The shit thing about being a werewolf on the Moon is that you don’t even get one night a month to run around naked and howl. My ancestors, before they got themselves shipped up here and Cured, crushed the jugulars of kings and gnawed their femurs in ancient forests, but I’m loitering in a sallow habtunnel triple-checking tonight’s gig address outside the graffiti-flecked door of Lunar-American Information Solutions, LLC. Up on Earth, the Moon is full, but the tame monster in my bones only itches, vaguely embarrassed.
“What’s the gig?” Lyca asks, humoring me.
“Missing person.” Several, maybe. Infinite, potentially. The number never matters to my clients.
“You’re anxious.”
“I’m sober. And this place is haunted up to my eyeballs.” It reeks of werewolf. Squatters. They bashed in the biolock, but my clients don’t care about that, either.
“The jitters are normal this time of the month. Want me to coach you through a mindfulness-based solution?”
Lyca™-Your-Personalized-Lycanthropy-Wellness-Support-Agent lives in my phone, but I imagine her as an intractably white woman who smells like packing peanuts. She has swollen knuckles and irritable bowels, and she is my health-department-mandated (and only) friend.
She must catch my finger over the “cancel” icon–she summons my motel balance, and it’s the familiar disappointed shade of red.
Besides, aren’t I a professional? 2,500 gigs, 4.98 out of 5. What have I got, if not that?
I tap “begin assessment.” Lyca showers the screen with celebration emojis and the biolock flashes green.
* * *
The shit thing about being a werewolf on the Moon is that the ventilators recirculate scents so your nose is always full of ghosts.
The whole building is empty, desks arranged with corporate indifference. No lights, but this close to the Dayline the horizon casts long slitted shadows through the blinds.
A skittish nose might pick up bleach and think drugs. They were drugs, but I recognize the scent of care. I smell a woman’s brown ankle-bones peeking over nylon socks. I smell the pine trees her daughter scrawled in crayon on the drywall. I smell the detergent she stole from the bodega to wash her daughter’s socks by hand.
I smell pills in the toilet and the empty spaces the monster ate in her soul because a monster’s gotta eat and if you can’t kill it and it can’t get free, what’s it gonna do?
I smell her bent over doing battle with the mold advancing under the floortile. It was a war of attrition; the mold won.
This detail isn’t required, but I ask Lyca to record it anyway. My form has two options. VACANT and NO ASSESSMENT.
The con is this: I’m sub-subcontracted by a compliance adjuster to verify that every square foot of this building is being put to no useful purpose whatsoever. I stand at one end of a great golden chain of purposeless people leashed to a purposeless AI that ticks a box on the landlord’s tax exemption form. By some ineffable grace, that machine bearing witness to all this emptiness makes money rain down from heaven.
The form doesn’t have a box for sniffing out the whos and hows that coat the walls and settle like crumbs into the unpadded carpet, but the skillset’s the same. And that’s the shit thing, isn’t it: I might’ve made a good detective.
I tap VACANT.
* * *
The shit thing about being a werewolf on the Moon is that we don’t get to be human, either.
I check the basement last. It’s unfurnished, bare concrete, the kind of place you’d expect to find a monster, but, well.
The daughter played down here. Phonelight reveals a crayon fresco of trees: palm, pine, others I don’t recognize because I’ve never seen a tree. A dozen little wolves, drawn by an adult hand, run through the crayon forest. Half-buried in dust, there’s a sticker: a dog, surrounded by stars. Laika, the first dog sent into space.
I know the story. A stray. A wild thing, a wolf, and they lured her off the streets of Moscow and taught her to do tricks for love.
My Lyca isn’t named after her, of course. Her coders wouldn’t want us remembering how they turned Laika into numbers on a spreadsheet, how they locked her alone in a coffin and shot her into infinite dark to convince the world they owned it.
“They say Laika died from stress,” I say. I could peel the sticker off the wall, but it would rip.
“The Soviets didn’t provide adequate mental health support,” my Lyca replies. “This is sad. Acknowledging our feelings is an essential part of self-care.”
Self-care. How long did Laika wag her tail and try to fix her superheated cage by being a Good Dog?
I trace the sticker, trace the trees. I smell the mother’s hope as she squatted, bony knees aching, to draw with her daughter and spin fairy tales of howlsong and the taste of kings’ blood.
I feel an unhinged urge to yank the pencil out of my trenchcoat and scratch my own stick figure wolf into the dust. But that’s not the kind of self-care Lyca means.
I check VACANT and submit my assessment.
5 out of 5. Yes, I am a Good Dog.
* * *
The shit thing about being a werewolf on the Moon is that we can never go back.
On Earth the gravity would snap our moon-hollow spines. This new world melted us down and now we’ve cooled and cracked into something new, as lunar as the basalt ground up in the concrete stairs below my feet. We’ve been remade for its purposes, but no matter how much we try to smother it, the monster in our bones just refuses to die. Maybe that’s something.
I can’t smell what happened to the woman and her daughter, only that they tried.
As I lock the door, I close the gig app and uninstall Lyca.
On the empty street, the ventilator howls and howls.
* * *
Ⓒ Eliza Pry