Afterlife by Paul Monette

forth from the brake to the gas, he moved toward the light at Fairfax. One hand on the wheel, he leafed through to the index, trying to act random, stopping at S. About halfway down the third column he spied Skyway Lane: 23, E-6 . Quickly he thumbed to Map 23, Hollywood and the hills. He traced the E longitude to Mulholland Drive, east of Laurel Canyon.
    So he lived up there, thought Steven, dispassionate as a realtor. Then on the map he spied “Skyway,” a squiggle off Mulholland on the spine of the mountains. The view would be out to the Valley, the opposite of Steven’s. A car behind him pounded its horn, and he looked up startled. The road ahead was clear. Steven lurched forward and took the turn, nodding guiltily at the sanitation crew as he passed.
    Four minutes later, heading uphill to his own aerie, he sucked the diet mint with innocent abandon. He swung onto his winding street and sailed the Volvo into the garage. Scrambling out, he paused at the top of the driveway, trying to think what to do first with the rest of his life. Down below, the 2 P.M. haze was pale as sherry, hunched across the city like a bad sleep. High up where Steven was, the sun beat unambiguously on the hills, scorching every vacant lot. Overhead a pair of hawks circled the canyon, their wings utterly still.
    Steven lifted up onto his toes like a diver. Wish small , as Victor always used to caution whenever a cake was lit for anyone’s birthday. With a lazy smile and nothing decided, Steven headed around to the front of the house. He went past the front steps and tramped through the ivy, ducking behind a white oleander. A couple of copper pipes with faucets stuck out from the house foundation.
    He opened both taps full force. There was a surge of pressure from under the house, then a sputter as several sprinklers began to spray. Steven hadn’t watered in months. The ivy and stunted shrubs that covered the hill below the house had done the best they could, brown and crumpled at every edge, holding out for the rainy season. Anything too possessed with being green was long gone in Steven’s yard. More than once, Dell had offered to hook up an automatic system with a timer, but Steven never pursued it. Let the desert reclaim itself, he decided grandly, wistful for the millennium.
    Now he surveyed his half-acre, the sprinklers playing on the dusty prow of the hill. A lunatic idea bloomed in Steven’s brain: the hillside covered with ferns and orchids. He thrashed around to the side of the house, skirting a sprinkler’s halo, making for the faucet on the northeast corner. All along this flank the lantana, thriving on thirst, had blanketed the slope in a twisted thicket. To reach the tap Steven had to crash his way through a maze of branches.
    As he bent to turn the water on, he saw the dog, curled in a shady hollow in the underbrush about four feet away. Its nose was on its paws, its glowering eyes on Steven. The animal growled threateningly, just this side of bared fangs. “Fuck you,” retorted Steven.
    He turned the faucet on hard, and the sprinklers in the eastern quarter burst with spray. Since one of these was a bare stone’s throw from where they crouched, it began to rain lightly through the bushes. The dog didn’t move from his burrowed place, or even lift his head. Getting wet was the given of a rainy day. Ringed around him in the hollowed-out cave in the bushes were the stubs of bones he had scavenged on Wednesday nights. The two of them blinked at each other with studied indifference.
    â€œJust don’t get any ideas,” Steven murmured disdainfully, rising out of the brambles.
    He slogged to the front of the house again, the squish of mud around his shoes. Across the hill the sprinklers’ mist was shot with minor rainbows. Irrelevantly Steven wondered: If he had Thanksgiving here, could he keep it to eight people, since eight was all the movable chairs he had? A startling thought for