Going back to the strange Saul questions now: if I remember myself right, the second day, when we were filming again at Pan Pacific Park, Eos didn’t ask anyone about Apostle Paul or the Detroit Tigers. Or what’s more likely is I just didn’t notice because I was still thinking all about my crazy dreams from that morning and the memory of Eos hugging me with her smooth black arms with the very nice veins was very fresh on my mind.

But on the third day, I know she asked the questions to many people. I clearly remember this because each person she asked was a boy near her age and I felt sort of jealous from it. Why wasn’t she asking me if I had an uncle named Saul? Or if I knew anything about the Detroit Tigers of 1938? Why didn’t she care if I knew the story of Apostle Paul and his revelation on the road to Dimashq? Just so you know, this is the Arabic name for the place where it is written Saul heard Jesus speak to him.

Most people’s lives change very slowly, more slowly than the seasons. Some people are born into the life they’re going to lead and nothing much ever comes along to force them to change. For Cheyenne Clark, change came about in the space of thirty very bad seconds.

It happened when she was younger. Much younger. It happened one day when she and her dad were driving in their car.

It was at the end of a vacation. They were coming down out of Jasper National Park, where her dad had shown her the glaciers. Just the two of them—she was on holiday from school and he was between jobs, but he’d scraped enough together for the trip of a lifetime. Her mother hadn’t been able to get time off from work, but frankly, she’d looked relieved when they packed up the car, waved good- bye, and pulled out of the drive—glad enough to have the house to herself for a while, to have some time off from looking after the both of them. For Chey and her dad it had been a time to bond, something they’d never had much of before. The park was half a continent away from home and they’d driven the whole way there, which meant a lot of time to talk to each other and reconnect.

That was the summer she’d started to really think about what it was going to be like to be an adult, and her dad had answered all of her stupid questions. He’d told her stories about his own youth, in America, and his time in the army there, which sounded like going to a summer camp you couldn’t leave. In exchange she’d told him all about her life, about school and her friends, and she’d even told him about her first kiss, with a sweaty Quebecois boy who had called her mademoiselle and then bragged, afterward, that he’d gotten his hand up under her shirt even though he really hadn’t.

As for the park itself, it had turned out to be a lot of fun. The two of them had ridden in a snowmobile as big as a bus and out of the window she’d seen a herd of deer. They’d had a week in the park, and though she’d been dreading the trip all spring, now that it was over she wished she could have stayed there for a month.

It was on the drive back that things changed.

She thought about Greg’s discourse on the loyalty of the vole as she put on her oversized gardening gloves to transfer the tiny carcass into the box. It annoyed her to think of it. He’d seemed to admire the dogged, exaggerated loyalty of the male vole, and appeared to credit himself with a similar level of devotion. To her, it seemed so high-and-mighty, so prissily above it all. Greg always prided himself on taking the high road, but sometimes she wondered if he simply suffered from a lack of imagination. Or maybe he just wanted to maintain moral superiority, to make her feel guilty. She did feel guilty; guilty and angry in equal measure. She shocked herself sometimes by how strongly she disliked him, how much contempt she had for him.

I should have expected second thoughts. I need to discuss them with a co-worker beside me. I watch her mornings through the small gap in our shared cubicle wall the size of a simple mistake, a separation where the plastic teeth beneath the beige fabric are made to align but don’t. While I wait for the screen in front of me to whirr on along with my day or as I press number one for new messages, she manages to look busy.

peteredpan: well im going to quit

jerseygirl: sorry repeat please

Instant messaging users aren’t often asked to repeat the words hanging before them during their written exchanges. Aude, who calls herself jerseygirl because she likes to pretend she’s from Asbury Park like Bruce Springsteen even though she’s actually and entirely French, will ask people to repeat themselves in conversation because she hasn’t understood.

peteredpan: well i sure will miss you

jerseygirl: where are you going

peteredpan: im done here, im giving my notice

jerseygirl: what does this mean?

peteredpan: cant do it anymore

jerseygirl: why dont i believe you

We work for the press in our office. Rather, we work for clients who want to make the press work for them. In the end, we find a way to work everyone around to the opinion our clients have paid us to formulate about themselves. The name we give to this process is consumer public relations. The post I occupy within it is junior account executive and, for longer than I could have imagined, the follow-up calls and the reply-at-your-earliest-convenience emails required to live up to the job title have been providing me with the understanding that a kind of inconceivable beauty begins just outside my office door, but sitting inside as I am, I miss what could be the last chance to ever be a part of it. I can feel the cubicle walls growing. I fantasize about the exit.

Before I can respond again to Aude, we’re directed to join in on a conference call from our desks. I hear the electronic dirge various phone keypads make around me, as people behind other cubicles punch in the conferencing access numbers. Aude and I and our boss, Pat, greet the two other parties dialed into the call: the client representative from nRapture Games there to provide details on the latest installment in a popular videogame series, and a national press reporter, who has been waiting to review the new game for a year, agreeing to listen to our spiel solely on the grounds that he receives an exclusive advance copy.

A duck slid in on the wind and flapped to a landing on the perfect mirror surface of the lake. Thick velvety ripples of black water hurried away from its body as it cruised serenely along. The breeze off the water made the quaking aspens rattle and shiver.

Chey’s weapon swung through the air and sighted on the duck as if the handgun were mounted on ball bearings. It felt like her arm didn’t move at all. She’d trained long and hard so it would feel like that.

“Remember,” Fenech said, “you have to be close.”

“I know. You told me already,” she said, slipping the gun into her back pocket.

She knew the science involved. Normal lead bullets were soft enough that when they passed down the barrel of a gun they changed shape, slightly, conforming to the rifling on the inside of the barrel. They emerged from the muzzle spinning as a result, and that spin kept them traveling in a mostly straight line. Silver bullets were harder than lead and they didn’t change their shape as easily. Because they didn’t spin they were far more likely to deviate in mid- flight from the trajectory you wanted—which made them far less accurate, especially at any kind of range. She knew all this; she knew it better than he did, but he was going to tell her again anyway. Bobby was one of those people who liked to repeat things for emphasis, because he assumed other people’s memories weren’t as good as his. “At more than twenty meters you’re unlikely to hit the side of a wood buffalo.” He smiled at his own jest.

“So you need to be close.”

“Close,” she said. “Got it.”

His smile deepened a little. Turned warm. In his own way he really could be affectionate, even caring. “How are you?” he asked. “It can’t have been easy getting this far. You look great, though. I kind of half expected to find you starving and frozen, but you look like you’ve been working out. You found out that life up north agrees with you?”

She nodded and bit her lip. How to tell him? Would he freak out? Would he shoot her on the spot?

“You know I always thought you were crazy for wanting to hike in like this.”

“It was the only way,” she said. “My cover story was that I was completely lost and near death. I had to look the part—enough to fool somebody who’s lived in these woods for decades.”

“Have you seen him yet?” Fenech asked. She hadn’t said much in her message. He had no idea what had happened to her. “Did you make contact?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I made contact. He has a cabin about two kilometers from here in a little clearing. He lives there with another guy, a Dene Indian named Dzo.”

She’d thought the pilot of the helicopter was asleep. When she mentioned Dzo’s name, however, he let out a little grunt of humor.

“Something amuse you, Lester?” Fenech asked, a cockeyed grin on his face.

She thought it was a mouse—the limp, dark gray little sack of a creature hanging upside down in the cat’s mouth as he rammed through the cat-door headfirst, like a diver anticipating a belly flop.

It wasn’t supposed to look quite like this. The cat flap was supposed to be spacious enough to permit a free range of movement in a normal-sized cat, allowing the cat to simply walk through. But for an overfed, borderline obese animal like Cataclysm, it was a tight squeeze, and this gave the whole thing an additionally creepy effect. He was struggling, with an odd undulating movement—a sort of half-writhe, half paddle--to propel his massive body through the small plastic aperture without forfeiting his kill. Finally, he managed to wriggle himself through, mouse intact, his fatness clearly contradicting his need for additional rodent calories.

She screamed, naturally. “Damn it, Cat! Get out of here with that!”

Chey announced, on returning to the little house in the woods, that the thing she wanted most in the world was a bath.

“I think we can make that happen,” Powell told her. He shot her a look with one corner of his mouth turned up in what sort of resembled a smile. “Of course, if you want hot water, you’re going to have to work for it.” He led her around the side of the house and showed her a big galvanized tin washtub hanging from a hook. “It’s big enough to sit down in.” It was mottled white with age, but there were no holes in it. “I try to take a bath myself at least once a week. Though typically I just jump in a pond and scrub myself until my fingers go numb.”

“All the comforts of home,” Chey said, and reached up to grab the tub. “You going to help me with this?”

“No need,” he told her.

She frowned, but then she lifted the tub off its hook with one hand. It felt far lighter than it had any right to be. She hefted it a couple of times and realized that it weighed quite a bit, actually, but that the muscles in her arm worked better than they ever had before. Somehow she’d gotten stronger since she’d changed.

“One of the few bright spots in your new existence,” Powell told her.

Chey slung the tub over her shoulder and started heading toward the woods behind the house.

“Where are you going?” he asked her.

“Far enough away that I can have some privacy, if you don’t mind. Don’t worry. I won’t go so far that I can’t scream for help if I see a bear.”

He shook his head, but he made no move to stop her. “You’re still figuring this out. If a bear attacks you out there, scream so I know to come help the bear,” he told her. She thought maybe he was going to leave her alone, but then he called for Dzo to come help her. The little man came jogging over and grabbed one handle of the tub, even though she didn’t need the help. The message Powell was sending her was clear. Still, she was glad it was Dzo who was going to watch over her and not her fellow wolf. She had been worried Powell might insist on keeping an eye on her while she disrobed.

The two of them, Chey and Dzo, carried the tub out to just beyond the edge of the clearing and set it down on a spot relatively free of undergrowth. Then Dzo pushed the mask up onto the top of his head and grinned at her. “You’re starting to like him, aren’t you?” he asked. “Monty, I mean.” He scraped out a fire ring and started to lay down a pile of thick logs with air space between them. “At least tell me you’re not still mad at him.”

I say to her in the dream, But mom, you have to fight it. We can do without the dinners and the doing up of the beds and we can shop for our own food. I tell her that she can’t quit like this because she’s young and the mathematical odds of surviving favor her very much. I remind her that Israel has the best doctors in the world and all the latest technologies and I also tell her about the four Nobel laureates that Israel has, just because it sounds impressive and maybe she will trust me because I know more than she does about some things. For the same reason, I remind her about Alexander Levitzki, who did not win the Nobel for his cancer research but discovered new chemicals that slow the progress of some cancers and make other cancers die. And I use all these impressive names and things I know about the Israeli medicine field to try and win the argument with her, so that she has no choice other than to fight.

Powell drank some water from an old tin canteen and went on with his story. “I left the castle in nineteen twenty- one, I think. I had lost track of time—when you’re not living in society, when every day is like every other, you stop paying attention to clocks and calendars. When I first came back to human civilization I was in a sort of fog and I wasn’t entirely sure where I was, either. I quickly discovered it wasn’t going to be easy fitting in. The moon rises when it’s going to, and there’s no way to hold back the change. I had to make sure I was someplace safe when it happened. That made it hard to make friends, and quite impossible to hold down a job. I slept rough for a lot of that time and spent my human hours pondering how I was going to get along, how I would ever make my own way in the world. I couldn’t go back to my family, I knew. They wouldn’t understand—and what if I ended up hurting one of them? I would have to create my own life, out of whole cloth. I don’t know if you can imagine what that’s like.”

Chey shrugged. Maybe she had some small idea.

“Without a plan, without money, with this horrible curse forcing me to take elaborate precautions for every day of my life, I fell from one bad circumstance into another. I followed the trains and asked everywhere if anyone knew a way to reverse my condition, but of course there was no good way for me to approach anyone who might actually know the answer. I went to scientists who wanted to study me—to experiment on me. I went to scholars of history who frankly disbelieved that I still existed. I went to priests who could only tell me that my immortal soul was forfeit, though their explanations as to why never made any sense to me.

“No one had anything tangible to offer me. I wandered around Europe for a while, but I’d been honest when I said I wanted to come back to Canada. Eventually I got enough courage together to try it.

“It wasn’t easy crossing the ocean. I could hardly afford to buy a silver cage. Instead I stole a trunk, a big steamer trunk large enough that I could climb inside. I had a silver chain I had taken from Lucie’s castle, and no matter how badly I needed money I managed never to pawn it. It was the only way I could keep my wolf from hurting anyone, you see. It wasn’t very thick, but it didn’t matter. When I would feel the change coming on I would climb into my trunk. Then I would wrap the chain around the outside in such a way that it held the trunk shut but could still be easily removed by a human hand. My wolf would try to get out, of course, but it was impossible—without hands the wolf couldn’t pull the chain free. Stuck inside that confined space the wolf couldn’t get enough leverage to kick the trunk to pieces, either. Every time I climbed into that trunk I worried the wolf would get out, all the same. I might hurt someone—for all I knew I might kill every human being on the ship, and as I was no seaman I would be left adrift on the ocean, unable to steer my way to any harbor. Far worse, there was the possibility I might get out, hurt only one person without killing them, and thereby spread my curse.

I read somewhere once that when a baby is learning something new, like how to roll from front to back, or crawl, or how to stand up, so this baby might have troubles sleeping at those nights. If I can remember myself right, this has to do with revisiting in its mind the new thing it’s practicing during the days. Maybe this isn’t something that’s only happening to the babies. Maybe this also happens to teenagers or even adults because the night that followed the first day with the interviews in Pan Pacific Park, basically I wasn’t sleeping very well.

I usually sleep right through the night, and sometimes even past the alarm clock. But that night I woke many times. First, it was like the babies and I was practicing locking my elbows to my stomach to prevent Eos from getting seasick. When we were making test films of the coat rack, this wasn’t a problem. But real people in a big park are not coat racks. They are moving often, and also there was the sun and my wet underarm pits to be contending with. And even though at the end of the shooting, when we came back to the apartment and watched all the films on her TV, Eos said she was very impressed from how well I did and how many good interviews we captured, I was able to see what she’d meant by seasick and I wanted to do better at the next day.

Dzo’s truck rolled ever onward, back toward the little house. How far had the wolves run, Chey wondered? The light was already changing, the day getting away from them. Powell didn’t seem to notice the time. He barely even glanced at her as he spoke. She recognized the look on his face from the many years she’d spent hanging out in bars—he was lonely. He hadn’t spoken to anyone but Dzo in years. He wanted so badly to tell this story that it would have been an act of deliberate cruelty on her part if she asked him to stop, or even interrupted too much.

So she didn’t.

“I thought I knew the rules. I thought I understood what I had become, but I was wrong. I don’t suppose children in this day and age tell stories about werewolves to each other when their parents aren’t looking. When I was a boy that was a favorite pastime: seeing who could scare the other boys with the most gruesome, the most vicious story, the best blood- curdling howl. So when Lucie and the Baroness imprisoned me I had reason to believe I knew what they wanted, that they were going to eat me. Why they should bother to change me into one of their own kind first was not something I spent much time thinking on. I spent the first few days trying to remember everything my boyhood companions had told me about lycanthropes.

“There had been wolves like us in Europe for thousands of years, I recalled. The older stories suggested there was something called a wolf strap—a belt, or a girdle, and when a person put it on they could take the shape of a wolf. Whenever they wanted to they could take it off again and regain their human form. Later on, when I was free again, I wasted a lot of time researching the wolf strap, trying to find if such a thing existed. Maybe, I thought, the strap actually prevented the change. Maybe there was a way to make myself normal. No dice, I’m afraid. That part was just a myth.

“The werewolves of the Renaissance couldn’t live in normal human society any more than you or I can. They changed, they ran free. They killed people. There were times when they almost overran the human population. In Germany and France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were thousands—tens of thousands—of werewolves burned at the stake or hanged or tortured to death. Church and political authorities shouted from the pulpits about an epidemic sweeping the land, about the wickedness of the people finally catching up with them. In some places whole villages were put to the torch because every last inhabitant was deemed to be a werewolf.”

Chey whistled in disbelief.

“The strangest part is that werewolves were turning themselves in. Confessing, in enormous numbers. I’m still not sure if there were that many wolves or if it was just mass hysteria. It didn’t matter, often enough. Whenever the authorities caught a werewolf the punishment was always death. Traditionally they were buried with their heads cut off and their hearts impaled by a silver cross.”

“Yikes.”

“The burning and hanging wouldn’t have killed them permanently. As soon as the moon rose their bodies would try to change, even inside their coffins. Those silver crosses would have finished them off. But not instantaneously.”

But when faced with the layout of the alphabet, Lynette did not enter her name, or a cute nickname, but instead began gleefully spelling out the word FUCK. Upon entering the k, however, the computer instantly converted the configuration of letters into a completely extrinsic end product. “BAD BOY!” it editorialized.

“I was trying to spell Fuckface,” Lynette said ruefully, the bluish-gray light from the screen dappling her face like frostbite.

“BAD BOY?” Amy scoffed. “Why’d it do that?”

“Hmm, maybe we can try SHIT,” Lynette said, and proceeded to type her second-string profanity, only to have it intercepted once again by the disapproval of the machine. “BAD BOY!” it reiterated.

“Guess we’re in trouble, huh?” Amy said.

“See, this machine is sexist,” Lynette said. “It’s a sexist censorship machine that assumes it’s talking to a man.”

“Or a dog that soiled the carpet,” Amy said. “Hey, why don’t you try ASS?”

Lynette laughed. “Now you’re finally getting the hang of what trivia’s really all about.”

Making love with Lynette was a frantic endeavor offering elusive rewards, like finishing a marathon run only to be given a flimsy, office water-cooler cone of water. It was never enough.

Amy opened her eyes under the water as if she expected to discover something important. This was how she looked for revelations now, around corners and on the other side of squeezed-shut lids, like she was moving through a haunted house. But of course, the water revealed nothing, and really, she didn’t see a whole lot more than she had with her eyes closed. Everything was haloed by the fuzz of her myopia—the sunny translucence of eerily blue pool water, the momentum of a breeze, scattering the water’s surface like a billiards break shot. Something round caught her eye: either a penny or an unnervingly circular dead bug, drifting with fatal attraction toward its date with the drain. A kid’s float bobbed around empty overhead; just a floating hole, really, even though it was supposed to be the spitting image of a smiling seahorse.

When she was a kid, her mother had told her that swimming pools were equipped with a special chemical compound designed to expose and humiliate those who indulged in the covert act of underwater urination. Such illicit pee would activate a fluorescent purple dye, which would trail the offender like a bright purple arrow, a pointing finger—precise, inescapable, and mortifying. She lived in terror of this electric purple accusation, especially at the swim club her family belonged to. There, the pool was additionally fortified by a sign which addressed the matter in no uncertain terms:

Welcome to our Ool. Notice there is no ‘P’ in it.

One of the truck’s wheels fell down into a deep pothole and the two of them lifted off the bed and fell crashing back. Chey’s hand jumped over to grab Powell’s arm, for support. When she realized what she’d done she yanked it back quickly. He didn’t seem to notice. He was wrapped up in telling his story.

“This beautiful French girl turned into a wolf before my eyes. I guess you’ve never seen the whole transformation—the first time you saw me change, you were changing too. It’s a weird thing to see. The body turns ghostly and transparent. Almost like the human being is fading out of existence. You can see the skeleton melting like wax from a candle; you can see the entire body collapse in on itself. Then it seems to stagger back up to its feet and become solid again. Color and then solidity return—but in a new form. Suddenly you’re staring a vicious animal in the face. Drunk as I was, as weird as that day was, I knew it wasn’t just a trick of the light. This snarling, slavering thing was going to kill me and it was going to hurt.

“I stepped backward, away from this monster. Behind me the silver cage stood open and inviting. Even as the she- wolf lunged for my throat—and believe me, she didn’t waste a moment—I leapt back into the cage and slammed the door shut. The key was in the lock and I turned it with shaking fingers, locking myself in. For just a moment, though, that meant my hand was outside of the cage. She got her teeth into it. She clamped down. Then she tore it right off and swallowed it like a piece of meat.

“The pain was unbearable, of course. I screamed and fell back on the filthy straw at the bottom of the cage and screamed and kept screaming. You couldn’t live in the trenches as long as I had without learning a little emergency medical aid, so I did what I could to stay alive. I wrapped my belt around my spurting wrist to try to stop the blood loss, and did my best not to panic. That wasn’t exactly easy. The whole time the she- wolf was throwing herself at the cage, over and over, making the bars ring like bells. The pain just got bigger and bigger, but the horror I felt was almost worse. There was the horror of being alone with that wolf, which was pretty bad. But I saw soon enough that it couldn’t get through the bars. They weren’t that thick, but every time the wolf touched them she jumped back as if they were red hot and she’d been burned. So once I knew I was safe, my mind started wandering to other subjects. Like what had just happened to my hand. I imagined what it would be like to live the rest of my life, my normal human life, with only one hand. I’d seen plenty of amputees on the battlefield. Bits and pieces of soldiers were always being blown off. I’d never truly thought it could happen to me, but now I had a ragged stump staring me in the face, confronting me with the reality of it. What woman would ever want me again? How would I find work?

“I was born in Winnipeg a while back,” Powell began, when they were seated in the back of Dzo’s truck and headed for the house. “I had a pretty normal childhood. I played at tin soldiers like any boy, and worked some for my father, who was a grocer. Never went to much school, but I didn’t know what I was missing, so I didn’t complain. Then, when I was nineteen, I was called up to serve this country in the Great War,” Powell said, facing away from her. “What you would call World War One, I suppose.”

“Hold on,” Chey said. She’d just thought of something. “This all happened when you were nineteen? The First World War started when you were nineteen?”

“I was born in eighteen ninety- five.”

She shook her head. “You don’t look a day over forty,” she said. Except his eyes were old. They’d always looked old to her.

“We change almost every day. When that happens we don’t just sprout hair and grow our teeth out. Every cell in our bodies is altered and renewed. Our cells never have time to age. It’s true, Chey. I’m a hundred and eleven years old. And for most of that time I’ve been a wolf. I can guess your next question, but I don’t have an answer. I don’t know if we die of old age or not. I feel as healthy as I did the first time I changed, but beyond that I just don’t know.”

Chey’s spine tingled at the thought of living that long running from one forsaken corner of the world to another. How long would her own life last, she wondered? Decades—maybe centuries of endless transformation lay before her. Of waking up naked in the frozen forest. Chey shivered and it wasn’t because she was naked. She felt a pressing need to change the subject. “Did you wear one of those funny dish- shaped helmets?”