The Wilds

by Julia Elliott

  At last I spot the glow of a fire, hunched hominids dancing around the flames.

  The fake Neanderthals are performing some ritual. They dance and twirl. They look dirtier than the other Neanderthals, their outlandish body hair so caked with filth that it looks real. When they see us emerging from the bush, they rejoice. Their jig grows frenzied. Women sway forth with wooden bowls. The fake Neanderthals shove us into the firelight. They pick at our clothes, babble, and sing. The women sprinkle water and herbs on us. I smell rosemary, wild thyme, pepper. Their fire pit is decorated with charred skulls. Their grass huts adorned with bones. Now one of them is tugging at my shorts, now scratching my thighs with his dirty, simian claws.

  “Hey, I’m kind of shy,” says Jeff, chuckling as a Neanderthal woman rifles through his pants pockets. Grinning, she barks some protolanguage. Two husky males secure Jeff’s arms. And then, bellowing in triumph, the woman snatches his iPhone. Not bothering to feign bafflement, she efficiently presses buttons, locates a document, waves the glowing screen in Jeff’s face.

  “So I’m working on a piece of creative nonfiction,” says Jeff. “A light feature, if you will, nothing to get worked up about.”

  Another woman steps forward, rips off Jeff’s shirt, and casts it into the flames.

  Now Jeff is struggling in earnest—tubby, twisting, stumbling. Now he’s cursing, causing a hullaballoo. When he elbows one of the apes in the gut and the brute who’s guarding me lurches in to help his cronies, I take off. I scramble through a nasty cluster of brambles, tearing my knees to hell.

  The forest is dense and dark and full of skittish creatures. I step on something soft, crush the creature to mush. Some stinging insect has crawled into my shirt. Some multilegged creeping thing has landed on my nape. But I don’t stop to brush it off. I run and run. I have no idea whether I’m headed toward the hotel or fleeing into deeper forest, toward more ferocious tribes of fake Neanderthals, spies and cannibals who slurp raw brain-pudding straight from bludgeoned skulls.

  Nimble pursuers are hot on my tail, panting rhythmically. I can feel the adrenaline quickening my blood. I think I hear a woman’s laughter, flitting jaggedly through the trees like a wounded bird. And then I see a shadowy figure—small, fierce, perched in a tree. Her body is impeccably toned. Her bowstring is taut, her arrow nocked and ready.

  “Hello!” I bellow into the darkness. “I’m looking for Zongar!”

  She leaps from the branch.

  “Did that bastard Wilbur send you?”

  “No,” I hiss, surprised at my bitterness. “That bastard did not.”

  She relaxes her weaponry. She looks me over. She beckons for me to follow her.

  Organisms

  When balmy summer days tilted toward unpleasant, and backyards transformed into jungles where super-mosquitoes patrolled lush weeds, Jenny Hawkes liked to walk outside and stand in a margin of shade, listening to the collective hum of her neighborhood’s HVAC units. She’d pretend that the Rapture had snatched all the idiots into outer space. She’d smoke a secret cigarette, a vice she hid even from her husband, and then hurry back into the air-conditioning.

  She worked as a guide for Sibyl, an online information company, answering the random questions of desperate people who were loath to do the research themselves. This morning there had been inquiries about Asian tiger mosquitoes, flood insurance, weight-loss nanobots, and Indian surrogates. Jenny already knew of several good websites on these topics, so she punched her answers in quickly. And then, for the twentieth time that day, she checked the Web for US fatalities in Afghanistan.

  It was one thirty and her son had not emerged from the den for lunch. Lately, as he spent more time before their wide-screen media monitor, he filled the den with his signature scent—the coppery tinge of stress pheromones in his sweat. Jenny did not like to step into this atmosphere, the musky turbulent ambiance that enveloped his gangly body. Obscure glands pumped inside him. Hormones spiked his blood, ripened his genitals, covered secret places with hair, and fed the zits that festered on his sullen face.

  Adam was busy killing off brain cells with a video game, she figured, hunched before Zombie Babe Attack or some other disturbing concept dreamed up by marketing teams who dabbled in adolescent psychology and flirted with the darker urges. As much as she wanted to, Jenny didn’t step down into the atmosphere to ask him if he wanted a sandwich. She went back to her office and dove into the sea of questions, braving the currents of the nation’s fears. Activity on sibyl.com tended to surge after disappointing lunches left people listless at work. With the afternoon stretched out before them, they compulsively typed questions into the crystal ball featured on the site’s main page.

  They could no longer concentrate for extended periods of time. Their hair was falling out. Their homes suffered infestations of bedbugs, fleas, roaches, and ants. On the brink of financial disaster, they received threatening letters from creditors. They maxed out their credit cards, defaulted on their mortgages. Their homes were swept away by tornadoes, devoured by fires, flooded by hurricanes. They hid incurable toenail funguses within their fashionable shoes. They injected their sagging flesh with botulinum toxin A. Cysts and tumors bloomed in the obscure darkness of their wombs and testicles, in their brain and breast tissue, in their livers, gallbladders, bowels, and lungs. Their teeth were yellow. Their garbage disposals smelled of death.

  They had fat sucked out of their thighs and buttocks. They tracked their cheating lovers with spy software and burned off crow’s-feet with laser beams. They were diabetic. They were ashamed of their old tattoos. They felt strange heart palpitations and were addicted to Internet porn. Their children suffered from autism and ADHD. Their lawns were turning brown. Fears of global warming and terrorist attacks and the collapse of the international economy kept them up at night. They thought that perhaps it was time to join a church, get some therapy, call a psychic, or visit a spa on the other side of the world, where the ocean was the blue of an Aleve gel cap and the dollar was still worth something.

  By three thirty Jenny could no longer take it, so she slipped out for another smoke. She pictured her husband scouting the desert in a tank. But she knew he was in an office building, staring at a computer screen, and that the sensitivity of his deployment did not allow him to send e-mails. On the way back to her computer, she took a deep breath and knocked on the door of the den. No answer. Her son must have slumped upstairs to his room. But no: when she opened the door he was still there, hunched on the floor, a few inches from the 3D HDTV. The knobs of his backbone protruded as though he were about to sprout iguana spines. She detected an unfamiliar smell akin to aerosol hair spray. Inhalant abuse was a hot topic on sibyl.com, and she wondered if he was huffing.

  “Adam,” she said, feeling a chill when he refused to offer a grunt in response. The solar shades were drawn. She walked deeper into the atmosphere, into the light of the screen where the carpet was scattered with crushed Coke cans.

  “You ought to eat something besides junk for lunch.”

  She had directed searchers to countless websites on how to get teens to talk, and there she was, at a loss. He was playing Zombie Babe Attack, a misogynist blood-fest in which zombified playboy bunnies chased a male hero through a postapocalyptic city. His avatar slaughtered big-boobed zombies with a Browning machine gun mounted atop a convertible Corvette. The zombie babes wore thongs and heels. They had long blond hair. They exploded with cartoonish bursts of hot-pink gore.

  “Adam,” she said. “You’re sitting too close to the television.”

  Lizard Man, a cinder-block dive near the railroad tracks, was named after the fabled local monster, an anthropomorphic reptile said to haunt swamps and sewers. The mural behind the bar featured a lizard in a top hat, nothing like the sludge-coated cryptid that more than a few citizens swore they’d seen lurking in the depths of their backyards or popping up from manholes on moon-white nights. The watering hole, with its oozing toilets and foggy fish tank, smelled like the kind
of place reptilian and amphibious creatures might inhabit. Toad-shaped men and women slumped at the bar. And the bartender, covered in a spotted hide that had never known sunscreen, seemed to possess a skink gene or two.

  The spray-painted windows blocked all light. It was an odd sensation to step from sun-roasted asphalt into Lizard Man’s smoky darkness. Some people, entering the place in the daytime, were startled to see stars overhead upon stumbling out. Others arrived during the velvet of a summer dusk only to be blasted by the roaring furnace of the morning sun when they finally pulled themselves up from their stools and departed. On certain drunken nights, when the building seemed to pitch like a ship, time played tricks on customers like Miles Escrow, who swore he’d once surfaced from the strangely compressed air of the place to discover that three days had passed. But that didn’t stop him from returning to Lizard Man whenever he’d had enough of Tina Flame, his common-law wife. He sat with with his back to the wall, his large ears twitching as he strained to catch the latest.

  Tonight, folks were abuzz about a recently busted meth lab, from which a former Pecan Queen had fled looking like a hag after entering the place as a dewy beauty of twenty-six. And word had it that the mayor was tangled up in a prostitution racket involving Slovakian thugs and a tanning chain. A graduate of Fox Creek High would appear on American Idol. A Presbyterian preacher had pushed his wife into an industrial feed grinder. And in a stagnant inlet of Lake Wateree, a teen had been killed by a brain-eating amoeba.

  The patrons at Lizard Man were in disagreement about what, exactly, an amoeba was. Tammy Horton said it was a teeny fish, so small that it could swim up your nose and wriggle through your sinuses into your brain, whereupon it’d wind through the maze of your gray matter like Pac-Man munching dots. Titus Redmond disagreed, opining that an amoeba was a plant, an algae-like organism that spread via spores. Roddy Causey had the feeling an amoeba was a mass of little critters, a swarm, though he had no idea what it looked like. At last, Stein cleared his throat. Though Stein seemed to know everything (his name was both an abbreviation of “Einstein” and a nod toward the pewter tankard from which he swilled), he liked to hold off, allowing the regulars to explore a subject before he descended from his Olympian mountain of omniscience to enlighten the ignorant drunkards below. He had two master’s degrees and lived in a rusted Volkswagen bus.

  “An amoeba is a one-celled organism,” he pronounced. “A protozoan, to be exact.”

  Like many of Stein’s clarifications, this didn’t do much to inform the revelers as to what an amoeba looked like or how it behaved. So, after having his tankard refilled with Heineken, Stein sketched a picture of an amoeba on his napkin and passed it around the bar.

  “It’s just a blob,” said Brandy Wellington. “I don’t see how that could eat anybody’s brain.”

  “The brain-eating type has a little sucker that eats your cells,” said Stein. “And then you come down with a fatal case of meningoencephalitis.”

  “I told my son not to go swimming this summer,” said Wanda Bonnet.

  “He just needs to stay away from stagnant water,” said Tubs Watson.

  This brought them around to a discussion of teens and their follies, an inexhaustible subject for those assembled, since most of them were either middle-aged parents or grandparents and thus had firsthand experience with the strange pupal state of the human life cycle, whereupon the organism transformed, almost overnight, from a sweet, well-behaved kid into a self-destructive, narcissistic goon, either monosyllabic or back-talking, a lurching zombie that ate up every morsel in the house and scattered filthy clothing all over the floor.

  Marty Bouknight said his son was a video-game junky. Kim Dewlap said her daughter was a Twitter demon. Most everyone nodded in empathy, having lost a child to the cyber world at some recent point in time. Old Man Winger shook his head. He was an ancient biker whose denim jacket had grown into his epidermis and whose tattoos had faded to ghostly shadows that looked like bruises on his withered arms. He had a very sad story to tell about his cousin’s granddaughter Kayla. She was so into Facebook and Twitter and E-Live that she couldn’t brush her teeth without tweeting. And just last week, her mother had found her in the living room, pressing her face against their plasma monitor as though trying to break through to the other side. The room was littered with so much junk-food packaging that the poor child was practically buried in cellophane. And then she fell into a coma.

  “She ain’t totally out but not exactly there either,” said Winger.

  “What you think caused it?” asked Wanda Bonnet.

  “They don’t know. They’re testing for organ failure caused by her junk-food diet.”

  Every parent of a teen child felt sick, but then relieved that this misfortune had happened to someone else. A few drunken mothers clutched their bosoms. But when Carla Marlin started bragging about her new swimming pool, the conversation shifted toward brighter subjects—like waterskiing, catfish noodling, and time-share condos going cheap at Surf City.

  Beth Irving was a vegetarian, partially for health reasons, but mostly because her line of work made her hyperaware of the intricate life cycles of infectious organisms. She couldn’t look at a piece of meat without imagining it swarming with bacteria and one-celled organisms, crawling with trichinosis roundworms or tapeworm larvae. Once again, she’d found herself in a godforsaken town with a malarial climate and no health-food store, and the only decent place to eat was an Indian buffet that put too much sugar in its eggplant vindaloo. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had stumbled upon another cluster of Toxoplasma hermeticus cases. And though Beth was thrilled to be on the research vanguard of what was quickly becoming recognized as one of the weirdest behavior-modifying protozoan organisms to emerge since Toxoplasma gondii, she always got depressed in these backwater towns with dead Main Streets and flood zones packed with double-wides.

  Because Beth had grown up in a dying town in South Georgia, she always felt an uncanny sensation when cruising empty downtown streets or walking from pounding summer heat into the deep chill of a Piggly Wiggly. She feared she was getting sucked back into the haunted swamplands of Clinch County, locale of her birth. She pictured a giant Venus flytrap swelling up from boggy land, opening its green jaws, and swallowing her. And so, with a few hours to kill before meeting the ID specialist at Palmetto Baptist, she had no choice but to return to her room at the Days Inn, where she succumbed to the narcotic allure of the television. Flipping through channels, she felt a panicky wash of pleasure as the borders of her identity began to dissolve.

  She remembered a film from Biology 629, a time-lapse sequence of a fox carcass devoured by necrophagous insects. The mammal shrank and then expanded with a moist infestation of writhing maggots that soon transformed into bluebottle flies that darted off to feed on wildflower nectar. Embracing the flux of disassociation might yield some exquisite Zen transcendence, she thought. Out of her usual context, she felt her self diffusing. Her Atlanta town house and boyfriend and collection of Scandinavian glass, her PhD and lucrative job with the CDC, her whole-foods organic vegetarian diet and Ashtanga yoga regime—all of it relegated to the realm of the theoretical, especially the boyfriend, who was eight years her junior, and whom she envisioned, with a shiver of arousal, making love to some faceless female with wavering limbs.

  Of course, wholeness and bodily integrity were illusions. The body was a conceptually organized system of potentially chaotic processes and minute, volatile ecosystems. Beth thought of Cymothoa exigua, the enterprising sea louse that ate the tongue of its fish-host and then masqueraded as that tongue, slurping up a portion of the spotted rose snapper’s food while the oblivious fish went on with its business. The elegance of this poetic adaptation took her breath away. And then there were more obscure parasites, micromanagers of evolution that changed the surface of biological “reality” with their incessant, ingenious niche marketing.

  Caught up in intricate mechanisms, these parasites hopped from one
organism to another at different stages of their life cycles, migrating from intestines to lungs, hearts, or brains, sometimes reprogramming the behavior of their hosts. Such was the case with T. gondii, cousin of T. hermeticus, which made rodents act irrationally, drawing them toward the smell of cat urine, compelling them to flirt with disaster until they were devoured by felines, who caught the bug and spread it through their droppings, thus repeating the cycle.

  Though T. gondii had evolved in a cat/rat system, it also infected humans, causing them to undergo personality changes—becoming more neurotic, more obsessive, and, even stranger, enacting more traditional gender roles. Suffering slower reaction times, they became more accident-prone. They had trouble concentrating. Some positive-testing males demonstrated a disregard for convention and indulged in risky behaviors. Scientists were even linking the bug to schizophrenia. Unlike the rat, the human host served no discernible purpose for the protozoan (unless the host was devoured by a large cat). As far as researchers knew, Homo sapiens was an evolutionary dead end for T. gondii, which infected about 16.8 percent of the American population.

  But T. hermeticus was a different animal, a mutant variation of the T. gondii species. So far, only a dozen teenaged humans throughout the United States had tested positive in serologic tests for T. hermeticus antibodies. And though they had ingested the protozoan the usual ways (via undercooked meat, contaminated soil, or cat dung), their responses to the infection were beginning to form a distinct pattern. Over the past two months, Beth had personally investigated ten cases in hot, humid regions of the United States, all of them ending in hospitalizations due to toxic-metabolic encephalopathic coma. It was not clear whether this was the normal upshot of T. hermeticus infection or whether these extreme cases were the only ones that had been medically documented.