He had occupied that space, lived in it, right up until they had left for Reno, but Bill’s had been the left side of the room, and even after a year had passed and then two, Nat sixteen and then seventeen, right up until the day he moved out, nineteen then, he had never really expanded his territory to that side. Someone came to take Bill’s bed away and the gap it left became a kind of receptacle for dirty clothes and cassette tapes and the other detritus of a boy’s life, not a space that he used but a space that collected the overflow. Now that gap was bare carpet and he knew that it had never really been his room but always shared with his brother and he also knew, looking into that gap, that this would always be the case.
And then he understood that he would never see this room again, for when he returned to Reno it would be to die.
When he returned to the front room it was to find his mother still asleep, the final tumbler of Long Island iced tea still half full on the foldout tray. He knelt before the television and flipped through the three channels the coat-hanger antenna managed to collect from Reno. A rerun sitcom on one. A commercial on the other. And then, on Channel 5, a close-up image of a wasp dragging a paralyzed insect to the entrance of its burrow in the dirt, its alien limbs pulling at its immobile prey. It lingered there for a moment, its antennae moving, and then disappeared into its burrow as if to ensure all was ready within before reappearing once more to seize the insect and pull it into the darkness. The narrator’s voice was calm and instructive, even soothing, explaining that the wasp would now lay its eggs on the body of the insect, providing a ready food source for the hatching of its young.
But then something changed. Another wasp or perhaps the same. The insect in place at the entrance and the wasp disappearing into the burrow but at the moment of that disappearance an instrument like a metal toothpick appeared at the edge of the frame, pushing the paralyzed insect a few inches from where the wasp had left it. The wasp appeared from the burrow for a moment, paused, its antennae waving, and then moved forward and grasped its prey and dragged it once again to the entrance and disappeared into the burrow again. In its absence, the instrument reappeared and pushed the insect a few inches away. The wasp emerged, once again found the insect, returned it to the entrance, and once again disappeared inside.
The sphex will repeat this behavior over and over again, the narrator said while the wasp checked and rechecked its burrow, the instrument shifting the insect each time it disappeared from the screen. What we might initially see as a behavior rooted in decision-making is revealed to be programmed instinct. The simplest action — in this case moving its paralyzed prey — creates a loop from which the wasp cannot escape. In some cases, researchers have created conditions where the sphex will check its burrow up to fifty times, triggered each time by moving the paralyzed insect a few inches.
He was shaking as he stood and clicked the television off and stepped past his sleeping mother to lift his coat from where he had draped it on the back of the sofa before opening the metal door and stepping outside. The night was frigid, his breath a tower of rising steam, and the trailers in their rows were dark. The whole town around him a blankness but for a distant streetlight swirling with frantic insects. A shush of cars on the interstate but otherwise no sound at all. The high desert endless around him. He extracted his cigarettes and lighter but his hands were shaking and he could not spin the tiny wheel to spark the flame. After a moment he rolled the wheel back and forth across the edge of the stairs, an old trick he had seen his brother do once in the rain, and at last a thin flame rose from the cylinder, its shape shaking and dancing as he lit the cigarette. Then he leaned against the peeling rail, puffing smoke into the black night, the cloud of bright insects throwing themselves against the hot burning globe, the Datsun floating amidst those circling frantic stars. Wasps everywhere caught up in their loop of activity.
He stood there for a half hour before he heard the door of Rick’s mobile home open and click shut again and Nat came across the gravel, his breath a hot white cloud before him.
Hey, he said quietly.
Rick came down the stairs. You got a light?
He handed across the lighter and there was the brief bright moment of the flame.
My mom’s dying, Rick said.
What do the doctors say?
That is what the doctors say.
What’re you gonna do?
No idea.
He took a drag on the cigarette. That thing you talked about the other day, he said.
What thing?
About Milt’s safe. You think we can pull that off?
Rick scoffed. If we can get in there, I don’t see why not.
Nat puffed at the cigarette again. Across the desert floor came the distant roar of a truck barreling down I-80. I think I know a way, he said.
No shit?
He nodded faintly.
Goddamn.
The night felt sharp and clear around him. The distant streetlight seemed to falter for a moment and then shone steady once more, the insects swooping and curling all round it, their shapes striping the air.
PART III. THE BOOK OF THE DEAD
15
AT THE END, THE BEAR FINDS HIMSELF LOOKING DOWN AT A vast sagebrush plain lit only by starlight and ringed by dry colorless mountains gone the color of black night. The two men stand at the edge of a collection of battered buildings and trailers that huddle in the middle of that darkness. Around them is a bleak town of some sort and the bear knows this even though he does not know what a town is, has never seen one, and yet knows more now than he ever has in his life, here at the end, although he does not know where he is or how he has come to such a place. There are questions but the bear does not ask them. The time for questions has long passed. One of the figures below him is the man he knows, the man the bear might call friend if he knew such a concept. Maybe he does. But what the bear wonders at now is the man’s smell, for it seems to come to him across time and across the darkness. He can smell him across all his life and the sense of him there makes the bear call out in a long protracted moan. How much he misses the man in that moment. And how much he knows that he will never see him again.
The bear knows too that the other is the stranger who came up earlier from the bottom of the mountain, came up from the snow near where the river crosses the road, bearing with him that hard sharp scent that felt like a jagged cloud swirling all around him.
He tries to call down to the man he knows but now his voice will make no sound at all and what exhales out of him is only a long slow hiss that flows upward into black trees that hang above his body like porcupine quills punched through a snowed-over night sky. And then he knows that he is in the forest again, even though he can smell the desert, a scent he has never smelled before but which he recognizes because there is something of the man he knows in that place, in that dark plain. Now he is in some other night, in some other time, as if the blizzarding gray sky is only a thin membrane so insubstantial that it has become transparent, so that when he casts his sightless milky eyes upward the snow seems to part, does part, circling away to be replaced not with the sky but with the dark desert plain ringed with high bare mountains gone flat black in the moonless night.