Elisa sighs. “Or not,” she says.
Billy begins to feel strange. He feels dizzy. Some fluish wave passes across him and he starts to feel sweaty at the same time that his body spasms with chills.
“Something’s happening,” Billy says.
“No shit, Sherlock,” says Elisa. For some reason she steps out of her slippers. “Tell me honestly: has this ever happened to you before?”
“I don’t know. I feel sick. I’ve been sick before—”
“This isn’t being sick,” Elisa says. “This is something different.”
He tries to take his final sip of coffee but his hands seem wired all wrong: the cup falls to the floor and the coffee spills out into the carpet’s unholy design.
He looks at his hands. His hands don’t look right. He remembers the first time he took acid, with Anil, remembers Anil saying Whatever you do, don’t look at your hands; I can’t stress that enough. And of course as soon as he started peaking Billy couldn’t resist looking at his hands, and sure enough they looked really strange, and then he thought too much about the connection between his hands and his brain and promptly had a panic attack, and Anil had to swaddle him in up to his neck in blankets and give him a stuffed raccoon to cuddle until he calmed back down. This is worse than that. He needs a stuffed raccoon and one is not available.
“Okay,” Elisa says. “Take off your clothes.”
“What?”
“We don’t have time for questions,” Elisa says. “You just have to trust me. You’re going to want to take off your clothes.”
As she says this, she slides her yoga pants down over her hips, steps out of them. She has nice legs but Billy’s not really in a position to enjoy looking right now.
“You’re not listening,” she says.
“Okay,” he says. He kicks off his shoes.
“One last thing,” she says. “This is maybe going to sound alarming but I think I should tell you.” She pauses, winces. “If what I think is happening is happening, I’m going to want you to fuck me.”
“I beg your pardon?” Billy says.
“You heard me,” Elisa says. She pulls her shirt off over her head. Before Billy really gets a chance to check her out, he jolts and falls out of his chair, needs to use his hands to catch himself. It feels more natural, suddenly, to be on all fours.
Something is happening to his face. That’s no good. He kind of likes his face, his boyish good looks. And then he vomits, a hot torrent of slime ejecting out of him. He experiences one acute moment of embarrassment, at having thrown up in front of Elisa, who he thinks is probably not going to want to fuck him now, but then the embarrassment is erased, wiped away, replaced by pain, the pain of his bones beginning to change shape. It sounds like kindling, crackling in fire, and it feels, well, it feels like shit.
His spine extends and his shoulders broaden. He gains mass. His shirt and jacket split across the back. He tears through his pants also. Turns out Elisa was right: he should have taken off his clothes.
He is growing what can only be described as a pelt.
As his jaw extends and his teeth begin to change, Billy finds himself wanting his mother. Not for the first time today. He wants her there, by his side, her swords at the ready, in full fighting stance, ready to fuck somebody up.
His skull extends uncontrollably, his ears flaring back and out, his bristling face exploding into a muzzle. The world of smells opens up to him. He can smell the coffee he spilled on the carpet, and the acrylic fiber of the carpet itself, and the dull note of industrial rubber that lies beneath. He can smell the shit on his torn clothes; he can smell microscopic particulates of goat from Apple Cheeks Farm.
And he can smell Elisa.
She smells like an animal.
He turns his head to look but she is gone. In her place is a wolf: a massive wolf, her coat so black it’s almost blue.
Maybe he should feel afraid, but then, his very capacity to think or feel anything is disrupted as something happens to his brain.
It’s as though his id and his ego are changing positions in some kind of Freudian square dance. Normally the part of him that is Billy—the part that is clever and funny and talented and distractible—remains front and center, merrily overriding the part of him that is something else—the wants and appetites, drives and instincts. The animal part. But now it’s the reverse. He can still hear his voice in his brain, frightened, trapped in some dark oubliette, repeating Your name is William Harrison Ridgeway, as though he might lose even that.
Your name is William Harrison Ridgeway, he thinks, helplessly. You prefer to be called Billy. You live in New York City. You are a human being. You are not a wolf.