Talulla Rising (2 page)

‘Did you get it?’ I gasped. Behind Cloquet the open door showed deep snow, the edge of the pine forest, frail constellations. Beauty mauled me even in this state. Aesthetic hypersensitivity was a by-product of slaughter. Life was full of these amoral relations, it turned out.

Cloquet rushed to my side, tugging off his thermal gloves. ‘Lie still,’ he said. ‘Don’t try to speak.’ He smelled of outdoors, dense evergreens and the far north air like something purified by the flight of angels. ‘You have a temperature. Did you drink enough water?’

For the umpteenth time I wished my mother were alive. For the umpteenth time I thought how unspeakably happy I’d be if she and Jake walked in the door right now, grinning, the pair of them. My mother would dump her purse on the table in a puff of Chanel and say, For God’s sake, Lulu, look at your
hair –
and the weight would lift and everything would be all right. Jake wouldn’t have to say anything. He’d look at me and it would be there in his eyes, that he was for me, always,
always
– and the nightmare would reduce to a handful of solvable problems. (I’d expected their ghosts, naturally. I’d
demanded
their ghosts. I got nothing. The universe, it also turned out, was no more interested in werewolf demands than it was in human ones.)

‘Talulla?’

Pain thickened under my toenails, warmed my eyeballs.
Wulf
smirked and kicked and cajoled in my blood. Come on, what’s a few hours between friends? Let me out. Let me
out
. Every month the same delirious bullying, the same pointless impatience. I closed my eyes.

Bad idea. The footage ran, immediately: Delilah Snow’s room, the wardrobe door swinging open, its long mirror introducing me to myself in all my grotesque glory, what I was, what I could do, the full range of my options. Monster. Murderer. Mother-to-be.

I opened my eyes.

‘Let me get you some water,’ Cloquet said.

‘No, stay here.’

I had hold of his coat and was twisting it. My dead moaned and throbbed. My dead. My restless tenants. My forced family of thirteen.
Those
ghosts, yes, of course, as many as you like. The only way to be sure of never losing the ones you love. The Dahmer Method. Extreme, but effective.

‘Breathe,
chérie
, breathe.’

Chérie. Mon ange. Ma belle.
Lovers’ endearments, though we weren’t, and never would be, lovers.

One by one the broken-glass fingernails withdrew. The pain furled shut, like time-lapse film of a flower closing. By degrees, with Cloquet’s help, I made it to the armchair.
Wulf
smiled. The prisoner’s smile at the guard, knowing the breakout gang’s already on its way.

‘Did you get it?’ I asked again, when I’d caught my breath. ‘At least tell me you got it.’

Cloquet shook his head. ‘There was a screw-up. It’s stuck in freight clearing at Anchorage. It’ll be in Fairbanks Saturday morning. There’s more snow coming, though. I’ll have to take the Ski-Doo and trailer.’

I didn’t say anything. I was remembering an artwork I saw once at MOMA: a foetus made entirely of barbed wire. Lauren and I had just stood there looking at it, silenced.

‘Don’t worry,’ Cloquet said. ‘It’s two days. You’re not due for six weeks. I’ll go back to Fairbanks Saturday first-thing. They promise it’ll be there. It has to be.’

‘It’ was a consignment of obstetrics equipment, including oxygen machine, forceps, foetal and adult stethoscopes, heart monitor, PCA pump, sphygmomanometer and sutures. ‘Fairbanks’ was Fairbanks, Alaska. Necessary obscurity: WOCOP – World Organization for the Control of Occult Phenomena (
think CIA meets Keystone Kops meets Spanish Inquisition
, Jake had said) – knew I’d survived Jake’s death and was carrying his child. Its hunters wanted my head and its scientists wanted me strapped down in a lab. It didn’t stop there. Having found a correlation between survived werewolf bites and increased sunlight tolerance, vampires were after – what else? – my blood. More than all that, my straw-clutching subconscious had seen the snow as a sterile environment, a natural hospital. Conventional medicine was out of the question –
Well, Miss Demetriou, as you can see on the monitor, here’s the umbilicus, and here’s a very healthy-looking placenta, and of course here’s the
—
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST WHAT
IS
THAT?
– so Cloquet had found the converted hunting lodge, with its exposed beams and wood-burning stove and wardrobes that smelled of camphor. Three thousand dollars a week, no other residents within fifteen miles, no phone reception, a half-mile of dirt road through the Christmas trees’ thrilled hush to the highway, from which Fairbanks was a ninety-minute drive southwest. I could scream as loud as I liked. No one would hear. I had a recurring vision of myself lying on the dining table in a pool of blood, screaming as loud as I liked. I had a lot of recurring visions.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘This thing’s going to kill me anyway.’ Gratuitous. Post-Delilah Snow I was full of random cruelties. I knew how the fear of me dying gnawed him now he was an accessory to murder. Murders, plural. Looking after a werewolf uniquely disqualified you from doing anything else. As Jake’s poor minder Harley could have confirmed, if he hadn’t had his head cut off. That Cloquet had become
my
minder still occasionally mesmerised me, the giant absurdity of the fact. Yet I remembered the feeling of dreamy inevitability that night in the forest five months before, when I’d put out my hand – my changed hand, clawed, wet and heavy with blood – and he, after a cracked laugh, had taken it. What had happened moments before – carnage, death, vengeance, loss – had left the two of us with a raw permissive consciousness, and into it this new relationship insinuated itself.
Expect the absurd
, Jake had warned me.
Expect the risible twist, the ludicrous denouement. Expect the perverse. It’s the werewolf’s lot.

Cloquet shut the door, took out a big white hanky and blew his nose. The cold had given him a look of surprised innocence. Sometimes I saw him like this, humanly, the mangled person and the road back to his childhood strewn with wrong turns and ugly coincidences. Long ago he’d been a little boy, side-parted hair and a volatile world of loved toys and stormy adults. Now, as he snuffled and swiped, nostrils raw, eyebrows raised, I had an image of this dark-eyed child standing alone on a jetty looking out over black water, waiting for the reunion that would never come. Tenderness stirred in me – and like an awkward reflex the new force obscured it, said it didn’t fit the grammar, wasn’t the done thing. There was too much else going on in me to argue, but I’d already made it known I didn’t like rules. God only knows to
whom
I’d made it known. Some vague werewolf scheme of things I didn’t even believe in.

‘How is it?’ he asked.

‘Better.’

‘I wish you’d take the drugs.’

Just say no
. So far I had. Acetaminophen, pseudoephedrine, codeine, Demerol, morphine. All with potential side-effects my imagination made certainties.
Administration of this drug during the first trimester can cause behavioural abnormalities in the infant.

Behavioural abnormalities. Jake and I would’ve exchanged a look. But ironies were like secrets: unshared they died. Jake and I would’ve. Jake and I. Jake. I. There were these moments when there was nothing between me and the reality of his death, when the future without him yawned, a vast space of sheer drops and wrong perspectives. There’d be more and more of these moments, I knew, until eventually they wouldn’t be moments at all, just the continuous, crushing way things were. The way things were that having our child was supposed to alleviate.

‘Save the drugs for when I really need them,’ I said.

We both knew I really needed them already, what with
wulf
jamming the room with its stink and the cattle-wire shocks in my fingernails and ringing iron in my eye-teeth and
outside
whispering the dirty talk of the wild. Transformation was less than twenty-four hours away.

‘You don’t have to be brave, you know,’ he said.

‘I’m not. I’m just thinking ahead.’ I didn’t want to think ahead. (I didn’t want to think back, either. There was horror in both directions.) Rufus, my fish supplier for the Brooklyn diners, had described watching his wife having their baby.
I want to tell you it was beautiful
, he said,
but basically it looked like someone had taken a twelve-gauge to her pussy
. This image kept coming back, as did the Sex Ed video they showed us in high school, yellowed footage of a big-thighed woman sweatily giving birth. Unanimous teen revulsion. Lauren had said to me: Fuck the miracle of life, where do I sign up for a hysterectomy?

‘I’ll go and check downstairs,’ Cloquet said.

‘No, I’ll go.’

‘You should rest.’

‘I need to move.
Ow
. Fuck.’ The baby shimmied, scraped something in me. It sent these violent communiqués. The same communiqué, every time:
I saw you. In the mirror. You and Delilah Snow.
Mother.

I waited for the pain to fold itself away again.

‘You sure you don’t want something?’ Cloquet asked.

I shook my head, no. Then held out my hand to him. ‘But I don’t think I can get out of this chair by myself.’

2

One minute you’re little Lula, eight years old, sitting on the counter in the Tenth Street diner drinking a vanilla shake under the pink Coors neon – the next this, the stink of liver under your fingernails and the water in the shower running red around your feet. In the thought experiment you commit suicide.
I wouldn’t do it. I’d kill myself
. In reality you don’t. In reality you kill and eat someone else. You start at one end of the experience, go through it, come out the other side. You’ve killed and eaten a human being. Blood winks on your fingers, mats the hair on your arms and snout. The gobbled life flails and struggles in what it touchingly mistakes for a bad dream. The moon sets. The next day you wake up in sheets that smell of fabric conditioner. There is CNN. There is coffee. There is weather. There is your human face in the mirror. The world, you discover, is a place of appalling continuity.
I ate his heart.
It seems incredible the words don’t refuse, don’t revolt. But why should they?
You
didn’t. There’s your horror, yes. But your horror’s a tide going out: every wave stops a little further away. Eventually the tide doesn’t come in any more. Eventually there’s just the sighing delta, the new you, the werewolf. The last werewolf, as it happens.

Jake had thought he was the last. He’d thought he was ready to go, too.
One by one I’ve exhausted the modes
, he wrote:

hedonism, asceticism, spontaneity, reflection, everything from miserable Socrates to the happy pig. My mechanism’s worn out. I don’t have what it takes. I still have feelings but I’m sick of having them. Which is another feeling I’m sick of having. I just . . . I just don’t want any more life.

Then he’d met me. Courtesy of the risible twist, the ludicrous coincidence.
Love has come
, he wrote.

Full, incendiary, unarguable with. Love has come, and with it the renewed pricelessness of time. I think of an hour with her – then of my hundreds of thousands of hours before knowing her was possible, wasted hours, by definition. The life we could’ve had if she’d been around a century ago (or fifty years, or ten, or Jesus Christ five) is an obscenity in my imagination. The bigger obscenity, of course, is the question of how much life we’ve got. There’s no God but I know his style: he wouldn’t teach you the value of time unless you had fuck-all time left . . .

He was right. We had two months.
Careful what you wish for
, he’d sent me, dying, in my arms. Before we’d met he’d wished for death. Death had listened. Death had made a note. Unerasable, it turned out.

A century and a half of loneliness coda’d by sixty days and nights of love. Not much of an equation. Reversed, it looked a lot worse: sixty days and nights of love followed by hundreds of years of loneliness. No wonder I missed every abortion appointment I made.

I had three recurring daydreams. One was of me with a twelve-year-old daughter living in a Los Angeles villa. Turquoise pool, cactus garden, sunlight, Cloquet in a straw hat and white bermudas teaching us French.

Another was of a little werewolf boy in a shredded school uniform covered in blood, a leftover eyeball in his lunchbox, a human tongue flopping out of his blazer pocket. Of course it was darkly hilarious. Dark hilarity’s always an option, if there’s no God.

I said
three
recurring daydreams.

I know.

Not yet.

•

Halfway down the basement stairs my legs buckled. I grabbed the banister, slid to my knees and vomited. Bile and water, since I hadn’t had solid food in twelve days. It hadn’t always been this way. I’d swanned through the first eighteen weeks of pregnancy symptom-free. Then, without warning, everything had changed. Cramps, vomiting, night sweats, visual disturbances, nosebleeds, back ache, diarrhoea, breathtaking uterine pains. Overnight, biology made me its punchbag. If I was lucky I got about a week’s grace post-transformation, when the bodily violence subsided, but when the moon hit first quarter it started up again, and the fiercer the hunger, the more maternity beat the shit out of me. A curse on top of the Curse: you’re starving, but your appetite makes you sick. (My last victim, an onion-and-whiskey-flavoured pimp in Mexico City, had brought on x-rated vomiting less than an hour after I’d eaten him. A pointless death. Now he was an oddity among my dead, confused and wraithy from having not been taken in properly – or from having been taken in and then half forced out again.) For a while I’d clung to a moral theory, that motherhood abhorred murder. But things had happened. Things had happened, and the theory had gone.