Where Were the Wolves

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

-Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

WAKE

And once again I would, against my better judgement, wake up and confront the violence of becoming a story. The first thing I saw was my own face, printed badly. It hung opposite the bed on a sheet of cheap vellum, already yellowing at the edges, printed in the Office’s usual manner with a grade-mark in the upper corner: COMMON ELEVATION, which was the lowest tier of public commemoration. THE LIFE OF VERUS CONSTANTINE, it proclaimed, A TRUE ACCOUNT. Someone had given me a finer jaw. I sat up. Beneath the title was a woodcut of myself looking noble, which was the image’s first lie; the second was that I looked far older than I was; the third that I appeared to have saved a life. There were others. I counted eleven inaccuracies before I stopped caring. Outside, the bells were ringing – not for me, I hoped, though I have never had the kind of luck that makes hoping worthwhile – and voices had begun to gather in the street, saying my name with the tenderness usually reserved for the dead and the famous.

My  wife Lara had packed bread and a jacket into my arms before I’d even woken fully, as she always did when she thought my day would be hard. My brother Mark was in the living room, grinning his wide stupid grin, and he walked with me to the door, talking about nothing.

I dressed, opened the door, and found a boy waiting there with a wreath of white flowers. He looked frightened when he saw me, then disappointed.

“You’re alive?” he said.

“Last I checked,” I replied.

He glanced at the pamphlet in my hand. “That’s not how it says it.”

No, I thought, of course it isn’t.

By the time I reached the square, there were perhaps two hundred people waiting, and every one of them seemed to know what I had done. At the centre of the crowd stood a statue of myself covered in linen, which seemed excessive for a man who, as far as I knew, had always been quite ordinary.

CORRECTION

The first sensible thing I did was find the author, because there are few things in this world more offensive than being misquoted by a woman who has never met you. The pamphlet named the Office of Public Memory on its final page, beneath a seal depicting an open eye, the mark they called the Waking Eye, which I considered unnecessarily smug, so I went there with the intention of making a nuisance of myself.

The Author occupied the front desk by absolute divine right and considerable mass. She was a woman of tremendous presence, draped in grey silk that had given up trying to contain her thirty years ago and now simply accompanied her, hopefully, like a faithful dog that knows it cannot win. Her hair was arranged in a tower of copper ringlets that added six inches to her height and at least forty years to her apparent age, and she wore, around her neck, a chain from which hung a glass eye that she occasionally lifted to inspect visitors. When she smiled, her teeth were blindingly white.

“I’d like to correct several inaccuracies,” I said.

She looked up from her manuscript. “Naturally,” she breathed.

“I did not save forty-three people from the river.”

“Your modesty heaves.”

“I saved six.”

Her quill stopped. She regarded me with disappointment.

“And two of those had already reached the bank.”

She resumed writing. “His humility,” she murmured, “was…a fortress? Unyielding? Majestic? Pure?”

“I am not humble.”

“His resistance,” she continued, “only proved his virtue!”

“I’m not resisting anything. I’m telling you it’s wrong.”

“His commitment to truth was legendary.”

I stared at her. She stared back pleasantly. Then I pointed to the pamphlet. “It says I stood upon the bridge until dawn.”

“You did.”

“I left before midnight.”

“A tactical withdrawal.” She wrote something, presumably beautiful and wrong.

“I was frightened.”

“Acknowledgement of danger.” Underlined.

“I ran.”

“A strategic retreat.” Added a flourish.

“I lied.”

At that, she finally set down her quill. Around us the office breathed its paper breath. “Mr Constantine,” she said, “you seem to misunderstand what a true account is.” She lifted the glass eye on its chain and regarded me through it, and let it fall. “But don’t worry. That is what I am for.” And there it was: the first glimpse of the machine at work, silent and relentless, ready to devour whatever truth remained of me.

SUPERMAN

By noon I had been congratulated forty-one times, blessed by two priests, embraced by a strange woman who smelled of lavender and funeral ash and wept into my collar, and struck across the face by an old man who called me a coward before being arrested for assault of a national treasure. Every shopkeeper had my face in his window; the butcher had arranged his cuts into a tableau of the rescue; the baker had shaped loaves in my likeness, which seemed an especially cruel fate for a man with my nose; the candlemaker had produced a wax effigy so befuddlingly accurate that I thought to check my house for hidden cameras. A poet had composed an epic in nine cantos overnight. Children chased one another through the alleys shouting things I had apparently said, though most of them were far better than any line I was capable of thinking up. One girl recited a rhyme about me drowning in the river and rising again with forty-three souls in my arms. A good rumour always outpaces a boring truth. I asked her who had taught it to her.

“Everyone knows it,” she said. That was the trouble with everyone.

At the square, they pulled the linen from the statue. There I stood in bronze, eight feet tall at least, chin raised against some invisible tempest, jaw heroically remodelled, one hand upon the shoulder of a child I had never seen and the other clutching a sword I had never owned. At my feet, three figures crouched in attitudes of salvation and gratitude. Around the plinth were carved four words: HE TOLD THE TRUTH.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It came out too loudly, startling a pigeon from my own bronze shoulder, and for a moment the crowd went quiet. A child began to cry. Someone dropped a wreath. Then the bells began again, all of them, every bell in the city.

A man beside me whispered, “You’re supposed to be proud.”

“I am,” I said. It was the first lie I told that day which they got exactly right.

LUTHOR

I spent the afternoon doing the one thing a sensible man should never do when the whole village has decided it knows him: I asked people who actually knew me. My wife was first. She threw a plate at my head before I reached the door.

“Lara?”

“Don’t. Fifteen years,” she said, “and you couldn’t even have the decency to do it once. You had to do it constantly, and with my own sister, and now it’s in print.”

“The hell are you – “

Another plate. I retreated into the hall. Through the window I could see a fresh pamphlet nailed to the gate post, its ink still dark beneath the Office’s open eye: THE LIFE OF VERUS CONSTANTINE: A TRUE ACCOUNT. REVISED EDITION. I had not known there was a revised edition. I was beginning to understand that I was always the last to know anything about myself.

My brother Mark was waiting outside, red-faced and grinning. “Four years,” he snarled. “Four years I was in that rat-hole, eating boiled turnip and listening to men scream through the walls, and you put me there.” He jabbed a finger into my chest. “You stood up in court with clean cuffs and a solemn little face and you fed them my name!”

“I never gave testimony against you…what’s going on here?”

“Didn’t you?” He barked. “Then why is your signature on page twelve, hm? Why does it say I confessed? Why does it say I begged you for mercy?”

“That never – “

He seized my collar and slammed me against the gatepost. The pamphlet above us fluttered in the wind. “They’ve printed all your testimony word for word on page twelve. You made me a monster, Verus. The least you could do is have the courage to speak on it!” He released me, spat at my feet and walked away, defeated. Two men I did not recognise followed him, watching me with the solemnity of undertakers. I found no old friends. My old friends, I was told by a pale-faced boy, were currently at the magistrate’s office, filing complaints against me. The stable-boy, who had been in my employ for twelve years and whose name I had forgotten until he reminded me, threw a bucket at me and said I knew what I had done.

By then the square had changed. Someone had draped a black cloth over the statue’s face. Someone else had painted LIAR across the plinth in red, directly beneath HE TOLD THE TRUTH. A crowd had gathered. My name passed through it contagiously. I chose to run, and did not stop until I was beyond the eastern wall, where an old outcast lived in a house slumping half-collapsed into the dirt road. She had known me since childhood. She had sold onions, candles, curses and once, memorably, a dead crow to my father. “You want to know who’s telling the truth,” she said, before I’d spoken.

I said nothing. Behind me, distantly, I could hear the bells again.

She laughed. “Oh, Verus. You still think you’re the only one who gets to decide who you are.” Then she touched my cheek, almost tenderly, and for the first time that day I did not recoil. “I remember you before you became yourself,” she said.

Something in me gave way then, quiet and absolute, like stepping off a ledge I’d spent all day trying not to see. I wanted to ask her what she meant. Instead I asked, “Was I happy?”

She shut the door.

OFFICE

The Office of Public Memory kept its records beneath the city. Getting in was harder than it had been that morning. The clerk at the first door had my face pinned above his desk – the new face, the villain’s face – and I pulled my collar up and kept my eyes down and told him I was a notary, come to verify a death record. He didn’t look up. He stamped something, slid a chit across the desk, and returned to his work. I took the stairs quickly. Beyond the stairs, the building changed character entirely: lower ceilings, older stone, the smell of something that had been damp for centuries. I found the archive at the end of it. The shelves went farther than the lamps could reach, packed with boxes bearing names, dates, wars, marriages, famines, scandals; whole lives reduced to neat little boxes, packed to erase any inconvenient contradictory bits.

My own aisle had grown exponentially since morning. There were hundreds of them now. VERUS CONSTANTINE: THE LAST HONEST MAN. VERUS CONSTANTINE: SAVIOUR OF THE DROWNED. VERUS CONSTANTINE: TRAITOR. VERUS CONSTANTINE: THE GREAT ADULTERER. I pulled one at random. It called me courageous. Another called me cruel. A third claimed I had died at thirty-two. The newest was three hundred pages long and smelled of The Author’s ink. In the margins, where older hands had made notations in pencil, her writing slashed across the page in great looping red torrents, crossing out, replacing, improving. The oldest was three pages and had no title. Across its cover, someone had written UNSUITABLE FOR PUBLICATION. I read it standing up, listening for footsteps. There was no sword. No river. No forty-three souls. It said I had been jealous of my brother, that I once stole money from a friend and returned it only because I feared discovery, that I loved my wife badly, that I had been kind to a dog and cruel to a beggar on the same morning. It was ugly, petty, inconsistent. I sat down on the cold floor with my back against the shelf. It was the first account of my life I had ever believed.

WOLF

There was a phrase in the margin of the oldest biography, written in a tight and nervous scrawl: Where were the wolves? I had heard it before, usually from drunkards and dying men, and had always assumed it meant enemies, or soldiers, or God, depending upon how much blood had been lost. Here it appeared again beneath a catalogue of names, followed by three interpretations in three different hands: WHERE WERE THE ENEMIES? WHERE WERE THE GUARDIANS? WHERE WAS GOD? Beneath them, in the original hand, one final note: Wrong every time.

I found the word again in a second notation, older still, the ink gone brown at the edges. Wolves, it said, beside a list of names I didn’t recognise, crossed through in red. Underneath, in a different hand: men who could not be made singular. Then a third: see: confused, unstable, dangerous. Then the original hand again, tiny and cramped, as though written quickly or in fear: no collar will sit.

I stood there for a while with the book open. A man could be coward and hero, thief and benefactor, husband and adulterer, victim and bastard. The Office had a word for each of those things. It did not have a word for all of them at once. I understood then why wolves no longer appeared in any current record. I understood also what my three-page life had been, and why it was marked UNSUITABLE FOR PUBLICATION.

Above me, footsteps on the stairs. More than one person. Moving quickly. I found the archivist asleep beside the fire and shook him awake. He looked at the open page for a long moment without speaking. “Where did the wolves go?” I asked.

He closed the book. “Why, they didn’t go anywhere.” He looked toward the stairs, then back at me. “There is another way out,” he said. “If you’re quick.”

EPILOGUE

I took a fresh sheet of vellum and wrote my name at the top, then stopped, because even my own name felt like a possession of the state. Still, there are rebellions you commit only because you’ve run out of better ones. I was not a good man or a bad man. I was afraid. I was cruel. I loved my wife and I did not love her near enough. I wanted to be remembered. I hated being remembered. I saved six people from the river and would have saved none if I had known what it would cost me. I lied. I told the truth. I was jealous of Mark. I said I forgave him but I never forgave him. I-

The Author stood in the doorway. She was alone. She held nothing. She looked at the page in my hand. I understood then. The trap was not that they had lied about me. The trap was believing that telling the raw truth would set me free. Even this, especially this, would become material.

So I tore the page in half. Then again. Then again, until my life was nothing but white fragments between my fingers. I threw the scraps into the hearth and watched them blacken. She didn’t blink. She was already committing the fire to paper. I left through the archivist’s door.

PROLOGUE

Verus Constantine died peacefully at home at the age of fifty-three. He left no surviving descendants. He was remembered principally for his courage, his devotion to truth, and the forty-three souls he rescued from the river on the morning of the Great Flood, for which he was posthumously awarded the Seal of Common Elevation, First Revision. A statue of him remains in the eastern square, where each year children gather to recite the epitaph: HE TOLD THE TRUTH. His widow remembered him fondly. His brother spoke of him with admiration.

His final words were: