Julia Elliott - The Wilds

He clambered around on all fours, trotting toward me, growling and spitting, and I wanted to dissolve into the couch. He sniffed my sneakers and licked my left ankle and whimpered like a dog. I was wondering if I should run or try to pet him, when he stood up and loomed over me, the air behind him darkening as a cloud passed over the moon. He shook with demented laughter. Then the night went white, and he tore the mask from his face.

His brothers shrieked and clambered to the top of the stairs. A door slammed, and I knew that I was alone with the wolfman, with all his fury and frustration.

Ben’s acne had broken into bloom. His face glowed with an eerie bluish luster, and I thought that maybe his father had brought nuclear radiation home in his clothes. Zits swarmed like fire ants on Ben’s brow. Purple pimples glistened like drops of jelly on his cheeks. Fat whiteheads nestled behind the wings of his nose. Only his eyes and lips had escaped the infection.

Ben sat beside me, holding his mask in his hands. “The moon controls the tides,” he said, “and brings poison boiling to the surface of my skin. But tomorrow I’ll be a normal boy again. I swear.”

I didn’t know what to say. Some of his pimples were seeping yellow drops.

“The family curse.” Ben winced. “My father had it, and his father before him. Whoever gets it always ends up having lots of sons.” He rolled his eyes again and forced a laugh. A complex blush lit up his zits.

He took my hand and I let him hold it. His hand looked completely normal, warm and smooth and brown, pretty enough to bite. I could feel the moon licking at my skin with its magnetic light. I wondered if it was true that the moon moved the blood of women. I wondered if mysterious clocks, ancient and new, had started to tick within me. Ben leaned toward me. I threw my head back and vamped for his kiss. I’d spent a hundred nights dressed up in gowns and makeup, kissing stuffed animals, and my lips felt fat and sweet. But the hot suction cup of his mouth hit my throat, and he bit me, digging his braces into the soft skin of my neck. When I swatted him off, he laughed like a hoodlum and scratched his chin.

“I’m a wolfman,” he said sarcastically, as though that explained everything. He shrugged and lit a cigarette.

Through the stinging wound on my neck, Ben’s slobber trickled into my bloodstream. I waited. I felt a slight burn when the poison hit my heart. Acid rose to the back of my throat. The taste of dead animals filled my mouth. Wild hope and withering despair tainted the meat, the craziness of animals shut up. The poison was in my body now, changing me, making me stronger and meaner.

I reached for Ben’s cheek and stroked a mass of oily bumps. My fingertips drifted along his jawbone and tickled the triangular patch of downy skin under his chin. He closed his eyes like a lizard in a trance and swallowed. I pressed my lips to his neck. I tried not to laugh as I licked the tendon that ran from his collarbone toward his jaw. Ben groaned and grabbed my elbow. His ears smelled like cinnamon. When I stuck my tongue into the silky cranny beneath his left earlobe, he bucked. I could feel the pulsing of intricate muscles and secret glands. I could feel veins throbbing with fast blood. Finding the spot I’d been searching for, I gnawed it gently until breaking the skin and tasting copper. Then I bit him harder with my small, sharp, spit-glazed teeth.

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.