How the Dead Dream (20 page)

Waiting for 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 light-headedness 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.

And yet a particular way of existence was gone, a whole volume in the library of being. Others were sure to fall afterward—a long fly with iridescent wings that lived only in the nest of this single rat, say; a parasite that lived under the wing of the fly; a flowering plant whose roots were nourished by the larval phase of the parasite; a bat that pollinated the plant . . . it was time that would show the loss, only time that would show how the world had been stripped of its mysteries, stripped by the hundreds and thousands and millions. Remaining would be only the pigeons and the raccoons.

But it was not the domino effect he considered most often, simply the state of being last. Loss was common, a loss like his own; he couldn’t pretend to the animals’ isolation, although he flattered himself that he could imagine it. He was aware that in his search a certain predictable need was being answered. Still he thought he had a glimpse of something in losing Beth. If a being could be so singular to another, there was no doubt that there was singularity elsewhere, that the irreplaceable nature of being was not limited to his own small circle.

One day, he knew, it would be men that were last. In the silence of the exhibits he thought he could feel time changing him too, atom by atom. He was so bored one night that he lost resistance to falling asleep. It would be good to let himself go,

he decided: so he did. After that sleep was part of the routine, and sleeping he surrendered—it was up to the animals what happened. He was not protected anymore by the city and its installations. Lying down in the exhibits with them, awkward, uncomfortable, and finally overcome; creeping out before the keepers appeared for the morning feeding.

While he slept, as far as he knew, the animals did not mean to approach him. But when he woke up they were sometimes near him by happenstance. In this way he saw a ringtail nosing her young down into the entry of her den and a hyena tearing hungrily at the breast of a pigeon.

•

As a rule no one else came to his apartment. Since Beth had died and Fulton had kicked the dog it had welcomed no one: the rooms were a set of monastic cells, unseen by anyone but himself and the cleaning lady. And while his financial research was kept vaulted and secure at the office, indexed in spreadsheets and cross-referenced, his animal research was spread throughout the space he inhabited like debris at a crash site. Magazines were spilled over the arms and cushions of sofas, where the dog lay sleeping and shed her white hairs; printouts from library computers were piled on the kitchen counter where he never cooked; spilled water gummed the pages together in wavy blocks and blotted the type. Videotapes were perched in crooked towers, maps were laid out on the guest bed and over tables and desks. In disarray were his tools, the lockpicks for doors and gates, binoculars and night-vision goggles, cords and carabiners, wet suits and waders.

After Beth his apartment had been reduced to a closet, with a door he could shut to seal off the contents. It was only the presence of his dog that kept the place from wholesale neglect. He did not like to think of the dog living in squalor throughout the workday, even if it was unlikely she would share his preference for tidiness.

He meant to leave the apartment, which he had rented purely for convenience and to which he had never had a particular attachment. In time he would have to buy, he would need a show home. He lived so far beneath his means that Fulton ridiculed him. But when he bought he would have to move his office and his mother with him; so he delayed and delayed and the apartment felt less and less like a place he lived in and more and more like a storage locker.

Meanwhile his mother and Casey met almost every day to work on jigsaws. They seemed to be forging an alliance, because when he stopped by they contentedly ignored him and made jibes at his expense. At first he viewed this development with alarm but soon it felt, when he stepped into his mother’s dining room, as though Casey was meant to be there, as though it was meant to be the three of them.

“Puzzles,” he said to Susan at the office, and shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

“You know what it is? It’s a miracle,” said Susan. “It really is. You don’t know the apathy I’ve been dealing with. I don’t care what her new hobby is. It could be beekeeping or kung fu movies. Really. Whatever gets her out of her apartment. Believe me. It’s a miracle, T.”

In the past Fulton had left the planning decisions to him, but now he began to question the fundaments of the island

project with a marked belligerence. He suggested, for example, that they should attempt to attract mammoth cruise ships to their facility, despite the fact that there was no port for such vessels and no channels deep enough to accommodate them; he saw no obstacles to a high-volume, fast-turnover operation on an island off a coastline that boasted only a one-runway airport and no paved roads, where even a modest supply of fresh water had to be imported.

T. explained patiently the reasons for the modest scope of the development and its tidy benefits—the exclusivity appeal, the quick returns due to the fairly small capital outlay—but Fulton only shook his head restlessly and accused him of “thinking small” and having “no cojones.” He made this kind of remark most often in a group meeting with other investors, not when the two of them were alone; and though his protests were easily overcome, due largely to their senselessness, the suppressed hostility behind them was disruptive.

When T. took him aside and reminded him the enterprise was only a boutique project, one of a large array of his current startups in which Fulton was free to invest, Fulton guffawed; when he offered him the opportunity to pull his funds Fulton ignored him. Clearly there was tension. Fulton had noticed that T. spent time with him only when he could not avoid it; it had dawned on him that T. preferred the company of others. Surprisingly to T. given his insensitivity in all matters, he appeared to be offended by this. He wished to draw T. back in, or failing that he wished to undermine him covertly.

Presently Casey liberated Susan from her long servitude. She left the apartment every day; she bought her own food, paid

her own bills, in short agreed to conduct her own life. For a while he drove her to buy groceries, to ease the transition.

They were in the produce section of a luxury food store in Santa Monica, Casey reaching up to a shelf of honeydew melons to touch them and smell them, when T. wandered away to pick up a bag of apples and found himself looking past the bag at a man’s broad chest in a sport jacket, over a V-necked sweater.

It was Fulton.

“Shit, guy,” said Fulton, and delivered a punch to the shoulder. “Look who.”

“Fulton.”

“What are you doing here? You don’t buy food. You order out. I saw your refrigerator. One old jar of mayo that looked like earwax and a six-pack of Heinie.”

“I came with my secretary’s daughter.”

“The dirty-blonde there? The quadriplegic?” “Just her legs are paralyzed, actually.”

“What I said, man.”

He craned his neck to see past T.’s shoulder.

“She’s not that bad. If you could get past the whole no-legs thing enough to just stick it in.”

“Don’t be foul.” “Good tits.”

“End of conversation.”

“You could always put a paper bag over the withered parts and go for the tittyfuck, I guess.”

T. turned on his heel. He meant to steer them away from Casey but Fulton preempted him, striding past him to stick his hand out in her direction.

Caught off-guard, she dropped a melon into her lap. “Fulton Hanrahan! Business partner of T.’s. Pleased as

shit to meetcha.”

“Casey.”

He shook her hand far too hard; when he let go she rubbed it, wincing.

“So you two been keeping this whole thing real quiet, huh? He told my wife he was seeing someone but he wouldn’t bring her over. Now I know why.”

“Excuse me?” asked Casey.

“We’re friends, Fulton. We’re not in a relationship. I’m not seeing anyone.”

“See Casey, my wife was trying to set him up with these hot women, and then he blows them off and goes for one with zero feeling below the waist. You like that, T.?”

Casey gaped. T. looked at Fulton sharply; his face was tanned and bland as ever.

“Shut the fuck up, Fulton. Casey. Let’s get out of here.” “Are you kidding?” said Casey, and then smiled at Fulton.

“I want to stay. Can I ask you something? So far what I’m thinking is Antisocial Personality Disorder. You may actually meet the diagnostic criteria for a sociopath. There’s a handy checklist in the DSM-III.”

“Great legs; nice personality, too.”

“Number one on the checklist: Would you say you’ve exhibited, since roughly the age of fifteen, a pervasive pattern of disregard for the rights of others?”

T. looked at them both and an odd, dreary calm settled over him. He was aware of danger. It was like a tidal wave or a freeze: it was not up to him. Shoppers milled around and behind them in a blur.

Casey continued to smile coldly; Fulton picked up a piece of pale red fruit. At first T. could not recall what it was and then he thought
pomegranate
.

“Wait. I forgot. A sociopath typically fails to recognize his behavior as antisocial. You probably had no idea until I told

you. Right? This whole time you thought you were just a regular rich guy, I bet.”

Fulton turned to T.

“This is one of those fruits where, if I ripped it open, there would be all those shiny red seeds inside. Right?”

“Leave us alone, Fulton.”

He took hold of the back of Casey’s chair, but she pushed off his hands. Fulton tossed the pomegranate back into the bin. “I can’t believe you, T. I knew you were a secret fag but I had no idea you would do sex on cripples. I mean that’s sick.

It’s one step away from fucking rotting corpses. I mean half of this little lady is basically already dead.”

T. felt stunned; the oranges and yellows of the produce aisle were dazzling. They fuzzed and vibrated in front of him. They were ancient Egypt in the tropics.

But Casey was still matter-of-fact.

“Among sociopaths the physically violent subjects tend to be the stupid ones. Did you know that? The ones who limit themselves to verbal abuse are smart by comparison. But that’s obviously not you. Unless—wait. Are you physically violent too? Are you a wife-beater?”

There was a pause; Fulton seemed preoccupied suddenly, gazing over T.’s shoulder. T. heard his own voice, clipped and neutral. “He doesn’t beat her, but he’s been sleeping with the same prostitute twice a week since a year before they got married. He claims his wife is frigid. Every year he gives the prostitute a Christmas bonus.”

“Fulton?”

Janet was staring wide-eyed at her husband from above a full shopping cart. A few feet behind her stood their preteen daughter.

Casey was the first to move, head slightly bowed, mouth solemn; she turned her chair and made for the row of check-out counters.

T. could not catch Janet’s eye but he saw her daughter’s face, alarmed. He was not sure what the daughter had understood: and if he made an apology to Janet it would only confirm the salience of what she had heard. He had to cut his losses.

“Janet,” he said softly in acknowledgment, “how are you,” as though nothing was happening. He raised a hand in greeting before he turned to leave.

If only the daughter had been out riding her pony.

At the front door he and Casey surrendered their grocery baskets without paying. They crossed the parking lot in silence. He was mulling over the damage to Janet’s feelings and the loss of Fulton’s money. For Janet—could she actually love him, or would it be mostly the shock? For himself, he considered whether he should be worried, because the funds were as good as gone already. Certainly their loss would be felt, he guessed, but it would not break him. He would go over the financials when he got home.