Christian Kiefer - The Animals

He and Rick had driven to Battle Mountain in near silence, listening to cassettes and smoking until the car seemed to contain within it a haze of fog, and when they reached the row of mobile homes and travel trailers at last the only thought that came to Nat’s mind was to ask himself where he could go if not here. If not Battle Mountain then where?

Rick’s mother had come to the door of her trailer looking ten or twenty years older than the last time Nat had seen her just a few months before, her skin a rough gray and her hair bleached to a crackling blond that spiked all around her head like an exploded bird’s nest. She screamed when she saw Rick standing there and in that scream Nat could see her as already dead, a creature comprised entirely of bones, her mouth a dry hole filled with gray teeth. She threw her arms around her son, drawing him into the trailer, the door snapping shut behind them.

Nat’s mother confirmed what he already knew. Mrs. Harris’s cancer had metastasized everywhere through her body. Nat’s mother did not know how much time she had left but she told him she would be surprised if the woman lasted more than a year.

I don’t think Rick knows it’s that bad, Nat had said in response.

I’m sure he knows now, his mother said. It’s not like she can keep it a secret.

He had half expected that Rick would knock at the door at some point during that night, looking for a drink or a cigarette or just to get away from the sad sight of his dying mother but no such knock came and eventually Nat wandered to the back of the trailer, to the room he had shared, so many years ago, with his brother, first in a double bed where they lay side by side, and later in two single beds, and finally with only one.

The room was empty but for his old bed and a few boxes stacked in one corner. When Bill was alive, there had been a poster above his bed and sometimes when he could not sleep Nat would stare at it, its features faint in the dim light from the slatted window: the cover of the Eagles album Hotel California , a dark image of some fancy Spanish-style building flanked by the silhouettes of palm trees, the title emblazoned in blue neon in one corner, the memory of which spawned another, a time when he had been sitting out in the desert at some bonfire party by the gravel pits, sixteen or seventeen years old, and the title song from that album had come pouring out of someone’s dark car in the night. Nat had been stoned or drunk or both, and when those guitars began they seemed to move him, physically, to float him out across the desert, and at the start of the vocal melody he was indeed on a dark desert highway and the cool wind was in his hair. And his brother was dead. That was what he remembered most of all. He was stoned and drunk and listening to the Eagles and his brother was dead.

He had occupied that space, lived in it, right up until they had left for Reno, but Bill’s had been the left side of the room, and even after a year had passed and then two, Nat sixteen and then seventeen, right up until the day he moved out, nineteen then, he had never really expanded his territory to that side. Someone came to take Bill’s bed away and the gap it left became a kind of receptacle for dirty clothes and cassette tapes and the other detritus of a boy’s life, not a space that he used but a space that collected the overflow. Now that gap was bare carpet and he knew that it had never really been his room but always shared with his brother and he also knew, looking into that gap, that this would always be the case.

And then he understood that he would never see this room again, for when he returned to Reno it would be to die.

When he returned to the front room it was to find his mother still asleep, the final tumbler of Long Island iced tea still half full on the foldout tray. He knelt before the television and flipped through the three channels the coat-hanger antenna managed to collect from Reno. A rerun sitcom on one. A commercial on the other. And then, on Channel 5, a close-up image of a wasp dragging a paralyzed insect to the entrance of its burrow in the dirt, its alien limbs pulling at its immobile prey. It lingered there for a moment, its antennae moving, and then disappeared into its burrow as if to ensure all was ready within before reappearing once more to seize the insect and pull it into the darkness. The narrator’s voice was calm and instructive, even soothing, explaining that the wasp would now lay its eggs on the body of the insect, providing a ready food source for the hatching of its young.

But then something changed. Another wasp or perhaps the same. The insect in place at the entrance and the wasp disappearing into the burrow but at the moment of that disappearance an instrument like a metal toothpick appeared at the edge of the frame, pushing the paralyzed insect a few inches from where the wasp had left it. The wasp appeared from the burrow for a moment, paused, its antennae waving, and then moved forward and grasped its prey and dragged it once again to the entrance and disappeared into the burrow again. In its absence, the instrument reappeared and pushed the insect a few inches away. The wasp emerged, once again found the insect, returned it to the entrance, and once again disappeared inside.

The sphex will repeat this behavior over and over again , the narrator said while the wasp checked and rechecked its burrow, the instrument shifting the insect each time it disappeared from the screen. What we might initially see as a behavior rooted in decision-making is revealed to be programmed instinct. The simplest action — in this case moving its paralyzed prey — creates a loop from which the wasp cannot escape. In some cases, researchers have created conditions where the sphex will check its burrow up to fifty times, triggered each time by moving the paralyzed insect a few inches.

He was shaking as he stood and clicked the television off and stepped past his sleeping mother to lift his coat from where he had draped it on the back of the sofa before opening the metal door and stepping outside. The night was frigid, his breath a tower of rising steam, and the trailers in their rows were dark. The whole town around him a blankness but for a distant streetlight swirling with frantic insects. A shush of cars on the interstate but otherwise no sound at all. The high desert endless around him. He extracted his cigarettes and lighter but his hands were shaking and he could not spin the tiny wheel to spark the flame. After a moment he rolled the wheel back and forth across the edge of the stairs, an old trick he had seen his brother do once in the rain, and at last a thin flame rose from the cylinder, its shape shaking and dancing as he lit the cigarette. Then he leaned against the peeling rail, puffing smoke into the black night, the cloud of bright insects throwing themselves against the hot burning globe, the Datsun floating amidst those circling frantic stars. Wasps everywhere caught up in their loop of activity.

He stood there for a half hour before he heard the door of Rick’s mobile home open and click shut again and Nat came across the gravel, his breath a hot white cloud before him.

Hey, he said quietly.

Rick came down the stairs. You got a light?

He handed across the lighter and there was the brief bright moment of the flame.

My mom’s dying, Rick said.

What do the doctors say?

That is what the doctors say.

What’re you gonna do?

No idea.

He took a drag on the cigarette. That thing you talked about the other day, he said.

What thing?

About Milt’s safe. You think we can pull that off?

Rick scoffed. If we can get in there, I don’t see why not.

Nat puffed at the cigarette again. Across the desert floor came the distant roar of a truck barreling down I-80. I think I know a way, he said.