She says: “Most of the time, you know, I really like them. They’re peaceful. Quiet. But the other week I was down on Vanderbilt and I saw one come up out of the street. Like, ok, the street cracked open—you know there’s never any traffic anymore so it was just cold and quiet and the storm was still blowing, and the street came open like it had popped a seam. Two white paws came up, and then the whole wolf, kicking and scrabbling its hind legs against the road to get a grip on it. Just like a fat little puppy. It climbed out and then it bit the edge of the hole it had made and dragged the street back together. I looked around—you know how it is now. Not a soul on the sidewalk. No one else saw. The wolf looked at me and its tongue lolled out, red in the snow, really red, like it had just eaten. Then it trotted off. I went out and touched the place where it broke through. The road was hot, like an iron.”
The wolves have eaten people. Why be coy about it? Not a lot of people. But it’s happened. As near as anyone can figure, the first one they ate was a Russian girl named Yelena. They surrounded her and she stood very still, so as not to startle them. Finally, she said: “I’m lonely,” because it’s weird but you tell the wolves things, sometimes. You can’t help it, all these old wounds come open and suddenly you’re confessing to a wolf who never says anything back. She said: “I’m lonely,” and they ate her in the street. They didn’t leave any blood. They’re fastidious like that. Since then I know of about four or five others, and well, that’s just not enough to really scare people. Obviously, you’ll be special, that they’ll look at you with those huge eyes and you’ll understand something about each other, about the tundra and blood and Brooklyn and winter, and they’ll mark you but pass you by. For most of us that’s just what happens. My friend Daniel got eaten, though. It’s surprising how you can get used to that. I don’t know what he said to them. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know Daniel that well.
Seth’s eyes have grown dark circles. He came wearing a threadbare 1950s chic suit: thin tie, grey lapels, wolf pack boy with a rat pack look. The truth is I’ve known Seth since seventh grade, but we never talk about it. We lived on the same sunny broad Spielbergian cul-de-sac, we conquered the old baseball diamond where we, the weird bookish kids, kept taking big steps backward until we were far too outfield to ever have to catch a ball. We’d talk about poetry instead: Browning (Elizabeth only), Whitman, Plath. We came back east hoping to be, what? A writer and a dancer, I guess is the official line. We run with the same crowd, the crowd that has an official line, but we’re not really friends anymore. We used to conjugate French verbs and ride our bikes home through the rain.
He says: “I came out to go to the restaurant one morning and one was sitting in my hallway. He still had snow on his ears; he took up the whole stairwell. He just stood there, looking at me, the snow melting into his fur and the light that never gets fixed flickering and popping. His eyes were dark, really dark, almost black, but I think they might actually have been purple, if I could have gotten close enough. He just stared, and I stared, and I sat down on my doorstep eventually. We watched each other until my shift would have ended. I reached out to touch him; I don’t know why I thought I could, I just liked how black his nose was, how white and deep his fur looked. He made me think of…” And Seth looks at me as though I am a pin in his memory and he wants to pull me out, so that the next part can be his alone, so that I can retroactively never have pulled down willow branches for a crown, “…of this one place I used to go when I was a kid, in the woods by my school, and I’d make little acorn pyramids or mulberry rings on the ground before first period, and they were always gone when I got back, like someone had taken them, like they were gifts. The wolf looked like the kind of thing that might have seen a bunch of sticks and moss and taken them as tribute. But he didn’t let me touch him, he howled instead—have you heard one howl yet? It’s like a freight train. The lightbulb shattered. I went inside like that was my shift, sitting with a wolf all day not saying anything. The next morning he’d gone off.”
Seth was my first kiss. I never think about that anymore.
I know this guy named David—he never comes out to the cafe, but I see him sometimes, sitting on a bench, his long thin hair in a ponytail, punching a netbook with a little plastic snow-cover over it. The snow never stops anymore. You do your best. He’s trying to track them, to see if they have patterns, migration or hunting or mating patterns, something that can be charted. Like a subway map. A wolf map. He thinks he’s getting close—there’s a structure, he says. A repetition.He can almost see it. More data, he always needs more data.
Ruben always looks sharper than the rest of us. Three-piece, bow tie, pocket watch and chain, hair like a sculpture of some kind of exotic bird. Somehow his hair doesn’t really look affected, though. He looks like he was born that way, like he was raised by a very serious family of tropical cranes. He wasn’t, though. He’s a fourth generation why-can’t-you-marry-a-nice-Jewish-girl Brooklynite. He belongs here more than any of us.
He says: “I keep wondering why. I mean, don’t any of you wonder why? Why us, why them, why here? I feel like no one even asks that question, when to me it seems such an obvious thing. I asked my uncle and he said: son, sometimes you have to just let the world be itself. I asked my mom and she said: Ruben, sometimes I think everything is broken and that’s its natural state. And, well, I think that’s bullshit. Like, ok, it’s either zoological or metaphysical. Either they are real wolves and they migrated here, or they didn’t, and they aren’t.”
Camille interrupts him. She puts her hand on his knee. She says: “Does it matter? Does it really matter?”
He glares at her. You aren’t supposed to interrupt. That’s the ritual. It’s the unspoken law. “Of course it matters. Don’t you ever wake up and hope they’ll be gone? Don’t you ever drink your coffee and look out your window and eat your fucking cruller and think for just a moment there won’t be a wolf on your doorstep, watching you, waiting for you to come out? They could leave someday. Any day.” But we all know they won’t. We can’t say how we know. It’s the same way we know that Coca-Cola will keep making Coke. It’s a fact of the world. Ruben is really upset—he’s breaking another rule but none of us say anything. We don’t come here to get upset. It doesn’t accomplish anything. “I asked one of them once. She’d followed me home from the F train—what I mean is she’d been all the way down on the platform, and when I got off she trotted up after me and followed me, me, specifically. And I turned around in the snow, the fucking snow that never ends and I yelled: Why? Why are you here? What are you doing? What do you want? I guess that sounds dumb, like a scene in a movie if this were happening in a movie and DiCaprio or whoever was having his big cathartic moment. But I wanted to know so badly. And she—I noticed it was a she. A bitch. She bent her head. God, they are so tall. So tall. Like statues. She bent her head and she licked my cheek. Like I was a baby. She did it just exactly like I was her puppy. Tender, kind. She pressed her forehead against mine and shut her eyes and then she ran off. Like it hadn’t even happened.”
There’s going to be a movie. We heard about it a couple of months ago. Not DiCaprio, though. Some other actor no one’s heard of. They expect it to be his big breakthrough. And the love interest has red hair, I remember that. It seems so far away; really, it has nothing to do with us. It’s not like they’ll film on location: CGI, all the way. Some of the locals are pissed about it—it’s exploiting our situation, it’ll just bring stupid kids out here wanting to be part of it, part of something, anything, and they’ll be wolf food. But shit, you kind of have to make a movie about this, don’t you? I would, if I didn’t live here. Nothing’s real until there’s a movie about it.