Lycanthropia

In a dream I saw Jesus hanging on the cross, bloodied, battered, suffering. But he quickly tired of it and said, “Enough! This is silly.” He pulled a nail completely through one of his wrists, extracted the other, then loosed his feet and hopped to the ground. He took off the crown of thorns, kicked the gambling Romans in the teeth, took back his robe, healed himself of all his wounds and got dressed.

The Pharisees were astonished. “Maybe he really was a son of God,” they whispered to one another. (Funny how a little coming down off the cross will change people’s minds.) The Romans, who had never seen a man leave the gibbet except as a corpse, fled. The howling mob hushed a moment, then became petulant and said, “Hey! What the hell? Who will be our savior now?” Jesus knocked one of them to the ground, stole his shoes and put them on his own feet. He walked a few steps, bounced up and down on his toes and kicked at a bit of dirt. “There,” he mumbled. “Better.” He turned to the mob and said, “Save yourselves. I’m tired of your yammering like ungrateful cats in heat. You won’t listen anyway. Not even if I hang there until I’m blue in the face and am resurrected a million times. None of you gets the love thing. All you want is ticket out of hell. Too bad. Find another scapegoat. I’m done with the lot of you. It’s finished.” Then he walked into town for a shave and a haircut.

There was no earthquake. The curtain in the temple was not torn in two. The sun shined and birds started chirping. Jesus told his disciples, “Go home. Get decent jobs. Take care of your families. And if it doesn’t work out, I’ll teach you a little trick with bread and fish.” After that he headed east. The last anyone saw him he was in India, had a pet wolf who followed him obediently everywhere, and was leaving the Ganges for Tibet.

Two thousand years later the Christian church evolved into a vast conglomerate of corporations that survived by bleeding congregations of tithes, and was led mostly by clever orators who contributed little more than their bombast to society. Some, emboldened by fame and their own cunning, created worldwide media empires and thus influenced politics and global affairs. Drunk with power and thirsty for more, they aligned themselves closely with governmental figures and traded their gospel for position and prestige. They were greedy, self-serving, lustful and proud. And they were rich. My God, they were rich!

Errant priests used their unquestioned authority to sexually abuse parishioners — the worst exploited children. Brutal nuns broke rulers over knuckles of students. Evangelists devoured whole fried chickens and lured farm girls into hay mows. Well-meaning missionaries inflicted misguided values on poor indigenous populations and seeded the whole earth with capitalism.

In other words, nothing really changed. It was business as usual.

I awakened from the dream in a cold sweat, climbed from the bed and stared out the window at the full moon. There were high winds, and a brace of translucent clouds scudded quickly past in the night sky, shimmering in the moon’s delicate light.

From the bed came the murmur of a woman’s voice, colored with small sleep notes: “Are you restless? Come back to bed.”

I turned and peered into the darkness, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the change in light; eventually I found her pale form on the bed, under a single sheet. Her golden hair, a darker mass, spilled over her pillow. I felt tears sting my eyes and could not understand why. “If there were no God,” I said very softly, “would it make a difference in who we are?”

“Goodness, baby,” my lover responded. “Where did that come from? Such a difficult question for so late in the night.” She turned back the corner of the sheet. “And tell me from bed. I’m cold and you should be sleeping. Not fretting about God.”

“I had a dream,” I said.

“Tell me about it,” she crooned. “But from here. Not from there. Come back to bed. I don’t want you changing. I want you sleeping.”

I walked across the room and sat on the edge of the mattress. My lover looped an arm around my waist and pressed her cheek into the small of my back. The contact was meant to still me, but already I could feel the change coming. A beetle walked along the wall in the far corner and I heard its tarsi scrape the floor. The smell of my lover was overpowering, so full, rich and erotic in my nostrils that the whole of my body was aroused by her. The room spun in my imagination: First clockwise, then counterclockwise.

She could feel it coming and knew the only defense against it was language. “Tell me about the dream,” she urged. “Please?”

I struggled to make even the simplest speech, but words to express the drama of my subconscious would not come. Instead I choked on them as the room spun like a manic top. “Nothing,” I croaked. “Nada.”

“No,” she said. “I won’t allow it. Not tonight. Make it a haiku, baby. Make it into three lines.” She turned on the small nightstand lamp and reached for a pen near the telephone. “Write it here.” She drew back the sheet and pointed to a place just below her navel.”

I pressed the palm of my hand against the flesh canvas, experiencing the slight swell of her belly and its small roundness. I shut my eyes against the light and her beauty, and I was lost for a moment in the articulation of her cells communicating with mine. It was an electric conversation, the most delicate whisper of subatomic particles, a gossip of electrons; but I could not allow myself to become lost in it. Instead, I let them dictate words to me. I took the pen from my lover’s hand and, in the small, precise block letters of a technical draftsman, I wrote the following haiku:

jesus spurned the cross,
but nothing in the world changed.
avarice still. oh.

She read the poem and then extinguished the lamp, and the entire dream played out in her imagination as though a compressed computer file had opened; she saw the whole panoply of history unfold from the crucifixion to the present, absent the saving grace of the cross. And it was all the same. No better. Certainly no worse. Just a long parade of both large and small kindnesses and cruelties. It was collective humanity, working out its certainties and its fears, expressing love and hatred, fumbling along the road of cultural evolution. In the end, the Towers still fell and atrocities occurred in an Iraqi prison. Nothing changed. Nothing. Some of humankind rushed headlong toward self-destruction; others worked to improve the human condition. It was yin and yang, a flurry of bees, a physical manifest destiny. It was predestination.

“It was a dream,” she said. “Just a dream.”

“No,” I replied. “It was fate.”

“Hush,” she insisted. “Lie down.”

I lay down beside her in the darkness, face-to-face, and she covered us both with the sheet. I touched her forehead lightly with just the tips of the fingers of my right hand, then traced down the bridge of her nose to the curve of her mouth. We kissed. She took my right hand in hers and pressed it to her chest, between the delicate swell of her breasts; I felt her heart beating against the palm of my hand, a quiet, steady thump. In the moment it was the pulsation of the Universe, the throb of existence, the drumbeat of ancients projecting into the future. She pressed her palm against my sternum and her touch was immediately thrilling and soothing. We spoke without words: I am yours. You are mine.

“God or no God,” she said, “we have this. We are this.”

“Yes,” I said. “But we are also the other thing.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “But we needn’t talk about it tonight.”

“No,” I said. “We can talk about it later. Or not at all, if you like.”

She turned her back to me and pressed hard against me. “Now,” she said, “You must tell us a bedtime story and lull us to sleep.”

I put my arm around her and worked my right leg between both of hers because I knew it was what she wanted. Then I told the story of a young woman living in Albuquerque among pink stucco houses with sunflowers planted in their yards who kept a wolf as a pet and walked it every day through the streets of her neighborhood. The wolf was the hue of aluminum with tawny, wheat-colored legs and with eyes as blue as a clear New Mexico sky. He grew so attached to the young woman in two years of walking together that he came to think of her as his life mate, and he guarded her carefully and was fiercely loyal to her. What the wolf could not know (because wolves mate for life and know nothing of divorce) was that the young woman’s marriage was failing, and one day she had to leave her Albuquerque home and travel to a faraway place where the keeping of wolves as pets was forbidden.

She left the wolf with friends who vowed they would keep him safe and well-fed for all the remainder of his dozen or so years. But within a few days of her leaving New Mexico for good, the wolf escaped his new owners and began trailing trace elements of her scent. They led steadily eastward. He followed faithfully and purposefully, as though he were tracking prey. In fact, during the whole of his pursuit he ate little more than scraps from trash bins, and he became almost emaciated with lack of proper food, water and rest. (Certainly he did not sleep — he could not be deterred from his quest by something so foolish and wasteful of time.)

What the young woman could not have known and would not have believed — because she had stopped believing in magic after her divorce — was her wolf companion was not a wolf at all, but a changeling and a shapeshifter — a lycanthrope — whose pursuit of her was motivated as much by the man in him as by the wolf. When he found her (not in wolf form, but in the shape of a human), he courted her with lupine tenacity and with the passion of a man hopelessly smitten by great love. In time, because the man offered his heart and life with patience and determination, the young woman came to love him, and her heart unfolded to him as a delicate flower unfolds its petals to the gentle spring sun.

Their relationship might have ended tragically (after all, no human can love happily with the spawn of elves). But as her heart blossomed her magic returned, and she discovered that she too was an alien and a changeling and a lycanthrope, destined to eternal metamorphosis and to distance and aloneness. And so they lived happily ever after (or as happily as two changelings can live in a world dominated by humans), which is how all good fairy tales end, and how all bedtime stories should be resolved.

The story done, I touched my lover’s forehead and she dropped almost immediately into a profound sleep. But I was still restless and too much a part of the dream for sleep. I lay very still and stared her hair in the darkness and tried hard to be lost in its texture and flow and so be distracted from the light of the moon.

In her sleep my lover said, distinctly, “You are the wolf and I am the young woman.” I knew she was rehearing and rethinking the story in her dreams. I wanted to go there with her, but I was absorbed by restless thoughts of salvation and damnation. How, if there were no gods or a God, all life would fall after death into what? Plato’s dreamless sleep? Oblivion? Chaos? And even with gods or a God, but lacking a savior, all life would still fall into ruin. Then it occurred to me that even with a human savior, we changelings — the product of elfin imagination and aliens in the realm of humans — would still be lost forever. Damned, even.

What we needed was a St. Francis of Assisi, who loved and interceded on behalf of all creatures, and called even inanimate objects his brothers.

“No,” my lover whispered from the depths of her sleep. “You are wrong, my love. What we need is this.” She tapped her breastbone with two fingers. “We need love. Genuine love. God or no God, it’s the only thing that lasts forever.”

She was right, of course. Little wonder she slept so soundly. I kissed between her shoulder blades and sniffed her skin. Before long I had fallen asleep and dreamed of flying.

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