Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (2 page)

For a time, the girl was made to live in cages, of one sort or another, and she was given pills and pricked with needles that made it even more difficult to remember what she had once been. She was forced into the peculiar, ill-fitting, mismatched pelts men and women wear because they long ago forgot how to grow their own. She was taught to bathe in soapy, hot water, because all the scents of her body had become shameful and offensive. With every passing day, she was, bit by bit, more a human girl and less the wolf she’d been born. And when she at last stopped biting and howling, when she had learned a few words, and how to dress herself, and that there was only one proper place to piss and defecate, she was turned out of the cages and hospital beds and back into the streets.

In this city, here in the lee of the mountains, she lives off whatever scraps she finds discarded and rotting in trashcans and dumpsters. Sometimes, she’s lucky and catches a stray cat, or a rat, or a pigeon, the city’s stingy wildlife, and so there’s meat that has not been charred or boiled. There’s warm blood and bones to crack open for their marrow. She sleeps in the empty concrete and brick shells of abandoned or disused buildings, of which there is no shortage. She does her best to stay clear of all the other women and men who have been driven away from the vast, murmuring pack of humanity, the ragged castaways whom the girl at first mistook for other wolves robbed of their true shapes by other demons. But she has long-since learned her mistake, and they are almost always as wary of her as are the rest. Perhaps, she thinks, the outsider’s senses are somewhat keener than those of the ones who live always inside their neatly stacked cages and their rolling, roaring caves, and who constantly scrub at themselves, dulling their noses and ears and eyes with perfume and noise.

She was born a wolf, and even now there is some lingering shred of her lupine birth that the shape-stealing demon and the city people have not managed to pry from her. She is certain that they
would
have, if they could only have found it, if they’d suspected there was anything left to take from her. She imagines that shred is like some small burrowing animal, dug in too deeply for even the most determined claws to ever extract from the sanctuary of its hole. But it is enough that there are nights when she finds her way up rickety fire escapes or deserted stairwells to the rooftops where she has only the omnipresent glare of electric lights to half obscure the moon and stars and the far-away mountains. If she is sure no one is watching her, that she is alone with the sky and the horizon, then she strips away all the filthy, alien raiments from her body and squats naked on tin and masonry and tar-shingle. She goes down on all fours again, though her anatomy is no longer suited to a quadruped’s gait.

She throws back her head, matted ginger tresses falling away to reveal bright eyes like moss and spruce boughs, and the cry that escapes her throat is not a howl so much as it is a wordless, keening threnody. It is the nearest thing to a howl of which she is now capable, and hearing such a strange and utterly inconsolable ululation, the men and women and children of the city lie awake in their beds, listening, breathlessly waiting to see if the cry will come again and maybe nearer than before, maybe right outside their windows. The girl who was a wolf wails her sorrow at the moon, and, in that instant, all those who hear her cry flinch or cringe or shut their eyes tight as the refuge of civilization seems suddenly to melt away around them. All it once, the Pleistocene was only yesterday, at best, and will surely come again tomorrow. Ancient, unconscious memories buried a million years in the deepest neocortical convolutions lurch slowly towards recognition. Shades are drawn and locks are double and triple checked; countless fretful dreams of humdrum inconvenience and workaday disaster are traded for nightmares of running in dark places and hungry red eyes and gnashing saber teeth. And maybe in the morning, there will be a rash of phone calls to the police and animal control and to anyone else who might help to reassert the promises of this modern century and remind these people when
and
where they are. Hearing the girl, a pious few mutter prayers, but they pray to a fatherly god of light and love and justice, a god of right and wrong, for men no longer recall the names of those dark, amoral spirits who once were summoned to stand between firelight and slavering jaw’s.

On the rooftop, the green-eyed, ginger-haired girl, who was not born a girl of any sort, rocks back on her naked haunches, and she barks and yowls until her throat has gone raw and there are only tears. She wets herself and moans and scratches in vain at her own body with short, brittle fingernails, as though she might tear away this obscuring flesh and discover her true form secreted just underneath. There will be bruises and scabby welts in the morning, but her clothes will hide most of them, and hardly anyone ever pauses to consider the wounds the city’s dispossessed inflict upon themselves. Finally, exhausted and trembling, she finds some place out of the worst of the wind and curls up thereto wait for daylight. Drifting in and out of wakefulness, she has her own sour dreams to contend with.

For a time, she is wandering the hospital ages again, those endless white caverns lit by tiny suns that blind her, yet shed no warmth. At last, she finds a hole in a wall of the cavern, and when she looks out upon a high and winter-bound meadow, she sees the corpses of all her pack strewn about there, a dozen lifeless bodies disemboweled and stripped clean of their hides, limp crimson smears stark against the fresh snow, become only carrion now left behind for starving ravens and coyotes. And she can also see the footprints of women and men, the tracks of the skinwalkers who have done this thing. Their laughter rises and falls, buoyed triumphant on swirling, icy gusts or drifting down from the hazy blue-grey sky, and they sing her a song that is all rattling bones and thunder.

Older than the one who spins the World
,

We are free.

Not enslaved by the likeness of Mother or Father,

We are free.

Unencumbered, unafraid, ever undying,

We are free.

And she turns away from the window, then, back to the nurses and their pills in paper cups. She is begging them to help her to forget that she was ever anything but a human girl. She is promising them that she can learn to use a fork and to shit where she’s told and to look at people when they speak to her.
Only let me forget,
she pleads.
Only let me forget and never remember myself again.
Rut they frown at her and say she clearly isn’t any better at all, because there was never anything to be forgotten.

She opens her eyes, and it’s day again, and there is a young man squatting beside her on the roof, brushing the tangled strands of hair back from her face. The girl who is no longer a wolf bares her teeth and snarls at him before she remembers how short and dull her teeth have grown and how little threat is left in her voice. Still, it is enough that he immediately pulls his hand away, and enough, too, that the man’s expression changes, his curiosity and concern dabbed now around the edges by surprise and wariness.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says, then glances at his hand as though checking to be certain that all five fingers are still where they ought to be. “But you must be freezing,” and as if to prove the point, his breath fogs. “You’re going to get pneumonia or frostbite or—”

“I’m not cold,” she says, though she is, in fact, very, very cold, and the girl sits up, scooting a little farther from the man. There’s a brick wall at her back now, and nowhere left to go.

“Do you have a home?” he asks. “Someplace to get in out of the weather for a bit? Do you have someone to take care of you?”

“I am awake,” she says, and he slowly nods his head. “Yes, you’re awake. But it’s very
cold
out here, and we need to get you inside, maybe get some coffee or soup in you. Maybe a strong cup of tea if you don’t like coffee.”

She wrinkles her dry nose, remembering the bitter black water called
coffee.
Then she hugs herself and glances up at the January sky. There are no clouds, no sign of snow, and she cannot hear the skinwalkers singing. But she is sure they must still be watching her, and so she looks quickly down at the toes of the man’s boots.

“Where are your clothes?” he asks, and she shrugs, not because she doesn’t understand him or does not know the answer, but because right now she’d rather be cold and naked than wrapped up in those tattered false pelts. This hairless skin is terrible enough, and when she sees the cuts and abrasions on her arms and breasts, her belly and thighs and long hind legs, she is only sorry that she has not done herself more serious damage.

The man removes his own coat and cautiously takes a step towards her. “Here,” he says, “please, take this,” and he drapes it around her shoulders. It itches, and the suede leather smells faintly of some long-dead thing, but she doesn’t shake it off.

“We really do need to get inside,” he tells her, “before someone else sees you and decides to call the police.” And when he offers his hand, she accepts it, rising slowly to her feet. The man leads her across the rooftop and in through an open window. He shuts and locks it behind them, and then she follows him down a long hallway and a flight of stairs to his apartment one floor below and on the other side of the building. He talks, and she listens. She understands most of what he says, enough to know that he was out all night the night before, and that he often comes up to the roof in the morning.

“The view,” he says, though the girl has not asked him to explain. He closes the apartment door and turns the deadbolt, then smiles and adds, “Most days, you can see all the way to the mountains from up there. That’s one reason I rented this place.”

She has to pee, and so he shows her where the bathroom is, then goes to make them each a cup of tea, leaving her alone. And when she’s finished, and her bladder no longer aches, the girl who was born a wolf stands before the mirror mounted above the sink with its shiny silver faucet and its knob marked H and its knob marked C. The girl watching her from the glass was also born a wolf, and she also wears nothing but the young man’s suede jacket. Her body has all the same inconsequential wounds. But the girl has long since come to comprehend the nature of mirrors—that she is only seeing herself reflected there and not another. It isn’t so different from sunlight off a pond or a slow-running stream, only made so much clearer, so much stiller, the image never marred by a ripple or the movements of a curious fish or turtle rising to the surface. She puts a finger to her chapped lips, as though warning herself not to speak, and the girl in the glass does likewise, and their eyes are the greenest things that she’s ever seen. She flushes the toilet, turns off the bathroom light, and then goes out to drink the steaming cup of tea the man has made for her. She dislikes the taste, though not so much as she dislikes the taste of coffee, and at least it makes her warm inside.

“No,” the man tells her, answering a question she hasn’t asked. “As it happens, I wasn’t born here. I came to the city a few years back:, looking for work and wanting to be near the mountains, wanting to photograph—” He pauses, staring back at the odd, soft-spoken girl sitting across the counter from him, shamelessly naked except for his jacket, holding her empty cup and watching him intently.

“It’s easier, I think, if you see for yourself,” he says, and so he shows her to the room that he calls his studio. There are a great many odd things there the girl cannot understand, though he tries to explain them to her. But mostly, there are images pinned upon the walls with thumbtacks or held inside black aluminum frames or kept safe between plastic archival sleeves in thick photo albums. She has seen this trick before, too, and knows that it’s something like a mirror. Unlike the objects seen through a mirror, however, these images do not move, but appear inscrutably suspended in time. He show’s her alpine meadows strewn with the bright blooms of columbine, lupin, and butterweed, and deep glacial lakes stained the color of polished turquoise by the constant influx of rock flour. There are photographs of jagged, snow-dusted peaks stark against the palest blue skies, and photographs of the ghostly white trunks of aspen groves, their leaves gone gold with autumn. There are elk and black bears, otters and mink and a badger, moose and mule deer, and one shot of a lynx crouched in the limbs of a ponderosa pine. And finally, he produces an album filled only with photos of wolves. She does not say a word, but only stares down at the familiar amber eyes and the lolling tongues as the man turns the pages and explains that he is especially proud of this one shot of a pack moving in a line across the snow, alpha wolf at the lead and the scraggly omega trailing out behind the rest.

She closes her eyes, so that she will no longer have to see the photographs. And he wants to know if something’s wrong, if it’s anything he’s said or done, and she can only shake her head and mutter entirely unconvincing assurances that she is fine. Then she asks to be excused and returns alone to the bathroom, where she sits on the edge of the tub, weeping and shaking and digging her nails into her palms until they leave behind red crescents and draw the tiniest bit of blood.

And later, after he makes her French toast with powdered sugar and pours her a glass of milk, the man asks her to stay with him, if she has nowhere else to go. And because she
hasn’t
anywhere else to go, excepting the streets, and alleyways, and the homeless shelters when she’s feeling very brave, she says yes. But the girl knows that isn’t the only reason that she’s agreed. Now that she has seen and held the album filled with his photographs of wolves, she cannot bear the thought of never being able to hold it again. She is lying on his sofa, warm beneath a woolen blanket, wondering if he would try to stop her if she simply decided to take the album and leave, when she falls asleep. She dreams, but this time there are no hospital nightmares or singing skinwalkers waiting for her.