How the Dead Dream

by Lydia Millet

  Delonn was not inside. The yellow bundle was not there at all.

  Then something sharp hit his back and the shock made his fingers slip off the gunnel. He fell and sank under, nose full of water: he had bashed into a tree. Splashing and choking he retreated onto his sand bar, the boat a light wraith as it moved off down the river, faint and fainter, glowing in the darkness and fading away. He was breathing hard. The branch had gouged his back. And he was being bitten savagely by insects: he shook himself off and ducked back under the net.

  How could Delonn have been moved? Something must have moved him.

  Now the boat would sail into the delta like a ghost ship; the boat would arrive and be empty of both of them. He had missed it.

  He sat back down beneath the net; he brushed the wet sand off his calves and ankles. The boat was out of his reach for good, he knew, trembling with the suddenness of it: but it was all right, actually. It was right. Delonn had loved the river and the forest. Delonn would not have minded staying there, disseminated among the elements that he knew. Let the vessel float, let it vanish quietly. He was leaving all that; he was letting it go.

  He thought of his mother. She let things go, he thought, but not because she chose to. And yet there was something right in her devotions, despite their idiosyncrasies. Despite the fact that the origin story was all about people and their passion and their sex, a tale in which animals and the rest of creation were window dressing at best … her story was a romance. But at least she had a love interest other than herself.

  And the mother of God knew how to put herself second. Not second to men, though some might see it that way, but second to everything.

  He had begun by idolizing the men, he saw now. Not so much his own father, who had been of limited interest to him, but the fathers of nations. It had been natural to begin with these men, wanting to emulate them, wanting to walk, as they did, wearing the luminous cloaks of their authority … no boy wanted to imitate his mother. No boy aspired to that yielding, self-effacing kindness, that quality of service. Boys wanted either to break things or to build them. But now it was his mother who stayed with him, not for what she was to others but for what she had always been to him alone, one small being where all her affection was concentrated—for how she had loved when it mattered most.

  He was fortunate. He had ended up here, in the middle of what was real—not what came easiest but what turned out to be closest to the center. He ended up here, under the black of the sky, wanting to copy his mother’s love. The affection she had given him when she was still herself, before she was robbed of it, the sense of protection and loyalty.

  This was the knowledge that mattered, he thought: simple, simple, simple.

  •

  He had nothing but the sheet to dry himself with. After he did this and wrapped himself in it again it was still damp, and a chill took hold of him. If he came, finally, to the mouth of the river, what would they think of him? If he told them what had happened to Delonn, would they even believe him? To think of this was a luxury; to think he might be suspected of crime or negligence was to assume he would see the ocean again. And yet it could not be more than another day’s walk.

  The river was simply not long enough to keep him walking until he fell down.

  He drank the rest of the whiskey. It warmed him a bit, but still he was shivering. He settled down on the sleeping pad as the song of the crickets rose around him; he held the empty flask close to him, inside the sheet. Good to have something to hold, he thought, even something empty.

  When a thing became very scarce, that was when it was finally also seen to be sublime and lovely. It had happened with wild nature in England in the nineteenth century: nature that had been despised and avoided before it was destroyed by cities and farms and pollution became, when there was almost none of it left, the subject of poems and paintings, the highest access to the divine. Now some few persons, he thought, marginal persons in their marginal groups, knew the value of the animals and their world, and he was one among them.

  He was as farsighted now, he thought with a flush of his old conceit, as he had ever been in his stock predictions, in his speculation for his own profit. He saw what was coming. Whether it was wheat futures or neighborhoods or the Nikkei or this; for the market had failed to see the animals for what they were, the animals in their own places with the ancient networks of their culture and landscape intact. Worth far more than single commodities.

  The lapping water was like a lullaby. Uncountable wealth, he thought, not the kind that was superfluous but the kind that kept you alive, down through the generations.

  But the market would take too long to recognize it; the market already had. The market had failed them.

  10

  When he felt it he did not move at all, not even—second nature—to look at the place on his wrist where his watch used to be. It was still night, not a glimmer of dawn. There was no moon; it was pitch black. He only woke up because it was lying on him. He had been on his side with his right arm flung out and his left clutched around his stomach; the animal lay on the right hand and arm through the mosquito net. It lay on top of his hand and arm, trapping them, and against his stomach.

  His first thought was that it wanted to hurt him. But it did nothing, only shifted once or twice after the first settling-in, shifted and took a breath. He tried to picture it from its breathing but was unable to. Beneath the dirt-smelling, musky coarse hair, through the very thin net, he could feel the movement of joints against him as it settled in on its haunches. What was it doing?

  There was heft to it, but it was not huge: it was neither large nor small. It was a mammal, certainly. It was not a

  jaguar, not an ocelot or a margay, nothing feline and sly— more likely a young tapir or a paca, large, stout, snouty and ground-dwelling. There were many herbivores here, more than he knew how to name. If it was a tapir, the lowland species that lived in the region, it was one of a kind that was soon to die off.

  Lying stiffly, the crushed arm pricking pins and needles, he wondered if it had lain down on him because it was wounded or hungry, because it smelled the vestiges of food on his person: but the pacas and the tapirs ate tubers, grasses and fruits, Delonn had told him. It could not be seeking warmth, not in the swelter of the tropical night. Even the sheet was almost too much for him. He did not dare to move; he kept his breathing regular; he would not turn over, would not give it cause for alarm.

  He remembered his dog. He remembered the feel of her paw in his hand, her knobby knuckles and smooth claws under the pad of his thumb. He had to get back; he had to take care of her. It was a small responsibility but it was his.

  The animal stayed: it breathed and wheezed: and though he was beyond exhausted he held himself rigid for a while. But the night wore on and on and he started to let himself slide. He still had whiskey in him. Drifting off he was confused about where and even when he was—in an orange place somewhere, that held memories? Here was Beth, for one thing; after all that had happened and not happened, she was faithful and she had stayed with him. She was not sad to have died, she said. She said that when you died what happened was you made room for the new. Young ones were born, occupying the space where your old self had been.

  She was not as selfish as he was, he thought. He still wanted to be there himself, wanted to be at the party. He still wished; he was not giving up. And the coyote he killed was

  there, and his dog. They ignored him but he was glad to see them. He was surprised, in fact, at how happy he was. He remembered his dreams, he knew them. Was this a dream, or was it a decision? Beth was far away but content. She smiled, still to reassure him. She had never forgotten what he needed from her, her happiness even after she was dead.

  He would let go, but never give up. A name, a life, the street he lived on when he was ten: goodbye then soon, to all of them. This was what was occurring all over, as the world dwindled and its colors were stripped from it. People kept busy on the surface but underneath i
t they were sleeping, sleeping in their billions. They were sleeping simply, as the other animals did, sleeping and dreaming of the life that might once have been.

  As the animal slept its way through time until the end of it came, so would he.

  What could it want from him? What it must have felt once— an imprint of touch on the other bodies, how they wriggled close there, in the den. He could almost feel them on his own sides. A mother and a small brother, a new one. On and on it was warm: it was warm, it was good. They were made to be close; they were made to be together. That was what mammals were. Not all animals, true, but his kind. Some of them.

  But the mother left then, and she never came back.

  They went out to find the mother again. The brother strayed from him and ended up somewhere else. It was strange without the others so close: it was strange and far too open. He imagined he knew the coldness of this, of walking for the first time alone.

  Looking for the mother the animal went down to the mud, went down to the wet grass and slippery ground. The silty water washed over him. His legs went pedaling; his eyes

  were above the surface as he pedaled with all four legs. It was warm in the water, as it was in the den. Better there than the air. He was looking for the mother, looking, looking: instead there was the brother, floating and not so warm. Why cold, brother? The brother floated and floated away.

  When the others left and they were all that you had, when all the ones that you loved had died: so it was, for last animals and for him. What did anyone do, when they were left alone?

  They found a way not to be.

  Think the thought and he would know how it was; he would see the past and with it the future, not only of them but of him. Angry, a person might thrash and fight—even against himself, because he did not know who he was, or who the others were either. Later he would have to sit, crying crumple-faced in the pile of the dead. This was how it would be with the men, after they finished their work. They would have to be alone after that, and for so many years. On and on they would live, surrounded by gray. Complexity would be gone, replaced with dull sameness that stretched out unending … and when they had killed all their friends and everywhere was empty: only then would they see how terribly they had loved them.

  •

  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.

  Acknowledgements

  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 rock-snail, Key Largo woodrat, Lange’s metalmark butterfly, and Miami blue butterfly.

  photo by Kieran Suckling

  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.