The Wilds (39 page)

I’d meant to duplicate all of our recordings while he was at work. But every time I stepped into the moldy basement, with its damp Berber carpet, sweating walls, and deceptively innocent toothpaste smell, I’d feel a wobble of panic in my heart. I’d rush back up into brighter air.

Millipedes had invaded the basement bathroom our second summer on the mountain. Every morning Bill found two dozen slithering around the dewy toilet base.
He’d smash them with a hoe. Their crushed bodies smelled like toothpaste. Flecks of brown chitin littered the carpet. The woods that enveloped us were practically a rain forest, and the summer humidity didn’t let up until first frost.

That fall, the landlords’ daughter, off at college for the first time, suffered from food allergies, and when the health center treated her with steroids, she had a mental breakdown. She went jogging after a star, followed it all the way out to an interstate exit, where the police found her, dehydrated and chattering about astrology. They sent her home. Every time she had a squabble with her parents, she’d run off into the woods. I’d be gazing out the window at the autumn leaves when she’d dart by our house, a whir of anxiousness and flowing hair. And one of the landlords’ llamas, Zephyr, had started spitting. Every time I strolled through the goat pasture, Zephyr would rush up, a flurry of black fur and dust, and attempt to spit a reddish jet of puke into my face.

When winter came, Bill turned vegan and lost fifteen pounds. He wanted to live off the grid, he said, away from bourgeois pretenders, in a small cabin that would meet our basic needs. The landlords’ daughter was still having episodes, wandering the woods behind our house. Zephyr was still a dark furious presence down in the goat pasture.

I got an instructorship sixty miles away at Clemson, would drive off into the mountains and return exhausted just as Bill got back from his stint at the bakery. We’d throw a meal together, open a bottle of wine, talk about the cabin we planned to build that spring, though we never agreed on how big it would be and whether or not it would have electricity.

Fifteen pounds lighter, Bill could never get warm. Huddled by the stove, he wore two layers of thermal underwear, a dingy mustard snowsuit, a wool cap with a special cotton lining he’d sewn in himself. In the flickering firelight, his cheeks looked ghoulish and his enormous eyes brimmed with strange fevers.

“I have a sinus headache,” he said one night, “because you didn’t clean the cheese knife.”

“What?”

“You used it to cut vegetables. All it takes is one tiny particle of dairy to make me sick.”

Bill winced like a martyr and turned back to
Mysteries of Beekeeping Explained
.

By summer our arguments had swelled luxuriant and green, like the poison-oak patch behind our house. We spent entire nights screaming our throats raw. Sometimes
the landlords’ imbalanced daughter, out prowling, would pause at one of our open windows to listen, an ecstatic grin on her face.

In July I got a job offer in Atlanta with the English department at Georgia State and Bill moved down into the basement with the millipedes.

One warm shrieking night, I drifted down to the basement. I intended to climb on top of Bill and kiss him all over his face. He lay prone on the moldy sofa he’d covered with a sheet, one arm flopped onto the floor. I could hear his thick breathing, louder than the silvery pulse of the katydids. I could smell the oddly minty scent of crushed millipedes. I straddled Bill. He opened his eyes. When I leaned down to kiss him, his thin black tongue slithered out of his mouth—a millipede, I realized, its underside feathery with a thousand moving legs. I floated back up the stairs, out of the house, and into the blackness of the sky.

Only when I was hovering high over the trees did the sadness of his transformation hit me. I woke up and e-mailed the English department at Georgia State.

“Brain-computer interface,” says Possum. “Wetware made of insect parts and frog neurons. Telepathic
cockroaches creeping around your house, gathering data for marketing companies.”

“But I thought everybody had a crystal implanted in their head and voluntarily broadcast all brain farts to the mainframe,” says Tim.

“They do, but the cockroaches are looking for microtrends, subthoughts, unconscious motivations.”

When Possum is deep into the bullshit intricacies of postmodern surveillance, and he has lit his thousandth cigarette, and Tim has drifted, once more, to the edge of the woods to take a leak, Bill arrives.

It’s 10:10
PM
. An owl offers an ominous hoot in his honor, then flutters off to snatch some clueless rodent into the howling air.

Bill must be surprised to see us. But by the time he kills his lights and opens his gate, eases his truck into its spot, and emerges, with a cloth bag of groceries, he has composed himself. He’s a slight figure, moving through darkness toward the porch, and I find myself gripping the handles of my chair.

“Well, well, well,” he says.

If I could see his face it would show only the faintest quirk of shock, I’m sure—an eyebrow twitch, a shifting of frown lines—the same look he used to get when he spotted yet another millipede gliding across the damp linoleum of our basement bathroom.

“It’s us,” I say, shining my penlight at Possum. “And watch out for Tim. He’s creeping around your property somewhere. Please don’t shoot him.”

“I’ll try not to,” says Bill. “I’ve upgraded to a Savage Mark II, a big improvement on the old Beeman.”

“Killer,” says Possum.

“Been doing a little hunting.” Bill steps onto the porch, puts down his groceries, stands warm and humming a foot away from me. “Though I do keep it under my bed at night.”

During our second winter on the mountain, on a sunny day after the first snow, alone in the house, I’d gotten caught up in a three-hour frenzy of vacuuming. With fierce efficiency, I’d vacuumed the walls and the baseboards and every square inch of floor. I emptied closets and cupboards and drawers, probed with my sucking wand under furniture and behind appliances. I vacuumed until I reached the ecstatic state of a fasting medieval nun, feverish with holy purpose.

When I squatted beside our bed to peer beneath it, I saw a dried roach, floating balls of filth and hair, a wool sock coated with dust. And I saw Bill’s machete, the one he’d bought to harvest heirloom grains, stashed under his side of the bed. He’d never mentioned that there was a weapon under our bed, poised within easy gripping distance.

I cleaned the machete with a damp rag and placed it exactly as I’d found it. I went to my office and dug a box of Camel Lights from a drawer. I smoked only one, out on the front porch, as the iced branches near our chimney dripped.

Possum’s pacing out in the front yard, in light as crisp and tart as a Granny Smith apple. His black boots gleam. His goblin grin has erupted in its full glory, thanks to two cans of Red Bull and a half-dozen cigarettes. He walks circles around Tim, who’s reclining in a broken lawn chair he found stashed under Bill’s cabin.

“Why not directly into their nervous systems?” Tim yawns. “Computer-calibrated microdoses for intricate mood adjustment, released by nanobot teams in the brain.”

“Not drugs per se,” says Possum, “but drug technologies. They might use bacteria, or viruses, or bioengineered parasites, for example.”

Bill has disappeared again.

This morning, in the dark chill of the cabin, I’d heard him getting dressed. As a bird warbled outside the window, I thought I was in Atlanta, waking up to a car alarm. But then I smelled Bill, the cedar of the cabin, the
glandular odor of small game animals. He actually sells their pelts on eBay, drives to the local library to check his account and upload pics. The walls of his cabin are soft with patches of fur.

Last night he told us that hipsters in Brooklyn will pay sixty dollars for a coonskin cap. That the Etsy crafting crowd can’t get enough of his bones. That’s why his industrial shelves are lined with the bleached craniums of foxes and coons. That’s why he has tackle boxes packed with the delicate skulls of birds. Some girl in Philadelphia dips them in silver and strings them on vintage chains.

“But I only kill what I eat,” Bill said, describing the taste of fox as wild, with a hint of brassy urine. “You have to soak the meat in vinegar.”

“Trap or shoot?” Possum asked.

“Both.” And then Bill told us about the ingenious bird traps he’d made of bamboo. He described the thrill of hooking brook trout, the sadness he’d felt when he shot his first rabbit and heard it scream.

In the guttering light of kerosene lanterns, we drank warm beer on the porch. Our cooler had run out of ice and Bill has no refrigerator. Sometime after midnight, Bill dug out the shoe box of old Swole cassettes and played them on his boom box. The music was ridiculously fast, as though calibrated to a hummingbird’s nervous system.
And we marveled at the thrill we’d felt back then, when we were enmeshed in every last bleep and sputter.

Though we could get no drunker, we drank more beer. Possum and Tim finally swayed off to sleep in the car. And Bill put on a CD of our mountain music, the stuff we’d concocted in the midst of a blizzard three years before. We sat on the porch as psychedelic crickets pulsed over a moaning Wurlitzer. And then: six meticulously layered violin tracks, silver smears of flute, and our voices—so many different versions of both of us. Moans, howls, hums, grunts. Lots of chanting. We circled each other, overlapped, fused, and retreated. We cleaved and melded and darted away.

“How are your mystics?” Bill asked me.

“I don’t ever get to read them. Too busy grading freshman essays.”

“Do you miss them?”

Of course I missed my scrawny passionate mystics, who starved themselves until their brains caught fire and Jesus stepped down from the ether, right into their freezing cells, his pink flesh so warm it almost burned their crimped fingers.

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

How could we help falling together in the darkness? How could we help giggling as we tripped over each other on the way to his futon? I still hadn’t gotten a decent look at him. But as we rooted in the dark, I could
smell pure Bill, his hands musky from the little animals he killed. Eating meat had changed the taste of him. And he seemed denser yet lighter, stronger yet somehow more nebulous, Bill and not Bill.

This morning, as he moved around the room getting dressed, making small domestic noises that were painfully familiar to me, I felt self-conscious and faked sleep, burrowed down under the blanket so that he couldn’t see my face. When he finally left, and I emerged from the covers to take a deep breath, I saw neat rows of animal skulls, white as industrial sugar, eyeless but somehow staring right through me.