The Return
[From a novel in progress]
Damian Tarnopolsky
There was snow on the streets. Just a thin layer. Late snow. Her shoes cracked through it sometimes as she ran, but she never lost her grip wearing winter spikes. She went up the hill toward the park, finding her rhythm, finding it hard. She ran past the solitary pet store, inexplicable amidst the houses on this street, some kind of grandfathered zoning regulation, equally inexplicable that it would stay open now, but perhaps that was it, people were feeding their children dog food after all. She should slow down, she thought, in order to be able to keep her pace up on the way back, her average pace was higher than usual, higher than it should be, her average pace appeared in red rather than blue. Because every time you start to run you feel like an Olympic champion; the question is always about the return.
When her music came on, as it always did as her pace slowed, as she climbed the hill because the shell knew she needed the push because she’d needed it before then she swiped it away, and she knew she was causing her shell no end of headaches with the way she was acting these days, but she didn’t care, sometimes she played with the algorithm to confuse it, and she equally swiped away Saul on the couch holding a thimble of Scotch in place between finger and thumb on his hairy belly and lingered only a moment on Flower turning over in bed before doing the same to her and said aloud I want to be able to see my damn feet, one shoe and then the next, as she got to the top of the hill, and there where she made her turn she could see the whole city, as if nothing were wrong, as if everyone were home, safe in bed, as if the majority of the street lights worked rather than the majority being in looted disrepair (and she hated what that meant, though she loved the darkness, she loved being able to show the Milky Way to Flower any evening in their shared backyard; it was like being at her mother’s farm), as if tomorrow would bring no shock greater than a hailstorm, as if this horrible, constant, febrile feeling of wrongness, of everything being wrong and hurried and dirty and wrong had disappeared forever, as late-winter air cracked so coolly through these tubes these filaments the capillaries of her lungs as fine as Flower’s hair as she stood there, waiting to run down the hill again, savouring this heated cold air that lit her up, turned her whole body orange from the inside out as her breath gradually, gradually, gradually slowed. I love you, she said, I hate you. I am happy, I am sad. She started back down toward her city. The last silver and yellow threads of the day let go and fell once and for all and it was dark.
As she returned, she was considering what she would say to Saul, that is, she was hearing her voice say certain things, making certain answers to his inevitable rebuttals and rejections. So much thinking is us making little movies of ourselves, and we do it all the time. Only some of them come up to the surface, most of this work we do without even knowing it. What the shell can do is slant the table, tilt certain thoughts more in the direction of consciousness. It’s all based on our own proclivities anyway, our own values; that’s why they say the shell knows you better than you know yourself. It can make you better than yourself.
In her head naturally she was hearing a song again she’d heard when she was young, a song by the Clash, a song that was old already when she was young, and then she realized that it was because she and Saul were clashing, and she hated her mind for being so obvious. And she was slowing down, she had to shorten her stride as she came down the hill, it was like jutting each leg down as she came down the hill, like an alien craft landing, maybe that would be the next calamity, and then a glaze of thinking about nothing at all, that was the best part of the run, just her body taking step after step to get her home, the last fifty paces as she came up to their side gate, the last laboured and ethereal walk along the side of their building, by that angling fence they had to fix, feeling like the best part of having a mind was feeling it was gone, when she saw it.
Coyotes were abroad in the city; that was nothing new, though they’d become more brazen, now they jogged down the middle of the streets they owned in daylight, and her first thought was Flower, and she saw Flower safe in bed and stopped dead. This was a big one. She leaned forward, hands on her hips, still trying to slow her breathing. It hadn’t run from her, and she wondered why. It was a shape in the dark, but no, too big for a coyote. Madly, she thought bear, no, boar, it was a bear come down from Moose Lake to eat their garbage, it was a wild boar run out of France to stalk her, its breath and grunt confirmed that, the bristles on its nose, wild boar, her shell was searching furiously, it was telling her to wait, Would you like to report a fault?, it asked her, The one time I actually need you, she thought, but it wasn’t a boar. Just give me some light, she said, and her vision improved, and the thing the dog the beast the werewolf took a sleek step sideways and backward. She touched the fence, and with her toe she nudged away a broken pink Frisbee. A sleek, grey wild dog made out of nature, black and silver and grey, strangely dignified though wild, and she knew what it was: a wolf was looking back at her, she was looking at a wolf in the alleyway next to her apartment. They were staring at each other, each one as surprised, each one as calm as the other. Her breath wouldn’t settle—first the run, and now the shock. She thought her heart would burst at the ravening beauty of it, the sheen of snow shining on the lower parts of its flanks. Both of them breathing, now, watching. I am dreaming, she said. You’re here because I dreamed of you.
The shell was saying many things to her, and she ignored them all. At last, the wolf shifted its weight and it gave a little whine as it did. Very slowly, gently, Heath knelt. She reached her right hand out. Often to speak to Flower about something serious she’d be down on her knees on the black wood floor. Her knee touched the wet gravel; nothing hurts more. Little wolf, she said. She moved two fingers forward for it to smell. I have nothing to give you, she said. It watched her for a while. She made her eyes narrow and soft and waited, trying to exude authority without threat.
Only my heart, she said.
Darling, you’ve got to let me know came into her head.
The wolves are invading. And then she thought no, they’re returning. All of this was forest long ago and theirs before anyone came to steal it; this wolf used to lie here on its belly with paws crossed, watching the snow fall. Was its paw caught in a trap like in Jack London, was Saul trapping wild animals in the driveway? And then she saw no, the big stomach bulging sideways and outward, babies. She-wolf, sow-breasted, limp-pawed, like me.
Are you hungry? Is that why you’re here? Is that why you’re not running, she asked, but it sounded stated, not a question. What a world you’ve chosen to bring them into, she said.
No snow now, no moon. She’d felt a sharpness tonight, all night, and it was confirmed now in the wolf’s sliced amber eyes.
I wish I had a chopped steak, she said. Their trashcans were emptied every night by hungry children but maybe there was something. She wanted Flower to come down, but she wanted her not to. Reading her mind, the wolf inched forward, soft-furred, unsteady.
Are you crying? she said.
When she first met Saul’s father, he kissed her hand. He was an old gentleman that way.
I’m sorry, she whispered. We’ve nothing here.
Heath slid her right foot forward, then her left. Then as if it were the little cat in residence in her brain, she put one hand behind its ear and rubbed. The wolf angled her head in that direction, did not demur, so she did the same with the other. She breathed in deeply now, smelling wood fire and wet pine, and fetid warm mud, and something older. The softness of the fur on diamantine bone. A growl and a wheeze, then quiet. Look at us both, said Heath. What are you here to dig up?
She lifted its grey lip back like a vet. She eased a finger into its mouth, then another, and then more of her hand, further, feeling the wet warmth. It watched her and at first it whined, but then it let her, and she withdrew, leaving just her index finger by its tongue.
Feast on me, she whispered. My blood. Bite. Kiss me. Feast. Search with your teeth and find.
A truck groaned down the street perpendicular to them and the lock of their gaze broke. Wolf-jaw snapped away, tearing her skin. Oh no, no, she thought. She felt it keenly, this bond cracked, it was like slicing a lemon and cutting your hand. And without a look back, it, she, was padding away silently and was gone, without a look back, only footprints, as if Heath had never been.
Good luck, said Heath, quietly, not wiping her fingers on her thighs. I’ll never see you again.
Wolves were taking over the city. There were wolves in every garden, in every boardroom. They were dropping spinach nests into pots, she thought, they were getting ahead, they were buying cottages up north, they were landing in airplanes on the Island. They had come down ahead of the glaciers melting. They were here to stake their claim.
Heath knew what to do then, as in a dream there is no doubt.
DAMIAN TARNOPOLSKY
Damian Tarnopolsky’s most recent book is Every Night I Dream I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster. His work has been nominated for many awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and the Journey Prize, and he won the Voaden Prize for Playwriting in 2019. He teaches at the Narrative-Based Medicine Lab at the University of Toronto.
