Saint Peter’s Wolf Page 12

  The next morning I half woke and felt the space in the bed beside me. Then I sat up, wide-eyed.

  She was gone.

  There was the great breathy hush of pines from the outside. The massive, spacious timber retreat was suddenly too empty. The cold was biting, my bare feet slapping the timber floor.

  I dragged on the heavy wool bathrobe that I always left hanging in the closet here, its collar permanently deformed by the hook. My thoughts were a tangle of I-told-you-so’s. I had no reason to expect a woman like that to be interested in me for any length of time.

  She had better things to do than to spend a weekend in this bunker of nostalgia. She had gone for a walk, or, more likely borrowed the car to drive to Tahoe City, Truckee, home. She had fled.

  I could not even lift my voice to call out. She was not here.

  Perhaps—but surely this was impossible—I had experienced one of my dreams. Was it possible? I could not conceive the thought.

  Had I hurt her? I clung to the bar, surrounded by the stools and martini glasses of a well-kept but abandoned men’s club. The bar had a view of the deck, and of the lake. I gathered the bathrobe around me, shivering.

  And then I saw her.

  She was kneeling on the redwood planks of the deck, feeding Fritos to a chipmunk. Another chipmunk joined her, a flick of tail, a bright eye. Yet a third joined them. Her voice just reached me, a soft clucking of encouragement.

  The lake was always too big. It was a photograph of the universe. It wrinkled, stilled, shirred, darkened, seethed, the center of everything, and at the same time apart from everything, always nearly ice and never freezing.

  Now the lake was gray, like the sky. A pine needle spun down in the light wind. It was nearly warm outside. Johanna looked up.

  “I thought you’d gone away.”

  She laughed. “Where would I go? Look at you—you’ll freeze.”

  I watched the chipmunks for a moment. They had not bothered to glance at me.

  “I feel so sorry for them,” she said. “All the long winter coming. And who will look after them?”

  I was so relieved to see her that I wanted to argue. Perhaps I resented her for making me feel so deeply about her. Some people think it teaches them to live on handouts, I nearly said. Maybe it makes them suffer all the more when no one shows up to feed them. My heart wasn’t in it, though, and I rested my hand on her bright hair. She was right. The animals were hungry. I knelt and held out one of the golden crisps, but they ignored me.

  We had coffee and toast. She didn’t mind such a spare breakfast, perhaps accustomed to the continental tidbit to begin the day, and my own appetite was strangely lax. Food meant nothing to me at all.

  We bundled into our goose down and wool, hiking boots and mufflers, and the air made her nose pink. It was on a walk along Sugar Pine Point, the coarse granite sand of the lake crisp beneath our feet, that she held my hand and began to tell me how she saw her future. I believe that our futures-the futures we imagine—are our true stories. Our memories lie; only our hopes are honest.

  “I can never marry,” she said.

  It was like the shocking snap of something solid, a rib. We had been walking in silence, enjoying, I thought, the red-trunked pines. I stopped walking for a heartbeat or two, but she tugged me along. We strolled together, and at last she continued, “There is a terrible history in my family.”

  Most people believe that families are safe cottages of flesh and blood, but, in truth, most families have a terrible history of some sort. She was about to tell me something secret and painful, and I squeezed her hand. “You must tell me.”

  “It is a history of madness.”

  I knew enough to say nothing, our unmittened hands tight together.

  “I suppose you might think that this means simply that I cannot have children.”

  This had not been my thought.

  “But it is deeper than a genetic predisposition to depression or epilepsy. It is a rupture of life that I could not ask any other human being to share.”

  I am not one of those psychologists who balk at using words like “mad.” Mental illness is profound and usually cruel. We need simple words for it, however inaccurate we might feel them to be. “I want to help, if I can,” I said.

  “It’s easy to tell, agonizing to recall.” She stared at the sand in front of us, rough grains sprinkled with pine needles. “My father was shot by police in Zurich, in what you would call the red light district. He was running along a roof after raping and killing a teenage prostitute.”

  She paused, hoping she had not shocked me, but I was saddened more than surprised. “It must have been very painful for you.”

  “I was a girl at the time, and there had been a series of such murders, but I never imagined it had anything to do with my family. In fact, I had only the vaguest, although painful, sense of what rape was. My mother, in turn, went mad ten months later. She threw herself under a petrol truck.”

  The lake’s waves were barely waves at all, absent-mindedly stroking the sand from time to time.

  “And then my brother. By the time I was seventeen I was living with my aunt, while my brother was hunted all over Europe. I lived in Saint Johann, in the Thur Valley east of Zurich. In the late spring, during hay cutting, the air is so rich with the smell of it you think you could eat handfuls of the sunlight.

  “My brother found me one night. He was wet from a walk up the stream so that the hounds, he said, could not find him. What hounds? I found myself wondering. There was no sound, only the chatter of the stream. I was so happy to see him, and so grieved to see how gaunt he was. He said only that I didn’t have to worry, that I was free. And he told me something that to this day makes no sense to me at all.” She could not speak, biting a knuckle. “I cannot tell you what he said.

  “He shot himself. My aunt identified the body.” Johanna was silent, then the sorrow passed, as it will when the soul is accustomed to it as an old burden. “This is a secret I carry everywhere I go. The truth about my family.”

  “It doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it does,” I suggested gently. “It might not be genetic at all. And there is no actual reason to believe you would pass it on to children.”

  “But you don’t know the entire truth. You can’t possibly imagine it. I really can hardly utter it.”

  I put my arms around her as she wept. “It was terrible,” she said when she could talk. “They were such good people, strong and loving life. You would have liked them, Ben, and they would have liked you. Each of them, my father, and then my mother, and finally my brother, experienced a kind of madness in which they thought they were no longer human. It was a syndrome in which a person thinks he is an animal.”

  I did not want to know anymore. The lake was a mat of shifting, intricate wrinkles. The wind seemed to blow, briefly, upward from the ground.

  “There is, isn’t there,” she asked, “a mental illness in which a human being thinks he is a wolf?”

  I cleared my throat. “Lycanthropy isn’t that common.”

  “But it does happen.”

  I wanted to tell her that there are more people in mental hospitals who think they killed Kennedy, or who think they are secretly married to the president, or are in hiding from the CIA, which is trying to get them to stop making hit records or television shows. Show business delusions are fairly common. As delusions go, I’ve met more people who have talked to beings from other galaxies than people who think they are animals.

  But I agreed that of course it happened. All the while not wanting to think what I was thinking, a thought too cold: that something was hunting us through the landscape of years, that disembodied smile, that hungry set of fangs, trailing us and knowing our every moment, from the day of our birth.

  I told myself that I should share my own secret, my dream, with her, and tell her about the fangs. But I did not, telling myself that I would only burden her with my own concerns.

  I tried to console her. I told her th
e truth: that she seemed quite mentally healthy to me, and that her sorrow should be for her lost loved ones, and not confused with fear about herself. I don’t usually deal advice, but I did not want to consider what she had said. Besides, I did want to ease her grief. I was sorry to see her so shaken.

  It seemed like an abrupt change of subject when she said, “That man came back to see. Karl Gneiss. He is some sort of investigator—”

  “I know.” I told her, briefly, of our meeting.

  “He made me remember my past, with all his questions. I must confess to you that I told him lies, whole fabrications, although nothing that he can discover. I lied by leaving out the truth.”

  “He is hard to figure out,” I offered.

  “No, not at all, Benjamin. I think he is quite simple. I think he is a very dangerous man.”

  “Do you mean … disturbed, mentally?”

  “Perhaps. And perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps he is simply another attentive policeman trained to protect us.”

  I had to wonder, as we continued our walk and she cheered up at the sight of a seaplane taking off far across the lake, if the rest of our separate lives had ever really existed, but had been like the pages of a book, closed shut and dark and never really alive at all, never even read. We had thought they had substance, and believed that the course of hours was, in truth, about to arrive somewhere. But nothing had been real until we had met each other, when Belinda nearly died.

  I thought of Johanna as I thought of my own body. But I did not like this new possibility, like the collapse of land one had always considered a solid plateau. We had been predestined to an end we could not change. This thought chilled every hope in me, and so I employed my new skill in denying to myself what was happening. Fate was a human misperception of random or purely human blunders. Life is accident, comforting, or, at worst, impersonal chaos.

  Besides, I kept reconvincing myself that my dreams were only dreams. A dog had made the print in the wet humus, and perhaps the same dog had made the prints in my back garden. A dog, and that fugitive animal had been shot. We returned to the cabin, and I built a fire.

  It snowed that afternoon, a swirl that seemed to rise upward from the lake itself. Trees turned black and shrugged and struggled in the wind.

  My mistake was in believing that now I understood that air of secrecy about Johanna. I thought that now, at last, I understood her.

  We needed chains on the drive back the next day, and could not remove the chains until Colfax, the freeway a tunnel of white that closed in from the sides, and swelled from the road itself, as though the earth and sky were one.

  Then there was the sloppiness of rain, pure formlessness. Johanna told me of herself as I drove, and I relished each chapter, even stifling my jealousy at the few lovers she had taken. She had seen so much, and had worked with so many brilliant people that she seemed to be a citizen of another, brighter world than mine.

  We had lunch in a quiet restaurant in Davis, watching the rain through the gradually steaming window.

  When we reached San Francisco, ants had overrun her kitchen.

  They were the tiny domestic ant, the tiny black fragment which, individually, seems too small and fragile to live. The counter was alive with them. “The poor, sad creatures. The rain drives them in,” she said.

  “You can’t let them crawl all over everything,” I said, feeling, as I said it, cruel.

  “They came in because they were drowning. You don’t really expect me to put out poison, do you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t really expect you to do that. Why don’t you make them a sandwich. Maybe they’d like some tea. Turn on the television, let them make themselves comfortable.”

  “Do you suppose if I put some sugar cubes on the floor, I could train them to stay off the counter?”

  “You could train them to do anything.”

  “I could have an ant circus.”

  “Ant football. Ant basketball. No question about it. Just get out the sugar cubes.”

  But she wasn’t entirely joking. She would take any measure to avoid killing a single ant.

  I was in my study, in a moment of childish curiosity trying to discern the cuneiform inscriptions on my Babylonian vial. In a way, I felt silly. I had no idea where to begin, squinting through my loupe and penciling the rows of finch tracks. It seemed somehow healing to do this, as though to parse something both ancient and matter-of-fact would cure something in me.

  No doubt Zinser was right. The inscription would prove comfortably dull, something about money, a scale of prices, or a one-time offer, a coupon for a free vial with three proof-of-purchase shards. It would, I knew, turn out to be a list of ingredients for an antacid, or a tisane to cure bad luck in the wine trade. A snifter of cognac was at my elbow, untouched. I was doing what I had rarely done in recent months, actually enjoying my collection. It was raining out, the downpour chiming off the eaves. I had just finished my list of inscriptions, and was beginning to consider which of my expert friends I would bore by consulting when the phone chirped.

  My hand was right when it hesitated, not wanting to pick up the receiver. I was delighted to hear her voice, but then I settled back into my chair like someone willing himself invisible.

  Her voice trembled. They had found the dog on Twin Peaks, as they had expected. The beast was dead. “The poor creature suffered. Two bullets in its haunch. It must have had such pain.”

  But, she continued, the neighborhood was huddled at back fences and front porches. The news was unsettling, but several calls to the police had confirmed it.

  The dead dog was a large half-breed collie, its paw not nearly big enough to fit the cast.

  Eighteen

  “How is he?”

  “You’ll be surprised.”

  I had brought flowers, a great shock of irises, and she gathered them from me. It was a quantity of flowers so great that for a moment I could not see her face at all. I had chosen them because during my therapy Dr. Ashby had kept a print of Van Gogh’s “Irises” beside his desk. The green florist’s paper crackled, and a drop of water sprang from a petal onto the carpet.

  “Lovely,” she breathed, and I paused for a moment, realizing that Eileen, too, had anticipated my visit with pleasure. “That was sweet of you,” she added, this woman who had always treated me with nothing more than calm, if kind, courtesy.

  I expected Eileen to lead me up the stairs, but to my surprise and delight she led me through the house, hugging the harvest of flowers. Dr. Ashby was sitting in the sunlight, huddled in a blanket.

  “He brought us irises,” she said.

  It was so wonderful to see him outside, with a book in his lap, that I could not speak. He was drowsing, I thought, but when my step whisked through the grass he looked up and blinked until he saw who I was.

  “Irises,” he repeated, as though the word meant little. Language was a puzzle to him, I thought. Then he smiled. “That was very kind of you, Ben. That’s a haystack of irises.”

  His grip was strong, but as soon as it had given the impression of strength, I sensed the weakness, the barely perceptible palsy.

  “I’m glad to see you again,” said Dr. Ashby. We both knew what he meant: I am glad to be alive to see you, and to see anyone.

  “I wanted to make sure you were doing all right,” I said. “And I also wanted to talk to you about something. The fact is, I need your help.” I stopped myself. My feelings overpowered me, and I blinked tears. I needed Dr. Ashby—I needed his wisdom. But as I saw him, his white hair in the sun, I felt unworthy. I shouldn’t trouble him.

  “Eileen makes the world’s best rose hip tea,” he said.

  “And these will need a vase,” she said, and hurried into the house.

  I had not intended to blurt out the truth. I did need Dr. Ashby’s advice, but I had hoped to approach the subject in stages. “You look terrific,” I said. “Really amazingly well.”

  Dr. Ashby grunted, acknowledging my excessive enthusia
sm. “I’m alive, somehow.” He lifted a hand to his eyes with effort, and shaded his gaze as he studied me.

  Under his gaze I felt myself feel much younger, too young, a neophyte, untrained, unlearned. I sat in a lawn chair and attempted a smile. After a long moment he said, “You still look different.”

  “Worse or better?”

  “You tell me.”

  I told myself that the subject would shock or at least worry him. I hesitated, and he knew me well enough to become impatient, pursing his lips in a way that meant: stop stalling.

  “I’ve never felt this way before,” I began. “I feel so—alive.” This did not, I realized, sound like much of a confession, but I felt that it was, in a way, sinful to feel so vigorous.

  “I’m very glad to hear it.”

  I leaned forward. “I want to talk about my dream—my old, recurring dream.”

  “Has the dream changed?”

  How could he know? The grass at our feet glittered in the sunlight. I did not speak for a moment. “I’m beginning to understand it.”

  His silence meant: don’t stop now. Tell me more.

  “We’ve always admired animals,” I said. “We’ve wanted to be beasts of some kind. We’ve wanted to put on wings or claws, and be eagles, or lions. We’ve been hungry for it. We’ve always felt cheated that we are human beings and not hawks or buffalo. Or wolves.”

  The last word rang within me. “Children know, don’t they?” I continued. “They pretend to be horses. They growl, and gallop, …” I looked away, overcome by his eyes, and by the sunlight. “But we lose it. We grow up, and forget to admire the beast.”

  “But it doesn’t forget us.” Dr. Ashby smiled. “It remains loyal to us. We know what we have lost.”

  We have lost, I thought, nearly everything, but that rational, hopeful lie: that we can control our lives with plans and with knowledge. We become personae, masks. We become hollow.

  The question was asked before I knew what I was saying. My own voice spoke, and I could not silence it. “Tell me about werewolves.”

  Dr. Ashby turned his head slightly, to look at me from a different angle. “Whatever have you been up to, Ben?”