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.
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 utter 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 contained— how 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 dry 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.