How the Dead Dream

6

He never spoke of his incursions and guarded carefully the difference between himself and the self that was available publicly. This was a clear benefit of being alone, because if Beth were still living he could never have done it. She would have broken the seal.

On occasion he had the sense that he was celebrating her through his dedication; though he knew she was gone he also allowed himself the conceit that she had special knowledge of his activities. With meticulous care he planned his business trips in relation to sanctuaries and captive breeding facilities, finding reasons to fly to these places even when profit was unlikely. Undetected he entered a bird sanctuary in San Diego, a rescue center for manatees scarred by boat propellers, a butterfly habitat in New Hampshire, a laboratory in Rhode Island where American burying beetles were bred and released. He was a regular at the best zoos in California, Arizona and New Mexico and he also flew to others-St. Louis, Seattle, Cincinnati. Each night he reserved for a single enclosure.

And he took a course in basic first aid that stood him in good stead. His thighs stayed lightly scarred from the tree in the Monkey House, whose superficial but stinging cuts had proved slow to heal; his knees scabbed over from multiple abrasions he tended to reopen, and his right calf bore the purple marks of teeth from a young Morelet's crocodile. It had been a fairly fortunate encounter in fact-the baby crocodile had let go almost right away, allowing him to drag himself out of its pen sheepishly, hurting but mostly ashamed of his carelessness. The punctures were not deep and did not require stitches; he slathered them in antibiotic ointment and left it at that.

So that Casey would not notice the marks he ran his halfmarathons in long pants; to her and to his mother he was rock climbing, in the mountains and at the gym. Thence came the battered kneecaps, the scrapes on his elbows and knuckles and cuts on his fingertips.

At the beginning he was afraid of the predators, and though he chose with great care, avoiding animals known to be highly territorial or prone to aggression, he was still wary. They were not pets. But he soon lost this novice fear. It was not his habit to stalk the animals, merely to enter their enclosures and sit in one place to observe them. So he waited for each animal to show itself, and over time he grew tired, then bored; he was amazed at the depth and reach of his boredom, the way minutes and hours wore on uneventfully. For the animals too the greater part of captivity was waiting: when their food was delivered the last animals fed, slept and briefly forgot, he believed, the urgency of hunger. Then they awoke and the waiting started again.

He wished he knew if they got impatient. Expectation struck him as a human impulse, but then he thought of his dog. Her days were entirely given over to expectation, it seemed to him.

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 checkout 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.

They got to the car and discovered Casey still had the honeydew, a symptom of their distraction. On her lap it lay pale and heavy.

The next business trip ended early. On his way to the zoo for daytime reconnaissance, listening to the news on public radio, he learned the pygmy chimpanzees he meant to visit had a newborn. He could not risk disturbing the group so with reluctance he turned back toward the airport.

He had left his dog in the care of his mother's nurse, since Angela could no longer be relied upon to remember to feed and walk her, and when he got into his car in the parking structure at LAX-a new 600, for he had recently traded in the 560-and called his mother's apartment on the car telephone, the nurse was out.

His mother made him nervous.

"Your dog was here. But she's gone," she said vaguely.

"Gone? What do you mean, gone? Out? Is Vera walking her?"

"She went away. After we saw the man in the BMW."

"I'm coming there now," said T., anxious. "Stay home. OK? I don't understand what you're telling me here. Tell Vera to call me on the car phone if she gets there before I do."

At his mother's apartment Vera answered the door with a worried face. His dog had run away, she said.

"What do you mean? She never takes off!"

"There was a man in a car when we were on our walk. It was the three of us, your mother and the dog and me. We were walking on Abbot Kinney. This man parked his car. It was a nice car. Shiny black."

"Leather seats," said his mother, nodding. "Beautiful. And brand new. A death machine, of course."

"He said he knew her," said Vera. "He was a friend of yours.

"He was the one from the party," said his mother. "And I'll tell you what, T. You should steer clear of him. I know he's your friend but in the end that young man is headed straight for the Pancake House, no questions asked. I could tell right away.

"What party?"

"At your office at Christmas last year. You know. The big one with the muscles, and the very small wife. She wore pink."

"Fulton."

"I don't remember his name. He talked about tennis."

"Fulton. Oh no. Oh shit."

"Your mother needed to use the bathroom," said Vera, "so he said he would hold the leash for us while we went into a store. But then when we came out again he said she had run away."

"This is not happening."

Legs weak, he sat down on the arm of the sofa.

"I called the Humane Society," said Vera. "I called all of them. We went there to give a photo of her-from the picnic, where she was biting the rubber bone? — but no one knew anything."

He was stunned. He blinked and looked down at his knees. He had failed her. Was she dead? Suffering?

He held out his hands: they shook. He put the heels of his hands on his thighs and ground them in. He had done this to her.

"Oh, honey," said his mother, and put a hand on his shoulder. "It's OK. She'll come back."

Charges could be pressed but that would get him nowhere; it would not help his dog. Fulton would not respond to anything but abasement. Fulton must be granted the power, must feel he had won. And T. would do it gladly: he did not hesitate.

He called and asked Fulton to meet him, but Fulton said no. Fulton was busy. Fulton was seeing a marriage counselor, to stave off divorce. Fulton had no time for him.

"But you had time for my dog. What did you do with her? Tell me, Fulton. Please."

"The thing ran off, T. Not a damn thing I could do about it.

"I know that's not true. She isn't a runner. I know you're lying about this, Fulton."

"Didn't take to me. Trying to do a favor for a couple old ladies. Holding their dog while they hobbled up the steps. Thing lit off down the street like a bat ootta hell. Who knew something so ugly could run so fast?"

"Tell me you didn't hurt her. Please."

"You fuck up my entire fucking marriage and now I'm the bad guy. Talk about blaming the victim."

"Listen. I'm very sorry for the effect my words must have had on Janet. I had no idea she was there. You know I didn't. Or your daughter. I deeply regret upsetting them. But I'm begging you here. Picture me on my knees. I'll give you whatever you want. So help me. Just tell me where she is. Let me have her, Fulton."

"What can I say. All I know is the thing took off down the street. All she wrote. And now I gotta go."

"Fulton. Please. I love that dog. You know I'm sorry. Help me out here, man. Please."

"See ya, T."

The dog had been missing three days when Casey rang his doorbell. In his distance he forgot the chaos and privacy of his space and opened the front door.

On her lap she held a basket full of rubber toys, a leash, a bag of dog biscuits.

"We're going to get her back," she said firmly.

The hopeful goods broke his heart.

"Come on," said Casey. "Let's go look. I'm ready."

He felt a dragging reluctance but she was determined; she turned her chair briskly and headed back to the elevator. Finally he grabbed a jacket and followed.

Casey had strong arms but even so, he knew, after a while they grew tired, and moving south along the boardwalk he thought of this: the farther, the longer, the more she must ache. He felt guilty. Other dogs passed them, for the boardwalk was popular among dog owners: now and then he or Casey petted one. At first they spoke but as they grew tired of walking their conversation dwindled.

"I'm exhausted," he said finally.

They had made a loop to the bottom of the Marina: it had been several hours. The soles of his feet were burning. Casey's stamina was shocking.

"I think we should cut in off the beach and get a taxi back to my place," he pressed.

"No," said Casey, and shook her head. "If you want her you have to pay. You have to pay for what you want. You know that."

"We're not going to find her just because we stiffer," he said.

"Yes," said Casey. "We are."

"I should have worn different shoes."

"What are those, Ferragamos? Fulton was right. Sometimes you dress really gay."

"It's not gay, Case. It's expensive."

On the way home along the bicycle path his feet hurt. A poodle with a tall bearded man in tight shorts, a Dalmatian with two lesbians, a pug with a fat man, a Chihuahua with an emaciated woman wearing too many bangles. All of them. But not her.

At the apartment door he remembered he should not let Casey in. On the floor in his dining room were the snarled, half-inside-out legs of his wetsuit; evidence was everywhere. But he was too sore to keep up his guard. He had to collapse.

"It's a mess," he said wearily as he opened the door for her, and strode ahead to scoop up the most obvious traces and hurl them into a closet.

"What are you doing with an article about a rare tortoise and off-roading? You getting into ORVs suddenly?"

"Impact fees. A casino project," he mumbled, lowering himself onto the couch. He kicked off his shoes and heaved his feet up on the arm. "You need anything?"

"I'm hungry."

"Chinese takeout in the fridge," he said, closing his eyes. "But it's from yesterday. No, wait. Two days ago."

"Disgusting… really. What is this stuff?" said Casey.

"What?"

"About animals? All this material. Everywhere."

"Told you! Research for a project."

"A lot of it."

He shrugged. "Money at stake. You know me."

She gazed at him for a moment, then let it go.

They drank a bottle of white wine with the TV playing and then they drank another; they lolled on sofa and chair, drunk and still drinking. He felt relief that she had let him off so easy. His secret remained securely hidden.

"I'm going to go out on your balcony," she said after a while, and left him there, eyes glazed over: there seemed to be a prizefight on, men sweating. He looked around for the remote, but did not see it. He was tired.

What if his dog appeared below? Casey might fail to see her. Casey's view was limited from the chair, her seated position. His dog had always liked the pool, tail wagging as she moved and sniffed among the long knifelike leaves of the tiger lilies. . he got up and went through the sliding doors to the rail.

Below the turquoise pool water glittered, empty.

"I thought she might be there," he murmured, and then looked over at Casey. Her face was turned from him.

"You don't know," she said. "You don't have a clue. You're not as arrogant as I thought, I guess."

"What?" he said sharply, a clutch of fear. "Know what?"

"It's damaging to say it," she said. "But it can't be helped. It's too bad. But without honesty I don't have anything. Once your body's taken from you, or at least your independence in the body, the only thing you have left is this, like, idea of yourself. It's an idea of character, or something. If I lie or hide, that's taken from me too. So I have to tell you."

"I don't know what you're talking about," he rushed. "Case, you're scaring me here. What is it? Are you sick?"

"No. Just pathetic. I love you."

"I love you too, Case. You know that. So tell me. What is it? 11

"No, that's it."

She turned her face toward him finally, small and white with wide eyes.

". . that…"

He felt nauseated. She studied him sadly: this was grim.

"Yes."

He turned and looked out at the palm fronds, still. He was glad of the lights, which gave him an excuse to look elsewhere.

"I thought it would go away. For Chrissake, you wear Ferragamos. And there's this one shirt you have with blue stripes on it that really dorks you up. No man should ever, ever wear a blue-striped shirt with a white collar."

"I'll take that under advisement."

"It should be federal law."

"Or maybe I should wear it more often. Then your crush will go away."

"It's not a crush, T. If it was I wouldn't bother telling you."

"Whatever it is."

"And don't feel you have to explain how deep but completely platonic your feelings are. It's obvious. I never expected anything else. I know I'm like the cute paraplegic sister you never had."

"You like to speak for me."

"I'm good at it. Don't you think?"

He bent down and put his arms around her; she rested her forehead stiffly against his collarbone.

Inside she put on music and they drank more and danced giddily, she by moving her wheels on the slick kitchen floor. They went to his closet and she tore shirts off hangers, threw the shoes she disliked into a laundry hamper. He thought of the hundreds of dollars they represented, indeed thousands, and as he thought this she raced away from him toward the sliding doors with the hamper balanced on her lap. On the balcony she tipped it over the edge.

Right behind her he looked down and saw the shoes floating in the pool.

"I can't believe you did that," he said, but he could.

She was at her bag, pulling out a vial.

"Have some of these," she said. "They're for pain."

"I don't have pain," he said.

"Then take them for mine."

He thought of all that he had always forfeited, how he always kept control. How he never lost his hold on himself for even a moment.

He swallowed the pills.

"I want to go swimming," she said, and was already on her way out.

In the elevator she pulled off her sweater. Beneath she wore a cotton undershirt; her torso was surprisingly lovely, compact and muscular.

"I don't have my flotation device," she said.

"You're not serious."

"You're going to have to be my buddy," she said. "Never go swimming without a buddy, T.!"

"But it's three a.m. The sign says closed after midnight"

"Really, T.," and she shook her head, "who gives a shit? You're such a prig."

"Proud of it."

"Have you ever even been in this pool the whole time you lived here?"

"Once, in the first week."

"I'm going in the deep end."

"Wait!" he said desperately, but she was already out the back door of the lobby and headed for the pool deck. "How does this work?" he called after her, but she ignored him.

A few moments later she was rising in her chair, lifted on her strong arms: and then she fell forward into the water and sank like a stone. He jumped in, panicking.

As he heaved her head and shoulders above the surface, sputtering and soaking in his clothes, he thought she was crying but in fact it was laughter.

"I do pool physio all the time, fool," she said, water running down her face. "You didn't, like, save my life or some shit"

"Good. You don't deserve it."

She pushed his head under, holding the rim of the pool with the other arm. Submerged-he stayed because he wanted to: the lights on the sides of the pool were bright and hypnotic-he thought that he admired her. He looked at her ribcage, her flat, lean abdomen, his eyes smarting from the chlorine; her shirt floated above her belly. Behind her the pool lights wavered and dazzled him. Hard to keep his eyes wide; the eyeballs smarted. But he was busy seeing. He admired her bravery. She was a heroine.

In the water beneath them her legs receded, white and tapering to a distant point of feet; but here any legs would recede that way, pale and disappearing. Other legs would be moving in the water, that was all.

He saw his own legs; he could barely keep them down. They were not white because he was wearing pants and shoes. They were big and heavy. They wanted to be floating.

It did not matter how proud she was; still he had to admit to pity. No matter what, there was always pity, however her defiance might reject it… and yet the water was turquoise, flooded with white, and they were here within it like two parts of a whole-connected by liquid, only the membranes of their skin between them. What were legs, anyway? She could swim without them.

How specific each thing was to the need for it.

In the pool someone might see her and not know. Someone might catch sight of her floating and believe she had legs that walked; they might believe she was whole.

He could almost believe it himself.

He thought he was happy, for a second, but then how could he be? — he must be missing something.

In a haze he burst out, dripping. His shirt around his shoulders felt cold instantly in the air and he wanted to be submerged again. She was a sacrificial lamb; she was both great and small. He adored her. Dear friend.

She could hold him under; he would not protest.

Instead she studied him with a serious expression, frowning.

"I can, you know," she said.

"You can?" he asked stupidly.

He carried her upstairs, and only later went back for her chair.

It was the emotion of it that was piercing, a thing he could not have known. He would have guessed it would be difficult, the rawness of what was missing. Instead he was suffused by a sharp, rending emotion, unidentifiable to him. With Beth there had been warmth, but not this extremeness, tearing and erotic. Was it the effect of the pills? Afterward sleep together was like being in the water, where there was hardly a line between them. But then daylight was bleak. He raised himself on an elbow and gazed down. She was lovely at the top, fresh: down and down further she was sleek and firm: then she wasted into pale angles and bone. He felt sad and furtive. He should not be seeing this.

She was awake and studying his expression.

"I need to get out of here," she said. "Right away."

He helped her to her chair and waited while she used the bathroom; they rode down in the elevator, saying little. Her car was parked a block away and he walked beside her, glancing down at the top of her head. She never raised her face to look at him; even as he loaded the chair into the car he could not catch her eye. He watched her drive away standing where her car had been, on a grease stain.

It was barely dawn. The grass was dewy and the sky over the sea lavender. The skin on his arms pricked and chilled; he hugged himself and rubbed his tipper arms with his hands.

Regret was nagging at him, even shame.

He was walking along the sidewalk back to his building, choked and empty, when he saw his dog.

She sat beside the front steps, waiting-thin and mangy, but alive. Alive!

He was floored by relief. He felt a splinter of pained love for Casey, shot through with remorse, as though his dog's return was her doing somehow. He knelt down on the grass and laid his cheek against the dog's flank.

When he stood again and she rose off her haunches to walk with him he saw she was reluctant to move; she held up one of her back legs. She was lame.

The leg, it turned out, was broken and fusing incorrectly, and also badly infected.

"How did it happen?" he asked. He was still so grateful it was hard to be upset. She was alive.

"Can't really say. Some kind of blunt-force trauma; maybe a car hit"

"Are you sure?"

"Wait a second," said the veterinarian. "Oh… take a look. You see this wound at the ankle, with the pus and scabbing? The hair's gone. Looks like it was rubbed raw by a cuff or a chain. Same thing on this leg here. Let's see. She has wounds here too, under the hair. And there's tenderness here. We should do X-rays. She might have other injuries."

"What happened?"

"She was chained at the ankle, maybe jabbed and hit or beaten. She worried the chain with her teeth, trying to get it off. From the angle here I can tell the injury predated the chaining. Someone kept her chained up when she was already injured."

He felt a wave of faintness, bitter taste in his mouth. He saw Fulton's wine cellar.

A course of antibiotics could be tried, said the vet, but there was significant necrosis. He advised T. to let him amputate right away.

"You'd be surprised," said the vet, "how well they do on three legs."

The rooms of his apartment were full with the dog home again, convalescing. He was satisfied to know, even when she was out of sight, that somewhere in the apartment she was sleeping or eating or sitting watchfully. It was family, he guessed, more or less. Did most people want a house of living things at night, to know that in the dark around them other warm bodies slept?

Such a house could even be the whole world.

It was days afterward that he went to see Casey. She was not answering his phone calls and he felt increasingly nervous about this. He gave his dog a strip of rawhide before he left, pulled on his running gear and went down to the beach. He ran south. Beachgoers were out in force; some of them wore very small swimsuits, though the air was only mild. The surf was low but still kids on boogie boards paddled frantically.

When he got to her building the sun was setting. Standing in the foyer he pushed the call button once, then again; he peered into the camera lens. She had a monitor in her apartment, though she seldom looked at the screen-only listened, said nothing, and used the remote to buzz people in. But lately she had not been in bed as she used to; lately she was active.

After a few seconds of waiting he turned to leave, let down. One of her neighbors, a man with a prosthetic foot, was hobbling along the sidewalk. He lived two doors down on her floor and they sometimes nodded at each other in the elevator.

"You seen Casey around?" he asked on impulse, as the man came up the walkway.

"She was out here earlier. She was watching a couple of kids carry boxes for her."

"Boxes?"

"Moving."

"Moving?"

"Yeah. She gave me a plant. I don't even like them."

T. stared at him.

"But I just saw her a couple of days ago. She didn't say anything about it."

"What can I tell you."

The man was past, fumbling at his mailbox.

He would call Susan.

Running back north he wanted to know; he swerved inland off the beach and found a payphone.

Susan picked up coughing.

"She's moving?" he asked, when the coughing trailed off. No preamble. He felt agitated, even anxious. "Where to?"

"Thanks for your concern about my health, T. And in case you're wondering, it's pneumonia."

"Oh. I'm sorry. I thought it was just the flu."

"Walking pneumonia."

"Walking? What the hell does that mean?"

"It means you need to get a temp."

"Sure. Of course. Take good care of yourself."

"Here's the thing. I don't know what happened between the two of you. This is my daughter here, and my job."

"Yeah," he said, waiting.

"But she can't have any contact anymore," she said. "I'm sorry, T. You know how much I hate to be in this position."

"You're kidding."

Susan coughed, and the cough wore on.

No.

"It doesn't-she's my best friend, Susan. I can't believe it. Is she really serious about this?"

"I think she's serious," said Susan. "Yes. I'm afraid she is, T. And I'm sorry, but I really do have to go," and she hung up still coughing.

He let his eyelids drop closed: a faint imprint of the great seal on the dollar bill, the glowing pyramid with its all-seeing eye.

He stood in the booth like a statue, testing the steadiness of his feet on the ground. He kept his eyes shut, and the sweat that had soaked his shirt cooled him in the night air. He started to shake. It came to him that beyond himself he had deprived his mother-she would be friendless once more.

He brought them to her and they were taken away again.

He needed Casey, he thought, because he liked her company, because her presence made him more than he was without it, but he could not deny that at the beginning he had also believed he was doing her a favor. That was where his arrogance had been. It was a mistake to think that because someone had fallen down, someone was injured or sick or less than complete, you were giving more to them by your association than they were giving to you.

It was a bad mistake.

He leaned for some time against the wall of the booth, still holding the receiver loosely till it occurred to him that he did not need to. The ears of unwashed men had greased the black plastic. Revolting. There was a sheen on the curving surface, the whorls and smudges of fingerprints.

He walked down to the waterline holding his hands out at his sides, feeling a need to wash them. But even as his legs moved him forward he knew a certain ambivalence or resistance, as though the leavings of strange men were also somehow the last touch of Casey, which would be washed off with the rest.

Still he plunged in his arms. The water was freezing.