by Lydia Millet
Later she refused to attend, though the school was willing to make accommodations for her. She was stubborn, said Susan. All she had left was speech, and speech stood in for action. She magnified herself through bold talk; she put her words where the rest of her couldn’t go.
“And she’s still my baby. I love her just as much as I ever did,” said Susan, backing out of her parking space.
Fruiting olive trees were planted on the parking lot islands, and beneath them black ovals littered the asphalt. He could hear the tires crunch them.
“No, that’s not true,” went on Susan, muted. “I love her more.”
He watched her tired profile as she looked over her shoulder and then turned back to the steering wheel. He felt a sympathy that made him wince and then a wash of gratitude.
“I know I’m lucky to have you,” he said.
After that he began to pay visits to Casey almost every week. He ran up and down the beach five or six miles on weekday mornings, his dog loping beside him on the path, and half-marathons by himself on Saturdays and Sundays, along the firm sand near the waterline. Part of him still resisted running, and when he started he doubted he would persist; but then he ran longer distances, and by the time he went eight or
nine miles he was often filled with euphoria. It flamed up through his calves and his chest and along his jaw to what felt like a trembling membrane beneath his skull, a rush of adrenaline that delivered him to elation.
Sometimes he ran down the beach from Santa Monica to Venice to the peninsula and stopped in at a convenience store to buy a small token for Casey, a newspaper or a bag of chips. Sometimes he stopped at a neighborhood pet store to pick up a plant or a new snail for her tank. He could not purchase anything but snails, for hers was a male fighting fish and would fight other fish to the death.
He was amused by her pugnacity. She was only a couple of years younger than he was but she seemed like a teenager. She did not mind that he showed up with sweat stains in the armpits of his T-shirt; she was not reminded by this, as he feared at first, of her own debilitation.
“Are you kidding?” she said when he asked her this. “I hated that shit. Sports and jocks. Only time I ever ran was to catch a bus.”
Her mother had persuaded her to attend support-group meetings and she liked to mock these; but she also knew they were helpful, and attended them faithfully. T. sometimes drove her there in her car, which was modified for hand operation and to hold her wheelchair. She taught him to drive it. At the third meeting to which he drove her, in late November, she confessed there was a man at the meetings who intrigued her; he was an ex-policeman, shot in the back by a rookie.
“You can’t tell my mother. She wouldn’t approve of him,” she said. “He obsesses about CIA covert operations and collects weapons. He buys some of them on the black market. They’re not even legal. Also he drinks malt liquor, and on special occasions he does crystal meth.”
“But you like that about him,” said T.
“Sure, hell,” said Casey, looking out the window. “I don’t care. Whatever works, right?”
“It’s not enough for you to have a paralyzed boyfriend, you want an addict too.”
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”
Waiting to pick her up afterward, leaning against the window of her car, he watched the wheelchair-access door for her emergence and felt like an elder brother, waiting to take his sister home from a school dance. Yet Casey had a family already, her mother and her father, a soft-spoken, kindly man. He was a bureaucrat of some kind who liked to discuss taxes. Whenever Congress attempted to reform the income tax code he shook his head sadly, as though heathens were trampling on hallowed ground. Despite the fact that T. reserved his reverence, such as it still was, for other agencies— the Department of State, for instance, and the Library of Congress—he felt a certain kinship.
The door cranked back on its circuit and a gray-haired woman in a wheelchair appeared; behind her was Casey, followed closely by a gaunt, grizzled man in a filthy peasant shirt with an old army blanket covering his lap.
“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 guilt-ridden 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 up 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 yo
u’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.
He closed his eyes and thought of swimming in the deep, armless and legless with only a streamlined slip of a form, swimming with nothing around him. He was in cool water: he flowed and was nothing: nothing was around him.
It was easy to think of the fish existing in pure monotony, to assume their brains were so small they did not even register this. From there it was easy also to see them as crude bundles of nerves that moved through their medium by reflex and instinct. He recognized the philosophy.
He put out a hand and touched a fingertip to the surface of the water. This alone was a disturbance for them; this was a pollution. Rolling onto his front again he looked over the ledge at them, propped on his elbows. To see them closely he had to stare, had to fixate on their minuscule bodies, the gestures of their movement. How good it must have felt to glide through the depths of the same water they knew through the eons, apprehend the slanting of long
beams of sunlight through the depths. Feeling must have filled their bodies there, under the sky, over the depths; feeling must have overwhelmed the small motes that they were.
After all they depended on their own decisions to survive and needed feelings to guide them; they needed fear, for instance, for this purpose. Fear they knew. And if they knew fear why not the inverse too, the glowing comfort of safety, the warmth and closeness of other fish; and why not loneliness too, even if it moved through them like one more ripple of light.
6
He never spoke of his incursions and guarded carefully the difference between himself and the self that was available publicly. This was a clear benefit of being alone, because if Beth were still living he could never have done it. She would have broken the seal.
On occasion he had the sense that he was celebrating her through his dedication; though he knew she was gone he also allowed himself the conceit that she had special knowledge of his activities. With meticulous care he planned his business trips in relation to sanctuaries and captive breeding facilities, finding reasons to fly to these places even when profit was unlikely. Undetected he entered a bird sanctuary in San Diego, a rescue center for manatees scarred by boat propellers, a butterfly habitat in New Hampshire, a laboratory in Rhode Island where American burying beetles were bred and released. He was a regular at the best zoos in California, Arizona and New Mexico and he also flew to others—St. Louis, Seattle, Cincinnati. Each night he reserved for a single enclosure.
And he took a course in basic first aid that stood him in good stead. His thighs stayed lightly scarred from the tree in the Monkey House, whose superficial but stinging cuts had proved slow to heal; his knees scabbed over from multiple abrasions he tended to reopen, and his right calf bore the purple marks of teeth from a young Morelet’s crocodile. It had been a fairly fortunate encounter in fact—the baby crocodile had let go almost right away, allowing him to drag himself out of its pen sheepishly, hurting but mostly ashamed of his carelessness. The punctures were not deep and did not require stitches; he slathered them in antibiotic ointment and left it at that.
So that Casey would not notice the marks he ran his half-marathons in long pants; to her and to his mother he was rock climbing, in the mountains and at the gym. Thence came the battered kneecaps, the scrapes on his elbows and knuckles and cuts on his fingertips.
At the beginning he was afraid of the predators, and though he chose with great care, avoiding animals known to be highly territorial or prone to aggression, he was still wary. They were not pets. But he soon lost this novice fear. It was not his habit to stalk the animals, merely to enter their enclosures and sit in one place to observe them. So he waited for each animal to show itself, and over time he grew tired, then bored; he was amazed at the depth and reach of his boredom, the way minutes and hours wore on uneventfully. For the animals too the greater part of captivity was waiting: when their food was delivered the last animals fed, slept and briefly forgot, he believed, the urgency of hunger. Then they awoke and the waiting started again.
He wished he knew if they got impatient. Expectation struck him as a human impulse, but then he thought of his dog. Her days were entirely given over to expectation, it seemed to him.
Waiting f
or a feeding the animals paced or swam or leapt from branch to branch, as their natures dictated, with a bat now and then at a so-called enrichment tool or a peck at an errant insect. Their lives were simple monotony. They slept to use up time; this was how their days were spent, the last sons and daughters.
In the wild, he thought, there would be almost no waiting. Waiting was what happened to you when you lost control, when events were out of your hands or your freedom was taken from you; but in the wild there would always be trying. In the wild there must be trying and trying, he thought, and no waiting at all. Waiting was a position of dependency. Not that animals in the wild were not watchful, did not have to freeze in place, alert and unmoving—they must do so often—but it would hardly be waiting then. It would be more like pausing.
Time must run more quickly there, matching heat and cold to the light of day and the dark of night. Familiarity with this pace would spin out through long days, as though it would never change: now and then would come quick fear or a close call, but mostly the ease of doing what had always been done. For a second a prey animal might grow complacent, and then in a rush the end came. As the animal moved where it had always moved, a scent on the wind might stop it. The last surge of adrenaline, the lightheadedness of a bloodletting: sleep again in the fade, in the warm ground of home.
And how different could it be when the death was a last death? Say an individual was the very last of its kind. Say it was small—one of the kangaroo rats for instance—and ran from a young fox through a hardscrabble field, towering clouds casting long shadows over the grass. The run lasted a few seconds only; no one was watching, no one at all because there was no one for miles around, no one but insects and
worms and a jet passing high overhead. Say neither of them knew either, the fox or the rat, that the rat was the last, that no rat like him would ever be born again. Was it different then? Did the world feel the loss?
The field stayed a field, the sky remained blue. Any pause that occurred as the action unfurled, any split-second shifting of the vast tableau would have to be imagined by an onlooker who did not exist. The fox started to run again, looking for his next quarry since the last animal had been barely a mouthful.