A neighbor complains in an anonymous note pushed under the door that there is howling at night coming from our apartment. It will have to stop, says the note or the police will be called. Animals are not allowed in these apartments. I howl and scratch at the walls, sensitive to hostile criticism. Later my wife goes over to apologize for my behavior.
Swatches of coarse matted hair appear on the palms of my hands. When I show them to Roper as evidence of my affliction he shakes his leonine head. “Your hands have entered into the obsession,” he says, “are now complicit with the ducts of the face. You go to great lengths, don’t you, to prove yourself right and the rest of us wrong.” It is an insight, though of no special relevance to my case. Of all the people I am close to, only my mortal enemy, Von Elfant, has not shut his eyes to me.
Von Elfant. Von Elfant, the master wolf hunter of our day, is dead. “The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack.” His eyes and tongue ripped out, says the report, the victim of some wild animal. “lf you weren’t so wolf-headed,” says my wife, “you’d apply for his job at the Sorbonne before others get wind of the opening.”
Goldie Tress is alive. She returns to school with a large bandage covering the right side of her face. When she sees me, slinking off, she lets out an audible groan. Our eyes slide away from each other in guilty embarrassment.
The wolf hair like some silken metal rips the blade of the razor this morning. My image growls back at me in the glass. The beast has survived the night in my face, fangs and all. After breakfast he subsides and I go into school to teach my classes. I give them a test, writing the questions on the blackboard so as not to startle them with my fangs, which hang heavy in my jaw. I long, while they write their lies, to spring out at them and rip their heads from their shoulders.
It strikes me at lunch that I am beginning to feel his feelings as my own. We are becoming, for better and worse — the worse, thinks the wolf, the better — one and the same. “I must talk to you,” Goldie whispers out of the injured side of her face. I run away, but she follows, follows me to the Men’s Room, to the Student Cafeteria, to the parking lot. “Come into my car with me,” she calls. “You’re inviting trouble,” I say, shout at her from where I crouch in secret, a snarl in my throat. “I forgive you, dear heart,” she calls back. “That’s all I wanted to say.” She drives off, leaving me to the furtive necessity of my calling.
ao wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!
I write in my notebook: “Wolf redeemed, released, by uncurse of love.”
My wife has a stainless steel door erected for her room, set inside the first door, which is a heavy mahogany. “It is not against you,” she says. “Last night something or someone tried to force his way in.”
When I walk in the streets disguised in my academic suit, stray dogs follow me and bark.
“What a handsome beaver,” the lady says. “Such texture.”
A picnic lunch with Goldie in the park. My hunger unabatable.
“You don’t believe that I forgive you, do you?” she asks as I wolf down the cold chicken she has brought, bones and all.
“Yes’m,” says the wolf with ambiguous cunning. Language, he thinks, is merely another shadow in an insubstantial world, the putative intention behind words, a shadow in itself.
“What if I kissed you?” says the unbandaged voice. “Would that convince you?”
Still hungry, I gnaw on the Navajo blanket she has brought for us to sit on while we eat. I eat the buffalo on the blanket, hair and all. She takes a movie of me while I eat, wanting, she says, to show me to myself.
I AM DAMNED, I growl at her wordlessly, THERE IS NO HOPE.
“If you think you can frighten me by growling and showing your teeth, you don’t know what kind of woman I am.” Tilting her head back to receive a kiss or a bite.
The man in and the beast out, the beast in and the man out, are merely variations on the same reality. Each day I become more monstrous, he or I. I teach my classes in a lightweight plastic mask. No one appears to notice.
Roper has decided to drop me from his rolls. “My competence extends only to the human,” he says.
Seven Ways to Destroy the Wolf*
1. By fire.
1. By ice.
2. By drowning (in his own fluid or in the tears of a maiden).
3. By a silver bullet through the back of the head.
4. By overwhelming and unsought kindness.
5. By a wooden stake driven through the heart.
6. By the unknown. (Lore has it that each case has its own unique resolution.)
* To be used in emergencies only.
An unseasonal snow, two inches fallen last night, the last flesh of winter. The tracks of an unidentified large animal are discovered in the courtyard of our apartment building. Rumors abound. The super’s wife comes to the door with the official explanation. The prints are a trick to frighten the tenants and were made by some teenaged thugs in the employ of the former superintendent.
“And what about the deaths reported?” I ask.
“No one lives forever,” she says.
At dinner my wife announces that she has something important to tell me. “Promise me you won’t be angry when I tell you,” she says. I can’t promise that in advance. She locks herself in her room which now has three doors and says that she has reported me to the police in an anonymous letter.
Feeling the nerve ends of the hair breathe under the skin as they come to life, I rake at the outer door with my teeth and claws.
“I didn’t have to tell you,” she says. “Think of it that way. If I didn’t tell you, you wouldn’t know they were coming here at any moment to take you away.”
The wolf lives on roots and berries and the stems of wildflowers, a vegetarian against nature. In exile, his appetite pales.
The wolf lives on roots and berries and the stems of wildflowers, a vegetarian in extremus. In exile, his appetite pales.
A child comes up to him in his makeshift lair. “You a wolf, man, or a person?”
“What do you think?”
“Man, I don’t want to hurt your feelings none so I’m not going to say. But you got big teeth, man.” He sticks his hand in the wolf’s mouth. “Wow! Them teeth real?”
He has not had his teeth in anything solid for four whole days.
Without appetite, he eats like a bird. Strength is down. He is the bare wolf of his former self without even the saving grace of occasional murderous desire. When he sees the wolf hunters with their torches and red shirts pass in procession outside his lair, his secret hope is that they will catch the beast and put an end to uncertainty. He suffers the damnation of human ambivalence.
It is as the hunted that one comes to understand the moral esthetic of the hunter.
Someone or something touches my face tenderly during the night while I sleep. Is it a dream? Unearned affection excites deep throated howls of rage. Even if my condition is the result of a curse, I am now a wolf by choice. By nature. OWWWWWWW WWWWWWWWWWW! And yet not the same savage wolf I was.
The human lady comes almost every day to sweep the bones and feathers from my lair. She brings me hot soup in a jar and consonants of comfort. “Let me love you,” she pleads in human language and without.
It is not my nature. What I am, the nature that is not mine, is beyond my inhuman capacity to sustain. The wolf is out and I am in. We are one, though duplicitous as anything inhuman and human must be.