He stepped outside the cage and locked the door behind him, then stripped off his fly-spotted clothes there in the woods, a stone’s throw from the hospital employees’ parking lot, too weary to care if any orderlies or nurses or janitors caught a glimpse of his pale ass shining through the trees. Funny thing, how tiring it was to sit in a chair for twelve hours, rising only to take photos, or take a piss in the woods, or scarf down a sandwich.
He bundled the clothes—stinking of sweat and decomp—into a plastic trash bag, hoping he wouldn’t forget to put them in the washer when he got home. Then he hosed off, using the spigot that Dr. B had somehow cajoled a maintenance guy into installing beside the enclosure. He filled his palm with shampoo and worked it into his hair, over his face, under his arms, across his chest and belly, and into his crotch, scrubbing with fingertips and fingernails, scrubbing away fly tracks and fly eggs, real and imagined. The water was warm at first, the afternoon’s heat still stored in the serpentine coils of the hose. Coil by coil it cooled, and by the time he was finished, he was shivering. Opening a second trash bag, he took out a threadbare beach towel and dried himself briskly, rubbing warmth back into his skin before slipping into ripped, velvety Levi’s, a faded sweatshirt, and floppy leather moccasins.
As he wadded the towel and added it to the laundry bag, he found himself blindsided by a wave of loneliness and longing and tenderness. The towel was one of two that he and Roxanne had found at a beach—at what he thought of as their beach.
PLUM ISLAND, MASSACHUSETTS, AUGUST of ’91—their first trip together, to visit Roxie’s sister in Newburyport. They’d borrowed bikes and started pedaling, no plan or destination in mind, and after a while they found themselves on Plum Island, following their noses and the signs to the wildlife refuge that occupied most of the island. Refuge Road: surprisingly hot and buggy, walled off from the Atlantic’s breezes by a ridge of dunes and scrub. Six sweaty miles down Refuge Road, they finally reached the southern tip of the island, Sandy Point, astonished to find that the small parking lot was empty. “I wish we’d thought to bring stuff to swim,” Roxanne had said, but Tyler had smiled and pointed to the towels: two of them, neatly folded at the edge of the asphalt—obviously forgotten by other beachgoers, but seemingly placed there just for them.
“Come on,” he’d said, grabbing the towels and running toward the water, shucking clothes as he ran.
“Tyler!” she’d shrieked. “We can’t—what if we get arrested?” He’d simply turned, arms spread wide, a goofy grin on his face, unabashedly delighted to be free of his clothes and headed for the water. Dropping the towels at the high-tide line, he’d bounded into the water until it was up to his thighs, then plunged headlong into a breaker. By the time he’d surfaced and stood, his back to the surf, she was naked and prancing into the water, high-stepping like a Tennessee walking horse, her breasts and belly and the dark thatch of her pubic hair catching the golden afternoon light in a way that took his breath away. She’d shrieked a second time as a wave reared up and broke against her, toppling her backward. When she stood up, laughing, she flung her head back, whipping her hair over her shoulders and sending a shower of droplets skyward. For a fraction of a second, the droplets created a rainbow around her, and Tyler knew that he’d remember that fraction of a second for the rest of his life.
A few minutes later they were lying on the warm sand and the found towels. “Tyler, we can’t,” she’d said again, this time in a husky whisper. “We could get arrested.”
“It’s a wildlife refuge,” he’d murmured, nibbling her neck. “We’re just part of the wildlife. And you are my sweet refuge.”
“Oh, my,” she’d breathed. Then, as his hand slid slowly down her body, simply, “Oh. Oh. Oh.”
HE RETURNED TO THE cage and the corpse at daybreak, arriving—as best he could tell in the pale light—before the first of the flies. During the night, as Tyler had drifted in and out of dreams of Roxanne, the temperature had dropped to 57 degrees, according to the bare-bones weather station he’d installed at one corner of the enclosure: a warm night for late September, but not warm enough, apparently, to hatch more of the fly eggs. Meanwhile, the prior day’s maggots—mere specks, as of sundown—had grown visibly, thanks to their unceasing efforts during the night. The graveyard shift, he thought. The head start meant that they and their progeny—the generations they would swiftly beget—already had a leg up in the Darwinian race to survive and thrive, to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and consume it.
As the first rays of sunlight slanted through the trees and slipped through the woven wire, Tyler caught a flash of iridescent green in the air, followed swiftly by another, another, and a hundred more.
And the evening and the morning were the third day, he thought, wondering what it was that he and Dr. B were creating here. Not exactly the Garden of Eden. More like Lord of the Flies.