How the Dead Dream (17 page)

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.

Janet was a homemaker by choice, a Texas debutante whose father had gifted her with a dowry that had made her attractive to a legion of Fultons; what distinguished her own Fulton was chiefly that he had beaten other suitors to the punch. So the women she brought to meet T. were seldom burdened by such useless accessories as an academic record or a sense of social purpose. They tended to be certain of their attractiveness and accustomed to admiration; they were eager to begin a conversation with him but not always sure where to take it. One of them asked him what he did for a living and then, after he told her, smiled, twirled her hair around a finger and gazed at him glassily, as though fully expecting him to run with the discussion from that point onward.

At first he tried to be polite to show deference to Janet, but as the dinners wore on over the weeks he saw he had to discourage the women, smoothly and cannily, without allowing them to say precisely what it was in his manner that had pushed them away. Janet should see only that the women, despite their initial surge of interest, would never quite warm to him.

He applied himself thus to the task of quiet repulsion; and as he grew competent at lock-picking the pace of Janet’s dinner invitations began finally to slacken.

“I don’t know what your problem is, man,” said Fulton as he was leaving one night, following an encounter with an interior decorator named Ligi who had wished to talk only of upholstery. “Why don’t you make a move for once?”

“Listen, Janet needs to stop setting me up,” said T. gently. “I appreciate her good intentions. But I’m not in the market.” “Jesus, you don’t have to
marry
them,” said Fulton. “But

they’re better than K/Y and carpal tunnel.” “Not to me,” said T.

“That’s hardcore,” said Fulton.

In New York for a business meeting he drove to the Bronx at night. The lock was easy. A low metal gate in a grove of thin trees, then a walk across a dark, wide square. Lights reflected on a sea-lion pool.

On the second lock his fingers slipped nervously, but soon he was in. His neck was wet and his heart rate rapid; he heard the rush of blood in his ears. He slipped the tools back into his pack, stood still and made himself slow his breathing. He had read a zoo press release. “The most endangered mammal in the world, the Sumatran rhinoceros has not bred in captivity since 1889.” Penlight beam focused, he read the card:
Dicerorhinus sumatrensis
. It was the only one in captivity in the United States and it was a dinosaur; its species had lived for fifteen million years and there were only a few hundred left. A female.

She hauled herself up as he stood there, hauled herself up and walked a few steps away. She was nosing hay or straw, whatever dry grass littered the floor of her room. She gave an impression of oblong brownness. The Sumatran rhinoceros, he had read, liked mud wallows. Here there was nothing but floor.

He was standing where any zoo patron could stand, and there was no danger or special privilege. Still, no one was around—he was alone with her—and he was content. It was not to claim the animal’s attention that he was here but to let her claim his. She was the only one of her kind for thousands of miles, across the wide seas. What person had ever known such separation?

The Sumatran rhinoceros reportedly had a song, difficult for the human ear to follow; its song had been mapped and similarities had been found between this song and the song of the humpback whale. It was not singing now.

Sight was less important to a rhinoceros than to him, he knew that, but she still had to see. He put his hand to his nose, blocking sight between his own two eyes, closing one and then the other. He had read that the vision of many animals was dichromatic; they saw everything in a scheme based on two primary colors, not three. Were they red, he thought, red and blue? He closed his own eyes, heard the rise and fall of his chest and nearby a rustle whose nature he could not discern. Behind the eyelids it was thick and dark but impressions of light passed there, distracting. They passed like clouds he found himself idly drawn to interpret, to fix into the shape of rabbits or swans.

After a while the rhinoceros sighed. It was a familiar sound despite the fact that they were strangers. He knew the need for the sigh, the feel of its passage; a sigh was not a thought but substituted for one, a sign of grief or affection, of putting down something heavy that was carried too long. In the wake of the sigh he wondered exactly how lonely she was, in this minute that held the two of them. Maybe she saw beyond herself, the future after she had disappeared; maybe she had an instinct for the meaning of boundaries and closed doors, of the conditions of her captivity or the terminus of her line, hers and her ancestors’.

Maybe she had no idea.

He put a hand against the cool wall and felt almost leaden. No other animal could have eyes shaped like these, see the ground and the trees from this place with this dinosaur’s consciousness. No other hide would feel the warmth of the sun wash over these molecules, and neither he nor anyone would know how it had felt to live there, in both the particulars and the generalities, the sad quiescence of the animal’s own end of time.