The Wilds

by Julia Elliott

  Regeneration at Mukti

  Call me a trendmonger, but I’ve sprung for a tree house. My bamboo pod hovers among galba trees, nestled in jungle with views of the sea, the porch strung with hemp hammocks. A flowering vine snakes along the railings, pimping its wistful perfume. With a single remote control, I may adjust the ceiling fans, fine-tune the lighting, or lift the plate-glass windows, which flip open like beetles’ wings. My eco-friendly rental has so many amenities, but my favorite is the toilet: a stainless basin that whisks your droppings through a pipe, down into a pit of coprophagous beetles. These bugs, bred to feast on human shit, have an enzyme in their gut that makes their dung the best compost on the planet—a humus so black you’d think it was antimatter. The spa uses it to feed the orchids in the Samsara Complex. As visitors drift among the blossoms, we may contemplate the life cycle, the transformation of human waste into ethereal petals and auras of scent.

  “Orchids are an aphrodisiac,” said a woman at lunch today, her unagi roll breaking open as she crammed it into her mouth, spilling blackish clumps of eel. She had crow’s feet, marionette lines around her mouth, a porn star’s enhanced lips.

  “Yes,” said a man in a sky-blue kimono, “I think I read something about that on the website.”

  “They have orchid dondurma on the menu,” I said, scanning the man’s face: budding eye bags, sprays of gray at his temples, the gouge of a liver line between his brown eyes. I placed him in his early forties.

  “Fruit-sweetened,” he said, “fortified, I believe, with raw mare’s milk, if you do dairy.”

  “Colostrum,” I said. “Mostly goat. But I don’t ingest sweeteners or juices, only whole fruits.”

  “My philosophy on dairy,” said the woman, waving her chopstick like a conductor, “is that milk is an infant’s food. I weaned myself ten years ago.” Her lush bosom actually heaved, hoisted by the boning of a newfangled corset.

  For some reason (maybe it was the way the woman shook her dead blond hair like a vixen in a shampoo commercial), I found myself smirking at the man over the centerpiece of sculpted melon. I found myself wondering what he’d look like after completing the Six Paths of Suffering. I couldn’t help but picture him shirtless, reclining on a rock beside one of the island’s famous waterfalls, his skin aglow from deep cellular regeneration and oxygenation of the hypodermis.

  “I’m Red,” he said. And he was: flushed along his neck and cheeks, the ripe pink of a lizard’s pulsing throat.

  The powers that be at Mukti—those faceless organizers of regeneration—have designed the spa so that Newbies don’t run into Crusties much. We eat separately, sleep in segregated clusters of cottages, enjoy our dips in the mud baths and mineral pools, our yoga workshops and leech therapy sessions, at different times. As Gobind Singh, our orientation guru, pointed out, “the face of rebirth is the mask of death.” But this morning, as I walked the empty beach in a state of above-average relaxation, I spotted my first Crusty crawling from the sea.

  Judging by the blisters, the man was in the early stages of Suffering. I could still make out facial features twitching beneath his infections. He had the cartoonish body of a perennial weight-lifter, his genitals compressed in the Lycra sling of a Speedo. He nodded at me and dove back into the ocean.

  I jogged up the trail that curls toward my tree house. In the bathroom, I examined my face. I studied familiar lines and folds, pores and spots, ruddy patches and fine wrinkles, not to mention a general ambient sagging that’s especially detectable in the morning.

  Out beyond the Lotus Terrace, the ocean catches the pink of the dying sun. A mound of seaweed sits before me, daubed with pomegranate chutney and pickled narcissus. My waitress is plain, as all the attendants are: plump cheeks and brown skin, hair tucked into a white cap, eyebrows impeccably groomed. Her eyes reveal nothing. Her mouth neither smiles nor bends with the slightest twist of frown. I’m wondering how they train them so well, to be almost invisible, when a shadow darkens my table.

  “Hi,” says the man from yesterday. “May I?”

  “Red, right? Please.”

  The bags under his eyes look a little better. His hair is losing its sticky sheen. And his bottom lip droops, making his mouth look adorably crooked.

  “Just back from leech therapy.” He grins. “Freaky to have bloodsuckers clamped to my face, but it’s good for fatty orbital herniation and feelings of nameless dread.”

  We laugh. Red orders a green mango salad with quinoa fritters and mizuna-wrapped shad roe. We decide to share a bottle of island Muscador. We drink and chat and the moon pops out, looking like a steamed clam.

  Though Red is a rep for Clyster Pharmaceuticals, he’s into holistic medicine, thinks the depression racket is a capitalist scam, wishes he could detach himself from the medical-industrial complex. I try to explain my career path (human-computer interaction consulting), how the subtleties of creative interface design have worn me out.

  “It’s like I can feel the cortisol gushing into my system,” I say. “A month ago, I didn’t have these frown lines.”

  “You still look youngish,” says Red.

  “Thanks.” I smile, parsing the difference between young and youngish. “You too.”

  Red nods. “It’s not that I’m vain. It’s more like a state of general depletion. The city has squeezed the sap out of me.”

  “And life in general takes its nasty toll.”

  “Boy does it.” Red offers the inscrutable smile of an iguana digesting a fly.

  I don’t mention my divorce, of course, or my relocation to a sun-deprived city that requires vitamin-D supplementation. I pass the wine and our fingertips touch. I imagine kissing him, forgetting that in two weeks we’ll both be covered in weeping sores.

  I’ve opened my tree house to the night—windows cranked, jungle throbbing. My heart rate’s up from Ashtanga yoga. A recent dye job has brightened my hair with a strawberry-blond, adolescent luster. Wineglass in hand, I pace barefooted. Red sits on my daybed, his face feral with a five-day beard, lips so pink I’ve already licked them to test for cosmetics.

  He’s rolling a globule of sap between thumb and index finger. Now he’s inserting the resin into the bowl of his water pipe. And we take another hit of ghoni, distillate of the puki bloom, a small purple fungus flower that grows from tree-frog dung. We drift out onto the porch and fall into an oblivion of kissing.

  We shed our clothes, leaving tiny mounds on the bamboo planks. Red’s penis sways in the humid air. Shaggy-thighed, he walks toward the bedroom, where vines creep through the windows, flexing like tentacles in the ocean breeze.

  He reclines and smiles, his forehead only faintly lined in the glow of Himalayan salt lamps. We’ve been hanging out religiously for the past seven days, are addicted, already, to each other’s smells. Every night at dinner we begin some delirious conversation that always brings us back to my tree house, toking up on ghoni, chattering into the night. Earlier, discussing the moody rock bands that moved us in our youths, we discovered that we attended the same show twenty-seven years ago. Somehow we’d both been bewitched by a band of sulky middle-aged men with dyed black hair who played broody, three-chord pop. Now we can’t stop laughing about how gravely we scowled at them from the pit, in gothic costumes bought at the mall.

  We’ve already been infected. Each of us received the treatment two days ago, Red at eleven, me at three. We met for a lunch of shrimp ceviche between appointments.

  All week long, Lissa, the lactose-free blond, has been chattering about the Hell Realm, wondering, as we all are, when our affliction will begin. She’s the kind of person whose head will explode unless she opens her mouth to release every half-formed thought. Her perfume, derived from synthetic compounds, gives me sinus headaches. Just as I suspected, she’s an actress. I’m almost positive she has fake tits. Even though Red and I beam out a couple vibe, huddled close over menus and giggling, she has no problem plopping down next to him, lunging at the shy man with her mammary torpedoes. And he al
ways laughs at her lame jokes.

  This afternoon I have a mild fever and clouds stagnate over the sea. The meager ocean breeze smells fishy. I feel like a fool for ordering the monkfish stew, way too pungent for this weather. And Lissa won’t stop gloating over her beef kabobs. Red, sunk in silence, keeps scratching his neck. I’m about to exhale, a long moody sigh full of turbulent messages, when Lissa reaches over her wine flute to poke Red’s temple with a mauve talon.

  “Look,” she says, “bumps.”

  I see them: a spattering of hard, red zits. Soon they’ll grow fat with juice. They’ll burst and scab over, ushering in the miracle of subcutaneous regeneration.

  “And my neck itches.” Red toys with his collar.

  According to the orientation materials distributed by Guru Gobind Singh, the Hell Realm is different for everyone, depending on how much hatred and bitterness you have stored in your system. All that negativity, stashed deep in your organic tissues, will come bubbling to the surface of your human form. The psychosomatic filth of a lifetime will hatch, breaking through your skin like a thousand minuscule volcanoes spitting lava.

  “Time for my mineral mud bath,” says Red. And now I see what I did not see before: a row of incipient cold sores edging his upper lip, wens forming around the delicate arch of his left nostril, a rash of protoblisters highlighting each cheekbone like subtle swipes of blusher.

  The Naraka Room smells of boiled cabbage. Twelve of us squat on hemp yoga mats, stuck in crow pose. Wearing rubber gloves, Guru Gobind Singh weaves among us, pausing here and there to tweak a shoulder or spine.

  According to the pamphlet, Gobind Singh has been through the Suffering twice, without the luxury of gourmet meals, around-the-clock therapies, and hands-on guidance from spiritual professionals. Legend has it that he endured the Hell Realm alone in an isolated tree house. Crumpled in the embryo pose for weeks, he unfurled his body only to visit the crapper or eat a bowl of mung beans. His skin’s as smooth as the metalized paint that coats a fiberglass mannequin. His body’s a bundle of singing muscles. When he walks, he hovers three millimeters off the ground—you have to look carefully to detect his levitational power, but, yes, you can see it: the bastard floats.

  I can’t help but hate him. After all, this is the Hell Realm and hatred festers within me. My flesh seethes with blisters. My blood suppurates. My heart is a ball of boiling puss. As I balance on my forearms, I tabulate acts of meanness foisted against me over the decades. I tally betrayals, count cruelties big and small. I trace hurts dating back to elementary school—decades before my first miscarriage, way before my bulimic high school years, long before Dad died and my entire family moved into that shitty two-bedroom apartment. I recede deeper into the past, husking layers of elephant skin until I’m soft and small, a silken worm of a being, vulnerable as a drop of dew quivering on a grass blade beneath the summer sun.

  “Reach into the core of your misery,” says Gobind Singh, “and you will find a shining pearl.”

  The pamphlet, Regeneration at Mukti, features a color photo of a pupa dangling from a leaf on the cover. Inside is an outline of the bodily restoration process. My treatment has borne fruit. I suffer (oh, how I suffer!) from the following: urushiol-induced dermatitis (poison oak rash), dermatophytosis (ringworm), type-I herpes simplex (cold sores), cercarial dermatitis (swimmer’s itch), herpes zoster (shingles), and trichinosis (caused by intramuscular roundworms). Using a blend of cutting-edge nanotechnology and gene therapy, combined with homeopathic and holistic approaches, the clinicians of Mukti have transmitted controlled pathogens into my body through oils, funguses, bacteria, viruses, and parasites. As skilled therapists work to reroute my mind-body networks to conduct more positive flows, my immune system is tackling an intricate symphony of infections, healing my body on the deepest subcellular levels: banishing free radicals, clearing out the toxic accumulation of lipofuscins, reinstalling hypothalamus hormones, and replacing telomeres to revitalize the clock that directs the life span of dividing cells.

  I itch so much that I want to scrub my body with steel wool. I want to roll upon a giant cheese grater. I’d love to flay myself and be done with the mess. According to the pamphlet, however, not only does scratching interfere with the healing process, but the mental discipline required to refrain from scratching strengthens the chakra pathways that enhance positive mind-body flow.

  I have a beautiful dream in which I’m rolling in a patch of briars. I worm my naked body against thorns, writhe ecstatically in nests of prickly vines. I cry out, convulsing with the sweet sting of pleasure. I wake before dawn, pajamas stuck to my skin.

  For me, consciousness is nothing but the seething tides of itchiness, hunger, and thirst, a vague sex drive nestled deep in the misery. I live like an animal from minute to minute, appointment to appointment, meal to meal.

  Morning: a bowl of oats with flaxseeds and blueberries, followed by a kelp bath and castor-oil massage. After that: a cabbage poultice administered by experts, who then slather my body with shea butter and wrap it in sea-soaked silk. Before lunch I must descend into the bowels of the Samsara Complex for blood work and nanotech nuclear restructuring. Then a lunch of raw vegetables and fermented organ meats, kombucha with goji and spirulina.

  Postlunch I do a volcanic-mud bath, then hydrate with a goat-milk-and-basil soak. Next comes a green-tea sensory-deprivation session, then Kundalini yoga with Gobind Singh. Staggering from this mind-fuck, I head straight for the Samsara Complex for stem-cell work and injections of Vita-Viral Plus. Then a light coconut-oil massage and I’m good to go.

  At supper I’m startled by Red’s appearance. Yes, I’ve been monitoring his Incrustation. But I wasn’t prepared for the new purple swellings around his eyes, or the dribbling boils on his chin. Ditto the lip cankers and blepharitis. Of course I’m aware of my own hideousness. Of course I recoil each time I see my face in the mirror (think rotted plums and Spam). And the itching is a constant reminder of my state. Nevertheless, deep in the core of my being, I feel unscathed, as though the process were happening to someone else.

  Though Red and I haven’t touched each other in weeks, we eat together most nights, fresh from soothing therapies and tipsy on our allotment of organic, sulfite-free wine. We have about an hour until the itching becomes unbearable, then we slink off to our respective tree houses.

  Tonight we’re enjoying the fugu sashimi with pickled dandelion greens. The humidity hovers around fifty-five percent, great for our raw skin. And the ocean looks like pounded pewter. Though we’re both disgusting—it’s as if we’re mummy-wrapped in putrid flesh—our real selves remain tucked down under the meat costumes.

  “I was thinking about the hot springs,” says Red. “Since our infections seem to be stabilizing.”

  “Quite a hike,” I say. “It’d be hell on our swollen feet.”

  “You can do the whole trip on an ATV.”

  “What?” says Lissa, who’s hovering over our table, wearing a full-body catsuit of black spandex, only a few square inches of her polluted flesh visible through eye and mouth holes.

  “I wanna go,” she says, sitting down on the other side of Red. “I hear the springs help with collagen reintegration.”

  “And improving the flow between throat and brow chakras,” says Red, smiling idiotically.

  “Really?” says Lissa. “The third-eye chakra? Cool.”

  A waitress appears. Lissa orders kway teow with fermented beef. The patio’s getting crowded. The music’s lame, all synthesized sitars and tabla drum machines. But Red bobs his head in time to the tunes. And Lissa slithers up next to him, gazes raptly at a pic on his iPhone.

  “That’s you?” she shrieks.

  “That’s me.”

  “A mullet. No way!”

  “It’s an alternative mullet, not a redneck mullet.”

  “Let’s not mince hairs,” quips Lissa.

  “Ha! Ha! Ha!” cries Red.

  And then Lissa flounces off to the bathroom, but not without tou
sling his hair.

  “God.” I take a sip of water. “She’s dumb.”

  “She’s not as stupid as she puts on,” says Red.

  “What does that mean?”

  “You know, the whole ingénue act.”

  “She’s got to be at least thirty-eight.”

  “Chronologically, maybe, but not biologically.”

  I want to drill Red for a more precise number—does she look thirty-two? twenty-six? nineteen?—but I don’t. I grab my purse, a practical satchel that slumps on the table beside Lissa’s glittering clutch.

  “Don’t go,” says Red. “I haven’t swilled my allotment of vino yet.”

  “Sorry.” I manufacture a yawn. “I’m sleepy.”

  I weave through the tables without looking back, skirt the rock garden, and stomp down the jungle trail. Deep in the forest, male Kibi monkeys howl, adolescents looking for mates. The small nocturnal monkeys spend their days dozing in the hollows of trees, but at night they hunt for insects and baby frogs. They eat their weight in fruit, sip nectar from flowers, sing complex songs that throb with vitality and longing.

  After a four-mile ATV jaunt, Red and I finally steep neck-deep in a steaming spring. Though Lissa invited herself along, I scheduled our jaunt for a Tuesday after lunch, well aware of her strenuous nanotech routine. For the first time in weeks, the itch has left me, and my body flexes, supple as a flame. The hot springs stink, of course, a predictable rotten-egg funk, as sulfur dioxide leaks into the air. But it’s worth it. My skin’s sucking up nature’s beauty mineral, strengthening its collagen bundles, improving its cellular elasticity. Plus, mist-cloaked mountains swell around us. And though Red’s facial blebs have started to ooze, he radiates boyish optimism.