The mountain laurel opens up in June and makes the valley look a whole lot more tropical. Evangela gives Woodstock Bonner roadhead on a road called Hillside, which shoots out in front of itself and snakes down the slopes of the valley for a few miles. Its curves and switchbacks barely give him enough time to jerk the steering wheel over and avoid total collision with the guardrail. Over and over again through the valley. The long laurel flower filaments waver softly in the evening. It might get up to over a hundred next week, and they might not make it. 

Nothing to be done though. Hundredyear heatwave. Second in three years. Even the wineberries will wilt in the sun. Even the stiltgrassed floodplains will dry and crackle. The birds will pick apart the last of the laurel. The deer, which verminously overpopulate the valley, will mostly leave it alone.

Evangie swallows by the time they reach the floor of the basin. Then, they get tallboys at the gasstation, whose name is obscured by a tarp tossed over half the sign. They know the gasstation is called FastMart but only in a part of their memory that’s close enough to dreaming, which means highschool. They sit in a parkinglot off the river and listen to Evangie’s music in the car, and they don’t talk much. A guy waterskis across the river, which, against the setting sun, looks creviced and mountainous. A family of white waterbirds descends on it. They’re too far away for Woodstock to ID, and Evangie doesn’t know birds. 

“How’s your brother doing?” she asks hoarsely. She doesn’t know her way around the question. They’ve known each other for three years, but now, Woodstock’s returned home, which he does rarely, and everyone in the valley knows it’s because of what happened to his brother. 

“In the hospital,” he says. “Fine now, I think.” 

“That’s good.” 

“It’s fine. It’s funny. He’s fine.” 

“I’m sorry.” The waterbirds fly off downriver. “I really am. If I can do anything for you or your family.” 

“Yeah. You’re fine.” The parkinglot light blinks without any certainty of turning back on. It’s light enough in the early summer that they don’t really mind. “Do you want to sleep over?” he asks.

She does, and they go to a houseparty in the next town over called Matheson. Deep in the night, they slip into Woodstock’s twin XL. They sleep in, and he makes eggs while she showers the next morning because his parents have already left for work. He kisses on her wet neck. She brushes her teeth with his toothbrush. Then, he drives her home. 

A guard named Anthony usually opens the gate at the entrance of her neighborhood, which is called Lochlora for no real reason at all. Anthony isn’t there this morning. Evangela says he got fired. 

“What for?”  

“Someone smelled weed at the gate.” 

“Jesus.” 

He skirts around the fountain at the center of the neighborhood. It’s an unbelievably clean day outside. Nothing out of place. The sky backdrops blue and unvaried, and its clouds look manicured except for the arc of a chemtrail that screams across the sky and even that looks placed with some tact. Like everything in this town, the lawns slope down towards the floor of the valley. The waters wash down and take everything into the ruddy mainstem turbulence. 

When Evangela gets out of the car and halfsmiles, Woodstock sees the Skeeter Peter truck in her driveway. A cartoonish soldier is painted on the side. Evangela sees that he sees it. “I know,” she says. “It’s bad.”

He nods flatly. 

“Look, all the commercials say it’s natural,” she says. “And the stuff works.” 

He had seen the commercials. Some guy in a mosquito costume gets shot to pieces by a cartoonish, crewcut soldier. The blood spurting from the bug’s entry wounds looks uncannily real. Gruesome. Then, a shining soldier smile. Crash zoom on soldier neck. Dogtags. Peter, Skeeter. Of course.  

 

Pat is prone to quick, jerking movements, and a spine of catgut prickles up from his fat, split lip.  “Busted it,” he says. 

Woodstock worries he might skewer himself on some rusty chainlink when they crawl under the fence like soldiers. Even in the heat, the light through these halfwoods scrubs them with an acidic green, mostly from the flat leaves of mileaminute and crabgrass and garlicmustard. They can see the road through gaps in the green. The real heatwave hasn’t set in yet, but they start sweating through their shirts.

They got tired of the oxbow. The fish had mostly died, from any number of a million different causes. They couldn’t even hook those sunfish, little pumpkinseeds, below an algae film that lay so thickly now on the oxbow’s surface that frogs could probably walk on it. They left. 

Pat calls his cousin on speaker, and they cook in his car, and the cousin tells them how to get there. The grass on the golfcourse is long, but flags with little soldiers arrange themselves around the edge of the green. Sulfurous wasteland.

Last year, the countryclub, which is called Whitespring, found a guy dead, twenty feet from the ninth. Dead without any identifiable cause, like the green itself killed him, in some act of retribution for invading its wellfertilized but mostly abandoned land. The toxicology came back and said he had ODed. 

This pond is also smothered in algae, and mosquito larvae kick and squirm in its backwaters. They slither and turn overtop each other. There is no sound. The spawn seem to arrange themselves into moving script, spelling out something oracular, telling Woodstock something about where we’re headed: this heatwave that should really set in any day now, this future whose immensity seems unspeakable. We might persist, they seem to write out on the surface of the pond. We might make it. 

The larvae have persisted through the onslaught of Skeeter Peter and his hellish smelling pesticide. An immunity. A superpest, maybe. They move without any awareness of the exterminators and the chemical agents waging an existential war against them. They wriggle, twitch. Woodstock wonders, for only a second, if his brother’s legs twitched like that after he hit his head. Synapses always fire. Limbs keep kicking.

 

That night, Woodstock has a dream about war. 

The people of the valley burn huge, screaming fires, out of control, down the walls of the valley, across the floor, stopping at the river. Birds drop out of the sky. Deer cook inside their own bodies. Fish jump, maybe boil. Wet things crawl into their burrows and warrens along the banks of the river, and jets of hot ash shoot down after them. Their bodies rot inside these ashy casts. They leave hollow spaces like sculptures. Something for people to find only years later while sifting through the gray afterwards. Violet shelves of clouds throw themselves against valley walls, and rain wets the fires, and the nonhuman things of the valley start singing weakly from their resting places. 

In the end, the dream makes him do it. 

 

In the morning, Woodstock finds the fence harder to crawl under without Pat peeling it up for him, but this time, he knows exactly which deer trail cuts through the half-forest into the countryclub. The day is less clean, and the sky threatens rain. 

No one walks along the green golfing. No one disturbs this funny work of filling fivegallon buckets with all this pondwater. Woodstock makes sure to skim as many wriggling mosquito larvae as possible from the surface. He collects the entire pond population. 

Woodstock incubates the mosquitoes in the garage, which is uninsulated and hot in the summer. It’s recycling day, and he pours allotments of pond water into empty gallon jugs. Ten milkjugs, collected from the neighborhood. Tens of thousands of mosquitoes, probably. He doesn’t count. He puts the jugs under his brother’s bench press. When his parents are at work, Woodstock attaches a clamplight to the bench because maybe a circadian rhythm is important to their larval development. Maybe it’s not. He hopes the pond scum contains enough protozoa, bacteria, microalgae, general detritus for the larvae to subsist. He throws a sheet over the set-up before his parents get back, and the rain never comes. 

 

“You know, you could look for a job while you’re here,” Woodstock’s mom says. She leans over the formica and pours more vodka into the tonic. “It might help.”

 

When Woodstock wakes up from a new dream of surging, resplendent life, he knows in some deep, throbbing part of himself that the heatwave has fallen across the valley. Fallen like a flood. He sticks to his bedsheets, which he has mostly thrown off the edges of the mattresses in the hot, dreamless night. 

The larvae love the heat and squirm in their milkjugs and seem to write out more litanies about persistence. They write with more fervor and more assurance in the overwhelming heat of this garage. Woodstock hasn’t drank enough water, and he feels like he could pass out. 

In the first days of the heatwave, some of the larvae die and stop moving. Many more of them become pupae, bunched up against the surface of the pond water, which has begun smelling like rot. Things are cooking, slowly and at high temperatures. Woodstock becomes worried that his parents might smell the setup, so he moves the ten, sloshing jugs to the attic, which is also uninsulated and unbearably, unbelievably hot. He opens an attic window, so the pupae can feel wind. 

 

Woodstock texts Evangie again, and she texts back. She says, “I don’t actually know if I can do this.” The pupae are still, silent, dreaming when Woodstock comes back home that night. One of the milk jugs closest to the window has crusted over completely with algae, and all its insects are dead. 

 

In the car with forty dollars cash in his hands, Pat cries, “God, I can’t believe they took us. I can’t believe we got the job.” He picks at something in his teeth and stares off into the asphalt that Woodstock’s car eats up with increasing voracity. 

Then, Woodstock drops off Pat and makes a sandwich for himself. The setting sun turns things red. His parents come through the door with his older brother. They bear him up over their shoulders, and for a moment, it feels like he’s this newborn that they’ve welcomed into the world. Huge and slow and overdue. He slurs his words, which make like something before language. Woodstock’s dad looks at him knowingly. 

His brother’s on painkillers, but he probably shouldn’t be. 

 

In the evening, Woodstock sits on splintered attic slats, and even though the sun has set, and the heat approaches being bearable, he sits there sweating. The sky becomes dark, and he remembers his dream, and sitting there, pulling himself together, he witnesses a miracle. He hears a buzzing, whining, and pinging against the plastic milkjugs. The mosquitoes begin emerging and throwing themselves at the walls of the milkjug. They complete metamorphosis. Imago. 

He watches for hours, through most of the night, as they liberate themselves from pupae and fling themselves across their plastic containers. Probably tens of thousands of mosquitoes. They rage like little soldiers.

Woodstock rolls the windows down and rolls his sleeves up and drives to Evangie’s neighborhood with nine milkjugs in the trunk. The gate is still unguarded. The fountain bubbles up softly like a mouth. 

He wonders if river water bubbled up from his brother’s lips like that when the friend he calls the Deerhunter pulled him from the shallows of the river. 

Woodstock opens the milkjugs one by one and releases probably tens of thousands of mosquitoes into the neighborhood. They escape into suburban night. He shakes them out until they cover his body in welts. 

That’s it. That’s the act. Woodstock Bonner feels very empty, very boyish, hollow and hot to the touch. The drive home is quiet. He pulls into the driveway and kills one more mosquito when it touches down on his neck. 

 

The welts are still fading days later when Pat and Woodstock crouch in the halfwood behind Whitespring and drink liquor out of plastic bottles. A creek juts between them. It probably falls into the stream that rims the golf course before emptying into the main stem. “You look like shit,” Pat says. 

“I really don’t want to do this,” Woodstock says. He buttons up the sleeves of his dress shirt. 

Pat slaps a mosquito on his thigh, and it leaves a mark on his slacks. In the intervening days, the mosquitoes have been a nuisance but nothing more than a nuisance. 

They pull things together and walk across the golf course in their uniforms. They stumble into each other a few times. New Skeeter Peter flags deploy themselves around the edge of the green. A golden light cuts across the tops of trees, illuminating the sycamores and the crowns of tall, straightedged poplars. Other trees have already fallen, but in this light, it looks like at least the tallest trees will repel these invasives until fires clean the walls of the valley and maybe even after that. The sunset looks really beautiful against dark clouds. The rain might break the heatwave. The world might keep on. 

The manager hands them aprons and sends us off to their various duties at the buffet on the terrace. The place smells a whole lot like sulfur. The guests slap themselves and swat at phantom mosquitoes almost unceasingly. Wealth seems to leak through the seams and rolls where their skin meets skin. They sweat fatly. 

Woodstock sees suddenly a new future in which the heatwave doesn’t break and, instead, autocannibalizes and perpetuates itself. The heatwave eats off its own fingers, which sustain it and enable it to soldier on for a few more weeks. Then, the toes. The heatwave makes itself home in the space around all these bodies and the sweat that lubricates them and allows them to pass by each other without friction. The heatwave becomes a condition for life. New life, new formations of bodiesand groups of bodies. Maybe nothing will change. Maybe things persisting just reduces to things being. They pierce the membrane, and there’s nothing there except further membrane. 

On the terrace, there, Woodstock also sees Evangela, between these folds of flesh, between three people, across the terrace. Nothing more than a glimpse. A sundress. A halfsmile to a guy Woodstock doesn’t recognize. Some other guy asks Woodstock for more tenderloin, and the carving knife whirs softly when he presses a button. 

 

Woodstock comes back to the valley two days before Christmas. The valley seems eviscerated and scraped clean by violently erosive rainfalls. Hostilities, now, seem muted as if the land has proposed a ceasefire with its people. The day after Christmas, it snows and lays a sheet atop the valley and quiets and stills all the small motion of life. Woodstock drives his brother to occupational therapy in Springwheel. He wears these dark glasses that block out much of the faintly fiery light that cuts through the December cloudcover. The next day, all the snow melts. 

 

He doesn’t come back in the spring, but the descendants of his mosquito clutch emerge from their winterish hiding places. They exit diapause. They retain immunity.

In the spring, bats come to the valley. Huge clouds of bats that roost in culverts and under bridges, infrastructures of the river. They kettle and cauldron above the town. First, smallish unremarkable bats that eat the mosquitoes, but then, species of bat that no one’s ever seen before: pignosed bats, dogeared bats, swallowtailed bats, longtoed bats, shorttoed bats, big foxish Asiatic bats, Austronesian bats that must have crossed an ocean and then much of a continent to get here, fisher bats, hunter bats, logger bats, mother bats and their children, bats with human faces. When the country club closes, they roost there.