Saint Peter’s Wolf (38 page)

He's a friend, I told myself. A friend, as Dr. Ashby was a friend. You can trust him.

“I'll help you, Byrd,” he was saying. “I'll help both of you. I promise you that.”

“What are they going to do with us?” I asked.

“What can they do, the poor men?” said Johanna. “They are afraid of us.”

She was right. It was bright in the air, like a color, silver and glistening.

Brittle, unyielding fear.

“We'll get you through this,” said Page.

A cop in a green jumpsuit stepped into the living room to eye us for a moment. The “Police” across his chest was stenciled in festive red.

Page slipped into the kitchen to make some telephone calls, and police kept looking in at us, as though they believed that we could vanish in an instant.

Page returned to say, “They don't even know where to put you.”

“Don't you see?” said Johanna. “This kind man is going to help us. The police will be happy to see us in what they will consider a mental ward. They are awaiting word from Washington. No one knows what to do.”

“You knew this would happen, didn't you?”

“The government will disown its hunters. The government is embarrassed by them, and at the same time tries to deny our existence.”

“You've been through this before.”

“Don't think for a moment that we are safe,” she said, with an amazing calm. “We are still in the greatest danger.”

Page put on his glasses and looked at me, and then looked down. He was hoarse when he said, “I've asked them to send an ambulance.”

“Dr. Page,” said Johanna, as though the name tasted sweet. “Dr. Page is afraid of us, too. Aren't you, Doctor?”

Page smiled at her, weakly, but plainly captivated by her. He did not answer.

“They can't kill us, Benjamin,” said Johanna. “Because Dr. Page is going to put us into an institution. Kind Doctor—the solution to everything. Call it a sickness, and lock it away. He is going to save our lives.”

Another siren wove from far away. She stood. “Let's go with this man. Let's go now, before someone decides to see what a gun can do to two creatures who do not exist.”

Forty-Two

“This is the sort of place they plan for us, Benjamin.”

It was a non-place. The ceiling was high, and the room was, essentially, a container. It smelled of wax, and air that had been processed into a lifeless gas. It could be a room anywhere in the world where they wanted to keep people confined and harmless. “It could be worse,” I said, trying to be hopeful.

But the thought throbbed: trap.

Johanna eyed the walls. “You see the colors they paint such places?” she said. “That practical green, that efficient gray.”

Dead green, dead gray. “At least we're alive.”

“I know you still dream of a life like the other people you have known,” she said, softly. “I know you still don't understand, and that you have to go through this before you know what we are to them—and to ourselves.”

“Page is a good man,” I said.

She laughed quietly. “I'm sure he is,” she said.

A metal door, high windows with a metal mesh within the glass—it was a prison, a cell at the University of California Medical Center, a room fit for someone enormously strong and completely beyond control. I began to sense the approach of night, like a passenger on a train reaching a broad valley where, long ago, he had been free.

Johanna sat quietly, her hands folded in her lap. “You've been in places like this before,” I said, not asking a question. I was discovering yet again how little I knew about her.

She did not have to answer. She smiled, and looked upward, indicating that every sound we made was overheard.

There was still a pretense, as though to keep us calm, that we were patients, people about to receive all the help medicine and civilization could give us. We were not separated, and comfortable black vinyl chairs had been placed in the room. Soon, I thought ironically, they will bring in potted plants. A male nurse with broad shoulders and a thick neck had asked us if we wanted some 7-Up, and had promised us “a hot meal.”

It was easy to see why they'd left us alone. Cameras followed our moves from two perches near the ceiling. Johanna was very still, gathered into herself, like someone waiting for long-expected news.

I paced. The ride in the ambulance had shaken me more than I had expected, making me feel trapped, and now the sensation was even worse. There was not enough air, and the walls were inching inward, closing in with each pulse of my heart. I had tried to sound hopeful, but it was only an act, and I had fooled no one, not even myself.

The feeling I had was beyond any human sense of being penned in. It was beyond the suffocation imprisonment would cause a human captive. This was a cringing deep within me, a seething in my blood. We had been there less than an hour, and already I felt as though I had never seen another room, except in long-past dreams.

I recognized the way Johanna was waiting, her stillness. I had seen it in airports, in the attitude of a dog in a traveling cage, and at the zoo, animals condemned to an endless, if imperial, drowse.

I struck the wall with my fist. Solid, impervious plaster met me. I should have run away when I was still free, under the sky. Remember sky? I mocked myself. Remember grass? Look at this place—this is where I had brought us. “Is this,” I asked, “how we're going to spend the rest of our lives?” It was my fault. Johanna would still be running, if not for me.

Her voice quieted me. “We know how to wait,” she said. It was a simple statement, but she made it to remind me that our kind was patient, our kind knew how to flee by staying still.

We could wait. We could do anything. I drew a deep breath, and made the room mine. I could not run. I would wait. It was simple.

But Johanna also meant that she and I were still special creatures. I was not so sure. Would I be able, when the need came, to become my night self, or had I forgotten how to do that, mislaid that ability, a man stricken with a profound sort of impotence?

A faraway step sounded through the heavy door. A key chimed, a bolt snapped. I held my breath, ready to fight for my life. The nurse wrestled the door open. Dr. Page entered, carrying a tape recorder, holding it in his hand like a prison chaplain's Bible.

He was thinner than he had been earlier, with that sudden lean look of someone who has had bad news. His voice had a forced confidence. “I thought,” he said, “that we might feel more comfortable in another room.”

Page snapped off the tape recorder.

For three hours I had been talking, and Johanna had by far the most enjoyable time, laughing when I talked about the coyotes, clapping her hands when I described the cougar's claws. Page often closed his eyes, and seemed relieved when it was time to change tapes.

Through it all Johanna was patient and kind, and at last I found myself telling it all over, all the things she already knew, for her pleasure, Page nearly forgotten.

We were never interrupted except by these tape changes, and the occasional lapse into silence, when I was so vibrant with memory, or sorrowful over a death, that I could not speak. The life beyond the walls had vanished, and we heard nothing but the fine, dry ticks of Page's Rolex.

Page put his hands together. He did not want to say what he knew was true. Responsibility is painful, his posture said.

“You still have one simple problem,” said Johanna, breaking the long silence.

I knew what she was about to say, but I waited quietly. I had learned, as Johanna had learned long ago, to drink silence, and let it fill me.

Page stood and paced the room, his hands in his pockets. “I don't know that I have a problem, exactly.”

“It's a problem for all of us,” she said. “You don't believe what we are telling you.”

We were locked in a smaller room, with comfortable mock leather furniture in vivid pastel blues and pinks. A coffee table was bolted to the floor. An aluminum ash tray was so flimsy that one butt had bent the metal into something of a bowl.

There were no cameras. There were mesh-glass windows high above, where night was on display like a distant, well-guarded treasury. This was a room for confidential confession. It was also a perfect prison.

Page found his glasses in his pocket and twirled them, like a useless toy. “I believe that you may believe it.” He paused, awkward, hating what he was forced to say. “I never doubted your sincerity.”

I found myself smiling ironically. Sincerity, I thought, that most useless of all virtues. “But you don't believe,” I said, “that we are wolves.”

He uttered the dry laugh of the wise and weary. “I believe that you, as you have put it so wonderfully, ‘ran with the wolves.' In your minds.”

“You believe,” I said, “that we are plain, garden variety human beings, suffering from a delusion.”

He hesitated. “I don't know if I would use the word ‘suffering.' Perhaps you enjoy it.”

“I can help you, Dr. Page,” Johanna said with a kind laugh. “It is so easy. After all these days I can't stand to see you so troubled.”

“I'm hardly troubled at all,” he said, a man plainly lying.

“The truth is, you are only stalling,” she said. Her voice was so pleasant she might have been paying a compliment. “You are delaying. They told you to talk to us, and let us talk, and do anything to use up time.” She turned to me and said, “They are deciding what to do with us, and Dr. Page is going through the motions of practicing his profession.”

“That's not true,” he said, sweating, but showing himself to be bravely calm. “I'm proud of my accomplishments. I've had a good career.”

“Are you ashamed of what you're doing now?” she asked.

He did not speak at once. “Why should I be ashamed?”

“You see, Benjamin? He is pretending to help, while the hunters plan to finish us. This has happened so many times, to us, and to our kind.”

“She's right, Page.” My voice was gentle, and I felt sorry for him, in a way. He did not know what to do. He had nothing left but pride, and even that must have felt suddenly cheap.

“That's ridiculous,” he said, blinking. “Have you any idea how sick both of you are? I have the evidence on tape.”

“They'll confiscate the tape, Doctor,” she said. “And if you tell anyone about us, they may silence you.”

He made a hard sound, an ugly laugh. “I think you are two very dangerous people.”

She seemed delighted. “You have been putting it off. I know you are afraid to ask, so I feel a little reluctant to show you. Don't you think that you are probably ready by now?”

“Ready for what?”

“Proof.”

“‘Proof.' Of course—you'll turn into a wolf, right before my eyes.”

“Would you like that?”

“I'm not nervous,” he said, pacing, then stopping himself. “But if you would feel better …” He looked at me for help, but I simply gave him my blandest smile.

“Psychotherapists don't like to confront their clients with the truth,” I said, feeling, I must confess, a little devilish. “He knows that you can't turn into anything but what you are now. You might say he doesn't want to embarrass you.”

“Poor Dr. Page. Is that the truth?”

Page tugged at his nose. He gestured, but could not speak. Then he said, “Basically. Not entirely, but basically.”

“But you are curious, of course,” Johanna reminded him. “And a scientist as well.”

Page rallied. “You put me in a difficult position. You are asking me to be more unkind than I really think is necessary. I do like you, both of you, and I would like to help you. But you force me. So—show me. Prove it to me. Go ahead—I'm waiting.” He put on his glasses, and put his hands on his hips in a schoolboy posture of challenge.

She stood up from her chair, and Page took an involuntary step back.

Nothing happened. Johanna stood casually, like a woman being measured for a new gown. She closed her eyes, with a pleasant expression, fully peaceful.

Page stared, then gave the smallest nod, not to me, but to himself, smiling regretfully. You see, he seemed to say. You see what all this leads to—nothing. He looked away for a moment, and coughed. He glanced back.

And caught his breath.

He not only went pale, he went gray, and put out a wavering hand. The hand found the wall, and I hurried to his side.

In Johanna's place was a shaggy, golden wolf.

He fell, slipping down the wall. He was unconscious, stunned, mouth agape. I loosened his tie, struggling with the knot. He mouthed a word: no.

He shivered and stirred, breathing heavily, groaning. Then he sat up, huddling back into the chair like a man climbing from a cataract. “No!” he said, and pressed his face into the chair like someone fighting to escape his own body. It escaped him, as though blows were falling on him. “No!”

The wolf made a tune. “Poor man,” the tune said, and the great beast padded to Page's side.

Page covered his face with his hands, and still did not look, did nothing at all but fight to deny what was happening. “No!” he cried again, and shuddered, about to weep.

“I'm sorry,” he said when he could manage sentences. “Please forgive me.” His voice was ragged. “I can't help you. The strain is too great. I'm beginning to—” Syntax fled him. Words scattered. “I am having some sort of hallucination.”

“Did they tell you to stall?” I asked.

He did not take his hands from his face. “It's been a difficult time for me.”

“The police, people in Washington—did they tell you to buy time?”

“I could have helped you, Ben. I could have worked with you to help you with this terrible delusion.”

Johanna made a single snort, and Page cringed. He did not look up, but tied himself even more tightly into a knot. “I am losing my mind.”