open a canister and punched through the foil. “When I was growing up,” Chase said, “my cousin started getting these headaches. They’d come and go at first. Then it didn’t matter how much aspirin he took. They took him in after the nosebleeds started. Brain cancer. Inoperable. Thirteen years old. Tumor the size of a starfish. In the end, he started saying and doing the most terrible things. Nobody wanted to be around him because nobody recognized him.”
He used his sleeve to dry off the rain-spotted spoiler of a car. On it he crushed three pills with the cap of the bottle until they were a mess of white powder. He pulled out his wallet and cut the powder into two lines with a credit card. “That’s how I feel these days. With this thing inside me. I want you to kill it, Doc.”
Then he rolled a dollar into a straw and brought it to one nostril while plugging the other. He staggered back with his eyes watering, furiously rubbing his nose. Then he sneezed into his elbow and gave them a dopey grin and slapped both his knees and said, “Phew. That’s a dose of death right there.”
Now Neal joins the two men in the woods. They wade through the damp cover of oak leaves, the leaves slurping and squelching underfoot. They turn their faces downward and hunt for the balls they know they will not find. And while they move among the thick-waisted trees, ten feet apart, Augustus talks about the plan. It is a good plan, he thinks. They will start by making a call to Senators Wyden a
nd Merkley.
Chase kicks over a pile of leaves and says, “I’ve punched Wyden. Twice.”
“He’ll forgive you. Because this is what we’re going to promise our dear senators: major campaign donations from Nike, Intel, Lithia, Harry and David, and Alliance Energy. Alliance Energy being the key. One of our major talking points over the next few months being nuclear energy. In turn, the Senate earmarks a lump sum from the federal budget for the Center for Lobos Studies, which will remain affiliated with the Infectious Disease Research Center and which our man, the distinguished Dr. Desai, will direct. And hopefully we will have a vaccine in place within the next two years. That’s completely possible. You’ve said that’s possible.”
Neal peers out of the woods and eyes the fairway and judges the angle of their drive and guesses again the placement of the balls. He does not look at Augustus when he says, “Creating the vaccine is not a problem. Implementing it is. The ACLU has blocked vaccine research the past twenty years.”
“These are special times. America is under attack.”
When Neal was a boy—in Los Angeles, his father first generation and a professor of psychiatric studies—he would spend his weekends hunting for golf balls. Trolling the woods, raking the sand traps, wading the ponds. The courses would pay him a nickel a ball. The groundskeepers thought he was Mexican and called him José. He said he was Indian and they asked about his headdress and tomahawk and he said, “Not that kind of Indian. Indian Indian.” He carried a backpack with him and by the end of the day it would be full of Titleists and Dunlops. He would bring his goggles and wear his swim trunks and dive down into the gray-green murkiness of the course’s ponds and lakes, holding his breath until his lungs ached, until his vision went spotty, clawing golf balls from the muddy bottom like pearls.
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