Dinosaurs

by Lydia Millet

On the walk, time moved so slowly that he ceased to measure it. It could be relentless in its tedium. Other times the slowness seemed like grace. At those moments, he looked back on the measured days and hours of his life in the city—its boxes and rows, its tidy compartments—and came to believe that version of time was the false one. A grid designed, like the city itself, to keep everyone in their assigned seats.

Her trust pleased him. Ardis was all invitation—openness. He wondered about it. Then thought he’d settled on an explanation: she was like someone who’d never been hurt.

And yet, he’d thought as he walked, without the last of the dinosaurs the sky would be empty.

“I doubt it,” said Ted. “It just, like, took me years to realize the look on her face wasn’t adoration.” “When you’re a young guy, it’s easy to mistake a woman’s boredom for rapture.”

He found himself tongue-tied, left alone with Van Alsten. Two men. Dullards. Blunt instruments. Women made conversation easier.

He felt an anxious tug. It seemed like more evidence of social engineering. Geometry. As though he was being paired up. He wasn’t fit for it—he was compromised. He might not look that way to casual observers, but he was stricken. Split between past and present. Less than whole. Lane’s memory took up the space where new affection might live. Lost and aimless, like a faithful dog. Confused by the disappearance of its master.

But he’d been slower to make decisions, and Lane took his willingness to comply with her own decisions to be a weakness of analysis. She was competitive, while he was not. He didn’t want to win. He only wanted to be worthy.

“You can do your best and still fail,” he said after a minute, to her back. She was already at the bottom of the stairs, likely too distant to hear. “You can do your best all your life.”

It was her complete silence after the note I met someone that made it hard to assimilate her leaving. And the call blocking. As though he’d committed an offense so egregious that he deserved nothing. And received it. In abundance.

And therefore, in the end—after years of what he took to be closeness—not even worth a goodbye. He must be less than no one. Because no one, at least, contained possibility.

They could put it on his gravestone: He tried to be of use.

Both of her decisions, to stay and then to go, had been purely about herself. Her absence had not made him no one. Just as her presence had not made him someone. In all of her choices he’d been more like anyone. They’d had little to do with him. Maybe he hadn’t exactly failed, back then. Only failed to see. And hoped—a hope that ended in disappointment.

You could do so much with so little. At times. Other times, with all the privilege there was, nothing.

“But also, I wanted to pay for something. When you have a lot of money, you never pay for anything. You never feel the cost, so you live like everything is free. There’s never a trade-off. Never a choice or a sacrifice, unless you give up your time. I wanted the change to cost me. You know? I wanted to earn it.”

She had his back, he thought. He wasn’t accustomed to someone having his back. It would take him a while to get used to it.

Surrender, thought Gil. Maybe it wasn’t the coward’s way after all. Maybe surrender, when it was called for, was the hard part. Not the fight. But how did you know when it was called for? And freedom, that sacred cow that was always invoked as an excuse for bad behavior, all manner of atrocity—what was it, even? They told you to love it, in the schools and the songs, but never said what it was. Possibly, to many of them, all it meant was the right to have money. Or get more of it.

Freedom can only be found in the mind, my dear, she said. Not in the world.

But being alone was also a closed loop. A loop with a slipknot, say. The loop could be small or large, but it always returned to itself. You had to untie the knot, finally. Open the loop and then everything sank in. And everyone. Then you could see what was true—that separateness had always been the illusion. A simple trick of flesh. The world was inside you after that. Because, after all, you were made of two people only at the very last instant.

It was the fear and loneliness that came in waves that often stopped him from remembering the one thing. The one thing and the greatest thing. Frustrating: he could only ever see it for a second before he lost sight of it again. Released his grip. Let it slip away into the vague background. But it had to be held close, the tree. In the dark, when nothing else was sure, the soaring tree sheltered you. Almost the only thing you had to see before you slept. How you came not from a couple or a few but from infinity. So you had no beginning. And you would never end.