Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

When he finally left them his neck was itching against his collar. He stopped at the pool, but the pool was empty. The elderly ladies were not there, not swimming. This place, he thought vengefully, had probably killed them off too. The Texan in his monster truck.

He pulled out of the parking lot for the drive back to the city and found himself turning right instead of left, toward the set aside. He parked and walked across it up the slope, stepping around the bunchgrasses and peering into the holes that had been meant for the last individuals of the rat species, the ones with the babies.

The rats were gone now, the biologist had told him. They had been extinguished.

He looked up from the sandy ground to the red tile roofs across the arroyo, arrayed in military precision. He could hear crickets somewhere in the dry grass; in the stasis of the morning all he heard was this chirping and the faint rush of traffic on the Interstate, over two miles away. He stood without moving and stared at the roofs, the low adobe wall that ran along the wash. They had built it to stave off erosion but it also served to separate the built environment from the desert; here the brush was not clipped or manicured and the rare tall cacti, when they aged and fell, could be left to rot on the ground. At dusk black beetles crawled faltering over small rocks, as though the pebbles were boulders, and coyotes ran lightly down the wash.

Coyotes could live anywhere. They were not like the rats, who lived only on one small patch of land. They could live anywhere and die anywhere too. Like him. They were opportunists. And the Texans with their path of least resistance, the racewalker… they would give up nothing they were not required to, they would insist on their right to all that they had and more, unyielding. The pinky rats had been struggling to feed: then they died, and took their parents with them.

How was it he could have changed like this? Before it had been a triumph; then it soured. He resented the people he had sold to, but he was worse than they were. The racewalker, the Texan were familiar aspects… he saw it like diamond, like a flash on metal.

He felt the sun on his head and a wave of nausea.

Win, win; oh, not to have to turn the wheel. To not turn wheels at all: to stay in one position. Pave it over, make it a smooth and continuous surface, flat and gray on the world, speed and ease.

And yet the seedeaters. Infants.

But it was not sentiment, not at the base of this-he felt for them, but it was not empathy. It was fear. It was the knowledge of the ants beneath them, the ants pouring away and taking with them the very foundations. Everything.

He was cold.

The foundations would be gone. Once the ants left, first the rats and finally even the ants, there would be nothing left of them.

He got back in the car, dazed. It took him a few minutes to turn the key for home.

He kept going back to the set-aside. He was permeable there, oddly inseparate from the dirt and the dry golden grass. He liked to park the car and leave it, walking up the slope with its tumbled rock, his feet slipping, till he crested the hill and went down the back side. Then he could no longer see the pavement or the road, and would sit on the flat top of a boulder. Sometimes at dusk he would sit there for hours, listening to what he once would have thought was silence.

He had never before sat anywhere for hours, unless he was working. He had never, he realized one night, been away from a road before, never in his whole life been out of sight of pavement. Unless he was in an airplane or building. Or out near his island.

What place would that be, a whole world without roads? It was a panicking thought. A world without roads! He would go nowhere in such a place. He would be trapped where he was, he would have lived out his life only where he was born.

And the world outside the roads was not straight or smooth. It was not shored up like those roads and the buildings, metal and cement and right angles. It was whirlpools and washes of soil and the mass of the clouds, dispersing into each other and leveling distinctions. It was trying to invade him and he should be alarmed. He was in danger. What you needed more than anything, for the purposes of ambition, was certainty, was a belief that the rest of being, the entirety of the cosmos, should not be allowed to penetrate and divert you from the cause-the chief and primary cause, which was, clearly, yourself.

Yet he was laid out to receive it. He was laid out by the force of gravity itself, by elemental physics. Sediment accumulated on him, buried him gradually, and more and more he was silted in.

The zoo was on the edge of a wide desert valley, with a view of cactus-dotted hills above and, in the flats spread out beneath, flocks of small white houses. He went there after a meeting in Scottsdale, to fill an empty afternoon. He was restless in his hotel and had seen the zoo in a tourist brochure, with a picture of a wolf.

In a series of arid gardens connected by pathways there was a hummingbird enclosure and an aviary, a beaver pond and a pool for otters; there were Mexican parrots squawking, bighorn sheep on artificial cliffs, an ocelot curled up in a rocky crevice and a sleek bobcat pacing restlessly. He passed a lush pollinator garden and a series of low and inconspicuous buildings; an elderly, white-haired docent stood with a watchful bird perched on her hand, waiting for interest. He wandered over and looked at the bird closely. It had large eyes in a beautiful face, and was compact but fierce looking.

"American kestrel," said the docent. "One of the smaller raptors. This gal is almost nine inches long, but weighs less than four ounces. Beautiful, isn't she?"

A few minutes later he stood bracing himself with his hands on a low wall over a moat. Across the moat slept a black bear on a sunny ledge. This was a zoo of animals native to the region, and though bears did not live in the hot flatlands a handful of them still roamed the piney mountains that rose above the desert floor. He had read that every so often a bear was found dead atop a power pole, where it had climbed suddenly in terror, escaping from a car or a noise, and been electrocuted.

He watched the bear sleep, and in the lull of the sun and the heat and the stillness felt like dozing off himself.

Then the stillness was disturbed by yelling boys, hitting each other in the face. The father, in shorts, stood at T.'s elbow, looking down into his camera and adjusting a ring on the lens. A projectile-someone had lobbed a balled-up piece of litter. It hit the bear a glancing blow on the ear and he stirred, disoriented, turned around once and then settled down again.

"Too soon, I wasn't set up yet. Missed the shot," said the man, shaking his head. "Go again."

The wife looked around for something else to throw and T. felt heat filling his face. A tension bowed in him: he felt a rush of fury.

"Are you kidding?" he asked, turning to the wife. She wore large mirrored sunglasses. "You're throwing garbage at the bear? For a picture?"

"What's the big deal?" said the family man.

"Don't do it," said T. His shoulders were fluid and nervy, his face shining. He was enraged. Or excited. But all here, he thought: and I will kill them. Even though he knew it was a posture, he felt the anger and relished it.

The man shrugged and the wife began rifling through her purse, apparently ignoring him; a few feet away one of the flailing children, a thin boy in khaki camouflage pants, was already lofting a second missile, a foam cup half-full of brown slush. The cup missed the bear and fell into the moat below, and the slush slung out of the cup as it arced past and dimpled the bear's dark coat. The bear reared up again, doubly confused.