Wolfentraum: The Prologue
One man will always be left alive to tell the story. _________Hannah Arendt, Eichmann In Jerusalem
Andrew Lightfoot had just turned eighteen that October when his father took him to Roanoke for a gala charity event, to be attended by the top whatever-it-was per cent of both Virginias, some of whom his father hadn't seen since Andrew was born - his brother Stephen was sick, as he often was, and couldn't come with, so Andrew and his father, Archibald, made the trip alone. They stayed in the sumptuous hotel which bares the city's name, which was borrowed from the river which runs through the town and then outward south and to the east, on to the Atlantic - not, as any native of the town will tell you with some degree of universal irritation, the far more famous folly of Sir Walter Raleigh down in North Carolina, the English colonists who vanished in circumstances which are perhaps better left unsaid. When the time came and the night arrived, Andrew was, to Archibald Lightfoot's specifications, polished and immaculate - for though the family was from West Virginia Archibald's son was to be a youth of Old Virginia, from manor born and manners bred. And though he dared not question his father - but Andrew hated it. The gala was an exclusive invitation-only masque of late capitalist decadence which had to be seen to be believed: a dinner was served of roast quail and braised asparagus and grouper over rice pilaf, an enormous English trifle for dessert, a small station where a bowl of black beluga caviar could be spread on fresh crackers. There were three chardonnay fountains serving California vintages from sometime in the late 1970's, one room had a modest but talented string quartet playing Vivaldi, while another had a lively and smiling Israeli pounding out jazz standards on a grand piano - and all, all bereft of the shrieking irony how this was a charity event for people who could never dream of being this ostentatiously rich. It was nearing the end of the first . And bad enough that Andrew was very easily the youngest attending - but that he had to swim and wade through this very bullshit that, growing up, he had always detested, in what surely would be, this time, a toxic dose. Amidst the inebriated chatter, the buttonholed conversations around the silent auction tables, the poignant but endlessly rehearsed pleas of people holding microphones entirely too close to their mouths to give and donate - every piece of clothing, every noun, on every human being in this swirl of undeserved opulence had a little addendum attached to it: where it came from, what it was made of, who made it. This went on, as Andrew overheard it: how lovely your purse is, oh don't you love it, from Coach, it goes so well with this dress, don't you think? By Nicole Miller, my husband got it for me at the Neiman's in Coral Gables. Oh you haven't been to Coral Gables? Why, you simply must! It reminded Andrew - painfully, dreadfully - of the two years he was presented at cotillion in Charleston, how every crook and every moron and every ingrate who suddenly came into money lost their minds and thought they were God's Own, here on Earth. The things he did - without question, every time - to please his father... His tie choking him and his tailored suit like a strait jacket - bespoke, Davidson's of Roanoke, he said to himself in his head with a biting sarcasm - Andrew was bored and irritated under the watchful but famously jaded eyes of George Washington in the cavernous lobby that dripped everywhere with crystal chandeliers and brass railings and wooden paneling and real granite floors. He was painfully alone even surrounded by the endless buzz of this black-tie affair, and so he had pulled out his phone - SonyEricsson, imported from Japan - to text his best friend, Bligh... ...when he was stopped cold by who he saw coming in from the open doors that led to the iron-fenced veranda. He was a man - a man carrying a small glass with half-drank whiskey on the rocks in it, garnished with cranberry. Everything about this man was perfect - his suit, his pants, seemed to be a part of him, so perfectly crisp and fitted, it was clear that the clothes wore him. They were all black, from head to toe, with a tie that was a solid, crystal blue, like his eyes - not as icy blue as Bligh's, back home, but different, predatory, the eyes of a hawk, the vision of an alpha predator. He was tall and slender, but it was clear his body was strong, the power inside him concentrated in small pockets, nothing overbearing, but together combined it would prove invincible. The sides of his head, bright champagne blond, were shaved to leave a long middle part on top that was slicked back, a kind of hairstyle several years ahead of its time that gave him a fascinatingly evil look, like Heydrich in Prague - monstrous, but magnetic. To complete the picture - as he took a sip of the whiskey and cranberry - from behind him blew a crisp October breeze, as though nature itself announced his arrival, forward go the banners of the king. Andrew was transfixed, hypnotized by the presence of this - this man, this epitome, this wonder and this terror. Painful seconds passed. He knew himself well - was he attracted to him? He certainly was handsome - no, that wasn't the right word, handsome was a paltry adjective for him - he could be a runway model, a soap opera actor, the highest tier of conventional human beauty... ...but no, Andrew wasn't attracted. There was something about him, some enigmatic equality that Andrew wanted to fixate on, to study - yes, like he was another insect for him to examine, an impossibly rare, exotic specimen, for he had never seen anyone, anything¸like him, in the world. Now he glanced down at his phone - he slid it back together, leaving the text unfinished, uncomfortable with himself, positively tormented by his formal wear. He maneuvered his way through the milling crowd, using his best fleeting smile of politeness as he passed by tuxedo and evening dress, closer and closer to this mystery that had appeared from nowhere. But he was stopped - to his endless and immediate agitation - by his father. "There you are! Where've you been, the bachelor auction is starting and I mean to make a fool out of that jackass, Baird!" "Oh - h-hey, Pa." Archibald's usually carefully combed and coifed hair had fallen just slightly in disarray - he had a handkerchief in one hand to mop his forehead, where a small glaze of sweat was developing despite the cool of the temperature outside. They gravitated together past yet more partygoers to find themselves by small set of steps that led to a spacious parlor crowned in the middle by a vast circular couch - Andrew noticed his father's eyes were aqueous with too much chardonnay, his demeanor a little too relaxed and at ease for the prim and pompous patriarch he usually carried himself as. "Pa are ye - are y'okay there, Pa?" "Yes!" his father answered with a sweep of his arm across the lobby. "Yes, boy, yes! Why wouldn't I be?" "Ya seemed t've had a little--" He let his face become nonplussed. "Yanno. Wine." "Aww, c'mon!" He laughed his smug laugh through his teeth. "We all having fun, ain't we? And it's all for a good cause, ain't it?" Andrew swallowed back his contempt for everything - for his father, for this wealth, for this entire hotel - to nod in agreement. "Yeah, yeah Pa we are - n'yer right, it is." "Good! Good! And how're you doing?" "Fine - um--" His eyes went back to the man he had been studying, and flicked his eyes over to him to get his father's attention. "I wanted to ask you - you see that guy over there?" "What guy?" His handkerchief went stuffed back in the breast pocket of his suit. Andrew repeated the action with his eyes. "That guy." Archibald's head jerked where his son had directed him - Andrew thought they both had spied the handsome man from the veranda, but at that unlucky instant another man, a tired, sad, haggard-looking fellow with unruly grey hair that perhaps had once been blonde, stepped in front. His mouth fell open in an unguarded moment of rare emotion. "God almighty damn, boy that's - that's Jones--" He saw his father pause, a flicker of pain coming to his face that was erased in an eyeblink. "I don't - recall his first name - we all - just called him Jones." A pause elapsed, and Andrew tried not to grit his teeth in impatience, letting his father have the moment. "How'd you know it was him, boy?" "I didn't--" "We - he and I - Bligh's folks, when they were still living - we all used to be friends..." He shook his head, long and slow. "But my gracious, what happened to him? I know what happened weren't pleasant, but--" Andrew rolled his eyes, at last keen to change the subject. "No - him." He forced his head in a point to the mysterious man eyeing the room with his whiskey and cranberry. "Oh..." His father said nothing for a few seconds, as if recalling from his encyclopedic recollections of every Mid-Atlantic aristocrat who this man was. "Oh, Hell - he's here too? I didn't think..." His face lost the tipsy luster of a good time again. "That - is Siegfried Stone," he father murmured, his face doing that characteristic twinge where disgust was being suppressed in order to be polite. "His daddy owned a whole bunch of timbermills down into Scott County - Virginia - down that way - but I heard his family's but as old as ours, coming in through Jamestown and all that..." He shook his head, just slightly, and Andrew realized with an eerie feeling he had wanted to say more, but couldn't. "Best, ah - best stay away from him - the whole family's nuts." "Nuts?" Andrew repeated, askance. "What kinda--" "I can't really tell ya right now - I should probably go, Nelson Harris is here and while I don't like the man's politics--" He stopped. "And maybe I should - say hello to Jones - maybe..." He glanced back to Andrew, meeting his son's frown, and put a firm grip on his son's shoulder in a rare display of camaraderie and trust. "You keep being a good boy, alright? I'll tell ya later about Stone - and Jones - trust me, it's a story." And with that, dashing away at such a speed that it almost made Andrew dizzy, his father melted into the crowd. Andrew shot his head back to Siegfried Stone as though he were a piece of metal drawn to a magnet, just in time to see him bend down to lay his now-empty glass on a wooden table. As he came back up, Andrew watched his face suddenly warp into a sneer of honest contempt - he was looking over the crowd in front of him, over them, through them, with a look of derision so complete and so palpable it struck Andrew cold. Before, there had been abject, nameless fascination - now, seeing this, Andrew felt only fear. He could scarcely breathe, watching him - watching him as the sneer faded, warped, to bemused mockery, watching him as he straightened himself and elbowed his way through another small crowd behind him, out of the doors of the Hotel Roanoke, into that little plaza where the limos were still pulling in, absorbed into the night as thought he had never existed. He was gone. Andrew was relieved - the spell had broken, he blinked several times, leaning in on the railing by the steps he had been standing on. He shook his head rapidly - what the Hell had just happened? Out from his pocket came his cell phone, he slid it open, he pounded out the beginning of a new text message to Bligh, and to Stephen too: Dude I just seen But he stopped - he stopped at that next word. What had he seen? He was absorbed into his own thought life, trying as hard as he could to rationalize how monomaniacal, even for just a few minutes, he had become over someone he had never met - and who his own father, who knew a son-of-a-bitch better than anyone, had flat-out told him he did not want to meet. It had all happened so fast, too fast to absorb, too fast to process. For the second time that night, the cell phone went back in his pocket, a text message unsent in bewilderment. Now he was reminded again how uncomfortable he was in the get-up he was wearing, how much he hated these kinds of events his father insisted on dragging him to in order to groom and educate him in the world of the trans-Appalachian aristocrat - but right then, he could not bear the thought of being alone. He went down the steps back to the lobby proper, to look for his father. Andrew would never forget Siegfried Stone, having never spoken a word to the man...if man he was at all. He would never forget him - though he already wanted to.