Hunger of the Wolf (23 page)

Were forelegs of a wolf, yet he resembled

Himself, what he had been—the violent

Gray hair, face, eyes, the ceaseless, restless state

Of drunken tyranny and hopeless hate.

It's hard to tell whether the werewolf is a victim or a monster, isn't it? For many years I had a recurring dream, though it has lessened
since I met your mother. In this dream I cannot tell whether I am chasing or being chased, I am just a running wolf. And that seems to be the same as in Gilgamesh and Ovid: Are we outlaws? Or are we poor shepherds?

The earliest records of werewolves were written by a French historian named Giraldus Cambrensis. He never doubted that encounters with werewolves were real.

Is such an animal to be called a brute or a man? A rational animal appears to be far above the level of a brute; but who will venture to assign a quadruped, which inclines to the earth, and is not a laughing animal, to the species of a man? Again, if anyone should slay this animal, would he be called a homicide?

I have always been surprised by how much compassion the commentators feel for men like us. Nonetheless, our inclusion among the human race has not always been a given. The most famous werewolf in France was a young man named Jean Grenier, who lived in the sixteenth century. He confessed to killing more than fifty children. The president, or judge of the case, refused to believe that Grenier was a lycanthrope: “The president went on to say that lycanthropy and kuanthropy were mere hallucinations, and that the change of shape existed only in the disorganized brain of the insane, consequently it was not a crime that could be punished.” The president sentenced the boy to life within the local monastery. He did not enjoy his subsequent life. He began by gorging on a bloody heap of offal and ended without being able to look anyone in the face. He died at twenty years of age.

There are dozens of other legitimate records. I honestly don't know what to make of most of them. They may be something. They may be nothing. I
followed every trace, every rumor, into the Amazon, into Haiti, into Malaysia, the Côte d'Ivoire, the Congo, up the Zambezi, and down the Mississippi. The stories would lead me to some place, to the woods where children had seen a werewolf centuries before, to a hill where townsfolk had supposedly hung a wolfman, to a dark prairie where a hunter had been eaten alive by our kind. Always the same question came to me when I got where I was going: What had I been expecting? What had I been looking for? There were just places. Woods, a hill, a prairie. I found no insight, only landscape.

The medical records are even less satisfying, though they're much clearer. The condition of lycanthropy has been well documented. In the second century AD the Greek physician Marcellus of Side saw dozens of lycanthropes. The prescribed treatment was bleeding to the point of fainting. That seemed to be the cure for pretty much everything back then. In modern medical literature, roughly fifty cases have been reported, although this number may be low because patients receive the diagnosis only after having passed through a period where they believe they are wolves, which means that only patients who have a moment of clarity, becoming capable of identifying their symptoms, appear on the record. I think it's safe to say that many more of these poor fellows simply remain in the delusion that they are wolves. Many others cannot remember what they became.

There are variations of lycanthropy, too. An interesting one, recently reported, is the case of the patient who believes he can turn others into wolves. The coexistence of lycanthropy and Cotard's syndrome has also been reported in more than three instances. Cotard's syndrome is a disease in which the patient believes that he is already dead and thus is immortal. It's a nihilistic delusion, and it can even go so far as the delusion that the flesh is rotting off the patient's bones,
rendering him invulnerable. In these cases, the lycanthropy comes as a punishment from God, as externalized sexual expression, as inferiority complex, as a form of identification with a despised aggressor, as the expression of primitive id-instincts, as an evasion of feelings of guilt. None of this applies to you or me, of course. They're not wolves, these people. They just think they are. Still, you may find their stories interesting and/or valuable at some time in the future.

I met several wolf-raised children. I thought they might help me understand the fusion of the human and the wild. A girl in Azerbaijan disappeared from her home for twenty-one days when she was four years old. She told her rescuers that she had been cared for by wolves who fed her and kept her warm. Anthropologists have verified her story, but when I spoke with her, she had been telling it for so long, to so many strangers, that the story had spun itself into a myth she told herself, so it was useless.

Shamdeo, the wolfboy of India, was not useless. Mother Teresa was caring for him in Calcutta when I met him, but the poor fellow had been discovered living among wolves outside Sultanpur in the Punjab. I spent an hour with him. He had sharpened his teeth on bones. He lurked in the corners, in the shadows. He was suspicious of everyone but the priest who took care of him. There was something of us in the dark-eyed boy but he would never say what. I realized that, even if he knew, he couldn't tell me whatever it was I wanted to know. I gave up searching after Shamdeo. He was as close as I was ever going to get, and it was nowhere. At least I could set up a small house and an annuity for the poor fellow.

There's one more incident it's my duty to tell you about. I'm not sure what it means but I'm sure it means something, and maybe you'll figure it out someday. Maybe some piece of the puzzle will fall
into your hands that never fell into mine. It concerns your sister. You may or may not remember her adoption. Your sister's biological father was a man named Pi-Lin, a Chinese official. Her adoption came shortly after your grandfather died, and before I began my investigations into our condition. We were still in Alberta after your grandfather's funeral. The caretaker came over with the message. It was extraordinary. A man I had met only once before was asking me to bring your mother to Hong Kong immediately. We flew out the next day. A very nervous middleman took us by junk into Victoria Harbor. Pi-Lin met us in the harbor, leaping into our boat. He had a baby in his arms. That was your sister.

Something terrible was about to happen to him, but he wouldn't be more specific. He was to be “reeducated.” I asked him whether he would ever come back. He said that it would be sensible to assume that he was already dead. He showed me his delicate short-fingered hands and asked me if I thought they would survive a season making pig iron. I didn't know what to say. He told us your sister's name, which sounded like “Poppy” to us, and Pi-Lin smiled and said Poppy would be a fine name for her. He took one last look at his daughter in your mother's arms, and said, “It's just painted skin.” Then he boarded his boat and disappeared into the Cultural Revolution.

The story “Painted Skin” comes from a collection called
Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio,
by Songling Pu. It's a story of secret monsters. In it, a man named Wang meets a beautiful young runaway on the street and brings her home. By accident one evening, he returns home, to his library, and sees a monster spreading out human skin on the bed, painting it. The monster throws on the skin like a cloak and becomes the girl. Shocked, Wang runs to tell his wife and a Taoist priest. The priest tells him to hang a flybrush
on the library door so that the monster won't be able to escape. The monster bursts past the door and rips out Wang's heart anyway. The priest pursues and manages to kill the monster with a wooden sword, but he cannot raise the dead man. Only a filthy and destitute maniac raving by the side of the road has that power, the priest says. So Wang's wife begs the madman, who beats and curses her. Finally, when she refuses to leave without the cure for death, he spits and tells her to swallow his spit if she wants her husband back. She finally chokes it down and later that night, as she's preparing her husband's body, a lump rises in her throat. She throws up a heart, which falls into her husband's chest cavity. Her husband revives, with no more harm done to him than a little scar on his chest.

I'm unable to shake the thought that Pi-Lin meant something by quoting this story. Had Pi-Lin seen? Had he somehow known about our monstrosity? If he knew, why didn't he say? Or was it all coincidence, misunderstanding, overthink? This is hard to explain, Ben, but part of having a deep, unbelievable secret is the sense that everybody knows but isn't talking about your deep, unbelievable secret. That's one of the hardest fantasies to lose, the selfish idea that everybody is thinking about you.

I set up a paper mill in Shenzhen, shipping timber from Oregon and British Columbia to be processed into glossy paper and shipped back, and it did turn out to be significantly profitable, I must say, but I was doing it as an excuse to have contact with the Party, and that was a failure. The economic future of China was obvious by then. The port at Shenzhen was like seeing a wonder of the world come into existence, larger than dreams. They won't be giving away their daughters anymore, I thought the first time I saw it. I told the series of apologetic officials that I wanted to deal with Pi-Lin.
They claimed that no one of that name had ever existed. I insisted he did. They blamed the destruction of records during the Cultural Revolution. After much pressing, they admitted that there may have been an official by that name who may have been reeducated. The problem was how thoroughly he had been reeducated. They probably really didn't know. At the end, I again found only a blank.

That's all I have. I've written all my disappointments down in the hopes that you won't have to repeat them. I believe that every person is a creature of inheritance. Life happens between what we've been given and what we leave behind. It's true for everybody but it's doubly true for us. I think I've done my duty. I think my old dad would think I've carried the bucket without spilling too much. But I hoped that I could give you an answer about who you are, who we are, and maybe even why we are. I can't.

At least I can offer you this. Don't fear our nature. That's what it's so necessary for you to know. What it takes some time to understand is that being a wolf is better than being a man. Wolves don't kill things for no reason. Wolves are loyal or they go alone. Wolves don't hide from themselves. I'm not sure that helps. I'm coming up short on wisdom. Maybe this: When you're a man, be a man. When you're a beast, be a beast. Find a woman who can live with both.

Your loving father

As Ben read, his heart fluttered up to his tonsils. A joke? No, he didn't know his father well enough. And besides, it was too detailed, the weird old poems and the medical records. As he read, Ben found himself remembering the time his sister had run away. Before they had sent her to boarding school in Switzerland. The servants had been zigzagging like
pinballs through the house, weeping for their jobs, and for the lost child. The police came to the door, knowing nothing, taking statements, asking questions. Nobody asked Ben, but Ben knew that his sister loved to play along the abandoned train tracks. So that is where he went. The fierce beams of his flashlight had arrowed intermittently through the forest, through the swallowing blackness. Just as he expected, she was sitting under pine branches by the abandoned tracks, and had brought with her a small group of her stuffed animals. She whispered to him when he arrived. She said she wanted to see if the stuffed animals spoke to each other at night. He had lain down beside her. Stuffed tigers and dogs and bears and parrots and wolves. When he had brought his sister back in the morning, the blubbering, grateful servants all looked like they wanted to smack him in the mouth.

The last page fell accidentally from Ben's tingling fingers. The surprise was not nearly so rough as it should have been. He had always suspected. Not a wolf. Not a wolf exactly. But he had always known. There are worse secrets.

His parents were waiting in the garden for his reaction. The bone moon, near-full, a faint watermark in the vast longing it overlooked, posed like a beacon over them.

“Are you done looking?” Ben asked.

“We'll be here, my dear,” his mother said.

“We'll have every weekend,” George added quickly, quickly understanding.

Ben shrugged. “I've always wanted to know what's in our basement.”

*  *  *

Ben's material introduction to lycanthropy followed two nights later. The basement, with its labyrinth of cages and restraint devices, was more
horrible than the cartoonish reality of his father's transformation. His mother calmed the beast, the prelude to civilization.

The next month, George and Ben shared the cage. At first, wolf-George was leashed to the wall out of reach of his son, but within a few hours Ben understood that his father knew him for his own even as wolf. They brooded together in the night, the wolf's head on Ben's lap, joint musk and warmth. George's howl reverberated shockingly in the echo chambers of the concrete cellar. Ben came to love the sound.

Month after month, Ben waited in the cage. Each moon began with the exciting possibility—today I may be transformed—then, after his father's appalling agonies, there was only the dreariness, the dirt floor, the leashes, three whole days with nothing to do. Terror and love sloped into boredom. In his disappointment, Ben began sketching in notebooks he carried down to the cage with him. He began sketching the wolf, its suppleness, its power, and its strangeness. He drew the wolf's head on his lap. The bars, the leashes, the restraints. He took to studying the momentary agony of his father's transformation, attempting to put that fury onto paper, to convert the memory of the sudden fluidity into an image. Drawing was a distraction from the question that swelled with each passing month. Why wasn't he turning into a wolf? With the lowering of the moon, his father's eyes would look up from his rehumanized face with a mangled hope: This time? No. Then they would dress and leap up to the kitchen, where Lavinia would soothe their disappointment with bacon and oatmeal.