Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

There were three elephants in the last zoo he broke into, all of them female and retired from circus life. It was still common for circus elephants to be beaten: for how else could an animal that weighed five tons be persuaded to stand on a stool on one leg? Domination had made the elephants resentful. Then there was their imprisonment, for in the wild they lived by walking. Walking was how they measured the passage of time. Here they were confined to cages; harassed by jabbering primates with long sticks; made to stand for endless hours on concrete, to suffer the indolence and aching muscles of eating food off the ground. In the wild they rose to take their food from the treetops; they did not nose around for it in the dirt. All of this filled them with a massive and brooding rage.

Sometimes, for sixteen hours of the day, they swayed where they stood, rocked and swayed as though catatonic, and likely they were. But there were still things they enjoyed. They liked to be shown affection, to feel water coursing over their broad backs and to kick at the sand in their cages to find toys buried within. They liked to reach up for swinging bales of hay that hung from artificial trees.

They liked anything that was more than nothing.

The first time he went he felt their breath, a warm wind of eaten hay. The pale tips of their trunks were like digits, with a single finger knuckle that bent and clutched. When he came back the next night they recognized him and their pink, black-spotted foreheads vibrated. They rumbled. At night he took to sitting beside the bars, on the concrete. The floor was sloped in the barn where they slept, with a trough at the bottom to channel water and waste. The ceilings were high and there were no windows. He fell asleep against the cold wall with the elephants breathing in the dark a few feet away.

One morning he woke to the elephants pacing and felt he was pacing with them. A panic took hold of him. He was sinking into the torpor of the elephants himself, their permanent impoundment, and he had to get out. Their deep rage that was as heavy as they were, massive in its resignation-this lay over him in a swell, a contagion of misery. He almost thought they had conveyed it to him, had entrusted him with the purpose of getting out. There was nothing he could do but leave, get out and leave them here.

He would go.

As he was leaving it occurred to him that he would not come back, either to this zoo or to any of them.

With the elephants more than any of the others, he thought as he left them-as he left behind these great beasts who recognized him when he came, who rumbled and swayed sadly-he could feel them waiting. He had thought at first it was food they were waiting for. Here they were, the last animals, locked up and ogled, who had no chance remaining of not being alone. Here they were, and what he had assumed in his smallness was that they wanted food. It was possible to be fooled by the signs of their animation, in the course of a day. But it was not food that interested them. Food was only a diversion for them, because they had little else.

They were not waiting for food, but they were, in fact, waiting. He had not been wrong about that. It was obvious: all of them waited and they waited, up until their last clay and their last night of sleep. They never gave up waiting, because they had nothing else to do. They waited to go back to the bright land; they waited to go home.

Vera and his mother could not keep his dog again so he boarded her, recovered and walking well on three legs, in a luxury kennel. It claimed to be a resort for the dogs of the stars.

From the small plane that flew him down the peninsula in the morning the sky to the west was a light, full blue over the rolling forested mountains. He could see nothing but the green and the blue, which reminded him of a globe, a freshly printed textbook with perfect illustrations. He had a sense of beginning.

He sat next to the pilot and wore a headset; this endowed him with a sense of competence. He was equipped. If someone saw him now, they would have a false impression of mastery… he turned to look to the east, over the water, and saw thunderheads gathering. The pilot shook his head and said he would not fly again that day. A hurricane warning had been issued.

In the restaurant at the resort, where he always stayed when he came to supervise construction of his own, more modest island facility, there were large televisions on the walls. They ran a weather station constantly, but guests paid little attention. The eye of the storm was approaching, pause and swirl, pause and swirl; it was predicted to make landfall by early evening.

He had heard nothing of this before he left home.

Still the island was not far and he had to see his own place, so after a quick lunch he paid a young boatman to take him out. As they crossed the shallows he sat happily on the padded seat with the sun on his face; when his skin was hot he bowed his head and gazed down through the turquoise into the brown and orange of the coral. It was not, he realized, as bright as coral he had seen in photographs: was there something wrong with it?

A crowd of pelicans skimmed and flapped, drawn by tiny silver fish in great schools that moved back and forth in sweeps and flashes. He looked up from the water to the horizon; before them was the delicate crescent of light sand, the buildings' white facades, the thatch roofs beneath the palms-everything as he had foreseen. There were the docks, on their brand-new pilings, a single hammock swinging, birds of paradise beneath the beachfront windows.

It was more than he had expected.

Two skiffs were tethered to the dock and as the motor cut off he heard the high whine of a drill. Swiftly he left the boatman waiting, walked to the end of the dock and touched the edge of the thatch roof and the sturdy metal eye that held the hammock. He craned his neck and stared into the rafters, radiating like spokes from the high beam in the center. Then he turned and strode up the dock to the beach, eager to see the buildings. He looked at the sand under his feet: old bleached coral cracked when he stepped-soft, porous driftwood here and there-large green coconuts fallen from the palms. The empty leg of a crab; the skull of a fish. Small young palm trees had been planted among the old.

One rule of thumb, a contractor had told him: tourists could never see too many palms.

The new white sand was full of vines and roots where the native mangrove was trying to find purchase; there were rake marks where the workers had scraped it back. Up ahead the main building, with its white dome and arches; off to the sides the flanks and the cabins. On the second floor, wide verandahs with thatch awnings. The doorways and windows had been roughed in but there was no glass in the windows and the doors had not been hung.

The buildings were still only shells, but lovely.

He could come here, maybe have a new life. His beach house, not for business but to be someone else, be different.

He felt a quick surge of euphoria; then there were pats of rain on his hair and he glanced upward. The cloud cover had lowered suddenly, a dark gray obscuring the distance. He was surprised.

Ahead the white buildings were backed up against the jungle. The sand was pocked with raindrops, more and more; palm fronds against the sky floated sideways. He zipped his windbreaker and stepped onto the patio. Behind a deep white wall two workmen were bent over electrical outlets, plying duct tape; the tarp beneath their feet was splattered with plaster and a radio played from a rickety stool. They turned and smiled politely when they saw him, wiping their hands on their shirts.

He shook their hands and asked in broken Spanish for his foreman; they answered in English and pointed him out, in the next room huddled over a circuit breaker.