Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

"T., this is Sal."

"Good to meet you," said T. But when he reached for Sal's hand his own was slapped, grabbed and flipped in some complex high-five maneuver he failed to follow.

"So who are you, Casey's big brother?"

"I don't have a brother," said Casey. "Big or little. Ever listen to me in there?"

"I meant Big Brother. Don't they have 'em for gimps? How come just the inner-city black kids get their own guiltridden Yuppie motherfucks? Get me a Big Brother. Take me to the park, shoot some hoops. Buy me an ice cream cone. I could use one. Shit. Get me a double-ass Rocky Road."

"If you're really nice to him he'll bring you some pink cotton candy," said Casey. "See you, Sal. T., could you get the car door please?"

"I can't believe you're into that guy," said T. as he drove. "Does he ever shower?"

"When the mood takes him. This was a low day."

"You might want to rethink."

"Like it's your business?"

"It's my business if the guy's an asshole."

"Please."

"I mean it. That handshake? Passive-aggressive."

"More like aggressive-aggressive."

"He's got a lot of anger."

"So would you if you had to piss through a catheter for the rest of your life. He's not going to beat me up, T. He's got a hollowpoint lodged in his spinal cord."

"Excuses, excuses."

"That's better. You sounded like a jealous husband."

T. cuffed her on the arm.

"Flatter yourself."

"Ow. That hurts."

His mother approved of his friendship with Casey, whom she referred to as "that little paralyzed girl." Partly she believed it was an act of charity, and as such would help to keep him safe from an afterlife in the Pancake House; partly she liked the fact that it gave him a social outlet. And she was eager to introduce Casey to the jigsaw puzzle.

"It's the ideal thing for that little paralyzed girl!" she said earnestly, twisting in her dining room chair to look tip at him. "It keeps your mind active."

"I think her mind's active enough already," said T.

"I can give her some of my old ones. I have more than forty in the closet. Please, T. It's such an opportunity!"

"I'll ask her," said T. "OK? I promise."

He kissed the top of his mother's head and waved to her nurse, soaping dishes in the kitchen.

Outside group therapy Casey did not socialize with, as she put it, other pathetic shut-ins; he suspected his mother would fall into this category. Casey preferred the company of those she could abuse, and was uncomfortable in situations that seemed to call for civility. But when, after delaying for several weeks, he finally conveyed his mother's invitation, she was surprisingly gracious. They went to the apartment on a Sunday, and as T. took the wheelchair off the back of the car his mother stood at her door, hands clasped, smiling and waiting patiently.

"I am so glad to meet you!" she cried as Casey rolled up her front walk. T. could hear her stage-whisper as she leaned down to the chair, "You are having a very healthy effect on my son!"

When they left, after stale graham crackers and tea, he was struggling to heft a stack of puzzles deep enough to impair his vision. Casey, he assumed, had no intention of even opening the boxes, but had nodded and smiled with a semblance of interest as his mother laid them out on the table.

"Thank you," he said, backing out of the driveway. "You didn't have to do that."

"Do what?" she asked, looking at him blankly.

"Be so nice to her."

"It wasn't, like, hard or anything," said Casey sharply. "I liked her. Don't be so condescending."

"How did I condescend to you?"

"To her, idiot."

True, he thought. But his mother was so often childlike.

"That woman is the only reason you're living. When you were born she could have thrown you in a garbage can. Many do."

"I never saw it that way."

"You should."

The pupfish lived in a small rocky pool in the desert uplands of Nevada, a few miles from Death Valley. Since long before the rise and fall of the Roman empire they had lived in the pool, only a few yards across, spawning and eating on a single ledge on the wall of the pool, beneath an overhang. There were no others like them in the world.

He drove to the pool with his dog on a three-day weekend; the dog sat in the passenger seat. They sped through a small town that contained almost nothing but an opera house, and they stopped for gas on a road that led to a nuclear test site. He had read a scientific paper that said the pool the fish lived in was fed by water from the test site, so-called fossil water; but the water would take ten thousand years to reach the fish's hole, so the radioactivity that now tainted it had not yet reached the fish.

Pebbles clanged against the undercarriage of the Mercedes and as the car lurched on the dirt road the dog lost her footing. Before them rose craggy hills, brown grasses and yellow wildflowers. Farmers had tried to grow alfalfa here. Finally he parked and walked up an incline, his dog watching him from the car. A plaque on the rock had a picture of the fish, blue and tiny, possibly an inch long.

But the walls of the hole were almost sheer, and even if he were able to rappel down he would risk hurting the fish, kicking the fragile outcrops where they ate. He had read that divers went in sometimes, but it was highly skilled work and he was neither trained nor equipped. The water was murky and he could not make out the fish beneath the surface. All he could see was a line of plastic funnels on a string.

But there was another place: the scientists had moved some of the fish to a refuge, not open to the public.

It was a concrete tank.

He peeled back a loose flap in the fence and crawled through; no cactus to navigate this time, only clumps of gold grass. The tank was built under a roof to protect it from the desert sun, and set low into the floor. He knelt down on the rim and leaned over the placid water, then flicked on his flashlight. He could make out brown scum, yellow algae. He waited.

Finally the fish came. They were tiny but their eyes were large, and for this reason even the adults looked like babies. They darted back and forth on the edge of his beam as he watched them, appearing to have no goal. Possibly they went back and forth because the light was disorienting them.

After a while he clicked it off. The floor was cement, and cool beneath him. To stave off extinction generations upon generations were bred and died in this concrete tank, where they were reduced to nothing-darting energy between straight walls. The cave where they had evolved, which looked from above like a dull puddle perched in a nest of rocks, was in fact the narrow mouth of a body of water that went hundreds of feet down, no one knew how far. Divers had descended to several hundred feet but still not touched the bottom. It was a deep, pinhead-narrow fissure in the earth, and water filled it from a profound source.

Back in the cavern, he thought, possibly the fish had a reason to live-no less or more than its fellows, anyway-and possibly there was even a civilization. Save the algae they ate on the ledge, there were no other species in the hole. The fish were alone, with only each other for company-not one animal but hundreds of them, alone as a whole kind, in a world without others.

Each fish lived for less than a year in the hole: once in a fish generation there might be an event. It might occur that a bird lit on the rock near the ledge with a flapping of wings, or a leaf was blown into the water from a shrub on the nearby ground; clouds might gather over the cave opening and rain might fall, dappling the surface and bringing molecules from afar, molecules from factories, cars, people's skin.