A Wolf Apart

by Maria Vale

  It used to be like that, watching a beautiful woman, knowing that beneath the tape on her breasts, her nipples will be tightening, that she will be feeling an uncomfortable warmth.

  Or will she? I can’t really tell anymore.

  “Lawyer.”

  “Oh,” she says, a slight tinge of disappointment in her voice.

  Noah, one of Testa’s owners, comes over and hands me back my credit card. I lean up on one hip, retrieving my wallet.

  As she watches me slide in the black-and-pewter card, she brightens. “Oh,” she says. “That’s interesting. I haven’t seen you around here before.”

  “Hmm.” Tomas, the mixologist, slides me my seltzer with bitters and lime. Wolves can’t really drink. Does something awful to our livers. Tomas is discreet about my drinking habits because it’s his job to be discreet, because the ownership certainly doesn’t mind customers who don’t use the bar as an all-you-can-eat buffet, and because I tip him well.

  “Thanks, I guess,” she says, lifting her Moscow mule toward me. She slides around on her seat, scanning the room, looking for someone who might be more responsive.

  “Elijah Sorensson?”

  In the mirror caught between the tall emerald-green bottle and the square blue bottle, the woman in white pauses as a sloppily drunk man I’m supposed to know slaps my shoulder. Pale-gray tweed jacket with black piping and a black shirt. Elaborately stitched jeans. He smells vaguely familiar. Like wild onion and rubber. I didn’t say pleasant, just familiar.

  “This man…” he slurs. “You remember, we bought Alacore? In 2015 we bought it. But the big abattoir around our neck”—I’m assuming he actually means albatross, not slaughterhouse—“was a busted-up cement plant up near… I don’t know where.” He waves his hand toward the Empire State Building so everyone will know he means north.

  Now I remember. His name is Dante something. “Fort Miller,” I say.

  “I think you may be right. State says we’re goin’ to have to clean it up. For a lotta money.” He rests one foot on the rung of my stool. “I don’ remember how much, because this genius, he makes it out so that we don’t have to do shit. Says the rotting concrete is good for climate change.”

  I’m not in the mood to explain the mechanics of concrete carbonation to Dante Something from the Mergers and Acquisitions Department at LMSC. It’s part of my job. I’m very good at my job, and when I’m good at my job, I make money. Money that is used to protect another piece of land and a different wilderness up there. North.

  “Well, anyway, the thing is still rottin’ away.” He guffaws again. “Rottin’ from the inside out. Being good for the environment.” He removes his foot from my stool but doesn’t slap me again. Humans don’t. They do it once to be comradely, but there’s something about what they feel under my bespoke jacket that makes them nervous about doing it again.

  I take another drink. The woman in white stands closer, her breast pressed against my arm.

  “I haven’t seen you here either,” I say. Now I’m just going through the motions, mouthing the words to an old script. “I would certainly have remembered. No man could ever forget you.” She looks exactly like half the beautiful women in this place. The other half have dark hair.

  When she finishes her Moscow mule, I order her another. She’s jabbering something about some start-up. An app that does something I don’t have any use for, so I hear but don’t actually listen. When her voice goes up in a lilting question, I nod or frown slightly, concerned. When conversation lags, I look intently at her irises for a beat or two past the norm and say something about sky or storms or chocolate, depending on their color. It’s a body part humans set great stock in.

  “Your skin is so soft.” Lifting my arm is like lifting lead when I brush her hair back from her face and my fingers trace her cheek. “You should never wear anything but silk.”

  Her bleached-blond hair is dry and crisp, and feels like late-autumn sedge against the back of my hand.

  • • •

  Back when I first came Offland, there was something exciting about this game. Maybe it was just that it was unknown. Cunnan—the Old Tongue word for sex that Pack use—that was something I knew. Cunnan serves two purposes: the pure feral joy of skin against skin and the infinitesimal chance that our chromosomes are at that rare moment in their slide along the spectrum of wildness when they are similar enough to create a new one of us.

  In Intensive Human Behaviors for Offlanders, Leonora was quite clear. “Sex with humans has as much to do with cunnan as buying carrion wrapped in plastic has to do with hunting. Both will rot you from the inside out.”

  All juveniles are indiscriminate. No one has a bedfellow yet, just schildere, shielders, the wolves who serve as our companions and protectors. The wolves who watch over us during our more discretionary changes, so coyotes won’t eat us when we’re vulnerable. Who partner with us for our first real hunt so if we take a hoof to the head, someone can get help.

  Shielders are fair game as long as they’re not within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, like Celia.

  I was more indiscriminate and more priapic than most, which among Pack is saying something. I went to bed with an erection, woke up with an erection. Worked and studied and ate and fought with an erection.

  My first week at college, I went through two whole boxes of Kleenex Mansize 3 Ply (soft and absorbent) before my roommate, Jeremy, asked if I could give it a rest for just a little while. Or take it into the shower. Or outside. Or anywhere that wasn’t our room.

  Leonora had been clear that humans frowned upon the public display of intercourse. She had not been at all clear that they frowned as well on the more solitary endeavors.

  I didn’t care what Leonora said. There was no way I was going to survive the coming years with nothing but my fist, so I started learning the human game.

  There were many mistakes. When I slid my cheek along a girl’s face to mark her. When I shuffled, stiff and engorged, at the foot of Marian’s bed, staring at her, wondering when she was going to put her ass in the air and present already.

  When I took the cords of her neck tight in my teeth and she screeched, deafening my sensitive ears.

  It was Jeremy who took me under his wing and introduced me to pornography and the fertile imaginings of humans when it came to how bodies could be fit together.

  Those movies were instructive, but also very hard to watch. Too often, men treated women like subordinates, doing things to them, rather than with them. They were gruesomely compelling, like a horror movie when all you can think is Now, now she’s going to do something very, very painful. Now, I kept thinking, now, she’s going to get his balls in her carnassials and…

  Crunch, snip.

  Wolves are always told that humans do things for one of two reasons: love or greed. In all my years Offland, I have seen all the many forms of greed—in which I count gluttony, betrayal, and envy—but I have yet to see something that counts as love.

  I don’t know when the thrill of the hunt died. My cock is so jaded now, but I can’t help myself. It’s like…it’s like when you’re a pup and the scent of prey hits you right in the back of the throat and everything tenses and you chase even though your tummy is little and full and all you really want is for that prey to escape so you don’t have to eat it.

  • • •

  The woman in white doesn’t. Escape, I mean. We end up, she and I, in the same old setting, one of the suites HST theoretically maintains for visitors from our offices in DC and Albany, but in reality, they serve all those politicians who need trysting spots in the City.

  For a relatively small outlay and a useful tax write-off, it makes the power brokers quite pliable.

  Every suite is exactly the same. Bold-patterned black-and-white wallpaper. King-size pillow-top bed in the middle of the wall facing the bathroom. Modern light fixtures and upholste
red seating. Between bed and exit, there is a small table with two hard-backed chairs and a chilling bottle of midrange champagne. At one chair—always the one nearest the door—I take off my shoes and socks, then, with socks tucked neatly inside, slide them under, but not too far under. I fold my jacket across the back of the chair, followed by my T-shirt, then my jeans. My boxer briefs go on top.

  From my breast pocket, I extract a condom, and not because I need one—we are too different to share diseases, and pregnancy is completely out of the question. I use them because of that thing Leonora said about sex with humans rotting you from the inside out. Humans take comfort from plastic-wrapping their carrion; I take comfort from latex-wrapping my cock. I am fooling myself into thinking that somehow it doesn’t quite count.

  She is stretched naked across the mattress, waiting for my appraisal. Look at me, her expression says. I am young and beautiful, and you have money and power, so tonight I am giving myself to you. It is a transaction. She gives her body to me, I give mine to her, and we both bolster our positions within the elaborate human hierarchy.

  Because I can’t stand to see the calculating seduction in another woman’s eyes, I hold her chest down with one hand, my finger and thumb working her nipple. The other hand holds down her hips while my mouth plies her furrow. I say appreciative things from time to time, but mostly I speed through my lines and my stale stage directions like an actor in his twenty-fifth year of a dinner theater production of Death of a Salesman.

  As soon as she comes, I thread my semi-turgid member in, screw my eyes tightly closed, and find release.

  It’s certainly not cunnan. It’s barely sex, because sex implies that at least two people are present.

  In the end, I am left looking at the ceiling, waiting for her breathing to even and slow. I don’t know how many Moscow mules this one has had, but it must have been a few. Her breath is sickly sweet, and she snores in the way that women do when they’re chemically relaxed.

  The senses of my human form are nowhere near as sharp as my wild self, but they are much better than humans, and the semidarkness of New York is as good as midday. Besides, my escape is so well rehearsed. I quickly pull my clothes on in the order that they lie folded across the chair, then pick up my shoes with the socks neatly tucked inside and head out.

  I take the stairs to the back, where Juan, the night porter, is on duty. He doesn’t say a word, just pulls out his key and opens the black door with the plastic panel that says Luggage storage and comes back with one of the broad, shallow, white boxes I keep there. It doesn’t matter which, because the robes inside are all the same: small, like every woman I meet. Pearl gray, which suits every complexion. And silk. Just like I promised.

  You should never wear anything but silk.

  She told me her name. I know she did, but as I stare at the tiny white card with the circled LP on the front, I can’t remember it. “Dear NAME HERE, I will never forget” is what I usually write, before promptly forgetting. Problem is, I’ve already forgotten.

  Crumpling up the note, I ask Juan to deliver the box to whatever woman is in room 513.

  I can’t take this anymore.

  Chapter 3

  When I get back to my building, the night porter is busily polishing the brass.

  “Nice evening, Mr. Sorensson?”

  “It was fine, Saul. Thanks.”

  I lope past the acrid smell of polish, up the elevator that smells of takeout carrion lo mein, and into the apartment. Because I bought a model unit that no one had ever lived in, it didn’t take long for the stench of carrion and steel and artificial sweeteners to dissipate.

  Humans don’t come here. The only thing I changed was the mattress. I left the queen in the hallway one Tuesday afternoon, so the men came and knocked and rang and eventually left the California king in its place. As soon as I was sure no one was around, I carried it into my apartment.

  The only thing that is truly personal is the photograph, sandwiched between two pieces of UV-resistant glass, of my echelon the summer before we divided.

  There are eighteen of us in the 9th Echelon. All born within five years of each other: Celia, my shielder, who runs things day to day, frames the left side; I frame the right. Between us are the other sixteen. Eight standing, eight crouching down, all side facing and squeezed together. Genetics as well as centuries of breeding to power mean we are very big on the human scale.

  The reaction to one of us is dully familiar: “You play football?” We rarely go Offland in groups.

  Some of us would go on to college and come back to run Pack businesses near the Homelands. Some of us would stay away longer. I remember staring at the shield on the acceptance letter to Yale Law School—with its crocodile, dog, and staples—and thinking with dread that from now on, I would be that dog, fastened far away, protecting my Pack from that crocodile.

  The photograph shows a happy cluster of newly minted adults, but so much has changed. Nils was the Alpha at our Daeling, our Dealing. He was the one who watched as we fought for position within the hierarchy and cemented our transition from juveniles to adult. Not long after, he and his mate were shot by hunters. His brother, John, took over, and now, another bullet later, he is dead too, leaving his mate, Evie, as Alpha.

  It has hit us all hard. I don’t think humans could understand the ties that bind us. They have family, but the longer I live Offland, the more I realize that family has nothing to do with Pack. Parents do horrible things to children. Children ignore parents. Spouses divorce. The loss of an Alpha goes beyond the loss of a parent. An Alpha is like the woody trunk of a grapevine. Everything spreads out from it. Yes, you can graft the vine onto a new rootstock, but not without consequences.

  Sarah and Adam, the 9th’s Gamma couple, seem to have been particularly hard hit by John’s death. This past moon, they huddled close to Home Pond and the burned-out remnants of the Great Hall.

  Carefully setting the photograph back on my bedside table, I reach into my pocket for my phone. Then I open the app designated by a full moon sandwiched between a black, star-speckled square and the silhouette of our native mountains. Called Homeward, this app is not available in the Play Store or on iTunes. It was developed three years ago by one of our wolves so Offlanders who sometimes get caught up in the rhythms of the lives of humans do not forget our own.

  Each morning, a wolf—the developer, I presume—intones “Hāmweard, ðu londadl hǽðstapa” in the Old Tongue before a computer-generated voice counts down the days until the next Iron Moon. “Homeward, you landsick heath-wanderer, in 27 days.”

  Whoever devised this must have known firsthand how desperate Offlanders became for the Homelands. How “landsick” we gray heath-wanderers—as men once called us—became.

  If Homeward calculates that a wolf is too far away to make it back before the change, it chirps out one last phrase in the Old Tongue.

  “Ond swa gegæþ þin endedogor.”

  And so passes your final day.

  Who says Pack have no sense of humor?

  • • •

  Usually, I set Homeward for a single reminder one day before the Iron Moon, but this time, I set it for a daily countdown just so I won’t forget how important this particular change is.

  Hāmweard, ðu londadl hǽðstapa, in 26 days.

  Homeward, you landsick heath-wanderer, in 26 days.

  From inside the elevator, I hear a door open, followed by tiny claws skittering on the carpet. My thumb is pressed so hard into the brass DOOR CLOSE button that it bends. We were told to be careful with human things. They are delicate and break easily, but it’s hard to remember when you’re in a rush.

  “Hold the elevator?” says a lilting, questioning voice. My finger drops from the elevator button, and my heart falls with it. I smile at the woman with the black Dutch boy haircut, yoga pants, and raincoat. Alana is in her thirties. Her husband, Luca, is nea
ring sixty.

  He travels way too much.

  Usually, I would have been smart enough not to screw someone who knew where I lived, let alone lived where I lived, but the day I did it, she was wearing a raw wool poncho that smelled like sheep and made my mouth water.

  “Elijah? How have you been?” She leans one hip against the wall of the elevator and smooths her hair over her ear. Left, then right.

  “Well. And how is Luca?”

  “Well?” she lilts again. She swoops down and picks up a fluffy, gray doglet whose hair has to be clipped from his eyes so he can see and away from his underbelly so he can walk and who is apparently full grown but is named, for some unaccountable reason, Tarzan.

  Pulling Tarzan to her nose, she eyes me over the faux-fur collar of the dog’s trench coat. “But Luca? He’s out of town? In China?” she says as if to ask whether the distance is far enough to revisit our infidelity.

  That damn poncho.

  Before the implicit invitation becomes explicit, the elevator door opens, and Alana is pulled into a conversation about lobby improvements while I glare at Tarzan.

  “You,” I whisper to the little ball of coyote meat dressed in beige-and-black plaid, “should be ashamed of yourself.”

  Tarzan lowers his eyes, then whimpers piteously. The little bit of wild that has not been bred out of him recognizes that submission is his only option.

  I know it’s not his fault, but still, a little dignity. Please.

  As soon as the elevator hits the ground floor, I mutter something unintelligible and race for the street, hailing the first car that will take me. The driver motions for me to wait while he pulls the seat forward, but I throw myself in along the length of the back and slam the door closed just as Alana extricates herself.

  • • •

  Halvors, Sorensson & Trianoff is housed in a tall yet squat postmodern building overlooking the last feet of the Hudson before it transforms into New York Harbor. The building is undistinguished except for its proximity to a huge, green-glass atrium holding sixteen palm trees. It’s odd that humans will pay so much for exotics, as though that makes up for the native trees they are so profligate with.