Dr. Vilkas handed me the bottle, his fingertips grazing my palm. He gazed at his laptop, detecting faint activity, he said, perhaps in my nucleus accumbens. I felt a vague prickling of the spine, heat in my cheeks. And Dr. Vilkas said my cingulate gyrus seemed to be stimulated, that my orbitofrontal cortex showed signs of activity. I felt wind on my face. A bubble of warmth moved down my spine, bouncing from vertebra to vertebra, and then dissolved pleasantly in my coccyx.
“And there’s this salty smell,” I whispered. “Don’t you smell that? Like corn chips.”
Dr. Vilkas didn’t answer. We both stood up. We knew the dogs were coming, and we smiled at each other when they materialized in a rush, pouring around the left side of the building, their barks blurring into a single smear of sound.
“Do they see us?” I asked him, my mouth dipping close to his ear.
“Yes.” He leaned toward me. “Though they smelled us first, but the DAP spray should keep them from attacking.”
As the dogs raced around the edges of the parking lot, circling us, sniffing out the borders of this territory, I felt a delicious terror. I took two steps forward and glanced back at Dr. Vilkas, who hung behind, grinning at the diagram of my mind, my feelings lit up, garish in yellow and red.
“Your brain’s really pulsing,” he seemed to shout, though I couldn’t be sure, for dogs were pressing in on me, stink and noise and wind merging into a single whirl of sensation, their heat humming against my skin. Fur floated in the air above their spastic bodies, drifted into my nostrils, tickling mucous membranes. I sensed the hot blasts of their panting, the throbbing of two hundred hearts, the clatter of four thousand toenails. I felt their tongues, pimply tentacles smelling of death, sliding over the flesh of my hands.
And now Dr. Vilkas was moving toward me through the canine sea, waist-deep in fur and slaver and stink, his shirt unbuttoned, hair kinetic from the wind the dog pack whipped up. He bobbed along, buoyed toward me, until, hurled at my feet, he squatted on the crumbling asphalt.
Tongue lolling, he panted. Squatting, grinning, he winked at me. And then he threw his head back and howled, Adam’s apple pulsing, until the dogs joined in. Sitting on their haunches, every last animal found a patch of territory on which to squat and bay. They pointed their elegant snouts toward the moon, yowled and keened and squalled until the air smelled marshy from their breath.
Jaws
You squint toward the seething sea, imagining that you are alone on the beach, a nubile castaway with sun-kissed skin. You try to remember what it was like to walk boldly in the sun’s poisonous rays, innocent and near-naked, trusting in the general goodness of nature, your flesh anointed with exotic tanning oil. Coconut Dream. Pineapple Passion.
But the sun has not been kind to you. It has left you blistered and spotted and scathed. And so you cower in the radius of a UV umbrella. You scowl, your lips smeared with oxybenzone. You’re not even on the beach, though you can sense its shimmer in the distance. You are one block away from the ocean, perched by the crowded pool of a budget condo, reading a book on endangered species and wallowing in grim statistics.
“There are fewer than one thousand red-handed howler monkeys left on the planet,” you say in an accusing tone.
“Caught red-handed,” quips your father, who sprawls rakishly in the full glare of the carcinogenic sun, sipping a gin and tonic, his body a moonscape of moles and barnacles and curious clusters of hair. You try not to look at this archetypal body, the degradation of which goes along with the general apocalyptic downturn of twenty-first-century civilization. But occasionally, when you reach the end of a long list of dying species (endangered rodents of Australia, for example), you take a glance, noting some particularly depressing detail (twin gouges where two basal-cell carcinomas have recently been removed, for example). And later, with macabre gusto, you will incorporate these tidbits into your dark, witty blog — misanthropos.blogspot.com.
Your mother is also a source of inspiration for the blog, especially since she’s been suffering from “senior moments” and demonstrating inappropriate social behavior, which may or may not be connected to hormone replacement therapy and intensified doses of cholesterol medication. It’s nothing serious — yet — which means that you may smirk grimly when she says, “Everyone is beautiful, even the blacks.” You plot a special blog entry called “Racist Shit My Mother Says,” jotting down her bons mots instead of passively sighing at the sadness of the world. It is still possible to keep panic at bay as you watch your mother frolic in the pool with excessive childish glee. At this very moment, she bounds toward a cool, sleek woman who reclines in a chaise and hides behind the latest Oprah-endorsed melodrama.
“You are so beautiful,” your mother says.
The woman peers at your mother over her book, eyes shrouded in enormous cartoonish sunglasses—geriatric glam captures the look precisely, you note, filing the image away for future use. Though your father watches like a half-wit politician’s handler, tensing in his chair, he does not get up.
“I need to lose weight,” your mother says.
As the woman simpers and cowers behind her book, you remain emotionally unscathed, relishing the absurdity of the encounter: the woman’s spotted, leathery skin, her sparkly pedicure, her Prada eyewear and chunky gold jewelry. In your blog entry you will use the term bling. You will breezily reference Veblen. You will point out (as a casual afterthought) that gold was used to make slave manacles on the island of Utopia.
“I need a breast reduction,” your mother says.
And it is only after she has grabbed her ample, Lycraclad bosom and squeezed her breasts together in classic pinup mode that your father finally pulls himself up from his chair.
“Jenny, come here for a minute,” he says, fumbling for an invisible cigarette, patting his pockets, forgetting that he, with the assistance of a nicotine patch, Xanax, and Prozac, was able to kick the habit a few months back, an amazing feat considering that he’d been chain-smoking since age twelve. Your dad grew up with an abusive father (an ogrish lumberman who made him spend his teenage summers toiling in the woods). His crisp comb-over, which he compulsively styles with aerosol hair spray and which you have ridiculed in previous blog posts, flutters in the breeze. You feel a raw throb of emotion crawling up from the cellar of your heart like a fleshy, red mutant from a horror flick. You do not want to look this creature in the eye. You beat it down with lines of poetry (An aged man is but a paltry thing / A tattered coat upon a stick), even though you are, of course, cynical about poetry.
Cornucopia, an international all-you-can-eat megabuffet surrounded by mirrors, stretches into infinity. You feel dizzy as you weave among the steaming troughs, looking for something edible. You stumble down an aisle of meats, red and dark and white, flesh from winged and hoofed and scaly animals, fried and broiled and braised and boiled, barbecued and jerked and simmering in vats of pure corn syrup. You are a fasting monk in the desert, caught up in a gaudy hallucination. You discover a tray of pallid salmon. You ferret out a pile of steamed broccoli, studded with cashews. Amid the obscene abundance, you cannot find one unprocessed grain. So you spoon a puritanical dollop of mashed potato onto your plate, though you know that it is larded with margarine and low-fat sour cream, laced with poisonous sugars, the ubiquitous corn syrup. You approach the table with a martyr’s wince. You imagine your husband at home, harvesting kale from his organic garden. Three days from now, returning with the starved and panicky look of a prisoner of war, you will devour a mountain of steamed greens.