When we step into the cramped darkness of the cabin, I’m overcome by the inexplicable smell of Bilclass="underline" a clean animal odor tinged with cinnamon and dust. A hint of cumin. A vague plastic smell like Band-Aids.
I remember Bill’s letter about digging out a tree stump. The earth had collapsed onto a fox’s den, a nest of keening pups. According to Bill, their lair had smelled of milk and piss, something dark and sweet like overripe yams. He didn’t touch them. He sat in his camp chair drinking beer, waiting for the mother, who appeared near dusk, a jolt of gleaming red fur, to move her pups one by one. When she snatched the puling creatures up with her teeth, they went limp and silent. Every time she darted off into the woods, she’d look back at Bill, meet his eyes to make sure they had an understanding.
“Imagine all the middle-class dog walkers,” says Possum, “gentle eaters of Sunday brunch, roasting their radioactive pets on spits.”
“Or eating them raw,” says Tim. “Tearing frail Chihuahuas apart with their hands.”
“We would resort to cannibalism,” says Possum. “How could we not?”
We sit on the dark porch, waiting for Bill. Katydids and crickets signal frantically for mates. I’m pretty sure Bill still has the insect recordings we made our second summer on the mountain. I’m pretty sure he still has that box of cassettes and CDs in chronological order, spanning from the early days of Swole all the way up to our third summer, when I left in a silent rage. And perhaps he has other recordings, brilliant and mysterious, that he made after I went away.
I’d meant to duplicate all of our recordings while he was at work. But every time I stepped into the moldy basement, with its damp Berber carpet, sweating walls, and deceptively innocent toothpaste smell, I’d feel a wobble of panic in my heart. I’d rush back up into brighter air.
Millipedes had invaded the basement bathroom our second summer on the mountain. Every morning Bill found two dozen slithering around the dewy toilet base. He’d smash them with a hoe. Their crushed bodies smelled like toothpaste. Flecks of brown chitin littered the carpet. The woods that enveloped us were practically a rain forest, and the summer humidity didn’t let up until first frost.
That fall, the landlords’ daughter, off at college for the first time, suffered from food allergies, and when the health center treated her with steroids, she had a mental breakdown. She went jogging after a star, followed it all the way out to an interstate exit, where the police found her, dehydrated and chattering about astrology. They sent her home. Every time she had a squabble with her parents, she’d run off into the woods. I’d be gazing out the window at the autumn leaves when she’d dart by our house, a whir of anxiousness and flowing hair. And one of the landlords’ llamas, Zephyr, had started spitting. Every time I strolled through the goat pasture, Zephyr would rush up, a flurry of black fur and dust, and attempt to spit a reddish jet of puke into my face.
When winter came, Bill turned vegan and lost fifteen pounds. He wanted to live off the grid, he said, away from bourgeois pretenders, in a small cabin that would meet our basic needs. The landlords’ daughter was still having episodes, wandering the woods behind our house. Zephyr was still a dark furious presence down in the goat pasture.
I got an instructorship sixty miles away at Clemson, would drive off into the mountains and return exhausted just as Bill got back from his stint at the bakery. We’d throw a meal together, open a bottle of wine, talk about the cabin we planned to build that spring, though we never agreed on how big it would be and whether or not it would have electricity.
Fifteen pounds lighter, Bill could never get warm. Huddled by the stove, he wore two layers of thermal underwear, a dingy mustard snowsuit, a wool cap with a special cotton lining he’d sewn in himself. In the flickering firelight, his cheeks looked ghoulish and his enormous eyes brimmed with strange fevers.
“I have a sinus headache,” he said one night, “because you didn’t clean the cheese knife.”
“What?”
“You used it to cut vegetables. All it takes is one tiny particle of dairy to make me sick.”
Bill winced like a martyr and turned back to Mysteries of Beekeeping Explained.
By summer our arguments had swelled luxuriant and green, like the poison-oak patch behind our house. We spent entire nights screaming our throats raw. Sometimes the landlords’ imbalanced daughter, out prowling, would pause at one of our open windows to listen, an ecstatic grin on her face.
In July I got a job offer in Atlanta with the English department at Georgia State and Bill moved down into the basement with the millipedes.
One warm shrieking night, I drifted down to the basement. I intended to climb on top of Bill and kiss him all over his face. He lay prone on the moldy sofa he’d covered with a sheet, one arm flopped onto the floor. I could hear his thick breathing, louder than the silvery pulse of the katydids. I could smell the oddly minty scent of crushed millipedes. I straddled Bill. He opened his eyes. When I leaned down to kiss him, his thin black tongue slithered out of his mouth — a millipede, I realized, its underside feathery with a thousand moving legs. I floated back up the stairs, out of the house, and into the blackness of the sky.
Only when I was hovering high over the trees did the sadness of his transformation hit me. I woke up and e-mailed the English department at Georgia State.
“Brain-computer interface,” says Possum. “Wetware made of insect parts and frog neurons. Telepathic cockroaches creeping around your house, gathering data for marketing companies.”
“But I thought everybody had a crystal implanted in their head and voluntarily broadcast all brain farts to the mainframe,” says Tim.
“They do, but the cockroaches are looking for microtrends, subthoughts, unconscious motivations.”
When Possum is deep into the bullshit intricacies of postmodern surveillance, and he has lit his thousandth cigarette, and Tim has drifted, once more, to the edge of the woods to take a leak, Bill arrives.
It’s 10:10 PM. An owl offers an ominous hoot in his honor, then flutters off to snatch some clueless rodent into the howling air.
Bill must be surprised to see us. But by the time he kills his lights and opens his gate, eases his truck into its spot, and emerges, with a cloth bag of groceries, he has composed himself. He’s a slight figure, moving through darkness toward the porch, and I find myself gripping the handles of my chair.
“Well, well, well,” he says.
If I could see his face it would show only the faintest quirk of shock, I’m sure — an eyebrow twitch, a shifting of frown lines — the same look he used to get when he spotted yet another millipede gliding across the damp linoleum of our basement bathroom.
“It’s us,” I say, shining my penlight at Possum. “And watch out for Tim. He’s creeping around your property somewhere. Please don’t shoot him.”
“I’ll try not to,” says Bill. “I’ve upgraded to a Savage Mark II, a big improvement on the old Beeman.”
“Killer,” says Possum.
“Been doing a little hunting.” Bill steps onto the porch, puts down his groceries, stands warm and humming a foot away from me. “Though I do keep it under my bed at night.”
During our second winter on the mountain, on a sunny day after the first snow, alone in the house, I’d gotten caught up in a three-hour frenzy of vacuuming. With fierce efficiency, I’d vacuumed the walls and the baseboards and every square inch of floor. I emptied closets and cupboards and drawers, probed with my sucking wand under furniture and behind appliances. I vacuumed until I reached the ecstatic state of a fasting medieval nun, feverish with holy purpose.