As part of my arrangement with Mac, I occupy a two-room guest house on the far verge of the estate, just under the walls of Rancho Seco, the gated community to the east of us. It was built back in the nineties, with all the modern conveniences, and it's a cozy-enough place but for the fact that the winds have long since torn off the gutters and three-quarters of the shingles, and the fireplace is bricked up, as per state law. Still, I have a space heater, and it never gets too cold here, not like in the old days—never below 60, anyway. But 60 degrees and wet at my age is like the temperature water turned to ice when I was 39, the year I met Andrea.

The place smells of mold—what else?—and rats. The rats are thriving, multiplying like there's no tomorrow (but of course there is, as everybody alive now knows all too well and ruefully, and tomorrow is coming for the rats too). They have an underlying smell, a furtive smell, old sweat socks balled up on the floor of the high-school locker room, meat sauce dried onto the plate and then reliquefied with a spray of water. It's a quiet stink, nothing like the hyena when she's wet, which is all the time now, and I forgive the rats that much. I'm an environmentalist, after all—or used to be; not much sense in using the term now—and I believe in Live and Let Live, Adat, Deep Ecology, No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth.

Andrea. Oh, yes, Andrea. She burned me in that crucible, with her scorching eyes and her voice of ash, and her body, her beautiful hard backpacker's body, stalwart legs, womanly hips, and all the rest. She's on her way to Swenson's Catfish and Sushi House to meet me. Maybe there already, the sake cup like a thimble in her big female hands, leaning into the bar to show off what she has left, stupefying Shigetoshi Swenson, the bartender, who can't be more than sixty-four or -five. The thought of that scenario wakes me up, just as surely as it ever did, and the next minute I'm in the bedroom pulling a sweater from the bureau drawer (black turtleneck, to hide the turkey wattles under my chin). I find a semi-clean pair of jeans hanging from a hook in the closet, step into my imitation-leather cowboy boots, and head for the door—but not before I finish off the ensemble with the crowning touch: the red beret she sent me the second time I went to jail. I pull it down low over the eyebrows, like a watch cap. For old times' sake.

There's a whole crowd out on the road, storm or no storm, commuters, evening shoppers, repair crews, teenagers jazzed on a world turned to shit. This used to be open country 25 years ago—a place where you'd see bobcat, mule deer, rabbit, quail, fox, before everything was poached and encroached out of existence. Now it's condos. Gray wet canyons of them. And who's in those condos? People who know no more about animals—or nature, or the world that used to be—than their computer screens want them to know.

All right. I'll make this brief. The year is 2025, I'm 75 years old, my name is Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, and I'm half an Irish Catholic and half a Jew. I was born in the richest county in the suburbs of the biggest city in the world, in a time when there were no shortages, at least not in this country, no storms (except the usual), no acid rain, no lack of wild and jungle places to breathe deep in. Right now, I'm on my way to share some pond-raised catfish sushi with my ex-wife Andrea, hoist a few, maybe even get laid for auld lang syne. Or love. Isn't that what she said? For love?