Julia Elliott - The Wilds

I keep picturing that moment when we’ll meet by the pool at sunset. I keep picturing Red reclined beside the waterfall featured on the hotel’s brochure. First he’ll look startled. Then he’ll smile as his eyes run up and down my body. He’ll bask in the vision of a female epidermis refortified with type-III collagen and glowing like the moon. Though I haven’t worn jewel tones for years, I’ll highlight the infantile pallor of my skin with a scarlet sheath dress. I’ll wear a choker of Burmese rubies. Dye my hair auburn, paint my nails crimson, wear lipstick the color of oxygenated blood.

After we revel in the softness of a ten-minute kiss, we’ll drink Romanée-Conti under the stars.

Yesterday, I stood in the airport lobby, watching Red hop from a flower-decked golf cart and then scurry through strong wind to Mukti’s commuter jet. Keffiyeh-style headgear and huge sunglasses concealed his face. When he turned from the platform to wave, a shadow passed over him, and then he dipped into the jet. I have no idea how his Shedding went. I have no idea what his refurbished carnality looks like, though I’ve seen Facebook pics of his thirtysomething self, his high school yearbook photos, a few snapshots of the young Red rock climbing in Costa Rica.

Lissa too has been spirited away — nubile and golden, I fear. Though she was obscured by a chiffon Lotus robe, I have the sick suspicion that she’s gone through her Shedding unscathed. That she looks gorgeous. That she’ll stalk Red at the Casa Bougainvillea, appearing naked and luminous beneath his balcony in a courtyard crammed with flowering shrubs.

And now, as the few remaining Crusties huddle in the basement of the Skandha Center, awaiting the wrath of a category-four hurricane named Ophelia, Gobind Singh lectures us on the Deceptive Singularity of the Self.

“The Self you cling to,” says Gobind Singh, “is an empty No Self, or Shunya , for the True Self does not differentiate between Self and Other, which is not the same, of course, as the No Self.”

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.

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.