The Wilds Page 15

  The guests descend from the stage with newfound confidence, as though Zugnord has galvanized them with his godlike breath. By the time my name—Ellen Wiggins—is called, I’m feverish with anticipation. I lope up to the platform, aware of the eyes on my dumpy body—stooped shoulders, curdy midsection, droopy bust and butt. I skulk across the stage, feeling larval and squishy from office work and domestic sloth.

  Zugnord flashes a twinkling, carnivorous smile.

  “Welcome,” he says, slipping me my cavewoman costume, packaged in plastic.

  And then he hands me the sacred pomegranate, the forbidden fruit packed with evil seeds—seeds of blood, seeds of knowledge, seeds of deadly agriculture.

  “You are no longer Ellen Wiggins,” Zugnord whispers, his ape breath hot in my ear. “You are Vogmar, daughter of the Blackboar Clan.”

  Only half the people attending the Wild Foraging Workshop the next morning are wearing their cave costumes. I myself am wearing spandex fitness gear. Jeff, a chatty journalist from New York who sports his standard-issue loincloth with a Magma T-shirt, keeps assuring everybody that he’s not an exhibitionist.

  “Yes, I look ridiculous,” he says, scratching the pale skin of his left thigh, which looks rash-prone, “but I feel obligated to indulge in the full Paleo experience.”

  Chewing dandelion root and jonesing for coffee, we drift down a forest trail as Whezug, ex-botany professor and author of Forest Feast, lectures us on the evils of caffeinated stimulants. A scrawny sexagenarian with the mangy ponytail of a decrepit hesher, Whezug sports a leather loincloth that looks like something from a fetish shop. Although he’s not literally lashing us with a bullwhip, he might as well be. As we stumble through the forest with empty stomachs, our brains mutinying from caffeine withdrawal, Whezug drones on about nuts, herbs, roots, and berries, forcing us to scramble up embankments, climb trees, crouch and dig with our bare hands to wrest a few bitter morsels from Mother Earth.

  Whezug pauses beside a sunbaked boulder and draws our attention to a withered newt, which he peels from the rock surface and eats, tearing strands of jerked reptile with his teeth.

  A woman shrieks. Jeff chuckles and jots a note on his iPhone.

  “Paleolithic humans took advantage of whatever protein they could get.” Whezug smirks.

  To further illustrate this concept he squats, overturns a rock, scoops up a handful of termites, and pops them into his mouth. And so begins his lecture on wild protein. Whezug teaches us how to locate and catch grasshoppers. He distinguishes between edible and nonedible slugs. We watch the old man shimmy up a tree to raid a woodlark nest. Watch him pick maggots from the carcass of a lynx. Watch him grab a baby squirrel that has fallen from its nest, sniff the dead animal, and pronounce it “fresh.” I turn away, fighting back a retch as Whezug gnaws off the head, recalling that urban legend about Ozzy Osborne biting off a bat’s head midconcert.

  “Oh my God,” says a guy in garish cycling apparel.

  “Paleolithic man ate plenty of carrion,” says Whezug. “Which enhanced his intestinal flora and quickened his metabolism into a state-of-the-art fat burner. Would anybody like a bite?”

  Silence. Most of us study our feet.

  “All right,” Whezug sniggers. “I was going to talk about edible scat next, but we’ll save that for another day. How about some fungi fun?”

  As Whezug enters deeper forest in quest of mushrooms, I lag behind with Jeff the journalist and a tax attorney from Atlanta.

  “Mental illness, anyone?” Jeff’s smile is squirrel-like but cute: a parting of beard, a revelation of yellow front teeth.

  “This is not exactly what I signed up for,” says the tax attorney, a tall lean woman in yoga garb.

  “I’m still feeling queasy from that Ozzy stunt,” I say.

  “Exactly!” says Jeff. “I thought of Ozzy too. Bet you Whezug’s into weed and metal. Bet you he still tokes up. Bet you he listens to Metallica, if the loincloth is any indication.”

  “Or worse, Cinderella.”

  “I was going to say Poison, but it doesn’t get worse than Cinderella.” Jeff flashes his squirrel smile—conspiratorial, contagious. I feel like we could stand there all morning, chatting about hair-metal bands, but Whezug summons us into the forest.

  At the mixed-grill meet and greet, Zugnord struts around with two cave babes—a brunette, a blond—both wearing fur bikinis. He shakes our hands, offers us words of encouragement, and then retreats to his ceremonial throne, an egg-chair of burnished stone, where he sulks like a sultan as his women feed him protein-rich hors d’oeuvres. A djembe troupe starts pounding skins. Spitted meats roast, sending fragrant smoke tendrils into the air.

  I spot Jeff, hunched over an appetizer tray, wolfing down trout-and-beet crudités. He waves his wineskin at me.

  Tonight Jeff’s sporting his loincloth with flip-flops and a Rock in Opposition tee. I try not to look at his man-parts, neatly packaged in their deerskin pouch. I’m wearing my fur cavewoman top with a sarong and sandals, a necklace of faux tiger teeth. I glance down at my belly and adjust my sarong.

  “How are you feeling?” asks Jeff.

  “Better.”

  “I can’t believe you ate that mushroom.”

  “It was just a bolete. Besides, Whezug must know what he’s doing. They wouldn’t risk the lawsuits.”

  “Don’t count on it,” says Jeff.

  According to Jeff, Pleisto-Scene Island has been sued for intestinal sepsis, E. coli infection, hypertensive heart disease, and a slew of personal injuries, including club-fight-induced memory loss, Jacuzzi overstimulation, and broken bones acquired during the recently discontinued saber-toothed-tiger hunt.

  “And Zugnord has settled countless sexual misconduct suits. Seems he has a penchant for pagan sex rites.”

  “Are you serious?”

  The swell of drums drowns our conversation. When the racket ceases, Zugnord stands, raises his wineskin, and blesses the fruits of the hunt.

  Jeff and I refill our own wineskins. As the orientation video explained, Pleisto-Scene Island serves only Stone Age vin de primeur, the juice of naturally fermented wild grapes. I take a grateful tug, pleased to taste some bite in the booze.

  We sit down at one of the stone picnic tables and dig into our arugula and berries. Our tablemates include the tax attorney we met earlier, a periodontist, and a belly dancer. Laughing, we take mock-fierce tugs from our wineskins. By the time we finish our salads, we’re all using our cave names, sprinkling our conversation with sarcastic primal grunts.

  A waitress in a fur bikini appears, lugging a grilled suckling pig on a wooden trencher. The pig, garnished with charred carrots and turnips, glistens in the torchlight. When my tablemates lift their phones to snap pics, I remember how Tim, my fiancé, swore he’d obsessively check Flickr for glimpses of my transformation. But I won’t post a single thing. He’ll peer into cyberspace and find a black void.

  “The pig has been stuffed with its own minced vital organs, a caveman power food,” says our waitress.

  “Uh, plates?” says Jeff.

  “Try to enjoy the carnal experience of communal eating.” The waitress, a college girl who channels Raquel Welch from One Million Years B.C., winks. “Of tearing off hunks of flesh with your bare hands.” The waitress licks her lips and leaves us alone with our dead piglet.

  “Well, this is awkward,” says the periodontist. “How do we begin?”

  “I guess we literally dig in,” says the tax attorney.

  She reaches out, claws at the pork with her manicured talons, and pops a strand into her mouth.

  “Oh, it’s very tender,” she murmurs, licking her fingers.

  We go at it, at first politely, avoiding each other’s paws as we pick meat from the carcass. But then, ten minutes in, something about the flickering torches, the throbbing percussion, the wine that tastes of summer forests, something about the rich, fatty taste of the shoat helps us relax. Soon we are tipsy, laughing. Soon we are ripping off hunks of m
eat and stuffing them into our maws. Soon we are talking with our mouths open, sharing anecdotes, heedless of the grease dripping down our chins.

  I am Vogmar, daughter of the Blackboar Clan, supping under the moon. Jeff is Bogwag, son of the Shaggy Bear People, tittering and mock-growling. The periodontist howls like a wolf, showing off his transplanted gums. The tax attorney sloughs her sequined cocktail dress hesitantly, revealing the cavewoman garb beneath.

  “Didn’t have the guts to wear this out, but now I’m drunk.”

  Everybody laughs.

  “You go, girl,” says the belly dancer, who is already sporting her standard-issue fur bikini. They high-five. We all hoot and roar. I am Vogmar, daughter of the Blackboar Clan, tossing bones into the shadows. I am Vogmar, huntress and medicine woman, studying the messages of the stars. I am Vogmar, slurping wild wine and feeling uncomfortable as Sexgoth, the belly dancer, begins to undulate under the moon and Bogwag of the Shaggy Bear People growls his approval. I am Vogmar, feeling pudgy and bloated despite the fact that I have not consumed a single carb since my arrival. I try to think of something clever to say to Bogwag, but he’s chatting up the nearly naked tax attorney.

  “I’m here to vanquish this paunch,” she says, pointing at the barely perceptible mound of her belly.

  “What paunch?” says Bogwag, who actually pokes her stomach with his finger.

  “Bless your heart,” says the tax attorney, flashing a mouthful of perfect, predatory teeth.

  The djembe troupe, clearly drunk, is trying to play the drum solo from “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

  “Groovy,” says Bogwag, smiling at the tax attorney. He bobs his shaggy head to the beat.

  The night deepens. The moon spills its primordial silver. Whispered rumors flit around the table: moon worship, pagan sex cults, animal sacrifices, and roving bands of actors impersonating cannibalistic Neanderthals. The belly dancer claims she’s already spotted the Neanderthals, staring intensely at her from a patch of jungle beyond the swimming pool.

  “For real?” says the tax attorney, sounding like an adolescent. She stands up, slinks over to the bonfire, and Bogwag trots after her.

  I hear my phone buzzing persistently in my purse. It’s my fiancé, but I don’t pick up. I picture him hunched in his office, bathed in sickly computer light. Perhaps my absence has prodded him out of his chair for a walk around the block. Perhaps he has emerged from what I call his “hibernation,” which started a year ago when he began doing search-engine optimization work at home. I picture him standing stunned on our weedy lawn, blinking at the sun like a prairie vole. One tipsy evening last spring, I’d joked that he was agoraphobic. He kept running toward the edge of our yard, pretending to strike an invisible force field, falling on his butt and laughing. Finally, snarling, he broke through. He turned toward me like a hero in a dystopian film, arm extended. Holding hands, we ran off to a neighborhood bar to get wasted. But under a trellis entwined with Confederate jasmine and strings of Christmas lights, he kept looking at his phone.

  “What, exactly, do you keep checking?” I tried to smile.

  “The usual.” He made a point of turning his phone off, tucking it away. “E-mails from clients. Various accounts.”

  Clouds floated across the pocked face of the moon. My fiance’s hand crept across the table like a tarantula toward his phone. He did not turn it on, but he could not refrain from touching it.

  Imagining him at home now, compulsively checking his phone for a sign of life from me, I’m tempted to text him. But I don’t. I scroll through pics on my iPhone, flashing backward through time into our courtship phase, his image multiplying into a swarm of smiling, impish men—and there he is on our first date, eyes alight, lips whispering wry comments about the ridiculous paintings of naked game-show hosts at the art show we’d attended. Comparing Pat Sajak to a “startled marsupial,” he made me laugh, softening me up for our first kiss, his lips full and feminine and tasting mysteriously of figs.

  The next morning at the Primitive Technology Workshop, Jeff is sitting by himself. The tax attorney is also there, at another table, chatting up some handsome triathlon type in clownish fitness apparel.

  “Birds of a feather,” says Jeff, glancing mournfully in her direction. I sit down next to him.

  At the front of the room, Ghunthag, a disgraced anthropologist rumored to have been arrested in the seventies for smuggling opium in a dead gorilla’s chest, demonstrates the Levalloisian flint-chiseling technique. Dressed in a deerskin tunic and Birkenstocks, he shows us how to produce a tortoise-shaped spear tip. He compares this particular tip type to the Clovis point, discusses the nuances of the Susquehanna projectile point, and then lets us go at it—twelve cranky, caffeine-deprived wretches, pounding at flint chunks with crude stone chisels. Sipping from a ceramic mug, Ghunthag strolls among us, offering tips and pointers on tips and pointers and making bad puns.

  “What do you think he’s drinking?” I whisper.

  “Green tea,” says Jeff. “The fucking hippie.”

  “I would kill for a caffeinated beverage.”

  “But would you steal for it?” Jeff points at something he has hidden under the table: Ghuntag’s thermos, glimmering and mermaid-green.

  “Want to blow this joint?” says Jeff.

  “Hell yes.”

  As Ghunthag shows the class how to bind a flint point to a spear with deer sinew, Jeff and I slip out and hightail it toward the woods with our contraband tea. Laughing like hoodlums, we plunk down in a wild olive grove.

  We open the thermos, sigh as steam purls out. Kneeling reverently, we take a long, luxuriant sniff.

  We pour tea into the thermos top. Pass it between us. Sip.

  We relish this brew of civilization, nectar of gods, exquisite perfume of the Orient. We perk up. The sky is the blue of flame. Purple olives glow in the branches above us. Wildflowers waver in the breeze, and two yellow butterflies zigzag amid the beauty.

  Bogwag of the Shaggy Bear People reclines on his side. His Art Zoyd T-shirt gapes. I try not to look at his belly fur, so bearish and frank compared to the smooth, coy abdomen of my fiancé. I most definitely avoid the moist bundle of his genitals, which rests against his sunburned thigh. I keep my eyes fixed on the sky, the branches, the dangling fruits.

  I think I hear Bogwag grunt.

  “What did you say?” I ask.

  “Nothing. Oh, shit. What the hell?”

  Bogwag leaps into a crouching position, points toward a cluster of brambles. I stand up. Some kind of redheaded, ridge-browed, ape-thing is peering at us through thorny vegetation. Now I see three ape-things mumbling behind the brambles.

  “Agbagaba,” says one of them. It leaps forward, hunched and frizzy, spear in hand. And then a dozen of these creatures crawl from the bush, closing in on us.

  “Fake Neanderthals,” whispers Jeff. “Actors. No worries.”

  “Still kind of creepy. Like those cannibalistic hominids in Quest for Fire.”

  “Excellent film. But, please, don’t say ‘cannibalistic.’”

  “They’re fake, remember? Some kind of theater troupe.”

  The Neanderthal leader, who’s wearing those ridiculous plastic hillbilly teeth, grins.

  “Grogoth vagamoo,” he exclaims, hoisting his spear. I notice an iPhone pouch dangling from his suede diaper. He’s wearing Crocs and smells reassuringly of soap.

  A wild-haired female lunges playfully at Jeff, her naked breasts dotted with clusters of fake frizz. The same synthetic orange fur adorns her arms and thighs. Suppressing a giggle, she snatches the silver thermos top from Jeff, twirls it in the sunlight to catch sparkles.

  The fake Neanderthals rub their bellies and point at us. Smacking their lips, they look us up and down.

  “I think we’re supposed to make a run for it,” I say. “Stimulate our fight-or-flight response and fry a thousand calories.”

  “Not really feeling up for a jog,” says Jeff. “Kungar the tax attorney said they chased her for five mi
les yesterday. But then, she’s a natural athlete.”

  “Oh,” I say, realizing that I don’t want Jeff to see me run. “It’s almost wine time anyway.”

  We lope down the trail toward the hotel, glancing back at the hominids, who are now kicking around a hacky sack. Perched on the embankment behind them is a small woman holding a bow and arrow, ready to shoot, her centerfold-worthy silhouette backlit by the setting sun.

  “Whoa,” says Jeff, rubbing his eyes and gawking. “I must be dreaming.”

  The woman vanishes into the trees. I wonder if I should sign up for the Aurignacian Archery Workshop.

  When we emerge from the forest, it’s almost dusk. We stroll right into an elegant patio scene, where cave babes lounge upon molded concrete chaises and frat dudes in loincloths feed them kabobs. A waterfall cascades down a boulder, filling a stone-slab pool. We’re back at Hominid Hotel, where meat smoke always wafts along the corridors.

  At dinner the next night, Jeff strolls up to my table.

  “Hey, Vogmar. Guess who I just ran into.”

  “Who?”

  “Our Neanderthal friends. One of them had the gall to bite me this time. I think she got carried away. Reminded me of my ex-wife.”

  Jeff displays a set of red bite marks on his forearm and sits down at my table.

  “Smells like a lawsuit.”

  “Actually, I kind of encouraged her. She kept trying to grab my phone, giggling like a freak.”

  “So your ex was a biter?” I say, wondering if his ex-wife is attractive, athletic, fleet of foot and long of limb, wondering why dumpy dudes like Jeff feel entitled to such women.

  “It’s complicated.” Jeff winces and grins simultaneously.

  As we dig into our grilled venison, my phone throbs like a persistent insect in my bag. I scroll through texts from my fiancé, feeling queasy as “What’s up, sexy cavegirl?” morphs into “What the hell is the problem here? Six days of silence? I don’t know whether to be angry or worried sick.”