The Wolf Gift (56 page)

Reuben smiled. This so beautifully touched on the lethal edge of the human species that he marveled.

“Something far more deadly than either of us had ever beheld had now been born,” said Margon. “The man wolf, the werewolf, the wolf man—what we are.”

Again, he paused. He seemed to be struggling with something he wanted to express but could not.

“There’s so much about it I do not understand,” he confessed. “But I know this and it’s what all people know now, that every particle of life explodes from mutation, from the accidental combining of elements on every level, that accident is the indispensable nuclear power of the universe, that nothing advances without it, without a reckless and random blundering, whether it is seeds ripped from a dying flower by the wind, or pollen carried on the tiny feet of winged insects or blind fish tunneling into caverns of the deep to consume life forms undreamt of by those on the surface of the planet above. Accident, accident, and so it was with them and with me: a blunder, a stumbling—and what you call a man wolf was born. What we called the Morphenkinder were born.”

He stopped and drank some more of the coffee, and once again Reuben filled his cup.

Stuart was enthralled. But the old impatience was cooking again in him. He couldn’t help himself.

“There’s a virtue,” Felix said, “to listening to a reluctant storyteller. You know that he is in fact diving deep for the salvageable truth.”

“I know this,” said Stuart, struggling. “I’m sorry, I know it. I know it. I’m just—. I want so much to—.”

“You want to embrace what you see before you,” said Felix. “I realize. We all realize.”

Margon was drifting. Maybe he was listening to the unobtrusive music, the isolated and methodical piano notes that rose and fell, rose and fell, as the Satie went on.

“And you managed to escape the island?” asked Laura. Her voice wasn’t tentative so much as it was respectful.

“I didn’t escape,” Margon said. “They could draw but one conclusion from what they’d witnessed. Their gods had willed it, and Margon the Godless was none other than the father of their gods.”

“They made you their ruler,” said Stuart.

“They made him their god,” said Thibault. “That’s the irony. Margon the Godless became their god.”

Felix sighed. “Your inescapable destiny,” he said.

“Is it?” asked Margon.

“And you will not be king amongst us, will you?” Felix said, almost confidentially as if the others weren’t there.

“Thank God for that,” Thibault whispered with a secretive smile. “But really, I’ve never heard you tell the story in quite this way.”

Margon burst out laughing, not loudly but in a very natural way. Yet he picked up the thread.

“I was their ruler for years,” he conceded with a long sigh. “Their god, their king, their headman, whatever one wants to call it—I lived in utter harmony with them, and when the inevitable invaders came, I led the defense. I smelled evil as they smelled evil. I had to destroy it as they had to destroy it. The scent of the enemy evoked the change in me as it evoked the change in them. And so did the presence of evil in our midst.

“But I suffered a craving to punish that they did not suffer. I longed for the scent of the attacker and they never really did. I would have sought out the attacker in his own land for the thrill of destroying him,
so irresistible to me was that scent, and the thrill of annihilating that supposed evil, that supposed cruelty, that threat. In sum, I would have produced aggression towards myself in order to declare it to be evil and destroy it.”

“Of course,” said Stuart.

“It was the king’s temptation,” said Margon. “Perhaps it’s always the king’s temptation. I knew it. I, the first
Homo sapiens sapiens
who’d ever experienced the change.

“And so it is with us now. We can fly from the voices. We can come here to this great majestic forest and hope to save ourselves from the savagery within us but eventually we are tortured by our abstinence and we go to seek out the very evil we loathe.”

“I follow you,” said Stuart, nodding his head.

Reuben also nodded.

“So true,” said Felix.

“And eventually we will seek it out,” said Margon. “And in the meantime, we will hunt the forest because we can’t resist what the forest offers, can’t resist the simplicity of the slaughter that involves only brute inevitability rather than innocent blood.”

“Did they induce the change in order to hunt?” asked Reuben. His head was teeming. He could taste the blood of the elk in his mouth, the elk, the soft-eyed beast who was not itself a killer, but food for killers. The brute inevitability, yes. The elk was not evil, had never been evil, had never carried the scent of evil, no.

“No,” said Margon, “they did not. They hunted game without the change. But I was not the same as they were. And when the forest or the jungles called me, when the hunt called to me, I went into the change. I loved it. And these people marveled at it. They saw it as the god’s prerogative, but they never followed suit. They could not.”

“And this was another surprise of the mutation,” said Laura.

“Exactly,” said Margon. “I was not what they were. I was something new.” He paused and then went on with the story.

“Oh, I discovered many things in those months and years.

“I didn’t catch on at first that I couldn’t die. I’d seen that the tribesmen were nearly invulnerable in battle. Stab wounds, spear wounds, they almost always survived anything they were subjected to as long as the change was on them. And of course I shared this strange, inexplicable vigor. But I healed much more quickly from any wound sustained
either during the wolf state or the man state, and I did not realize what this could mean.

“I left them without ever realizing that I would roam this earth for centuries to come.

“But there’s one more thing I must tell you about what happened to me on that island,” he said. He looked intently at Reuben. “And someday perhaps you will share this with your brother, when he is suffering acutely from his dark night of the soul. I have seldom if ever told anyone this small thing, which I want to reveal now.”

Felix and Thibault were watching him as though they were mightily intrigued and couldn’t guess what he meant to say.

“There was a holy man on the island,” he said, “what we call now a shaman, a mystic of sorts who imbibed the few plants there that could intoxicate and induce madness and trance. I paid little attention to him. He didn’t hurt anybody and he spent most of his existence in a blissful stupor and scratching signs and symbols understood only by him into the dirt or the sand of the beach. He was actually quite beautiful in a ghastly sort of way. He never challenged me and I never questioned him on his supposed mystical knowledge. And of course, I believed in nothing, and held that I’d acquired the power, as I saw it, on my own.

“But when I prepared to leave the island, when I had passed on the scepter so to speak to another, and was ready to embark for the mainland, this shaman came down to the beach and called out to me before the assembled tribe.

“Now this was a time of ceremonial well-wishing and even tears. And so for this strange being to appear, crazed by his revolting potions and talking in riddles, well, it was not something any of us wanted to see.

“But he came on, and when he had the attention of everyone present, he pointed his finger at me and he said the gods would punish me for the theft of the power that had been given to ‘the people,’ and not to me.

“I was no god, he told the others.

“He cried out: ‘Margon the Godless One, you cannot die. The gods have decided it. You cannot die. There will come a time when you’ll beg for death but it will be denied to you. And wherever you go and whatever you do, you will not die. You will be a monster among your own kind. The power will torment you. It will give you no rest. This is because you have taken into yourself the power which the gods intended for us alone.’

“The tribe was very agitated, outraged, confused. Some wanted to beat him and chase him back to his hut and his drunken stupors. Others were merely afraid.

“ ‘The gods have told me these things,’ he said. ‘They are laughing at you, Margon. And they will always be laughing at you, wherever you go or whatever you do.’

“I myself was shaken, though why I didn’t fully grasp. I bowed to him, thanked him for his oracle, firmly resolved that he ought to be pitied, and prepared to leave. For many a year after that, I never so much as thought of him.

“But then came the time when I did begin to think of him. And not a year goes by that I have not remembered him and every word that he spoke.”

He paused again, and he sighed. “Well over a hundred years later I returned to that island, to see how my people, as I called them, had fared. They had been wiped out to the last one.
Homo sapiens sapiens
ruled the island. And only the legend of the feral people survived.”

He looked at Reuben and then at Stuart and finally to Laura, letting his gaze linger on Laura.

“Now, let me put it to you,” he said. “What is there to be learned from such a story, may I ask?”

No one spoke up, not even Stuart, who was merely studying Margon, with his elbow on the table and his right fingers curled under his lip.

“Well, obviously,” said Laura, “that the power had evolved in them in response to their enemies, over how many thousands of years no one could say. It was a survival mechanism that was gradually enhanced.”

“Yes,” said Margon.

She went on.

“And catching the scent of the enemy was part of it and became the trigger mechanism for the change.”

“Yes.”

“But clearly,” she continued, “they never used it for simple hunting or feasting, because they were more intimately connected with the animals of the jungle.”

“Yes, perhaps.”

“But you,” she said, “a human being,
Homo sapiens sapiens
, you suffered the divide from the wild beasts that we all suffer, and you did want to slay them, and though they were neither innocent nor guilty, neither
good nor evil, they were fair game, just what the expression means, fair game, and you hunted them in your new form.”

Stuart interjected: “And so the power took a new evolutionary turn in you. Well, that means it must have taken other evolutionary turns in you, and in others since. We’re talking thousands of years, are we not? We’re talking many changes.”

“I would say so,” said Margon. “Understand one thing more. At the time I had no sense of these things of which you’re speaking, no sense of an evolutionary continuum. So I could not conceive of this new power, this wolfen power, as anything but depravity, a sinking, a loss of soul, a contamination with a lower and bestial drive.”

“Yet you’d wanted it,” said Stuart.

“Yes, always, I wanted it. I very much wanted it, and loathed myself for the wanting of it,” said Margon, “and only afterwards, only as time passed, as my understanding deepened, did I come to think that something magnificent might lie in this great potential to become the unbeatable monster while still retaining my cunning, my intellect, my human soul as it were.”

“So you believe in the soul?” Stuart said. “You didn’t believe in the gods, but you believed in the soul.”

“I believed in the uniqueness and the superiority of humankind. I was not a man who thought animals had anything to teach. I didn’t know there was a universe—not in the way we use the word now. I thought this earth was all that there was. Think for a moment of what that truly means—that we, the people of that time, truly thought this earth was all there was. Any spirit realm above or beneath was a mere antechamber. That’s how small our imagined cosmos was. I know you know this, but think about it. Think about what it must have felt like to us.

“Whatever the case, I wanted the ability in order to possess a marvelous weapon, a powerful extension of myself. If my brother ever came after me, I wanted the ability to turn into a beast and rip him apart. Of course that was hardly the only thing I wanted. I wanted to see and feel as the wolfen beast and bring back to my human state whatever I’d learned. Yet it was a selfish and greedy thing that I sought it, and obtained it, and afterwards I was a suffering man, resorting most often to the beast in defeat, and rarely ever in joy.”

“I see,” said Laura. “And when did you begin to see it differently?”

“What makes you think I ever did?”

“Oh, I know you did, and that you do,” she said. “You see it now as a Chrism. Why else would you use the word, even if you didn’t originate it? You see it now as a great synthesizing power, uniting not the higher and the lower, but two ways of being.”

“Yes, I did come to that. I admit it. I did. Slowly, I did come to that. I woke from the self-loathing and the guilt and I came to see it as instructive and even at times magnificent. I didn’t need the wisdom of Darwin to know by then that we are all one great family, we creatures of the earth. I’d come to sense it, the communion of all living things. I needed no principles of evolution to open my eyes to it. And I did hope and dream of a lineage of immortals, creatures like us who, possessing the power of human and beast, would see the world as human beings themselves could not see it. I conceived a dream of witnesses, a tribe of witnesses, a tribe of Morphenkinder, drawing from the beast and the human a transcendent power, as it were, to have compassion and regard for all forms of life, rooted in their own hybrid nature. I conceived of these witnesses as set apart, incorruptible, unaccountable, but on the side of the good, the merciful, the protective.”

He held her gaze, but he’d stopped speaking.

“And you don’t believe that now,” she ventured. “You don’t believe in the magnificence of it, or that there should be this tribe of witnesses?”

He seemed on the verge of answering but then did not. His eyes moved back and forth on the empty space before him. Finally he said in a small voice.

“All creatures born in this world want immortality,” he said. “But why should a tribe of immortal witnesses be Morphenkinder, part human, part beast?”

“You just said it yourself,” said Laura. “They should draw from the two states a transcendent power, and have compassion for all forms of life—.”