Julia Elliott - The Wilds

At last the tears start trickling, and the sadness of the world courses through my scrawny body, hurling me into the musky nest of my parents’ bed, where I give in to the delicious abandon of weeping. My mother hangs her belt on its hook and slips out of the room. I start feeling sorry for myself. I’m an ugly runt, breastless and knobby-kneed, writhing on a cheap bedspread, wearing a Pamper under my linty shorts. My hair won’t hold a curl, and I’ve blown my chances for a home perm. My nose won’t stop growing. I’m a peeling, sunburned, freckled monster who’ll never know the casual beauty of radiant, suntanned limbs. My mouth is a scrap heap of bitter metal. School will start soon, and I’ll have to face my class without breasts, without a tan, without a perm.

By the time I’m done wallowing, it’s almost evening. I climb off the bed and am overjoyed to discover, on the dresser, an open pack of cigarettes. I figure I deserve at least six after what I endured, so I slip the cancer sticks into the empty cups of my training bra. Then I tiptoe down the stairs, through the dark living room, and out into the yard, where dark birds churn the sky. The twins have put down their boxing gloves. They’re sitting in the long grass, taking turns scratching each other’s back. And Cabbage walks toward me in the balmy air, cupping something in his hands.

“Got him,” says Cabbage, slightly opening the cage of his palms.

Cabbage holds a toad, belly-down. A tiny head pokes out, nostrils quivering, goggle eyes glowing in the sulfur light. The beauty of the toad’s eyes shocks me — rich and marbled gold. I lose myself in their intricacies, breathing in smells of warm pine straw, metallic boy-sweat, the crisp, dusty gaminess of the bones around Cabbage’s neck. The sky flushes pink. A breeze, light as a genie, swirls through the thick air.

Cabbage sticks out his little tongue, turns the toad belly-up, and licks it.

“What does it taste like?” I ask.

“Rain,” he whispers, “with Lysol and ham.”

“Now chant,” I say.

“O gobwe gammu,” says Cabbage, “hep me not die. Gwabu, gwabu, gwabu.”

He licks the toad solemnly and closes his eyes in prayer. When he opens them, the yard fills with the moist whistling of the blackbird flock. The air has darkened.

“Gwabu monsoon ubu booboo,” says Cabbage, holding the toad high in the air. Lightning bugs rise from dusky shadows. Cabbage marches with his toad to the picnic table.

“Belteety momamabu,” he says, blessing the piles of robin guts with his toad. The moon has floated to the edge of the sky like a bubble of golden grease. Gardenias perfume the dead-bird stench. Flies walk around on the robin guts like delicate and mysterious robots. Cabbage moves off, chanting in the darkness, and I feel the backyard expanding around me, glittering with stars and bugs, crawling with strange beasts. Dad is in the kitchen, smoking, a warm light illuminating his bald spot. Mom laughs at something he has said — they must be in love again. Some kind of stew boils on the stove, crickets are singing, and the twins are humming the Donkey Kong theme. I light a cigarette, lie on my back in the pine straw, and take a deep, sweet drag while staring up at Venus, which pulses in the sky.

Clad in a deerskin loincloth, his ripped body gleaming with boar lard, Zugnord looms above us on a stone dais. We are flabby newbies, he tactfully suggests, snatched from the industrial teat of civilization, where we’ve grown battery-fed and soft, our blood percolating with poisons. We are half-dead, our brains zombified by office work and Internet surfing. We are discontent. But so was Zugnord, once. Projected behind him on a vast screen is his former self, Wilbur Sims, a paunchy, befuddled dumpling of a man in rumpled khakis. He squints at the camera like some subterranean rodent.

We gasp. For how could this clammy, balding creature have transformed into Zugnord? Zugnord with his glistening pecs and flowing Tarzan hair? Zugnord with his bold eagle eyes? Zugnord, who looks as though he could leap over a boulder and tackle a mastodon, gut it with a piece of expertly chiseled flint?

As Zugnord clicks through his slideshow, we gasp and gasp. We watch in amazement as a chunky troll of a man sheds flab, sprouts hair, stands tall, and wields the most exquisitely sculpted limbs we have ever seen. We watch him journey from a dark gym to a sun-dappled forest, where he builds his own wood hut. Watch him forage for berries, dig up tubers, kill deer with a hand-hewn bow and arrow. Watch him sketch magic symbols onto his face with charcoal, arrange bones on the ground, dance and chant in the light of the full moon. We would not be surprised if he sprouted wings and flew up into the stars.

“But enough about me,” says Zugnord. “Tonight is all about you. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

The banquet hall of Hominid Hotel resembles an imperial stateroom from Planet of the Apes , a vast pseudo-cave with undulating walls of stained concrete, indoor streams, and flickering gas torches. Lush fruit trees grow out of the pebble-tile floors, a feature that was probably absent in a typical Paleolithic cave, but whatever. I could also take issue with the melodramatic mural that sweeps along the curved wall behind the stage. It features a hunting scene — a mammoth stippled with spears, Schwarzeneggerian hominids exulting around the flailing beast. I recall my college anthropology teacher lecturing us on Aurignacian cave art, debunking the mythical male hunter as she cleaned her glasses with the sleeve of her polyester dashiki. According to her, a typical hunt scene was probably a family working together with spears and nets to bag a rodent or monkey.

But I’m not here to nitpick. I’m here to lose weight. I’m here to become a sinewy cavewoman with a core of steel and a glint of primal vitality in my eyes. I’m here to purge my body and mind, shed the bloat of civilization, cast off the epochs of agricultural decadence that have collected around my midsection. The banquet hall is packed with pudgy office drones, rich mothers serious about vanquishing baby weight, and B-list celebrities at the dawn of middle age. I myself won the stair-walk competition at my corporate office, and the prize was three weeks off and a free ride at Pleisto-Scene Island, the Paleopalooza of fitness adventure tourism. I left my fiancé sulking in his man cave, slumped in the ennui of our two-year engagement. Despite his protests that I’m perfect the way I am, despite the terror lurking in his eyes as he kissed me goodbye (yes, he would miss me sorely, but not for the right reasons), I dashed off to transform myself.

The lights dim. Tribal electronica pumps from hidden speakers. And Zugnord, our fearless leader, speaks to us in his mellow baritone, radiating casual virility.

“This is the beginning of a journey,” he says, “deep into the self.”

According to Zugnord, there is a caveperson, crouched and muzzled, within each of us. According to Zugnord, we will travel to the land of our ancestors, awaken primitive parts of our brains, forge new synaptic maps, and tap into hidden stores of vitality.

“You will walk into an ancient forest and meet your uncorrupted hominid self,” says Zugnord, fumbling with his remote. A lush forest scene glows upon the screen behind him — primeval, Edenic. Zugnord reads through the guest list in alphabetical order. One by one, people walk up to the stage as he calls their names, accepting their Paleolithic workout costumes. Zugnord presents the guests with pomegranates, symbolic of the fall into decadent agriculture, and whispers something into their ears.