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.

Continued after the jump

On the morning of the day Norman “Twigs” Morton was killed by a vampire, he awakened thinking of his upstairs neighbor’s legs — more precisely, wishing his ceiling were made of two-way glass, so he might answer the jangle of his alarm clock by staring up at her long limbs. Twigs was a leg man, and proud of it. His upstairs neighbor represented for him the culmination of all things wonderful. As he said often enough in the Moon and Six, “Her gams start at her neck and go all the way to the floor.” They didn’t, of course, except in Twigs’ twisted imagination; but when I pictured her, I envisioned his neighbor as a head and a pair of shoulders perched atop 6-foot stems. A rose, by any other name.

The Moon and Six is a bar out on Alvarado that caters to an odd mix of drunks and recovering drunks, who are distinguished only by the color of their drinking straws. Like the rest of the 12-steppers in the room, on the evening of Twigs’ death, I nursed a red straw drink (in my case a virgin club soda with a twist of lime). Over the course of the same evening Twigs drank a fifth of Wild Turkey one neat, blue straw highball glass after another. The only apparent effect it had on him — other than a slight slurring of speech — was in making him more gregarious and daring, which is why he proposed, about a third of the way into the night, we measure his neighbor’s legs.

Continued after the jump

Not far from where I live is an old train depot, a decaying hulk of building that was once the community’s showpiece. A century ago it sparkled, a hub of activity, the nexus of all transportation, surrounded by vigorous manufacturing concerns and bright commercial ventures. But as railroads dwindled in importance and interstate highways flourished, the center of the city shifted to the Continental Trailways bus station and various trucking firms, and the train depot fell into neglect. Soon it looked as shabby as the handful of hobos that lurked in the bushes down the track, waiting for the train to slow so they could hop freight cars and ride them to better days in Atlanta or Nashville, Memphis or Chicago. Anywhere but here.

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The twin demons of insomnia and depression are inextricably linked, it seems, and my most recent bout of depression manifests itself in sleep patterns that defy logic: Two hours here, thirty minutes there, no rhyme or reason.

My shadow is unhappy with the arrangement, and this morning he simply refused to get out of bed. Instead, there was a slow s-c-rrr-itch — not unlike the sound of a long Velcro strip being slowly opened — as I arose from my fitful rest. For a moment it seemed my shadow would lose the contest of wills when, suddenly, with the pop! of a champagne cork, we separated. My shadow snoozed contentedly in the bed, and I floated like a leaky helium balloon toward the ceiling. It turns out physics is all wet: Our shadows, and not the effects of gravitation, anchor us to the earth.

At first the novelty of the thing entertained me. My back against the ceiling, I examined cobwebs in the corner and dust I missed on the blades of the ceiling fan. Everything had a different look and took on new meaning from the perspective of up. I contemplated crab-walking my way to the door and exiting into the blue day, imagining I might drift past the ozone layer through the mesopause and thermosphere into outer space, but it occurred to me that I might be trapped, instead, in the stratosphere and linger there in an absurd Limbo — depressed and sleepless, cold and hungry besides.

Continued after the jump

After the flood, the sky turns a robin’s egg blue unfamiliar during east-Tennessee summers, and it takes a few days of unrelenting sun before the more normal late-August haze reappears. A week of it and humidity rises. Walking from the air-conditioned cool of the office to the car is like shoveling coal on a steamship, and even minor gardening leaves one dripping sweat. It is no time to be out in the heat.

So on a Friday evening we flee with a picnic dinner into the mountains, where it is cooler, winding steadily up the side of the North Carolina foothills through the low deciduous forests into the newer pines, arriving at last at a pale clapboard church. I pull the car down and around the parking lot until it is out of sight of passing motorists. Not that anyone else will interrupt: At 9:30 nearly everyone who lives in the area is either settled in for a banal evening watching television or is installed at one of several honky-tonks for the long-necked Mickeys, loud country music, and a possible romantic tryst. What few cops prowl the area will be occupied chasing down DUIs, breaking up the occasional barroom brawl or reasoning a rare drunk out of a gun. It is unlikely we will be disturbed.

Continued after the jump