How the Dead Dream

4

Soon grief ceased to order his time and his old demeanor returned intact. But while the pace of his life was restored the tone of it had altered, though the precise nature of this alteration at first escaped him. In keeping up his routine in business he was now almost dutiful-almost as if the accumulation of capital was nothing more than an obligation kept tip for the sake of honor. Still the obligation was strong, and he held onto it.

First among his new tasks was the purchase of the jungle island in Belize. So inexpensive was this pristine land with its surrounding reefs and atolls that he considered himself welladvised to focus his acquisition program in the tropics, assuming he could gain enough expertise in transnational business and tax practices. There in the sunny lands lay the leisure fantasy of all northern peoples; there despots fell, borders opened, and wealthy tourists streamed. Or in some cases, his contacts informed him, despots did not fall but would cooperate for minimal subsidy; borders still opened; and younger but still wealthy tourists streamed, in disregard of despots.

He went to the island twice a month to meet with local contractors, taking investors with him. His property was a twist of mangrove and deciduous forest in the midst of sea with no fresh water or roads; on the small strip of open shore sand fleas bit relentlessly and pelicans splattered white on the rocks. He stayed a short boat trip away, in a luxurious beachside resort on the mainland.

Once a guide took them out to scuba-dive from a small motorboat, to gauge the asset value of the reefs; he instructed them on the basic functions of valves, how to sink and rise again. Fulton, his investor, declined to enter the water, remaining on the boat with his wetsuit peeled open down to the waist and a cooler of beer at hand. He sat fishing off the bow with a rented pole, catching nothing but refusing to budge from his post.

So T. dove by himself, over the guide's objection. He had not dived before or even snorkeled but it was not hard, beyond the awkwardness of the heavy tank as he rolled backward over the boat's side. He swam peacefully thirty feet below, moving his fins languidly among conch and sea cucumbers, and was glad to be alone there. He found he luxuriated in the perfect seal of his mask, the muted quality of sound.

On the veranda of the hotel restaurant he watched wethaired children run around the pool, laughing as the sun glanced off the water behind them, chasing each other on the slippery tiles until they cannonballed into the deep end shrieking. At his own resort he planned docks for boats and for swimming, and on the end of the swim docks would be circular decks with palm-thatch roofs, white hammocks beneath them suspended around a floating bar. Guests could drink their cocktails standing in the shallows; fish would gather around their legs to feed on the scraps, bits of lemon and maraschino cherry and olive. Sand as blindingly white as snow, which made the shallow water above it look deep turquoise for the brochure photographs, would soon be shipped in and dumped over the native sand, which was colored a natural and dull brown.

But first the shoreline would have to be scraped of vegetation, so he went out to the island to supervise the clearing of the first beachhead. From a small yacht anchored in the shallows he drank coffee and watched workers with power saws cut down and bundle the bushy trees along the waterline. As the limbs fell their small glossy leaves rained down onto the water and the boat captain, seated behind T. with a hand on the tiller, smiled gently and described them to him: red mangrove, black mangrove, white. Buttonwood.

He thought of her then, watching flotillas of leaves drifting and bobbing on the surface, and it was less difficult than before-as though the shock, once absorbed, had spread so thin and wide that it was only the skin of the world.

As he regained strength his mother's mental health seemed to falter again, as though, watching him be restored, she deemed herself released at long last; as though she could resign her duties and retire once more into premature senescence.

He saw her almost daily when he walked his dog. Invariably she was seated at her dining room table, face bent low over a jigsaw puzzle as her reading glasses slid down her nose. She worked on one puzzle after the next with no rest between them, keeping a stockpile at the ready, and when she finished placed each one atop its predecessor in a stack in the closet. Because she made her selections on the advice of a young clerk who worked at a nearby toy store, and content was irrelevant, puzzles featuring water lilies, moon landings and civil war battlefields all came within her purview and passed out of it equally. Because she did not like interruptions to break her concentration, talk was often stilted, and T. would soon leave again, his dog straining at the leash to continue their walk.

He had barely noticed while Beth was living but he had no friends outside business: he had spent all his free time with her and now was left with no one. He took up the habit of playing racquetball thrice weekly with Fulton, who slammed the ball so hard against the walls and the ceiling of the court that a former partner, omitting to don safety goggles, had lost the use of an eye.

He played only partly for the exercise and expedience and partly for entertainment. Fulton, who specialized in mutual funds when he was not investing his wife's family fortune in T.'s projects, could go from zero to screaming fury in ten seconds flat. He delivered angry monologues as he played, expletives often drowned in the deafening ricochet; and his phrases were punctuated with vicious swipes from his powerful but imprecise forehand.

"That-piece-of-shit-had-the-goddamnsweaty- little-balls," he might scream, running and leaping to slash downward with his racquet, "to-say-that-wecould-not- upzone!"

In racquetball no response was needed for Fulton to proceed with his soliloquy, and this rendered the sport relaxing. When Fulton suffered a setback or personal loss-his son was sidelined on the soccer team, his daughter's orthodontist indicted for tax evasion-his rage stayed bottled only long enough to reach the courts, where it was funneled easily. There was no subtlety to Fulton, who was always most alive when fulminating. At Fulton's sure-footed advance, complexity took flight: what did not surrender to his simple will to dominate was plowed under forthwith, and wrongs were crudely and rapidly redressed. The sheer effectiveness of a brute had never been so clear to T.

Observing the investor's unfettered path through life T. felt his distaste tempered by incredulousness. But though he patronized Fulton, often speaking to him as others might to children or the feeble-minded, he also had to stand back and cede his position when confronted by the stampeding bull. Stupid rage commanded the obedience of more even-tempered men in a way impossible to deny or moderate; a Fulton cured of his instinct toward wrath would be a pitiful creature.

Beth had only met Fulton once, over dinner, on a night when Fulton had chosen to adopt a curiously meek stance. It was as though he had known by instinct when to retreat; for his quiet deference to Beth, which T. thought bordered on toadying, had marked him forever in her eyes as a gentle, selfeffacing presence. Later that night, as she and T. prepared for bed, she had remarked innocently that she really liked Fulton. "Does he have just a little bit of a lisp?" she had asked with the lilt of sympathy in her voice, raising the coverlet and sliding beneath. "Poor guy. That must be very hard for him in his job. Face-to-face with so many new people all day."

At the time he was vaguely puzzled by the remark but forgot it in the pleasure of bed; but later it dawned on him that on their way into the restaurant, briefing her on the backgrounds of those she was soon to meet, he had referred to Fulton as a banker. By banker, in this case, he had meant an individual who-on the strength of a Harvard MBA, family connections and very little in the way of native intelligence-made investment decisions for tens if not hundreds of thousands of retired nurses and welders, whose future pensions he placed in the hands of such corporate luminaries as Royal Dutch Shell and Monsanto.

But she had assumed he meant Fulton was a teller.

Fulton did not have a lisp; if Fulton were ever to meet a man with a lisp he would surely ridicule him, most likely with reference to words not contained in a standard dictionary. When it came to details such as social identity and stereotype Fulton was nothing if not a blunt instrument. Indeed Fulton suffered from no articulation disorder save rudeness; at one point during the dinner T. had noticed him talking about his daughter's pony with his mouth full of beef stroganoff. Possibly this was what had given Beth the impression of a speech impediment.

Since the two of them had not met again the illusion of Fulton's harmlessness had never been dispelled. Certainly, if he dwelled on it, he would be forced to concede that Beth's positive impression of Fulton could not have been sustained through multiple encounters: but as such encounters had never occurred he did not have to make the admission to himself openly.

Was it the man's brutishness itself, his triumphant profanity, that was so intriguing? Fulton's awareness of the independent existence of others was vestigial at best. T. had the feeling, in fact, that for Fulton the presence of other people in the world was purely hypothetical. Like the philosopher Bishop Berkeley, whom T. had read with considerable interest in college, Fulton was certain only of his own existence; all others were most likely figments.

On his mother's birthday he took her yellow roses. Once they had been her favorite but she barely looked at them, nodding at his entrance as she fitted a jigsaw piece. Leaning over her shoulder he saw the work in question was titled "The Ages of Man," a vintage puzzle depicting the stages of human evolution from Atistralopithectis to Homo sapiens. An illustration in full color, it pictured many different hominids, historically separated by millions of years, performing daily activities concurrently in what appeared to be a vaguely Native American encampment. Some among their number wore papooses on their backs and squatted in front of teepees.

Putting his face closer he saw an apelike figure labeled CRO MAGNON standing beside a small pile of sticks, thumb and index finger posed lightly on his chin as though lost in thought. Possibly he was discovering fire. Female apes milled uselessly in the background, their hairy breasts hidden behind interposed branches, and in a far corner a Homo erectus raised his cudgel over a frightened rabbit.

He smiled as he looked at it. It was primitive in depicting the primitive. That was it.

As a child he had thought man advanced.

He stood still now, back from his mother, frozen.

As a child he had thought man advanced.

Moving into the kitchen he found a pair of scissors in a disordered drawer; he cut the stems and stuck the roses into a vase. In former days his mother would have leapt to the task, but now she demonstrated no interest. Thorny stems in his grip he popped the lid of the trashcan, which was overflowing; he barely registered the smell of rancid food as he stood there, thorns digging into his thumbs.

That was what had changed, he thought. To love posterity and the great institutions you had to believe in the wisdom of men. You had to love them as a child might, gazing upward.

He recalled himself presently; a thin string of blood crawled down his wrist, tickling, and his nostrils were compressed. Atop the trash lay a limp piece of uncooked chicken, blueish. He coughed briefly, nauseated, and let the garbage lid fall shut again. He dropped the rose stems in the sink; he washed the blood off his hands. Two small punctures, was all.

He turned and pulled out the full bag, tied it and carried it, bulging with sharp angles, out the back door. His mother had fallen from her attention to cleanliness, fallen far and quickly.

Glancing around for her outdoor garbage bin he saw a small shrine on a stucco wall and moved closer. The centerpiece was a photograph of Beth that must have come from one of his own packets of loose snapshots; around it, stuck to the stucco with pushpins, were snatches of poetry, rosaries draped ornamentally, prayer cards and lace and dried flowers. He saw sacred hearts, haloed angels and melancholy Marys, faded and curling and made porous by rain.

Sorrow.

The evidence was everywhere: he could not avoid it. At first he had believed only a few men were childish, and raised himself above them. Arrogant, because all men were childish, including him.

They still had their institutions and those institutions still had their beauty-less grandiose, however, than ruined. He loved them nonetheless, revered them even as they declined. But the beauty they had, did it mean something? Or was it artful like the scrawls of preschoolers-chiefly by accident?

In his relationship to Fulton he knew he had found a pastime that allowed him the twin guilty pleasures of judgment and observation: his passivity under the onslaught was that of a voyeur.

When Fulton committed infidelity, for instance, he did so as a paying customer, every Tuesday and Thursday at three. This kept him, he claimed, safe from the fear of detection and perfectly blame-free. When T. inquired as to the workings of this absolution Fulton gaped at him openly, as though T. was the world's first moron. For he, Fulton, was committing no act of betrayal; he did not love the prostitute; theirs was a business arrangement.

T. asked him then if, in fact, he actually loved his wife. He could easily believe that Fulton did not love, prostitute or wife equally. In fact the proposition that he did love had a tinge of absurdity.

"I married her," said Fulton. "Same fucking thing."

Possibly, T. reflected now and then in the wake of some particularly egregious revelation, Fulton trusted him with the confidences simply because he knew that he, Fulton, represented a primary capital stream to T., one that T. would not dare to put at risk through disloyalty. Or possibly, he suspected at other times, Fulton actually liked him.

But Fulton barely knew him. As a rule T. revealed little in the way of personal information, since Fulton did not seem to require it. For Fulton communication was a one-way street. And when, on occasion, T. chose to contribute to the conversation with a brief disclosure of his own, Fulton became bored and changed the subject.

"So my father," said T. on the way to the racquet club one Wednesday, reclining in the leather passenger seat of Fulton's Land Cruiser, "used to be an ad executive in Manhattan, but now he mixes drinks at a transvestite bar in Key West."

"He turned gay?"

"I guess so."

"Huh," said Fulton, hunching down and squinting into the side-view mirror. "Did you see that? Asian woman in the Hyundai almost rear-ended me."

"No. Didn't see."

"Asians can't drive for shit."

"Might want to keep that insight to yourself."

"It's not exactly a secret, T. Damn, you're a rube. Disoriented Orientals. Ring a bell?"

"If the poor woman had rear-ended this car she would have been killed instantly."

"You gotta watch out, T.," said Fulton, shaking his head. "That stuff's in the genes. You could turn homo too."

"You think so?"

"Watch out for it. If you feel the urge, rent a copy of Anal Alley and have a jerkoff marathon."

"That's very helpful."

"What am I saying? That's like offering smack to a guy on methadone. Better stay around the front side, T. Avoid the ass region completely."

"Good tip."

"Janet's sister's church has this deal where they deprogram them. I don't think it works though."

"No? Doesn't work?"

"It's a boot camp. They tell them man-boy love is the work of Satan. They bring in straight guys to teach them how to act straight. Like you're not allowed to smoke, it's faggy. Then they lock them up in small rooms and yell their heads off at them. `Repent, sinners! For the sake of Jesus Christ Our Lord, cast out the homo devil from your butt!' It's kind of like hardcore bondage and domination. It's supposed to scare them straight but I think it actually makes them horny. Some Christian faggots actually hook up there. Serious. It's basically a dating service for Christian homes."

"What does Janet's sister think of that?"

"She put her son in it and he came out of there with a brand-new assfriend. That's how she found out the real deal. I have a faggot nephew."

"I didn't know."

"No blood relation though. Janet's side of the family only. My genes are pure hetero. I had a great-grandfather who was a rapist."

"Excuse me?"

"Yeah. The guy raped. Rapists are basically superheteros. A rapist is a hetero on steroids."

"That's quite a theory you've got there."

"I forgot to tell you, you gotta use the shit racquet today. The titanium's being restrung."

Over time, as T. had suspected he would, Fulton delivered an education.

The change came suddenly, when the two of them went back to T.'s apartment for beer once after a game. Fulton claimed he wanted to see the place. As soon as they pulled up stools to the kitchen island and sat down, lifting freshly uncapped bottles to their lips, the dog came trotting over. She stood on her rear legs and put her forepaws on Fulton's stool, tail wagging, with the slavish affection she sometimes bestowed on strangers who seemed welcome.

Fulton surprised T. by pushing her away roughly with an elbow to her face and the side of his shoe to her flank. Grimacing, he wiped his arm on his gym shorts.

"Dog spit. Disgusting."

"Spit? What spit? This dog doesn't slobber at all. Come here, girl."

The dog retreated to T.'s side, where he put a protective hand between her ears and stroked her head. He was irritated.

"I don't touch dogs."

"Why? Are you allergic?"

"I don't like to touch the things, OK? They lick their anuses. You got any chips? Crackers or something?"

T. stared at him as he tipped his head back and took a deep swallow.

"No chips," he answered. "No crackers."

"I'm starving."

Fulton jumped up and opened the refrigerator door, scouting. T. followed him with his gaze and felt a tide of revulsion rising in his bones, in his blood and muscles. Fulton's back was a wall of hostile blankness; Fulton's neck was no neck.

He got off his own stool abruptly, a cursory glance at his watch.

"Know what? Forgot. Got a meeting. Escrow thing."

"Take the brew with me, then," said Fulton without missing a beat, and turned toward the door of the kitchen with his beer bottle still in hand.

T. watched him leave without saying a word.

That night he kicked his legs in and out of the sheets, turned and punched his pillow into different shapes against his cheek. The cheek felt slack, distracting as he tried to sleep. There was no good position for the side of his face. The scissoring of his legs and pulling and twisting of the blankets kept the dog awake too, circling and circling and rearranging herself head to feet into her curved moon of sleep.

Finally he got up and went toward the bathroom, dog rising once more on the bed behind him. He leaned over the toilet with his eyes closed and saw pricks of light on the surface of his eyelids. Nothing happened beyond a head rush.

He had let him kick her. Almost a kick. His dog-but it was not whose she was that mattered, only how devoted she was, how she followed without questioning. Would follow on and on forever.

He stood. He was taking Fulton's money, certainly. He would take it as long as he could. But to bring him home? To seek him out?

His dog should not forgive him.

From a garrulous surveyor who worked for him in the desert, a man with psoriatic arms and perpetual mint covering the whiskey on his breath, he discovered that a group of small rodents called kangaroo rats had been displaced by the paving for his subdivision. This had been part of the lawsuit that had held up the project; the rats were the last of their kind, on the brink of disappearing.

He met with state and federal biologists and offered a parcel of land in what the bureaucrats called mitigation; after the agreement was signed he acquired the habit of walking there, on a few acres of gravelly dirt studded with patches of grass and backed up to a low hill on a far edge of the project. Here, one of the biologists told him, the rats could settle the abandoned burrows of pocket gophers and build their nests; they could nibble on buckwheat and brome and filaree. He was gratified to find a use for the parcel, for it was a desolate, stark piece of ground, flat earth and old mine tailings in a bright, bland slope. Here and there an anthill. The weight of ants, a biologist told him, was equal to fifteen percent of the weight of all land animals; ants roiled beneath the surface in untold billions.

Biologists had captured some of the rats before paving began and were breeding them, planning to move them to the site when the numbers were sufficient. One afternoon, at the invitation of the biologist, he toured the biological field station, which smelled of bleach and cedar shavings. She showed him a cage of baby rats called pinkies, squirming alongside their mother. The mother was sleek and looked less like the rats he had seen-gray, oily subway vermin with hairless tails and sharp faces-than a chipmunk, with a head too large for her body and bright dark eyes.

"They're technically not rats, actually," said the biologist eagerly. "They're in the heteromyid family. They've evolved to extract all the water they need from seeds."

He looked closely at the pinkies, their miniature bodies with finely articulated feet, their closed eyes as they struggled to feed. In the softness of the impression the room glowed amber at the edges. What was this? He felt receptive; he had an inner buoyancy.

But the sense of well-being fled when he left, and in the course of the relocation the baby rats died. The biologist mentioned it weeks after it happened.

"The mortality wasn't complete," she told him. "But this was a delicate situation, because the numbers were already so low. So, and I mean this is best-case scenario, there's a question, with the reduced numbers, of population viability."

"I'm so sorry," he said.

"With so few individuals in a population there would be problems of genetic drift and inbreeding depression. Resilience to disturbance drops. The gene pool is too small for long-term survival."

"I'm very sorry," he said again.

"Worst case, and what we're probably looking at here, is extinction. The remaining adults aren't thriving. They're losing weight, starting to die off. Haven't identified the cause. But we can't re-release them like this."

The biologist was not emotional; she was matter-of-fact. But oddly he found his own throat closing.

Was it something else from his life? It must be, something else glancing across from the side as he stood here. Still always Beth, possibly; he could not be choked up over the kangaroo rats. But he felt tentative, suspicious-as though someone had slyly robbed him and only now was he suspecting it. Cities were being built, built up into the sky, battlements of convenience and utopias of consumption-the momentum of empire he had always cherished. But under their foundations the crust of the earth seemed to be shifting and loosening, falling away and curving under itself.

He found he was barely breathing. He let out his breath and filled his lungs again.

When he slept that night it was the ants abandoning ship. They left in their billions, all of them, and as they went away holes opened up in the earth, yawning sinkholes into which oceans and mountains poured.

In subsequent weeks he was often irritated by the Mojave project's denizens. The racewalker, for one. As he walked along the road one morning-a cul-de-sac called Elysian Fields-the racewalker bore down on him with ferocious intensity. The racewalker's lips were pinched together and he wore a mesh singlet bearing a single word: WIN!

The racewalker, he saw, was a rigid man clamped together in barely suppressed resentment. As they passed each other T. waved and nodded politely; the racewalker looked straight at him but made no acknowledgment. When T. turned to watch his retreating back he noticed the racewalker's defiant gluts, moving tip and down with vigorous emphasis.

He wondered what the racewalker had been doing when he took refuge here; he was barely in his fifties, surely, and must still be working, but here he was in a retirement community. The racewalker had a wife, if he recalled correctly, a potato-like lump of a woman who stared sullenly and rarely spoke: most likely the racewalker perambulated their house with barely a nod at her lumpen presence.

Leaving the racewalker behind he proceeded to the house at the base of the cul-de-sac, recently purchased by a couple from Texas he had not yet welcomed. He rang the doorbell and waited, and when the woman opened the door he smiled at her pleasantly. Yet he found himself dwelling on the car parked in their driveway, on a political bumper sticker of obnoxious intent. When the husband emerged from behind his wife he took an instant dislike to the man, who wore a loud flag-pattern T-shirt and a cowboy hat. He could barely stand the pressure of the Texan's outstretched hand. When the Texan announced a plan to replace his desert-landscaped front yard with asphalt, T. struggled to remain civil.

"Sorry, but the bylaws won't allow that particular kind of modification," he said. "Visual quality, for the benefit of the neighborhood as a whole. I'm sure you appreciate that."

"With the turning you gotta do to park here, you know, if we had a bigger driveway we could just drive right onto it straight. You know, not have to turn at all, first left and then right, when we come down the street to the end right out there."

"Labor-saving," said T., nodding and tapping his foot softly.

"You know, we could just keep going straight and park right in front of the door here."

"You'll get used to turning the steering wheel, I'm sure," said T. "I mean that's what they're made for, right?"

"Huh," said the Texan.

"I think you'll find the nice look of the trees and flowers in your yard will be worth it. The extra effort of wheel-turning, that is."

"Plus which," said the wife, "we wouldn't have to back out. We could just turn a little and go out frontward again."

"It sounds like what you want is a crescent drive," said T. "You know what? We're building some homes on the other side of La Terrazza that are going to have crescent drives. They're even larger. Maybe you can trade up when they're finished. I can put you on the waiting list, if you're interested."

"This little hideaway already drained me dry," said the Texan. "Are you fuckin' kidding?"

"Just a suggestion," said T. mildly. "How's the rest of the move going? Got your bearings yet?"

"She was the one wanted its to move here," said the Texan. "I'm strictly an Amarillo man. SoCal's not my bagga shit"

T. turned to the wife. "And how are you liking it?"

"When are they gonna have the fall schedule for step aerobics?" scolded the wife. "The brochure said step aerobics! Five days a week!"

When he finally left them his neck was itching against his collar. He stopped at the pool, but the pool was empty. The elderly ladies were not there, not swimming. This place, he thought vengefully, had probably killed them off too. The Texan in his monster truck.

He pulled out of the parking lot for the drive back to the city and found himself turning right instead of left, toward the set aside. He parked and walked across it up the slope, stepping around the bunchgrasses and peering into the holes that had been meant for the last individuals of the rat species, the ones with the babies.

The rats were gone now, the biologist had told him. They had been extinguished.

He looked up from the sandy ground to the red tile roofs across the arroyo, arrayed in military precision. He could hear crickets somewhere in the dry grass; in the stasis of the morning all he heard was this chirping and the faint rush of traffic on the Interstate, over two miles away. He stood without moving and stared at the roofs, the low adobe wall that ran along the wash. They had built it to stave off erosion but it also served to separate the built environment from the desert; here the brush was not clipped or manicured and the rare tall cacti, when they aged and fell, could be left to rot on the ground. At dusk black beetles crawled faltering over small rocks, as though the pebbles were boulders, and coyotes ran lightly down the wash.

Coyotes could live anywhere. They were not like the rats, who lived only on one small patch of land. They could live anywhere and die anywhere too. Like him. They were opportunists. And the Texans with their path of least resistance, the racewalker… they would give up nothing they were not required to, they would insist on their right to all that they had and more, unyielding. The pinky rats had been struggling to feed: then they died, and took their parents with them.

How was it he could have changed like this? Before it had been a triumph; then it soured. He resented the people he had sold to, but he was worse than they were. The racewalker, the Texan were familiar aspects… he saw it like diamond, like a flash on metal.

He felt the sun on his head and a wave of nausea.

Win, win; oh, not to have to turn the wheel. To not turn wheels at all: to stay in one position. Pave it over, make it a smooth and continuous surface, flat and gray on the world, speed and ease.

And yet the seedeaters. Infants.

But it was not sentiment, not at the base of this-he felt for them, but it was not empathy. It was fear. It was the knowledge of the ants beneath them, the ants pouring away and taking with them the very foundations. Everything.

He was cold.

The foundations would be gone. Once the ants left, first the rats and finally even the ants, there would be nothing left of them.

He got back in the car, dazed. It took him a few minutes to turn the key for home.

He kept going back to the set-aside. He was permeable there, oddly inseparate from the dirt and the dry golden grass. He liked to park the car and leave it, walking up the slope with its tumbled rock, his feet slipping, till he crested the hill and went down the back side. Then he could no longer see the pavement or the road, and would sit on the flat top of a boulder. Sometimes at dusk he would sit there for hours, listening to what he once would have thought was silence.

He had never before sat anywhere for hours, unless he was working. He had never, he realized one night, been away from a road before, never in his whole life been out of sight of pavement. Unless he was in an airplane or building. Or out near his island.

What place would that be, a whole world without roads? It was a panicking thought. A world without roads! He would go nowhere in such a place. He would be trapped where he was, he would have lived out his life only where he was born.

And the world outside the roads was not straight or smooth. It was not shored up like those roads and the buildings, metal and cement and right angles. It was whirlpools and washes of soil and the mass of the clouds, dispersing into each other and leveling distinctions. It was trying to invade him and he should be alarmed. He was in danger. What you needed more than anything, for the purposes of ambition, was certainty, was a belief that the rest of being, the entirety of the cosmos, should not be allowed to penetrate and divert you from the cause-the chief and primary cause, which was, clearly, yourself.

Yet he was laid out to receive it. He was laid out by the force of gravity itself, by elemental physics. Sediment accumulated on him, buried him gradually, and more and more he was silted in.