“Oh,” I said.
“Lynn,” Irina said gently, “there is shit in nature. Humans shit. Animals shit.” In her accent it sounded like “sheat,” and somehow more elegant.
“I know, I know,” I said, leaning back in my seat and closing my eyes.
“What we have to get away from,” Irina said, settling herself and the baby in the back, “is this idea that we are separate from nature. We are natural too, with bodies and smells, just like the animals do.”
I kept my eyes closed and listened to her lilting European intonations while ignoring the words of her harangue. Eventually I heard the car door open and felt a breeze rush into the van. “You should’ve seen that dumpster,” Wylie said. “A cornucopia of provisions. Cheetos, day-old muffins, melted cheese on pizza boxes.”
“Please say you didn’t get our picnic from a dumpster.”
“I was going to,” he said. “But Angus thought you’d prefer some first-time-use food.”
“Angus,” Irina said, “I think you are getting soft.”
“I know it,” Angus said, and started the car. Before long we were in Tijeras Canyon, the road winding between the mountains, Angus humming as we drove, Wylie and Irina chatting quietly in the backseat, Psyche gurgling along with them. I felt a tightening in my chest, heat and air compressing in my lungs, then realized what it was: I was happy.
On the road to the Crest the traffic was thinner and we swung around to the east side of the mountains, the trees now thick and green. Angus parked at a trailhead, and we started hiking.
Tiny brown birds flitted in the juniper scrub. Rustles in the underbrush, scissors of movement far ahead, glimpsed only out of the corner of your eye: the world narrowed to things like this. The sun beat down on the steep, rocky trail. I started to sweat, and my legs hurt. Irina was in front of me, her legs flexing with muscle as she climbed, and gradually she got farther and farther ahead. At a small lookout point I stopped to catch my breath, the mountain falling below me, banded with the switchback curls of the trail.
Then Angus stepped up beside me, holding out his Nalgene bottle. “You look like you could use some water.”
We smiled at each other, and I had a long drink. In the sunlight his skin looked blanched, white and shadowless, overexposed. I handed the bottle back and said, “I thought you said you always wear a hat.”
“Always,” he said, “except right now.”
“Hey!” Wylie shouted from up ahead, and we started back up the trail, which soon sank into shadow and was carpeted with pine needles. After a minute or two I saw bright swatches of clothing through the trees. Wylie and Irina were standing off the trail, looking at a washing machine, square, white, half-rusted, suspended on its side in the act of falling downhill. Its chrome dials were black, absent any markings or instructions. A word I’d always liked in high school ambled into my brain: “erratic,” the word for boulders swept into new territories by the movements of glaciers.
“How do you think it got here?” Irina said.
“Somebody dumped it,” my brother said. He tried opening the lid, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Litterbug,” I said.
Wylie found a stick, wedged it under the lid, and lifted it, releasing a terrible, thick, sick-making smell. I backed away and covered my mouth with the tail of my shirt.
“Oh, no,” Irina said. She covered up the baby and moved well up the trail, and I followed. But the smell was still with us, so I motioned for her to keep going. I didn’t know what Wylie and Angus were doing back there, and didn’t care. Finally we stopped in a sunny place where the air smelled fresh and waited for them.
“What was it?” Irina asked when they caught up with us.
Wylie was looking at Psyche. “It was a cat,” he said.
“With kittens,” Angus added.
“What? How did a cat get in there?”
“I think it got dumped with the machine,” Angus said. “At the same time.”
“But that machine’s all rusted,” I said. “Wouldn’t the cat already be, you know, disintegrated?”
“Oh, dear,” Irina said.
“That’s what I said,” Wylie said.
“But with the door closed,” Angus said, “it’s almost a seal. That would slow down the process.”
“But it wasn’t a seal,” my brother said, “because there was rotting.”
“I said almost.”
“I don’t know, Angus,” Wylie said. “I think the cat was feral. It just climbed in there to have its kittens, then the door slammed shut and trapped them.”
They stood there for a few minutes, calmly discussing the chemistry of rot, the population of feral cats in the Sandias, recent weather patterns and their likely effect on corpses in the wild. I started to feel sick again, and, without speaking, I took off up the trail, my stomach churning.
Wylie caught up to me and we hiked together without saying anything.
“What did it look like?” I asked him after a while.
“You don’t want to know,” he said.
Looking at him, I thought about the animals piled up in the pale blue basin of the old washing machine; I thought also of a famous painting I’d once seen, an elegant oil of a hare on a wooden table, dribbling fresh blood, in a gilt frame. Irina’s words about shit ran through my mind, and so did the naked self-portraits and paintings executed with menstrual blood I’d studied, and Eva Kent’s paintings, and so, finally, did the face of my father as he lay in the coffin my mother had chosen, recognizably himself and yet not, his skin plumped with embalming fluid and his cheeks rouged with the undertaker’s makeup. You can celebrate the body all you want, I thought, you can sing hymns to its presence, its shit and stink, but it will only ever betray you in the end. I touched Wylie’s arm.
“It’d been taken over,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Maggots,” he said. “Blowflies. Other insects. They take over the body.”
“That is so gross,” I said.
“It’s beautiful, if you think about it.” All of a sudden, his eyes were glowing with enthusiasm. “It’s egalitarian in concept. We act like the human body is the center of the universe, but it decays and gets reabsorbed into the system, just like that cat and its kittens, just like everything else. It loses its boundaries, its privileged status.”
“Wylie.”
“We don’t like to think about it, but that’s only symptomatic of our power-driven—”
“Wylie, shut up, for God’s sake.”
“What’s your problem?”
“Just shut up,” I said.
At that moment I smelled smoke, and Wylie started walking fast in front of me. Before long I saw a red cloth hanging from a juniper tree, and the burning smell clarified itself into a joint. A couple of hippies were sitting on a boulder in front of a rocky overhang, a scenic overlook behind them. I recognized the place then, and wondered if Wylie had brought me here on purpose. It was another place we used to hike to, when we were kids; one time we’d even spent the night here, Wylie and I in one tent, our parents in another. It occurred to me that this was probably where Wylie stayed when he lived in the woods.
The girl had long hair gnarled into dreadlocks that twisted down her back like vines. The boy had thin dark hair that fell into his eyes; he’d taken off his shirt — the cloth hanging from the tree — and was sunning his pale, sunken chest.
“Hey, how’s your life today, man?” he said calmly to Wylie.
“Could be better, could be worse,” Wylie said.
The hippie held out the joint between his thumb and his index finger. It was thickly rolled and coated at the end with saliva that sparkled visibly in the sun. We both shook our heads. The sweet, acrid fragrance of pot mingled with the scent of juniper and the heat and the buzz of insects all around us, and I started to feel faint.