Saint Peter’s Wolf (21 page)

Tina would not leave me alone with my fears. She kept brushing against me as she passed, and when at last it was time to go she gave me a look that verged on resentment.

I was about to leave the office when Dr. Eng called from the Medical Center. She was a woman with an efficient manner, and a gentle voice that disguised a mind like a drill. They were seeking a consultant in a very difficult case. Surely I must have heard of it. Several other professionals had been called in, because it was hoped that some sort of description of the assailant might be formed if the patient could be both sedated and induced to talk simultaneously.

“I really don't know how I can help.”

“But you have experience in such matters. We can use you.”

I wanted to say: please don't ask me to do this.

On Christmas Day I walked with Johanna to Land's End and watched the surf.

And that night I ran again, this time feeding on several cats. It was easy work, running through the dark with my ears flattened, earth streaming beneath me, branches snapping with my weight as I leaped to run down yet another quarry.

I bounded through the cool night with more-than-human joy.

Twenty-Three

Eileen Ashby opened the door and let me into the house which now seemed to echo at every whisper. She was calm, but it was not the calm of someone who had anticipated this day for years. She seemed weary, and as if all feeling, all thought, was a burden to her.

“I'm so sorry,” I choked.

She was a strong woman, and even in her trance of grief saw that her sorrow could only reawaken my own.

She had taken on some of her brother's dignity. She had always been like him, but I could only see it now.

She left me briefly, and when I was alone I felt how truly foreign to us a house is. The chairs, the carpets, the hammered copper vase, were all inert objects. In their unfeeling lumpishness they were almost enemies to the spirit. Without the presence of a human being to love the walls, a house was a wood-and-plaster prison.

Eileen reappeared. “He wanted you to have this. It was one of the last things we discussed.”

She pressed into my hands the small Italian she-wolf. I clasped the bronze, unable to begin to form my thanks. While Dr. Ashby was alive, he had given me cause for faith. Humans were frail, and cruel, but they knew how limited they were, and in this they achieved a glory. How else could a human being conceive of beauty, like this small wolf, except by knowing that it is a beauty a man cannot possess?

Most men. One man alive did possess such beauty.

Her teeth were bared to warn away the faltering step in the forest. She had young, and she would kill.

It began at the cemetery in El Cerrito. Eileen was tall and pale, her face within the black veil nearly fading into a phantom. The winter day was warm, the sun igniting the green grass, and only in the shadow of trees did the cold slip through the body.

Dr. Ashby had known the finest minds, and the cemetery was crowded. Photographers kept a respectful distance. There was a congressman, and a university chancellor, and two Nobel laureates. In the distance was San Francisco Bay, and the elegant lines of the Golden Gate Bridge, and the waterbugs of tankers surging west.

The service was simple. Even the Lord's Prayer seemed created for just this afternoon. Perhaps I should have been surprised that Dr. Ashby had elected such a traditional service for himself, but Ashby had always been beyond me.

As we all began to leave, car doors thudding, engines starting up, Dr. Page, my old psychiatrist friend, took my arm. It was a grievous loss, he said, and I agreed, and then we could say no more, enjoying each other's companionable silence. Since it was he who had told me of Dr. Ashby's stroke, I felt events fold together sadly but neatly.

Then my future began.

Dr. Page took my arm again, and said, “There's Orr.”

The conspiratorial tone he used should have alerted me, but I was not thinking quickly.

“If I were you,” said Page, “I would see a lawyer.”

Orr was very blond in the sunlight. I thought, for the first time: he must dye it.

“He's been telling lies about you, Byrd.”

Orr was smiling down at a covey of women in black and gray. His teeth flashed.

I must have asked a question, because when Page continued, he said, “He says you're under investigation for some sort of crime. FBI, or some other organization like that. He's vague. Obviously doesn't know what he's talking about. But he tells everybody.”

The carefully tended lawn made a crisp, ungrasslike crinkle under my black shoes.

“He won't shut up about it. At the tennis courts, hosting out-of-town guests at the Fairmont—everywhere. Says a big investigator out of Washington is after you. Hints at falsified tax documents, plagiarism. Rolls his eyes and says you're in trouble.”

“He used to be my friend.”

“People who don't know you, or who don't know you well …”

I tried to make a nonchalant remark, but it came out like a cough. “He hates me. Cherry still cares for me, and I'm beginning to take away his clients, even his secretary. I think he may get over it. But this … He has no cause to do this.”

Dr. Page weighed his next words. “I used to play tennis with Orr every Tuesday noon.” He pressed the lawn with his black shoe. “You can learn a person's character by playing a game with him. Orr is a spiteful man. He wants, and he gets. Anything not a part of that sweeping movement angers him. He isn't really very complicated. That's why he's considered such a good therapist. He finds understanding easy. It isn't—I imagine he's wrong much of the time. But he thinks it's easy, and he seems to convince his clients.”

He looked me in the eye as men rarely look at each other. Dr. Page, competitive and detached, was not an especially warm man but he was, I saw, a good psychiatrist. “He's trouble, Ben. He's uttering slander. If I were you I'd break his jaw. Or sue his ass.”

I was trembling, and not only my fingers. The large muscles of my thighs, my hamstrings, even my bones, were humming with a powerful emotion. It was so strong I could not recognize it for a few heartbeats, as a man might not recognize the sound of an avalanche.

It was anger. It was the anger I had felt toward Orr for a long time. But it was not the clumsy anger of a man. It was a bright, nearly joyful desire for blood. Here in this naked afternoon, I found myself smiling.

I had a surprise for Orr.

Dr. Eng wore a white lab coat. She was courteous and offered me a cup of coffee. It was the sort of courtesy a matter-of-fact professional adopts to keep from seeming blunt.

“I really would like to begin,” I said, meaning that I would really like to get it over with.

Dr. Eng was pleased. She whisked the door open and hurried along beside me. “The other consultants have done no good,” she said.

“So I'm the bottom of the barrel.”

“I remember your work. You are high on my list, Dr. Byrd.”

Earlier that morning I had read the contents of the manila folder in her hand, the pages held in place by a metal tongue. The various scrawls had been familiar. I knew all of the consultants. They were all very capable, although naturally some were definite in their diagnoses, and others tentative. The word “trauma” occurred in all of them, modified by various adjectives, “profound” and “severe” among them. As in many psychological workups, these gifted people were, in elaborate syntax, stating the obvious. I doubted I would be more successful than they had been. What brought me here was partly a residual sense of duty. But mostly, almost entirely, it was raw curiosity.

I wanted to see the woman I had raped. A man with any humanity left would not have walked down this green-tiled corridor. I felt, still, quite human. But I was like a radiation victim, or a leper: the disintegration was deadly but painless. I did not fully realize even as I straightened my tie in the reflection of a glass door, and admired my looks in passing, that I was a monster.

The patient had passed through a stream of psycho-sedatives. Ataractics had not soothed her from her wide-eyed terror of everything that moved. The hydroxyzines, the meprobromates, the thioxanthenes had all danced against the armor of whatever had captured her. She had not experienced even a minute of normal sleep, not even a moment of normal unconsciousness. Scopalamine, often used as a truth serum, had been as effective as soda water.

She had cringed from all nurses, babbling, unable to respond to any individual. Family and friends meant nothing to her. She had ignored everyone, except to cringe from them. I knew all this from the history. But what I did not know was what sort of woman I had chosen as my night-mate.

What, I wondered, did she look like?

We paused outside the gray door. Dr. Eng surprised me by putting her hand on the knob and waiting. “I don't like to visit her,” she said.

I must have raised an eyebrow.

“I have never seen anything like it,” she added.

As soon as the door was open a sound like gagging reached the corridor. The room was too warm. There was the bleached scent of linen and antiseptic.

A woman in a classic straitjacket of beige canvas gnashed at the air. Her hair was bound to keep it out of her face, but what I had not been prepared to see was the sight of her salivating, drooling, glistening with spit, and with tears.

I had expected her to cringe at the sound of our steps, and she did. Grunting, she fought away from us, and then rolled her eyes back at me. The sound she made then is the worst sound I have ever heard a human utter, a scream so horrendous both Dr. Eng and I found ourselves frozen in place.

The scream was endless, deafening. It was more than a scream. It was the cry of a psyche torn in two.

And it was directed at me.

We did not speak again until we sat in a conference room. Dr. Eng put the folder on the table with unsteady hands. We both sat, and she plucked a pen from her breast pocket. She let it fall to the table, and only then looked at me. “She's never done that before. Not a scream like that. Never before.”

“It looks as though, after a preliminary examination, I really won't be able to work with her very well.”

Dr. Eng considered me. “She's getting worse.”

My desire to make light of it should have warned me. I was not merely using humor to defuse an ugly experience. I was, profoundly, without compassion.

“I'm glad I don't know what actually happened to her,” said Dr. Eng. “Something very bad.”

“Apparently so.”

“What do you think it must have been?”

I confessed ignorance.

“You read the police doctor's report.”

“I deliberately avoided it, actually. It was all too upsetting.” It was unsettling more than upsetting. It might begin to tell me how close detectives were to discovering who I was. I did not want to know. I wanted to imagine that I had weeks yet, perhaps even longer. If there was a threat to me, I did not want to know about it.

“Wolf hairs, Dr. Byrd. In her vagina they found very coarse wolf hairs. You read in the newspaper some of the theories.”

“No, I've stopped reading the paper.”

This did not surprise her. Many therapists avoid newspapers. They hear enough bad news every day, and one's clients keep one informed of really important disasters. “They have an interesting theory. That a psychotic used a turkey baster to insert lupine semen into her vaginal sheath.”

I nearly laughed. “This is imaginative journalism. I'm sorry I didn't read it.”

“You saved yourself a useless theory. There is no question about it. This woman was attacked by a large, wolf-like animal. She will never have a normal life again.”

The sight of the victim had confused me. She looked so wretched I could not conceive of mating with her, and I was puzzled at my emotional deadness. I lacked even the most casual, professional sympathy. I disguised this lack, however, expressing concern over her state.

Dr. Eng looked hard at me. “It would have been better for her to be killed.”

That night, for the first time, it did not happen to me as I slept. I was fully awake, turning off the VCR. I had just watched
The Heiress
, one of my favorite movies, and as I pushed the on/off switch and slipped the tape into its cover I felt a pain like a cracked tooth. Very much like a cracked tooth, except that it was within every single bone in my body.

The tape clattered to the floor. My hands itched. Then my metacarpals seemed to burst, and crawl beneath my skin like beetles. I could see them crawling under my skin. My body burned, my skin writhed. I fell to the floor, hunching my body, my skin seeming to wither and split in a hundred places. My eyes seemed to dry in my head and trickle like salt from between my lids.

I was on my feet again, staggering, bounding from wall to wall, crawling toward the bathroom. I was about to vomit, I thought, but I had misinterpreted the churning, rising swell from within my gut.

The worst sensation was the pain in my teeth. Each tooth was yanked from the bone, twisting as it was pulled. Each molar exploded. But even as the pain was worst I experienced a joy so deep my heart nearly stopped. This was not pain. This was triumph.

I slumped to the carpet. The sensation was a bright explosion in my brain, brighter than any flag, the pennon of a battle won.

I snapped at the air, and the sound of my teeth was loud and bright. I fell to my feet—that was how it seemed, that standing was an act of falling toward the ceiling. When I was on the floor again I no longer sought the bathroom. This house had nothing for me. My breath was loud, each exhalation a growl.

It was only when I was padding toward the back door that I fully understood what had happened. It was over. It was that simple. An easy triumph. Because for all the pain—and it had been considerable—it all had been so unexpected, and so quick, that the power I now felt was more than compensation for it.