How the Dead Dream

5

The zoo was on the edge of a wide desert valley, with a view of cactus-dotted hills above and, in the flats spread out beneath, flocks of small white houses. He went there after a meeting in Scottsdale, to fill an empty afternoon. He was restless in his hotel and had seen the zoo in a tourist brochure, with a picture of a wolf.

In a series of arid gardens connected by pathways there was a hummingbird enclosure and an aviary, a beaver pond and a pool for otters; there were Mexican parrots squawking, bighorn sheep on artificial cliffs, an ocelot curled up in a rocky crevice and a sleek bobcat pacing restlessly. He passed a lush pollinator garden and a series of low and inconspicuous buildings; an elderly, white-haired docent stood with a watchful bird perched on her hand, waiting for interest. He wandered over and looked at the bird closely. It had large eyes in a beautiful face, and was compact but fierce looking.

"American kestrel," said the docent. "One of the smaller raptors. This gal is almost nine inches long, but weighs less than four ounces. Beautiful, isn't she?"

A few minutes later he stood bracing himself with his hands on a low wall over a moat. Across the moat slept a black bear on a sunny ledge. This was a zoo of animals native to the region, and though bears did not live in the hot flatlands a handful of them still roamed the piney mountains that rose above the desert floor. He had read that every so often a bear was found dead atop a power pole, where it had climbed suddenly in terror, escaping from a car or a noise, and been electrocuted.

He watched the bear sleep, and in the lull of the sun and the heat and the stillness felt like dozing off himself.

Then the stillness was disturbed by yelling boys, hitting each other in the face. The father, in shorts, stood at T.'s elbow, looking down into his camera and adjusting a ring on the lens. A projectile-someone had lobbed a balled-up piece of litter. It hit the bear a glancing blow on the ear and he stirred, disoriented, turned around once and then settled down again.

"Too soon, I wasn't set up yet. Missed the shot," said the man, shaking his head. "Go again."

The wife looked around for something else to throw and T. felt heat filling his face. A tension bowed in him: he felt a rush of fury.

"Are you kidding?" he asked, turning to the wife. She wore large mirrored sunglasses. "You're throwing garbage at the bear? For a picture?"

"What's the big deal?" said the family man.

"Don't do it," said T. His shoulders were fluid and nervy, his face shining. He was enraged. Or excited. But all here, he thought: and I will kill them. Even though he knew it was a posture, he felt the anger and relished it.

The man shrugged and the wife began rifling through her purse, apparently ignoring him; a few feet away one of the flailing children, a thin boy in khaki camouflage pants, was already lofting a second missile, a foam cup half-full of brown slush. The cup missed the bear and fell into the moat below, and the slush slung out of the cup as it arced past and dimpled the bear's dark coat. The bear reared up again, doubly confused.

The thin boy jeered.

T. turned to the father, who was still fumbling with his zoom lens. A split second of hesitation. "You let your kid do that again, I swear to God I'll grab that camera and break it open on the cement," he said.

He realized his molars were grinding. He had never done this, never. Never anything-. He was thrilled and at the same time he hated the man, hated his wife and even his children.

"Mind your own business," said the family man.

"I'm dead serious. I'll smash it to fucking bits."

"I'll sue you!"

"What are you thinking? Seriously. What does someone like you think? Do you think?"

"Stupid bear!" jeered the camouflage kid.

"Mind your business," said the family man again.

"It is my business," said T. "Just like it would be if you threw garbage at my sister. What don't you get about that? Is there an argument for what you're doing?"

"Let's just go, Ray," said the wife.

"I got a squirt gun," said the kid, and pulled it out: the size of an assault rifle, bright pink.

"Don't even think about it," said T., and looked at the father. His neck tensed, his hands flexed. "Tell him to put that thing away. I'll punch your face. I mean it."

The man was squaring off, his eyes narrowed. He let his camera rest against his chest, the dangling lens cap swinging.

"Tell me how to handle my kid? He can squirt his water gun at the bear if he wants to."

"You disgusting. Piece. Of shit," said T.

The wife tugged urgently on her husband's sleeve.

"Come on, Ray."

After a moment the family man turned, his wife beside him and the kids ranging around them both; as they turned a corner the kid in camouflage pants whipped around and sneered, sticking up the middle fingers of both hands before he disappeared.

T. felt the adrenaline surge fade but still he burned. He wanted to hunt them down and punish them. But he did not. He did not titter a word of complaint to the zoo's management. He was flooded with elation.

He was elated. This was who he was, he thought; he was a person who would defend, who would swear and threaten and feel the heat and the cliff-edge of opinion. He felt good-better than good. He stood there for seconds, or was it forever? — stood there partway in rapture, struck.

On its flat rock the bear was still turning blearily round, tossing its head as though trapped in a nightmare. Finally it resettled itself and laid its chin on its paws to go back to sleep.

He went back that night when the zoo was closed, thrilled, as if he was lightly drunk, at the illicitness in himself. It was new. What arrested him in the zoo was the wildness it containedhow far this was from the realm of his competence. He wanted to meet it. He knew the zoo animals lived in cages but nothing more about them except that they were alone, most of them, not only alone in the cages, often, but alone on the earth, vanishing. Their condition was close to what he was trying to grasp, lay somehow at the base of his growing suspicion that the ground was no longer fixed, was shifting beneath him.

Empire only looked good built against a backdrop of oceans and forests. It needed them. If the oceans were dead and the forests replaced by pavement even empire would be robbed of its consequence. Alone, he thought-a word that came to him more and more, in singsong like a jeer. In the zoo the rare animals might have been orphaned or captured or even born in captivity. He had no idea where they came from, could not know their individual histories. But he knew their position, as he knew his own: they were at the forefront of aloneness, like pioneers. They were the ones sent ahead to see what the new world was like.

Would they tell what they saw?

The rarest animal in the zoo was a Mexican gray wolf, the one pictured in the tourist brochure, an animal that was apparently frail and aging. Its fur looked mangy; it had been asleep when he was there earlier. The wolf's pen, as the sign posted on it told him, was a temporary setup during construction of a new exhibit. It was nothing more substantial than a chain-link fence near the road, with barbed wire curling along the top.

He looked at his shoes: round toes. He should be able to wedge them into the holes. He shoved his flashlight in his pocket, hooked his fingers through the mesh and pulled himself up, kicking for purchase. His feet flailed against the fencing and his fingers were already bruising, imprinted with purple lines. Speed was the key, he thought, move quickly. He always had reasons for each single action, but he had no good reasons for doing this. Was he irrational? But it lifted him. He would follow the question to its resolution, even if the question was unconscious.

He was not even all the way up the six-foot fence when he regretted his tactics. He had to get down from here, the pressure on the pads of his fingertips, which he feared were going to be sliced clean through. In a scramble he grabbed the metal frame the wire was stretched on and went up and over it, catching barbs on his chest and thighs. His leg, halfway over, was tangled in the wire, and struggling he lost his foothold. Falling he tried to launch himself forward, away from the barbs.

When he recovered, on the ground with an aching neck and shoulders, he had a sharp pain in his leg. Sitting up he saw he had grazed his calf on a cactus as he fell. Through the thin cotton of his pants it was bleeding, and in the dark he could see white spines sticking through the fabric. He stood unsteadily, bracing himself against the fence; he could make out almost nothing. He walked around the cactus, lifting his flashlight. In the dark he could imagine not only wolves but almost anything, a secret menagerie. He was filled with the rush of this, with the idea of myriad creatures materializing from the blackness. Their coats glowed, their faces were both benign and predatory. The faces of animals were amazing in that, tongues of velvet and claws of ice. What were they?

There was a gate, padlocked; a metal box built into the base of the fence; a diy log, a thin tree. Doves rose suddenly from the tree, a flurry of hysterical wingbeats. He jumped.

His leg was aching.

He began to point his beam at bushes and the bases of trees, where holes might be tucked. Finally he flicked off the light and squatted down. Without the glare his eyes adjusted and finally he apprehended a shape that was not a bush or tree, hunkered down against the fence, low and dim.

He got up silently and picked his way closer, still without the flashlight on, his eyes on the ground while he threaded his way between bushes. Closer and closer till he pointed the flashlight toward the ground in front of the wolf's hunched shape and touched the switch with his thumb. A quick yellow flicker of eyes and then the wolf moved fluidly, fleeing along the fence. It went away from him, into a corner where it remained.

He would not get closer. The wolf would not allow it.

The next morning he removed the small spines from his leg. The wound was throbbing, but he did not mind; there was something he savored in it, pinching the hair-thin fibers hard between the tweezer edges. The sensation was fine and sharp as a grass blade. It satisfied him.

He took two aspirins and showered. In his socks and his shirt, standing in front of the in-room coffeemaker, he thought of the old wolf again. Animals were self-contained and people seemed to hold this against them-possibly because most of them had come to believe that animals should be like servants or children. Either they should work for men, suffer under a burden, or they should entertain them. He had strained against the wolf's aloofness himself, resenting the wolf for its insistence on distance. He had felt it almost as an insult, and inwardly he retaliated.

But then he was self-contained too: he had a private purpose, a trajectory, and no one had license to block it. It might be obscure even to him, but that obscurity was his own possession. The old wolf's unwillingness to be near him was fully forgiven by the light of day and in fact the joke was on him. Wariness was simply its way of life, having nothing to do with him. It had not been robbed of this quality, though it was caged and it was solitary: it retained its essence. It did not attempt to ingratiate itself. It did not have diplomacy.

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 tinder 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 minds 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 reproductionwhose 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.

His mother had always been punctilious about hygiene but now she neglected to bathe; timely about bills, but now she neglected to pay them; anxious to read her mail, but now she neglected to pick it up from her box. The lapse of her mania for cleanliness was the most glaring change, making of her inward switch an ongoing outward pageant. Once she had watched milk expiration dates like a hawk but lately, neglecting to purchase new food, she settled for eating butter without bread, ketchup on stale crackers, aged baby carrots excavated in surprise from a rancid puddle of red-leaf lettuce at the back of the crisper.

A new frugality had taken hold. Although her savings were sufficient for a comfortable retirement she did not like to draw upon them; instead, before T. even knew her intent, she had sold all her jewelry and commissioned her former neighbors in Darien with the sale of the family heirlooms she had left in the house.

"You don't need to do this," he told her when he found out, perched on the arm of her sofa with his arms crossed. At work on a puzzle of cavorting dolphins, she showed no interest in turning to face him. "If you're worried about money I can help you. There's no reason you should deprive yourself."

"I didn't want those old things anyway," she said, and fit in a puzzle piece. "The armoires and the tables. Who needs them?"

"Someone else in the family might want them. That desk from 1680, for instance. Maybe that second cousin that sends you those long family letters at Christmas? The one in Salt Lake City?"

"Betsy?"?

"Right. Betsy."

"I don't like Betsy. She's obese. And Mormon."

"Still, might as well keep it in the family. We're not hurting here, you and me. I'm rolling most of my profits back into investment, but I have plenty left for you to live well."

"A penny saved is a penny earned."

"You don't need to earn pennies. I paid six million in taxes last year."

"Don't brag. You could end up in the Pancake House."

"I'm not saying it's a big deal. I'm just trying to make you see.

"I'm doing just fine, honey. Really."

"Yesterday when I came in you remember what you were drinking? The vinegar from a pickle jar? It had pieces of stem and peppercorns floating in it."

"It was good. If you like pickles, why not the juice? People are so finicky."

"And the cereal you were eating Tuesday? With the maggots in it?"

"Those weren't maggots, T. Don't be ridiculous! They were mealworms."

All he could do was hire a nurse, who kept the refrigerator stocked, cooked and cleaned, and made sure his mother remembered to bathe. A strong and matronly woman from Yugoslavia, the nurse took her charge out once a day to walk through the streets to the beach; she was a staunch believer in the restorative powers of locomotion.

In celebration of his nation's birth Fulton had pulled out all the stops, resulting in Fourth of July festivities so red, white and blue that heads spun from the impact of spangles. In his three-acre backyard a band in cowboy gear played traditional favorites: for Fulton liked gangsta rap but Janet listened exclusively to country. Thus the lyrics of "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" were belted out by a woman with long, elaborately curled red hair who swayed back and forth in an agitated fashion from one high-heeled foot to the other; as the afternoon wore on she began to caress the microphone with a frantic obscenity, groaning "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" as though straining under the lash.

T. was prevented from leaving by the promised arrival of a new investor whom Fulton had invited to meet him. He watched the redhead stagger back and forth across the front of the stage and felt battered; across his horizon Janet paraded a number of sacrificial virgins, each of whom required civil handling. During a foot stomping rendition of "Clementine" there was a blonde from Indiana; when the sheet cake was cut-a giant flag in the shape of the country, with Hawaii and Alaska as bundt cake satellites-there was a dark-haired woman with a long face.

"This is Tanya," said Janet. "She's a real estate agent! You guys have so much in common!"

"I'm sorry," said T., smiling affably. "What would that be?"

"You know! Real estate things!" effused Janet, and steered her friend forward with a viselike grip on her arm.

"I'm really sorry to hear about your loss," said Tanya, but wavered between a frown and a smile.

"Tanya just got divorced recently," said Janet.

"Well then I'm sorry," said T., and meant it.

"It was actually a very positive step," said Tanya.

"She was wasted on him," said Janet.

"I don't doubt," said T.

"So, you're in real estate too?" asked Tanya, and T. nodded very slightly before turning back to the redhead, who was now wailing, "Hang down your head, Tom Dooley, hang down your head and cry-iy-iy…"

"I develop resort properties," said T.

"Hang down your head Tom Dooley; poor boy you're going to die-iy-iy."

"Oh, wow. Yeah. I'm a buyer's agent. Residential. I'm actually new to the whole racket. I just started a year ago. When I was married, you know, all I ever did was the Home Shopping Network, basically."

"Listen," said T., because he could not bear to look at the singer a moment longer and did not want to make small talk either. "Can I confess something? Janet's always trying to set me up, and her intentions are good, but I don't want to be set tip. I'm basically still in mourning. I don't want to meet anyone.

Tanya nodded eagerly, as though what he said had nothing to do with her.

"You're probably totally sick of it," she said. "Am I right?"

He hoped she would impart the tidbit to Janet, but this must not have occurred; for after the triumphant finale, namely "The Lord of the Dance," he was served up the redhead herself.

His second break-in after the rhinoceros was a Monkey House near San Diego, where his research failed him. The Monkey House was equipped with a silent alarm.

Making his way down a narrow corridor between the cages of the smallest monkeys-marmosets, tarsiers and golden lion tamarins, their small homuncular faces beadily watchful in the foliage behind the thick glass-he felt the shock of security guards bursting into the building, one from the front and one from the rear.

He heard the crash of the metal doors and the racking of slides on two guns; thoughtless and rushing, he leapt over the wall of an open enclosure and shimmied down a palm tree. The rough bark tore at his legs and he tumbled onto a tussock and hid behind a fake rock, his thighs burning so hard he had to grit his teeth at the sting.

Within hearing distance the guards met; they came together in the walkway between his enclosure and another.

"See anything?"

"… bird got in earlier? And just tripped the thing now? Like with the myna at the fundraiser."

"I betcha it was Galt. Couldn't raise him before. Heard he's off the wagon."

They stumped heavily toward the front of the building, the beams of their flashlights scoping but giving him a wide berth. When their footfalls faded he climbed out of the exhibit as quietly as he could and scurried out the rear service door. He wanted to apologize to the monkeys, to tell them he was sorry for the intrusion. He had not meant to bring them the loud men with guns-behind him, unseen, a monkey had squealed at the noise, startled out of its sleep.

Attacks had occurred in the past, he learned; a young female baboon had been shot in the stomach by a hunter wanting to take home her skull for a trophy. The zoo in question was under pressure. But the incident led him to research animals who were not always closed within buildings, who could not be sealed off so easily with electronic systems. It was not that he was afraid of the awkwardness of an arrest-victimless trespasses like his tended not to draw much publicity-but more that his experience would be trivial if it revolved around awareness of risk.

And how arbitrary it was that certain authorities ruled over zoo animals, decided which persons could draw near to them-authorities vested by neither the state nor any other body, handed permits with a near-infinite laxness by the Department of Agriculture. There were almost no standards for the treatment of the animals unless the zoo they lived in belonged to the American Zoo Association-some two hundred out of two thousand. The other zoos could do almost anything to their charges.

He had standards. He only broke into accredited zoos. In the others he knew he would see nothing but misery. They held no appeal for him.

When he first met Susan's daughter he was hitching a ride with Susan to the dealership where his 560 was being serviced. He had finally traded in the 190.

Her daughter lived in an apartment building hemmed in by smaller buildings on the Marina's narrow peninsula. Herons and ducks alit on a dirty-looking canal; wide ramps led up to the front doors. The building's functionality, he thought as he passed through the foyer, gave an impression of coldness, as though the Herculean effort of making the premises handicapped-friendly had drained those in management of all their energy reserves and left them no choice but to decorate the lobby with two dead philodendrons and a stained brown carpet.

Casey seldom left the building, Susan told him as they waited for the elevator, not because she was not able to do so but because she was angry and depressed. Susan brought her food and supplies twice a week and had done so, she told T. as they stepped into the freight elevator, ever since the accident nearly six years before.

The apartment felt temporary, with plywood on bricks for bookshelves and ripped pieces of cloth tacked over the windows. Susan set down a grocery bag on the counter and the two of them passed into the dining room and the hall, where dirty beige indoor-outdoor carpeting bore deep gray grooves from thin wheels.

"She won't let me make improvements," whispered Susan.

"I hear you, Mother," called Casey. "Don't apologize for me, OK? If I want to live in a shithole that's my choice. I'm not sorry."

"I wasn't apologizing, honey," said Susan calmly as they turned a corner and stood at the bedroom door.

"You were making excuses for the paraplegic. Same thing."

T. saw a thin, pale young woman sitting in her rumpled bed. She had her television on with the sound muted; on the nightstand sat a fish tank containing a single blue-and-gold fish, its long fins waving. She scowled at him.

"This must be the boss," she said. "COLA raises plus five percent."

"T., this is Casey. Casey, T."

"I'm a bitch. Did she tell you?"

"Not in so many words," said T.

"Yeah well. You can't say bad things about a cripple."

Susan had warned him she was outspoken. He went with it.

"True," he said.

"The best thing about this room is the view," said Susan cheerfully, and opened the blinds over a wide window. "Would you look at that? Beautiful!"

"I forget the Pacific is even there," said Casey to T. "I look at Oprah and Jerry Springer. And my betta fish. At night sometimes, when I'm moisturizing my atrophied legs, I look at the test pattern. You should give her a ten percent raise this Christmas. She has a cross to bear."

"Indeed," said T.

"Did you bring the batteries for the remote?"

"Everything on the list, dear. Like always. Mind if I clean this up here?"

"Go for it."

He watched as Susan picked up balled tissues, brown apple cores, coffee mugs full of mold and glasses coated with the residue of old juice. Oddly he was relaxed, even sleepy. He felt content in the room. Susan gathered the detritus into a waste basket and carried it out.

While she was in the other room Casey glared at him.

"Is this a staring contest?" he asked, amused.

"It was. You just lost though."

"I'm devastated."

"You should be. Staring contest performance is a measure of social anxiety. Losing means you're even more spineless than me."

He cocked his head, waiting for her to continue.

"Get it? Spineless?"

"It's not funny."

"Tell me about it. Hey. Pass me that chapstick, would you?"

Before the car accident, Susan said on their way out, her daughter had been quiet, gentle, somewhat passive. She had been seventeen then, a good student, popular; she had been accepted to Stanford, but then came the accident, a pileup of cars on the freeway in an ice storm outside Denver. When the school semester began she had still been in the hospital.

Later she refused to attend, though the school was willing to make accommodations for her. She was stubborn, said Susan. All she had left was speech, and speech stood in for action. She magnified herself through bold talk; she put her words where the rest of her couldn't go.

"And she's still my baby. I love her just as much as I ever did," said Susan, backing out of her parking space.

Fruiting olive trees were planted on the parking lot islands, and beneath them black ovals littered the asphalt. He could hear the tires crunch them.

"No, that's not true," went on Susan, muted. "I love her more.

He watched her tired profile as she looked over her shoulder and then turned back to the steering wheel. He felt a sympathy that made him wince and then a wash of gratitude.

"I know I'm lucky to have you," he said.

After that he began to pay visits to Casey almost every week. He ran up and down the beach five or six miles on weekday mornings, his dog loping beside him on the path, and halfmarathons by himself on Saturdays and Sundays, along the firm sand near the waterline. Part of him still resisted running, and when he started he doubted he would persist; but then he ran longer distances, and by the time he went eight or nine miles he was often filled with euphoria. It flamed up through his calves and his chest and along his jaw to what felt like a trembling membrane beneath his skull, a rush of adrenaline that delivered him to elation.

Sometimes he ran down the beach from Santa Monica to Venice to the peninsula and stopped in at a convenience store to buy a small token for Casey, a newspaper or a bag of chips. Sometimes he stopped at a neighborhood pet store to pick up a plant or a new snail for her tank. He could not purchase anything but snails, for hers was a male fighting fish and would fight other fish to the death.

He was amused by her pugnacity. She was only a couple of years younger than he was but she seemed like a teenager. She did not mind that he showed tip with sweat stains in the armpits of his T-shirt; she was not reminded by this, as he feared at first, of her own debilitation.

"Are you kidding?" she said when he asked her this. "I hated that shit. Sports and jocks. Only time I ever ran was to catch a bus."

Her mother had persuaded her to attend support group meetings and she liked to mock these; but she also knew they were helpful, and attended them faithfully. T. sometimes drove her there in her car, which was modified for hand operation and to hold her wheelchair. She taught him to drive it. At the third meeting to which he drove her, in late November, she confessed there was a man at the meetings who intrigued her; he was an ex-policeman, shot in the back by a rookie.

"You can't tell my mother. She wouldn't approve of him," she said. "He obsesses about CIA covert operations and collects weapons. He buys some of them on the black market. They're not even legal. Also he drinks malt liquor, and on special occasions he does crystal meth."

"But you like that about him," said T.

"Sure, hell," said Casey, looking out the window. "I don't care. Whatever works, right?"

"It's not enough for you to have a paralyzed boyfriend, you want an addict too."

"Don't knock it till you've tried it."

Waiting to pick her up afterward, leaning against the window of her car, he watched the wheelchair-access door for her emergence and felt like an elder brother, waiting to take his sister home from a school dance. Yet Casey had a family already, her mother and her father, a soft-spoken, kindly man. He was a bureaucrat of some kind who liked to discuss taxes. Whenever Congress attempted to reform the income tax code he shook his head sadly, as though heathens were trampling on hallowed ground. Despite the fact that T. reserved his reverence, such as it still was, for other agenciesthe Department of State, for instance, and the Library of Congress-he felt a certain kinship.

The door cranked back on its circuit and a gray-haired woman in a wheelchair appeared; behind her was Casey, followed closely by a gaunt, grizzled man in a filthy peasant shirt with an old army blanket covering his lap.

"T., this is Sal."

"Good to meet you," said T. But when he reached for Sal's hand his own was slapped, grabbed and flipped in some complex high-five maneuver he failed to follow.

"So who are you, Casey's big brother?"

"I don't have a brother," said Casey. "Big or little. Ever listen to me in there?"

"I meant Big Brother. Don't they have 'em for gimps? How come just the inner-city black kids get their own guiltridden Yuppie motherfucks? Get me a Big Brother. Take me to the park, shoot some hoops. Buy me an ice cream cone. I could use one. Shit. Get me a double-ass Rocky Road."

"If you're really nice to him he'll bring you some pink cotton candy," said Casey. "See you, Sal. T., could you get the car door please?"

"I can't believe you're into that guy," said T. as he drove. "Does he ever shower?"

"When the mood takes him. This was a low day."

"You might want to rethink."

"Like it's your business?"

"It's my business if the guy's an asshole."

"Please."

"I mean it. That handshake? Passive-aggressive."

"More like aggressive-aggressive."

"He's got a lot of anger."

"So would you if you had to piss through a catheter for the rest of your life. He's not going to beat me up, T. He's got a hollowpoint lodged in his spinal cord."

"Excuses, excuses."

"That's better. You sounded like a jealous husband."

T. cuffed her on the arm.

"Flatter yourself."

"Ow. That hurts."

His mother approved of his friendship with Casey, whom she referred to as "that little paralyzed girl." Partly she believed it was an act of charity, and as such would help to keep him safe from an afterlife in the Pancake House; partly she liked the fact that it gave him a social outlet. And she was eager to introduce Casey to the jigsaw puzzle.

"It's the ideal thing for that little paralyzed girl!" she said earnestly, twisting in her dining room chair to look tip at him. "It keeps your mind active."

"I think her mind's active enough already," said T.

"I can give her some of my old ones. I have more than forty in the closet. Please, T. It's such an opportunity!"

"I'll ask her," said T. "OK? I promise."

He kissed the top of his mother's head and waved to her nurse, soaping dishes in the kitchen.

Outside group therapy Casey did not socialize with, as she put it, other pathetic shut-ins; he suspected his mother would fall into this category. Casey preferred the company of those she could abuse, and was uncomfortable in situations that seemed to call for civility. But when, after delaying for several weeks, he finally conveyed his mother's invitation, she was surprisingly gracious. They went to the apartment on a Sunday, and as T. took the wheelchair off the back of the car his mother stood at her door, hands clasped, smiling and waiting patiently.

"I am so glad to meet you!" she cried as Casey rolled up her front walk. T. could hear her stage-whisper as she leaned down to the chair, "You are having a very healthy effect on my son!"

When they left, after stale graham crackers and tea, he was struggling to heft a stack of puzzles deep enough to impair his vision. Casey, he assumed, had no intention of even opening the boxes, but had nodded and smiled with a semblance of interest as his mother laid them out on the table.

"Thank you," he said, backing out of the driveway. "You didn't have to do that."

"Do what?" she asked, looking at him blankly.

"Be so nice to her."

"It wasn't, like, hard or anything," said Casey sharply. "I liked her. Don't be so condescending."

"How did I condescend to you?"

"To her, idiot."

True, he thought. But his mother was so often childlike.

"That woman is the only reason you're living. When you were born she could have thrown you in a garbage can. Many do."

"I never saw it that way."

"You should."

The pupfish lived in a small rocky pool in the desert uplands of Nevada, a few miles from Death Valley. Since long before the rise and fall of the Roman empire they had lived in the pool, only a few yards across, spawning and eating on a single ledge on the wall of the pool, beneath an overhang. There were no others like them in the world.

He drove to the pool with his dog on a three-day weekend; the dog sat in the passenger seat. They sped through a small town that contained almost nothing but an opera house, and they stopped for gas on a road that led to a nuclear test site. He had read a scientific paper that said the pool the fish lived in was fed by water from the test site, so-called fossil water; but the water would take ten thousand years to reach the fish's hole, so the radioactivity that now tainted it had not yet reached the fish.

Pebbles clanged against the undercarriage of the Mercedes and as the car lurched on the dirt road the dog lost her footing. Before them rose craggy hills, brown grasses and yellow wildflowers. Farmers had tried to grow alfalfa here. Finally he parked and walked up an incline, his dog watching him from the car. A plaque on the rock had a picture of the fish, blue and tiny, possibly an inch long.

But the walls of the hole were almost sheer, and even if he were able to rappel down he would risk hurting the fish, kicking the fragile outcrops where they ate. He had read that divers went in sometimes, but it was highly skilled work and he was neither trained nor equipped. The water was murky and he could not make out the fish beneath the surface. All he could see was a line of plastic funnels on a string.

But there was another place: the scientists had moved some of the fish to a refuge, not open to the public.

It was a concrete tank.

He peeled back a loose flap in the fence and crawled through; no cactus to navigate this time, only clumps of gold grass. The tank was built under a roof to protect it from the desert sun, and set low into the floor. He knelt down on the rim and leaned over the placid water, then flicked on his flashlight. He could make out brown scum, yellow algae. He waited.

Finally the fish came. They were tiny but their eyes were large, and for this reason even the adults looked like babies. They darted back and forth on the edge of his beam as he watched them, appearing to have no goal. Possibly they went back and forth because the light was disorienting them.

After a while he clicked it off. The floor was cement, and cool beneath him. To stave off extinction generations upon generations were bred and died in this concrete tank, where they were reduced to nothing-darting energy between straight walls. The cave where they had evolved, which looked from above like a dull puddle perched in a nest of rocks, was in fact the narrow mouth of a body of water that went hundreds of feet down, no one knew how far. Divers had descended to several hundred feet but still not touched the bottom. It was a deep, pinhead-narrow fissure in the earth, and water filled it from a profound source.

Back in the cavern, he thought, possibly the fish had a reason to live-no less or more than its fellows, anyway-and possibly there was even a civilization. Save the algae they ate on the ledge, there were no other species in the hole. The fish were alone, with only each other for company-not one animal but hundreds of them, alone as a whole kind, in a world without others.

Each fish lived for less than a year in the hole: once in a fish generation there might be an event. It might occur that a bird lit on the rock near the ledge with a flapping of wings, or a leaf was blown into the water from a shrub on the nearby ground; clouds might gather over the cave opening and rain might fall, dappling the surface and bringing molecules from afar, molecules from factories, cars, people's skin.

He closed his eyes and thought of swimming in the deep, armless and legless with only a streamlined slip of a form, swimming with nothing around him. He was in cool water: he flowed and was nothing: nothing was around him.

It was easy to think of the fish existing in pure monotony, to assume their brains were so small they did not even register this. From there it was easy also to see them as crude bundles of nerves that moved through their medium by reflex and instinct. He recognized the philosophy.

He put out a hand and touched a fingertip to the surface of the water. This alone was a disturbance for them; this was a pollution. Rolling onto his front again he looked over the ledge at them, propped on his elbows. To see them closely he had to stare, had to fixate on their minuscule bodies, the gestures of their movement. How good it must have felt to glide through the depths of the same water they knew through the eons, apprehend the slanting of long beams of sunlight through the depths. Feeling must have filled their bodies there, under the sky, over the depths; feeling must have overwhelmed the small motes that they were.

After all they depended on their own decisions to survive and needed feelings to guide them; they needed fear, for instance, for this purpose. Fear they knew. And if they knew fear why not the inverse too, the glowing comfort of safety, the warmth and closeness of other fish; and why not loneliness too, even if it moved through them like one more ripple of light.