Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

He thought he recalled feeling, in the flash of its eyeshine, a similar flash in himself-a fleeting awareness that in the wolf's gaze there was a directness unlike the directness of men.

Wolves were gone, the educational sign on the cage had read, from most of the country. They were the villains of fairy tales, and there had been vast campaigns to exterminate them all across the continent. A slaughter of the wolves, along with the buffalo. Long before that in the late Pleistocene, according to the sign, the Clovis people had caused the extinction of the cave bear, the giant beaver, the saber-tooth tiger, the horse and the mastodon.

He buttoned his shirt without looking at his fingers, eyes on a weather map on the television, a smiling weatherman pointing and gesturing. He had wanted the old wolf to come close to him, head down, softening. As though all wild animals could one day be tamed-as though this was an aspect of all of them, this one-day-tamable quality, and their wildness was nothing more than coyness or a mannerism. As though other animals should not only submit to people but behave like them, comport themselves with civility.

Privately, he thought, at the heart of it, you wanted animals to turn to you in welcome. It was a habit gained from expecting each other to do this, from expecting this of other people and only knowing people, not knowing anything beyond them. That was another kind of solitude, the kind where there was nothing all around but reflections.

And what about the endless differences of the animals, their strange bodies? Many legs, stripes, a fiery orangeness; curved teeth or tentacles, wings or scales or sky-blue eggs… Instead of looking at the wolf as an animal he never knew and never could, as with the sacred and the divine, he had fallen into the trap. He had wanted it to lick his hand and lope along beside him.

Beth was finished being dead, with her departure accomplished and her absence complete. There was the memory of her but that had nothing to do with death, or at least was a willful opposition to it.

The animals on the other hand were in the middle of dying, not only one at a time but in sweeps and categories. This he found increasingly distressing. He began to comb newspapers for the latest word about animals vanishing; he began subscribing to magazines. In magazine pictures he saw animals far away, in the places where they had been born and either continued to live or were beginning to die off. Some were in backgrounds of green, others yellow, others a bright turquoise. White now and then, Siberia or the Antarctic. These were the places of the animals' origin, warm green, dry yellow, the wet deep blue.

Then there was the gray of human habitation. The blue places were turning to brown, the yellow places to dust, the green places to smoke and ashes. Each time one of the animals disappeared-they went by species or sometimes by organizations of species, interconnected-it was as though all mountains were gone, or all lakes. A certain form of the world. But in the gray that metastasized over continents and hemispheres few appeared to be deterred by this extinguishing or even to speak of it, no one outside fringe elements and elite groups, professors and hippies, small populations of little general importance. The quiet mass disappearance, the inversion of the Ark, was passing unnoticed. The flocks of passenger pigeons that had darkened the sky, Teddy Roosevelt on safari shooting hundreds of animals from a train… he saw a list from one of Roosevelt's trips to Africa in 1909. Five hundred and twelve animals shot, including seventeen lions, eleven elephants, twenty rhinos, nine giraffes, forty-seven gazelles, eight hippos, and twenty-nine zebras. George V of England had killed a thousand birds in one day for sport; in a year the Roman emperor Titus had nine thousand captured animals killed in popular displays.

He soon learned to recognize the signs of an animal's imminent disappearance. Some were tagged or collared or photographed, some monitored by bureaucrats. Sometimes a group or individual took up the cause of an animal or a plant and could muster the rationale for a lawsuit, and often the courts favored the victim; but the victim remained a victim and for each victim whose passing was noted thousands more slid away in the dark. From where he stood they succumbed with great ease; from where he stood they had always been invisible anyway.

In his own case it had not required strength or merit to make the authorities take his side. The judiciary was harder for industry than the executive but still the case had been a rote one-he himself had not even been there, had been ignorant of the stakes and indifferent to them-a few lawyers paid, a few dates, phone calls and briefs and filings. That was all, and he won, and the pavement spread in a flood and now he was richer and the universe was simpler by one. But it should not have been so easy, either for him or for his competitors. He thought of the other people he knew in real estate development, mostly middle-aged men with solid tans who inclined toward arrogance. There was entitlement, of course-he knew this and had always accepted it, in practice if not in theory, for in theory he cleaved to merit, held merit in high esteem.

But alongside entitlement there also had to be good information-information about supply and demand, history and the future. In this matter of mass extinction, he decided, there was a scarcity of information.

His competitors had done no more than he did, he knew this, except insofar as they could be represented by points further out along the same arc: most of them were older, better capitalized. But they were no worse than he was, in substance, and yet he resented them now as he resented the racewalker, for reasons he recognized were hypocritical-as though they had done an injury to him personally. His own profit seemed beside the point, seemed to exist within the realm of the personal and the trivial, while the profits of others exemplified a trend.

He was a name on a list, a long list. It was not necessarily that he should have been outright prevented from realizing his object, but there should have been resistance. There should have been a fair fight and he should have been in the thick of it. His position was a curious one, certainly-he had a living to make, he had his plans and projects. But there had to be reason, balance. There had to be, at the very least, recognition.

Animals in the outside were far from his life, but zoos were close at hand. Zoos would be his study.

His practical lessons took place at nighttime, which left his days free for commerce. At first he read mail-order manuals but soon they left him at loose ends and he hired a locksmith to teach him. The locksmith, a Brazilian, came to his apartment twice a week and brought his full toolkit: hooks, rakes, diamonds, balls, tension wrenches. They practiced on T.'s doors and cabinets, on a variety of locks the locksmith installed for the purpose.

After the lesson the locksmith would often stay for a nightcap; T. had assured him that he would not use his hardwon knowledge to commit crimes against persons or property, and though he had the impression the locksmith could not care less whether he used his powers for good or for ill the friendly assurances served as a bridge between them. Criminal trespass would be the limit, he said jokily. The Brazilian stayed to drink with him on Fridays and sometimes played a few hands of cards.

His nights were not always free, however. He was still not delivered of Fulton despite the fact that he had professed bursitis to get out of playing racquetball; Fulton's wife had taken him tinder her wing.