Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

He stood. He was taking Fulton's money, certainly. He would take it as long as he could. But to bring him home? To seek him out?

His dog should not forgive him.

From a garrulous surveyor who worked for him in the desert, a man with psoriatic arms and perpetual mint covering the whiskey on his breath, he discovered that a group of small rodents called kangaroo rats had been displaced by the paving for his subdivision. This had been part of the lawsuit that had held up the project; the rats were the last of their kind, on the brink of disappearing.

He met with state and federal biologists and offered a parcel of land in what the bureaucrats called mitigation; after the agreement was signed he acquired the habit of walking there, on a few acres of gravelly dirt studded with patches of grass and backed up to a low hill on a far edge of the project. Here, one of the biologists told him, the rats could settle the abandoned burrows of pocket gophers and build their nests; they could nibble on buckwheat and brome and filaree. He was gratified to find a use for the parcel, for it was a desolate, stark piece of ground, flat earth and old mine tailings in a bright, bland slope. Here and there an anthill. The weight of ants, a biologist told him, was equal to fifteen percent of the weight of all land animals; ants roiled beneath the surface in untold billions.

Biologists had captured some of the rats before paving began and were breeding them, planning to move them to the site when the numbers were sufficient. One afternoon, at the invitation of the biologist, he toured the biological field station, which smelled of bleach and cedar shavings. She showed him a cage of baby rats called pinkies, squirming alongside their mother. The mother was sleek and looked less like the rats he had seen-gray, oily subway vermin with hairless tails and sharp faces-than a chipmunk, with a head too large for her body and bright dark eyes.

"They're technically not rats, actually," said the biologist eagerly. "They're in the heteromyid family. They've evolved to extract all the water they need from seeds."

He looked closely at the pinkies, their miniature bodies with finely articulated feet, their closed eyes as they struggled to feed. In the softness of the impression the room glowed amber at the edges. What was this? He felt receptive; he had an inner buoyancy.

But the sense of well-being fled when he left, and in the course of the relocation the baby rats died. The biologist mentioned it weeks after it happened.

"The mortality wasn't complete," she told him. "But this was a delicate situation, because the numbers were already so low. So, and I mean this is best-case scenario, there's a question, with the reduced numbers, of population viability."

"I'm so sorry," he said.

"With so few individuals in a population there would be problems of genetic drift and inbreeding depression. Resilience to disturbance drops. The gene pool is too small for long-term survival."

"I'm very sorry," he said again.

"Worst case, and what we're probably looking at here, is extinction. The remaining adults aren't thriving. They're losing weight, starting to die off. Haven't identified the cause. But we can't re-release them like this."

The biologist was not emotional; she was matter-of-fact. But oddly he found his own throat closing.

Was it something else from his life? It must be, something else glancing across from the side as he stood here. Still always Beth, possibly; he could not be choked up over the kangaroo rats. But he felt tentative, suspicious-as though someone had slyly robbed him and only now was he suspecting it. Cities were being built, built up into the sky, battlements of convenience and utopias of consumption-the momentum of empire he had always cherished. But under their foundations the crust of the earth seemed to be shifting and loosening, falling away and curving under itself.

He found he was barely breathing. He let out his breath and filled his lungs again.

When he slept that night it was the ants abandoning ship. They left in their billions, all of them, and as they went away holes opened up in the earth, yawning sinkholes into which oceans and mountains poured.

In subsequent weeks he was often irritated by the Mojave project's denizens. The racewalker, for one. As he walked along the road one morning-a cul-de-sac called Elysian Fields-the racewalker bore down on him with ferocious intensity. The racewalker's lips were pinched together and he wore a mesh singlet bearing a single word: WIN!

The racewalker, he saw, was a rigid man clamped together in barely suppressed resentment. As they passed each other T. waved and nodded politely; the racewalker looked straight at him but made no acknowledgment. When T. turned to watch his retreating back he noticed the racewalker's defiant gluts, moving tip and down with vigorous emphasis.

He wondered what the racewalker had been doing when he took refuge here; he was barely in his fifties, surely, and must still be working, but here he was in a retirement community. The racewalker had a wife, if he recalled correctly, a potato-like lump of a woman who stared sullenly and rarely spoke: most likely the racewalker perambulated their house with barely a nod at her lumpen presence.

Leaving the racewalker behind he proceeded to the house at the base of the cul-de-sac, recently purchased by a couple from Texas he had not yet welcomed. He rang the doorbell and waited, and when the woman opened the door he smiled at her pleasantly. Yet he found himself dwelling on the car parked in their driveway, on a political bumper sticker of obnoxious intent. When the husband emerged from behind his wife he took an instant dislike to the man, who wore a loud flag-pattern T-shirt and a cowboy hat. He could barely stand the pressure of the Texan's outstretched hand. When the Texan announced a plan to replace his desert-landscaped front yard with asphalt, T. struggled to remain civil.

"Sorry, but the bylaws won't allow that particular kind of modification," he said. "Visual quality, for the benefit of the neighborhood as a whole. I'm sure you appreciate that."

"With the turning you gotta do to park here, you know, if we had a bigger driveway we could just drive right onto it straight. You know, not have to turn at all, first left and then right, when we come down the street to the end right out there."

"Labor-saving," said T., nodding and tapping his foot softly.

"You know, we could just keep going straight and park right in front of the door here."

"You'll get used to turning the steering wheel, I'm sure," said T. "I mean that's what they're made for, right?"

"Huh," said the Texan.

"I think you'll find the nice look of the trees and flowers in your yard will be worth it. The extra effort of wheel-turning, that is."

"Plus which," said the wife, "we wouldn't have to back out. We could just turn a little and go out frontward again."

"It sounds like what you want is a crescent drive," said T. "You know what? We're building some homes on the other side of La Terrazza that are going to have crescent drives. They're even larger. Maybe you can trade up when they're finished. I can put you on the waiting list, if you're interested."

"This little hideaway already drained me dry," said the Texan. "Are you fuckin' kidding?"

"Just a suggestion," said T. mildly. "How's the rest of the move going? Got your bearings yet?"

"She was the one wanted its to move here," said the Texan. "I'm strictly an Amarillo man. SoCal's not my bagga shit"

T. turned to the wife. "And how are you liking it?"

"When are they gonna have the fall schedule for step aerobics?" scolded the wife. "The brochure said step aerobics! Five days a week!"