How the Dead Dream

by Lydia Millet

  “That’s very helpful.”

  “What am I saying? That’s like offering smack to a guy on methadone. Better stay around the front side, T. Avoid the ass region completely.”

  “Good tip.”

  “Janet’s sister’s church has this deal where they deprogram them. I don’t think it works though.”

  “No? Doesn’t work?”

  “It’s a boot camp. They tell them man-boy love is the work of Satan. They bring in straight guys to teach them how to act straight. Like you’re not allowed to smoke, it’s faggy. Then

  they lock them up in small rooms and yell their heads off at them. ‘Repent, sinners! For the sake of Jesus Christ Our Lord, cast out the homo devil from your butt!’ It’s kind of like hardcore bondage and domination. It’s supposed to scare them straight but I think it actually makes them horny. Some Christian faggots actually hook up there. Serious. It’s basically a dating service for Christian homos.”

  “What does Janet’s sister think of that?”

  “She put her son in it and he came out of there with a brand-new assfriend. That’s how she found out the real deal. I have a faggot nephew.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “No blood relation though. Janet’s side of the family only. My genes are pure hetero. I had a great-grandfather who was a rapist.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yeah. The guy raped. Rapists are basically superheteros. A rapist is a hetero on steroids.”

  “That’s quite a theory you’ve got there.”

  “I forgot to tell you, you gotta use the shit racquet today. The titanium’s being restrung.”

  Over time, as T. had suspected he would, Fulton delivered an education.

  The change came suddenly, when the two of them went back to T.’s apartment for beer once after a game. Fulton claimed he wanted to see the place. As soon as they pulled up stools to the kitchen island and sat down, lifting freshly uncapped bottles to their lips, the dog came trotting over. She stood on her rear legs and put her forepaws on Fulton’s stool, tail wagging, with the slavish affection she sometimes bestowed on strangers who seemed welcome.

  Fulton surprised T. by pushing her away roughly with an elbow to her face and the side of his shoe to her flank. Grimacing, he wiped his arm on his gym shorts.

  “Dog spit. Disgusting.”

  “Spit? What spit? This dog doesn’t slobber at all. Come here, girl.”

  The dog retreated to T.’s side, where he put a protective hand between her ears and stroked her head. He was irritated.

  “I don’t touch dogs.” “Why? Are you allergic?”

  “I don’t like to touch the things, OK? They lick their anuses. You got any chips? Crackers or something?”

  T. stared at him as he tipped his head back and took a deep swallow.

  “No chips,” he answered. “No crackers.” “I’m starving.”

  Fulton jumped up and opened the refrigerator door, scouting. T. followed him with his gaze and felt a tide of revulsion rising in his bones, in his blood and muscles. Fulton’s back was a wall of hostile blankness; Fulton’s neck was no neck.

  He got off his own stool abruptly, a cursory glance at his watch.

  “Know what? Forgot. Got a meeting. Escrow thing.” “Take the brew with me, then,” said Fulton without

  missing a beat, and turned toward the door of the kitchen with his beer bottle still in hand.

  T. watched him leave without saying a word.

  That night he kicked his legs in and out of the sheets, turned and punched his pillow into different shapes against his cheek. The cheek felt slack, distracting as he tried to sleep. There was no good position for the side of his face. The scissoring of his legs and pulling and twisting of the

  blankets kept the dog awake too, circling and circling and rearranging herself head to feet into her curved moon of sleep.

  Finally he got up and went toward the bathroom, dog rising once more on the bed behind him. He leaned over the toilet with his eyes closed and saw pricks of light on the surface of his eyelids. Nothing happened beyond a head rush.

  He had let him kick her. Almost a kick. His dog—but it was not whose she was that mattered, only how devoted she was, how she followed without questioning. Would follow on and on forever.

  He stood. He was taking Fulton’s money, certainly. He would take it as long as he could. But to bring him home? To seek him out?

  His dog should not forgive him.

  •

  From a garrulous surveyor who worked for him in the desert, a man with psoriatic arms and perpetual mint covering the whiskey on his breath, he discovered that a group of small rodents called kangaroo rats had been displaced by the paving for his subdivision. This had been part of the lawsuit that had held up the project; the rats were the last of their kind, on the brink of disappearing.

  He met with state and federal biologists and offered a parcel of land in what the bureaucrats called mitigation; after the agreement was signed he acquired the habit of walking there, on a few acres of gravelly dirt studded with patches of grass and backed up to a low hill on a far edge of the project. Here, one of the biologists told him, the rats could settle the

  abandoned burrows of pocket gophers and build their nests; they could nibble on buckwheat and brome and filaree. He was gratified to find a use for the parcel, for it was a desolate, stark piece of ground, flat earth and old mine tailings in a bright, bland slope. Here and there an anthill. The weight of ants, a biologist told him, was equal to fifteen percent of the weight of all land animals; ants roiled beneath the surface in untold billions.

  Biologists had captured some of the rats before paving began and were breeding them, planning to move them to the site when the numbers were sufficient. One afternoon, at the invitation of the biologist, he toured the biological field station, which smelled of bleach and cedar shavings. She showed him a cage of baby rats called pinkies, squirming alongside their mother. The mother was sleek and looked less like the rats he had seen—gray, oily subway vermin with hairless tails and sharp faces—than a chipmunk, with a head too large for her body and bright dark eyes.

  “They’re technically not rats, actually,” said the biologist eagerly. “They’re in the heteromyid family. They’ve evolved to extract all the water they need from seeds.”

  He looked closely at the pinkies, their miniature bodies with finely articulated feet, their closed eyes as they struggled to feed. In the softness of the impression the room glowed amber at the edges. What was this? He felt receptive; he had an inner buoyancy.

  But the sense of well-being fled when he left, and in the course of the relocation the baby rats died. The biologist mentioned it weeks after it happened.

  “The mortality wasn’t complete,” she told him. “But this was a delicate situation, because the numbers were already so low. So, and I mean this is best-case scenario, there’s a question, with the reduced numbers, of population viability.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “With so few individuals in a population there would be problems of genetic drift and inbreeding depression. Resilience to disturbance drops. The gene pool is too small for long-term survival.”

  “I’m very sorry,” he said again.

  “Worst case, and what we’re probably looking at here, is extinction. The remaining adults aren’t thriving. They’re losing weight, starting to die off. Haven’t identified the cause. But we can’t re-release them like this.”

  The biologist was not emotional; she was matter-of-fact. But oddly he found his own throat closing.

  Was it something else from his life? It must be, something else glancing across from the side as he stood here. Still always Beth, possibly; he could not be choked up over the kangaroo rats. But he felt tentative, suspicious—as though someone had slyly robbed him and only now was he suspecting it. Cities were being built, built up into the sky, battlements of convenience and utopias of consumption—the momentum of empire he had always cherishe
d. But under their foundations the crust of the earth seemed to be shifting and loosening, falling away and curving under itself.

  He found he was barely breathing. He let out his breath and filled his lungs again.

  When he slept that night it was the ants abandoning ship. They left in their billions, all of them, and as they went away holes opened up in the earth, yawning sinkholes into which oceans and mountains poured.

  •

  In subsequent weeks he was often irritated by the Mojave project’s denizens. The racewalker, for one. As he walked along the road one morning—a cul-de-sac called Elysian Fields—the racewalker bore down on him with ferocious intensity. The racewalker’s lips were pinched together and he wore a mesh singlet bearing a single word: WIN!

  The racewalker, he saw, was a rigid man clamped together in barely suppressed resentment. As they passed each other

  T. waved and nodded politely; the racewalker looked straight at him but made no acknowledgment. When T. turned to watch his retreating back he noticed the racewalker’s defiant gluts, moving up and down with vigorous emphasis.

  He wondered what the racewalker had been doing when he took refuge here; he was barely in his fifties, surely, and must still be working, but here he was in a retirement community. The racewalker had a wife, if he recalled correctly, a potato-like lump of a woman who stared sullenly and rarely spoke: most likely the racewalker perambulated their house with barely a nod at her lumpen presence.

  Leaving the racewalker behind he proceeded to the house at the base of the cul-de-sac, recently purchased by a couple from Texas he had not yet welcomed. He rang the doorbell and waited, and when the woman opened the door he smiled at her pleasantly. Yet he found himself dwelling on the car parked in their driveway, on a political bumper sticker of obnoxious intent. When the husband emerged from behind his wife he took an instant dislike to the man, who wore a loud flag-pattern T-shirt and a cowboy hat. He could barely

  stand the pressure of the Texan’s outstretched hand. When the Texan announced a plan to replace his desert-landscaped front yard with asphalt, T. struggled to remain civil.

  “Sorry, but the bylaws won’t allow that particular kind of modification,” he said. “Visual quality, for the benefit of the neighborhood as a whole. I’m sure you appreciate that.”

  “With the turning you gotta do to park here, you know, if we had a bigger driveway we could just drive right onto it straight. You know, not have to turn at all, first left and then right, when we come down the street to the end right out there.”

  “Labor-saving,” said T., nodding and tapping his foot softly.

  “You know, we could just keep going straight and park right in front of the door here.”

  “You’ll get used to turning the steering wheel, I’m sure,” said T. “I mean that’s what they’re made for, right?”

  “Huh,” said the Texan.

  “I think you’ll find the nice look of the trees and flowers in your yard will be worth it. The extra effort of wheel-turning, that is.”

  “Plus which,” said the wife, “we wouldn’t have to back out. We could just turn a little and go out frontward again.”

  “It sounds like what you want is a crescent drive,” said

  T. “You know what? We’re building some homes on the other side of La Terrazza that are going to have crescent drives. They’re even larger. Maybe you can trade up when they’re finished. I can put you on the waiting list, if you’re interested.”

  “This little hideaway already drained me dry,” said the Texan. “Are you fuckin’ kidding?”

  “Just a suggestion,” said T. mildly. “How’s the rest of the move going? Got your bearings yet?”

  “She was the one wanted us to move here,” said the Texan. “I’m strictly an Amarillo man. SoCal’s not my bagga shit.”

  T. turned to the wife. “And how are you liking it?” “When are they gonna have the full schedule for step

  aerobics?” scolded the wife. “The brochure said step aerobics! Five days a week!”

  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.

  5

  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.