Lycanthropia

Kate lay waiting for Gabriel atop a blue blanket on a narrow strip of sand between two patches of beach grass on one of the last wild beaches on earth. When she last saw him, nearly an hour past, he was loping into the ocean with his odd gait and diving head-first into a wave so dark it was almost violet. Then he disappeared, leaving her the sole occupant of the beach as far as she could see in any direction. During the week they had been honeymooning in a bungalow five miles away, they had seen only three other people — a young couple and their toddler daughter who had stopped one early afternoon for a quick picnic before driving hastily away. Gabriel had wrapped Kate, who was sunbathing nude, in a spare beach towel, and they sat giggling together in the tall grass, hoping not to draw attention to themselves. It was futile. As they the couple left they passed within a few feet, nodding a greeting that caused Kate and Gabriel to explode in a paroxysm of laughter.

Now she lay alone on her back with her arm shielding her eyes from the afternoon glare. Her skin was tawny from the sun and glistened with baby oil and beads of sweat. She had pulled back her chestnut hair with an elastic band, but strands had come loose and they tickled her face like fine feathers when she sat up to search the horizon for Gabriel. Her wide blue eyes were mutable and untamed; they were perhaps the most striking feature of a face that never failed to turn men’s heads in public. In private, her lips glossy and fragile with balm, she seemed more vulnerable, though no less wild. When Gabriel did not appear after long minutes, Kate fell into sleep, lulled by the sound of the waves, and dreamt of a summer wedding.

In her dream the minister was asking for an exchange of rings when Gabriel emerged from the sea. He was tall and spare, but wide through the shoulders and graceful in a way that was surprising for a man of his height. Wading through the water toward the shore, he appeared unaware of his physicality, but focused completely on Kate, his objective. With an impatient hand he pushed his dark hair out of his face and wrung the sea from it before letting if fall to the middle of his back. He was a man out of step with his time, his hair too long, his face bearded, and his disposition opposed to rule by machinery. No corporation had long controlled him, and no closed room had fully contained him. Only Kate, with her feral determination, had ever held him and commanded him to be still.

Once on the strand, Gabriel trotted the twenty or so steps to Kate, then dropped to his knees and dragged his wet hair over her skin from her breasts to her waist, stopping to kiss the soft flesh an inch below her navel. She squealed in shock and delight and tugged at his hair, pulling his mouth toward hers. A mere second before they kissed, she spoke the name she had given him: “Vishko!“

“Yes?” Gabriel answered.

“You were gone a long time.”

“I was chasing a fish.”

“Did you catch it?”

“No. I only wanted to chase it.”

“Silly boy,” she smiled. “Always chasing. Never catching.”

Later, he showed her the shells he had brought from the floor of the sea, and he teased her with stories of mermaids and sirens. She giggled and feigned jealousy, making a fuss over the shells as if they were rare gems. It was then, had one been close enough to observe the scene, he would have noticed her hennaed hands, both of them covered from fingertip to wrist with an intricate design that looked like red lace gloves. Their only differences were her palms: Her left hand held a smiling sun, while the right contained a laughing quarter moon. Gabriel had inscribed them on the day of their wedding, his gift to her, and the images were fading, day by day, as the distance from their nuptials grew.

They sat, side-by-side, facing one another and resting their backs against each other’s raised thighs. They had reached the time of ritual in their day, and it was Gabriel’s turn to invent a story.

“Which will it be, Katie?” he asked.

She stared for a moment at her closed fists, as though trying to decide. Then she very slowly opened her right hand.

Part of their romantic mythology during storytelling included holding hands tightly to prevent the storyteller from escaping into a Far Country. Kate understood this and took Gabriel’s left hand in both of hers. Gabriel stared into the distance.

*

Many years ago (his narrative began) in a land where people lived simply and did not worship technology but still believed in magic, there lived a Man with No Regular Name. He was an orphan — a shape-shifter and a changeling — and many in his village believed he had been left on the doorstep of the orphanage in a basket of elfin manufacture by mysterious gnomes who were unable to care properly for a human baby. Though he grew up straight and tall and possessed a good and gentle heart, he had a mercurial nature and his eyes were the color of the moon. Most of those who lived in his village believed he was bewitched, so they gave him wide berth when they passed him on the street. Many crossed themselves out of his line of sight.

Because he had no Regular Name, he could get no regular employment. To earn his keep he collected dragonflies for a University in a Great City where technology was a God and where people cared only for scientific knowledge. To them he was nothing more than a source of the dragonflies that they genetically altered and made into the great flying machines they harness trained and buzzed from place to place. They paid the Man with No Regular Name a dollar per dragonfly, and many days he went home from the university with two hundred dollars or more in his pocket. For this reason, those in his village tolerated him: Bewitched or not, he had plenty of money.

He collected the specimens among the cattails and tall grasses growing along the banks of a pond near his home. He would scoop them into a butterfly net, remove them gently from the net with his hand and place them in a collection box made of wood and wire mesh screening. He collected from sunup until late afternoon, when he carried his bounty to the University.

One Wednesday in the middle of summer his catch was plentiful, so he worked somewhat lazily and netted only those fat dragonflies he didn’t have to chase. After a while, though, he noticed a glimmer of aquamarine in a patch of cattails. Believing he had sighted a rare and exotic Odonata indeed, he swung the net, felt the tiny weight of capture and reached inside to find—

“Please don’t hurt me,” a tiny voice said.

The Man with No Regular Name nearly dropped his catch, a small wriggling creature that felt not at all like the crisp, lustrous exoskeleton of a dragonfly, but more like the squirming flesh of a — well, of a maiden.

And so it was. The Man with No Regular Name had captured a fairy — and not just any fairy, but the Princess Vodichka, ruler of all water fairies on the planet. He stared at her in wonder. Her skin was the palest pink, very nearly white, and almost translucent. Her wings were like those of a dragonfly, but more iridescent; they threw flashes of rainbows into the air when they moved. She wore a gown made of sheer aquamarine fabric that had been woven from spider webbing and dyed with pigments from under the sea to the hue of the ocean just as it turns from turquoise to royal blue. Her hair was fine, the color of a field of ripe wheat, her lips were like apple blossoms, and her eyes were bright blue oceans. The Man with No Regular Name feared he would drown in them.

“Please, kind sir,” said Princess Vodichka in a voice like a babbling brook. “Please release me.”

“Not until you grant me a single wish,” her captor replied.

“And what would that wish be?” Princess Vodichka asked.

“I want you to give me a Regular Name,” said the man. “And I want a single kiss from your lips.” (He knew a kiss from a fairy would draw his fellow villagers to him — and perhaps remove the stigma of his restless nature and his moon eyes.)

“I can give you the kiss,” the princess said. “But you must earn your name.”

“How?”

“You must tell me a story,” the princess answered. “Then, if I think you are worthy, I will grant your wish and give you the kiss.”

The Man with No Regular Name thought a moment, then cleared his throat and began:

“Once upon a time,” he said.

“I love stories that begin —once upon a time—,” said Princess Vodichka. (“So do I,” Kate said, and she lay her head against Gabriel’s chest. He touched her hair and felt a slight sweat at the roots. Tenderness welled inside him, and for a moment the story stopped.) “Please continue.”

The Man with No Regular Name began again: “Once upon a time there was a man who fell in love with the Moon.”

“Ah,” said Princess Vodichka. “An old tale. The best.” (Kate smiled and squeezed Gabriel’s hand.)

“Every night, from the window of his apartment, he would watch the Moon and sigh. He thought she saw him too and was teasing him with her coming and going. On nights when she disappeared into black silence he would pine and write plaintive ballads that he sung in a rich baritone until the Moon, out of curiosity, he thought, returned again, slipping in quietly, a little at a time, and revealing herself to him. He came to love the Moon’s capricious nature most of all.

“The poor man longed for the Moon’s embrace. Over the years it grew into an obsession. He moved from one apartment to another, each on a higher floor of a high-rise building, hoping to be nearer the Moon, but nothing got him close enough. He bought a telescope and mounted it on the roof of his building so he might spy on the Moon, but all it did was magnify the imperfections of her face, and so further endear him. ‘My Beloved Moon,— he said, ‘is not vain.—

“Days turned months into years and even decades, and the man who loved the Moon grew very old. Oddly, his skin and hair and eyes paled to resemble the light of the Moon, and his face became a mass of craters, peaks and valleys. His love of the Moon grew into the stuff of legend, and people from around the world came nightly to stare at him, alone in his high tower, his arms spread wide, imploring the Moon: ‘Oh, come to me, my Love! Release me from this awful torment of loneliness!— Down below, onlookers stared at one another, shook their heads and said, ‘What a Fool!— The Fool heard some of them, but was not angry. He simply said to himself, ‘At least I have loved passionately.—“

At this point Princess Vodichka brushed tears from her eyes and said to the Man with No Regular Name, “This story is far too sad.” The Man with No Regular Name took out his handkerchief and touched the smallest corner of it to her eyes.

(“Vishko?” said Kate.

“Yes, Beloved,” he answered.

“Please tell me this isn’t the end of the story.”

“Patience, my Love,” Gabriel responded. His eyes turned again toward a faraway place.)

The Man with No Regular Name said, “One October evening, when the Fool who loved the Moon was so old that not even the oldest census recalled the date of his birth, and the Moon was so full and bright she seemed swollen and pregnant in the sky, the Fool implored her, ‘Oh my Love! I fear if you do not take me my heart shall surely burst!’ Then something remarkable occurred.

“The crowd below, whose numbers had swelled into the thousands, disagreed about how it had happened. Some said the man leapt from the tower and soared like a rocket toward the Moon. Others claimed his spirit left his body as a specter and simply drifted toward the heavens. Still others believed the Fool had sprouted the wings of an angel and they carried him up and up until he vanished into the night sky. But all agreed on the outcome: Where once the shadows on the Moon had been an indistinguishable mass, they now formed the silhouette of a man. Which is the reason,” said the Man with No Regular Name, “in some parts of the world even today people speak of the Man in the Moon.”

Princess Vodichka smiled a radiant, liquid smile and touched her tiny lips to the lips of the Man with No Regular Name. “You tell the most lovely story,” she said. “So I shall call you Moonteller.”

Gabriel looked into the Great Distance and whispered, almost beyond Kate’s hearing, “And so he is called by all his townspeople and in the Realm of Fairies to this very day.”

“Vishko?” said Kate.

“Yes?” Gabriel answered.

“Did Moonteller release Princess Vodichka?”

Gabriel smiled and returned from the Great Distance. “Yes. But she had learned to love his heart in the telling of the story, and with a kiss to his lips she transformed herself into a human princess and they were wed and lived in a cottage on the side of a hill. They raised six children (and bore a seventh who died in childbirth — their secret sorrow) and they grew very old. They remain there in love to this day.”

“Happily ever after?” said Kate.

“No,” Gabriel answered. “Sadly all true love stories end in sorrow.”

“Even ours?” Kate asked.

Gabriel stared at the ocean. “The fish!“ he said. For a moment he wavered, then kissed Kate, leapt to his feet and raced toward the blue water. He could see the red and black fish taunting him.

*

That night, in the safety of their rented bungalow, they slept together in a narrow bed, and Kate dreamt of a fairy princess in an aquamarine gown while Gabriel dreamt of rainbows of fishes.

They had been practicing a small sleeping ritual since first becoming lovers, one that began with Kate waking quietly in the night and whispering, “Vishko?” No matter how softly she spoke the word, Gabriel would immediately respond, “Yes?” He would pull her close and she would lay her head on his chest and listen to the beating of his heart. Between them it was a small security, and it bound them together more surely than the vows they had exchanged in a tiny chapel by the sea.

But on this night, when she uttered the single word there was no response, and, startled, she opened her eyes wide and reached to touch him. Gabriel was not beside her. Instead she found him standing at the window, staring at the moon. She spoke more firmly: “Vishko?” Gabriel shook himself and turned his gaze on her. For a moment his eyes blankly reflected the light of the moon, and a chill shot through Kate. Then his eyes softened and he said, “Yes?”

“Darling, come to bed,” she commanded.

He left the window and climbed into bed, pulling her close and nuzzling her neck. In a minute he was asleep and dreamt of the last wild beach on earth.

But for a long time Kate could not rest. She listened closely to Gabriel’s rhythmic breathing and tried to let it draw her into sleep, but the system failed; and, when exhaustion finally closed her eyes near dawn, her dreams were filled with mercurial moonlight.

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