The Wilds

by Julia Elliott

  “My sexuality is not a cross,” said Uncle Mike. “And if you don’t want me to lose my shit, I suggest that you drop the subject.”

  “You’re the one who was talking about your friend.”

  “Boyfriend,” said Mike. “Boyfriend, okay? And I would think that I could discuss my relationships with my own sister. We used to talk a lot in high school, remember? When you used to sneak out with Bill and come home wasted and Mama lashed out at you. You would come to my room crying, remember? Of course, I’m a fool to try to talk to you now that you’ve been brainwashed by snake handlers.”

  “We don’t handle snakes.”

  “Whatever. Brunell’s the most reasonable person in this house.”

  “She’s just a child. And speaking of children, we ought to keep it down. We got kids in the house. Nice girls.”

  “By which you mean middle-class.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Dear God.” Mike sighed. “Let’s just drop it.”

  “Girls!” Brunell’s mama yelped.

  When we strolled into the kitchen with our smiles of fake innocence, both adults greeted us with fierce, clenched grins. We reveled in the exquisite alchemy of bacon coated in the artificial-maple runoff from Bisquick pancakes. We drank glass after glass of Mr. Pig. We devoured the remnants of the Garfield birthday cake and ate every last Pop-Tart in the house. Uncle Mike, pretending to recover his spirits, tucked his sadness into a corner of his heart and chatted with us about Duran Duran. When he started up on California, Brunell’s mama went upstairs to get ready for church.

  Uncle Mike said we’d love the Venice Beach boardwalk, where fine ladies like ourselves roller-skated in string bikinis as palm trees swayed in the warm wind. There were break-dancers and snake charmers, mimes and jugglers, ancient movie stars with Latin gigolos and beribboned poodles that smelled of death. As Uncle Mike described the ecstasy of sipping a tropical cocktail on a beachfront cabana while sea winds tousled his hair, he reminded us of Meemaw, his grin crooked, his face lit up like a jack-o’-lantern. He, too, seemed to float in his chair for a minute as visions of paradise spewed from him—the swarming stars, the crashing waves, the tan men in white shorts who smelled of cocoa butter. A boy whisked by on a glittering ten-speed. A bodybuilder the color of roasted liver flexed his rippling pecs. An escaped pet parrot swooped down from a coffee-shop awning, landed on Uncle Mike’s shoulder, and said, “I love you.”

  As Uncle Mike imitated the mechanical croak of the parrot, a light beam bounced off the refrigerator and shot directly into his forehead, where it left a small, red welt. A great twitch shook him. His pale skin glowed like the moon.

  And Brunell’s mother shrieked.

  Meemaw sat scrunched on the sofa, dead, her eyes jacked open wide, her hands crimped up like bird claws. Her skin looked dark and moist, vaguely congealed like canned ham. Just as Brunell splashed a glass of water in her mama’s face to rouse her from her fainting fit, just as Uncle Mike came to from the sudden seizure that had sent him collapsing into a La-Z-Boy recliner, Bonnie and I caught sight of our mothers cruising up the driveway in a white convertible LeBaron. As they climbed out of the car, they looked two-dimensional, light and unencumbered, like magazine women. Bonnie’s mother wore tight Calvin Kleins with a cotton sweater draped over her back like a cape. Her hair was honey blond, colored by Tina at Cut-Ups and styled to look wind-blown and free. My own mother wore hers in a sleek wedge, not a speck of lipstick on her mouth, though she did accessorize her linen tunic with a string of wooden beads. They traipsed up the stepping-stones that led to Brunell’s front door with its BLESS THIS HOME knocker. Through the window we could see them—laughing like heathens, reveling in harlotries as they prepared themselves for the sight of Brunell’s poor mama in her sad polyester dress.

  Brunell’s mother sat up and picked at her ruined hairdo. Her jaw muscles jerked her mouth into a snarling grin. She stood erect, smoothed her Sunday frock, and answered the door.

  “Hi,” said my mom chirpily, perhaps sarcastically, and I wanted to slap her in the face.

  “I hope the girls behaved themselves,” said Bonnie’s mother, winking wryly, craning her neck to catch a glimpse of the living room.

  “Like little angels,” said Brunell’s mother. “Do come in. You’ll have to excuse my mama, she just . . .”

  And then the taut musculature of her smile went slack. Her lips writhed as she unleashed a primal howl.

  “No need to make excuses.” Uncle Mike pulled himself up from his chair and wiped a tear from his cheek. “Our mother just passed away.”

  “My God,” said my mom, who now looked terrified. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

  Mike smiled darkly. “I know. Sympathetic platitudes never cut it, do they?”

  “I hope the girls weren’t in your way,” said Bonnie’s mother.

  “They’re fine.” Mike took hold of my shoulder and pushed me toward the door. “Wonderful girls.”

  “Yes,” Mom piped. “Let’s be going.”

  As we stumbled out into the sunny day, I felt a tug in my gut, a visceral longing for the magical dusk of Brunell’s living room, which smelled of strawberry air freshener and the dark, turbulent vapors of the Holy Ghost. Just before the door closed on its own like a haunted house prop, I caught sight of Brunell, hunched and sniveling, falling into her uncle’s manly embrace. Uncle Mike’s hair, popped free of its ponytail, cascaded over his shoulders.

  To take our minds off death, Bonnie’s mother suggested a shopping trip to Columbia. As we drove out to Dixie City Fashion Mall, our mothers kept glancing back at us, scoping our faces for signs of trauma. Bonnie and I exchanged looks but said nothing. We kept the rich darkness fermenting inside us, like wine to savor in illicit sips. We sprawled in the backseat, staring up at the cryptic convolutions of clouds, our eyes awash with mystic light. The clouds were thick, the color of smoke, as though the whole world were on fire. I could see hosts of dragons slithering in the froth, their damp, gray scales blending with the mist. I could see sparks of light like silver flashes of wings. I could see angelic multitudes, their faces crumpled in wrath, gearing up for the final battle. I could see a near-naked Jesus nailed to a cross, his long hair fluttering in the wind. Skinny and ripped like Tommy Lee, he wore nothing but a loincloth, and his eyes gazed right into my heart.

  When a drop of rain hit my cheek, I imagined that it was a drop of blood. I stuck my tongue out to taste the holy wine. But then, with the press of a button, Bonnie’s mother eased the LeBaron’s top back up. She trapped us in the sterile air-conditioning, Neil Diamond whining on the radio. When the DJ decided to torment us with a double shot and “Sweet Caroline” came on, we couldn’t take it anymore. Smirking knowingly at each other, Bonnie and I sang “Rapture.” Trying to warble like Debbie Harry, we belted out her visionary lyrics, reveling in the thought of strange funky beings sweeping down from space to wreak havoc on planet Earth.

  The men from Mars would startle disco dancers out of their comatose trances. They’d stomp around the crowded cities, terrifying twenty-four-hour shoppers and devouring cars. They’d fill our tired old world with blissful panic. Businessmen would cast off their suits like werewolves and flaunt their hairy bodies. Housewives would hop astride their brooms and fly laughing through the electric air. Schoolchildren would turn into ferocious wild animals and romp ecstatically in patches of forest behind their suburban homes.

  But then, growing bored with human beings, the spacemen would fly back to their cold red planet. Things would return to normal: the men marching to work in their suits, the housewives furiously sweeping, the schoolchildren squirming in cold, metal desks.

  The spacemen would leave us earthbound and restless, dissatisfied with everything, watching the sky for glints of ominous light.

  LIMBs

  On a gauzy day in early autumn, senior citizens stroll around the pear orchard on robot legs. Developed by the Japanese, manufactured by Boeing, one
of the latest installments in the mechanization of geriatric care, Leg Intuitive Motion Bionics (LIMBs) have made it all the way to Gable, South Carolina, to this little patch of green behind Eden Village Nursing Home. And Elise Mood is getting the hang of them. Every time her brain sends a signal to her actual legs, the exoskeletal LIMBs respond, marching her along in the gold light. A beautiful day—even though Elise can smell chickens from the poultry complex down the road and exhaust from the interstate, even though the pear trees in this so-called orchard bear no fruit. The mums are in bloom. Bees glitter above the beds. And a skinny man comes toward her, showing off his mastery of the strap-on LIMBs.

  “Elise.” He squints at her. “You still got it. Prettiest girl at Eden Village.”

  She flashes her dentures but says nothing.

  “You remember me. Ulysses Stukes, aka Pip. We went to the barbecue place that time.”

  Elise nods, but she doesn’t remember. And she’s relieved to see a tech nurse headed her way, the one with the platinum hair.

  “Come on, Miss Elise,” the nurse says. “You got Memories at three.”

  Elise points at the plastic Power Units strapped to her lower limbs.

  “You’re gonna walk it today,” says the nurse. “I think you got it down.”

  Elise grins. Three people from the Dementia Ward were chosen for the test group, and so far, she’s the only one with nerve signals strong enough to stimulate the sensors. As she strides along among flowers and bees, she rolls the name around on her tongue—Pip Stukes—recalling something familiar in the wry twist of his mouth.

  For the past few months, nanobots have been rebuilding Elise’s degenerated neural structures, refortifying the cell production of her microglia in an experimental medical procedure. Now she sits in the Memory Lane Neurotherapy Lounge, strapped into a magnetoencephalographic (MEG) scanner that looks like a 1950s beauty parlor hair-drying unit. As a young female therapist monitors a glowing map of Elise’s brain, a male spits streams of nonsense at her.

  “Corn bread,” he says. “Corn-fed coon. Corny old colonel with corns on his feet.”

  Elise snorts. Who was that colonel she knew? Not a colonel, but a corporal. She once kissed him during a thunderstorm. But she was all of sixteen and he was fresh from Korea, drenched in mystique and skinny from starving in a bamboo cage. Elise vaguely recollects his inflation into a three-hundred-pounder who worked the register at Stukes Feed and Seed. Pip Stukes.

  In a flash, she remembers the night they ate barbecue together, back when the world was still green, back when Hog Heaven hung paper lanterns over the picnic tables and Black River Road was dirt. After wiping his lips with a paper napkin, he said, You ought to be my wife in his half-joking way—and she dropped her fork.

  “Look,” says the female therapist. “We’ve got action between the inferior temporal and the frontal.”

  “Let’s try another round,” says the male, the one with the ponytail so little and scraggly that Elise wants to snip it off with a pair of scissors.

  “One unit of BDNF,” says the female. “And self-integration image therapy with random auditory sequencing and a jolt of EphB2.”

  The boy clamps Elise’s head into a padded dome, and the room gets darker. She hears birdsong and distant traffic as a screen lights up to display a photo of a couple, the girl decked out in a wiggle dress and heels, the man slouching beside her in baggy tweed, his face obscured by a straw hat. At first Elise thinks they’re walking on water, but then she realizes they’re standing at the edge of a pier, a lake glinting all around them.

  Something about the lake makes her gasp, and Elise wonders if the young woman in the photograph is her daughter, though she’s pretty sure she never had a daughter—so maybe it’s her mother’s daughter, which means she and the girl are the same person.

  “We’ve got action all over,” says the female therapist, “mostly in the temporal and right parietal lobes.”

  “Emotional memory and spatial identity,” says the male, tapping a rhythm on the desk with his fingertips.

  Elise glares at him for breaking her stream of thought, then looks back up at the image, noting a streak of silver in the upper-right corner.

  “Boat,” she whispers.

  And then she sees him clear as day: Pip Stukes at the wheel of the boat, his hair swept into a ducktail by the wind.

  In the pear orchard, Elise takes long strides, easy as thought, around the bed of mums. Scanning the lawn for Pip Stukes, she notes a cluster of wheelchair-bound patients idling at the edge of the flower bed, two women and a sleeping man, his shoulders slumped forward, his chin resting on his chest.

  “Hey, good-lookin’, what you got cookin’?” Pip Stukes struts toward her on cyborg legs. The skin around his eye sockets looks delicate, parchment shrunk down to the bone. While one of his eyes shines as blue as a tropical sea, the other is frosted with glaucoma. But Pip still flirts like a demon, sadness nestled under the happy talk.

  Elise blushes, and Pip laughs, stands with his hip cocked.

  “Pretty day for a walk.” He holds out his arm and she takes it.

  He leads her into a stand of planted pine. Interstate 95 drones, but Elise thinks she hears a river. Looking for a thread of blue, she gazes through the trees, but all she sees is the blurry outline of a brick building. A crow flutters down in a shaft of green light. And Pip turns to her with an aching look from long ago.

  “Elise.”

  She studies him, mentally peeling back layers of wrinkled skin to glimpse the shining young man inside. She thinks he may have been the one, the dark shape in the bed beside her when she came up gasping from the depths of a bad dream.

  She practices the phrase in her head first—Are you my husband?—but her lips twitch when she tries to say it.

  “What?” says Pip.

  And then a male tech nurse, alerted by their RFID alarms, rushes into the patch of woods to retrieve them.

  Elise sits by the lake on a towel in early spring, delighted to see that she’s young again. As the sun sinks behind the tree line, she shivers, waiting for someone. She spots a wet glimmer of motion out past the end of the pier, a lithe young man doing tricks in the water. He crawls dripping from the lake, a merman with seal-black hair and familiar green eyes. As he inches toward her, his tail, a long fishy appendage glistening with aqua scales, swishes behind him in the sand.

  Elise wakes, panting, in her semielectric bed. She reaches into the dark, claws at the aluminum railing. She’s cold, her blanket wadded beneath her feet. And her roommate moans, a steady animal keening. The night nurse drifts in with pills in tiny cups. Though Elise can’t see her, she knows her voice, low and soothing like a sheep’s. The night nurse fixes her blanket, checks her diaper, gives her a drink of water, and then slips out of the room. Now her roommate’s snoring. The air conditioner hums. And Elise lies awake, thinking about the beautiful swimmer from her dream.

  Elise can smell the stuffiness of Eden Village Nursing Home only when she returns from being outside for a while. It’s as if they’ve shellacked the floors with urine and Lysol. And in the cafeteria, some gravy is always boiling, spiked with the sweat and waste and blood of the dying, all the juices that leak from withering people—huge cauldrons of gravy that emit a meaty, medicinal steam.

  Now that Elise can walk, now that she’s thinking a little faster, she feels up to exploring. She wants to find the room where Pip Stukes lives, ask him point-blank if he’s the man she married.

  Someone’s approaching down the endless hallway, a speck swelling bigger and bigger until it transforms into a nurse, a boy with a golden dab of beard.

  “Looking for the Dogwood Library?” he says. “Elvis and the Chipmunks?” He points toward a small corridor, then shuffles off into nonexistence.

  Peering down the passageway, Elise sees a parlor: wingback chairs, sofas, a crowd of patients in wheelchairs. She wills her strap-on LIMBs to move and, after a heartbeat pause, lurches down the hall. Over by a makeshift s
tage, the wheelchair-bound patients watch some middle-aged men set up equipment. A few people with LIMBs weave among the furnishings. Elise recognizes a tall woman with bald spots and a stubby old man with big ears. She creeps behind a potted palm to watch Elvis and the Chipmunks take the stage. Three large plush rodents sporting high pompadours, they jump into a brisk, twittering version of “Jailhouse Rock.” Elise is about to leave in disgust when she spots a man slumped in a wheelchair, dozing, his face so familiar that the shock of it interrupts the signals pulsing from her brain to her legs and into the sensors of her Power Units. She collapses onto a brocade couch. Sits there wheezing in the blotchy light. Then she calms herself and looks the man over. She remembers the hawk nose, the big, creased forehead.

  The Chipmunks croon “Love Me Tender” in their earsplitting rodent way, and Elise snorts. The man in the wheelchair had a great voice, could play guitar by ear. All those summer evenings they spent on the porch have been streamlined into archetypes and filed away in different sections of her cerebral cortex. And now the memories come trickling out. She remembers the sound of the porch fan and the smell of the lake and the feel of his hand on the back of her neck. She recalls swimming under stars and singing folk songs and drinking wine until their heads floated off their necks.

  Elise steps around a coffee table heaped with Reader’s Digests. She studies the pink bulges of the man’s closed eyes, the blanket draped over his legs, the big, fleshy head, humming with mysterious thoughts. The mouth is what strikes her hardest, the lips full, just a quirk feminine. When he opens his eyes and she sees the strange green, she knows it’s him, the man who once kissed her in a birch canoe, moonlight twitching on the water.

  “Who are you?” she says, the words pouring miraculously from her tongue.

  He studies her, and she fears he’s been drained dry, all of his memories siphoned by therapists into that electric box, where they bump around like trapped moths.