fairs, their factories, their nature centers, their disasters, and then they were simply gone. They were, then they were not. I never dreamed such a thing. It’s as if my celebrated aquifer were shrinking, as if every day, no matter how clear and luminous, runs the risk of cold and clouds. It’s as if a new wide vein has been slipped under my ground, a vein not of chalk or limestone, but of fear. Any day now, people will poke in the ground and hit it. For a loke, what one dreads isn’t change or age or even decrepitude. A loke is like a person: it fears death.”
Chad raised his eyebrows and looked hopefully at Sharis. She shook her head and blinked and looked away. It works, Chad thought, delighted.
wanted
NO ONE CAME anymore. No families appeared in the parking lot, children tumbling from the cars and screaming; no solitary birdwatchers worshipped in the Church of the Woods; no school buses disgorged their loads and waited, their drivers lingering at their vehicles like coachmen near their steeds. Charles and Diana, Aullwood Audubon Nature Center’s two full-time paid employees, had spent the summer almost totally alone. Charles hadn’t escorted a morning nature walk for days, although in the past he had guided groups of up to thirty. The two interns, fresh out of college, had been yanked by their families to safer jobs in Virginia and Wisconsin. The hyper-oldie guide who liked to dither about watching Prince Charles marry the real Princess Diana had transported herself to Florida. The gift shop volunteers hadn’t shown up for weeks, and even Edna, the only volunteer who dusted, no longer bothered to message that she wasn’t coming. Charles suspected that Aullwood’s peculiar position—just south of the watchtowers and electrical fencing of the Grid, just west of the old Dayton airport (which saw a lot of military use these days), just north of I-70—gave it a sinister air. If it lay five miles in any direction but south, the nature center would be inside the Grid.
Charles had an apartment on the property, above the turtle exhibit in the Education Building, but where Diana spent her nights he wasn’t quite sure. For several days, he was certain, she hadn’t left the nature center grounds. She had told him she hated going back to her apartment, on the electric robo-tram that was always empty, past the closed houses and the unmowed lawns of northern Dayton. It was the middle of a heat wave, the planes droning over them, and Diana, the titular nature center director (chosen over Charles, and he was bitter about this), who had a categorical if not particularly scientific mind, was much better than Charles at identifying the aircraft. Several afternoons they lay on the flat rocks of the amphitheater and watched the planes pass overhead. There’s a C-16, she’d say. That’s an F-24, or a Scorpion (a new sort of bomber), or a Turkish Delight. “My,” Charles might say, shaking his head, lifting his shirt to scratch his belly, “a woman who knows her machinery.” He knew most males would at least pretend an interest in the planes, but he knew by chirp and feather and flight pattern every bird that cut the nature center’s airy way. Birders thought he was a wonder; he didn’t care what other people thought.
One afternoon—a Thursday? He’d lost track of the days—Charles fell asleep on a bed of moss under a tree, and when he woke up and staggered along the creek bed toward the Education Building, he happened upon Diana by the stream, pulling her cotton shirt over her head with a single hand, her back twisting in a disturbingly erotic way. He said, “What are you doing?”
Diana didn’t seem surprised to hear him. She unlatched her bra and dropped it on the ground. “It’s a nature center,” she said, coyly yet firmly, dropping her shorts and unpeeling her underpants, “and I’m hot.” Smiling and totally naked, she turned to face him.
Charles felt his penis swell. “What could be more natural?” he said.
“Exactly.” Diana nodded approvingly, like a teacher. She brushed a dried leaf out of Charles’s beard. She’d been a teacher, Charles knew. She’d been a teacher, then some sort of counselor for people considering cloning (he didn’t understand this, exactly; she’d worked for a doctor), then she’d had a bad experience and returned to college for a Masters in business. When they first met, five years before, she’d been hired on as the coordinator of investments. Her being a businesswoman repelled him. Despite her wild head of hair he’d thought of her as asexual; no sparks had ever flown. But now he saw her delicately upturned breasts and pink nipples, her modest tuft of pubic hair (reminding him of the hopeful crest of the pileated woodpecker, one of his favorite birds, not, unfortunately, spotted at Aullwood since 2024—the Grid had had some devastating effects on birds), and her overabundant hips, really quite triangular, spreading from a small waist. She smiled, turned, and slowly approached the creek, bending over to splash her face with water, displaying herself just as a female wolf would, her buttocks dappled with leaf-shadow, her pink cleft beckoning him in that animal way, and it was no surprise to either of them when he stripped off his clothes and came behind her, slipping into her right there on the stream bank as she moaned and maneuvered herself to lean against the log which had, in the old days, been the forest’s lure to adventurous children to cross the stream and come inside.
Afterwards they faced each other, strands of her curly bangs plastered to her forehead, her pubic hair clumped and dripping. She cupped in her two hands his penis, now sadly shriveled, looking down as if its power still amazed her. “We should do that every hour,” she breathed.
Charles felt something like panic.
She lifted her eyes to his, turquoise-blue irises flecked with orange-brown, the coloring of a bluebird. “We’re Adam and Eve,” she said.
Trouble. She had a boyfriend, Charles knew. A man who also lived at the far end of the electric tramline. “I don’t think I’d make a very good Adam,” Charles said. “I think of myself more as a male wolf.” For several months now, Charles realized, she hadn’t mentioned the boyfriend: it was possible he’d left.
She glanced at him from beneath her eyelashes, behavior Charles recognized as classic courtship. What a relief that he could see it for what it was. “That’s biologically predetermined, you know,” Charles said. “That little look up.”
“Excuse me?”
“That look.” He mimicked it for her. She made a quick gasp and released his penis. “I just want to be fair,” he said. “I want you to understand the sort of behaviors instincts will drive you to. It’s very common for the urge for sexual intercourse to be magnified in times of danger.”
Her look had hardened; Charles noticed a flush across her chest. “Thank you, Professor.”
“I don’t mean to discourage you,” he said, glancing down at her nipples. Deep in the fold of his mind there was a fact about erect nipples that eluded him. “I mean, I enjoy instincts.”
“You seemed to, briefly.” She folded her arms across her chest, blocking his view. Her voice rose. “But I guess this is no Eden!”
“I’ve never said it was Eden,” Charles said, surprised that, in the course of the hundreds of tours he’d led, that word had never come up. “Eden is not in my vocabulary.”
“No. Of course not.” Diana looked around her and found a flat rock the size of a large maple leaf that she held with her left hand in front of her groin. She then uprooted a fan of honeysuckle to hold over her chest. She took a few steps backward away from Charles, turned her back on him, and reoriented her honeysuckle behind her to cover her buttocks. With a dignity as comical as it was unassailable, she stalked to retrieve her clothes.
LANSING PETTIGREW WAS sitting across from Lila. Another messenger from Agro, several notches higher than the luscious Michelle. Lila had known Pettigrew for years. An officious, superior man. Once, in the midthirties, in the middle of a meeting with the county commissioners, Lansing had
