The Wild

by Whitley Strieber

  He returned to the living room. "Hawk woman, owl boy, wolf man. And wolf man has been stolen." He ground out a laugh, dropping down to the couch. "You think I don't know what I'm doing—it happened over there." He pointed straight to the spot where Bob had changed. "That's where he entered the wolf clan."

  She was astonished, excited. He was either very clever or schooled in disciplines hidden to her own eyes. "What do you mean, 'entered'?"

  "The wolf clan is dying. They are calling all the ones whose spirits will help them. The people who have a special affinity for them. The Wolf People. Do you understand?"

  "No."

  "Everybody implies a certain kind of animal. Each human soul contains a little dust from some other species."

  "We're descended from apes."

  "It's much more complicated than that. Remember the philosopher Whitehead? He stressed that there is no 'nature.' Only details. Millions upon millions of details. Concentrate on any one, or any group, and your whole reality changes to support your new focus of attention."

  "I thought you were an Indian. What in the world does Whitehead have to do with it? What about Black Elk or somebody like that? Chief Dan George?"

  "We get what we can where we can. Injun Joe's been a beggar for a while now. I'm from a culture that went under."

  This was leading nowhere. "What do you want?"

  "I want to help you understand what happened to your husband. From my own understanding, from the cultural tradition I represent, I might have a few answers."

  He was beginning to annoy her. "So, I'm waiting."

  "You're very impatient."

  "I don't think you know what you're doing. You made a lucky guess but now you're ad-libbing. You probably aren't even an Indian."

  "I'm a full-blooded Mohican."

  That answer chilled her. She had been taunting him for more information; she had not believed that he was an imposter.

  "The last of the Mohicans?"

  He gave her a long look. "The last one around here. I was a Mohawk, but what the hell, there's a family tradition that we were Mohicans until the Mohawks stole my great-grandfather eight times removed. So why not? Let old James Fenimore Cooper turn over in his grave if he wants to, I don't give too much of a damn."

  Once again he had surprised her. You thought you had captured the measure of this man, only to discover a moment later that your conclusions were still wrong, but in a new way.

  "I could use a beer, if you've got any."

  Her mind went to Bob, Bud in hand, reading a novel in Sunday-afternoon sunlight. "Help me get him back."

  "Why don't you join him?"

  "Don't be ridiculous!" The way the Indian looked at her made her furious. "I have a child to raise!"

  The Indian laughed. "Him too."

  "I want help, not this superstitious nonsense! People don't just turn into animals. That's ridiculous, it doesn't. . . happen."

  His eyes were twinkling. "Have it your way, white eyes. But I'd like to keep talking about reality for a second, if you don't mind."

  She closed her eyes. He went on: "I was trying to tell you about the fact that the animal kingdom is dying, and because it is dying, it is beginning to take heroic measures to save itself. That's why the spirit of the wolves beguiled your husband. The animal kingdom is after the mind of man."

  "I want my husband back!"

  He leaned forward, clasped his hands between his knees. "So, follow him. You're his squaw."

  "Crap!"

  "Well, I don't mean it in a demeaning way. It would take great courage to follow him. He is a hero. You would be a heroine if you did it."

  It was time for a family conference. She went in and woke Kevin up. He was flushed with sleep, his hair tangled, his smooth skin warm and sweet. "I don't know what he is," she told him, "but he's saying things that make a kind of bass-ackwards sense. He thinks we should try to find Dad."

  Kevin regarded him down the shadows of the hall. "He looks like an old drunk, Mom."

  "Well, he's most definitely that. But he also knew the truth about Dad, from the very first. He has the idea that the wolves are in such desperate trouble that they sort of seduced Dad into becoming one of them in order to gain the power of the human mind."

  Her son's hand came into her own. "I wonder what the truth is about Prometheus," Kevin said. "What did he steal, to make the gods so mad? Was it only fire?"

  "Wasn't that enough?"

  "My guess is that he stole their inner fire. Their godliness. That's the point of the myth. And the wolves want to steal our inner fire, our humanity."

  "Is that bad?"

  "Mother, the animals are beautiful." Squaring his shoulders, he went into the living room.

  The Indian got to his feet. "You are a young brave. I salute you!"

  "Hey, Mom—"

  "Let it go. Just listen to what he has to say." Catching a glimpse of herself in the dark window, she saw the sharpness of her face, that angular, questing shadow that seemed to fight her beauty, but was in fact its center. Her psyche had claws:

  she remembered last night, waiting in the middle of the bed for Bob, waiting like a wolf in the secret dark, to devour him with her demands. Wolf woman.

  "You know the old idea of types? In the West, it used to be thought that there were seven types of personality. There are more than seven types! A type for every beast in the animal kingdom. We are reflections of the whole of reality. Among us there are shrew types, porcupine types, owl types, frog types, lion and zebra types, eagle types. On and on. Often people change types when they get dogs. That's why old people and their old dogs look alike. A bulldog owner becomes a bulldog type. You have to understand the universe as it really is. A hall of mirrors, and we are the mirrors. I hate to sound like a broken record, but I would be able to do this better if I had a beer in my hand."

  He was and wasn't a fraud. She got him a Bud. They'd been out. When had she bought more? She didn't remember doing it. But there were also three new Lean Cuisines in the freezer, some apples and grapefruit in the fridge, and another half gallon of Tropicana Premium OJ. She'd done the shopping automatically, sometime in the black struggling hours.

  "Can you dance, boy?"

  "I can waltz."

  "That isn't dancing. What's dancing is what attracts spirits. Ghost dancing." He began to shake, leaning from foot to foot. "You have to jiggle your insides so your soul jiggles. The spirits hear that and they get curious. They're like fish that way, coming up when you jiggle the bait. Only be careful, because your soul is the bait."

  Kevin started the same movement. The man began to chant, "eaah, eaah, eaah eaah." He repeated the simple rhythm, his eyes closed. Then he had a little packet in his hands, made up of fur and bones and bits of skin. "Wolf medicine," he said. "Very powerful. Medicine of the Thunder Wolf."

  For fifteen minutes they danced. Occasionally the man went around in a little circle, hopping and chanting. Once he whooped. He took a small rattle from his pocket and shook it. He handed the wolf medicine to Kevin, took it back, handed it over again.

  Finally he stopped and took a long pull on his beer. "They aren't coming," he said. "My magic's not powerful enough. I could hear them laughing, though."

  "Who?"

  "The wolf clan. They're very happy. I don't want to upset you, but it looks to me like they've got him for good."

  A rocket blasted into the center of her gut and exploded with phosphorus fire. "Nobody got him for good! He's mine, do you hear that! He is mine and I am going to have him back. My God, Bob was one of the gentlest, most humane people I've ever known. He was this boy's father. He's ours. I'll curse the whole species of wolf unless they give him back to me."

  "Stealing's never a good idea, I guess."

  "Get out of here, you old idiot! You're like some quack with a fake cancer cure. And if you tell the papers that the wolf is really Bob, I will come after you and personally kill you, and believe me, I will do it slowly."

  He smiled, the w
hole bottom half of his face cracking open in a paroxysm of black pits, gnarled stumps, and yellow teeth. "What will you use, the claw or the tooth?"

  Shaking like a disturbed longleg spider, she guided him to the door. "Get out."

  "Thanks for the swallow of beer."

  She slammed the door behind him. Kevin came and put his arm around her waist. That felt awfully good. Now if only Bob was standing on her other side . . .

  "I'm going to find your father and bring him home and turn him back into a man."

  "Yes, Mom."

  "You'll help me?"

  "Mom, of course I will."

  She told him how close she had been to him earlier. "He's been hurt, he's all scruffy. The last I saw of him, he was heading for the far West Village."

  They made bacon and eggs and coffee together, and opened the fresh orange juice. Sitting at the kitchen table, in the thin light of dawn, they laid plans, gardens and castles and clouds of plans, to go down the labyrinth that had claimed husband and father, and lead him back to his humanity.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE STREETS OF NEW YORK ARE ALLEGEDLY NEVER quiet, but they were certainly quiet tonight. An occasional siren wailed, mist billowed, shadows moved behind windows. After seeing the Post extra Bob understood why: this city of seven million lethal human creatures was stifled with fear. The beast of apocalypse prowled its streets. Ancient terrors were invoked. All was quiet.

  To Bob, slinking along hurt and cold and famished, it seemed absurd. In his present mood he would gladly have let a child kill him. Smelling Cindy so close had been too keen a sorrow. He could bear no more of this. As he paced the banks of the Hudson, he contemplated jumping from one of the ruined piers and bringing this whole bizarre experience to an end.

  The city around him could not have seemed more oppressive or unfriendly. He had ho way of explaining himself, not even in his own mind. His only thought was that ours is an age at the far limit of time, and it is at limits and extremes that the impossible can happen. Or maybe the mysterious fifth force that physicists speculate about had something to do with it. Maybe it was a disease, psychological or otherwise.

  He stood looking down at the waters. They were black and smelled of creosote. Lapping and sighing beneath the pier, the river surged in its course. Far out, a magnificent yacht moved in stately passage, its portholes all alight, the sound of its engines coming faintly on the wind.

  Bob inhaled, almost believing that he could still smell Cindy's special odor. People's smells were as distinctive as their faces or fingerprints. Were there two smells exactly alike? He suspected not. They hung in layers in the streets of the city, millions of them. He had just noticed this, and was beginning to be able to tell them apart.

  He looked down at the water again. How would it feel to die in that murk? Would he struggle, or just go to sleep? It might be a painful death, indeed, like the death of smothering. Once when he was ten, another boy had smothered him in a plastic shower cap, a large, vicious boy. To this day he remembered the gnawing agony.

  And the water was cold. He did not know how this miserable body might react to that. Normally he shunned even slightly cool swimming pools. Cold showers, cold days, snow sports were all abhorrent to him.

  He could see things floating in the water, big, amorphous things, like great masses of sewage. Doubtless that's what they were. So he would not only drown in the river, he would drown in sewage.

  His ears back, his tail down, in his anguish he snapped at the air.

  He smelled Cindy again, this time much stronger, as if she was somewhere nearby. It was the perfume of her spirit, this, or the trembling scent of memory. Until he had been blocked by this new body from his relationship with her, he had not understood just how much a part of him she had become.

  Then he heard a noise, a tapping on the pier. Figures approached, moving silently side by side, by their smells a man and a heavily scented person, probably a woman. She was so powdered and perfumed that her real smell was almost obscured. There was a faint underlying odor of pus and scabs. He was fresher, the scent of healthy sweat, the remains of deodorant put on many hours ago, a touch of Afta still clinging to his face. The blue odor of oiled metal was chief among those he noticed coming from the woman's purse. He knew she had a pistol hidden there.

  There was a quick round of bargaining between them, obviously further to an earlier conversation.

  "This ain't exactly a hotel."

  "You're gettin' off easy, ten bucks."

  "It's cold. I wanna do five."

  Her voice, exhausted. "Seven."

  They came closer, the prostitute and the john. Bob stayed absolutely still, embarrassed and ashamed to be witness to their humble and private business. Closing his eyes did nothing to shut them out: he smelled them, he heard them. The woman was kneeling before the man, the man leaning against a piling, his fingers working in her hair.

  In a merciful few minutes it was over. There was a stink of hot bodies. The woman made a rustling movement. "Take off your clothes," she said in a low voice. The gun was in her hand.

  She tossed everything into the Hudson—the underpants, the socks, the shoes, the cheap suit.

  "Please, lady."

  She opened the wallet. "Eighty fuckin' bucks," she said in a new, harder voice. No wonder all the powder: she was a man. "I oughta blow you away."

  The transvestite turned and marched off the pier, leaving his john cowering naked. "What am I gonna do?" he moaned. After a short time, he also hurried back toward the darkness of West Street, a pale flash in the night.

  To Bob that poor man seemed the luckiest of creatures, normally formed, his body the key to the whole list of human freedoms and powers.

  The wild was not freedom at all; the wild was a terrible bondage. Man was free.

  He remembered the wolf in the zoo. That had been the message in his eyes.

  Was that wolf like me, a lost man? Was he warning me with his eyes, or cajoling me?

  His eyes had been so beautiful. Too bad being a wolf was such hell.

  He could escape, of course. All he had to do was let himself fall, then take a single, deep breath after the water enclosed him.

  Before he jumped, there was one thing he had to do, if only to satisfy himself that his situation was indeed hopeless. Many years before he had been interested in meditation. TM had been popular when he was in college, and he had tried it. He had met a girl who was involved in the Ecstatic movement within the Catholic Church, and he had gotten high on repetitive prayer.

  They had joined together, Bob and Lorelei, on the Way of Flesh and Prayer—their own name for their Catholicized sexual freedom—and had learned secrets of meditation known, if at all, to a few adepts of the Kama Sutra.

  Bob wondered if he could still sense his body in the old way. Could he perhaps re-create his human body by creating a vivid enough image of it in his mind?

  With all the will he could bring to it, he concentrated on turning his left rear paw back into a foot. He visualized a foot—his own foot—just as he remembered it, complete with the scar from his bunion operation and the ingrown second toenail he had been meaning to show to Al West, his podiatrist.

  Nothing happened, nothing at all. He kept on trying, raising the paw off the ground in the intensity of his effort. Nothing seemed to happen, but when he put the paw down, he was amazed and shocked to feel ordinary human toes and heel. He looked back, and there in the shadows was a pale, naked man's foot attached to his wolf leg.

  Pure excitement made his blood rush so hard he started to faint. The foot felt a little like rubber, a lot like gelatin, and it seemed as if a lessening of attention might make it dissolve once again into a paw. The moment he shifted his attention to his upper leg, the foot indeed began to disintegrate. There was no sensation, but his contact with the ground began to change. Then he returned his concentration to the foot. At once it was human again.

  But it wouldn't stay like that, not without a Zen master's ability to
concentrate on it and keep it human. A very real force was urging his cells into the wolf shape. When he fought it, he could feel it resisting, striving to recapture the shifted part.

  Then he learned another thing: By keeping some attention on his foot and extending it up his leg, he could transform the leg as well, and include it in the new fortress of his human being. He labored, striving to fix the quicksilver of concentration, until he was a human torso with a wolf's chest, shoulder, and head. There was war inside him. His organs battled the confusion of juices. He vomited and the wolf body regained the torso for a moment. Then he recaptured his attention from his pain and dragged it up his midriff. It slipped, concentrating suddenly on what he wanted most, which was hands. They popped out of his paws, new and slightly wet, knuckles closed against the ground. Then the wolf tail slipped out again. He fought it down, felt the fur of it tickling against his buttocks as it was absorbed.

  Now, holding in awareness all of his human parts, he made a great effort to draw his attention up both forelegs and then across his chest and neck. With a rush as of swirling snow his whole sense of smell disappeared. He was shocked to realize how dependent on it he had become. For a moment, shaking his head, he thought he was blind.

  Then he saw a flush of color, the crystal world that human eyes see. He was lying, wet and new on the dirty slabs of the pier. He raised himself up.

  Shaking, he stood slowly to full height, and felt the sharp airs of night on naked skin. He clapped his hands, he swooped and swirled.

  He had to be careful, though. The wolf itched just beneath the surface of him, waiting to pop out the moment he stopped concentrating on his shape.

  He remembered a paraphrase of the physicist Richard Feynman, that reality is plastic, that it is essentially dependent upon the observer.

  Speaking of whom, he found himself lit by headlights, which proceeded slowly down the rattling pier toward him. He began to back up, momentarily terrified. But why? He was human again. He was safe. Smiling with relief, he ran forward toward the car. "Hey, I need help."

  A light bar flashed: it was a police car. "You couple of fuckers," a voice said, drawling easily. "Come aaannn." Two young policemen emerged from the car. Sitting in the back was the dim figure of the man the prostitute had mugged. "What is this, a new thrill?" one of them asked.