The Wilds

by Julia Elliott

  Gobind Singh sighs and takes a long glug of springwater, for we are the Stubborn Ones, unable to take pleasure in the Shedding of Others, greedy for our own transformation. According to Gobind Singh, the True Self must revel in the Beauty of the Devas, even if we ourselves do not attain True Radiance during this cycle, because the True Self makes no distinction between Self and Other.

  According to Gobind Singh’s philosophy, I should delight in the divine copulation of Red and Lissa, which is probably taking place right this second on 1,000-thread-count sheets. I should yowl with joy at the thought of their shuddering, simultaneous orgasm. I should partake in the perkiness of Lissa’s ass as she darts from the bed, turning to give Red a full-frontal display before disappearing into the humongous bathroom to pee. According to Gobind Singh, their ecstasy is my ecstasy.

  Glowing with self-actualization, floating a few millimeters above the bamboo flooring, Gobind Singh weaves among us. We sit in full lotus, five sullen earthbound Crusties, slumped in our own hideousness. We fidget and pick at our flaking shells. The second the guru turns his back, we roll our eyes at each other.

  And when the winds of Hurricane Ophelia pick up, shaking the building and howling fiercely enough to blot out the throbbing of electronic tablas, we can’t control the fear that grips us. All we can think about is literally saving our skins. As the electricity flickers and the storm becomes a deluge, Gobind Singh tells us that all men, no matter how wretched, have a Buddha Embryo nestled inside them, gleaming and indestructible as a diamond.

  I wake alone in the basement of the Skandha Center, calling out in the darkness for the others. I bang my shins against their empty cots. Upstairs in the dim hallway, I discover sloughed casing, shreds of what looks like crinkled snakeskin littering the jute carpet. I pick my way toward the light. Hurricane Ophelia has shattered the floor-to-ceiling lobby windows, strewing the floor with shards of glass.

  Out on the wrecked patio, windblown chairs have been smashed against the side of the building. And bird-calls whiffle through the air.

  “Hello!” I yell, but no one answers.

  The Samsara Complex is empty. So is the Lotus Lounge, both buildings battered by the storm.

  I jog down a jungle trail toward the Moksha Jasmine Grove. There, a natural spring trickles from the lips of a stone Buddha. Pink birds flit through the garden. The statue squats in a pool, surrounded by trellises of Arabian jasmine that have miraculously survived the hurricane. Raindrops sparkle on leaves. The garden is a locus of peace and light.

  From the deepest kernel of my being, I crave water. My throat’s parched. My skin burns. And I know that my time has come. I feel pregnant with the glowing fetus of my future self.

  I shed my robe. I step into the blue pool. I sink neck-deep into the shallow water, mimicking the pyramid structure of the seated Buddha, face-to-face with his stone form. I drink from the spring until my thirst is quenched. And then I breathe through my nose, fold my hands into a cosmic mudra. Counting each inhalation, I become one with the water.

  My body is like a pool’s surface, its brilliance dulled only by a skin of algae.

  My body is like a fiery planet, casting off interstellar dust.

  Slowly, I rub myself, chanting the Bodhisattva Vows:

  I vow to liberate all beings, without number.

  I vow to uproot all endless blind passions.

  I vow to penetrate, beyond measure, the Dharma gates.

  And the Great Way of Buddha, I vow to attain.

  My casing begins to pull away. I don’t look at my uncovered flesh. I squeeze my eyelids shut to avoid temptation and keep on chanting, focused on the radiance pulsing within. In my mind’s eye I see a glimmer of movement, a hazy form with human limbs, a new-and-improved woman emerging from the murk—glorious and unashamed.

  On the count of three, I open my eyes.

  The Whipping

  In one hour and forty-five minutes my punishment will transpire. That’s how Dad, who sits in the kitchen flicking ash on his greasy plate of pork crumbs, always says it. After putting on a rubber glove, stealing a pack of cigarettes from the snot-yellow depths of his handkerchief drawer, getting caught, insulting his cheap brand (Doral), and then hovering around the breakfast table pronouncing the similarities between the intestinal tube of liver pudding he was eating and a turd, I was told that I would receive a whipping, in my parents’ bedroom, in exactly two hours.

  My father, an elementary school principal who paddles kids for a living, has several lines on his résumé devoted to his whipping expertise. He’s developed it into a high art form. Just last week I overheard him tell my mother about a nightmare he’d had in which an endless line of summer school delinquents stretched down the central hallway of the school, wound through the hot hell of the playground, and then snaked up the hill toward the poultry-processing plant, where the angry gong of the sun clanged over the horizon. The boys he whipped were blond Aryan imps like the children of the damned, and they taunted him with the high tinkle of their laughter. Dad finally discovered that he’d been beating them with a dead chicken, and he woke up, had a cigarette, and could not get back to sleep.

  It’s Saturday afternoon, and the dog breath of summer pants through the windows. Cicadas scream. T. W. Manley’s go-cart keeps ripping through our backyard, where my twin brothers are boxing with the gloves Dad bought them so they won’t bash each other’s face in. Mom’s taking a nap upstairs. My huge father hunches at the kitchen table in his red bathrobe, working on his novel about King Arthur, and I’m not allowed to say one word to him. But the best way to delay a whipping is to keep my parents angry. They won’t whip us when they’re mad. That would be abusive. So I creep around the table, every now and then freezing into the position of a hideously deformed mutant and flashing fake sign language. I gargle grape Kool-Aid and spit long spumes of it into the sink. Dad’s trying to act mature, frowning thoughtfully, scribbling notes in the margins of his manuscript. But the knuckles of the fist grasping his pen are white.

  Mom has refused to give me a home perm, which means I’ll be ugly for the rest of the summer, and one of my little boobies has grown an alien lump down in it that hurts. A massive zit festers in my nose like a parasite; I’ve spent the morning picking at it with a needle. I shaved my legs without Mom’s permission, and the tiny cuts where I sliced off my mosquito bites sting. The sour chunks of food I keep sucking from my braces symbolize something—I’m not sure what, but it makes me think of the night Dad told me about Turdus philomelos, the songbird that lines its nest with mud, dung, and rotten wood. Walling itself in a domestic prison of its own crap was how he put it. That could be a metaphor, Dad said, lighting his zillionth cigarette and scowling at my mother.

  And now, exactly one hour and forty minutes before my scheduled beating, Dad splashes Jim Beam into his glass of Coke. If he gets drunk, he won’t be able to administer the beating. Then my mother will lash me with one of her colorful belts.

  I’m thinking that this time I’ll run away. I’ll get my best friend, Cujo, to swing by on his moped, and we’ll ride all the way to the beach. We’ll build a fort and live off fish and candy. But my bathing suit is hideous, my boobs are deformed, my freckles have darkened into an ugly swarm, and I don’t feel like creeping out of the hot dark house today. So instead I slump against the desk where Mom’s bloated purse holds court among unpaid bills, an empty cheese puffs bag, a broken sandal she’s been meaning to have repaired, several of Dad’s prescriptions, a bottle of Mercurochrome, a catcher’s mitt, a corroded battery, and an empty basket adorned with dusty plastic magnolias.

  One hour and thirty minutes before my appointment with the whipping expert, the twins come scrambling through the back door, Little Jack clutching a bulging Star Wars pillowcase spattered with blood, the Runt toting their BB guns. I wonder what it’ll be today, and Dad, into his second whiskey Coke, perks up at the smell of game.

  “What you got there, boys?” he asks, pecking at the bag with his long gr
ay nose, pinning it with his good eye, and licking his lips.

  “Robins,” the ten-year-old twins squeal.

  “Robins don’t have much meat, but we’ll cook up a huntsman’s feast.”

  Sputtering happily with nervous tics, a fresh drink tinkling in his hand, Dad leads the boys out to the picnic table, just beyond the open kitchen window. As he spreads newspapers, he boasts about survival in the wilderness, how a true man must learn to live off the fruits of forest and lake, how he could gut a hummingbird with a toothpick before he was potty trained. I sit down at the kitchen table, light one of Dad’s butts, and suck the sweet smoke down. Poison frolics through my bloodstream. I drip some Jim Beam into my Kool-Aid and guzzle it. I eat a Tic Tac. Enjoying a second cigarette butt, spying on them through the window, I watch Little Jack pick at the pile of robins as emerald flies cavort and my baby brother, Cabbage, strolls over in his tinfoil loincloth to aim his laser gun at Dad’s head. Our obese Boykin spaniels have crawled from their holes. They waddle and grunt at Dad’s feet, drunk on the delicious musk of dead animal.

  “Chew chew,” says Cabbage. “You dead, Daddy.”

  A cat skull dangles from a filthy shoelace tied around Cabbage’s neck. He’s wearing Dad’s yellow jockstrap on his head, long gloves made of panty hose, and two plastic RC bottles strapped to his back with a Cub Scout belt. Born premature, Cabbage lived in a tank for three months, and he still looks like a bleached frog.

  “I kilt you,” Cabbage says. Dad slumps at the table, then twitches back to life.

  “I’m immortal,” he says, grabbing a bird.

  Dad plucks feathers and demonstrates how to singe the remaining fluff off the scrawny carcass with his cigarette lighter. He decapitates a robin with one strong chop of his rusty hunting knife, then hacks off its wiry reptilian claws. He slits it open and picks out a wad of dainty guts, cupping the gleaming wine gem of the animal’s heart in his hand for the twins to examine. Cicadas pulse their mystical chants. The sun beats down, and my father’s great and noble nose gleams with manly oils.

  “This is the heart, sons,” says Dad, “the pouch containing the animal’s soul. We’ll dice it up and put it in the gravy, and it’ll give us the keen eyesight of the bird. Indians said a prayer for the beasts they killed, thanking them for their sacrifice.”

  Dad closes his eyes, and the idiot twins copy him; Dad mumbles something and then drops the giblet into a bowl.

  “General Richard Heron Anderson lived an entire month in the wild on pokeweed salad and fried lizards,” Dad says.

  “Gross,” says Little Jack. “I’d starve.”

  “If we ever suffer a nuclear holocaust,” says Dad, taking a sip from his blood-smeared tumbler, “you might have to live off the flesh of radioactive dogs.”

  “I would eat stuff out of cans first,” says the Runt, trying to saw through a robin’s neck with his pocketknife.

  The twins make a mess of cleaning their robins. They can’t find the guts. They slump in the heat, glancing hungrily at the shrubbery. T. W. Manley’s go-cart engine revs up again. Dad hurls a cluster of intestines at the Runt’s cheek and scowls at him when he squeals.

  Fifty-five minutes before my scheduled punishment, Mom’s still sleeping and Dad’s manning the kitchen in his red bathrobe, cooking up a huntsman’s feast of robins and grits and gravy, sloshing golden drink from his Jim Beam bottle without bothering to screw the cap back on. The grimy ceiling fan churns the muggy air. The twins hunch at the table, drinking pickle juice from shot glasses. Cabbage lurks in the dim roachy realm of the pantry, clanking metal cans together and muttering.

  I’m eating stale cheese puffs while reading random snatches from Dad’s novel:

  And so Merlin became a hawk and flitted through the green velvety forest . . . When Sir Lancelot gazed into the deep pools of Guinevere’s eyes, fires flickered within him, terror and joy commingling in the hot cauldron of his soul . . . From a shroud of white mist Morgan le Fey slipped naked and laughing, her alabaster breasts adorned with twin rosebuds, her long raven locks dancing about her taut buttocks.

  Say what? With his huge hand, Dad snatches the pages just when the reading looks promising. He stashes his novel atop the refrigerator and stomps back to his pale pile of birds. The robins look fetal. They might be frogs or mice or fatty little moles. He rolls the dead things in flour and drops them one by one into the spitting skillet. Rich marrowy smells float from the pan, and Cabbage emerges to take a sniff. His rabbit nostrils quiver, and his eyes screw up with thinking.

  “It smells like a rusty hamburger out here,” Cabbage says, disappearing back into the dark of the pantry. Dad chops a purple onion and sautés it in the charred grease, adding flour, pouring milk from the gallon jug, spattering Worcestershire sauce and bright red drops of Texas Pete. He piles the fried birds on a silver platter pulled from the dusty depths of the china cabinet and smothers them with gravy. He sets a plate of grits before each twin and positions the platter in the center of the table, beside Mom’s diseased cactus plant.

  “Eat up, boys,” Dad says.

  The twins pick at their robins, fidget, and take itty-bitty baby bites. They hold their noses and squirm. Into the stubble-fringed shredding machine of his mouth, our father slowly inserts a whole bird carcass, grinds it into gamy gruel, and swallows.

  “Delicious,” he says, bathing us in the glow of his ghoulish grin.

  “Among the Indians it is a sacrilege to let the sacred flesh of an animal go to waste,” Dad informs us. “You must eat, boys, or the spirit of the robin will haunt you. The spirit of the robin will fly around your room at night, slither into your ears, and peck your brains until you go crazy.”

  Each twin lifts a bird to his lips, sighs, and licks it clean of gravy. Each twin removes the burnt, scabby film of fried breading from his respective dead animal, wads it into a ball, places it on his tongue like a holy wafer, closes his mouth, and waits for the substance to dissolve. Tears drip from their eyes as they swallow.

  “That doesn’t count as the animal itself,” says Dad, biting a robin in two. Delicate bones snap as he chews. He gulps as he swallows, and his tongue slips out to dab grease from his lips. “The flesh is the thing,” he says. “The transubstantiated spirit of the robin will fill you with the bird’s power.”

  The twins pinch tufts of meat from their carcasses and line them up like pills to be swallowed whole. Little Jack eats one first.

  “It tastes like pesticides,” he says.

  The Runt copies Little Jack.

  “It tastes like toads,” says the Runt.

  According to the twins, the robins taste like hair spray, ammonia, and chicken necks. The robins taste like grasshopper meat dipped in gasoline. They taste pee-sautéed and weird. According to the twins, because the robins they slaughtered spent the morning pecking pesticidal pellets from old Mr. Horton’s mouthwash-green lawn, the birds are probably lethal.

  “Get out of my sight, you ungrateful wenches,” Dad says, banging his tumbler on the table. “You better prepare yourselves for a visit from the Great Robin. It will flap into your window tonight and fill your room with feathers. The Great Robin will terrify you with its rotten worm breath. The Great Robin will drop turds the size of shoes. Calling upon the nobility of its bird genealogy, the Great Robin will sprout the atavistic claws of the pterodactyl and tear your soft, womanly bodies into bloody confetti.”

  Dad grins until his mandible vanishes. The twins scramble to their feet. Dad lights a cigarette and flicks ash into the rib cage of a half-gnawed robin. A sunbeam shines directly onto the ashy carcass and lights up stained cracks in the ceramic plate.

  On a rancid summer dog day, when you’re dirty and scrawny and ugly and poor, when your fingernails sting from too much biting, when the kitchen stinks of unclean plates, when there’s nowhere to go, when punishment awaits you, when swarms of gnats flicker beyond bright windows, when heat sinks your mind into the syrupy filth of boredom, when you are disgusted by the sight of your
own stubbed toes, when the glimpse of an ancient neighbor drifting across the green void of his lawn fills you with a new species of sadness, a screen door slamming can shoot straight to your heart, plunging it deeper than you thought it would go.

  I hold my breath for as long as I can. I exhale noisily. Dad sneers at me and pours himself another drink.

  Even though my father may whip me in twenty-five minutes, I feel abandoned when he staggers off to the living room, snatching his manuscript from the top of the refrigerator. He closes the door behind him. I mope around in the kitchen, plucking crusted bowls from counters, sniffing them. I hear a creak on the stairs, and Mom steps into the greasy light of the kitchen. Her face looks puffy. Her nylon housecoat sticks to her sweaty spots. She plods to the stove, where Dad has left the platter of fried robins covered with a dented pizza pan. She lifts the pan and sniffs. Slowly, with blank black eyes, she fixes herself a plate of robin and grits and gravy and sits down under the stale bluster of the ceiling fan. She nibbles a chunk of robin from its carcass, and only after she has chewed and swallowed and made a bitter face does she see me, lurking behind her.

  “What are these—quail?” she asks.

  “Robins,” I say.

  “Quit being a smart-ass, they must be quail, they’re just freezer-burned.”

  My mother will not believe that the robins are robins, and she eats several bites of grits and robin gravy before putting down her fork. Her mind is sunk deep beneath her chewing, but eventually she registers the taste.

  “They’re robins, I swear to God,” I say.

  “Who would cook robins?”

  “Dad, of course. He would cook anything. He would cook an iguana or a monkey or a cat.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  I take Mom out back, where bright guts and rusty feathers have been strewn across the table by the scavenging spaniels. Flies crawl on the waxy shreds of organs.