Wolfentraum: One
Under the cloud-murk he moved towards it
until it shown above him, a sheer keep
of fortified gold.
_________ Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney
Siegfried Stone wondered if history
would record his every move these few days he would be in Roanoke - unimportant
minutiae to try to comprehend the incomprehensible, as they did to Oswald in
Dallas - like his dinner, that early afternoon, at the expensive steakhouse across
from the big skyscraper.
Perhaps that perky, friendly
waitress who was so attentive and sweet - they would interview her, in her
hushed Franklin County accent would she recall him, how nice he was, how
charming he was, the evil he was about to commit unthinkable with his manners,
his charm, but how it all made sense, that feeling she got she couldn't shake,
now it all made sense, oh Lord...
On his plate was prime rib -
exceptional, but he'd never tell a soul, he was loathe to praise anything
except his family, his kind, himself - he took his knife in one hand, fork in
the other, and stabbed it to steady it before making the cut...
...a spurt of blood erupted from
the meat, lashing his face with liquid crimson.
He blinked, offguard but
steady.
By the kitchen he saw that the
waitress was staring at him, on her own face written the breathless, primal
arousal of Red Riding Hood face to face with - him. A big, bad wolf.
They made eye contact - he
smiled at her, the blood a soft drip down into his curving lips, softly,
sinisterly, the only way he could smile, like how the Serpent smiled at Eve as
she bit into the fruit - she could only bear it for a moment before she laughed
aloud, an explosive sound of feral, unguarded sexual excitement, her face went
red, with her own blood, and she turned away and ran into the kitchen,
humiliated.
He chuckled to himself.
What a charming little thing.
He'd spare her.
His dinner was taken alone,
the steakhouse - Frankie Rowland's, supposed to be the finest establishment in
this wretched valley town - suitably hushed, the people were nothing like the
pulsing, writhing grotesquerie that he had been subjected to last night.
The people here might remember
him - but the people there most definitely would.
Those that lived, survived -
they would recollect how they never saw it coming, no hint, no clue, that their blood would be splattered on his
face like the steak on his plate, running down his claws, slathering his teeth.
The terrible new world they were forced to live in was just as much of a shock
and a horror as seeing what he really was, what his family was...all the time
they had to prepare, all those times they never listened to his family that one
day there would come a reckoning, and so still the surprise would be fresh, the
terror eternal.
The waitress did not return to
give him another glass of cabernet, and Siegfried had to switch to water with
the carafe she had left on the table - he noted with another small chuckle that
he had freaked her out too hard, made things entirely too awkward...it was time
to go.
He wiped his face off with his
napkin, finished his prime rib, rose, donned his long jacket, threw some cash
onto the table so the waitress could keep her change for the trouble - a nod to
the host at the front of the restaurant and a discreet Thank you, have a good day and he was gone, out into the street
Now he could saunter, looking
about him, out the door and to his right, at the skyward-sweeping lines and
shapes of the bank tower now above him, reaching desperately yet futilely
toward Heaven - he would contemplate his place in this Commonwealth, in this
country, in this universe.
They called the structure that
he beheld by many names since it had been here very long, a quarter-century at
best: Dominion Tower, First Union Building, Wachovia Tower...soon it would change
again. But the name one uses for it is very telling: the building has changed hands so many times that one can know
the age of the person, when they moved to Roanoke, how well they know their own
city, all by what they call this place. The name of the
building ultimately gives an identity not to it, but rather he or she who knows it by whatever name they call it,
and details the history of themselves in the city, how well they know they know
Roanoke and how well Roanoke knows them. The neon signage at the top of the
structure is easily replaceable - but the memory of what it was, what it used
to be, stays forever.
Why had Siegfried chosen this
place, this Roanoke? Were there not other places - bigger, better, more
exciting places - to reveal himself to the world? Places where he would get
more attention, where he would have more impact?
Perhaps it was because that,
for all his worldliness, for everything that an education at Mr. Jefferson's
College in Charlottesville and the deep-pocketed wealth of centuries of
exploitation and despoilment could give him - he still could not get out of his
head, still, the impression of
Roanoke from when he was a boy, before the darkness of his destiny occluded
what little innocent spirit he was born with.
He was so small, and Roanoke
so large - he had seen this building, which
he would always know as the Dominion Tower, and it had impressed him,
impressed him deeply and permanently, this magnificent stone behemoth aching
toward the sky...
The Virginian late October - a
week, exactly, before Álfablót - came unexpectedly cold even for an afternoon,
and Siegfried pulled his coat closer to him, putting his chin down to his neck
but his eyes ahead, taking in the city that was his first taste of
civilization.
So it would be here - this
little town that fitfully dreamed of being a city, called Roanoke - it would be
here, it would be where it all began.
Cars came by him, pedestrians
on the other side of the street, unaware of him, his presence. Would they
notice him? Would they recognize him - in the future?
He lifted his head to the
street, to the pure Autumn sunlight that came crystalline over the buildings.
He blinked as the phrase came
back to him: in the future. What future, anyway? The constant reassurance
was that it was his, his family's...his kind's.
But was it?
Siegfried, his family, those
like him, were discerning creatures that saw white color on the flesh but no
special gift, no special privilege - outside of his own kind he was far more
comfortable around those that shared his lack of melanin, diversity and
multiculturalism was an acquired taste he could not savor, and so in some
quarters he would be called racist and
still others supremacist. The former
was a mere quibble, a preference - the latter was a plain fact.
Yet it was the feeling of
supremacy not over any one group, but against a whole swathe of humanity that
transcended all of its polychrome, who were not like him - he, who had wolf's blood run deep in his veins.
Empathy for humans - white,
brown, yellow - was a country forever undiscovered for him and his people.
Humans had done them terrible wrongs in the past - persecuted, tied to stakes
and burnt alive, tortured in ad hoc courts
of injustice across the European continent...the memory ran long. How could it
not? So like the first time you see a skyscraper, so like the flames of the
bonfires his ancestors in agony writhed in, it was seared into him forever.
Every human being would have his amercement unrelenting and terrible in the new
order he, Siegfried, hoped one day soon to create. For - across the sea in the
New World some of them, a bare few, had escaped, carrying with them the old
customs and the old ways and hoping, one day, that ever eluded them, to live in
peace, to be pack, family, and clan, without the prying eyes and intangible
demands of what Europe once was.
America - liberty, freedom, democracy: concepts so noisome and
awful it was as though a door had shut in Hell, and from the upthrown infernal
brimstone came forth the whole of this nation.
All this was illusion. There
was no justice, no democracy, no liberty - only the brutal way of might making
right, only the shedding of blood to acquit guilt, real or imagined...only
strength, and strength alone, to rule and to reign.
And if this was the philosophy
of the Fascist then - so be it. Not all that long ago did relations of his
reveal themselves as the Werwolf for
Hitler, whose first name, Adolf, had
etymological roots in people like Siegfried, wolf-of-the-land - great leader as he was, he still remained an
Austrian mountebank, the spawn of peasants, an industrious murderer, little
more. Could he ever fathom the secrets that Himmler dare tried to stir up? Of
course not - he was a puny human, they all were. And while Siegfried was born
long after the Werwolf fought and
died for that imbecile with the pencil moustache - the disgrace would be ever
fresh.
Taking in a breath - the asphalt,
exhaust from the passing cars admixed with the the airish October breeze - he
took the time to let his face twist in an unreserved sneer, his favorite
expression.
His was the race of both
Beowulf and Sigurd, for whom he was named, though the humans who knew the old
stories would be too dim to know, to understand that - they would deny it, they
would deny him, as a physical
impossibility. And it angered him - his whole existence was endless fury,
bottomless anger.
This rage that Siegfried felt
in the strength of his denial was the rage of something far greater than he
could comprehend and so he refused to, he refused to question his beliefs, he
refused to question the darkness that poured out of the one blind eye of Odin,
straight into his soul. All he saw was his own suffering, the heaviness of an
imaginary crown across his brow, laurels of patriarchy laid daintily over his
ears to rule over others.
For the future - as so the
past, as so the present - belonged not to the mongrel wasteland that America
had become, the lowing cattle with their mindless babble in their meaningless
quotidian existence, but to him, what
little was left of his tribe, the tiny minority scattered throughout the world
that, as integrated as they all may now be, would surely still rally to his
flag and assert their true destiny as masters over mankind.
The past is something one
cannot touch, nor smell, or even, truly see - only in the lonely solipsistic
theatre of the mind does it play, and there, like a daydream, it may as well be
a fantasy.
And so it was, in the present,
that Siegfried Stone was the very last hope of the lycanthropic people, the
Werewolves - those who had been furry and fanged and were written of in crushed
awe and wonder by the Nordic bards, crossed the sea
It would not be long at all,
his father had warned him in growing panic before he finally died, before the
mindless hatred for his species would reappear in the form of the demand for a
cleaner and more homogenous demographic hygiene...an overly verbose way of saying
they would be exterminated, the final spasm against them.
But - not unless he struck
first.
He longed to do it, but the
moment was not right - he had longed to do it last night at the Hotel Roanoke, he
longed to take that fool Lightfoot who was blissfully unaware of the monstrous
perversity that pulsed just beneath the surface of the town his ancestors had
stolen and impale him on talons and teeth of justice...but then, even then, the moment was not right then either. He must be
careful, he could not be showy - he would chose his victims one by one, he
would let the body count grow over a few days' time...and only when the hour was
correct, would he lure those who would piece the puzzle together. Then could
the revolution begin.
Still - still how he longed to
do it now.
He adored the exquisite pain
that would come when he directed his hand to turn - the nails would start to
grow out, longer, sharper, but he would have to stop, he would bid the muscles
in his hand to cease even as they seized, he would have to file them back to
looking normal again.
How badly he wanted them to
stay the way they were becoming - how badly he wanted to go further, deadlier,
and let one hand, then the other, accomplish their needed task...and kill.
His heart raced at the thought
- the fantasy of bloodshed.
Yet who would be first? Who,
the first thrall to swing from his personal branch of Yggdrasill, choked on the
hangman's rope of his claws?
He stopped - he had been
walking away from the friendly corners of the restaurants and shops, passing by
an ugly parking lot, an uglier Greyhound terminal, neither of which had
benefitted from the gentrification that was slowly but surely polishing and
bettering this town. On the other side of the street was a squat brick building
that was some sort of outreach center for junkies...
...who often, he had heard
hinted by those who'd lived here, like to sleep in the parking garage near the
Greyhound station.
It was perfect - a perfect way
to begin.
Siegfried had to do it. What
were they always saving in Germany
about Destiny - Providence?
It was time.
He dashed across the street,
ducking into the parking garage, his nose wrinkling at the unseemly smells of
gasoline, concrete, the aching odor that buildings like it seemed to give off
after so many years.
The parking garage was a dim
concrete cavern strewn with orange-yellow lights, the roar of distant engines a
constant ambient din like a far-off cave-monster warning away intruders.
Amidst the maze of cars and
columns, one floor and then the next, no one seemed to notice him - he was just
another person looking for where he'd left his vehicle.
They would never guess he was
about to commit murder.
He found his victim sitting in
the space between a pickup truck and a minivan, eyes picking up a liquid light
from being glazed with some kind of stupor.
Siegfried approached his prey,
stalking it cautiously. The man was lean and wiry - not much meat. He seemed to be in his late
thirty's - he was dirty but not filthy, an unruly but short head of sandy,
brownish-blonde hair with a full, tawny beard and moustache that seemed to have
been trimmed recently, flecked in places with streaks of grey. He was
prematurely aged - he had a great scar across his face from his nose to his left cheek, adding to the
overall affect of being rough and having been
roughed by life itself. He wore a grey shirt that was so faded one had to
squint to read it: Green Bay Packers--1998--Super
Bowl Champs. It had holes in parts that revealed a hairy tummy, the hair the
same color as his beard - workaday jeans and ugly, unfashionable shoes
completed the look of a neglected hobo. But he was the refuse of human society, he had been dumped here from
somewhere and he would be doomed to a nothingness and oblivion...no one would
even remember his name.
How ironic, then, that his
fate would be so important: the first full step to the Werewolf's return at his
rightful perch.
Now Siegfried came closer: "Hello,
friend."
The man blinked in surprise
before letting out a loud guffaw. "Well hey there, stranger." The man
tilted his head back and grinned - he seemed to be drunk, completely out of it,
blissfully and luckily not in this world. "Why ye'd wanna say hey ta me, I
ain't nuthin special."
"Oh, I dunno about that..."
Siegfried's expression was still smug, but he could hide no longer the
wickedness within it. "How would you like to - be - special?"
The bum jumped to his feet,
swaying, as he did, uncoordinated - public intoxication at four in the
afternoon, Siegfried would be doing the world a favor, dispatching this one
into the next life.
"Whatcha say, now?"
"Special," Siegfried repeated.
He grinned again, and
Siegfried felt a twinge, however small, of humanity - he was all goofiness, all
rakish enchantment, he did not seem to really know what was going on around
him.
"Well alright then, sir! I'll do anythin once, yanno - but I gotta ask ya..."
Siegfried was losing himself -
he felt his adrenaline spike, his inner primal urges flooding him - he let
claws grew enough for the bones in his fingers to, at last, deform and
lengthen, the inner wolf desperate to be free at last.
He flew forward to attack this
filthy hobo who would not be missed, in a parking garage between two cars where
nobody would see or miss him.
But he was stopped.
He was jarred - terribly,
painfully - back to reality.
He blinked several times
before he felt it: the counter-force against him.
The man had caught his punch with
one hand, an unnatural, preternatural strength.
"What the Hell--"
Siegfried hissed.
"Now wait a minute - wait
jest a minute, here - I ain't rightly think this the way I's s'posed ta be special there, sir," he heard the
man say, his charm clouded over with a knowingness that belied his appearance.
"Yew want me ta suck yer dick for some money, that be fine - but I ain't
bout ready ta die right yet."
Siegfried was shaking,
unyielding in this unexpected match of wills. "Who - who are you?"
"Ya can call me
Lucky," said the man, his eyes unblinking, a dare, a demand. "Lucky
ta live on the street. Lucky ta meet such a charmin
man - like yerself."
Siegfried's sneer twisted his
face - his eye twitched, his breaths came in deep and fuming - but he relented,
he jerked his hand back, throwing it into his coat, so that no one could see it
was struggling to become.
There were so many questions
he wanted to ask him, so many things he feverishly needed to know - how anyone
who was a non-Werewolf could be this strong, how he could have known to parry
his blow so effortlessly like that...
...unless, this man, too...
"That's not your
name - is it - Lucky?" He nearly
spat the last word, the falsehood encased inside it.
"It'll do fer now, won't it?"
Siegfried's pulse pounded in his neck, his whole
body a writhing mass of barely-together public decorum. "And why fucking
should it--?"
"Cuz I knew who yew is - smelt ya on the
way in ere."
Siegfried's eyes narrowed - he was not to
bested, even as, now, his whole being was awash in the terror of being
discovered. The punch had been one thing, but this was
something else altogether.
"You lie."
"I tell the truth - yew real important,
ain't ya?" He grinned again, his half-lidded eyes full of some inner
knowledge he evidently found irresistible. "Last of yer kin, I
reckon--"
"Enough. You're a crazy - unwashed homeless
person - dumped out of a booby hatch
and left to stink up the streets." His insults were his only offense,
should this ragdoll, stringbean man be telling the truth. He spun on his heel,
straightened himself. "Go die in a gutter somewhe--"
"Stink,
huh?" The man - Lucky - called after him. "T'ain't I the one stank, boy - it's yew."
Siegfried shook his head, mortified he had let
this go on so long - but his mind was a blank what he could, or should, do
next.
"Yew - stink
- like one o'them big fellas down yonder." And then, his voice lowered
just enough for Siegfried to hear: "Ya smell like em old boys down where
the Natural Tunnel were - name o'Stone."
At the sound of his family name, Siegfried's
bowels turned to ice. How could he know something like that? No - a better
question - how could he have blocked his punch, and known that at the same time?
Over his shoulder, his face giving away nothing.
"What
did you say?"
Lucky's face, naturally friendly though it seemed
to be, had grown serious - and a little cruel.
"Yew heard me - Stone. Yer kin been round a long, long time - down yonder. Ain't I
right?"
Siegfried paced briskly back to pull Lucky by
his shirt collar so that they were inches apart, face to face:
"Who the Hell are you. Really."
Lucky's eyes - blue, like Siegfried's, but
darker, like an old china plate - darted about, studying him, his face, the
contours of his expression.
"Just like yew, Stone."
Siegfried stared at him. "The Hell do
you--"
"Yer gonna take me ta where I live,"
Lucky cut him off.
"You're homeless," Siegfried said
flatly, trying to recover.
"Nuh uh. Live up yonder--" He pointed with
his head, behind him, an unseen distance away. "Sugar Loaf."
Siegfried balked. "That's clear across
town! If you really did live on a mountain why the Hell are you all the way
down here?"
The man - Lucky - seemed to sway again, the same
kind of pseudo-drunkenness, but his eyebrows went up, defiant. "Think I'll
be askin the questions from now on there, sir."
Moistening his lips, Siegfried gritted his
teeth, feeling a predicament he had never imagined close in around him. "And
- if I don't?"
"Well - ye can either
take me there, or - me n'yew gonna have a little talk--" He grinned - and
as Siegfried watched, his eyes widening in soul-clenching terror at the same
time, his teeth sharpened and grew.
"--and everyone's gonna see. Yew
wudn't want that, would ya Stone?"
Siegfried said nothing back.
The time for talking had passed.
He gave a small, noncommittal
shake of his head, the abrupt anxiety of being the hunter captured by the game
tearing into him as he had planned to tear into Lucky.
But now he turned around, his
face red, blushing with blood like that poor waitress from not so long ago.
He was deathly shamed, unable
to even look at who, now, was his forced-upon travelling companion.
He heard himself mutter,
numbly: "F-follow - follow me..."
And then he heard, the same kind
of numbness, the reply: "So
glad y'asked." There was a pause, and then, like he was grinning again as
he spoke it, Lucky said: "I really hope we can be friends, after I what
wanna show ye..."
Siegfried did not answer - the
past weighed too mightily upon him as his present, his future, collapsed in
pieces, as the swaying, grinning hobo - fellow Werewolf, the cosmic irony too
excruciating to comprehend - followed him, polished and well-dressed in his
black coat, out of the parking garage, and back down the street.