Lydia Millet: How the Dead Dream

So an animal had come to him, in the end. He was lucky: he recognized this again and again, as though each time was the first recognition. He was contented in this luck, which at first he had mistaken for a tragedy. But he was not done yet. In the morning, he could tell, he would get up again and he would walk to the sea.

The tough skin, the coarse hair. The animal breathed thickly. For a time he did not know what he felt. In out, in out, they breathed and breathed. They both had lungs, they loved to sleep, they liked to be alongside each other in the comfort of their rhythm. He slept, or thought he slept; he dreamed, or thought he dreamed. Did it matter? If the animal was speaking to him, fine: if it was only what he believed was the animal, that was fine too. To know was to be.

The animal was glad, he saw. The animal trusted, and its trust was simple but it was not crude. It had found something, a protector. And then he knew: it was thinking of its mother. That was why it was here. The mother had left and been killed, the mother had disappeared: how the animal missed her!

It had made a mistake, though it did not know this yet. It believed it had found its mother, found its mother again. It came down to the river searching for her and because it wanted to find her, wanted desperately, here she was. It believed it was not alone anymore. He was close, a real and breathing body: so at long last it was sleeping soundly.

Sleeping here it could feel safe again, and this thought of safety was the same as it had always been. The good thought was the same thought wherever you were. Faced with being the last, faced with being alone, the thought was still the same, still and always the same. When it came to the future the animal might not have plans, might not need them-what it had was an impression, almost a whimsy. An impression of seasons, the smell of the rain; of the ground and the wind, the sun and the moon, towering clouds, the great sky in flight. The feel of others like itself here close, of others not itself further out; the feel of rushing youth and the feel of slow growing old, of misery and joy. This was one breath, first stifled and then freed: one soft and glancing touch that was the memory of life.

Back to the beginning and on to the end-home was flesh, was nearness. Poor animal. It thought he was its mother, but its mother was gone.

As, after a while, all the mothers would be.

I want to thank Kieran Suckling for his talent as a critic and his knowledge of endangered plants and animals. I'm very grateful to Richard Nash for his unflagging enterprise, Maria Massie for her excellent instincts, Kate Bernheimer for her generous editorial help, Julie Miller for her time and talent with photographs, Chris Dietz for his reading, and my brother Joshua for his intimate understanding of the capitalist spirit.

For their own writing, particular thanks to David Hancocks, author of the lovely and necessary A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future; Joy Williams, author of the groundbreaking essay "The Animal People," among other works, for her inspiration; and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, authors of When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals.

For their kindness in allowing me close to zoo creatures, many thanks to Jeff Williamson and Steve Koyle of the Phoenix Zoo, as well as Nancy Biggins-Adams, keeper of mammals at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

To the memory of the West African black rhinoceros, which disappeared from the world in the time it took to write this book. And in honor of the rarest species in the United States, any of which may vanish in the blink of an eye: the Alabama beach mouse, Alabama lampmussel, Alabama sturgeon, Attwater's greater prairie chicken, Berkeley kangaroo rat, Buena Vista Lake ornate shrew, Cahaba pebblesnail, Carolina elktoe, Catspaw, Devil's Hole pupfish, Florida panther, Florida salt marsh vole, Fosberg's love grass, Franciscan manzanita, giant Palouse earthworm, Guam Micronesian kingfisher, Hawaiian crow, Hawaiian monk seal, interrupted rocksnail, Key Largo woodrat, Lange's metalmark butterfly, and Miami blue butterfly.

Lydia Millet is the author of five novels, most recently Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, which was shortlisted for Britain's Arthur C. Clarke Prize and named one of the best books of 2005 by publications such as the Christian Science Monitor, Time Out Chicago, Booklist, and Canada's Globe and Mail. Her 2002 novel My Happy Life won the PEN-USA Award for Fiction. She lives in Arizona with her husband and daughter.