A Threesome Party

A Story by Vasco

A Threesome Party

In those days there was so much to do. It all happened suddenly, as if by magic. The howling sound of the wolf streamed: ARH-WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO or was it a WOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW sound that echoed throughout his skeleton: Up and down from pelvis to skull through his vertebral column and ribcage.

He felt blood cells spark off in his bone marrow and a sudden strength and vitality engrossed him as he howled.

A high-voltage electric short circuit made its way through the air between exposed conductors. A flashover!

What materialized in his mind was a cacophony: Harsh, discordant mixture of sounds flashed him, suddenly, streaming in a time-lapse photographic technique, where he was taking a sequence of frames at set intervals to record changes that took place slowly over time. “W.....h..... o A.....M..... I? ....W.....h....a.....t i....s t....h.....i.....s a....l....l a....b....o....u....t?”

Later on, his companion who was sleeping over at his place had told him that she had rushed alarmed on hearing his voice howling like a werewolf. She had jokingly said, “When I came in the studio I was afraid of finding a real wolf, thankfully it was you!”

It all resurfaced as he collapsed on his preferred sofa: The night! The howls! The Full Moon! Was it him that had glimpsed at her figure; or, was it She that had a peep at his face? He could not say. It all vanished as he dropped off on his comforting sofa.

Time passed. The weird accident was not discussed anymore between the two lovers. He, however, could not forget. Not that he did not want to forget. Each night following the first night, he would emit wolf sounds with an unrelieved uproar: "ARH-WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...WOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW."

“All this is chilling me to the marrow” he kept thinking day in and day out.

He was concealing the truth from his lover; and, making sure that she would not stay over for the night. It was not without some repercussions to their strong relationship.

In a few other blows, the doors would have opened.

He would have been catapulted in a world in which the demand for quality would have run with the stream of his inner shrine. Was this blessing or curse? He did not know it at that time. Yet, he began to mull over various possibilities.

He came to the realization that the night of his first howl the Moon was Full. Then he had started to pay extra attention to the precise details.

An examination of facts and figures revealed that the intensity of his howling would coincide exactly with the Moon’s cycle: He would howl more like a wolf ARH-WOOOOOOOOOOOO on full moon nights and others nights when the intensity of moonlight waned more like a human WOWWWWWWWW.

Dazed and confused, he could not explain why all this had started and where all this would have taken him. He despaired! Something, he reflected thereafter, had been lost in the nature of things. Then a question crept in: “Was it nature that had lost something or was it him?” He had no real answer.

Finally, somehow, he cast off the option that nature could lose anything: “Must be me that has lost something”, he concluded.

What had he lost? He could not say for sure.

Yet in between his despair, what he was feeling like a curse, there were also blanks where time and space disappeared, giving him a brief respite.

It was a clear night near Full Moon that he had started shyly glancing at Her, and he felt like they were getting acquainted with each other. A night just before the Moon was Full he dared to glance at Her steadier and intenser. Steadily and intently enough to let Her take a good look at him and him at HER. Finally, she made Her unveiling and announced that Her true color was not silver, as commonly people believed, but rather particularly bluish. In that day, his ARH-WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO blew into a sudden realization: He had been blessed!

The next morning, a Saturday morning, he woke up with pleasure. He did not need to go to work. He awoke anew but had no time to realize this. He stepped out to his backyard holding a warm and fragrant black coffee that he so much enjoyed first thing in the morning. He sat down in his preferred spot, and as he lit his cigarette, inhaling deeply, he tilted his head slightly toward the Sun. The strong rays stung his eyes and he buried his head back into his coffee cup. He took a long drag on his cigarette and found himself surrendering to train of thoughts where he felt like a passenger just starting his long journey to an unknown destination. As he got a first full sight of the sun, by now high in the clear spring sky, a clear thought raised right from his consciousness: In that world, he was living in, there seemed to be no time, neither by day nor by night, to fully peer at the imposing open firmament. Nevertheless, it was by night that he felt drawn to the sky. She, the Moon, was the peak of it all. He belonged to Her, and Her to him. This thought made him shiver with joy and excited him fully.

He maintained this joyful exhilarating mood until the night when the moonlight’s intensity grew thinner. That night he could not howl. As he badly wanted to ARH-WOOO or at least WOW, he felt an urge for violence followed by a deep sense of insecurity.

He felt cursed again. In bewilderment and consternation, he cried silently all night long and exhausted, dropped into murky sleep.

With his moods fluctuating with the waning and waxing of the moon, days passed in a stupor until the waxing gibbous moon. That morning, over his usual favorite coffee and cigarette, he reasoned, “I have felt cursed by the late events but I have also felt blessed by it. Blessing and curse must be the two sides of the same coin. If two things are two sides of the same coin, they must be closely related although they seem different. Isn’t this magic?”

It was time to get ready and go back to work.

The word MAGIC resonated in his skullcap as a primordial Tibetan Om in a stupa until the long awaited weekend. His lover had asked him to run a few errands and he had promised to dine with her that night. As he mulled it over in silence, sipping his coffee, a hypnotizing voice whispered in his mind, “So what ... I must play through the entire game with solely two main characters?” Another voice responded, “Solely as a lone wolf you could have a 3-person party. The vital thing is that to stay a lone wolf we just have to think of ourselves as I. And with that ... pow, I'm gone!”

Was this a revelation of some sort that he just had? As usual, he did not have the answer. The voices had bewildered him. As he debated over the meaning of “3-person party”, images of the moon, his lover, and himself flashed in his mind. First, he could see the Moon in her changing stages, then his companion in her changing moods; and, finally himself changing from a man, to a wolf to a revolting werewolf. He found no clear explanation. He stepped out from his home deciding to go along the flow of the newly discovered Magic.

He ran the uninspiring errands while inspirations buzzed all around him: “The a-rendezvous restaurant was just around the corner of the Bridge of Sighs; bizarre enough the restaurant was named ‘La Luna’ and the night was going to be a Full Moon Night.”

In that restaurant named “La Luna,” on that Full Moon Night, he would have revealed the macabre truth of his present events to his lover, and once rejected by her he would have gone to surrender to the Moon. He would have ascended the skyway, the Bridge of Sighs of his beloved city Venice, and implored her, The Moon, for answers and mercy; to her silent disgust, he would have jumped into the freezing water and done with life.

The day gave way to the night. He dined with his lover and he revealed to her the raw facts of his macabre reality, she ran away from him as he had predicted.

Self-absorbed, he started to walk the few meters that separated the restaurant to the Bridge of Sighs, feeling lightened from a burden that he had carried on for too long, at the same time feeling a strange mixture of emotions that subtly shifted his weight.

It was almost midnight and as he was passing the Ponte Canonica on the way to the Bridge of Sighs, he stopped and watched himself reflected in the moonlit waters of the Grand Canal. A disjointed voice cut through his brain, "Oh! Is that me? What does it all mean?". He shifted his gaze to the undulating Gondola beneath and he retched until the heaves went dry.

He felt strangely empty devoid of any questions. He told himself, “These moments are weird, and you feel weird within them. Life is pretty strange, and you often feel like a stranger within it.”

He turned around from the Ponte Canonica to peer at the silhouette of the Bridge of Sighs. The Moon’s light shone on the white limestone making it all the more resplendent; and, from Il Canaletto to the Canale Grande the bridge rose like a shining stage from the expanse of the water. The windows with stone bars on the skyway revealed it’s obscure now grayish interior.

He would have acceded the inside of the Bridge of Sighs, through a secret itinerary that he shared with old inmates like Casanova and Galileo and like them, he had reason to sigh a last breath and get a last sight of the Full Moon.

He then ascended the skyway of his beloved city, seeking his star of mercy. He gripped hold of the bars, until his knuckles turned white, as he prepared to face Her, The Moon, for her final judgment.

Clear and bright she stood over his beseeching gaze, her bright blue rays overflowing into the dark waters under the Bridge of Sighs. He prayed earnestly as she gazed splendent and broad open in Her full might; she knew that he had beseeched her, urgently and fervently, and that he was ready to let go of her.

A beam of light flashed and penetrated his frontal lobe. She had spared him and mercifully given him the answers.

“You ought to revere me and seek to know all about me; I will show you the path to your tribe and find the way to the adytum, the sacred inner shrine. Since remote past humanity has been separated from its magic and therefore, people strive to communicate, find the connecting door between the atriums of the heart, to win back something that they have lost or been separated from. In their convulsive, compulsive desire to connect they strive and struggle to communicate their intense feeling of longing for something, which they are not aware of. And, with that ... pow, I'm gone!”

As he had made his way back home reprieved and ready for his new course, his lover was waiting for him at the entrance of his apartment. By now he knew that she also had spared him, and together with him she was ready to the restoration of the third �" the eradication of the original sin, as in the garden there were not two but three. Thus began a long 3-person party where he was also able to retain his ‘I’.

He started to learn eagerly all about the lunar cycles, how this deeply affected him, and how to navigate through its magic.

Days went by and he had by now developed a frenzy to know all about wolves and werewolves. He discovered with dismay that people had hunted and poisoned the wolves almost to extinction. The phenomena of lycanthropes had been encapsulated through the millennia in folklore. According to the folktale, Full Moon was believed to have transformed a human into a werewolf. The werewolf was born out of alchemical essence, a seemingly magical process of transformation, creation, or combination between the two sides inherent in each of us, the primordial and modern, the light and shadow. The combination of the two opposite, like the moon and the lunatic, is an inherent part of all creation. He read voraciously the medieval chronicles of Gervase of Tilbury and the philosophies of Pliny the Elder, Aristotle, and Heidegger. He felt a growing admiration for the indigenous people of the Americas who honored the wolf as a wise, powerful and instinctive hunter, a teacher of tactics humans could emulate against buffalo or caribou.

His interest in the wolves grew and one day his lover introduced him to the wolves conservation group. He had hesitated at first. He had feared that he would lose his freedom and status of a lone wolf. His half-hearted attempts turned full gusto as he realized it was better to go on as a wolf in a pack of wolves than to carry on and risk the extinction of the entire species.

Humans chirping like birds in the day; while at night others howl like wolves. Sing like a bird he could not: He howled like a werewolf. Who can say which is a curse and which a blessing, aren’t the two faces of the same coin: Magic?

Who can say who is blessed and who is cursed? Aren’t they all magically alive?