Nu

The Stream Behind Alice’s House Fed into a river that led to the ocean. Besides men and women out hiking, and children skipping school, she sometimes saw deer, birds, and stray cats along its banks. She was afraid of cats. Cats had been gods to the ancient Egyptians, a death-struck people. The section of stream that divided her property ran down current from Mandrake Woods. Beneath Mandrake Woods lay a sea of natural gas. This sea was either confined and in need of release or contained and best left alone. Whether it was confined or contained depended on whether humans had as many rights as they had obligations in the human era, the Anthropocene, now underway.

The week before, a man named Carl had come to Alice’s house and told her about a town hall meeting to discuss gas drilling at Mandrake. A company had made a bid on the land. If she valued the stream, he said, she had to protest the drilling, because it would poison Mandrake’s substrata and kill off fish, algae, amphibians, birds, and other creatures that used its waterways. Carl had bad posture but strong, cloudless teeth. In his left hand he held an impact report drawn up by biologists who took no money from energy companies and cared only for science. He wore blue canvas sneakers with a slight elevation at the heel.

After Carl left, a woman stopped by and said that the company asking to drill beneath Mandrake Woods would in fact use safe, ecologically sound methods, and that it would restore the area to its original condition afterward. If anything, the water and wildlife would be in better shape. This woman had been a year ahead of Alice in high school. Her name was Didi then, but now it was Celeste, and her long, blond hair had been dyed red and shaped into a playful bob with curls framing her ears. More to the point: natural gas emitted thirty percent less carbon dioxide than oil, a statistic the impact report failed to mention. With the world’s energy needs growing daily, the report’s authors were foolishly advising that the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Alice’s father had started building this house before she was born, but it was still unfinished when she left for college, so she’d grown up in a leafy neighborhood in the nearby town of Kent. She’d returned to live in this remote house for the first time four months ago, as an adult upon the suspension of her marriage. There were unwired rooms and unhung doors, the paint was flaky, the sump tank cracked, and the chimney a ziggurat home to squirrels and bats. Otherwise it was in good condition. Her mother, who also hated cats, being allergic to them (or allergic to the glycoprotein in cat saliva), had suggested that she water the dirt path beside the stream so that people would find it muddy and quit using it. Privacy was important for a woman living alone.

Alice’s husband, Marouf, would have thought watering the path a terrible idea, and worried about someone breaking their ankle—or worse. Hikers were generally unprepared for the procession from one world into the next, unlike the ancient Egyptians, who—from closely studying death and from revering cats—had learned a great deal about the Underworld, which they called Duat.

As a girl, Alice had played hide-and-seek in Mandrake Woods and knew all of its secret spots. One day she went home after a game and found her mother wiping slurred mascara from her eyes. “Your father,” her mother said, “isn’t a bad man. We need to remember that.”

The suspension of Alice’s marriage had happened suddenly. One day she and Marouf were spicing lamb cubes and making potato salad together, and the next she was packing her bags to drive 125 miles back to the unfinished house near Kent. According to the ancients, people were a combination of ka, spirit, and ba, body. For the former to...