The Last

2

All Paradigm Answer the amoral craving for novelty. Obama's election victory did it. So did the Auschwitz footage in its day. Good and evil are irrelevant. Show us the world's not the way we thought it was and a part of us rejoices. Nothing's exempt. One's own death-sentence elicits a mad little hallelujah, and mine's egregiously overdue. For ten, twenty, thirty years now I've been dragging myself through the motions. How long do werewolves and demons live? Rao asked recently. According to WOCOP around four hundred years. I don't know how. Naturally one sets oneself challenges-Sanskrit, Kant, advanced calculus, t'ai chi-but that only addresses the problem of Time. The bigger problem, of Being, just keeps getting bigger. (Vampires, not surprisingly, have an on-off love affair with catatonia.) One by one I've exhausted the modes: hedonism, asceticism, spontaneity, reflection, everything from miserable Socrates to the happy pig. My mechanism's worn out. I don't have what it takes. I still have feelings but I'm sick of having them. Which is another feeling I'm sick of having. I just ... I just don't want any more life. Everything has burned out on me.

Maikoa crashed from anxiety to morbidity to melancholy but I remained dreamy and light, part voluntary obtuseness, part Zenlike acceptance, part simply an inability to concentrate. You can't just ignore this, she kept saying. You can't just fucking roll over. For a while I responded mildly with things like Why not? and Of course I can, but she got so worked up-the bone-handled cane came back into play-I feared for her heart and changed tack. Just let me digest, I told him. Just let me think. Just let me, in fact, get laid, as I've arranged to do, as I'm paying for even as we speak. This was true (Rao waited at a £360-a-night boutique hotel across town) but it wasn't a happy shift of topic for Maikoa. However, it got me out of there. Tearily drunk, she embraced me and insisted I borrow a woollen hat and made me promise to call her in twenty-four hours, whereafter, she kept repeating, all this pathetic sissying cod Hamlet bollocks would have to stop.

It was still snowing when I stepped out into the street. Vehicular traffic was poignantly stupefied and Earl's Court Underground was closed. For a moment I stood adjusting to the air's fierce innocence. I hadn't known the Berliner, but what was he if not kin? He'd had a near miss in the Black Forest two years ago, fled to the States and gone off-radar in Alaska. If he'd stayed in the wilderness he might still be alive. (The thought, "wilderness," stirred the ghost animal, ran cold fingers through the pelt that wasn't there; mountains like black glass and slivers of snow and the blood-hot howl on ice-flavoured air ...) But home pulls. It draws you back to tell you you don't belong. They got Wolfgang twenty miles from Berlin. Alaron cut his head off. The death of a loved one brutally vivifies everything: clouds, street corners, faces, TV ads. You bear it because others share the grief. Species death leaves no others. You're alone among all the eerily renewed particulars.

Tongue out to taste the cold falling flakes I got the first inklings of the weight the world might put on me for the time I had left, the mass of its detail, its relentless plotless insistence. Again, it didn't bear thinking about. This would be my torture: All that didn't bear thinking about would devote itself to forcing me to bear thinking about it.

I lit a Camel and hauled myself into focus. Practicalities: Get to Gloucester Road on foot. Circle Line to Farringdon. Ten minutes flailing trek to the Zetter, where Rao, God bless her mercenary charms, would be waiting. I pulled the woollen cap down snug over my ears and began walking.

Maikoa had said: Kovu wants the monster not the man. You've got time. I didn't doubt she was right. There were twenty-seven days to the next full moon and thanks to the interference Maikoa had been running WOCOP still had me in Paris. Which knowledge sustained me for a few minutes despite the growing conviction- this is paranoia, you're doing this to yourself -that I was being followed.

Then, turning into Cromwell Road, the denial allowance was spent and there was nothing between me and the livid fact: I was being followed.

This is paranoia, I began again, but the mantra had lost its magic. Pressing on me from behind was warm insinuation where should have been uninterrupted cold: surveillance. Snow and buildings molecularly swelled in urgent confirmation: They've found you. It's already begun.