Silence Kit

He hemmed and hawed about it for a few days — it was March and raining — but in the end he walked alone in the cold damp darkness to see Iggy Pop touring his record Party at a shitty bar called the Dragoon. Just before he left Dumbledore had put his head in the Floo asking for a word and Remus had said he was busy. He was wrapping his scarf around his neck in the door.

“Glad to see you getting out,” Dumbledore said. Remus swallowed tightly. When the head was gone from the hearth and the false flame had faded he turned his lights off and went out the door.

On his own per se he could not afford the flat because he hardly could work. He was writing reviews of dismal noise tapes for a Muggle music magazine and with the proceeds he could afford canned soup and little else. On account of it he had lost what other people noted was a great deal of weight. Dumbledore and a contingent anonymous had been generous and/or Oblivated the landlord and when the headmaster had told Remus that he had taken care of things (this of course had been in the beginning of December, as Sirius had split November rent with him) Remus had nearly out and dueled him. It was the first he had so much as drawn his wand since the first of November but granted two of those weeks he had spent hardly able to stir from bed because the wolf had been so heartbroken. He had been obliged to go to the fucking Shrieking Shack to transform; Dumbledore escorted him via side-along because Remus would not use magic. When the headmaster left through the trapdoor Remus undressed and sat on the bed trying to feel nothing. The moon rose and he woke four days later in the Hogwarts infirmary wrapped like an Egyptian mummy in bandages and special salves. With no voice he had asked Madame Pomfrey, “Why the fuck am I here?” She had knocked him out shortly thereafter when he tried to remove the bandages and leave.

But in the end of March 1982 he went to see Iggy Pop at the Dragoon. At the bar he ordered a gin and tonic. The cocktail had always given him something to think about vis a vis its colonial legacy and the quinine in the tonic glowed just so, like a sick jellyfish, in the hazy cast of the blacklight. He enjoyed the things Muggles came up with to fake magic.

The room was full of smoke. Later he would remember little about the show except that it was not so good. He had been sitting at the bar but he got up when the band played “Lust for Life.” He had finished the gin and tonic and by then also several others and he shoved up to the front where it was hot. To breathe he had to toss his head back. It was not so much that he was dancing as he was pushed around by others who were and eventually it got into his bones and his blood like a sickness. Shoving up at him and out through his skin like something else and other did. He thought Iggy looked thin and his hair was lank and Remus wondered if he was on heroin. Himself not long ago he had thought about buying some.

I’m worth a million in prizes, Iggy sang, or rather kind of hoarsely intoned like a cult leader. I’m through with sleeping on the sidewalk no more beating my brains with liquor and drugs.

Seventh year they had listened to Pete’s tape on the roof smoking spliffs innumerable and then eventually Remus had bought his own vinyl.

I am the passenger and I ride and I ride.

When the band left the stage he went to the bar again and ordered another inadvisable gin and tonic. Someone else who had been dancing up front came and bellied up to the bar beside him and ordered two shots of vodka. Remus could feel the sweat cooling in his hair.

The orderer of the shots was tall and young and his hair was dark and when the vodka came he passed one of the small and overfull glasses to Remus. He smiled a little in the corner of his mouth. Going down it burned the back of Remus’s throat deliciously like saying an evil spell.

They went out together into the street and the orderer of the shots leaned in altogether unnecessarily close to Remus to light his cigarette and they walked on together to the Tube. He was tall and his hair was dark and he looked like the black-sheep seventh son of someone from the tabloids or the parliament but he did not look like Sirius because his eyes were not the same. “Good show,” said not-Sirius.

“Right.”

The not-right eyes crinkled a little with laughter at the corners. “What are you doing after this?”

“Going home.” Remus swallowed. His mouth tasted like gin and ash. “You could come over for another drink.”

The smile was, he thought, like a scavenger’s having smelled blood. Remus’s stomach turned over stirring problematically the gin and the vodka. He had not ever done this. He was not the kind of person that did this and in fact he had never even slept with a Muggle because he had only slept with Eleanor Weinstein, Rhys Forsythe, Caradoc Dearborn, and Sirius. Yet still they went. The orderer of the shots was drunk and so was Remus. He slurred something like, “I’ve had a rough couple months.” They were sitting close on the subway which rattled loudly like some express rocket to hell and the place where Remus’s knee touched this man’s was warm. Across the aisle an elderly woman was watching them with a confused intensity.

In his peripheral he could see the spots on not-Sirius’s jaw that he had missed shaving. The freckle under his ear and how his lips were so red perhaps he had rouged them. Kiss me, he thought, wildly, kiss me now. Now now now. Wishful and with might. He reasoned that perhaps like this he could perform Imperius. He had never been able to summon the will for it before.

At the apartment they eschewed drinks completely and went immediately to Remus’s bedroom tripping over the things he had left scattered on the floor in his extended quasi-convalescence. He was shoved against the wall in the bedroom powerfully such that he lost his breath and an old portrait that had been crooked anyway fell to the floor and the glass shattered.

“Sorry,” said not-Sirius against Remus’s neck where he was sucking something hot.

It was alright because Remus did not know who the portrait was of and anyway in the morning he could repair it. Not-Sirius undid his buttons and his fly and pushed his shirt up over his belly and pressed his palm flat over the thin warm skin and the freckles and the reddened pressure marks of his jeans at the tender place between Remus’s belly button and the coarse ridge of his pubic hair. “You’re so skinny,” he breathed, as though it were miraculous. Then he pushed Remus’s shirt up higher still. “What happened to you here.”

“I got attacked by a dog when I was a kid.”

The long nail-bitten finger traced it with a fragile reverence and Remus shut his eyes. “Some dog.”

“It was a great dane or something,” said Remus. He was bored of the charade. “Do you want to fuck me?”

The guy pulled back and his eyes were dark and drunk in the streetlight through the rainy window and big as saucers. Here comes success, Iggy Pop was singing in Remus’s head.

“If you want,” said not-Sirius.

“Yes,” Remus told him, “would I say it if I didn’t want.”

They kissed again swooningly deep and not-Sirius’s hands crept around the back of Remus’s jeans and squeezed his ass of which there was not much and lately even less. Remus’s hands were in his hair which was long and dark and wet from the rain and cool and soft and tangling. Together they fell upon the bed still mostly clothed. “Have you got lube,” said not-Sirius, against his lips.

Fuck. “Um,” said Remus.

Not-Sirius lifted up on the palms of his hands. “Are you a virgin?”

Remus sat up too, so quickly they nearly bumped heads. “No.” He thought perhaps he should say, I’ll show you. Instead he said, “I think I have something in the bathroom.”

He went in there and put the light on and stared at the mirror. He was a wild feral drunken mess and naked from the waist down but for one sock and there was already a hickey bruising bright purple on his neck. “Fuck this Muggle bullshit,” he said quietly to himself. How did they even have sex without magic? Certainly it made the prep and without a doubt the cleanup a lot easier. Not to mention James had this book seventh year that he had shared with Sirius but notably not with Remus — he had always thought James suspected the truth, which was that Remus and Dearborn were fucking athletically and sometimes twice daily in vacant classrooms, broom closets, locker rooms, the prefect’s bath, etc. — that had contained spells of general carnal interest. Anyway it didn't matter that he had never been privy to the book because Sirius had recalled select tidbits from it long after his Hogwarts graduation. At first Remus thought it was very stupid. Can we try this, can we try this, you’ll like it, I swear you’ll like it. And he had said, whatever, but finally he said sure. He figured it couldn’t hurt and indeed it had not. He felt like a collapsed star dense and tight and trembling. The softness of the breeze through the window tormented him and Sirius was kneeling between his legs doing something so infernal Remus could not quit sobbing. Thankfully at the present moment the soul-searing and cauterizing electrifying humiliation that usually accompanied memories like this was rather unfocused by his drunkenness.

He found a tub of Vaseline he had not so long ago used to soothe his broken knuckles when he could not afford magical ointments and they were not provided for him by other people likely out of of their unfocused guilt. When he went back out into the bedroom he saw not-Sirius had laid himself out in the bed in a pose he no doubt thought was seductive and it took everything in Remus to keep from laughing. His cock was like, reasonable. It was curved and red, and very hard. “See something you like?”

Remus ignored him and he took his socks off and his sweater and t-shirt and kicked the pile of his clothes to the corner.

“That dog really got you, didn’t he?”

“Yes.” You have no idea, he thought about saying. He still has me. Instead he came to the bed and sat on the edge of it and not-Sirius reached between his legs. They kissed again. Not-Sirius pressed him down into the bed with the strength and the heat of his body and the sheets smelled like Remus’s own nightmare sweat and like blood, like the taste of the dawn hour when he woke up screaming, and the fingers inside him were slick and strange.

“You’re so sexy,” said not-Sirius. “I don’t know what it is about you.”

He was thinking about Iggy Pop singing, you look so good to me here in this old saloon way back in West Berlin. He turned unartfully on his stomach and pressed his face deep enough into his pillow he could still smell this something like lavender and not-Sirius lifted him up by the hips. Long callused fingers slick against his belly. His heart was slamming like some nocturnal visitor at the door and he closed his eyes tightly and counted to one hundred and when he got there he started again.

When he woke up in the morning he was alone in his apartment but for his hangover which was like a demon in the bed with him. He rose to vomit neon acid and hours later for a piece of toast he scraped the mold off with his longest fingernail and then he laid in bed again.

After a while he got up and put on his sweater and had a cigarette by the window and went through his records. When he came to Lust for Life he took it carefully from the sleeve and blew the dust from it and traced his fingers gently through the grooves as if to memorize them, then he stood and without a second thought broke it against the windowpane.

With the cigarette in his mouth he took the larger pieces and broke them smaller and what was left he put in the fireplace. When he had finished the cigarette he Floo’d Dumbledore.

Budapest, 1984. Echo and the Bunnymen, Ocean Rain

He was in Budapest pretending to be happy and going dancing and working odd Muggle jobs and fucking various and sundry. He lived across the Danube in the new city amidst the brutalist bloc and he smoked too many cigarettes. He had not had his name on a lease since he had left London and rather he slept on folks’ couches some of whom did not know he was a wizard and fewer of whom knew he was a werewolf. The week before the moon he wandered the city scouting abandoned buildings in which to transform. He woke amongst half-eaten rats and once a snake, puked, found his clothes, lit the joint he had pre-rolled and stuck in his wallet, dressed, and limped homeward. “Mugged,” he explained to select among the slew of quasi-roommates. They cooed over him and brought him bandages and cold compresses and put a record on. “Also hungover,” he would add. Then they would turn the record down and they would cook him a large and greasy breakfast.

He told these people that Something Had Happened in London. He did not even go deeper than that inside his own mind. If he went in there he would never come out, he told himself. Easily he could go in there and spend the rest of his life in there. He could say his vows to that place. In sickness and in health. If he did that he understood one day he would wake up in St. Mungo’s and it would have been decades. Touching it was death. He thought about putting it all in a Pensieve but he couldn’t afford one. So instead he took a lot of drugs. He ate mushrooms and went to the ancient wizarding library in Buda and read Transfiguration theory for six hours. When they kicked him out he slept on the street and at dawn he woke sober with a terrific backache. He went back to where he was living and ate more mushrooms and wrote seven feet of parchment as a dissertation of sorts on what he perceived to be at once the ultimate and the sort of original or founding form of Transfiguration eg. the permanent transformative contagion that was lycanthropy. Transferred via a curse that was not a spell but rather it was elemental. It was another action of the mouth that was altogether more primordial and atavistic. And the curse itself was a sickness that was magical and like a cancer it transformed the healthy cells that touched it into sick ones. But unlike cancer there was no chemotherapy nor radiation to prevent the spread and there was certainly no remission. It was always. He had to hide the paper from the people he was staying with at the time who did not know that he was a werewolf but eventually they dropped acid and were going on and on in another corner of the room about something entirely else. He wrote all night and afterwards he slept two days. When he read the paper again it was scarcely legible and probably a quarter of it made any sense. Still he sent the decipherable pieces to a few magical theory newsletters seeking publication under a pseudonym. Eventually the paper was published in Ancient Curses Quarterly Review.

Dumbledore Owled once a month or so and Remus never responded. The letters were mostly updates on James’s son who was living with the horrible sister-in-law in some bleak Surrey suburb, and they were entreaties to return to London where Dumbledore claimed he could secure Remus a Real Job. Remus snorted altogether too much coke and wrote epic responses he never mailed which customarily resembled the following:

Albus in all honesty I cannot even read your letters because I feel like I have been scraped against a cheese grater and reading the word “LONDON” is like continual cheese grating. I am not once not never coming back to fucking London not for thirty fucking seconds like I would not take a flight to Reykjavik with a layover in London is like how badly I cannot even taste the fog for fear I would immediately jump the fuck off something and I am beginning to be certain that you do not understand real human misery? Certainly you cannot even begin to imagine what it feels like to be in my life. Actually perhaps you can because I feel like I am nine hundred years old which I think maybe you are.

I am getting away from my point but the general gist is clear I suppose which is 1) please please for the love of God/Merlin and Morgana etc. leave me the fuck alone. Have you not done enough to fuck my life? Did you not step back and watch whilst munching Every Flavor Beans as my life went supremely fucked? I am trying to stay alive. Which is very hard because I cannot think down below a certain layer in my brain for self-preservation reasons. Honestly if I get down there enough it's like I will get the bends. And 2) please do not tell me ever again to come to London because I will not. I am going to be an expat for the rest of my life. Honestly I have hated London since I first went there at age five to go to the werewolf registry. Also 3) I am an adult and I can make decision for myself. And you know what while I’m on the subject 4) You would not let me have the kid when I asked to take care of the kid and instead you put him in hell and are now reporting to me on said hell so honestly fuck you. Do not speak to me of the kid. I just want you to know that I would have loved the kid like my own soul if that means anything to you. Yours sincerely, Remus J. Lupin.

Those nights he would pass out at about dawn and wake up around 6pm with a splitting headache, having missed his Muggle job from which he would of course summarily be fired, and he would burn the letters and have a few cigarettes and send Dumbledore’s owl out to see what his quasi-friends were doing.

He went by the bakery he had been fired from a week previous to pick up his final check accompanied by several withering glares from the proprietors and other employees and he took it to the bank to cash it and then to the corner store for cigarettes and then for a walk across town to the record store. Occasionally he slept with one of the cashiers at this particular record store so on the way he looked at himself in the reflective window of an empty shop for sale on a quiet street. His hair was a mess because he had let drunk and/or high friends cut it and he had missed a spot and cut another at his jaw shaving and his skin was bright across the cheekbones and inside the collar with sun. He wore a Wire t-shirt that he had bled on at some juncture and the old blood was like a coffeestain at the torn hem and it had been washed so many times it was going kind of sheer and it was torn at the collar and showed his bones and freckles and a piece of the long radial ridge of one of the worse scars. His leather jacket and jeans were both too big and purchased secondhand and the jeans were held up with a braided leather belt he had borrowed from an old roommate and never returned and the big leather boots he had had since sixth year at Hogwarts. In the Something that had happened the Someone had always called them his curb-stomping boots. There was a nicotine stain between his first two fingers and blood under his nails and he wore sunglasses because his eyes were red-rimmed from his seemingly perpetual hangover. In the interim since London he had eaten somewhat better and could no longer see his own ribs but it was a near thing. He rearranged his hair and widened the rip in the shirt at his collarbone and chewed hard on his lips until they turned pinker then he went on.

Even after all that the cashier in question was not there. Instead it was a girl he had seen a few times before and over the speakers in the shop she was playing Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets. Namely she was playing “Baby’s on Fire” which was a song of deep carnal significance from the Something that had Happened in London. Remus very nearly turned around and walked out of the shop. He had found sometimes the best way to heal was by avoidance, e.g. don’t use the hand belonging to the arm that hurts. But he steeled himself because he desperately wanted to buy Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ocean Rain which had just come out because after all he had loved Heaven Up Here though it had walked with him through the end of 1981 and as such he could hardly listen to it any longer. The girl at the counter was watching him. She was filing her nails and there was a safety pin through the top shell of her ear. At first she spoke to him in rapid Hungarian. Then when he didn’t respond she made a face.

He found the record and brought it up to her and paid for it and went out. The moon was in the blue evening sky sitting heavily in the West and it was waning from its crescent half and he watched it for a while and eventually took a side street detour so he wouldn’t be able to see it any longer. The shops were closed but the restaurants were open and there were people sitting outside drinking wine and coffee watching him and the movement in the street and the breeze that came off the Danube was humid and sweet. Sometimes he wondered if he would have come to Budapest even if everything that had happened had not happened and he thought perhaps it was so. At the heart of the city there was a deep dividedness that he empathized with. And it was the same dividedness between the old and the new. Between the elemental and the amorphous. Between history and possibility — between the motion and the act.

He would go home and listen to Ocean Rain and ignore Dumbledore and he thought somewhere in his backpack he probably had some acid. There was a club they went to sometimes Saturday nights and he still had enough cash left for admission and drinks and perhaps if he was lucky someone would like how he looked which for some reason some people did. Once a few months previous he had woken up in Buda in a ransacked four-poster bed in a penthouse apartment overlooking the river and the Palota and he had dressed silently and crept from bed and snuck out the door before whoever he had slept with could emerge from the shower.

At the apartment where he was staying no one else was home. He threw open the windows and made a cup of coffee and put the record on the turntable and set about digging through his backpack for his LSD. He had put an invisible extension charm on it and several lightening charms and so it took him the first three songs to pull all the shit out of it and lay it out on the floor. There was a six-inch high stack of Xeroxed sheets of schoolbooks and research texts he had left at his parents’ house and there were all his records and another pair of jeans and four more t-shirts and another leather jacket. His school robes from seventh year, which he was not sure why he still had. The bewitched address book James’s mother had given him on the date of their graduation which included moving laughing smiling pictures of James and Peter and Lily and another which he had long since burned to ashes.

The record was good. He liked Ian McCulloch’s voice and its low sweet yearning bitterness. At the beginning of “Thorn of Crowns” he found two remaining squares of blotter paper pressed between his copy of Eno’s Discreet Music and Suicide’s ’77 LP. He turned the record up louder and sat on the couch and pressed one into his tongue and the other he tucked inside the case of the Suicide record figuring that was the place it made the most sense for it to be. He settled in and shrugged out of his leather jacket and closed his eyes and reached out.

Time was stretching like taffy as it often did in his memories. Time that he remembered making love for days. Fingers that touched his lips and then one was in his mouth. For a while he did not realize the voice was in fact from the stereo. “Fate up against your will — through the thick and thin — ”

Indeed it had seemed like fate and he had laid in bed afterward while Sirius was asleep watching at the way the yellow streetlight and the white shade of the moon limned his face. Of course it was supposed to happen and of course it was then and right then that it had to be. It had to be because looking at death would remind you of what you were missing and though they pretended they had been in real danger and though they pretended they knew themselves and each other in fact they had not. He had wanted their skin touching wherever it could. Sirius was so warm and his tongue was halfway down Remus’s throat and they really had not taken much time before the proceedings and so it hurt but the hurt was good and he supposed he needed it. It was like being flayed open as he had never been. He had not been fucked much at that juncture in his life except by Dearborn only twice because he was shit at it so mostly they had stuck to blowjobs. And in fact not long after he had first hooked up with Sirius Dearborn had died in Manchester on an investigative mission scouting a very old and very exclusive blood purists’ club and Remus had laid in bed all day and would not get up and he had understood that horribly Sirius was jealous. And that he was wondering, would Remus lie in bed moping all day if I died. To which the answer was, of course, Remus was lying on the couch moping because Sirius had lived.

He stood and the whole room spun and slid off itself and he went to the record player and dragged the needle back over to the beginning of the song.

“Fate up against your will — through the thick and thin — he will wait until you give yourself to him…”

Time compressed and expanded like water freezing. The side had ended so he started the song again.

“The killing moon — will come too soon — ”

“Fuck,” he said.

Every fragile eggshell he had put up around it came shattering and it was like the great wave from the Hokusai woodcut. Eventually he laid on the floor. Very late his roommates came home extremely drunk and at first they thought he had overdosed and he heard them arguing over whether to call an ambulance. When he sat up one of the girls screamed.

“Bad bad bad very bad fucking trip,” he said. He could tell from his voice that he had been crying but he did not remember it. The turntable was still spinning but the record was gone. Two days later when he felt well enough to leave the apartment again he was having a cigarette on the sidewalk and saw shards of the glossy black vinyl in the gutter.

Dharmsala, 1985. Kate Bush, “The Dreaming”

The school where he was working was stalked by kelpies because a treaty had been violated. After the drownings of three students despite stringent warnings and an attempt by the faculty at a sort of harm-reduction program the administration including Remus were tasked to come up with some other solution.

“We never had problems until white people,” said Chopra, the groundskeeper. He liked to remind Remus of this on occasion and Remus understood he deserved it. They resented having to hire white people to keep beasts from the door especially white people who were also werewolves but they had begrudgingly appealed to Dumbledore for help and he had been unsatisfied by Remus’s list of reasons why he should not be shipped from Budapest where he was kind of spiritually languishing to India which Dumbledore who it seemed appreciated George Harrison over any other Beatle said would be Good For Him. Besides everyone else with appropriate credentials was guarding James’s son or hunting down ex-Death Eaters which left Remus who could apparently be trusted doing exactly neither.

The headmaster convened a working lunch to which homemade cashew curry with rice and mutton was brought in tiffins from the kitchen of a young widow living down the street. While they ate they discussed Next Steps. The headmaster was young and ambitious and he had graduated from a magic teaching college in Egypt and he was interested in theory and practice and all sorts of esoteric things with which the rest of the faculty could not be bothered. Including Remus, whose official title was Magical Creature Defense Consultant. But at the time he was twenty-five and spent much of his time stoned (because for a while he could not eat sober) listening to Kate Bush in his apartment laughing to himself while he did gentle and poised balletic steps upon the wooden floor until eventually he retired to his futon mattress to stare at the ceiling and sometimes to weep. Occasionally he was called upon to appear in classes and demonstrate particular self-defense spellwork to the students who were bright and talkative but with whom he had only about six words of Hindi in common. One of which was beast. Otherwise he had an office where he appeared rarely, as customarily he was in the library doing spell development and research as well as scourings of worldwide wizarding newsletters for reportage regarding the capture of Voldemort’s remaining Death Eaters.

One of the students who had drowned had frequently bummed cigarettes from Remus and occasionally they had stood together on the edge of the property where smokers were confined attempting and failing to communicate with each other. So now he supposed this business with the kelpies was moderately personal. Still it was hard to feign interest in the working lunch or at least in the working aspect of the lunch. “I have a couple early warning lines in development that we could try,” Remus said when prompted by the headmaster, covering his mouth, which was full. “They’re heavy work though so I could use help.”

“What exactly will these lines do,” said the charms professor.

“If anything that isn’t human crosses it — I can make a totem object that will respond.”

“What about something in human form?”

“It counts,” said Remus. “For example if I crossed it you would be warned.”

Folk murmured amongst themselves. They had disproved almost to a one of Remus’s appointment and several other elements of what the headmaster called his “diversity plan.” The general idea was to keep his werewolfness from the students as they would doubtless overreact or perhaps to break it to them slowly as Remus moved up the “ladder of engagement.” Which was a ladder he sincerely doubted he would climb as it led inexorably to tenured professorship. He was obliged to transform in an old root cellar across the city belonging to Chopra who was deeply miffed he no longer had somewhere to store his backpacking gear.

“How can we guarantee the — secrecy and ah, the security of our students?” said the potions master.

“Is it not true that all the students’ status is on file with the registrar.”

“I can just see an incident with an individual responding to what turns out to be a student with excessive force.”

Oh my God, Remus almost said. He had once embarked on a two week intensive research spree in attempt to ascertain what exactly the potions master was. “Then student status should be shared with the response team.”

“You are suggesting a kind of witch hunt — ”

“Please do not evoke that terminology in this room,” said the woman who taught Witch Studies and A History of Magical Feminism.

“I’m not — I’m happy to talk with every non-human student about the status that we, um, share,” said Remus, “and the necessity for everyone’s safety and that this is a moment of added security and blah blah blah whatnot rhetoric.”

“It is true just generally that perhaps they would benefit from talking to you, Remus,” said the headmaster, who tried his best to call everyone by his or her or their first name.

“I don’t speak Hindi or Urdu,” said Remus, because it was perhaps a better excuse than the actuality: I also hate myself and everything.

“This is entirely beside the point,” said the potions master. “Kelpies can rather easily be poisoned as their ability to survive outside water is an evolutionary fluke. There are traps on the market and rather simple potions — ”

“You can’t be serious,” said the feminist professor. She turned to the headmaster. “I hope you understand this is an act of gendered violence. Targeting female-presenting individuals for their sexuality.”

“First we tried the other way,” the potions master said. “But boys will be boys.”

The feminist professor punched the table such that it toppled the charms professor’s glass of water. “I can’t stand to be in this fucking room with you sometimes, Mortimer.”

“Likewise, Xie.”

“If we could perhaps move on…”

“We’re not killing them. Half the students will riot.”

“We could have them relocated,” Remus suggested. “There’s a kelpie sanctuary outside of Moscow.”

“They will not go peacefully,” said the headmaster. “And a forcible relocation would be at least seven hundred galleons.”

“Why so steep?”

“Specialized tranquilizer or so the representative told me… and they have to be shipped by train in specially outfitted cars.”

“Then we have to negotiate with the kelpies,” Remus said.

“They will not be negotiated with,” said the potions master.

“Our problem is that a treaty was broken so it seems as though at least at one time they negotiated.”

“These are beasts.”

“God, Mortimer, fuck you.”

“Xie,” the headmaster gentled.

“I’m a beast,” said Remus to quell further argument. “I’ll go talk to them.”

“He’ll get himself immediately seduced.”

He thought it sort of funny he was out about being a werewolf but not so much about the other thing. Possibly because the other thing sometimes seemed worse. The lycanthropy for all its horrible badness seemed mostly like something he couldn’t help. “I won’t,” he said. “I’ll do it. I’ll go this afternoon if it’ll shut you all up.” He stood up and put his jacket on and reassembled his tiffin to bring the leftovers to his office for dinner. Then he looked around the table. Xie had also gotten up and started wrapping herself in her colorful layers but the rest were glaring with their arms crossed from their seats. “Well I suppose if that’s it…”

He left with Xie. “Fuck those fuckers,” she said when they were not entirely out the door. She was tenured and could give a shit. He did not know how to feel about Xie as sometimes he suspected he made her nervous. But perhaps that was just because he was a man. “Best of luck to you,” she said. She looked in his eyes for the longest he thought she had ever dared. Hers were shrewd and sharp and smart but they were also trying to be kind. “Please keep in mind these are women’s lives at stake.”

Indeed there was a woman down by the river sitting on a mossy rock and picking at her fingernails as if she was waiting for him. She looked up when he crunched a twig, and her mouth twitched. “Hi wolf,” she said. He was surprised and thankful that she spoke English.

“Hello, horse.”

There were an awful lot of big squarish teeth in her smile. She looked like one of the Beardsley woodcuts of Salome and her long vivid shock of hair was arranged artfully over the white drapey lace wet and sheer against her skin. Remus was shivering even in all his wool layers but she was not even goosebumped.

“Do you want a cigarette,” he asked her.

He passed her one and lit it for her but when she inhaled she made a face. “This tastes like shit,” she said.

“They are shit,” he agreed. It was all he could afford.

Together they walked along the river her leaping between the mossy stones with an inhuman grace. “I’m supposed to come ask you to stop seducing students,” Remus told her.

“They sent a werewolf — ”

“I work there.”

“They gave you a job?”

“Yes. I have some connections.”

“Would they give me a job?”

“Perhaps if you had not drowned like, three kids.”

She made a face. “Asshole, only one was me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“They broke their end of the bargain so we broke ours. You understand. Any number of werewolves have done the same. Any number of any of us have done the same. Have you ever read like a single old American Western?”

“Not read but seen. A few.”

“I prefer the books.”

“What was their end of the bargain?”

“Not to come down to the river. Ever. Not to so much as touch it or even drink a single drop. We made concessions for the classes from the school. It is important for the children to understand the environment because how else will they learn respect? But then they built the new dormitory and that was the final straw.”

“What is it about the new dormitory?”

“It diverts water. One third of the flow. And we were not consulted.”

“Would you have been in agreement if you were consulted?”

“Fuck, no, but we could have warned them we were going to start taking their children.” Her smile now was huge and wicked. She dropped the butt of the cigarette in a swirling eddy.

“If they dam it back up will you stop?”

“Perhaps.”

“What will you accept as enough of a concession to stop?”

“If they return the river to how it was. And I want a job. What’s yours?”

“Magical Creature Defense Consultant.”

“That’s bullshit. I want a better title.”

“I’ve asked for the same and they’re not forthcoming.”

“These are fucking assholes. They need to fix the river and give me a job and a full written apology. And then perhaps I will think about it.” She was standing so close to Remus he could feel her loose electric power crackling. Her smile widened impossibly showing her full wild mouth. “You simply do not know how good they taste.”

Remus went back to the headmaster’s office to relay this news. When he arrived the headmaster was trying to mediate an argument between Mortimer and Xie, the latter of whom was shouting, “As far as I am concerned wizards’ only value is their semen. And only select semen!”

In the doorway Remus cleared his throat. Three faces turned to him. “He lives,” said Mortimer flatly.

“They want us to un-divert the river and write a full apology and one of them wants a job.”

“What’s she like?”

“She talked at length about how good people taste.”

A strange smile flitted like a snake at the corner of Xie’s mouth.

“Perhaps she will settle for an adjunct professorship,” mused the headmaster.

“In what? Adjunct Professor of Man-Eating?”

At that Xie out and cackled.

“We cannot un-divert the river,” Mortimer continued. “We can host seventy more students per year because of that dormitory. We have to be thinking, I mean, do the gains outweigh the risks here…”

“So, with the risks at three children’s lives per year…”

“Still that’s a net gain of sixty-seven,” said Mortimer.

“You’re a psychopath,” said Xie.

“You’re suggesting we give this creature a professorship when she has bragged about her gleeful consumption of children.”

“I’d suggested adjunct,” said the headmaster, “say, she’ll co-teach one class per year. Perhaps with Remus! I can see the course catalog now… Magical Creatures in Situ.”

“I can’t speak Hindi or Urdu,” Remus reminded him for the nth time.

“Damn, that’s right.”

“We can meet approximately none of her demands except for the written apology,” Mortimer said.

“Also we could cast that line I was talking about.”

“That is out of the question.”

“Are you a vampire?” Remus asked, etiquette and resolve similarly shattered. “I could have sworn but then I saw you eat a whole clove of raw garlic.”

Mortimer turned to the headmaster. “You see, continued examples of the lies and slander to which I am suggested daily from the — unsavory characters in your pitiful employ…”

“I’m saying I honestly would not think worse of you and I’m just curious.” Mortimer was pale and his jaw gawped like a fish. Xie’s left eyebrow was halfway up her forehead and she was studying intently her beringed hands in her lap and the headmaster’s mouth was so pinched he appeared lipless. Not for the first time Remus regretted having said anything at all. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve — ”

“Headmaster,” said Mortimer, regaining his composure, “will you please fire this bitter stoner manchild excuse for a security consultant.”

Remus stormed out, slamming the door, and marched back to the river. It was nearly dusk and the kelpie was sitting back on her rock combing through her long black hair with her fingers. Through her sheer clothing her breasts and her hipbones and bellybutton were visible and she looked like a Greco-Roman goddess sculpted by the old masters. “What did they say?” she asked when she saw them.

“They’re fucking assholes.”

“I’ve been telling you.”

“Is there anything else they can give you to make you stop? I can’t stand to hear them debate like, if kids’ lives are worth the embarrassment of having to employ more creatures.”

“They’re horrible and disgusting,” she said. “All humans are. Do you get it? They make us out to be the bad ones and I think it’s a sort of smart tactic. Like they had to pretend they were better than us so we would hate ourselves and each other so they could keep us under their bootheels. Because otherwise we could overpower them easily. And we would have by now.”

Remus had heard Xie explain patriarchy as a similar concept. He nodded.

“I can tell you hate them.”

“Well I didn’t always.”

“People in general I mean.”

“I meant that too. I didn’t always hate people.”

“But you got burned.”

“Royally fucking burned. Like scorched earth burned.”

“That’s what they do,” she said. “That’s all they do. They burn. They come in and they rape and slash and burn. Then they’re like, why can’t I live here anymore? Why does everything hate me?” She stood up. Her legs were very strong and unshaven and he could tell looking at her what her other self would be like and he wondered if she could tell the same of him. “Let’s go for a walk again.”

“Don’t lure me in,” said Remus, but he set off down the bank and she followed.

“I wouldn’t lure you in. It doesn’t work on folk like you.”

“Werewolves?”

“No,” she said, “you don’t like women.”

“I like women plenty.”

“But you don’t for fucking.” She smiled her horsey smile. “There aren’t boy kelpies. You would be drowned already if there were boy kelpies.”

He looked at her and her bright grey eyes and her wild dark hair. The regal nose and the laughing mouth and the self-assured bearing. He understood she was trying to goad him and not to take the bait. “Then how do you reproduce?”

Her thick eyebrows cocked in a sort of silenced laugh. “You wouldn’t get it.”

“Fine.”

“You should just go out and live in the woods and it would be easier. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

“Not necessarily.”

“They’ve got to you to make you think that. You’re supposed to go around barefoot and hunt for what you eat.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You’ll think you can’t until you do it. And then you’ll wonder why you weren’t doing it before.” She slung her cold bare arm around his shoulders and she smelled like horse and like saltwater and like the strange unnamable spices of Indian cooking and like cold dark shallows and far away very low and quiet a delicate tendril of nostalgia like lavender. Her clothing was soft and her skin and the fine hair under her arms. “They are so weak and they are so fragile and you are not.” She pressed her hand against his heart which was beating very fast inside his coat. “You are very not fragile but they have told you that you are. They have told you over and over and over again that they know how to make you live. But they lied.”

“They all — ” The words were stringing out of him on their very own and it felt like being sick. “They all lie. Don’t they all lie.”

“Yes. Every single one of them does it. It is their grandest weakness that they cannot help. It’s how they eat each other. They eat each other with lying instead of with their teeth.”

“Well I mean, I lie too. I lie all the time. I’m fucking good at it. Sometimes I feel like I can’t stop. Like I think up a whole lie that’s so big I can walk in it. And when I do people believe it.”

“Because they’ve got to you. That’s why that is. You started lying to be like them because you felt like you needed to.”

Of course she was right. His hands were trembling and his skin felt loose and wrong.

“Whoever it was who scorched earth burned you if you found him you could destroy him. You could not just kill him but you could destroy him such that it would be like he had never been. Do you see?”

“I see.”

“Wherever he is you can scale the walls and drink all his blood. You cannot tell me you have not thought about it.” In fact he had done casual research into how exactly one got to Azkaban telling himself it was not for this purpose though there was none other he could conceptualize when he challenged himself. “He will very much regret having ever lied to you and having made it such that you felt you had to lie. Because have you not lied to him? And for him?”

“Yes. How do you know all this?”

“From doing it. All you have to do is cut the one single string in your brain. Which is a false string anyway. Do you feel it?”

She was whispering in his ear such that her lips touched the shell of it.

“If you can feel it you can cut it. And when you cut it everything will go away and you will be very much free again. Because you will end your biggest lie. The biggest untruth that you walk in. Can you feel it?”

Her cold rough tongue touched his earlobe. Clarity was a sudden wash like a triggered floodlight. When he moved from her grasp her skin was glowing greenish and her eyes were pure cold white. He did not even think before he Apparated.

In his flat he let his breath out to find it was a very cold wet sort of screaming sob. Like no sound he had heard himself make before even when it all was at its worst. Somewhere he understood she had been trying to seduce him to drowning and she as such she had said what was necessary but he could not shirk the understanding that all of it was true. He went to the toilet and vomited until nothing was left in his stomach and then he ran the shower cold and dunked his head in it and afterward while it was still running he sat on the floor trying to breathe.

He rose after perhaps an hour to turn off the shower and he was dizzy and vomited again. Then he went to the kitchen and poured himself a drink. After three he composed a letter to the headmaster resigning from his position at the school. He burned it and then he wrote another which he folded and tucked in the pocket of his coat to hand in the next day. For half an hour or so he wept silently and watched at the moon in the window.

You’ll think you can’t until you do it, she had said. She was talking about killing but he supposed eerily the same was true of survival.

Eventually he went to the stereo and put a record on. He chose one he thought would be soothing because it had been a favorite of his for a long time. It was The Dreaming by Kate Bush. He just dragged the needle past the first track and dropped it without caring where it would go. So it started toward the beginning of “Suspended in Gaffa.” He had a cigarette and paced a tread in the wood floor. Usually he would fake ballet steps but also he was usually stoned and usually an extended hallucinatory nightmare had not happened. He pressed his thumb into the crease of his forehead like it would do anything for the rapidly surmounting headache. What was the fucking point of doing any of it when it was just the lie he walked in and now there were two ways out of it and one of them was to do as she said and the other —

When Kate sang “I want it all” her voice was like a birdcall or the voice from a portrait or a Pensieve or memory. The rhythm of this song was like a song passed back and forth on a playground by children. “Unless we can prove that we’re doing it we can’t have it all.”

He picked up the record straight from the table and threw it across the room and when it hit the wall it shattered.

In the morning he woke hungover, vomited thrice, found a packet of Saltines and made some coffee and walked to work two hours late having missed the daily staff briefing. When he arrived they were debating how to break the news of his apparent drowning to Dumbledore. On the way he stopped in at the only record store in town and bought a new copy of The Dreaming and also Kate’s newest record which was titled Hounds of Love. In his office later he burned the resignation letter. He ended up working at the school nearly two more years. The administration held a fundraising drive and eventually secured a grant from the Himalayan District Magical Parliament to ship the kelpies to the sanctuary near Moscow.

King William Island, NT, 1987. Sonic Youth, Bad Moon Rising

At a conference of magical creatures specialists in Damascus Remus had had mint tea and halal lamb with a Canadian magical archaeologist who had graduated at the top of her class from the anthropology program at both Penticton Magic Institute and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Remus had been sent by the school in Dharmsala to keep abreast of the latest red cap trapping technology but truth be told he was looking rather desperately for a new job as the appeal of India had rather worn off after a recent bout with malaria. This scientist whose name was Natasha Harpy-Ross would be excavating wreckage of a ship that summer in the distant and frigid Canadian Arctic and she was in need of a yeti wrangler and she was in need of one cheap, which she explained as she puffed on a hookah they were sharing.

“It might be Brits,” she said. “Do you know anything about John Franklin.”

“Two ships lost in the Arctic with 130 hands, et cetera.”

“Not so lost if you pay any credence to the Inuit oral history. I do think I’ve found one of them but I’ve been asked by the Canadian Minister of Magic to keep it under wraps as we can’t exactly break to our layfolk that the founding element of their cultural mythology is in fact, well. Not so much their culture at all.”

“Which one is it?”

“The Terror. The one that bombed Baltimore during the War of 1812 engendering the American national anthem if you can believe it.”

Harpy-Ross explained the ship was magic at least in part and for certain one at least of the officers had been. She had been trying to negotiate with the Royal Navy for the records of the sailors but they were tight-lipped on the subject. “Anyway I have a bunch of archaeologists and most of them are grad students who couldn’t even keep Protego up thirty seconds. I doubt two of them have a corporeal Patronus and so I am very much in need of someone who does.”

“I do,” said Remus. “I can.”

“Can you stalk yeti?”

“I went on a survey trip into to the Himalayas a few months ago and I had all the training but we didn’t see any,” Remus told her. “I have stalked kelpies and kappas and red caps, though, um, grindylows and maybe six different cryptid cats, and last year I staked a vampire.”

“Werewolves?”

“I am one.”

Harpy-Ross raised one eyebrow. Then she said, “I suppose you have references.”

In two weeks he wrapped things up in Dharmsala and flew to Toronto then to Edmonton then on a prop plane to Yellowknife and another to Gjoa Haven on the Southeastern bank of King William Island, in the Northwest Territories. Amundsen had moored here when he navigated the Northwest Passage in 1906 and the two Royal Navy ships under the command of John Franklin had sunk nearby after having been icebound and summarily abandoned. The town was populated largely by Inuit who understood all the new white folk were in search of the old white folk and left them alone but for withering glares except when consulted.

Harpy-Ross introduced Remus to a few of the community elders and oral historians. “This is Lupin,” she said, hand between the shoulderblades of the massive neoprene coat he had bought secondhand from a Himalayan backpacking outfitter, “our security man.” Then she departed to see about a shipment of coffee. A few of the elders sniffed him out immediately but did not hesitate to sit near him and/or bum his cigarettes. One or two he supposed were wizards in the European definition but the rest even had a weird magic about them like something they had absorbed from the ice.

“You about one sixteenth the size of one of them,” said the eldest. “They could eat you up in one bite even with you like you are.” Still she rolled out a geographic survey map so old it still had the DEW radar line woven about the islands showing the stations that were supposed to give Americans early warning of Soviet nuclear holocaust. “You need to eat good or you’ll fuckin freeze I hope you know.”

“I do know,” said Remus. It was still difficult for him to remember to eat sometimes and it had been even in India where the food smelled good and not like pure rich fat and blood served with half-hearted, freeze-dried vegetables shipped from the prairie provinces. He reminded himself that Harpy-Ross had told him Franklin’s men had traded knives and other implements with the Inuit for seal meat but they had refused to eat the blubber; subsequently they had eaten each other, then they died.

“Most of them died near Cambridge Bay,” said the elder as she pinpointed it on the map. “You could go there and see the bones scattered all about if you wanted.”

“Maybe another time.”

“This is where Natasha is excavating — ” she indicated a spot on the Western shore of the island — “and this I will tell you is where they like to be.” There were two islands in the middle of the gulf connected customarily by ice but in the summer there was a window of open frigid water. “Good seals and things. You have to have very much will in your spells or they will not so much as feel like, a fish nibble, I hope you know.”

“I do know,” Remus said again, “thank you.”

“I’m just telling you enough ill prepared white folk come up here to die and then more come looking for those that died and more come looking for them and on and on until the end of time.”

“You must be sick of it.”

She smiled at him and in doing so she looked him in the eyes for the first time and hers were bright and creased around the edges with laughter but also her brow was folded with sadness. She rolled the map up carefully and gave it to Remus. “If you all disappear mysterious enough it will be another two hundred years of morbid tourism.”

The earth up there was not so much earth as stone having been scraped raw by ice in its grand eternal recession and a low grass that was pale and mossy. They drove out to the site in a series of Jeeps like a parade of steampunk dogsleds. Not far from the site was one of the old DEW stations, which was equipped with a crude fallout shelter in which Remus would be obliged to transform for the four full moons of the expedition. En route they passed a memorial cairn that had been erected at the site where in the 1850s two skeletons were discovered with a lifeboat rigged into a sledge of goods for trade. Then they came to the site, at the end of a long tidal flat, where the ocean had been forcibly moved away in a neat equilateral square around an ancient vessel molded in seaweed and lying on its side like a massive fallen musk ox. Like an animal the slats of its ribs were visible but beyond that was only darkness. They had not yet ventured inside the vessel.

“How are you doing this,” Remus asked Harpy-Ross, about the displacement of the water.

She leapt down from the Jeep as though she were Indiana Jones, which he rather supposed she was. “It’s a new theory out of Oxford.”

Remus had not gotten into the advanced magical theory program at Oxford and occasionally still felt a removed bitterness. Sirius had told him he should sue for discrimination because Martha St. James had gotten in and her Arithmancy NEWT was dismal. He knew this because he had been hooking up with Martha at the time though he claimed this was mostly for stress relief purposes. Remus had reminded him that Martha’s father was an endowed chair in the linguistics department of said advanced magical theory program.

The first thing he did was walk a loop around the keeled ghostship mostly to see it but also to lay his own early warning line. It would tremor in his wand if crossed by certain parties; he had perfected it in Dharmsala. Grad students were clustered around the wreck taking measurements with wands and scientific implements alike and a few waved. Not a whisper from his back he could feel the massive cold wall of sea pushed up like a mantle ten meters above his head. He carried the line with him up onto the tidal flat where tents were set up beyond the sea’s reach should the invisible retaining wall fail in the night and he walked around the fleeting settlement of bright tents clustered florally and fluttering in the stiff breeze. At the stone where he had left the beginning of it he knelt and shut his eyes feeling the rope of the spell tugging and all the laughing humans and the ghosts inside it and the thread of the ship still and looming like a big black heart and he whispered the last few incantations and sealed it off. Once he had done it he stood and was dizzy. His heart was pounding in his skull and his vision turned black and then gradually things developed again. It would not get dark that night, he understood. He desperately wanted a drink.

In another week he woke up naked in the bomb shelter at what would have been dawn had the sun bothered to set. The moon had risen enough his bones started stretching on him but he had kept his wits at least a couple strange blurry hours of excruciating migraine warfare. His head still ached but his body wasn’t half as sore as usual and while he dressed he thought about trying to live permanently in the Arctic before he remembered it was only like this half the year. And the other half the sun never bothered to come up.

Harpy-Ross was waiting for him on the steps of the fallout shelter smoking a cigarette. Her Jeep was parked nearby on the steppe. “You look alright,” she said when she saw him. She sounded surprised.

“I feel alright. I’ve got a headache.”

“I’ve got a potion for that in my tent. And I think someone was cooking bacon. And the prop plane came this morning and there’s a package in it for you.”

It must have been the cassettes he had purchased via catalog his last month in Dharmsala that had been backordered. One of them was Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising and the other was R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction.

“I thought I was going to have to carry you out of there from the way you talked about it,” Harpy-Ross said. Together they walked to her Jeep and she was standing very close at his shoulder like to catch him if he collapsed. “Actually my wife was writing an ethnography about First Nations werewolves in Manitoba. She was in this community that was decimated by the residential school system you know and they tried to — they were frightened of the kids. They hired these kind of snake oil salesmen, experimental potions, yada yada yada. And a lot of the kids died.”

She rested her hand warmly between Remus’s shoulderblades when he climbed in the passenger seat of the Jeep. She had tucked a woven wool blanket under the dashboard that he pulled gingerly over his feet and legs.

“It’s interesting both from an indigenous history point of view and also this moment of contact perspective we’re always talking about or trying to conceptualize vis a vis magic-Muggle relations.” Harpy-Ross climbed in the Jeep herself and started the engine. “Just like the very belly — the crux of the colonial moment — ”

“Natasha,” Remus said, “this is really very interesting but my head.”

“Oh,” she said, “oh, God, I’m sorry.” In silence they drove back to the camp and despite the roughness of the ground Remus fell almost immediately asleep. He woke again when Harpy-Ross stopped the car at her tent and gently pressed her hand to his shoulder.

In all that summer yeti broke Remus’s line once, at a new moon, on the bright evening when he finally could stand to eject the R.E.M. tape from his walkman and try the Sonic Youth one. He lay in his cot with a scarf bound around his eyes to fake nighttime darkness and pressed play and he was halfway through “Brave Men Run (In My Family)” when the wand he held against his chest started vibrating.

He tore the headphones from his ears and Apparated even before he had fully unwrapped the scarf from his eyes and the spell was in his mouth before even he landed on two feet. “Stupefy!”

The creature was big and pale and it smelled like fish and blood and it stood hunched in the sickly wet shadow of the ghostship. Remus’s spell hit it and it stumbled back two paces and he saw for the first time there were two of them. The second was smaller and it eyed the wall of sea with a great sadness.

He thought inexorably of Sirius almost on instinct — third year in Divination during a long lecture they were playing hangman with esoteric creepy spellwords on a sheet of parchment and that day in his tea leaves Sirius had laughed because he had gotten something about true love — and his Patronus summoned itself almost without his meaning to. He dispatched it after Harpy-Ross and it went running off silvery across the tidal flats, silent in the dusk like a long ectoplasmic thread.

At the belly of the ship the yeti had slunk into the shadows. Remus regretted suddenly that he had not taken the time to learn any words in their language. “Go on,” he said, feeling stupid. Like to a stray dog or a raccoon out back of the old flat in London. He made light flare bright and blinding from his wand to flush them out of the deep briny hollows. “Go on, get.”

They did not get and in fact they charged him but he caught them both with a stinging net and while they were fighting free of it Harpy-Ross, in her pajamas, appeared with the shattering of her displaced air at his side. In her presence he could sense her intention in the way magic sometimes seemed inherent and permeable in the very air and in unison they both shouted, “Stupefy!”

Both the large pale bodies collapsed in the red netting as it faded. Harpy-Ross ran to them and Remus followed. “Breathing,” she said, observing the rising and the falling of the barrel chests. Remus had never seen one so close before. Their faces were still and peaceful in their unconsciousness and they looked like the bridge between man and creature and their ribs were visible and their hair was thin and lank and colorless like a polar bear’s. “What shall we do with them?”

“Keep them unconscious,” Remus said. He was breathing hard. “Oblivate them and truck them out far from here.”

Harpy-Ross laughed. “Like catch and release.”

With the help of the camp nurse they induced a heavy magical sleep in both creatures and carefully erased their memories of how they had come to that place and then Remus and Harpy-Ross hauled the sleeping bodies in a sledge pulled by one of the Jeeps halfway across the island past the cairns and the jetsam of the ancient dead. Remus sat in the back seats watching at the yetis while Harpy-Ross drove, wand trained, making sure they were breathing, but not too fast. They dropped them about an hour’s drive toward the North of the island in a grassy patch between scraps of stone and then Remus climbed in the front seat and Harpy-Ross performed a quick compass spell and drove them back to camp.

“Good one,” Harpy-Ross said. “Earning your keep.”

“It’s just the line.”

“Well the line is really something. You'll have to teach it to me.”

He was thinking of how sad and thin the creatures were and he could tell Harpy-Ross was thinking of it too for her brow was tightly furrowed. “Is there a — what’s the state of liaison with magical creatures in Canada?” Remus asked.

“There’s a department in the Ministry,” said Harpy-Ross. “Beautiful Gothic building in Ottawa. Clio presented to them her findings from Manitoba, two or three years ago maybe? She said there were lots of white men in suits.”

“All human?”

“She said she thought so. You know she’s got a good eye for this sort of thing.”

“I’ve been thinking about what you told me about her project,” Remus said. In fact for very many nights he had lain awake in the tent looking into the darkness and the itchy wool of the scarf wrapped around his head thinking about the project. “The potions… how those kids were double other. They were indigenous and they were werewolves and they must have thought they were beyond redemption.”

He could feel Harpy-Ross looking at him but he feared if he met her eyes he would start weeping. Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel of the Jeep. “That was part of Clio’s work,” said Harpy-Ross finally. “How they — all their suicide. Heroin… and they abandoned their magic. They forgot it on purpose. They told her they wanted to cut it out of themselves. Because they were made to believe it was wrong and it was sickness. When it had in fact been upheld otherwise in their mythology for generations.”

“It had been?”

“Yes, yes, they were blessed, the kids. They were very sacred.”

Remus’s parents had run with him a few times through a kind of fire drill execution of what they would do should the townspeople find out and come upon the house with pitchforks.

“Clio has this theory.” Harpy-Ross was verifiably throttling the steering wheel now. “Based on oral history and some of the cultural artifacts. She thinks they had — maybe not so much a cure but a treatment. A treatment for lycanthropy.”

They drove past the cairn where the bones from the sledge place had been interred. Remus let a shaky breath out.

“You know I didn’t believe her until two weeks ago when you climbed out of there under your own power looking like you had a bad hangover and that was it. She thought they had some potion or a spell series that would trick your body into not recognizing that the sun went down. So you cannot help the change in your body but — ”

“You can keep your mind.”

“Yes. But of course all this was lost to colonial progress. Muggles would have executed them for it and European wizards had no patience for shamanism in itself the sort of pagan approximation that connects our kind to atavistic roots…”

“So instead they locked them in basements and fed them poison.”

“Yes. In the name of proving that the Western way was better. The grand disgrace of Canadian wizardkind, Clio says. Maybe sometime in the distant future they will attempt reconciliation. You know, like the Truth Commission in Transylvania in the seventies. But now is not that time.”

This country was wilder than anywhere he had ever been, Remus thought, and likely it would be that way for a while; past a particular longitude no one lived, and there was only one telephone area code, and it was cold and bitter, and everywhere bones. Even where you would not look to find bones there were bones. There were bones scattered all across the tundra and the tidewater sat in the flats until under the summer sun it turned red and sweet saline as blood.

“How long have you and Clio been married,” he said, embarrassed by how fragile his voice seemed.

“Seven years. We were married while she was doing this work and I was at UBC. I guess it’s been a trip. As much as it can be difficult to be a witch it’s harder I think to be a lesbian.” She reached across the center console of the Jeep and squeezed Remus’s knee. “I hate to do this to you Lupin but have you got a cigarette?”

Indeed he did. He lit one for each of them and the wind past the windshield snatched the smoke. “But you can get married — you can marry someone of your same sex in Canada?”

“I mean if you were a Muggle you couldn’t. Not yet. Canadian wizarding law regarding marriage is looser. We still have to file federal taxes separately.” She took a long drag, and then she looked at him. “Why do you ask? Is there someone, um, would you marry someone — ”

“Well I would have,” he said, entirely without meaning to. “Someone long ago. We were very young and I would have regretted it. But I thought about it.” All the blood had rushed into his face. Instinctive humiliation response. As though she could tell looking at him the person he was talking about had gone into Erebus itself to rage at nothing. “I don't know what the law is like in the UK.”

He could not look at her. He watched at the unending slate scrape variant of taiga until his eyes hurt. Then she dropped him off at his tent and her smile goodbye was very sad.

Sometimes he wondered in spite of himself what Sirius was doing. He went to the cot and sat down and rewound the Sonic Youth tape back around to the beginning of side A and listened again to keep the wolf from the door. Underneath the music was ever the sound of the sea. The sea sweeping forth along the flat beating and bubbling against the retaining wall. The sea ever in the ghostship speaking something. On the tape Kim Gordon was singing. “Seven days and seven nights I dreamed a sailor’s dream of me…” He wondered what in Azkaban Sirius dreamed about and if he was in those dreams and what he was like in those dreams. If it was him all tender with his pale flesh laid out in the bed on Sirius’s transfigured dress robes going please, please, please. Or rather if he was not human at all.

This song bled noise into the next in which Thurston Moore sang, “Society is a hole — it makes me lie to my friends — ”

Remus took the headphones off and ejected the tape and crunched it against the flaking stone under his bootheel and kicked the skeleton of it under his cot. In fact it would remain there until the end of the expedition when one of the graduate students picked it up and added it to the bags of trash they would bring with them to dispose of in Gjoa Haven. Part of him had hoped it would be abandoned to the tundra for discovery in another several hundred years as part of the wreckage of another such doomed voyage. Scattered ghosts identifiable only by their bones and belongings.

That summer his line was broken one more time not a week before they were due to pack up and take the Jeeps back across the island to the airfield. It had started to get bitter cold and almost dark at night and the shadow thrown by the ghostship was ever longer. He was asleep when his wand started shaking but again he Apparated nearly instinctively and even before the ship and the sea fully developed he was shouting the stunning spell but it went right through the thing, which was a ghost.

It was a man or rather perhaps a boy. He had to have been at least five or six years younger than Remus (who at the time was twenty-seven) when he had died. His face and hands were emaciated and his hair was thin and his eyes bleary in their jelly ectoplasm were wild and sick and he wore a surcoat embroidered with the arrows of the Royal Navy and there were holes in his boots.

“Hello,” Remus said. He had never feared ghosts because there was no reason to. He put his gloved hand out but it was not taken. The ghost opened his mouth but could not speak.

He must have been magic to have come back like this. But perhaps he did not understand it or he did not want to. He would have received a Hogwarts letter when he was eleven years old. And now perhaps he did not understand when or where he was. After all they had all gone mad at the end with lead poisoning.

“What officer are you under,” said Remus carefully, thinking of Harpy-Ross’s work. Dutifully the ghost tried his voice again. When nothing came of it he reached for Remus’s hand as though to write letters in his palm. But the grasp went right through, like a hot knife through butter, except the hand was frigid cold.

The ghost was very close and looked through him studying his face and his soul in the manner the more suspicious Hogwarts ghosts once had. The smile was horrible for the gums had receded in the final sickness and the teeth were browning and skeletal. It was a smile that said, we are not really so very different you and I. Then the spectre was gone, and Remus walked back to his tent. So help him he never told Harpy-Ross.

Lubbock, TX, 1991. Slint, Spiderland

In Texas he lived in a trailer park on the red plain that blew dust off from itself like a skin it was shedding every day and every night. Dust offset in vivid minimalist color palette with the sky, which was huge and blue and unmarked by cloud as far as he could see into the horizon. The rent on his lot and the lease on his tiny grey Honda he paid on time monthly with his earnings from a wizarding school called Credence Academy. It was underground in a series of very poorly engineered caves connected with narrow passages just North of Lubbock in a village depressingly called New Deal. Remus taught what had been called Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts but which in America was called Self-Defense and Nonwizard Species in a classroom that was mildly caving in, whose ceiling necessitated daily repair by hand and with magic. Some of his students came by after the rest of their classes let out to assist in the patching. Most of them were Muggle-born and were obliged to go home and help in the fields immediately after class or sometimes even on their lunch break. Many of them had started smoking cigarettes before they were twelve and once a student came to him crying asking if there was an abortion spell.

Remus had turned thirty just over halfway through his first year teaching. His hair had been turning grey since he was sixteen but lately it seemed like it was more rapid. It had begun to take him longer and longer to recover from his transformation and on rainy days he couldn’t get his knee to work right which was possibly the only reason why he was thankful for the relocation to the Texas dustbowl. His students called him Mr. Lupin and sometimes made fun of his accent and they were curious and intelligent and most of them would use only quotidian magic after they graduated from Credence. Probably two or three would go East to study something esoteric and ridiculous in the graduate program at Ilvermorny or Richmond Institute and the rest would be particularly well-equipped cattlemen and -women of hardy Texan magic stock sourced from the days when the state was its own nation. They needed to know how to stalk and kill the occasional chupacabra or Ozark howler or wampus cat (all of whose pelts were extremely valuable and necessitated special processing), and they needed to know how to hypnotize snakes, and they needed to know what the American Magical Congress had deemed Common Core Basics for Muggle Safety and Protection, spells on which they would be tested rigorously in their seventh year so as to ensure continued funding for the school: Oblivate. Obfuscate. Stupefy. Expelliarmus (it also worked on firearms). Still he taught them the stinging net, Rictumsempra, a cobweb hex, a compass spell, a few tracking spells, spells to keep the dust from their eyes, and a bit of desert navigation by stars, for which he had to have them fill out special permission slips.

In America he was surprised to learn the Unforgivable Curses were far less regulated on account of a clause in an ancient magical constitution that was still adhered to. American wizards used it rather the same way American Muggles used their second amendment. A few of his students, those from particularly conservative wizarding families, would raise their hands to deliver confusingly argued rhetoric defending the existence of the clause, during which they would invariably invoke the Salem Witch Trials. “It’s almost the three hundred year anniversary,” Remus reminded them each time in attempt to contextualize the event historically. He learned from a few of them and some of their dropped notes that there were uprisings planned and as such he resolved to leave America before February 1992. But logically he knew not much would happen, because American wizards were very proud but they were also very afraid and most of them were possessed by self-hatred and those that were not were of the sort who would forge documents allowing their transfer into a public university so they could use their talents to seduce young Muggle women.

Still because they could be cursed over a simple dispute at little to no cost to the perpetrator he taught them Protego and Finite incantateum. He taught them Imperius could be fought and had them practice on each other in the school gymnasium on the wrestling mats. Their wands were short and volatile and powerful and they spat sparks and the magical material at their hearts came from creatures Remus had never himself heard of and had to look up secretively in a textbook.

There was one student who was a werewolf and her name was Nancy Morris. The principal of the school had asked Remus if he would mentor her as her parents were Muggles and they were very confused about most things as they had been Oblivated to hell by an overzealous SMAT (Special Magics and Tactics) Team of the Texas Regional Magical Law Enforcement Unit on the night of Nancy’s wounding at age seven. When they met she was fourteen years old and drove a faded blue pickup truck to school. Her parents remembered how to do their work with their cattle but she had to help them with dinner and sometimes with dressing in seasonally appropriate clothing and she always looked very tired. Perhaps it was the nature of the literal beast to always appear exhausted if you were a werewolf and you were trying to also be a human, Remus reasoned. He always looked tired whenever he dared look in a mirror but then he spent much time grading his students’ dismal papers.

Nancy came to his office hours once a week and they would talk. She had been bitten high on her left shoulder almost in her neck and now she had been a werewolf half her life. Her father was old Texan ranching stock but her mother had fled over the Mexican border somewhere deep in the Chihuahuan desert and it seemed likely she was a Squib. Once she had seen Nancy washing the dishes with magic and had dissolved into a flurry of Spanish of which Nancy herself understood very little. But she had leaned in and kissed her daughter’s cheek and hugged her tightly rocking back and forth like a strange dance as though very many things were explained and confirmed and absolved. But they never spoke of it again.

In his dark and purely horrible office (he suspected he had been relegated to the worst one because he was not on a tenure track) Nancy would look at all his things. The preserved grindylows in formaldehyde and all his books and the couple vinyl records he had brought to work — most of them recordings of field interviews with semihumans, kelpies, werewolves, vampires, merfolk, conducted by the old masters of the study and transferred to vinyl from wax cylinder. Sometimes when she came they did not speak and she explored and read sitting cross-legged in the floor and sometimes she would sit across from him in an armchair he had scrounged from the local dump, and on one such occasion she asked, “Who bit you?”

Remus looked up from the papers he was grading. Nancy was chewing her nails. There were a couple band-aids on her legs around her knees and her bony ankles where she had cut herself shaving. She was such a teenage girl. She had once told him she had a crush on a Muggle boy who was a football star at Levelland High School. “This — he was like almost sort of a folk legend where I’m from,” Remus said. “Do you pay attention in History of Magic?”

“Oh my God, of course I don’t.”

“Well have you guys talked about — do you know about He Who Must Not Be Named?” Nancy’s face was blank. “Voldemort?”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Oh my God,” said Remus. “You children are so disserviced by this bullshit system.”

“You say that every fucking time we talk about anything!” Nancy yelled. Remus recalled from his own childhood seemingly a symptom of puberty was the inability to control the volume of one’s own voice. “I don’t know who that is. I’m sorry I didn’t go to Hoggy Warty Hogwarts.” Remus laughed despite himself. But then Nancy said again, “Who bit you.”

“This — well his name was Greyback and that was what he did. He went around biting kids.”

“Who does that?”

“Voldemort had promised him — actually I don’t know. But he wanted a young malleable army of werewolves who resented wizardkind.” Nancy was staring at him from her armchair. “I’m sorry Nance but do you mind if I have a cigarette?”

“Can I have one?”

“You can have like one drag of mine.”

“Fine.” While he lit it she watched him. “Mine was my neighbor,” she said. He passed her the cigarette across the desk and she took a shallow clumsy drag and then she coughed mightily. “He was my neighbor,” she said again. “It was by accident. He was a Muggle and he didn’t know — but later he killed himself.”

She had to nearly stand on the chair to pass the cigarette back to him. “Oh,” he said.

“He hung himself in whatever regional MLE detainment in Amarillo and so I wonder.”

“What do you wonder?”

“What are we supposed to fucking do?” She had started crying. “Like, with our lives.”

One morning before class Nancy came by to give Remus a woven basket her mother had made. She was listening to something loudly on her walkman and she had pulled the headphones down around her neck.

“This is lovely Nance,” he said. He had some fruit on his desk (bruised and unpretty, purchased from the local Muggle grocer) he arranged carefully into it. “Tell your mom — ”

“I will,” said Nancy. She was at the door. She had to get to Arithmancy which he knew she was failing. The sound from her headphones was like something falling from a height and shattering over and over.

“Wait up,” he said, “what are you listening to?”

When he got closer he could hear some of the lyrics. Past where the river bends. Past where the silo stands. Past where they paint the houses. Past where they paint the houses. Past where they paint the houses —

Nancy showed him the tape in her walkman. It was a record called Tweez by a band called Slint.

After school let out he drove to Lubbock and circled until he found the record store. He had no quarters for the meter so he fooled it with magic and inside he found they did not have Tweez but they had a newer record by Slint which was called Spiderland and which had come out in 1989 on Touch and Go Records out of Chicago. In the late ‘80s he had spent much time listening to Big Black’s Atomizer which had been released on the same label so he took Spiderland up to the counter and bought it with his credit card. He went to the grocery store and then he drove home. The radio played a song by Madonna and he rolled the window down and stuck his elbow out it. The shirt he was wearing had torn through months ago but he still wore it to school because no one could tell with his jacket over it.

On the cover of Spiderland were four very young men swimming in a quarry. There were three tracks on each side. Interested female vocalists were directed to write to a PO Box in Louisville, Kentucky. He put the record on while he made dinner and he turned it up loud enough he could sit on the back steps of his trailer eating undercooked pasta in a kind of bastardized carbonara of bacon and woody parmesan. Often these days he found he felt alright. He should; it had been almost ten years and now he lived very far away. Sometimes he still felt like some demonic umbilical stretched across the North American continent and across the Atlantic ever into the North Sea. And some other pulled tight to the gravesite at Godric’s Hollow which since the funeral he had not visited. And some other drew like a bowstring to Hogwarts, and to Dumbledore, and to James’s son who by now was doubtless studying there, and to the immensity of all he owed that he had not made much effort to repay. But now was alright because the sun had done a rare thing, spreading still and golden over the land entire, warm white eye resting Westerly, and the wind had stilled, or at least his trailer mostly blocked it. The moon was shivering in a corner of the sky. It was waxing but he had three days left. The dates had been marked on his calendar and already requested off with the school principal. He had told his students he suffered from an obscure and uncontagious case of spell poisoning. They had endless stupid questions on the subject but it was also an excuse to teach them proper wand safety.

The record was the best he had heard in a long time. He went in to put his dishes in the sink and to check what song was playing — “For Dinner…” — and then he sat again on the back steps and had a few cigarettes. It sounded like a final dance in a decaying and partly burned mansion. The drums were mixed loudly and they directed all unfolding and on a few songs the guitar tone was like a subway train grating, throwing sparks. The singer did not so much sing as he intoned, and then he shouted. It reminded Remus of how Sirius had always talked about the way Muggle music had real magic in it. More magic than wizards could stand to put in music. Of course it was impossible, but it was almost the only explanation.

The sun was so warm it did not worry him much to think about Sirius. It was warm and there was no wind and he felt full up with it. There was a happy completeness in that sun-stoned feeling and perhaps that was why people had ever settled in the desert to begin with. Certainly it was inhospitable and hideous and it hammered home your very smallness but sometimes the sun made you feel like everything that had ever happened had happened and was over. He found himself tapping the pattern of the drum rhythm on his thigh.

He went inside. His trailer was cold and largely it was undecorated but for the stacks of books and records on the floor and his sweater and jacket thrown over the back of the couch. Sometimes the song would burst like rainclouds and then it would draw back up into itself again. It felt like a storm so great the ground would not absorb it and it would run along the earth carrying the dust in itself like blood. On days like this school would be cancelled. His belongings in his office were protected with impervious and as such he did not worry.

“I’m trying to find my way home,” said the singer from the stereo. “I’m sorry, and I miss you.”

It reached out again and expanded. He went to the record player and sat on the floor like a supplicant. The vocal was whispered like a visitor at the door. And then it was not.

The wind came back and the screen was slamming. The singer cried, “I miss you, I miss you, I miss you, I miss you — ”

He stood and ripped the needle from the record with the tray still spinning and the sound grated horribly across the whole side like something tectonic unzipping. He picked up the record and held it; it was warm. Perhaps outside it was raining, he thought somewhere, but of course it wasn’t; it was his heart in his ears. He took his keys from the cut glass bowl on the table just inside the door and he brought the record with him to the car. He was thinking, I’ll return it. I’ll drive back to Lubbock right now and return it. But he had left the case in the house. So before he closed the door to the Honda he tucked the record carefully under its front left tire. When he turned the car on he thought he heard the song still playing in the fuzzy static on the radio.

He reversed and then he drove forward again in the track in the dust worn down by the car and by the rain. When he got out he gathered the pieces of the record into his hands and their corners were sharp. One cut his finger and it was the sudden bright shock of pain that reawakened his clarity. He, thirty years old, betrayer and betrayed, adult British werewolf from Somerset, professor of Defense at an accredited American magic academy, knelt in the red Texas dust cradling shards of a record by teenagers from Kentucky that he had run over repeatedly with his fucking car. His hands were shaking when he repaired the tiny wound in the pad of his finger with a wandless healing spell. When he went back inside the tray of his record player was still spinning. The shakes had moved from his hands up into his arms and his breastbone like the wringing of a bad hangover. “I’ve truly fucking lost it,” he said aloud to no one.

Since he was twenty-one in London he had had a sneaking suspicion every transformation would be his last and that when the wolf seized him the human never would again. Every feral thing he did in this self seemed evidence it was swallowing him up piece by piece from the inside ever quicker by the day and what it wanted was to kill him because so many times he had tried to kill it. He could not altogether blame it for its vengeance. What had he put it through? It must have been difficult for an animal to have a human heart.

He lay on the couch and listened to the spinning tray and the broken needle sliding against the rubber mat. For no reason he was thinking about Wuthering Heights which he had done a project on in sixth year Muggle Studies because it was his Muggle aunt’s favorite novel. As a fifteen year old werewolf he thought he had a rather unique and ingenious reading of it, though the professor had pulled him aside when she had given his paper back to ask if he wanted to see a magical therapist because she knew a good one. At the time he had not really been in love in his young strange life but when Cathy talked about Heathcliff dwelling in her mind not as a pleasure but as her own being the parallel seemed clear. He had just learned about Greyback and the actuality and not a month previous Sirius had done that stupid thing, perhaps the second-stupidest of all his things and the one that should have very much been the most obvious hint, but which was not, because Remus had forgiven him before all the wounds had even healed, because Sirius had cried, and it was so pathetic. He was wondering if perhaps his whole conscious life he had been in fact possessed by another. And then before he knew it his possession had changed hands to another monster entirely.

Whatever souls are made of his and mine are the same. That was another hint. Much as it took a beast to make a beast it would take a beast to love a beast, would it not? Outside the record was crunched in the dust. But still he heard the soft voice — “I’m trying to find my way home — ”

Somerset, 1994. Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

He walked in the rain down the long road from town smelling the wet earth and the fog in the hills and the ancient richness of the stone. The livestock in the fields and the cold sky. All the smells of the forest he had memorized in his youth when he was still realizing it would be this way forever. Waking up with his face in the dirt and the feeling of it — the cold leaf loam and the soft mushrooms and the worms and the moss and crunch of insect exoskeletons — and eventually his father would come with a blanket and the key that would undo the chain at his ankle. Inside his mother would have made tea and there would be a fire going. He could smell blood and taste in his teeth the grist unswallowed. In the chair by the fire he was wrapped up in a little bundle of mismatched wools such that only his nose and eyes and hair peeked out and perhaps he was seven years old. His mother had brought from the kitchen a cast-iron pot for him to puke in if necessary and the tea she brought him smelled of belladonna.

“How’s your mouth,” said his father gently. “How’s your hands and feet.”

He was helped to his bed which had been warmed magically and he slept there the rest of the day and into the evening.

It had been strange to inherit the house which was why he had rented it out for many years while he travelled and lived elsewhere. It felt like a reliquary or a locket of something disappeared. The tenants had kept it neat and tidy and free of magical pests and they had replaced the linens and there were unperishables and obscure potions ingredients tucked far in the back of the pantry. He had come back from America on a fever-dream whim shortly after he had spent a brutally hot summer Sunday morning perusing the the Texan wizarding newsletter (still titled The Wizard Cowboy Daily), namely the International News section which customarily contained semi-xenophobic rambling, only to nearly have an actual heart attack. When he returned to the house in Somerset it had been vacant over a year and there were doxies in the curtains. Dumbledore arrived when he was elbow-deep in his Hogwarts potions cauldron out back soaking the curtains thoroughly in a Doxycide solution. He had had to Apparate to London to buy it because the Doxycide pages in his old potions textbook (stored in his trunk in the basement these sixteen years since Hogwarts) were illegibly waterstained. The headmaster helped Remus dry and hang the curtains again and then they had tea on the unfriendly couch. “How did you know I was here?”

“Remus, my dear, where else would you be.”

Remus ignored that. “What is he after.”

“It seems he is after Harry.”

He recalled only the chubby baby face and the laughing green eyes and the reaching grubby hands in the garden out back of James and Lily’s in Godric’s Hollow showing Remus and Sirius the big stretching pink earthworm he had dug up out of the mulch. Sirius had stopped him from putting it in his mouth. They were altogether too young when it had happened; they were twenty years old. Amidst all the death and the funerals all of a sudden there was this small impossible life and the spark of it was very bright. James and Lily were standing in the doorway and Remus could feel their eyes on his back. What he had been thinking in those days on a pure unending spectral loop was, trust me, trust me, trust me, please trust me. And now this child was thirteen years old.

“Right,” Remus said to Dumbledore. “I want to help this time if you'll let me.”

“I do not doubt your unique qualification,” Dumbledore replied. Then he was silent for a moment, and he refilled his tea from the kettle with naught more than the point of his finger. “I have other hopes for you however if you’ll hear them out.”

As such he had taught at Hogwarts and as such he had made a rather massive mistake and as such the veil was lifted. When he woke in the Forbidden Forest in June Dumbledore was crouching there with a robe and a steaming mug of Pepper-Up Potion. “All is well,” he said. And as such since that night there had been not much. He was not entirely sure where Sirius was. Harry wrote to him to say he had his suspicions but could not divulge any information. He also enclosed a 7” by the Breeders that Remus already owned which he said was “utterly brilliant.” Remus wrote back to say yes certainly Kim Deal was the more talented songwriter in the Pixies and he enclosed a cassette by Bikini Kill.

He had been solicited to write a white paper on the state of the United Kingdom’s werewolf populace for Magical Creatures Quarterly and he was an adjunct in the Non-Human Relations department at Edinburgh Magical College and he corresponded with Chen Xie who by then was in Mongolia and with Natasha and Clio Harpy-Ross in Vancouver. He walked with a limp that was near-permanent and he had reached officially two-thirds of the average male werewolf life expectancy, though he suspected that his smoking would kill him before that would.

The rain peeled away from the blue in the sky for a moment and the sun came through upon the green summer fields. At the end of the sudden pale bolt of it the cottage in which he had been raised was tucked amidst the dells such that the bright red shock of its mossy terra-cotta roof was alone visible.

When he came in the door he was altogether less surprised than he thought he would be to see that Sirius was in the living room sitting cross-legged on the floor looking through his vinyl records and that he had tracked mud all over the carpet. His hair and clothes were soaked through and he was barefoot and pale and bedraggled and the backs of his hands were tattooed intricately which Remus could not remember noticing before.

“Hello,” said Sirius. His voice was hoarse and soft with disuse. “Didn’t you have Lust for Life on vinyl?”

“I smashed it,” said Remus, putting down the groceries, undoing his raincoat, pulling off his boots. “I smashed it and I burned the pieces.”

Sirius just looked at him for a moment. Then he smiled sort of quick and feral, and he turned back to the records.

“What are you doing here,” said Remus carefully.

“Certainly you heard from the old man.”

“Somewhat. And cryptically as usual.” He went and sat on the couch erasing with household magic learned from his mother the muddy footprints on the carpet. “The shower’s upstairs and down the hall.”

“Lest you forget I’ve been here,” Sirius reminded him. He pulled from the crate Wire’s 154 then put it away again. “We were fourteen. Do you recall? Honestly it’s a miracle I do.”

Remus’s mother had snapped at Sirius for his table manners over potatoes as if he were her own child. Indeed he recalled. “You must be cold is all.”

The lich king’s a-rising, he wanted to scream. He’s collecting his scattered pieces as none of us have managed to, and is it not cold, to be so numb?

“You haven’t listened to this yet,” said Sirius, and he stood with the great and terrible cracking of his knees and passed the record still in its plastic sleeve to Remus on the couch. It was Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain.

“I haven’t yet,” Remus told him. “Some of the songs play on the radio.”

“What’s it like.”

“Sometimes pretty. Also sometimes stupid and sometimes very sad.”

Sirius smiled the feral narrow smile again, as though Remus had described something else, which indeed perhaps he had; he was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet.

Remus was worrying at the plastic wrap with a fingernail and finally he passed the record back to Sirius. “Go ahead and put it on then.” Sirius unwrapped it with his teeth. His fingers were shaking on the needle such that he couldn’t find the first groove and had to start the record toward the middle of “Elevate Me Later.” Remus had heard the first song “Silence Kit” and he liked it but he had neither the heart nor energy to get up and start the record from the beginning.

Sirius came and sat beside him on the couch which was too close and also too far away. He was chewing his fingernails uselessly because there was not much left of them. He had always done this when he had no cigarettes left but Remus didn’t have any either.

“Tell me about this band,” Sirius said.

“I don’t know. They’re from California. But not cool California, like, nowhere California. Their first record’s called Slanted and Enchanted.”

“Did you smash that one too?”

“No. It’s in there. It’s good. There were a few songs on it I couldn’t listen to.”

“Why’s that?”

Remus took a deep breath and let it out and stretched his legs out on the coffee table shifting some of his papers and his copy of Clio Harpy-Ross’s Manitoban werewolf ethnography. “There’s this one that goes, your jokes are always bad but they’re not as bad as this.”

Do not fucking cry about Pavement on this couch right now, said his brain. Meanwhile Sirius was looking at his own strange and mangled inky hands in his lap. “You lived in America?”

“Yes I did. How’d you know that?”

“I didn’t know there was a nowhere California.”

“I lived in nowhere Texas. For two and a half years, teaching, which is how I was quasi-qualified to teach at Hogwarts.”

“Did you travel?”

“I mean I saw the Grand Canyon.” Clio’s book fell off the table and tumbled to the floor. “I think Dumbledore only hired me because he wanted me around because he thought no one hated you more than me. Like of anyone he could have hired to protect the kids from you no one would be more effective than me because I was the person most wronged by you still living. Because I taught at like, the shittiest American magic school.”

“You always — I would have thought you would stop chalking your accomplishments up to other people’s misguided pity after thirteen years.”

“I guess you would’ve thought wrong.” He pulled his feet off the coffee table and stood. “Sirius if we’re going to do this now I need to go to back to town and get cigarettes.”

“I have some.”

“Well why are you biting your fucking nails if you have some?”

“They’re wet,” Sirius said carefully, measuredly, as though he had practiced. Over and over again at night in prison on the North Sea. This is how you will have to explain all of this to Remus. “I forget the spell to dry them; I was waiting for you.”

“It’s the same as clothes or whatever. Exaresco.”

“I can’t do it; can you do it?”

Sirius had laid them out on the shag carpet near the radiator which anyway was broken. Remus dried them out with his wand and they each took one. “Do you need me to light yours?”

“I can still do that.” He had always been able to do it just snapping his fingers and he’d joked it was his evil pure blood cauterizing and inflammatory. Running pure crude. It took him three snaps but the light between his fingers flared with a sulfur smell like an old match and he lit his own and then Remus’s. Like a ghost from the past Remus could almost smell weed or wax or the spilled wine that had usually come along with it, with the soft blue flare of the cigarette flame swallowed back up into Sirius’s hand, which afterward was always warm.

“What did you do in there,” Remus said.

“Stared at the wall. Tattooed myself, um, mostly nightmares, like even awake, just nightmares. When I could think I was just consumed by hatred — I mean, I could feel it burning me up. When the moon was full I would look at it and think, there is something I’ve forgotten to do. But I forgot your name. Then when I left, the moment I left it seemed very obvious.” He leaned his forward to ash his cigarette carefully and delicately in a teacup Remus had abandoned on the table the night previous. It was his parents’ wedding china and it was all chipped and tarnishing. “What did you do out in the real world?”

“Stared at the wall,” Remus said. “Mostly nightmares, consumption by hatred et cetera.”

“I had hoped you would try to live but I doubted you would really do it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean.”

“You love suffering. You always have.”

“I do not love suffering and I did plenty of other fucking things.”

“Not enough to tell me about any of them I guess.”

“I just told you I taught in Texas.”

“You made it out to be this hell-on-earth bullshit!” Sirius said, but there was a kind of nervous laugh in his voice and mouth. Like if he really let it happen there would be bad repercussions.

“Fine, well it wasn’t really,” Remus told him, “the kids were sweet. Actually they were brilliant. It’s just American schools are shit. Also Lubbock Texas is shit. I will say other parts of Texas are not quite so bad. But Lubbock is like, I think hell opens up there.”

“How’s that?”

“There’s this red dust blowing everywhere and it feels like something underground is sucking your soul out of you.”

“Ahh,” said Sirius, but he was smiling, “Moony, I think maybe, you should perhaps not use that metaphor.”

“Right. Fuck, I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright with me. Have you ever known me not to laugh at my bullshit life?”

“I thought maybe you would’ve gotten over that.”

“No,” Sirius told him, “because my life has gotten even more bullshit. I feel like I subtracted ten years from myself. Sometimes I feel like I’m fourteen years old and sometimes I do feel twenty-one and sometimes very much thirty-four and other times like, seventy-nine. I don’t know really what time is supposed to mean, anymore; you know sometimes I think the whole thing was like a twelve-year very bad acid trip.”

“God,” said Remus, “I had a six-hour very bad acid trip when I was twenty-four, in Budapest; my roommates thought I was dead.”

Sirius laughed his big hoarse barking laugh and Remus thought he would start crying. Instead he picked up the sleeve of the record to see what song was playing. It was “Newark Wilder.” My my my my my my my I love your tinted eyes so bad so bad so bad so bad… “I like this record,” said Sirius.

“We can listen to their other one next if you want.”

“I can’t believe — fuck. I can’t believe I missed the whole eighties.”

“There are only a couple great bands from the eighties and also Kate Bush kept doing genius stuff.”

“Harry was trying to tell me about Nirvana. He sent me a tape but I don’t have anything to listen to it with.”

“Harry loves Nirvana. The day he found out Cobain died he came to my office in a horrible sulk.” Sirius laughed again. “I have some records. We can listen after Pavement.”

“Do you like it?”

“I guess I like it some.”

Sirius pressed his cigarette out in the teacup and reached for another amidst the nest of papers. “He’s a lot like his dad.”

“Harry? He is. Also like Lily.”

“Yes. Which I think maybe is why sometimes I feel fourteen years old.” This time he struggled to light the cigarette so Remus leaned over and did it for him. He too could do it in his fingers but the flame was weak and guttering and it had embarrassed him when he was young. Like his own blood was too watered down with both Muggle and inhuman strains to catch neat blue fire like a gas stove, the way Sirius’s did. “Time — Remus, this is funny.” As was the strange spinal thrill Remus got whenever Sirius called him by his name. “For me now it feels like time didn’t happen or perhaps went backwards. But at the time it felt like forever. Like it had been forever and it would never be over. Like even after I died it would feel like that. I was so certain. And so I wonder what it feels like for you. Because I know you were in another kind of hell for all that time.”

“I was. It was like a prison I built in my head but I couldn’t get out of it. Just about — that I didn’t see or that I couldn’t tell because.”

He had to stop. But Sirius, God damn him, said, “Because you loved me.”

“Well yes and I almost did still. You knew everything about me like my whole entire soul. And I thought I knew you but I did not. So then did I really ever know anything?” He stood up mostly to keep from crying. “But to answer your question yes it did feel like twelve years and in fact it felt like centuries sometimes. I thought about trying to stop pretending to be human. Do you want a cup of coffee?”

Sirius just stared at him for a minute before he said, “I guess so.”

“That’s another thing,” he said, feeling woozy, “you should watch Twin Peaks. I think Sybil Trelawney has everything on VHS.”

The song that was playing was one that Remus had heard before. He had to brace himself with his hand on the edge of the couch because watching Sirius on the couch smoking it was like such pure centrifugal deja vu he almost thought he would be plucked straight out of it by the scruff of his neck, as if it were a memory in a Pensieve. So he hung on into the fabric of it as tightly as he could. “What song is this,” Sirius asked.

“It’s called Gold Soundz.”

“So drunk in the August sun,” said the voice on the stereo amid the sound and the static, “and you’re the kind of girl I like because you’re empty, and I’m empty, and you can never quarantine the past.”

“I guess this is what you meant by pretty and sad,” said Sirius. “Sit back down.”

“You wanted coffee.”

“No I don’t.” He was looking up at Remus from the couch and there was this pleading thing in his eyes that was familiar from so long ago and so utterly and eternally devastatingly unrefusable that for a splitting broken second Remus too felt very much younger. “Please sit back down.”

Remus did, at the edge of the couch cushion such that his right knee touched Sirius’s left. With his elbows on his knees he leaned forward to straighten the papers and books and teacups on the coffee table and he felt Sirius’s big narrow clammy hand spread very nervously across his back, over the hungry elastic ranges of ribs and spine rising and falling tectonically with his breath. Sirius's thumb moved over and over the ridge of vertebra in a slow hypnotic fan and the nail was so broken it snagged on the fabric of Remus’s shirt with a sound like a quill scratching parchment. They sat together that way without speaking until the record ended. Then Remus got up and put on Slanted and Enchanted.

Notes:

this story is named after the pavement song "silence kit." it is a bit of a spiritual sequel to sex and dying in high society. i've dreamed about it since writing the scene in that fic where remus destroys the jesus and mary chain's "psychocandy."
i wrote this in under 72 hours so please chalk up any and all errors to the strange fever dream i have been in!

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