The Wilds

by Julia Elliott

  My cheeks felt hot. I vaguely remembered having sex with my husband once in the last month, late one night on the couch, struggling to concentrate, fidgeting to achieve a comfortable position, the television buzzing on mute.

  “I don’t mean to pry into your private life, but pregnancy would explain an intensification of olfactory perception.”

  Dr. Vilkas smirked again. He smiled at the oddest times, undercutting the professionalism of his words.

  I imagined him scrawny and naked, moving toward me with the purple heat of his erection, his chest narrow, hairless except for a few wisps around his nipples, his thighs shaggy, his fingers splayed to clamp my shoulders, to hold me steady for a proper mount. I saw myself drawing my knees up. I could smell the bleach in the motel sheet. And there would be other smells, intimate and bodily, pumped from his glands and blending with odors of feral dog. His breath would also have an odor, a mix of food and toothpaste and the health of his mouth, bacterial colonies, his tongue and gums seething with organisms, infinitesimal animals bursting with the drive to swarm. The room would reek of his equipment, plus the ghostly effluvia of inhabitants past—layers of eagerness and disappointment, ecstasy, bitterness, rage—feebly radiant but there, almost pulsing.

  His wallet on the nightstand. His underwear on the floor.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said, pulling cash from my purse, stacking it in front of me, wrinkled and grubby with the sweat of a million human hands.

  “What?” said my husband, for I had kissed him on the mouth; I had probed with my tongue until tasting the animal depths of him, hoping to pull this part of him out into the waning day. But he fiddled with his electric fence, which had a short, and I was tipsy, my heart getting ahead of itself, red leaves fluttering down from the maple trees.

  “You’ve been drinking,” he said.

  “Just a cocktail,” I said, “with a few of the teachers, after the workshop. But look at me now: I’m home.”

  I was pacing in little circles around him.

  “And we should do something,” I said. “Go somewhere, maybe?”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. A walk?”

  “What about the dogs?”

  “Take your stun gun. That would be fun.”

  “I don’t feel like it,” he said. “I’m kind of involved with this. And it’s about to get dark.” He turned back to the manual that had come with his electric-fence system.

  “Well, I’m going,” I said, taking big strides away from him. I was crossing the street now, dipping into the gulch where the mini-McMansion had sprouted up overnight. I looked back, half expecting to see my husband scrambling after me, but apparently the idea of wild dogs tearing me to pieces didn’t bother him, or perhaps he hadn’t even seen me stalking across the street with my fists clenched.

  I started to run. I jogged into the scrap of woods where a doe had been killed by a dog pack just last week, hunted and cornered and stripped of flesh, her bones cracked open and scattered. It was getting dark, and the terror I felt was like a ringing in my blood, an addictive stirring of something I hadn’t felt in a long time, ancient feelings pouring from deep nooks of my brain. I could run forever, I thought, and I kept going, scrambling up a weedy hill until I reached the top. I watched the sun sink into the pond of an empty golf course, and then I sat in the dark for a spell, wondering what to do.

  The next week a cold front came, and my students arrived bundled, their winter things musty from summer storage, their eyes lit with the false promises of different weather. The old heat pump groaned. Smells of burnt dust floated up from the vents. The children were squirmy. And my mind kept going blank. The words on the pages of my books would blur, and I’d squint up at the children’s faces, forgetting why I was confined with so many restless young mammals. Each day I turned off the lights. I showed them films about dogs—Benji, Lassie, Cujo—making their minds converge into a single entity—gray, staticky, amorphous—and their bodies sit still.

  I saved Cujo for after lunch, the most difficult period, and it seemed that the reign of terror held by the crazed slavering dog would never end, that Cujo had always ruled the endless afternoon with his fury and red snapping mouth. But then, by two o’clock on Friday, the dog lay dead. His exhausted hostages were finally crawling from their dusty Ford Pinto into the harsh summer sun. My students were finally filing out into the cold bright day. And Dr. Vilkas was finally standing outside my portable, hunched in his army jacket, his face freshly shaven and vulnerable looking, like the skin of a baby mouse. The wind flapped his hair, and I could see the crow’s feet that etched the corners of his eyes, a sprinkling of dandruff in his dark hair, two cuts on his chin.

  “I called you,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah. We were . . . I mean . . . installing an electric fence. All week.”

  “About the experiment, of course.”

  “Experiment?”

  “Your preolfactory neurological sensations and detection of canine activity.”

  “Right.”

  “Whenever you’re free, we could set something up.”

  “People tend to romanticize so-called wildness,” said Dr. Vilkas, who did not drink so much as open his mouth and splash wine down into his dark, gurgling throat. “So when a dog joins a feral pack, it does not, in any sense, break free—it simply exchanges one set of rules for another.”

  “Yes,” I said, sipping my wine carefully. I could feel dark vapors dancing up from what was probably the reptilian part of my brain.

  We were in his room at a Hampton Inn, the butter-yellow curtains drawn, sitting at a little breakfast table beside the window in a cone of lamplight, two beds floating in the darkness beyond, one of them rumpled, the other pristine. The vinegary smell of our sub sandwiches hung in the air. And I thought I could detect a faint, sulfuric whiff of dog lurking beneath the food odors and the sick fruity tang of an air freshener.

  Dr. Vilkas insisted that a few drinks sharpened his intuition, that a little wine helped him think about the dogs in refreshingly new ways, and that sometimes, on certain evenings, when his brain chemistry conspired to make his head glow, he could figure out the whereabouts of one of the largest feral packs. This is all he would reveal about his dog-tracking techniques. When I pressed him, he answered me with his trademark smirk. He twiddled his thumbs in a way that I imagined would become annoying to someone who knew his tics. He tossed more wine into his maw.

  And then, padding around me in his stocking feet, smelling of wet wool and wine and the deeper animal brine of armpits, he applied wireless electrodes, metal sensors the size of fleas, to my scalp, sifting through my hair with his fingers. He put on his boots. He sipped the last of his wine and smiled. Wearing my EEG helmet, I followed him out into the night—big, bright moon, sweater weather, a single cricket chirring in the shrubs. He cleared a spot for me on the seat of his jeep, brushing crumpled Hardee’s bags to the floor.

  We drove toward the river, asphalt turning to tar and gravel. Hitting rocky dirt, we bounced along, the road flanked by meadows of dead goldenrod. An electrical substation loomed ahead, three fat transformers rising up like old-fashioned robots. Dr. Vilkas had a little can of Comfort Zone with DAP—dog-appeasing pheromone, a synthesized version of the stuff produced by lactating bitches to calm their young—and we sprayed the tart substance on our clothes. We walked deep into the meadow, down to the river, where the dogs sometimes slept, the goldenrod trampled, the air musky and ammoniac, tinged with a familiar, fried, salty smell.

  “They’ve rested here,” he said, kneeling on the ground. “How do you feel?”

  “Nothing too exciting,” I said.

  “Faint amygdalic activity.” He studied the crude cartoon on the laptop screen that represented my brain. “Perhaps a stirring in the hypothalamus. Let’s move on.”

  We climbed back into his jeep and drove in the moon-bright night, skirting the old mill village, taking a back highway into a desolate neon-lit area flush with check-cashing
shops, car-title-loan joints, strip clubs, and used-car lots. Beyond a cluster of gas stations, out near an interstate exit, an abandoned Target was sinking to ruin. Dr. Vilkas said that dogs sometimes took shelter there, but it was too dangerous to venture inside. He had a bottle of merlot in his backpack, and we sat in the parking lot, a weedy void of crumbling asphalt, its pole lights long dead. We drank in the moonlight, passing the wine between us, listening for the yip and stir of canines. We watched the sky for the flutter of bats, pointing in silence when they dipped jaggedly into our sight.

  Dr. Vilkas whispered of the mysteries of echolocation. He told me that dolphins and whales used the same biological sonar, drifting in deep-sea gloom, clicking at high frequencies, their pulses penetrating the delicate anatomies of fish. And certain birds that lived in caves could navigate the blackness of intricate chasms.

  Dr. Vilkas handed me the bottle, his fingertips grazing my palm. He gazed at his laptop, detecting faint activity, he said, perhaps in my nucleus accumbens. I felt a vague prickling of the spine, heat in my cheeks. And Dr. Vilkas said my cingulate gyrus seemed to be stimulated, that my orbitofrontal cortex showed signs of activity. I felt wind on my face. A bubble of warmth moved down my spine, bouncing from vertebra to vertebra, and then dissolved pleasantly in my coccyx.

  “And there’s this salty smell,” I whispered. “Don’t you smell that? Like corn chips.”

  Dr. Vilkas didn’t answer. We both stood up. We knew the dogs were coming, and we smiled at each other when they materialized in a rush, pouring around the left side of the building, their barks blurring into a single smear of sound.

  “Do they see us?” I asked him, my mouth dipping close to his ear.

  “Yes.” He leaned toward me. “Though they smelled us first, but the DAP spray should keep them from attacking.”

  As the dogs raced around the edges of the parking lot, circling us, sniffing out the borders of this territory, I felt a delicious terror. I took two steps forward and glanced back at Dr. Vilkas, who hung behind, grinning at the diagram of my mind, my feelings lit up, garish in yellow and red.

  “Your brain’s really pulsing,” he seemed to shout, though I couldn’t be sure, for dogs were pressing in on me, stink and noise and wind merging into a single whirl of sensation, their heat humming against my skin. Fur floated in the air above their spastic bodies, drifted into my nostrils, tickling mucous membranes. I sensed the hot blasts of their panting, the throbbing of two hundred hearts, the clatter of four thousand toenails. I felt their tongues, pimply tentacles smelling of death, sliding over the flesh of my hands.

  And now Dr. Vilkas was moving toward me through the canine sea, waist-deep in fur and slaver and stink, his shirt unbuttoned, hair kinetic from the wind the dog pack whipped up. He bobbed along, buoyed toward me, until, hurled at my feet, he squatted on the crumbling asphalt.

  Tongue lolling, he panted. Squatting, grinning, he winked at me. And then he threw his head back and howled, Adam’s apple pulsing, until the dogs joined in. Sitting on their haunches, every last animal found a patch of territory on which to squat and bay. They pointed their elegant snouts toward the moon, yowled and keened and squalled until the air smelled marshy from their breath.

  Jaws

  You squint toward the seething sea, imagining that you are alone on the beach, a nubile castaway with sun-kissed skin. You try to remember what it was like to walk boldly in the sun’s poisonous rays, innocent and near-naked, trusting in the general goodness of nature, your flesh anointed with exotic tanning oil. Coconut Dream. Pineapple Passion.

  But the sun has not been kind to you. It has left you blistered and spotted and scathed. And so you cower in the radius of a UV umbrella. You scowl, your lips smeared with oxybenzone. You’re not even on the beach, though you can sense its shimmer in the distance. You are one block away from the ocean, perched by the crowded pool of a budget condo, reading a book on endangered species and wallowing in grim statistics.

  “There are fewer than one thousand red-handed howler monkeys left on the planet,” you say in an accusing tone.

  “Caught red-handed,” quips your father, who sprawls rakishly in the full glare of the carcinogenic sun, sipping a gin and tonic, his body a moonscape of moles and barnacles and curious clusters of hair. You try not to look at this archetypal body, the degradation of which goes along with the general apocalyptic downturn of twenty-first-century civilization. But occasionally, when you reach the end of a long list of dying species (endangered rodents of Australia, for example), you take a glance, noting some particularly depressing detail (twin gouges where two basal-cell carcinomas have recently been removed, for example). And later, with macabre gusto, you will incorporate these tidbits into your dark, witty blog—misanthropos.blogspot.com.

  Your mother is also a source of inspiration for the blog, especially since she’s been suffering from “senior moments” and demonstrating inappropriate social behavior, which may or may not be connected to hormone replacement therapy and intensified doses of cholesterol medication. It’s nothing serious—yet—which means that you may smirk grimly when she says, “Everyone is beautiful, even the blacks.” You plot a special blog entry called “Racist Shit My Mother Says,” jotting down her bons mots instead of passively sighing at the sadness of the world. It is still possible to keep panic at bay as you watch your mother frolic in the pool with excessive childish glee. At this very moment, she bounds toward a cool, sleek woman who reclines in a chaise and hides behind the latest Oprah-endorsed melodrama.

  “You are so beautiful,” your mother says.

  The woman peers at your mother over her book, eyes shrouded in enormous cartoonish sunglasses—geriatric glam captures the look precisely, you note, filing the image away for future use. Though your father watches like a half-wit politician’s handler, tensing in his chair, he does not get up.

  “I need to lose weight,” your mother says.

  As the woman simpers and cowers behind her book, you remain emotionally unscathed, relishing the absurdity of the encounter: the woman’s spotted, leathery skin, her sparkly pedicure, her Prada eyewear and chunky gold jewelry. In your blog entry you will use the term bling. You will breezily reference Veblen. You will point out (as a casual afterthought) that gold was used to make slave manacles on the island of Utopia.

  “I need a breast reduction,” your mother says.

  And it is only after she has grabbed her ample, Lycraclad bosom and squeezed her breasts together in classic pinup mode that your father finally pulls himself up from his chair.

  “Jenny, come here for a minute,” he says, fumbling for an invisible cigarette, patting his pockets, forgetting that he, with the assistance of a nicotine patch, Xanax, and Prozac, was able to kick the habit a few months back, an amazing feat considering that he’d been chain-smoking since age twelve. Your dad grew up with an abusive father (an ogrish lumberman who made him spend his teenage summers toiling in the woods). His crisp comb-over, which he compulsively styles with aerosol hair spray and which you have ridiculed in previous blog posts, flutters in the breeze. You feel a raw throb of emotion crawling up from the cellar of your heart like a fleshy, red mutant from a horror flick. You do not want to look this creature in the eye. You beat it down with lines of poetry (An aged man is but a paltry thing / A tattered coat upon a stick), even though you are, of course, cynical about poetry.

  Cornucopia, an international all-you-can-eat megabuffet surrounded by mirrors, stretches into infinity. You feel dizzy as you weave among the steaming troughs, looking for something edible. You stumble down an aisle of meats, red and dark and white, flesh from winged and hoofed and scaly animals, fried and broiled and braised and boiled, barbecued and jerked and simmering in vats of pure corn syrup. You are a fasting monk in the desert, caught up in a gaudy hallucination. You discover a tray of pallid salmon. You ferret out a pile of steamed broccoli, studded with cashews. Amid the obscene abundance, you cannot find one unprocessed grain. So you spoon a puritanical dollop
of mashed potato onto your plate, though you know that it is larded with margarine and low-fat sour cream, laced with poisonous sugars, the ubiquitous corn syrup. You approach the table with a martyr’s wince. You imagine your husband at home, harvesting kale from his organic garden. Three days from now, returning with the starved and panicky look of a prisoner of war, you will devour a mountain of steamed greens.

  But at this moment you are inexplicably here, in this windowless dungeon of decadence, where the obese demographic stands in line to suck soft-serve ice cream straight from the industrial teat. Your mother’s plate is heaped with deep-fried tidbits: fried clams, fried shrimp, fried lobster, fried crab, fried fish, fried chicken, fried steak, fried pork, fried potatoes, fried onions, fried batter.

  “You need to eat some vegetables,” says your father, who has added a blue-cheese-smothered salad of pesticide-saturated genetically modified iceberg lettuce to his pile of garbage.

  “That’s not good for you,” he says.

  “It is good!” cries your mother, jerking her plate away as though your father wants to snatch her food.

  “Good for you, Jenny, not good.”

  “It is good,” says your mother.

  Her pouched brown eyes quiver behind glasses.

  Do you detect a glimmer of slyness? You wonder; for during your childhood your mother was in some ways the shadow-governor of your house, the manipulator, the ever-scheming dumb-playing domestic Machiavelli, and though her bubble of understanding may have shrunk, her control impulse is stronger than ever.

  “Of course it’s good, Jenny. Fried meat is high in saturated fat and cholesterol. But it’s not good for you.”

  “It is good!” screams your mother. “Look at the flowers.”

  She points at a vase of plastic hibiscus that rests on a pearl-white baby grand that you suspect has never been played. “Aren’t they beautiful?”