The Last Werewolf (25 page)

We both knew this was a juvenile phase that would pass, or, if it became a monolithic perversion, cause trouble, choke the sexual stream, breed pestilence. For now, however, she’d looked at me in rousing collusion, yes, I
know
. How not? How should she, six victims deep, not know the joy of the fall beneath the Fall?

The floor’s chill had become unpleasant. I got up and took a hot shower. I wanted to go back to her clean and put my nose in her cunt, my tongue in her sweet young asshole, the cunning animal scent down there that answered the years of asking.
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they loved it
. But all the while and
all the while and all the while the world. We couldn’t stay here. That business with the dart didn’t make sense. Grainer’s days of live specimen capture were long over. Although of course it had been Ellis, not Grainer, after Alfonse in the desert. In any case we’d have to move. Dumb to have come to Manhattan in the first place, where among the multitudes surveillance was harder to spot.

I brushed my teeth and went back into the bedroom just as she was wrapping up her call. She looked at me. We didn’t laugh, but if it was a movie that’s what the script would have settled for as a way of showing it was the kind of thing where seeing each other again after ten minutes in separate rooms was a return to the only reality that mattered.

“You’re all scrubbed,” she said.

“Maximal contrast. I want your dirt.”

“Yikes. Okay.”

I went to the bed and lay down next to her. “Tonight we can luxuriate,” I said. “Tomorrow we have things to do.”

P
ARANOIA MADE THE
decisions over the next few days. We met only four times, never in the same place. She had to prep Nikolai for her absence (he was prone to quarrelling with Ambidextrous Alison, prone to
interfering
) and I had logistical matters to attend to. California number plates, an array of wigs, spectacles, false moustaches, centrally the procurement of a fake driving licence for and the transfer of assets worth approximately twenty million dollars
to
Talulla Mary Apollonia Demetriou. The po-faced spirit of political correctness put its head around the door but my girl dismissed it. Obviously I should feel whored-out or patronised, she said. Well, I don’t. I barely heard her. Even with the recent global mugging twenty million’s a minor prang in my ride. It’s walking-around money, I told her. I need more time to sort you out properly. Offshore. Swiss. This is just in case of … Yes. Well. The bad smell around the transfer of lucre was that it smacked of providing for her
after my death
. Neither of us could quite keep that out. Therefore we gave it its moment in the spotlight. I plan on staying alive, I said. But in case I don’t you’ll have what you need. Just promise me you’ll always buy beautiful underwear. You drive a hard bargain, she said, but okay.

However, the paranoia. I had business lawyers in Manhattan (four of my companies have their head offices here) but insisted on meeting for instruction and signatures out of town. (Such meetings are a palaver. My face is rubber masked—I’ve been Richard Nixon; Marilyn; the Wolfman—and I affect one of a dozen accents. The relevant identity’s established first by code numbers and secondly via fingerprint-recognition technology in a portable gizmo. All tiresome, and used only when there’s no alternative.) I hired a car from JFK and drove to Philadelphia. An opportunity, I deemed, to check for surveillance or pursuit. The results were uncertain. No sign of the undead, but I thought I made a couple of WOCOP agents in Philly. I left the car at the airport and took a flight
to Boston, dodged around the city for twenty-four hours, then plane-hopped for three days getting increasingly dehydrated: Detroit; Indianapolis; D.C.; Philadelphia. I picked up the car, drove back to JFK and took a cab into the city.

Where I all but bumped into a vampire.

I was getting out of the cab on Fifth Avenue and he was exiting a deli, tearing the cellophane off a pack of American Spirits. The reek hit me when I was halfway out of the car. I went down on one knee on the sidewalk, an impromptu genuflection. Looked up to see him stopped in his tracks with an expression of outraged revulsion. I didn’t recognise him. Tall, long-faced, with short thick hair dyed deep purple. Skinny jeans, leather three-quarter-length coat, orange Converse boots. Humanly you’d say mid-twenties cyberpunk. I got up off my knee. For a few moments we just stood and stared at each other, gorges rising. He looked as if this was new to him, this business of how Jesus Christingly awful running into a werewolf made you feel. Manhattan, needless to say, flowed around us, honked, glimmered, flashed, steamed, whistled, whooped and subterraneanly shuddered. Eventually, shaking his head, he backed, turned, and stumbled away downtown.

“An accident, right?” Talulla said. “I mean he wasn’t following you?” We’d moved to the Waldorf Astoria, a suite overlooking Park Avenue. I was Matt Arnold again. Couldn’t rest easy in any of the aliases.

“I don’t believe he was,” I said. “I’m getting it. I’ve assumed
all
the vampires know about the virus. They don’t. This is one lot looking for leverage. Why am I so slow?”

Talulla sat in one of the room’s red rococo armchairs with her feet up on a footstool. We were playing this, our condition, what we
were
, with bright circumspection. The hideous central fact informed everything we did but only took full unironic ownership of us when we fucked. In the sack
wulf
was stinkily eloquent, the odorous truth around which everything else fainted away. Out of the sack we conceded it like a childless couple who’d agreed to invent a fictional son, the premise, now that I thought of it (God
still
being dead, etc.), of Albee’s
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
It was as if each of us was daring the other to admit it wasn’t true. Actually it was her daring me. Or asking me. It reminded me how
new she was to the Curse that she had such willingness to believe the whole thing—changing into a monster once a month and killing and eating people—might yet turn out to be a horrible dream. We’d avoided the question of what she’d gone to England for, though I knew: Five victims, however widely she’d spread them across the U.S., had started to feel too close. You go to another country—get in, do it, get out—the police are looking for a native, you’re long gone. England because they spoke English. You want maximum fluency. She knew I’d worked this out. It introduced me to the guilty version of her face, the look an anchor-woman would have on air when someone in her earpiece says he knows all about the abortions or kinky photos, a slight swelling of the cheeks and the mouth momentarily without its guiding will. Sexually becoming, of course, the ghost of Eve’s look, lips still wet with the juice of forbidden fruit.

Thus the obscenity remained draped. For now.

“That’s good then,” she said. “It means we don’t have the entire species to worry about.” She was wearing a grey woollen sweater dress, black nylons and knee-length black leather boots. So you got the soft of the dress and the hard of the boots. Like the soft of the thigh and the hard of the hip. Not sartorial archness, just a sound instinct for sexual accents. We were more than halfway through the lunation and her scent was yielding darker notes. Under the bittersweet glamour of Chanel No. 19 her quickening She exuded a high, tight-packed smell of predatory knowledge. Heat throbbed around her. The Hunger was a second heartbeat still a long way beneath her own. The next dozen days and nights would be the story of its rising. In both of us. Synchronised.

“Yes,” I said. “But the danger is this twerp blabs. He looked as if I was his first lycanthropic run-in. An experience to discuss with his peers. If other vampires who
are
in the know are here in the city there’s no reason they wouldn’t hook up. He tells his after-dinner werewolf cherry story and they’re onto us. No. We should go.”

“Now? Tonight?”

“Can you stand it?”

She got up out of the chair, crossed to where I stood by the escritoire, slipped her arms around me, kissed me.

“We shouldn’t travel together,” I said, without much conviction.

“Don’t be insane.”

“They don’t have you yet. If they get to you through—”

“Those days are over. It’s you and me, now. That’s all.”

However ridiculous this sounds I already know there will never be a time when putting my hands on her won’t palliate the certainty of death. The feel of her waist between my palms is of the deep geometry that takes you back or forward past the incarnate incidentals to the elemental realm, the realm of soul, one wants to say, knowing one’s going soft in the head. Holding her is a Keatsian beauty-truth. I don’t know what to do with it. I know there’s nothing
to
do with it. Just live in it and let it bring what it brings.

“We could wait half an hour,” I said, moving my hands to the firm flare of her bum.

“Is it always going to be this bad?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hurry up,” she said. “Hard and fast. Please.”

We quit New York that night (cab to Penn Station, Amtrak sleeper to Chicago) with very little discussion. She knew I’d put arrangements in place, but to talk them through would have been, according to the intuited werewolf proprieties, vulgar. Instead we moved around it, our giant ugliness, our unforgivable end point, dirtily enriched, like molested children, by knowing all and saying nothing. I saw in her abstracted moments that she remained disgusted in spite of the months of violent self-baptism. She’d hardened herself in blood but not all the tender remnants were dead. She was a monster, yes, but all she’d lost could still ambush her, turn her gaze back to her childhood and force her to look. You Can’t Go Home Again. (
Thomas
Wolfe, Jesus how much more?) This hurt, very much. She’d been darling to so many, little black-eyed Lula with the high forehead and the beauty spot. Becoming a werewolf ought to have cut her off from all that but it hadn’t. Continuity of identity persisted. It was like being tortured by an innocent child.

“How do you get around the fact that you should have died several times already?” she asked. To any but new lovers the Amtrak sleeper’s
three and a half foot bed width would have been a trial. The little window’s curtains were open, revealing a rolling night sky of curdy backlit grey and gun-blue cloud just beginning, in patches, to break. The train smelled of filter coffee and air-con. “You were born in 1808—which is not a sentence I ever imagined saying—and here we are two hundred years later. There must have been questions to answer.”

We could discuss these past practicalities.
Past
practicalities.

“It got easier,” I said. “It’s easier than ever now, if you’ve got money. It’s always money. The principle doesn’t change: You’re paying specialists in the manipulation of identity technology. Used to be old guys in basements with loupes and inks and plates and presses, now it’s young guys in lofts with computers. This is the primary level, the simple business of purchasing a fake birth certificate, passport, driving licence, social security number. You’ll be surprised how far you can go with just those: bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages, loans, investment portfolios. Over a regular lifespan it’s more than enough. Several lifetimes, it gets trickier. I can’t believe what I did the first time. I can’t believe I thought I’d be able to
go on
doing it.”

“What did you do?”

“I became my own son.”

“Holy moley.”

“Jacob Marlowe ‘Senior,’ as it were, became a recluse at forty-two, in the year 1850. I couldn’t put it off any longer: people were starting to notice I didn’t seem to be aging
at all.
”

She shivered next to me.

“What?”

“You. 1850. I think I’m used to it and then it gets me again.”

“To tell you the truth I can’t remember much about 1850. Dickens published
David Copperfield
. Wordsworth died. I’ll have to think.”

“It’s not the big events, it’s the ordinary stuff. A butler warming his hands. Those big damp houses. A bonnet on a chair.” She was trying to picture the time when the present would be as distant to her as 1850 is to me. She was feeling the backdraft or slipstream of the far future: a cold flow. She shuddered, turned towards me, slid her right leg over my hip. “Anyway, go on. Jacob Marlowe Senior.”

“Jacob Marlowe Senior went into reclusion—is there such a word? You think I’d know by now.”

“No one cares, honey. Go on.”

“Marlowe Senior went into reclusion if there was such a word in 1850. Not in England, but at a secret location known only to my lawyers. In fact I was rarely there. Couldn’t afford to be.”
Because as you know we can’t let the victims pile up in one place
. She felt us duck to avoid this
present
practicality, a motion like a kite dipping in the wind. “All his business decisions were enacted through authorised proxies and lawyers, who received their instructions from him—I had codes, passwords, ciphers, the whole fucking caboodle—in writing. A rickety arrangement. Near misses of catastrophic losses when messages didn’t travel fast enough. Telegraphy was a great relief when it came in. The telephone—well, you can imagine. Not long after leaving England I was ‘married’ and less than a year after that I had ‘a son,’ Jacob Junior. All fictional. A new will was drawn up—Jacob Junior would inherit everything—and that was that. All I had to do then was stay away from anyone who knew me.”

“Are you serious?”

“Of course. You’ve got to remember it was a lot easier not to be seen in those days: Photography was in its infancy. No television, no CCTV. Half a dozen false names kept me going through Europe—and eventually here—for thirty-five years. Again, I had money. Money and mobility, that’s how it’s done.”

“Thanks again for the twenty million, by the way. Another sentence I never imagined I’d have use for.”

“You’re welcome.”

“And the fictional wife?”

Another kite dip. The fictional wife evoked the real one. The aphrodisiacal kick Arabella’s ghost being forced to watch had given us, the promise of dark enlightenment. All apparent evil promises the same. It’s a lie. There’s no dark enlightenment because there’s no evil. Whatever it is you’re doing—raping a child, gassing a million—it’s just another thing you can do. The universe doesn’t care. Certainly doesn’t give you divine knowledge in return. All the knowledge and all the divinity is already there in you doing whatever it is you’re doing. Who knows this better than monsters?