The Wilds (18 page)

“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 always 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.”