The Wilds (5 page)

To take our minds off death, Bonnie’s mother suggested a shopping trip to Columbia. As we drove out to Dixie
City Fashion Mall, our mothers kept glancing back at us, scoping our faces for signs of trauma. Bonnie and I exchanged looks but said nothing. We kept the rich darkness fermenting inside us, like wine to savor in illicit sips. We sprawled in the backseat, staring up at the cryptic convolutions of clouds, our eyes awash with mystic light. The clouds were thick, the color of smoke, as though the whole world were on fire. I could see hosts of dragons slithering in the froth, their damp, gray scales blending with the mist. I could see sparks of light like silver flashes of wings. I could see angelic multitudes, their faces crumpled in wrath, gearing up for the final battle. I could see a near-naked Jesus nailed to a cross, his long hair fluttering in the wind. Skinny and ripped like Tommy Lee, he wore nothing but a loincloth, and his eyes gazed right into my heart.

When a drop of rain hit my cheek, I imagined that it was a drop of blood. I stuck my tongue out to taste the holy wine. But then, with the press of a button, Bonnie’s mother eased the LeBaron’s top back up. She trapped us in the sterile air-conditioning, Neil Diamond whining on the radio. When the DJ decided to torment us with a double shot and “Sweet Caroline” came on, we couldn’t take it anymore. Smirking knowingly at each other, Bonnie and I sang “Rapture.” Trying to warble like Debbie Harry, we belted out her visionary lyrics,
reveling in the thought of strange funky beings sweeping down from space to wreak havoc on planet Earth.

The men from Mars would startle disco dancers out of their comatose trances. They’d stomp around the crowded cities, terrifying twenty-four-hour shoppers and devouring cars. They’d fill our tired old world with blissful panic. Businessmen would cast off their suits like werewolves and flaunt their hairy bodies. Housewives would hop astride their brooms and fly laughing through the electric air. Schoolchildren would turn into ferocious wild animals and romp ecstatically in patches of forest behind their suburban homes.

But then, growing bored with human beings, the spacemen would fly back to their cold red planet. Things would return to normal: the men marching to work in their suits, the housewives furiously sweeping, the schoolchildren squirming in cold, metal desks.

The spacemen would leave us earthbound and restless, dissatisfied with everything, watching the sky for glints of ominous light.

LIMBs

O
n a gauzy day in early autumn, senior citizens stroll around the pear orchard on robot legs. Developed by the Japanese, manufactured by Boeing, one of the latest installments in the mechanization of geriatric care, Leg Intuitive Motion Bionics (
LIMB
s) have made it all the way to Gable, South Carolina, to this little patch of green behind Eden Village Nursing Home. And Elise Mood is getting the hang of them. Every time her brain sends a signal to her actual legs, the exoskeletal
LIMB
s respond, marching her along in the gold light. A beautiful day—even though Elise can smell chickens from the poultry complex down the road and exhaust from the interstate, even though the pear trees in this so-called orchard bear no fruit. The mums
are in bloom. Bees glitter above the beds. And a skinny man comes toward her, showing off his mastery of the strap-on
LIMB
s.

“Elise.” He squints at her. “You still got it. Prettiest girl at Eden Village.”

She flashes her dentures but says nothing.

“You remember me. Ulysses Stukes, aka Pip. We went to the barbecue place that time.”

Elise nods, but she doesn’t remember. And she’s relieved to see a tech nurse headed her way, the one with the platinum hair.

“Come on, Miss Elise,” the nurse says. “You got Memories at three.”

Elise points at the plastic Power Units strapped to her lower limbs.

“You’re gonna walk it today,” says the nurse. “I think you got it down.”

Elise grins. Three people from the Dementia Ward were chosen for the test group, and so far, she’s the only one with nerve signals strong enough to stimulate the sensors. As she strides along among flowers and bees, she rolls the name around on her tongue—Pip Stukes—recalling something familiar in the wry twist of his mouth.

For the past few months, nanobots have been rebuilding Elise’s degenerated neural structures, refortifying the cell production of her microglia in an experimental medical procedure. Now she sits in the Memory Lane Neurotherapy Lounge, strapped into a magnetoencephalographic (
MEG
) scanner that looks like a 1950s beauty parlor hair-drying unit. As a young female therapist monitors a glowing map of Elise’s brain, a male spits streams of nonsense at her.

“Corn bread,” he says. “Corn-fed coon. Corny old colonel with corns on his feet.”

Elise snorts. Who was that colonel she knew? Not a colonel, but a corporal. She once kissed him during a thunderstorm. But she was all of sixteen and he was fresh from Korea, drenched in mystique and skinny from starving in a bamboo cage. Elise vaguely recollects his inflation into a three-hundred-pounder who worked the register at Stukes Feed and Seed. Pip Stukes.

In a flash, she remembers the night they ate barbecue together, back when the world was still green, back when Hog Heaven hung paper lanterns over the picnic tables and Black River Road was dirt. After wiping his lips with a paper napkin, he said,
You ought to be my wife
in his half-joking way—and she dropped her fork.

“Look,” says the female therapist. “We’ve got action between the inferior temporal and the frontal.”

“Let’s try another round,” says the male, the one with the ponytail so little and scraggly that Elise wants to snip it off with a pair of scissors.

“One unit of
BDNF
,” says the female. “And self-integration image therapy with random auditory sequencing and a jolt of EphB2.”

The boy clamps Elise’s head into a padded dome, and the room gets darker. She hears birdsong and distant traffic as a screen lights up to display a photo of a couple, the girl decked out in a wiggle dress and heels, the man slouching beside her in baggy tweed, his face obscured by a straw hat. At first Elise thinks they’re walking on water, but then she realizes they’re standing at the edge of a pier, a lake glinting all around them.

Something about the lake makes her gasp, and Elise wonders if the young woman in the photograph is her daughter, though she’s pretty sure she never had a daughter—so maybe it’s her mother’s daughter, which means she and the girl are the same person.

“We’ve got action all over,” says the female therapist, “mostly in the temporal and right parietal lobes.”

“Emotional memory and spatial identity,” says the male, tapping a rhythm on the desk with his fingertips.

Elise glares at him for breaking her stream of thought, then looks back up at the image, noting a streak of silver in the upper-right corner.

“Boat,” she whispers.

And then she sees him clear as day: Pip Stukes at the wheel of the boat, his hair swept into a ducktail by the wind.

In the pear orchard, Elise takes long strides, easy as thought, around the bed of mums. Scanning the lawn for Pip Stukes, she notes a cluster of wheelchair-bound patients idling at the edge of the flower bed, two women and a sleeping man, his shoulders slumped forward, his chin resting on his chest.

“Hey, good-lookin’, what you got cookin’?” Pip Stukes struts toward her on cyborg legs. The skin around his eye sockets looks delicate, parchment shrunk down to the bone. While one of his eyes shines as blue as a tropical sea, the other is frosted with glaucoma. But Pip still flirts like a demon, sadness nestled under the happy talk.

Elise blushes, and Pip laughs, stands with his hip cocked.

“Pretty day for a walk.” He holds out his arm and she takes it.

He leads her into a stand of planted pine. Interstate 95 drones, but Elise thinks she hears a river. Looking
for a thread of blue, she gazes through the trees, but all she sees is the blurry outline of a brick building. A crow flutters down in a shaft of green light. And Pip turns to her with an aching look from long ago.

“Elise.”

She studies him, mentally peeling back layers of wrinkled skin to glimpse the shining young man inside. She thinks he may have been
the one
, the dark shape in the bed beside her when she came up gasping from the depths of a bad dream.

She practices the phrase in her head first—
Are you my husband?
—but her lips twitch when she tries to say it.

“What?” says Pip.

And then a male tech nurse, alerted by their
RFID
alarms, rushes into the patch of woods to retrieve them.

Elise sits by the lake on a towel in early spring, delighted to see that she’s young again. As the sun sinks behind the tree line, she shivers, waiting for someone. She spots a wet glimmer of motion out past the end of the pier, a lithe young man doing tricks in the water. He crawls dripping from the lake, a merman with seal-black hair and familiar green eyes. As he inches toward her, his
tail, a long fishy appendage glistening with aqua scales, swishes behind him in the sand.

Elise wakes, panting, in her semielectric bed. She reaches into the dark, claws at the aluminum railing. She’s cold, her blanket wadded beneath her feet. And her roommate moans, a steady animal keening. The night nurse drifts in with pills in tiny cups. Though Elise can’t see her, she knows her voice, low and soothing like a sheep’s. The night nurse fixes her blanket, checks her diaper, gives her a drink of water, and then slips out of the room. Now her roommate’s snoring. The air conditioner hums. And Elise lies awake, thinking about the beautiful swimmer from her dream.