How the Dead Dream

by Lydia Millet

  Then the stillness was disturbed by yelling boys, hitting each other in the face. The father, in shorts, stood at T.’s elbow, looking down into his camera and adjusting a ring on the lens. A projectile—someone had lobbed a balled-up piece of litter. It hit the bear a glancing blow on the ear and he stirred, disoriented, turned around once and then settled down again.

  “Too soon, I wasn’t set up yet. Missed the shot,” said the man, shaking his head. “Go again.”

  The wife looked around for something else to throw and

  T. felt heat filling his face. A tension bowed in him: he felt a rush of fury.

  “Are you kidding?” he asked, turning to the wife. She wore large mirrored sunglasses. “You’re throwing garbage at the bear? For a picture?”

  “What’s the big deal?” said the family man.

  “Don’t do it,” said T. His shoulders were fluid and nervy, his face shining. He was enraged. Or excited. But all here, he thought: and I will kill them. Even though he knew it was a posture, he felt the anger and relished it.

  The man shrugged and the wife began rifling through her purse, apparently ignoring him; a few feet away one of the

  flailing children, a thin boy in khaki camouflage pants, was already lofting a second missile, a foam cup half-full of brown slush. The cup missed the bear and fell into the moat below, and the slush slung out of the cup as it arced past and dimpled the bear’s dark coat. The bear reared up again, doubly confused.

  The thin boy jeered.

  T. turned to the father, who was still fumbling with his zoom lens. A split second of hesitation. “You let your kid do that again, I swear to God I’ll grab that camera and break it open on the cement,” he said.

  He realized his molars were grinding. He had never done this, never. Never anything—. He was thrilled and at the same time he hated the man, hated his wife and even his children.

  “Mind your own business,” said the family man. “I’m dead serious. I’ll smash it to fucking bits.” “I’ll sue you!”

  “What are you thinking? Seriously. What does someone like you think? Do you think?”

  “Stupid bear!” jeered the camouflage kid.

  “Mind your business,” said the family man again.

  “It is my business,” said T. “Just like it would be if you threw garbage at my sister. What don’t you get about that? Is there an argument for what you’re doing?”

  “Let’s just go, Ray,” said the wife.

  “I got a squirt gun,” said the kid, and pulled it out: the size of an assault rifle, bright pink.

  “Don’t even think about it,” said T., and looked at the father. His neck tensed, his hands flexed. “Tell him to put that thing away. I’ll punch your face. I mean it.”

  The man was squaring off, his eyes narrowed. He let his camera rest against his chest, the dangling lens cap swinging.

  “Tell me how to handle my kid? He can squirt his water gun at the bear if he wants to.”

  “You disgusting. Piece. Of shit,” said T.

  The wife tugged urgently on her husband’s sleeve. “Come on, Ray.”

  After a moment the family man turned, his wife beside him and the kids ranging around them both; as they turned a corner the kid in camouflage pants whipped around and sneered, sticking up the middle fingers of both hands before he disappeared.

  T. felt the adrenaline surge fade but still he burned. He wanted to hunt them down and punish them. But he did not. He did not utter a word of complaint to the zoo’s management. He was flooded with elation.

  He was elated. This was who he was, he thought; he was a person who would defend, who would swear and threaten and feel the heat and the cliff-edge of opinion. He felt good—better than good. He stood there for seconds, or was it forever?—stood there partway in rapture, struck.

  On its flat rock the bear was still turning blearily round, tossing its head as though trapped in a nightmare. Finally it resettled itself and laid its chin on its paws to go back to sleep.

  He went back that night when the zoo was closed, thrilled, as if he was lightly drunk, at the illicitness in himself. It was new. What arrested him in the zoo was the wildness it contained— how far this was from the realm of his competence. He wanted to meet it. He knew the zoo animals lived in cages but nothing more about them except that they were alone, most of them, not only alone in the cages, often, but alone on the earth, vanishing. Their condition was close to what he was trying to grasp, lay somehow at the base of his growing suspicion that the ground was no longer fixed, was shifting beneath him.

  Empire only looked good built against a backdrop of oceans and forests. It needed them. If the oceans were dead and the forests replaced by pavement even empire would be robbed of its consequence. Alone, he thought—a word that came to him more and more, in singsong like a jeer. In the zoo the rare animals might have been orphaned or captured or even born in captivity. He had no idea where they came from, could not know their individual histories. But he knew their position, as he knew his own: they were at the forefront of aloneness, like pioneers. They were the ones sent ahead to see what the new world was like.

  Would they tell what they saw?

  The rarest animal in the zoo was a Mexican gray wolf, the one pictured in the tourist brochure, an animal that was apparently frail and aging. Its fur looked mangy; it had been asleep when he was there earlier. The wolf’s pen, as the sign posted on it told him, was a temporary setup during construction of a new exhibit. It was nothing more substantial than a chain-link fence near the road, with barbed wire curling along the top.

  He looked at his shoes: round toes. He should be able to wedge them into the holes. He shoved his flashlight in his pocket, hooked his fingers through the mesh and pulled himself up, kicking for purchase. His feet flailed against the fencing and his fingers were already bruising, imprinted with purple lines. Speed was the key, he thought, move quickly. He always had reasons for each single action, but he had no good reasons for doing this. Was he irrational? But it lifted him. He would follow the question to its resolution, even if the question was unconscious.

  He was not even all the way up the six-foot fence when he regretted his tactics. He had to get down from here, the pressure on the pads of his fingertips, which he feared were

  going to be sliced clean through. In a scramble he grabbed the metal frame the wire was stretched on and went up and over it, catching barbs on his chest and thighs. His leg, halfway over, was tangled in the wire, and struggling he lost his foothold. Falling he tried to launch himself forward, away from the barbs.

  When he recovered, on the ground with an aching neck and shoulders, he had a sharp pain in his leg. Sitting up he saw he had grazed his calf on a cactus as he fell. Through the thin cotton of his pants it was bleeding, and in the dark he could see white spines sticking through the fabric. He stood unsteadily, bracing himself against the fence; he could make out almost nothing. He walked around the cactus, lifting his flashlight. In the dark he could imagine not only wolves but almost anything, a secret menagerie. He was filled with the rush of this, with the idea of myriad creatures materializing from the blackness. Their coats glowed, their faces were both benign and predatory. The faces of animals were amazing in that, tongues of velvet and claws of ice. What were they?

  There was a gate, padlocked; a metal box built into the base of the fence; a dry log, a thin tree. Doves rose suddenly from the tree, a flurry of hysterical wingbeats. He jumped.

  His leg was aching.

  He began to point his beam at bushes and the bases of trees, where holes might be tucked. Finally he flicked off the light and squatted down. Without the glare his eyes adjusted and finally he apprehended a shape that was not a bush or tree, hunkered down against the fence, low and dim.

  He got up silently and picked his way closer, still without the flashlight on, his eyes on the ground while he threaded his way between bushes. Closer and closer till he pointed the flashlight toward the ground in front of the wolf’s
hunched shape and touched the switch with his thumb. A quick yellow

  flicker of eyes and then the wolf moved fluidly, fleeing along the fence. It went away from him, into a corner where it remained.

  He would not get closer. The wolf would not allow it.

  The next morning he removed the small spines from his leg. The wound was throbbing, but he did not mind; there was something he savored in it, pinching the hair-thin fibers hard between the tweezer edges. The sensation was fine and sharp as a grass blade. It satisfied him.

  He took two aspirins and showered. In his socks and his shirt, standing in front of the in-room coffeemaker, he thought of the old wolf again. Animals were self-contained and people seemed to hold this against them—possibly because most of them had come to believe that animals should be like servants or children. Either they should work for men, suffer under a burden, or they should entertain them. He had strained against the wolf’s aloofness himself, resenting the wolf for its insistence on distance. He had felt it almost as an insult, and inwardly he retaliated.

  But then he was self-contained too: he had a private purpose, a trajectory, and no one had license to block it. It might be obscure even to him, but that obscurity was his own possession. The old wolf’s unwillingness to be near him was fully forgiven by the light of day and in fact the joke was on him. Wariness was simply its way of life, having nothing to do with him. It had not been robbed of this quality, though it was caged and it was solitary: it retained its essence. It did not attempt to ingratiate itself. It did not have diplomacy.

  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 under her wing.

  As a young man with no clear defects or blemishes, with his health and his wealth and a full head of hair, he was apparently eligible. He was a sad and noble sufferer, apparently, and from this position—an invalid minus the illness, with all his parts in working order—he became an object of desire for many women newly introduced to him. Still others, who had met him before and deemed him cold or distant then, now viewed him with excessive generosity. Possibly they imagined themselves as Florence Nightingales; possibly they saw in him a soulfulness brought to the fore by loss.

  It was Janet’s calling to bring him and these wanting women together. Janet did not believe it was feasible to be single; to Janet a bachelor eked out his living on the margins of society, orbiting the married couples wild-eyed and feral as a homeless man at a polo party. A single man, to Janet, was superior in the social hierarchy only to a single woman—this

  last a life form that was repellent but fortunately short-lived, naked and glistening as it gobbled its way out of its larval cocoon.

  Because Fulton was an investor T. could not refuse his hospitality on every occasion, and so at least once a week he found himself a dinner guest at Fulton’s house in Brentwood. It was an article of faith with Janet that when men brought wealth to the table women must bring good looks; and since this was Los Angeles there was always someone sitting across from him—not too much older than he, for Janet had imposed a limit of thirty to allow time for courtship, engagement, and a brief honeymoon followed by reproduction— whose hair had been bleached, breasts lifted, or nose pinched into narrowness above delicately flared nostrils.