by Lydia Millet
“She’s fixated on hair. Dog hair, people hair. She looks for hairs on the furniture and picks them off one by one. She can spend hours doing this. And she keeps throwing away her hairbrushes. Then we have to buy new ones. I bought two in the last week. And I dug one of them out of the trash with yogurt all over it.”
“Organic,” said his mother, and squinted at him. “Fat-free.”
She turned back to the television.
She had forgotten which room was her bedroom, said Vera; she had slept on the floor of the corridor and her hands and feet had been icy when Vera found her. She had omitted to put on a shirt in the morning and gone outside in nothing but underwear and a brassiere; she had made her way to the building’s laundry room, where Vera found her picking the gray fluff out of the lint screens.
He went over to his mother and knelt down between her and the television; she leaned to her left and then to her right to see past him.
“You remember me, right? Mom. It’s me.”
Part of him thought that speaking close to her face, holding her wrists, fixing his eyes on her own would snap her to attention.
“Mom?”
“Are you a criminal?”
“I’m your son.”
She was staring glassily and he turned to look where she looked; a man punched another man in the face.
“Is that a joke? Or a lie?” asked his mother, more speculative than accusing.
“Why would I lie about being your son?” “Maybe you want to steal something.”
“If I wanted to steal from you I would just grab your purse and run.”
“You’re a criminal. You have a criminal mind.” “I give up, then. I’m a criminal.”
“Are you still my son?” “Yes. I’m also your son.”
“I must not have brought you up right. I did something wrong. Was I the wrong mother?”
“You were a great mother.” “Can you change the channel?”
“Sure. What are you looking for?”
“I just want to watch a show that’s not about criminals.”
He flipped through the channels, waiting for her to stop him.
“See? They’re all about criminals. All the shows are about criminals. All of them.”
“Do you want to watch the news instead?” “All that is is more of them.”
“OK. I’ll let you have the remote back then. Here.” “Are you a criminal?”
He looked over at the nurse, who shrugged and bent down with a cup of tea for him.
“We’ve already been through that.”
“I need to have a shower. I need to shave my armpits.” “Good to know. Go for it.”
“It has sprouts in there.”
She picked up a magazine from the end table and shuffled off toward the bathroom; he waited dranking his tea, and heard nothing. There was no sound of water running.
After he finished the tea he went to the bathroom door and knocked; his mother opened the door fully dressed and stood back slightly, waiting. Behind her the bathroom looked ransacked.
“Who are you?” “I’m your son.”
“The rapist? Or the murderer?”
“I like to flatter myself that I’m neither.”
“I remember you. You like to do those crimes. The police come and solve them and have a trial with a pretty lady talking. You have to go to jail. Because sometimes you do killing, other times you do rape.”
“I do mostly real estate.”
She studied him suspiciously, at some remove. “OK. I admit it. A little land speculation.”
“I know you. I saw you there. You’re the one from the program. Why do you even deny it?”
“Mom. I was with you in the living room, and we were watching TV. So let’s not talk about me. Let’s talk about you instead. I didn’t hear the shower, is all. I wondered if you forgot. You said you wanted to have one.”
“Oh,” she said, and turned to look behind her. The floor was littered with toiletries and medicines; the cabinet doors were ajar.
“What are you doing there?” “I thought …”
“Tidying up?”
“I wanted to get rid of them,” she said faintly, and looked down at the spread.
He remembered the vial of pills. He looked down at similar vials on the floor.
“Let me help you,” he said.
He knelt down and picked up the pills, slipped them into his pockets as she turned away and began to handle a hairbrush, plucking at the hairs that were caught in the bristles. Pink plastic razors were everywhere. He would not confiscate her razors, but he wished that he could.
“This is all over the place,” she said, holding a tangle of hair she had removed from the brush. “It gets in things. It grows on you.”
“It grows on all of us.” “Disgusting.”
“You like to have it on your head, don’t you?”
He put his hand on her shoulder and guided her to the mirror over the sink. They looked at their images: she was pale and old, he was smooth and young. She had not colored her hair in some time—since Beth, he guessed—and gray was woven through the yellow. He tried to keep his gaze on her worn features but it was hard and he was drawn back to his own reflection.
“See? It’s good to have hair on your head,” he said. “Isn’t it? You wouldn’t want to be bald.”
“It should stay there, then,” she said uncertainly. “It shouldn’t fall off everywhere. It gets in the cracks. It sticks on things. It even gets on your tongue. Then you can’t get it out! You can’t even find it with your fingers. It’s a finger tricker.”
She was growing agitated.
“It’s OK,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
“It goes down your throat and makes you choke and throw up.”
“You’ve been swallowing it?”
“Not on purpose,” she said, indignant. “Good. I’m glad to hear that.”
“But it grows in the dark.” “At night, you mean?”
“In the body cracks. Under the arms. In the crotchal region.”
He looked at her again. So much of composure, which he had till now believed to be a process of physical assembly, was in fact internal. His mother’s hair had been combed, her face was clean, and yet she was dissolving. It was clearly visible.
“It also grows in the light,” he said softly. “On the top of the head. Right? The sun shines right down on it. And on the legs and arms.”
She cocked her head, considering.
“Let me run you a warm shower. Can I do that? Then I’ll give you some privacy and you can get in.”
In the kitchen he talked to Vera, keeping his voice low.
“Listen,” he urged, helpless. “Maybe a specialist could help her. A neurologist? I’ll make calls. I mean she’s not even sixty.”
“She still goes to church,” said Vera. “Almost every day. She is not unhappy.”
They turned to see his mother standing in the hallway, fully dressed but soaking. Her clothes dripped onto the floor. She had a comb in each hand.
Walking back to his apartment he tried to enumerate family members and came up with almost none. His father’s parents had died before he had time to form a memory of them, his mother’s mother had died when his mother was a small child, to be replaced by a stepmother who left again when his
mother was only twelve, and his mother’s father, the cranky Ukrainian who was the only grandparent he could remember, had died a few years back of cancer … aunts and uncles were estranged or distant. He had met a couple of them when he was a boy or a teenager, but they had fallen away after. The few cousins he had he would not even recognize if he passed them.
His father had never seemed to remember the family he’d grown up with, never seemed to think of them—as though it was usual and correct to move ahead and leave brothers and sisters behind you, unnoticed. His mother had tried to encourage visits, he recalled vaguely, had sent Christmas cards and gifts to his aunts and uncles and cousins until possibly they stopped acknowle
dging them.
Part of the growing estrangement from family, in the end, was a simple product of freedom. It was the American way to pick and choose from a range of possibilities, not to be bound and obligated. Cut loose from a certain idea of duty, it turned out, individuals did no great deeds but only drifted apart.
Women left. There was a general feeling, he thought, a preconception that men were the leavers, but in fact according to statistics men rarely left. Mostly the leaving was done by women. But it was men who drove them to it; it was the men who misbehaved.
With each mammal it was different, with each bird, reptile, amphibian, fish and invertebrate, but in the main it was the males who went out, wandered, ventured, and were exposed. They traveled further, died faster, and did not raise the young. Meanwhile the females stayed. The females stored up fat for lean times and lay low, in the hive, in the den, in the nest, in the web. In the sandy hollow. Mostly the females
stayed, the males strayed, and so on down through the years. In the wild the males were more showy; they strutted and preened and the dull ones died off and the others fathered sons with magnificent plumage.
But among modern Americans, he had read in a magazine in his dentist’s waiting room, three-quarters of divorces were instigated by women. More men betrayed their wives than vice versa: but finally it was the women who removed themselves, who went away completely, when it came to humans. In his case it was true, anyway—first her, then her, and even her. All left him in the end, whether by death or choice or defect. He couldn’t blame them. They were otherwise occupied, or they were hurt.
Of course his father had left before anyone else, that was also true. His father was a man, and he had left both of them. But by his own admission his father had never been there in the first place.
•
The zoos were not new. What was new about them was the way the animals were valued as possessions more than symbols, the way the animals had become scarcer and scarcer as millennia passed so that they now were tradable. There had been zoos for thousands of years, for almost as long as there had been men who wanted to show their power through the jewels of their collections. More than two thousand years before Christ there had been, in the Sumerian city of Ur, vast collections of thousands of animals, gifts to the kings from their subjects—goods already, maybe, though still ripe for slaughter. Tuthmosis III let his
wild trophies pace the gardens of the temple of Karnak— cheetahs, monkeys, deer and antelope with curling extravagant horns.
He thought of these ancient zoos as he slept in the new ones, so that some nights he was almost in both of them.
These days the zoos were full of final animals. Almost all primates were on their way out, almost all the large carnivores, the great cats and wild dogs and the bears, almost all the wide-ranging and large herbivores, giraffes and pachyderms, almost all the vast, intelligent mammals that lived in the oceans. They were all on the clock, in the long moment of going before being gone. The zoos were a holding pen: they had the appearance of gardens, the best of them, but they were mausoleums.
A child might believe a zoo was a small paradise—to a child it might look like an Ark of creatures, in all their splendid forms. When he went to a zoo by daylight, a visitor like everyone else, he watched the children watching the animals. He saw their captivation. Why should it not resemble an Ark to them? In an Ark the animals were orderly, after all, walking neatly in pairs and, for the purpose of their salvation, submitting politely to the will of men.
The parents reassured each other and they reassured the children. Here animals were separate from the hazard of each other, their predators and their prey. They were safe from men too, for in the wild there was always also the ruin of the wild—new roads, earth-moving machines and fire and chemicals that stripped the leaves off forests. Here the animals were safe from everything but old age. It was widely known that they lived longer in captivity.
In fact whole species were being protected as living relics, given the honor of being almost extinct. This status was posted on their exhibitions sometimes, as though it was a
blue ribbon. But even when the animals were relics they were less the last of their kind than a different kind entirely— a hybrid kind, he thought. A zoo kind. It had been observed since the nineteenth century that the mental fitness of zoo animals was seldom attended to by the zoo authorities, and this persisted. Where the large and wide-ranging animals were concerned, more often than not there was little to find there besides illness. Long ago they had lost everything and gone mad.
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 day 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.
8
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