Immortal Lycanthropes (20 page)

When you say I am a thief, Pete, you lie. You can kill me, but still I will say you lie.

Jack London,
The Cruise of the “Dazzler”

There is a famous paradox, probably already familiar to you from the letters of Paul: Epimenides the Cretan has stated that all Cretans are liars. But if Cretans are liars, who trusts Epimenides the Cretan when he tells us all Cretans are liars? If you are a space robot, your circuits have already been fried by reading this.

Slightly less well-known is the fact that Plato, who proclaimed that all poets are liars, was himself a poet. “I wish I were the night, so I could watch you sleep with its thousand eyes,” he wrote. In Greek it’s a poem. Plato was therefore a liar.

Or was he? I mention Plato in the first place because he also proposed, through the mouth of Socrates, that so-called learning is merely recollecting what we, or our immortal souls, already knew. Usually this, like much Platonism, sounds spurious to me—Plato also said that humans were once four-armed hermaphrodites, and I think I would remember that if it were true—but Myron offers a curious case.

I have written a great many stories in my time, as I have mentioned, and certainly many of them involved a young man learning various things. Myron, at the very least, is or has been an amnesiac. For him, if anyone, learning can be recollection. What did he learn in the Fortress of the Id (as I call it)? Or what did he recall there? As he was leaving, dashing through the woods, did he think he was wiser than he had been two months before? Did he think he was as wise as he had been ten years before?

To be handed, after years or even a lifetime of powerlessness, a chance at power, this must be a heady feeling. But Myron had lost it, and whether he had thrown it away in the pursuit of absolute truth, or whether it had been wrenched from his grasp by a capricious fate—well, it was probably a little of both. The woods were cold and filled with burrs, and Myron was alone. For a good twenty feet the dim light from the blaze lit his way, and then abruptly it was dark. Whatever tears he shed in the blackness may have been for Spenser and may have been for himself.

When he finally stumbled onto a highway, his fancy suit was in rags and he was covered in mud. He kept his head down and stuck his thumb out. He asked the first trucker who picked him up if he was headed for the West Coast, but this was, of course, the wrong road for that. They were going to Chicago, which, Myron said, was good enough. Frankly, it was the only place he knew where someone he knew was.

Over the next two hundred and fifty miles, Myron passed the time inventing stories about how he had gotten separated from his Chicagoan family and cleaning himself with several-dozen premoistened towelettes. “I can give myself a complete bath with those things and still keep one hand on the wheel,” his driver said. “Wanna see?” But Myron faked asleep, and soon he really was.

Once within Chicago city limits, Myron hopped out at a stoplight and ran the wrong way up a one-way street, leaving behind only his hastily shouted thanks. Then he just looked up the Central Anarchist Council in a phone book. He went to the address and claimed he had burned his face off with acid protesting the existence of the bourgeoisie. The guy he was talking to didn’t know what the bourgeoisie was, but he thought burning your face off with acid was pretty hard-core, and he just went ahead and told Myron where to find Gloria. At a bowling alley, passed out in a booth near the back. She was wearing a powder blue tracksuit, with a unicorn on the top. Her shoes were not regulation. Half a cigarette had smoldered out in her hand. As Myron slid in across from her, Gloria’s head snapped up.

“Hello,” he said.

Gloria said nothing.

“I want to go to the West Coast to meet the Rosicrucians,” Myron said. “But I have no idea where they are, and I have no way of getting there. Can you help me?”

“Follow me,” said Gloria, lighting another cigarette.

They went out a back door into an alley. “Tie your shoe,” Gloria said. She held the doomsday device and the compound bow while Myron bent over. When he straightened up again, Gloria was atop a fire escape, her clothes a little disheveled. She was looking at the cardboard tube with doomsday inside it.

“Actually, I don’t want this,” she said, and dropped it down to Myron, who caught it after some bobbling.

“Hey, come back with my bow,” Myron then said.

“No one knows where the Rosicrucians are,” Gloria said. “You should probably just ask the Nine Unknown Men.”

“They want to kill me,” Myron said.

“They do, huh? You’re better at this than I thought.”

“Give me back my bow.”

“I’ faith, Myron, I’m doing this to teach you a valuable lesson about the world. No one else is going to take the time to teach you these things—”

Myron shouted up, interrupting, “Mignon Emanuel gave me lessons all the time.”

“She did? Like what?”

“Like about confirmation bias.”

“What the devil is that?”

“That’s when you notice things that agree with what you already believe more often than things that contradict your beliefs.”

“I’ve never noticed anything of the sort. Anyway, she was just using you, I heard all about the conference. No one else—”

“Spenser taught me all about woodcraft. He taught me how to make a fire with a soda can, and how to build a shelter.”

“The moose taught you how to build a fire?”

“And he taught me all about the lycanthropes, and how there’s one of each species and everything.”

“No, I taught you that. I taught you that in Shoreditch.”

“Well, he taught me more, about the Time of Troubles, and who killed who.”

“That was all implicit in what I told you,” Gloria shouted down. “You could have pieced it together yourself.”

“And he told me about meeting you in Scotland.”

“I had no way of knowing you’d even be interested in that.”

“And he taught me how things always get worse.”

“I could have told you that! Did you think I couldn’t have told you that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Marry! I’ll show you what I know.” Gloria turned, up on the fire escape, from an old woman into a gorilla. Her clothes stretched out but stayed on the gorilla; they just fit poorly. A cigarette still dangled from her lips. She jumped down to the alleyway and then became a woman again. The tracksuit was bunched up at the knee and off kilter around the shoulders. “No Unknown Men, then,” she said. “Some of us have met the Rosicrucians, although there are only three that I know of still alive. The lion’s one, but he’s right out. There’s the ring-tailed lemur.”

“I strangled her unconscious, and then her house blew up. Also, I don’t think she likes me.”

“Her house blew up? You are better at this than I’d thought. Well, that leaves the coyote.”

“And you’ll tell me where the coyote is?”

“Oh, Myron, that’s not what I’m going to teach you. I’m going to teach you so much more. You’re going to learn life on the C.”

On the sea
was not something Myron had expected to hear in Chicago, and he had a bout of excitement mixed with a minor panic attack that his knowledge of geography was totally kinked. But the
C
was for
con.

“I would really prefer not to steal from anyone,” Myron objected.

“What about when you liberated that suit of clothes in Shoreditch?”

“I was going to freeze to death! I needed that suit of clothes, and it was an emergency!” Looking back, Myron wasn’t sure this was true. He had been awfully cavalier about the theft.

“Well, we’re not even going to steal anything at all. We’re going to persuade people to give us stuff. It’s the only way we’ll be able to find the Rosicrucians. And anyway, we’ll be like Robin Hood, or some romantic jewel thief. We’ll only steal from the rich, and they can afford it.”

Myron was skeptical, but desperate. “Only from the rich?”

“The haute bourgeoisie only.”

But this, too, turned out to be a lie.

The first thing Myron needed was a suit of clothes—the current one was unsalvageable, but he didn’t need anything that nice, really. Just anything that had not dashed through the muddy, thorny woods at night.

The bow and tube Gloria stashed at the bowling alley, under a ceiling panel in the ladies’ room. Then, on the bus ride out to the purlieus along Kimbark Avenue, she smoked incessantly and explained to Myron the basic tenet of life on the C. You simply (she said) had to be absolutely certain of everything you say. Most people are rarely absolutely certain, so if you sounded like you know what you were talking about, they would tend to go along with you. Should you ever meet someone else who is absolutely sure, apologize for the mistake and leave. This person is probably too stupid to fool and may be extremely dangerous.

The bus let them off in a quiet residential neighborhood. Two streets over they came to a small children’s-clothing store—but they didn’t go in. Leaving Myron outside, Gloria went to the bagel shop next door and came out empty-handed.

“I am pretty hungry,” Myron said.

“There’ll be time for that later, we’re working. I went in there and asked for one hundred and ninety-nine onion bagels. The woman was surprised, and she asked me why I didn’t order two hundred. I said, Are you crazy? Who can eat two hundred bagels? Then we both laughed. So you get it?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Myron said.

“This way, when I say, sure, give me two hundred bagels, she can’t object—it was practically her idea. I told her I was going to be dropping them off at various local businesses as part of a charity drive. Now I sound like a mensch. She just told me to come back in a couple of hours, with the understanding that I would pay on delivery. Do you follow it so far? Now to look at suits.”

They spent a long time in the clothing store. The proprietor was an old man who drew a sharp intake of breath when he saw Myron, but Gloria quickly explained that “boys be boys,” and she needed new church clothes for her grandson. Myron did look a fright; he always looked a fright, but this was something special. He had to be careful not to touch any of the suits, lest he get mud on them, but Gloria held them up in front of him to eyeball a size. The suit and a new shirt were priced at almost a hundred dollars, and Myron warned her in a whisper that he had no money.

“You don’t need money when you’re on the C. This is what you have to do. When I open the door, you run out, go next door to the bagel shop, and open the door; catch the woman’s eye and then leave. She should step outside after you—it’s important she step outside. Can you do that?”

They brought their selection to the front counter, and the man rang them up and boxed the ensemble, nestled in tissue paper.

“I done forget my wallet,” Gloria said, tucking the box beneath her arm. “You mind if it go on my account?” She took a step to the right and opened the door, and Myron darted out.

The proprietor looked worried, and he stepped out from behind the counter. “Ma’am, I don’t mean nothing by it, but I don’t know you. I never seen you before. You don’t have no account here, and I hope I don’t sound suspicious if I say so.” As he opened the door to the bagel shop, Myron could hear the man saying something more or less like this. And there in the bagel shop the woman gasped at the sight of this tiny revenant, and came running out after Myron, who was backpedaling.

And so, at that moment, Gloria stood in the open door of the clothing store, its proprietor a half step behind her, and the bagel seller a few feet to her right. The three of them made almost a straight line, with Myron the anomalous point, floating away backwards into the parking lot. It was at the moment that Gloria took control of the situation. Turning to the bagel woman, she said, “When you have two hundred for me, honey?”

Surprised, the woman said she needed another hour or two.

“Well, make sure he get one hundred, will you?” Gloria said. Then she smiled and nodded at the clothing store proprietor, who could no longer very well object. He was grinning, and the grin was a grin of heartbreaking trust. And as the door dinged shut behind her, Gloria said to the bagel seller, “I’m a come back in an hour.”

Gloria gestured Myron over and took him by the hand. The woman returned to her bagels. Myron and Gloria walked away. They hopped on the first bus they saw.

“That was called the Laurie, after Joe Laurie, who invented it,” Gloria lectured.

“What’s that woman going to do with two hundred onion bagels?” Myron asked. “What’s that man going to do when he figures it all out?”

“You did a good job today. Now we’ve got to get you cleaned up.”

Gloria was currently staying in an abandoned and crumbling building. To get to her section of the building you had to pass over a part with no floor. Gloria as a gorilla could go hand over hand above the hole, but Myron could only nervously balance his way across a narrow beam. On the far side, Myron got washed in a basin of rainwater, and Gloria put on a bright orange muumuu.

“You put on loose clothes and hope they’ll work with the change,” she complained, “and it almost all works except for the underthings.”

They cleaned off Myron’s shoes, Gloria fashioned fake socks (she’d forgotten to get socks!) out of the pieces of his vest that had not been soiled, and, after a quick amateur haircut, Myron was presentable. “Now let’s go see what we can find out.”

With the speed of a montage, they went on a whirlwind tour of retirement communities in Chicago and environs. The plan was Gloria’s. Myron would go in the front. Usually he could just duck under the front desk and no one noticed him, but if they noticed him, and didn’t ignore him under the assumption that he was someone’s renegade grandson, one look at his face usually shut them up long enough for him to get away; now that he was well groomed, and it was clear his face was not the result of a raw wound but was actually stuck that way, they were just too embarrassed to stop him. Then Myron would hasten to a rear fire door and let Gloria in. That was his only job, and sometimes he would slip out as she slipped in, to meet up with her later; but sometimes he would stick around to learn. Gloria would go to the rec room, pretend to be new here, find three more for bridge, and after losing a few rubbers, say, “Well, we could continue to play for pennies, but why don’t we make this next rubber
interesting?
”