2.
One day at recess, alone behind the jungle gym, the boy spots a crow perched on a low pine branch. He is used to seeing entire flocks in this tree. At dusk dozens will gather together on its branches, visible from across the playground as a cloud of black specks. They dot the treetop then, like ticks in a green flank. Even at that distance he can hear them cawing, a dark, sharp sound that they seem to draw from deep within the tree itself, their black bodies growing engorged on it. After school each afternoon, waiting for his mother in the parking lot, the boy will watch them, listening. Today, however, there is only the one crow, and although its beak hangs open, it does not caw. It is perfectly silent. It just sits there, cocking its head and blinking its beady eye in profile. The boy keeps expecting the crow to caw, to let the tree speak through it, in a voice infinitely older than it is. But its beak gapes and no sound comes out. If the boy listens carefully, he can distinguish the rustle of a breeze, some wind in the needles. And then it is possible to imagine that this hissing is emanating from the bird’s beak, in steady, crackling waves, like static from a broken radio. That is the closest it comes to cawing. Maybe, if he startled it, he could get it to caw, the boy thinks. He kneels at the base of the tree, palming a pinecone from the ground. It is pear shaped, and imbricated with brown scales, like a grenade of shingles. Rising, he readies the cone at his shoulder, the way a shot-putter would. The crow keeps cocking its head back and forth on its branch, oblivious. Its beak never narrows. The jaw’s twin points remain poised at a precise and unchanging angle, as though biting down on something that the boy can’t see: an invisible twig, or tuft of grass. Materials for its nest. The boy waits for the crow to blink, then lobs the pinecone. It misses by a foot, crashing through the foliage and landing behind the tree somewhere. The crow is unfazed. It retracts its head on its neck slightly, but it doesn’t caw, and it is careful neither to open nor close its beak. It really is as if there is something in its mouth, something that it is determined not to drop. But its mouth is empty, and so the boy imagines that it is this very emptiness that it is bringing back to its nest: that it is building a nest of absences, gaps. The way it jealously hoards this absence between its mandibles, like a marble. Its beak must be broken, the boy decides, broken open. Or else, no: The bird is simply stubborn. It could caw if it wanted to. It is resisting only to spite him. He gathers four more pinecones. The longer the crow doesn’t caw, the louder its silence becomes. The gap in its beak magnifies the stillness around them, until the boy can no longer hear any of the other playground sounds: teachers’ whistles; the far-off squawks of his classmates on the soccer field. The boy feels alone with the crow, alone inside this quiet. He hugs the four pinecones against his stomach. He is determined to make the crow caw once before recess is over. He imagines that he is the teacher, the crow his pupil, and he remembers all the ways in which his own teacher calls on him in class: how the boy is made to speak, pronounce new vocabulary terms, say present when his name is said. Before recess is over, the boy will make the crow say present. He will pelt it with pinecones until it caws, until it constitutes itself in a caw, until the moment when—dropping that absence from its beak—the crow will finally announce its presence, say present, present its presence in the present sharpness of its caw. The crow looks up at the sky for a moment. Seizing the opportunity, the boy hurls another of his pinecones, this time missing its torso by a matter of inches. The crow spreads its wings and begins to bate on the branch. For a moment, it almost seems as if it is going to fly away. The boy grips a third pinecone tightly, until its spines bite into his flesh. Soon, he knows, the recess bell will ring. He squints at the crow, focusing its black body in the center of his vision. But just as he is about to throw the pinecone, the bird tucks its neck into its chest, looking down at him. It blinks its black eyes rapidly, agitatedly. Finally it closes its beak. And when at last it caws—rupturing the quiet around them, with a loud, sharp-syllabled awe—it is as startling as the first sound in creation.
3.
The boy walks his bike up a hill. In the middle of his street he sees a dead chipmunk, crushed evenly by the tires of a car. It has been flattened into a purse of fur. Around it, a red aura of gore. It makes a brown streak in the center of the lane, straight as a divider line. Ahead of him on the sidewalk he sees a live one. Only a yard away, a second chipmunk stands tensed on all fours, eyeing the boy and his bike. When it wrinkles its nose in rapid sniffs, the boy can tell that it is smelling the carcass stench, wafting in faint off the tarmac behind him. It must seem, to the chipmunk, as if the boy is its brother’s murderer. He does not know how to correct this misunderstanding, or reassure the rodent that he means it no harm. He stands silent, trying to stifle any movement that might terrify it. It flees in terror anyway. In an abrupt about-face it dashes up the sidewalk, hugging the hill’s concrete revetment; when it reaches a ground-level drain-pipe—barely bigger than its body—it squeezes inside. The boy walks his bike up to the drainpipe. He moves slowly, so as not to startle. But his wheel spokes make a sinister sound as he approaches: Each bony click seems to close in on the animal, skeleton sound of Death’s scythe tapping. When the boy reaches the drainpipe he bends to peer inside. Huddled into a ball, the chipmunk is shaking violently, its walnut-colored chest convulsing. It glares out at the boy, trapped. The rear of the pipe is backed up with gunk: mud, pine needles, dead leaves. The sight of the boy there, darkening the aperture of the drainpipe, must be a source of unbearable dread for the creature. He starts to back away, but it is too late. Inexplicably, recklessly, the chipmunk rushes forward. It reaches the edge of the pipe and leaps free, landing on the sidewalk at the boy’s feet. There it freezes, locking its eyes on his shoes, as if awaiting the killing blow. The boy is careful to stand behind the bike’s front tire. He gives the chipmunk a barrier, a zone of safety. He reassures it, by his very posture, that he means it no harm. The chipmunk cowers, catching its breath. The wheel casts a barred shadow over its body, a cage of shade in which the chipmunk trembles, frozen amid the many spokes. Indeed, the way that the tire’s shadow encloses the rodent, it looks like a phantom hamster wheel. Like the kind of toy Death would keep its pets in—all the mortals who are Death’s pets. Maybe that is why the chipmunk dares not move, the boy thinks: because it already understands the nature of this wheel. To flee from Death is just to jog in place. Spinning inside one’s dying. The boy takes the bike by the seat and rolls it back. As the front wheel withdraws, the shadow slides off its prisoner. Now the chipmunk is free to flee. But it hunkers to the ground, eyeing the boy’s feet with coiled purpose. A second passes in which it does not so much as flinch, and the boy understands exactly what is about to happen: Feeling cornered, the chipmunk will charge him. In a brown blur it will scurry up his shoe and latch onto his pants leg, the way a squirrel mounts a tree trunk. As it claws at his pants for purchase, tearing through the cotton, the boy will be able to feel its bark-sharpened nails get a scansorial grip into his shinbone. The sear of skin tearing; the beading of blood. He cannot help imagining all this. He will kick out his leg—as if it were aflame, he imagines—but the chipmunk will hold fast to him, out of rabidness perhaps. Then the boy will have no choice. Above all, he knows, he will have to keep the creature from biting him. After trying so hard not to frighten it, he will be forced to kill it. With his free foot he will have to scrape it from his pants leg, onto the sidewalk, and stomp the life out of it, flattening it as dispassionately as that car had flattened the rodent in the road. In this way, he will become everything the animal mistook him for: its murderer, its personal death. The boy stares down at the chipmunk, which has begun to vibrate like a revving engine. Because it was wrong about the boy, it will prove to be right about the boy. Because it has mistaken the boy for a murderer, it will make the boy murder it. And so perhaps, the boy reflects, the chipmunk wasn’t wrong after all: Maybe it could see clearly what the boy could not. That he had a role to play in its fate. The boy stomps his foot lightly on the sidewal
k. Still the chipmunk does not run. It is ready now. It must have been waiting for this moment its entire life. Seeing the boy today, it recognized him instantaneously: He was the human who had been set aside for it, the boy it had been assigned from the beginning. He was the place it was fated to die. Now, at long last, it has an appointment to keep.
4.
On his walk home from school the boy pauses at the edge of his neighbors’ yard. It is wide and well manicured and unfenced, and today their dog is out in it. A standard chocolate poodle—as tall as the boy’s chest when standing—it is couchant now, in the middle of the lawn. It has not yet noticed the boy from where it lies. It pants happily in the midday heat, its long tongue lolling from its jaw. Some curls are combed into a bouffant on its forehead, where they seem to see the, massed and wrinkled like an exposed brown brain. The dog’s owners—the boy’s neighbors—are nowhere to be seen. Far out of earshot, deep within their white two-story house. If the dog were to suddenly bark loudly and attack the boy—if the boy were to shout for help—they would not be able to hear. At least twice a week the boy passes the poodle in the yard like this. The sight of it always paralyzes him with fear. He will stop walking for a moment, then sidle slowly down the sidewalk, careful not to draw the dog’s attention. What is to keep it from mauling him? The owners are never outside with it. Evidently they trust the poodle. It is allowed to roam unsupervised in the yard, which is not technically—but only appears to be—unfenced. In reality, the boy’s mother has explained to him, it employs a so-called invisible fence: a virtual boundary of radio waves tracing the perimeter of the lawn. GPS coordinates are broadcast to the dog’s shock collar, which is programmed to administer mild jolts of admonitory electricity whenever the poodle trespasses the property line. There is nothing—she reassured him—to be afraid of. After a few hours of behavioral training, the dog would have learned to obey the dictates of its collar. It would have internalized the limits of its prison. And so even if it noticed the boy one day—even if it bounded barking toward him—it would know to stop short at the pavement. As his mother was explaining this, the boy nodded to show he understood. But deep down he still does not trust the invisible fence. He wonders, for instance, how it is supposed to keep other animals out of the yard. All it would take is for a rabid bat, or raccoon, or chipmunk to crawl across the boundary line and bite and infect the dog. Then when the boy was walking home one day, he would see the poodle foaming at the mouth in the yard, with nothing but a symbolic cage of X/Y coordinates separating it from him. And what was to keep the dog—mindless with rage—from simply disregarding the fence, in that case? Assuming it could remember the fence at all. For the rabies might very well have wiped its memory clean, erasing its behavioral training. Then the dog would be incapable of recognizing symbolic cages, only real ones, and it would not think twice before bounding across the yard at the boy. He stares at the poodle. It is facing the house, panting. He does not know its name. Sometimes he imagines being attacked by the dog, and in these fantasies—which he indulges in involuntarily, standing motionless with fear on the sidewalk—he assigns it the name Gerald. He imagines the neighbors running across the lawn, calling, Gerald, Gerald, get off him, even as the poodle pins him to the pavement and snaps its jaws. This is always the most horrifying moment, for the boy, in the fantasy. How the dog can ignore its own name. How it can conduct this beast’s balancing act, suspended between two minds: the mind that answers to Gerald and the mind that murders meat. For once it starts tearing into the boy’s throat, it is not Gerald any longer: It has already regressed, passed backward through some baptism. Not only nameless now, but un-nameable. That is what terrifies the boy. The name cannot enclose the dog forever. It is just a kind of kennel you can keep it in. The boy pictures all the flimsy walls of this poodle’s name: the collar’s silver tag, engraved Gerald; the blue plastic food bowl, marked Gerald; the sound of its owners’ voices, shouting Gerald. Each of them is just another invisible fence, which the dog can choose to trespass at will. The poodle turns to him now, cocking its head sideways. At any moment, the boy knows, the animal could transform from a friendly house pet into a ferocious guardian: a Cerberus at the gates of the hell that it will make this boy’s life, if he makes even one move toward its masters. From his place on the sidewalk, the boy reaches out his arm. He extends it over the lawn, as over a candle’s flame. Unfolding his hand, he holds it palm down inside the dog’s territory. The poodle rises, stretching its hind legs and shaking the tiredness from its coat. It begins to cross the yard. Every few steps it stops, eyeing the boy. It is afraid of him, he realizes. The dog must recognize the threat that the boy poses. That he could snap. Attack it. That he is wild, unpredictable, unconstrained. From the poodle’s point of view, the only thing holding the boy back is a kind of invisible fence, or else system of invisible fences. The name his mother gave him. The school uniform he wears. The fact that he walks with his back straight, and hair combed, and that he knows better than to murder his neighbors’ pets. This is all that protects the poodle from him now, the poodle must be thinking. He imagines himself enraged like the dog, rabid like the dog; he imagines himself punching the animal, in blind mindlessness. Yes, it is possible. He can see himself that way, one day: suspended over a void where no name reaches. The dog approaches the edge of the grass. It stops a foot back, looking up at the boy’s hand. Suspicious, it sniffs. It curls back its lip slightly, revealing a white incisor. The boy’s hand is cold with sweat. It is exactly as he always imagined. He wants to call the dog’s name, in soothing tones—There, Gerald. There, Gerald.—but he remembers that Gerald is not its real name. And so, not knowing what to call it, the boy says nothing. He stands there on the pavement. The dog stands on the grass.
5.
Behind his house one afternoon the boy finds a chunk of ice. It is lying on the sidewalk, fist sized and flecked with dirt. Someone must have dropped it there from a five-pound bag or a cooler. Now it lies exposed to the summer. It is the clear kind, blue-gray all the way through, except at its core, where a brilliant whiteness has condensed: sunlight, locked inside. Tiny hairlines of trapped light radiate outward, veining the ice’s interior from corner to corner, touching the edges and returning to center. The radiance seems to ricochet around in there, bouncing off the walls of its container. Even as the boy is considering this, the ice jerks toward him. The chunk shifts a centimeter across the pavement, then stops abruptly, as if thinking better of it. The boy can hardly stifle his surprise. He knows that there is some kind of glacial principle at work: that as the chunk melts, it lubricates its own passage, and is displaced across the pavement in a basal slide. But still, the way it had moved. Exactly like a living thing. Bending down, he can see the darkened trail behind the ice, where it has wet the pebbled concrete. While the boy is studying this, the chunk scrapes forward again, another centimeter. The light at its center glints, melting it from within. Where is it headed? The boy’s shadow stops an inch or two away, and it almost seems as if the ice is trying to crawl inside. As if, stuck beneath the sun, it is seeking shelter in his shade. Dragging itself into his shadow. And it’s strange too, the boy thinks, how what melts it helps it move. That is the paradox the ice has been presented with: this light at its core, the light that is killing it, is what enables it to escape. It has to glide along a film of its own dying. The faster that it moves, the more of itself that it melts, and so it is alive with its own limit, animated by this horizon inscribed in its being. There is a lesson to be learned in this, the boy thinks. He watches the chunk, waiting for it to judder forward again. The ball of light sits calmly at its center, like a pilot in the cockpit. It will steer the chunk forward by destroying it. Death is what’s driving the ice. It collaborates with the ice’s other side, the side that wants to survive, and together these twin engines propel the chunk to safety. As the boy watches, a line of water melts off one edge, trickling down the sidewalk in an exploratory rivulet. Paving the way for the glacier. The boy was right: It is h
eaded directly for him. He watches the tendril inch into the shadow of his head, worming blindly forward. It punches deeper and deeper into the darkness. This is the track that the death-driven ice will travel, the boy understands. Gradually the glacier will slide into his head. One-way into the shade. One-way into the shadow that his skull casts. There has to be some kind of lesson in this.
Where Have All the Animals Gone?
Dale Peterson
IN THE SPRING OF 1900, approximately one hundred ten years before the three of us—Karl, Dan, and I—are sitting in Uganda’s airport transit lounge at Entebbe moaning about the state of the world, the British governor of the Ugandan Protectorate, Harry Johnston, was sitting in his house at Entebbe and listening to some Mbuti Pygmies from the Ituri Forest. They could have been moaning about the state of the world too, although I imagine they were more concerned about their own personal condition, since they had recently been kidnapped by a German entrepreneur who planned to exhibit them in Paris at the World’s Fair. Once the entrepreneur traveled with his human cargo into the Ugandan Protectorate, headed for the coast and a boat, however, Governor Johnston put an end to all that nonsense. He freed the Pygmies and sent the evildoer back to Germany.
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