When I Was Killing as a Footnote to the Virus

During these strange times of seclusion and roadblocks and restaurants closed and everybody doing their best to hold their respective own while this planetary house arrest is in progress, I guess I have nonetheless managed to find a handful of reasons to live. I felt I wanted to write you this letter, describing exactly what those reasons are, how I feel about all this, and what I find noteworthy about my life now that most of the things I have held so dear are going or gone.

I hope you will please forgive me, should you find these musings utterly in poor taste, if I was mistaken, and there never should have been even an inkling of intention on my part to ever share with you what I am about to share.

While my husband is writing his urgent pieces about the virus for the paper downstairs, I have taken into carrying a heavy brass candlestick with me around the house, thinking if we are going to do it, let’s go all the way with this upsetting, mauve-tinted paranoia, this hysteria, panic, and looming threat of violence. I dress up and sneak around in full eveningwear regalia, floorboards creaking, candles flickering in the draft, ice cubes in the cocktail glass clinking while I fix my sixth drink of the day. We used to do this, you and I. Now I do it alone. The wind keeps howling in corners and fireplaces and in the grand baking oven in the downstairs kitchen as well as the smaller one in my rooms, and the Secret Room behind the Northern wall of my boudoir is suddenly filled with all sorts of creatures of darkness.

During the night, I suffer the painful transformation of Becoming, then blast through my second-story bedroom window and roam the nearby woods and the abandoned railroads and the majestic cliffs and wilderness just outside the hamlet limits, right where they say the weird and reclusive family with strange names and nocturnal habits that are quickly becoming more and more familiar to me were said to once inhabit a grand yellow mansion. It happens every night now.

I know things are getting serious. What were our biggest problems three or four weeks ago? Because I sure can’t remember. But here’s what I do.

Being bitten, and the old man with what I then took to be a dog disappearing in the fog. The way my hand became infected. The news that started dripping, then pouring from around the world. First, it didn’t seem so serious. First, it was sort of funny.

Then, it wasn’t.

The sheer velocity and aggression of the virus, the growing confusion and helplessness of governments, armies, medical professionals. And I couldn’t help thinking, what if there were more people like me? Who, instead of catching the deadly virus, were at the same time infected with something more ancient, even more confusing, even more deadly? What if what I had was just a mutated form of the same thing? Or was it a mere case of survival of the fittest? An occurrence seemingly supernatural at first glance, only to reveal itself in later inspection as the human body’s desperate and extreme fighting maneuver? Was it, dear god, lucky, that I was bitten just when things started to get ugly?

When we moved here, into this small, rural hamlet, I swore if I made it through the winter, I would teach myself how to love beyond conditions. I ended up learning without blinking the many varieties of love without even trying.

The way you swallow half the syllables when you are writing a note to me in a hurry. I find it extremely endearing and lovely.

The way your shadow follows you on a sunny day like a persistent lover, and how your upper lip bends like an adorable monkey’s, making you constantly look like you are enjoying some secret joke of your own.

As I write this, there is a blizzard developing outside. Birches and pines bend from the weight of the gushing air.

The way the thin ice sounds now that it is about to melt, with the rafts chafing against one another, creating an almost otherworldly sound, and the lake itself is turned into one giant echo chamber.

Walking in the sunny spots in the woods, hearing woodpigeons cooing somewhere down on the shoreline in the pines. The swans gathering in the flaxen fields, huge families of them, keeping their distance from one another exactly as we have been instructed to do, taking flight, hooting their orders to each other. The blackbirds singing in the dead of night.

Masturbating constantly, feverishly, and with intense pleasure, in the afternoons, screaming out loud in the most powerful string of orgasms of my entire life – an interesting counterpoint to the horror all around us.

When I was bitten, I didn’t know. No one does, do they? But as the bitter burning sensation in the hand grew, I knew something was about to happen. When the mice suddenly disappeared from our house, and the horses started neighing and stampeding. When the neighbor’s black cat started avoiding our yard. When I no longer heard the sound of coins dropping on the hardwood floor every night from the Secret Room. Because I knew I was one of the Secret Room folk now.

The lingering cooking smells, the way the house smells of bonfire after an especially difficult ignition, the smell of a fresh pot of coffee in the morning, how the distinct smell of my husband’s chili soup boiling on the burner downstairs creeps up the blue stairs, in my writing room, making my stomach rumble. The fragrance of lovemaking, the aroma of arousal, the faint stench of fear as I walk by the old men holding court at the bar terrace, throwing all caution to the wind though at the same time realizing they are risking their lives, with the airborne virus as well as seeing me there. These old men, they look at me as if they really see who I am, not just the mild-mannered, middle-aged wife of the local newspaperman, but the beast. I can’t say how that could be, since it is hidden deep inside me. Perhaps old people develop a sense for these things.

For whatever reason, I cannot smell if someone is infected, I only smell if they are not well, so I try to keep it simple and only eat other animals. Sometimes it isn’t possible. Sometimes things get out of hand. Mostly, though, I can contain and control myself.

The way my husband is frightened right now, in a way I have never seen before.

Your chin dimple. The way you absent-mindedly finger your hair while talking. The way your bottom looks in the black slacks with the high waist.

The sound of the rapids.

Tending to my houseplants, contemplating whether it is unlucky to have an even-numbered amount in my house, when I have always made sure I get everything odd. Seven pears, thirteen potatoes, five cartons of milk. One husband, three sisters, five family members, nine usable teapots.

We have so many haunted houses here it is as if there are two sets of population.

How hard it has been to come to terms with one’s ailing physical health. When I change, I lose all frailties. My head doesn’t throb, my sciatica no longer bothers me, my stiff neck is completely forgotten. It is like a fountain of youth in that sense.

How, when we heard of the virus, no one believed they were really going to catch it. Because of our own stupidity and hubris, it was able to spread so quickly and so wide. Everyone likes to think they are special, and special people won’t catch something so trivial and mundane. But we are not special, not single one of us.

The way last year’s leaves, turned white now, like phantoms, hurl past my window in a sudden gale, followed by tiniest imaginable snow drops, hard as rocks but too minuscule to be called proper hail, that crowd the ground like little white pebbles before eventually melting away, making the yard mushy and impossible to cross with dry boots.

That night when we drank so much and took off our clothes and ran into the lake.

I wanted to tell you, in case the end comes in some form no one expected.

In my animal form, I see many things, and the way things smell so intensely and far is pure magic, I feel alive and dark and mysterious.

There is the bloody trail of dozens of executed folks in the Civil War who were assembled in tall piles and drawn in sleighs to a place where they were burned. The red trail of blood in the snow is remembered by the woods and the Wood Folk, and the oldest residents, and the ghosts, travelling to and fro in the ghost train that runs in the hour of the Wolf, the sound of which I can hear clearly inside my bedroom.

I see the old manors being built, the workers carrying lumber and spikes and enormous iron gates, and sometimes having an accident. I see the village being born, house by house, the railroad being built, the men sleeping on the beach and hiking to the steam rooms and saunas to wash themselves.

The Execution Tree stood by the bank, where now several young weeping willow trees are thriving.

The rock formation where they used to beat up thieves and fornicators, unfaithful women and sexual deviants. The history books don’t say it, but there were lynchings and hangings, too, in the middle of the night, when the wives and little ones were home in bed, and the able-bodied husbands took an oath of silence after murdering who they considered to be the weaklings, the criminals, the unnaturals. Folks like me.

I feel simultaneously stronger than everybody else, connected to timelessness and the mysteries of age and history the way no one has ever been, and frailer than the smallest, most fragile dragonfly.

I keep touching myself as if that was the secret to staying alive. I feel no cold then.

I saw you once, walking alone at the pier, after the town was shut down. I wanted to call your name and run over to you, hold you, make love to you. I have imagined that moment a thousand times. You were a silly girl, not minding the curfew, feigning nonchalance, but I smelled your fear. It was like an aphrodisiac, mixed with your natural fragrance of a slightly moist pussy, the light grease in your hair, the eye shadow you use with its dry, ashen, powdery smell, and your body, which I had never before realized smelled like tree bark on a warm summer day, and ripe Italian lemons, and embers from a winter fire, and mint. But I was in animal form and could not show myself. It was bad enough as it was.

Staying away from you was the hardest thing I have ever had to do.

My husband remains unaware of what I have become, and thankfully still uninfected. It is a small blessing we are sleeping in separate rooms, or I would never be free. Sometimes, I think I should just tell him and ask him to do what he felt was the right thing. He does still have his father’s rifle somewhere in the attic. Sometimes I think if I bit him, we could both be free of worry.

Sometimes I think if I bit you. But I could never do that to your family. And you are what keeps me grounded, what keeps me from staying a wolf always.

Writing this, there are tens of thousands of deaths. The religious are preaching the world’s end. But that is not what is going to happen. While this chaos seems to be designed to get rid of us, the pest of the world, the natural world will remain unscathed. I am strong now because there is more than human blood in me. Becoming an animal has made me privy to the larger scheme of things. I believe will survive, even if I caught the virus. And as long as I breathe, I will make sure you do, too.

The storm is making the snowflakes appear to be shooting from the ground instead of falling from the sky, as if they were dancing.

I think you might know now something is wrong, since you have stopped coming to see me. We, too, used to tell the quarantine to kiss our asses. I am so sorry I never found the courage to tell you. I waited too long, and now I feel like it is even more dangerous to share my secret with anyone, even you. Especially you.

The birds don’t sing near me anymore. They sense the beast. But this, too, like the virus, shall pass. Like the unspoken, secret histories of this town, this knowledge has come to me easily, as if in a dream, as absolute truth. It will run its course, and in the end, I will either die from it, or crawl back from the other side, human, when turning into a wolf has lost its meaning and is no longer necessary.

When that happens and the world doesn’t end, I will run to you and kiss you the way you have never been kissed.

Inspired by those long walks and talks of ours, so this is for you, T.R.

Picture manipulated with PhotoLab

(More like this? Try the sister, Love Lies Bleeding (in My Hands)