Immortal Lycanthropes

by Hal Johnson

  Q: Why did Mignon Emanuel’s militia guards have harpoon guns?

  A: In case any lions showed up, harpoons, and their tangling lines, are better for stopping them than ineffectual bullets.

  Q: Why does Gloria talk that way: i’ faith and zounds?

  A: You tend to internalize a language best when you first learn it. Gloria learned English sometime in the sixteenth century, so when she gets distracted or excited, she falls upon old habits. In contrast, I learned English from a set of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I acquired from a British soldier in India in 1791, so my speech, like my prose, is as pellucid as Edward Gibbon’s.

  Q: Who was still looking to kill Myron?

  A: Too many people to count, now.

  Q: Why don’t we go see the Rosicrucians?

  A: BECAUSE IT’S A TRAP!

  Ah, but how did I know it was a trap? The ermine may or may not have been in league with the lion, but he was in league with somebody. And when it came down to it, the Rosicrucians were much more likely to want to help someone as powerful as Mr. Bigshot than our little Myron. And also they were the Rosicrucians. Who trusts them?

  Myron was far too trusting. He believed he was paranoid, but he didn’t know real paranoia: he couldn’t remember the Time of Troubles. I was amazed by how little animosity, though, he had toward Mignon Emanuel and Florence. He actually seemed concerned that Florence was the last survivor of the Vazimba. He also seemed to think I was callous for not sympathizing.

  “Her whole people were wiped out! Isn’t that sad?”

  “Kid,” I said, “everybody’s whole people were wiped out. You knew Spenser, right?” (I’d heard about Spenser.) “Spenser’s from Scotland before the Celts arrived. What do you think the Celts did when they got there? Here’s a hint: Scotland ended up Celtic. And anyway, there are plenty of Vazimba left—I’ve met at least three species of civet, and a fossa—they just don’t like Florence. And anyway, the real Vazimba are not Florence’s people. The real Vazimba are humans.”

  But Myron still seemed to care even about Mrs. Wangenstein. She’d been blackmailed a little, by the way, but mostly she’d been bribed. And Oliver, too. “I hope he’s okay,” Myron said.

  “He’s alive; he’s back with his parents, I’d heard. But I don’t think he’s okay, if you get what I mean.”

  It was a long drive, and finally Myron began to tell me his story, much of which I’d already pieced together, fragmentarily and at times inaccurately. “Hold the wheel, will you, I want to take notes,” I said. But Myron seemed to think this was dangerous. He wouldn’t even let me set my typewriter up while I drove. I tried to explain I was a touch-typist, so it was perfectly safe, but perhaps Myron was notching closer to the paranoid ideal. I couldn’t wait until we were able to stop, so I could write things down, but I kept driving, anyway, because I didn’t want to break his train of thought. Finally, in a dull generic motel in Grand Island, Nebraska, which is incidentally not an island, I pretended to a desk clerk, who was literally eating paint chips, that Myron was my son. He faced away from the front desk. The warped and filthy key card got us into a room with a bed and a cot. I was tired from driving, but I stayed up till all hours, despite the people who banged on the walls and shouted through the door, typing up what Myron had told me.

  Instead of starting out again the next day, I just had him tell me everything again, while I took more notes. I know I also made a note to call Alice and tell her we were on our way, but it somehow got lost in the shuffle. I grilled him carefully on the parts I thought unclear. What were they serving in the school cafeteria that day? What Degas painting did he see at the Featherstone Academy? Why would anyone want to summon Asmodeus, as opposed to say Demogorgon, who wears, after all, two hats?

  Not that Myron did all the talking! I had a lot to teach him. There was so much he didn’t know. He’d never seen the ruins of Mu or beautiful Kandam. He was only dimly aware of the peregrinations of the planet Proserpine. He wanted to hear all about the wide world he’d only brushed the surface of. He wanted to hear about the ambitions of Evelyn, the elephant, and the vast wanderings of Svipdag, the wolverine. But most of all, he wanted to hear about me, your humble narrator.

  And so: My name is not Arthur Hong, although I own, or have owned, a birth certificate that claims it is. The date, re-inked so many times, started to seep through the paper, and I haven’t had recourse to it in a while. My earliest memories are of the jungle, of trees laden with fruit, of unknown dangers on the forest floor but relative safety deep in the branches. I learned eventually, painfully, that leopards could kill my brothers and sisters, but they could not kill me.

  How long this went on for, I do not know—I could not count, nor speak, nor did these ideas mean anything to me. It was when I met humans, and found I could assume their form, that I first began to understand the concept of understanding. The first humans I met tried to burn me, assuming I was a demon, but I just laughed until the fire burned away the ropes that bound me, and then I showed them what a bearcat is made of. The battered remnant tried to make me their god, but I preferred to return to the binturongs. In this way, coming back and forth between the trees and the villages, I saw generations of humans spring up and die, I saw whole people, unique tribes with unique methods of face painting and dress, rise up and disappear. The Khoanh massacred and replaced the Naga who had massacred and replaced the stegosaurus-riding, snake-worshiping Lodidapurans who had massacred and replaced the first peoples I knew. I wasn’t lying about the endless genocide. History is one long more- or less-successful genocide. But, really (I would like to ask any human I meet), what difference does it make if your people are done in by violence or not? They will, in time, forget all that made them your people. They will turn to strange customs and strange gods. Your grandchildren’s grandchildren will be unrecognizable to you, why do you weep if they are murdered? They’ve already murdered your people by forgetting their ways. We pretend that life among the inhabitants of prehistory had an ancient continuity, but I saw what happened, and I can assure you that was not true. Their memories were short. An antediluvian custom to them was one that was eighty years old. After two generations, when I appeared again among them, they had no memory of me. Often their language had changed beyond recognition.

  The number of people arriving and dying seemed to me infinite and arbitrary. I did not realize for quite some time that the invaders had had to come from somewhere. And once I realized that, I had to find out where they came from. I traveled from tree to tree to the edge of the jungle, and there I came across a body of water broader than the Mekong in flood. I assumed it was infinite, but men in boats came over it, from distant islands. I tried to swim in the water, which was salty and foul, but was always thrown back on shore, half drowned.

  The people around me, meanwhile, had started getting better at doing things. They could make buildings out of stones instead of sticks, now, but this innovation was not quite enough to impress me. I traveled north, and when I reached the outposts of China I realized that people did not spring up autochthonous like ants. I began to have an idea of the world, an inaccurate, skewed idea of the world, but an idea nonetheless. For the first time I learned to speak a language with a sense of time, of long periods of time. For the first time I realized how much time had passed.

  There followed an infinitude of adventures and imprisonments and condemnations and hairsbreadth escapes.

  I would like to draw a character sketch of me. But the truth is that most people’s characters can be identified best negatively, by the things they haven’t done. And there is very little I haven’t done. I have never flown an airplane without crashing it, I guess, but little else. The modern age, temporarily and psychotically, values experience above all else, and my life would sound appealing to moderns, but they forget how many bad things there are to do. Murder, slaving, probably genocide—if you waited around long enough, you’d end up doing them, too. There is very little anyone can avoid do
ing forever, there are only things you can put off until you die. Sure, I’ve gone a hundred years without killing anyone. I can do a hundred years in my sleep. But try doing a thousand. That’s the difference, proportionally, between going without water for one day and going without water for ten days. I know which one a human could do.

  Vampires, it is true, do horrible things, but this is not because they are undead. It is because they have forever.

  Ahashverosh, called by some the Eternal Jew, was a good friend of mine in the twelfth century, when he wandered over to the courts of the Angkor kings, and he had kept kosher for all those years of his existence; I ran into him in a Wendy’s ten years ago, and he was eating a cheeseburger. Sheepishly he shrugged at me. He made almost two millennia without going astray, but the thought of a looming third was too much for him. And frankly, he had it easy: his rules hadn’t changed out from underneath him. For anyone else, all virtue turns to vice once someone else comes along and redefines things. There have been times when massacring a whole bunch of children seemed not just like a tempting idea, but like the right decision, and everyone patted you on the back for it, and two hundred years later everyone who patted you on the back is dead, and suddenly they decide you’re a monster. Torquemada of the Spanish Inquisition was a hero before he became a watchword for cruelty. Attila never got anything but approval from the other Huns for any slaughter he perpetrated. They were good men first, and only later did flighty people change their minds.

  At this thought, some turn up their nose and insist that massacres have always been evil, and will always be evil, and they refuse to consider the way mores change. But these people, too, will die, and so will their belief, and their future will look back at them aghast, picking through their lives and finding something they did to be horrified by. And then massacres will come back into vogue. They always do.

  Spenser is one, or was one, who tended to get up on a high horse about massacres and murders, as though everyone in the past was supposed to guess that the early twenty-first century would find them distasteful. It’s bully for him that the world temporarily came around to his point of view, but he’s like a man who has always worn skinny ties, elated that fashion has started requiring what he has in his wardrobe already. “At last they’ve figured it out!” he crows, unaware that in a year or two he will appear hopelessly out of date, as fashion travels on, leaving him floundering in its wake. Deep down, Spenser was too much of an optimist, a romantic—in a word, he still believed in stuff, and it is for this reason that he was constantly disappointed.

  Alice, incidentally, disagrees with most of the above.

  Once you figure out what’s going on, and once you remove the possibility of being a good or bad individual, life becomes a series of meaningless incidents. There is the tedium of pretending to acquaintances that you grow older; there is the necessity of establishing new identities. The Everblums (see below) found this delightfully novel, but they’ve only done it once. Nothing will you ever do only once. Yawning on the latest roller coaster, yawning on the latest hoverbike, yawning through the latest planetarium or cinema show, you sleepwalk forward through history.

  I bought many years ago and have inherited from myself time and again a modest brownstone in Boston. My needs are slight. I enjoy fruit juices and a warm fire. I would have gone mad long since if I didn’t have the justification of my art.

  The sketches of that whimsical parodist Plentygood van Dutchhook brought me a small measure of renown in 1811. I was rather slavishly aping Washington Irving, but I found it a simple matter to adopt a different pseudonym when I had evolved a different style. And briefly I wrote, as promised, pellucidly. Through two centuries that style declined. It is difficult, when you are sleepwalking through history, not to sleepwalk through prose as well. Scenes and characters repeated themselves in my books, because after a while, in life, scenes and characters repeat themselves—but when you’re writing under six or seven names, this can look like a case of plagiarism. Clichés lose their ability to horrify because novelty itself seems so tired now. Aren’t all the most important things that could be said clichés? I love you. I beg of you. Prepare to die. Anything truly beautiful became commonplace long ago, and now we sneer at it. But you start thinking this way and all you can write are adventure series or (on rare occasions) Maoist propaganda tracts. And now The Magic Pony Club.

  Oh, but Myron, Myron! Stop me! This is your story, after all, it’s all your story! You’re the first new thing under the sun I have to write about in so long. I should be talking about you!

  2.

  We stayed two days in that flea trap. We talked about literature, the secret history, all the things that Myron had seen. There was so much to teach him. Even the simple things everyone else already knew—that it was easier to murder one of us than a human, because humans left behind a body, while we just turned into an animal corpse, and who paid attention to those?; that mixing candy corns and cheese crackers made a tasty snack; that we, as immortals, were completely sterile—he knew none of it. And he was in seventh heaven, being cooped up in a room with his hero. His hero, a typewriter, and room service. I would be surprised if he ever had a better time in his life—in his life that he could remember, I mean.

  It was only two days, but in my memory it stretches out to weeks. In my memory I pretend we had no car, and we walked across the western states, sleeping under the stars.

  All those two days I kept taking notes about Myron and his odyssey. We could have stayed longer—I could have extracted from Myron all those colorful little details that lend a degree of verisimilitude to a narrative—except that after a complimentary continental breakfast we went for a stroll around the bleak and arid grounds. There in the chill air, reclining near an empty pool, was a dark-haired woman in a lime bikini. I didn’t recognize her with the sunglasses and the dye job, but she said hello, and I knew we were doomed.

  I tipped my hat politely and hurried Myron away. He wanted to know who it was, of course.

  “That was the Baroness von Everblum, and it’s not her I’m worried about—it’s her husband and twin brother.”

  “What? Ew!”

  We had hustled into the lobby and were headed back to our room. “The Baron von Everblum is the worst gossip I’ve ever met. He also can’t stop talking about how the two of them found the nagbu-thorn, and how it grants them eternal youth, which is really annoying. They’re thirty-five and they look twenty-seven, big deal—it’s just not that impressive!”

  “Are they alchemists?”

  “No, they’re no one, they’re just in the scene.”

  And just as we turned a corner, there was the baron, dressed in plaid shorts and a pink polo shirt. His hair was also dyed, bright flaming red.

  “Why, Arthur! Fancy meeting you here. It has been an age of dogs. You are looking young, of course. You will notice that I, too, have not aged, thank you to the nagbu-thorn of Utnapishtim, Lord of the Source of Streams.”

  “Yes, yes. Good to see you. The baroness is by the pool, did you know that?”

  He was not so easily ditched. “You’ll note that we are both in disguise. It would be awkward if we ran into old acquaintances who recognized us and wanted to know our secret, the secret of the nagbu-thorn.”

  I was trying to hide Myron behind me, but he couldn’t help peeking out.

  “Why, what is this?” cried the baron. “This must be the young man the Brotherhood of Moloch was raving about.”

  Myron, God bless him, lacks the ability to blend in anywhere except a trauma ward.

  “You were supposed to speak at a conference, no? Where are you going now? Speak up, young man. You look so startled, your mouth is like my blood, for it is a positive O.” He laughed hysterically.

  “Nowhere,” Myron said.

  “We really should go, your lordship,” I said, doling the honorific out as a lagniappe to flatter him, but refusing to go so far as to give it a capital letter. Perhaps, therefore, it was not good enough fo
r him, and he kept talking.

  “You’re heading west, aren’t you? You must be, for you have come from the Michigan states. And you are dressed so warmly. It must not be to the Southwest you are going, for it is warm there.”

  Myron hummed nervously.

  “San Francisco, perhaps? But no, your eyes betray you; it is not San Francisco. Seattle? Portland? Ah, Portland! Arthur, you should tell your charge not to be so obvious. His mouth does not twitch, perhaps due to nerve damage, but in his eyes, his naked desire for Portland is so evident.”

  “Fine,” I said, “you got us, you’re a caution, Baron. Now come on, kid, let’s get started. It’s a long drive.”

  The baron said, as we left, “Gang aft eagle.” He was laughing uproariously again.

  “What does that mean?” Myron asked as we locked ourselves in our room.

  I was packing up the typewriter. “It means the best laid plans don’t always work out. Also, he’s an idiot.” I was so distracted as we headed for the car that I accidentally paid the hotel bill.

  3.

  Myron couldn’t make a journey without imagining himself a Jules Verne character, so he was distracted with all of that, but me, I was worried. It was a straight shot along I-80 W from Chicago through Grand Island to Sacramento, and it wouldn’t take much skill with a map and a ruler to extrapolate our actual destination. On the other hand, veering north was out of the question: the baron was already on his ham radio telling everyone we were aiming for Portland. But veering south was also out of the question, as any fool who knew that we knew the baron knew we were supposed to head north would assume we would head south in reaction. Probably the smartest thing to do would be to turn back, but I didn’t want to run into the Everblums again. Just to be safe, first chance I had I stopped at a post office and mailed all my notes to my Boston PO box.