You’re Not the Only One

“I didn’t kill her,” said Peter. “I figured it was you.” Roman was confused. “Me? Why would I do it?” Peter shrugged. “Why would I?”

“People are saying you’re a werewolf,” said Roman. “You believe everything people say?”

Roman persisted. “Then why did you come back? Is this your territory or something?”

Peter’s hackles went down, identifying no immediate threat of attack. He sat Indian-style. “Territory is so bourgeois,” he said airily.

Roman eyed him. “Are you sure it wasn’t you?”

“You could try to like contain your disappointment,” said Peter.

“I was just asking,” said Roman, chastised. He sat too and picked a leaf from a bush. “Then who was it?” he said.

“Bear,” said Peter. “Cougar. Creative suicide.”

Roman tore the leaf down the middle and rubbed the halves between his forefingers. “It’s weird,” he said. “I knew her. I mean, I didn’t know her know her. But to see her. Parties and stuff. She liked my car.” Tearing the leaf into quarters. “Now she’s dead. How fucked is that?”

“It’s a nice car,” Peter said.

“I also knew your uncle or whoever,” said Roman. “Vince?” said Peter.

“Yeah. Sometimes we’d have bonfires and he’d show up with a bottle of hooch. I liked his stories. The girls would get pretty freaked out, but girls, you know?”

Peter nodded that the intrusion of an alcoholic vagrant who had grown tired of shaving by the age of fifteen was the kind of thing to put girls in a state.

“I didn’t know him very well,” said Peter. “He called me Petey and I didn’t like that much. But he always used to slip me one last nip after Lynda cut me off and sometimes he had this way of passing out while he was still sitting at the table with his eyes open that I thought was a neat trick.” He was reflective. “I guess he had a real problem.”

A cloudywing moth passed close by and Peter’s arm darted out to catch it. A flair for opportunistic showmanship ran in the Rumanceks’ blood and he was pretty sure he could get twenty bucks from the rich kid in a dare to eat it. But his hand wasn’t clever enough and the moth fluttered off.

Roman tore the leaf into eighths and let them sprinkle to the ground. “I remember coming here with my dad,” he said. “I don’t have too many memories of him, but I remember when I was pretty young and being here and getting stung on like the webbing between my toes and the look on his face. How helpless he was. Because there was no way for him to figure out why I was crying like that. Until my foot swelled up like a tit with toes.”

“What happened to him?” said Peter.

Roman made a gun out of his hand and blew his own brains out. “Shee-it,” said Peter.

“Shee-it,” said Roman.

“My mom says my dad is dead or something,” said Peter. “She doesn’t really get more specific. Ladybug.”

Roman brushed a ladybug from his lapel.

“What’s it like?” he said. “Living like, you know. You people.”

It didn’t bother Peter being referred to as “you people”—it respected the fundamental boundary of life: haves and have-nots. And Peter did not account himself the impoverished one.

“I guess there’s always something over the hill I gotta see,” he said. “What’s in your sister’s shoes?” A pair of headlights fell on them and a police light flashed silently.

“Shit,” said Peter.

“It’s cool,” said Roman, but Peter was already sprinting for the tree line. He stopped in the same shadows from which Roman had appeared and watched as the pair of cops he knew emerged from a sheriff’s cruiser and approached Roman, who looked up into the flashlights without concern.

“Get yourself lost, buddy?” said the shorter one, who had a fat weight lifter’s build and no real neck to speak of.

“I’m fine but appreciate your concern, officer,” said Roman.

“It’s that Godfrey kid,” said the other, tall and reedy with a shrilly aggressive nose that led his stooped walk, a drawn bow waiting for release.

“You know it’s a school night?” said Neck. “I’m a night owl,” said Roman.

“You know you’re not supposed to be here, wiseass,” said Nose. “I don’t care what your name is.” “Am I disturbing anyone, officer?” said Roman.

“Who was that with you?” said Neck. “Was it that punk Gypsy? Now what could you two birdies be hatching out here that we would look upon favorably?”

“We were having a conversation,” said Roman. “What about?”

“The mysteries of mortality,” said Roman. “Okay, let’s go,” said Nose.

Roman looked at him, he looked into his eyes and for a fleeting moment his own candesced in that same cat’s eye way that had attracted Peter’s attention in the first place, and he said with a kind of rote inflection as though feeding an actor his line, “But his old lady’s gonna be a pain in the balls.”

Nose was quiet. His face was a whiteboard between periods.

Then his eyes blinked several times rapidly and he said, “You know, on second thought, his old lady’s gonna be a pain in the balls.”

“What?” said Neck.

Roman looked into his eyes. “Yeah. Beat it, kid.” “Yeah,” said Neck. “Beat it, kid.”

“Yes sir,” said Roman.

They returned to the cruiser, Neck muttering, “Spooky little fucker.” Once they’d gone, Peter rejoined Roman.

“I bet you save a lot of money on roofies,” said Peter. “Potting soil,” said Roman. “That’s what’s in her shoes.”

Peter’s tongue stood at a crossroads between silent acceptance and trying to understand any of this. He said nothing.

Roman lay down flat and put his ear to the ground like a movie Apache.

“Can you feel it?” he said. “What?” said Peter.

“Whatever it is that’s … down there.” “Oh,” said Peter. “That.”

“Good,” said Roman. He stood. “It’s good to know you’re not going crazy.” “Or you’re not the only one,” said Peter.

A cloud drifted over the White Tower. There was probably the sound of a train.

* * *

From the archives of Dr. Norman Godfrey:

From: morningstar314@yahoo.com

To: ngodfrey@hacres.net

Subject: Let them eat croutons!

Dearest Uncle,

Another week and time again for you to indulge my incorrigible prattle. I would suggest you’ve opened Pandora’s (in)box, were it not so laborious pecking at the keys with the eraser end of a pencil—these fingertips the Almighty (with some assistance from Dr. P.) saw fit to provide too, shall we call it, abundant, to press one key at a time. I suppose it would be simple enough to request Mother order me some variety of keyboard receptive to a less dainty touch, but I’ve grown to appreciate that every word I choose is the product of deliberate effort. It seems to me so many who don’t need to select their words carefully, do not.

Now what’s happened since our last correspondence worthy of my eraser’s attention? (An irony that somehow escaped me until this moment—how wonderful!) Of course—you will be so proud of me, Uncle, I followed your advice and asserted my independence to Mother. We were having dinner at the club, Mother, Roman, and I, and while orders were being taken I noticed a salad of the most stirring medley of color pass. So just as Mother was telling Jenny I would be having my usual I impetuously took up a menu and pointed with great vigor.

“Is that what you want, honey?” said Jenny, my most favorite of the club staff.

“No, no,” corrected Mother, “we’ll be going with her usual, I believe.”

Which is, of course, a tureen of chopped beef.

But I shook my head and gesticulated once more to my bold whim.

“Darling,” said Mother, “you must have your meat.”

To which Roman made an off-color remark. Jenny, with whom he regularly engages in light flirtation (and perhaps more outside her place of employment—how fatiguing it is trying to keep track of my brother’s extracurricular activities), hid a smirk. Mother was cross.

“Her usual will be quite satisfactory,” she said in her the-matter-is-settled voice. Which I confess would have withered my determination on the vine were it not for divine Jenny’s intervention.

Resting her hand on my shoulder with no hint of repugnance, she said, “Oh now, she’s just thinking of her figure. All those cute boys at the high school.”

I could have kissed each of her fingers one by one but restrained myself to an absurd grin from which Roman dabbed a regrettable strand of spittle.

“Now, Shelley,” said Mother, the terrifying reason of her tone reflecting her increased annoyance at this alliance, “whatever decision you make you’ll have to live with. I think both of us know you’ll end up wishing you’d made the more appropriate choice.”

She looked at me, naturally expecting acquiescence. How it startled her when I firmly tapped the menu one final time. And though Mother was, in fact, correct—my stomach was rumbling its second guess before we’d even gotten home—I nursed that hunger all night as proof I was indeed capable of living with my decisions. But without a single instant’s regret!—tasting all the while the delectable discord between the sweet of the apricot and bitter of the spinach, the effusive pepper and rakish scallion, chaste almond and concupiscent tomato: a feast if not for the belly then the spirit. And more important, I feel as though Mother took note. I am more than some living—albeit unwieldy—marionette who will dance obediently at the manipulation of her strings; as you have been so kind to suggest, I am an intelligent, autonomous individual with valid desires. I believe this encounter may have earned your nervy niece some small measure of, does she dare say it? respect.

Otherwise, I’m finding the transition to high school genial enough. My studies are coming apace; I continue to progress at a rate in defiance of standardization: while the more advanced of my classmates are occupied with Spanish subjunctives or trigonometric functions, I am at my corner—my sanctuary—in the back boning up on my classical Greek or Bohm’s quantum mind hypothesis (food for thought—I am indebted for the recommendation). I am also, it shall please you to hear, racking up friends at a positively dizzying pace! Christina Wendall has taken to giving me sympathetic looks when no one is watching— working her way, I’m confident, to a proper introduction (as though words had more to offer than the plain grace of the soul’s window); your own Letha remains, as I’m sure is no news to you, a positive angel; and that Gypsy boy I referred to once before continues to favor me with his charms. What a devil he is!—a few inches shorter than the other boys his age, but broader in the shoulder (of course, either way he is doll-sized relative to your affectionate authoress). He is of swarthy complexion with a black ponytail possessing the sheen that suggests petroleum jelly as his hair product of choice. Roman says he is a werewolf. Mother says he is vermin and to have no truck with him (directed, naturally, at Roman—it would not occur to her to include me in such an admonition).

I do hope he was not involved in the incident at Kilderry Park. (How I wept when I heard.) Of course, if I am to live with the decisions I make, I suppose I ought to take care with questions to which I may prefer not to know the answer.

Yours always,

S.G.

The Angel

The virgin placed the applicator on the counter and rinsed her hands and sat on the edge of the tub, waiting. Not for the answer; the answer she knew. The test was for them, for the proof she knew they would need. Or at least a certain extent of proof, to be sure a conversation starter.

Check with your physician if you get unexpected results, it said on the box. This was one way of putting it.

The virgin looked at the pending window of the applicator. She was not unafraid, but more so she remembered the way it had shone, the halo over his head, shining not just gold but all the colors in a shimmering aurora. She stood up and inhaled deeply, puffing out her belly, and held her breath and rubbed her hands over that uncanny foundry, the ember of his perfect light inside it.

* * *

Olivia Godfrey met Dr. Norman Godfrey at the Penrose Hotel bar the next afternoon. Olivia was an unpleasantly beautiful woman of indeterminate age. She wore a white Hermès pantsuit in brazen Old World indifference that Labor Day had been weeks ago, with a head scarf around a head of black hair and blacker Jackie O sunglasses. She sipped a gin martini. Dr. Godfrey was a trim man in his middle age with prematurely graying hair and beard, and eyes that under normal circumstances had a certain cast of patrician magnanimity, this the favored result of the parallel character traits of a deep fundamental kindness and near complete lack of humility. But these were not normal circumstances and his stride was hard with purpose, his green Godfrey eyes bullets in extreme slow motion. She slid a scotch neat down the bar at his arrival and he ignored it.

“Did you have anything to do with it?” he said.

“Why thank you, Olivia,” she said. Her accent was careful British with continental traces. She had been in her time an actress of some favor on the boards of the Lyceum and even at their most extemporaneous her words had the ring of her craft.

He regarded her evenly. His composure was volcanic.

“Don’t think, answer. Were you or that walking God complex in any way involved?” “Norman, you’ll really have to be a little more goddamn specific,” she said. “Letha’s pregnant,” he said.

“Oh.” Her lips were a perfect formation of the syllable. “Well, I’m afraid you’ll find me inadequate to such a task, and as for Johann, I think we both know his … proclivities lie elsewhere.”

“I am not fucking around here,” he said. The bartender looked over.

“Lower your voice,” she said. “Sit down.” She patted the stool next to her. Come come. He sat. “You will drop that patronizing tone right now,” he said.

“Well, you have to admit that’s a fairly astonishing accusation to respond to in a civilized fashion.” “We haven’t reached the accusation stage. Right now it’s just a question and you will give me a straight

answer.”

“No, Norman, I had nothing to do with it,” she said. “Nor, to my knowledge, did Dr. Pryce, and frankly that you would feel compelled to ask would be beyond outrageous were it one iota less mystifying.”

He tilted his glass one way and the other regarding the level plane of the liquor.

Her tone became delicate. “Has it occurred to you she may be … reluctant to share with her father the specific circumstances of conception?”

He tapped the glass on the bar top in punctuation of a private punch line and laughed bitterly. “Reluctant? No. Not reluctant,” he said.

She looked at him.

“She says she’s still a virgin,” said Godfrey. She was quiet. He responded to her silence. “She says,” said Godfrey, “it was an angel.” She was quiet.

“She says it visited her this summer,” he said, “and she didn’t say anything at the time because she didn’t want us getting all bent out of shape—her words—but she felt the time had come she needed our help with the … child. And she took a pregnancy test, so she’s not hallucinating that part.”

“Has she got a boyfriend?” she said. “None lately.”

“Has she been going to church?”

“When have you known this family to go to church when someone hasn’t died?” “What’s your … professional evaluation?”

He looked at her. Was that a real question.

“Rape,” he said. “She was raped and her mind bricked it over with this fantasy. The clinical term is psychogenic amnesia.”

“Have you contacted the police?”

“With what? My suspicion of something that would have happened in July that she won’t corroborate? At this point my hope is to talk her out of keeping it.”

Her eyebrows arched. “Is that for the best?”

“As opposed to encouraging her to carry to term a child she’s convinced is a product of immaculate conception, at seventeen, when at any minute the actual event could come back to her after an irrevocable decision has been made?”

She nodded the point.

“Now might I ask what could possibly give you the notion I could have any involvement in this?” she said.

He regarded his reflection in the wall mirror across the bar. He had found that when his hair had begun to silver, maintaining a neat beard conferred on him a certain archetypal authority: I have things under control. The fact was he could provide no rational explanation for why he was here. Last night his crying wife had left the room and he had remained seated and his child had taken his hand across the table with the grace of the sunrise, and in that moment when there wasn’t another comprehensible thing left to him he had a feeling. Darkly and obscurely and defiant of any rational analysis, he felt Olivia’s hand in this. And that feeling, it had to be admitted, was not having things under control. It was in fact no more rational than his daughter’s explanation. It made his beard a liar. But independent of the absurdity of this intuition, hopelessly apparent on voicing it, he understood now its true and ugly little function. It gave him something to hit back.

“Because I honestly have no fucking idea what you would be capable of if you were afraid of losing me.”

He glared at her. She removed her sunglasses and met his eye.

And then the hard and angry thing sheltering him to his hot relief cracked and he covered his face and

wept. A booth of half-drunk lawyers pretended not to stare. Olivia gently rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. She replaced her sunglasses with the other and pulled her olive from the toothpick and stripped it of brine with her tongue.

* * *

They went up to their customary room and had the customary dispassionately antagonistic sex that was the way things were done for years. Afterward Olivia lay on her stomach smoking a cigarette though smoking had not been permitted in their room for some time, but the notion of moving to another was not one they would have given any more serious thought than a bird would flying north for the winter. It was not the way things were done. There ran along Olivia’s spine above the coccyx, like the mountain range of a relief map, a pale, pinkie-length scar, the remnant of some crude surgery. Dr. Godfrey was up and stuffing his shirt into his trousers. His eyes swept the floor.

“Where’s my—” He saw her foot waving to and fro and his tie dangling between her toes. He reached for it but her foot darted away. He seized her ankle and took his tie and moved to the window, looping it around his neck. Visible across the river on the Hemlock Grove side was the lancing flame burning waste gas from a chimney of the coke works, now operated by a Luxembourg steel company but once a part of the Godfrey dynasty of polluting vulgarity that like so much else was lives ago.

He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled his socks on. Olivia exhaled smoke and steepled her fingers. “I was afraid you meant it,” she said. “Last time.”

Last time, which had been in the spring, he had said not to expect him to call again. It was news to both of them, his saying it had surprised him maybe even more than her. The way the most obvious thing can be the least thinkable. Atlas shrugged.

“I see,” she’d said eventually.

“Because I just don’t have the energy anymore,” he answered in explanation to himself.

“The energy for what?” she said. It was a rhetorical point, and a correct one. Their arrangement required none. It was a perpetual motion machine by now, older than the tides. He knew married men who would kill for it. Men who would kill for her. It occurred to him he had once been a man so worthy of envy and pity.

He said nothing. His face was a much-used sponge that had not actually held moisture in years. “Please,” she said. The quiet dignity with which she said this word belying how infrequently she used

it. “Please … think about it.”

He lied without charity that he would and in the interim had not. He had instead taken up drink as affective novocaine. If the point of novocaine was the numbing of a numbness. In his last loveless years Jacob Godfrey was known to spend hours on end standing in the front yard of the house he had constructed at the summit of the highest hill in the valley. He would survey the land of his sovereignty, a land he had forged into his own vision through blood and fire, and know at his life’s epilogue that it was all a petty, transient thing, nothing about it transubstantial, and that here he was just a lone and useless rich man at the house on the hill, visible and still forgotten. Dr. Godfrey had spent his entire life terrified of this fate and taking every step to rebel against it by throwing himself into a vocation that was as antithetical as he could imagine: compassion. Hence his calling to psychiatry, the meeting place of matter and spirit. He had helped people, so many people, and what more can be said than that? I helped. Tell me what else there is to be said.

Presently he stood and said, “I meant it. I didn’t want this to happen. This was—” “Spiteful,” she said.

“Weak,” he said.

“We’ll agree to agree,” she said.

She held out the butt of her cigarette. He took it into the bathroom and dropped it in the toilet, then

stood in front of the mirror and smoothed his hair. Olivia rested her face in her hands. “Frightful business,” she said. “This Penrose girl.”

“Your daughter thinks it was a werewolf.”

“My daughter has an impressive imagination.” She rolled onto her back into a full-body stretch. “Still … it does hold a terribly erotic sort of appeal. Being hunted down and devoured by some savage brute. It’s enough to give one the shivers.”

He shut off the bathroom light and went to the door. She made no move to cover herself. “I meant it, Olivia,” he said.

She smiled wistfully. “What makes you think I don’t know that?”

* * *

On the third Saturday of October Roman gave Letha and a few friends a ride home from the movies. By now the agitation over Brooke Bluebell had settled. There was no target to which blame could be nailed, no face to the outrage, nothing to be done except the handful of hunters who attempted to track the creature that had left a ghostly lack of trace, nothing to be said except how senseless, utterly senseless it was, and how it just went to show you. Leaving unspoken what was nonetheless agreed: at least she wasn’t from here.

Once it was just the two of them left in the car Roman produced from his blazer the flask of vodka from which he had been taking slugs during the movie and helped himself to another, then held it decisively in Letha’s face. She’d been waving it away all evening with what he considered an appalling lapse in manners. She made no move to take it so he gave it a shake in case it had somehow escaped her attention.

She held up her arms in an X and told him to get over it. “Since when?” he said.

“Since get over it,” she said.

Growing up, Roman and Letha had seen almost nothing of each other; there had been no formal meeting between the branches of their family since the death of Roman’s father and the two of them did not have regular contact before high school. Letha had gone up till then to a private Episcopalian academy but had found that the elitism made her bones ache: Roman did not seriously consider any of the prep schools it would have been logical for someone like him to attend for the simple and unthinkable reason it would have required living away from home. So when they did finally indulge their mutual curiosity it was with the bond of blood but none of the familiarity. Letha was a small and sandy blond girl with distinctively idiosyncratic features that were as far from pretty in the conventional sense as they were from homely, and where Roman was mercurial, Letha was mystical. She possessed a kind of half-step-removed sense of discovery as though she passed through life having just woken from a successful nap. Naturally this polarity drew them only closer—a fact that filled her father with no small disquiet.

Roman made a wounded face. “Have a drink like a civilized person,” he said. “Watch the road,” she said.

Roman merged left onto 443. They entered the mouth of a wooded passage between two hills, and dark branches from either side made a trellis overhead.

“Don’t be uncivilized,” he said. “Can we drop it?” she said.

“We can drop it when you stop being a See You Next Tuesday and have a drink.” “Roman, drop it.”

“What, are you pregnant or something?” he said. She said nothing. He looked at her.

“Shut up,” he said.

She nervously smoothed her hair.

“Shut your lying whore mouth,” he said.

“I … was waiting for the right moment,” she said.

He drank, and pulled suddenly onto the shoulder and stopped the car. Route 443 was a road with many dips and blind curves with regular accidents for that reason.

“Roman, start the car,” said Letha.

He sat with his hands on the wheel, unmoving.

“Maybe I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to be a drama queen,” she said. “Is it Tyler?” he said.

Tyler was a boy Letha had dated briefly in the spring, an utter drip Roman held in just about the regard of a wet towel left on the bed. But now Roman sat looking ahead and in the center of his mind’s eye he saw the other boy while off on the edges there was a dark flickering like a pair of taloned shadow hands slowly wrapping around his face.

“It wasn’t Tyler,” she said. “Now please start the car and stop being a drama queen.” Tyler left his mind but those dark fingertips continued to dance, to taunt, to close. “Who,” he said.

“I don’t want to talk about it unless you start the car.”

He rolled down the window and took the keys from the ignition and dropped them onto the ground outside.

“Who,” he said.

“See? I knew you were going to make a federal case over it.” “Who,” he said.

She folded her arms. “Well, you sound like the world’s dumbest owl,” she said.

He shut his eyes, wanting the shadows to go away, but they didn’t care whether or not his eyes were closed. He opened his eyes and took one hand off the wheel and pressed the horn so it made one long blare.

“Who,” he said. “Stop it, Roman.” “Who,” he said. “Stop it, Roman.”

He centered his vision on his hand on the horn, only distantly hearing it. This is really here, he reminded himself, growing less convinced.

“Stop it, Roman!”

The finger began to lace and he grew less convinced.

Afraid, she tore his hand from the wheel and clasped it hard between her own. “It was an angel,” she said.

The shadow evanesced from his mind’s eye and he grew aware of a pressure, the pressure of her hands on his. Really here.

“It was a what,” he said. “It was an angel,” she said. He was quiet.

“Literally?” he said.

“It was an angel,” she said. He was quiet.

“Tell me about it,” he said.

“How would you talk about dancing to a person without legs?” she said.

“I have legs that won’t quit,” said Roman. But as someone who was by nature a taker he knew when he had taken exactly as much as he was going to get. Though it had never before been so much more and so

much less than what he wanted.

He opened the car door and leaned out and picked up his keys. He took a long drink from the flask and turned the ignition and pulled back onto the road.

“Told your folks?” he said. “They’re … adjusting,” she said.

Roman raised his eyebrows. Imagine that.

“Mom is coming around to where she can even admit it. Dad … Dad wants me to have an abortion.” “Holy cow,” said Roman.

“He thinks it’s all in my head.” Roman offered no opinion.

“But I’m having this baby.” Stated with a calm, nonpartisan, and immovable authority. “Deal with it,” she said.

“I didn’t say anything,” he said. “Deal with it,” she said.

Roman rounded a curve carefully, his drunk driving always much more conscientious when Letha was in the car. Neither spoke for a while as he dealt with it.

She let him. She had not enjoyed hiding this from everyone she loved. Liar! In fact possession of a miracle all to herself had filled her with a private thrill no less than a pack rat who had stumbled across a lost temple of fascinating refuse—it was hers, all hers! But now the time had come to share it; it was no longer hers alone. Annoyingly.

Roman did not reopen the subject, but he did pick up his iPod and put their song on the sound system. Their song was a British pop-rock ballad about a rich girl who sexually slums it with a poor boy in the interest of vacationing among the lower classes. Their mutual appreciation of this song was a private joke between them, being the only members of their own peer group who could relate to the unique position of having been born into irrational privilege. Letha began to hum along and Roman gave the volume a quarter turn up and followed shortly with another.

You’ll never do what common people do

And soon enough the dial could turn no farther and both Roman and Letha sang along with it at full volume, her hair swept from side to side as she danced in the passenger seat and he steered with his knee and pretended to drum the wheel.

You’ll never watch your life slide out of view

They rounded another bend where the vagrant who frequented Kilderry Park was lying in the middle of the road directly in their path. Roman slammed the brakes and the car screeched to a near perpendicular angle before humping to a crass stop. The air was bitter with hot rubber and the radio continued.

because there’s nothing else to do-o-o-o-o

Roman turned off the music and asked Letha if she was okay.

She nodded, looking out at the man. The man was on his back, grimacing and mashing his palms into his temples as though trying to squeeze something out.

“We should help him,” she said.

Roman nodded in disagreement. But there you had it with girls and their notions. He put on the hazard lights.

“Maybe you should stay here,” he said.

They both exited but Letha stood by the car as Roman cautiously approached the man. There was on his shirt a damp bib of vomit and he smelled like the underside of a bridge. Roman asked if he was okay and the man emphatically jerked his head from side to side in indignation over what he heard in place of Roman’s question.

“It’s not right,” said the man.

“Would you like to come with us?” said Letha.

Roman winced. “Calling the paramedics is also an option,” he said.

“I don’t want to see,” said the man in an infantile whine. “I don’t want to se-e-e-e-e tha-a-a-at.” Roman stepped to the side and dialed 911 on his phone as Letha came forward. He tried to stare her

back as the call connected but she knelt over the man. “What’s your name?” she said.

“I don’t know, there’s a guy here on the road, I nearly hit him,” said Roman into the phone. “I think he’s schizophrenic or something.”

The man looked at Letha with terrified incomprehension. The lid of his dead eye twitched.

“What’s your name?” Letha said again, with a preternaturally supple bedside manner like a nun played by Ingrid Bergman.

“Uh, 443,” said Roman, “about two miles south of the White Tower. Right before Indian Creek.”

A look came over the man’s face like there was suddenly something of desperate importance he needed to communicate.

“Ouroboros,” the man whispered. “Is that your name?” said Letha.

“He’s just, uh, he’s out here in the middle of the road freaking out. He really needs some kind of help.” His gaze fell from her face. Tears streamed from one eye.

“Today I have seen the Dragon…” said the man. She held out her hand.

“Don’t—” said Roman.

But the man took her hand and held it, a flower known to be extinct. “I’m Letha,” she said.

“What?” said Roman. “My name?”

He hung up and gently drew Letha away.

“Okay, boss,” he said, “how about we chill out right over here where no one’s gonna makes us roadkill?”

He swallowed his own antipathy and bent to lend the man a hand. The man’s eye met his. The seeing eye like bloody milk, spotlit and then shadowed in the blinking hazards. Roman attempted something like a smile, it was like lifting a thousand pounds overhead. The seeing eye became a thorn that hooked into Roman and the man held up his hands protectively and they fluttered frantic and effete as he screamed with full-throat horror.

“Jesus!” said Roman, leaping back.

The man desperately crab-walked to the side of the road. “YOU!” he screamed. “IT WAS YOU! IT WAS YOU! IT WAS YOU! IT WAS YOU!”

Roman was still and quiet. He felt a tug on his arm; Letha was pulling him to the car. His eyes lingered on the man, who had backed himself into an escarpment and his legs continued pushing uselessly, like a remote control toy commanded by a cruel child.

“I don’t want to see,” he said pitifully to himself, and repeated this appeal in incantation long after the car had disappeared.

They sat in the car in competing silences. As they passed over Indian Creek, Letha looked at Roman. The moonlight on his affectless face like silk gliding over stone. Her hand rested over his on the shift.

A Pattern

Later that night Roman was sitting at the darkened dining room table sipping from the flask and slowly counting the number of crystals that comprised the chandelier—160, he knew well, but the product of 40 fours was considerable comfort to him and its confirmation a soothing process—when those crystals began to glitter from a faint light.

“What are you doing up?” said Roman.

Shelley was filling most of the doorway. She was wearing a shapeless nightgown and emitting a soft glow, an idiosyncrasy of hers when experiencing agitation and anxiety.

“Thirsty?” he said, offering the flask.

She did not move and in her eyes there was the justifiable apprehension over what pyrotechnics habitually erupted in Godfrey House after a period of studied silence.

“I’m fine,” he said unconvincingly. “I’m … just thinking.”

Her glow gently lapped the ceiling through the chandelier like the light in an indoor pool. He shoved back from the table.

“I’ll tuck you in,” he said.

They went up to the attic, where Shelley slept on a stack of king-size mattresses, with another stack of twins crosswise at the foot. Shelley did not have an auspicious relationship with bed frames. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with books and in one corner was an easel and in another an antique astrolabe consisting of concentric brass rings. The ceiling was a firmament of many dozens of glow-in-the-dark star and moon stickers.

Shelley sat on the bed. Roman stood at the astrolabe and placed his fingertip to the rim of the outermost ring and traced an orbit. He regarded the darkening of dust on his fingertip, the abstruse whorls and eddies providing a pattern but not a clue. Outside, there was an owl’s low hoot and Shelley’s light guttered under her gown.

He brushed his finger along his jeans and came over and sat on the edge of her bed, facing away from her. She waited for him to say something.

Softly, he began to hum. She smiled wide and joined in with him. He started the words and she kept the melody.

“This little light of mine,” he sang, “I’m gonna let it shine…”

He turned and ran his finger down Shelley’s cheek, leaving a faint, luminous worm in its wake. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s brush your teeth and change your shoes.”

Peripeteia

On the afternoon of October 29, Roman surprised Peter by passing him a note in English. A month had passed; tonight was the Hunter Moon. No further relationship had developed between them since their earlier meeting, which Peter believed to be for the best. Roman was unstable, like a coin spun on a tabletop: the closer it came to rest, the greater its velocity, now one end up then the other. He was neither heads nor tails. And of all potential outcomes in their continued association nearly none fell outside Peter’s extensive Hierarchy of Shit He Could Live Without.

But then, without warning albeit in keeping with his mercurial nature, Roman handed Peter a piece of folded notebook paper with a disarmingly plain request:

can i watch?

“Are we passing notes, Mr. Godfrey?” said Mrs. Pisarro. “Wouldn’t dream of it, ma’am,” he said.

After the bell rang, Peter approached Roman. He had debated all period and convinced himself that indulging the other boy’s curiosity was the more sensible course than evasion—discouraging him would only egg him on. But in truth his Rumancek blood would not permit him to pass up an opportunity to show off. He said, “Come by around five.”

“Holy shitbird, is that Gypsy butt-pirate asking you out?” said Duncan Fritz. “Eat a tampon, you uncouth mongoloid,” said Roman.

The sky was in a hierarchy of reds when Roman arrived at the Rumanceks’. Peter let him into the trailer, a dense babel of inherited and inventively scavenged furniture and incense and healing stones and Hollywood musical collector plates and figurines of Renaissance masterworks and unreturned library books and a cabinet devoted to the Indian god Ganesh gaudily bordered with Christmas lights like the Virgin of Guadalupe. Roman stopped at the latter, confused. He asked if they were Hindu or whatever.

Peter shook his head. “He’s the god of new beginnings. But I’m not sure if Nicolae ever actually knew that. He would always call him Jumbo and ask him if what he had between his legs was anything like what was on his nose. Nic was a real class act,” he added.

He led Roman into the kitchen and introduced him to Lynda, who was placing a pan of peanut butter cookies in the oven. She had been delighted when Peter informed her the upir would be visiting them after school: since her son would be out for the evening it gave her someone to cook for. She sat the boys at the kitchen table and asked if they’d like milk.

“Sure,” said Roman. “Honey?” said Lynda. “Lactic acid,” said Peter.

“Right right,” she said. She poured Roman a glass of milk and gestured at her own abdomen, spinning the finger. “It does funny things to the tummy,” she explained.

Peter’s eyes flitted out the window to monitor the sunset. He had, Roman now noticed, a general air of

twitchy distraction, rubbing both his biceps like he had a case of the mean reds after smoking his last cigarette.

“So,” said Lynda, “what are your plans after graduation?”

Roman shrugged like it was a question of commensurate consequence to his agenda for the weekend. “I guess my mom’ll bribe my way into somewhere decent.”

“That’s nice,” said Lynda.

Peter’s hand clacked a butter knife on the table independent of any conscious motor command on his part. She laid her hand over his.

“He gets nervous beforehand,” she said. “Hormones.” “I have Xanax,” said Roman.

Peter declined.

“Maybe just enough to wet my whistle,” said Lynda.

Roman took out his tin mint container–cum–apothecary and produced two Xanax, giving one to Lynda. “Does it hurt?” he asked Peter.

Peter shook his head. “You wouldn’t notice if a bus hit you.” “Are you still … you?” said Roman.

Peter looked at him. Guess.

Lynda reached and pinched her son’s rough cheek. “He’s a good boy,” she said, tugging on the flesh between her fingertips with the brutality of perfect love. “He’s his mother’s handsome little honeybun.”

A few minutes before five-thirty the three of them went outside. Lynda held Roman by the door as Peter went forward. He removed all his clothes. He was brown and covered in black densities of hair and his penis was uncircumcised. On the right side of his rib cage there was a tattoo of a letter, a small g.

“What’s the g stand for?” said Roman. “‘Go suck an egg,’” said Peter.

He walked forward undoing his ponytail and his hair fell around his shoulders. It was as though the scent of falling night soothed his shaky nerves and he moved with a grace and authority invested by no lesser power than the earth under his feet. The air was suddenly so pregnant with anticipation of magic and its brother menace that it occurred to Roman somewhat belatedly to ask if they were safe here.

“It’s fine,” said Lynda. “Just stand back.” Roman then snapped his fingers and said, “Darn.” “What?” she said.

“I forgot to bring a Frisbee.”

With shamanic gravity, Peter raised his middle finger. He glanced at the last of the sun puddling into the horizon like red mercury and got down on his knees, head bowed and hair hanging over his face. He was still. He waited for the calling of his secret name. Lynda clutched Roman’s arm. Fetchit sauntered over and sat with one leg splayed, licking himself.

Then there was a spasm in Peter’s shoulders. His toes curled and his fingers clutched the dirt. Lynda’s grip tightened and Peter let out a cry like nothing Roman knew walked this earth. Peter fell to his side, his face contorted as though pulled by a thousand tiny hooks and muscles quivering in a frenzy of snakes under the skin. The cat fled into the trailer. Peter clutched at the pulsing flesh of his abdomen and raked, leaving pulpy red gashes with wet bristle poking through. He gripped the pulp and tore decisively, the flesh coming away with the slurp of a wet suit to reveal a blood-matted vest of fur. Roman put a hand over his nose as a stench of carrion filled the air and the sloppy, ramshackle operation that moments ago had been known as Peter thrashed its hind parts, the lower half kicking free of its man coat. A wet tail protracted and curled. Its howls all the while more plaintive and lupine as a snout emerged through its lips and worked open and shut, its old face bunched around it in an obsolete mask. It rolled onto all fours and rose shaking violently, spraying blood in a mist and divesting itself of the remnants of man coat in a

hot mess.

Now standing before them in the gloaming was the wolf. Roman leaned against Lynda; he had lost his center of gravity. He had not actually known what to expect in coming here tonight, much less that it would reveal to him two essential truths of life: that men do become wolves and that if you have the privilege to be witness to such a transformation it is the most natural and right thing you have ever seen.

“Fuck,” Roman whispered.

The wolf was a large animal, tall and sleek and regal as the moon its queen, possessing the yolk sheen of the newly born and lips curling back to reveal white fangs as it yawned and stretched out its forelegs, rump wiggling in the air. Lynda’s eyes moist with ultimate maternal egotism and Roman weak-kneed with admiring envy of those fangs, white fangs gleaming, gloating over the purest dichotomy of having/not having. Of course the fangs of a werewolf are of an exaggerated length and curvature more typical of the feline family. They are the final say; once the jaws are closed nothing on earth can escape them. Lupus sapiens: the wise wolf. This, Roman, who had lived here all his life, finally saw, is the lord of the forest. You are a serf.

The hurly-burly settled, Fetchit reappeared and inquisitively approached the wolf, which gave the cat a peremptory and aloof sniff before turning its attention to the slop of flesh from which it had been born and burying its snout within with wet gnawing sounds soon following.

“Can I … pet him?” said Roman, somewhat recovered. To the extent he ever would be. “Not while he’s eating,” said Lynda.

“Peter,” said Roman.

The wolf finished its supper and looked over, snout comically wreathed in red pulp, but whether or not there was any recognition in those old eyes it would have been impossible to say. What, however, was with certainty absent was any conventionally canine display of interest or affection. Werewolves, unlike either species of which they are representative, are not pack animals. It defeats the whole point of being a werewolf. This was a wild thing as cosmic and inscrutable as all truly wild things, and having an entire world of smells waiting, it turned and walked intentionally to the trees and with a rustle disappeared.

* * *

Three days after the Hunter Moon, Christina Wendall cut through a wooded path behind her house to the Walgreens to make a secret purchase. Tyler Lane, an eleventh grader, had asked her out this Friday and not only had she defied expectation by agreeing, but she was also planning on doing something to set expectation on its head. Christina did not have that sort of reputation—really her reputation was pretty much the complete opposite—but recent inner portents suggested to her some significant changes were in the tides. People change—who says they can’t? Alexa and Alyssa didn’t buy it, pointing out she still blushed at the word menses. Christina blushed. But a person could change, and if she was to become an important writer of her time she had an obligation to broaden her horizons. So she was a late bloomer, this gave her Character—peripeteia, they called it in drama class, a turning—but now what was needed was Material. The twins had pretty much bloomed when they were ten, so they didn’t understand that. They thought they knew everything, but they didn’t. As far as they knew, she hadn’t even had her first kiss. There were things they didn’t know. At the register the cashier pursed her lips in disapproval but rang Christina’s items silently. Cunt! trilled an outrageous voice within the reaches of Christina’s mind, with such vehemence she had the momentary thrill it might have been audible outside herself.

You see! Who would have had any suspicion a girl who couldn’t say the word menses went around calling people cunts and fat retarded cows in her head? Saucy little bitch! She caught sight of her small smile in the ceiling mirror. She paid her money but it still felt like stealing.

She returned along the same path twisting the plastic bag on her wrist clockwise and counter and saw in a furrow of earth a small rabbit hole. She stopped. It reminded her of the dream. She considered this

another less welcome occult indicator of the turn inside her, the return of a recurring dream she had not had in years. It is a simple dream. She is inside the mill, as she had been once before, in that dark you can feel on both sides of your skin, and something is in here with her. The thing is the same color and smell as the dark. But she knows it’s in here all the same; there’s a difference between a place where you are the only living thing and where you are not, and something in here is alive. And there is only one place to hide: in the dark she can just make out the outline of that great black cauldron keeled to its side. Of course if she doesn’t know what the thing in here is she can’t know what it wants, if there’s even any reason to hide. But it’s a chance she can’t take so she makes her way to the cauldron and puts her hands to the lip and peers in. But what if hiding means there is no place to run? What if there is something worse inside the cauldron? Or if there is nothing in it at all? Real bottomless nothing? But there is a dark thing in this mill with her and she can feel its nonshadow fall on her, it is right behind her now and she doesn’t know what it will want if she faces it. She is paralyzed. She doesn’t know whether to turn and face it or Go Down the Hole.

And then she woke up.

“You can be such a weirdo sometimes you should just tie a ribbon around your skull and walk into the Brain Barn,” Alyssa said. (The Brain Barn was the common nickname for the Neuropathology Lab at Hemlock Acres, which housed three thousand human brain specimens and was an object of great fascination among local youths.)

Well, what of it? Some people had funny dreams. And moments where they felt that every cell in their body was made of cancer, or that when they breathed they breathed out pure oxygen and breathed in cigarette ash. And broke down into hysterical tears at that video on the Internet of the elephant that paints its own portrait, as Christina had recently in the computer lab, for no more articulable a reason than it seemed to her that all nameless sadness she had ever experienced or for that matter existed in the great ethereal matrix of which all life is part was somehow encapsulated in that video transmitted for light amusement. She was a late and mysterious bloomer with a date on Friday with an eleventh grader and a plan to show certain somebodies just how much it was possible for a person to change, so peripeteia and what of it!

As she passed the rabbit hole something else came to view beyond the furrow—an incongruous patch of color—fabric, a shirt. At first she thought it might be a vagrant and she tensed, but … did vagrants wear pink? She crept a few steps to peek. It was a girl. Lying on the dried leaves, near Christina’s age, a little older. Face pretty but smeared clownishly with mascara and body glitter as though she hadn’t washed off last night’s makeup, and whoever she was Christina did not know her from school, though she had some inkling of recognition. The girl’s eyes were open and staring at the sky with a glazed, insensate look, what Christina would imagine a person hopped up on PCP would look like if Christina knew exactly what PCP was, except the twins’ dad occasionally had a cautionary story of people hopped-up on it.

Christina stepped forward and started to ask if the girl was all right but didn’t finish. She dropped the bag containing one spiral notebook, one Pilot Precise pen, one diet iced tea, and one box of condoms.

The girl was on the ground, twigs and leaf bits caught up in her splayed hair, arms twisted at all the wrong angles; her pink shirt had an image of a lewdly frosted cupcake on the chest and her skin and lips similar in hue to rubber cement, and, as had been obscured from Christina’s vantage: the girl’s lower half was missing.

Christina sagged against a tree trunk. No sir. Obviously this was a gag, some kind of cheap prop. It didn’t even look real after a second look. Halloween on its way and some guys got this from the mall and left it here for some stupid little girl just like her to stumble on and completely freak out. And she had probably seen the horrible thing on a wall display somewhere and that was where she “recognized” her from but still fell for it. Probably a camera on her as we speak. Okay, if that’s your game. She was making

a few changes, here was a golden opportunity.

“Oh,” she said experimentally to the torso, “you gave me a real scare there.” She talked in the suggestive, wide-eyed tones of pornography. Which she wasn’t personally familiar with, but sometimes the twins imitated. “Ooh, you look a little pale. Do you need … mouth to mouth?”

She was greatly pleased with her own performance. The unseen conspirators somewhere in the trees getting a real bang for their buck. Well, hold on to your hats, fellas. She got on her knees, flushed at her own daring—what a little slut!

“Gosh,” she said, “you sure have pretty lips.”

She lowered her mouth to the dummy’s. The dummy’s mouth was moist and feculent like if you have ever had the unfortunate but irresistible impulse to smell a compost jar. Christina fell back, gagging. It was then that she caught movement in the gray-white gore of the lower abdomen, a pulsing that at first she thought was something trying to push its way out. But then it hit her it was actually lots and lots of little pulsing feeding things that were not trying to emerge; this was the last thing they wanted.

* * *

Who am I? What’s my dog in this fight?

I’m the killer.

Boo.

PART II

NUMINOSUM

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 1005