How the Dead Dream

by Lydia Millet

  Exhaustion settled over him. He could not answer swiftly when she asked, and she was onto him.

  “What? When? What did he say? Where is he?” “I don’t know,” he said wearily.

  “Did he say anything? What did he say?”

  He moved past her to the refrigerator, whence he removed a bottle of water. Uncapping it, tipping it up and drinking thirstily, he closed his eyes: this moment by itself must restore him. He opened the back of his throat into a wide hollow and felt the water in it, cool and flowing.

  When he lowered the bottle again she was staring at him, fever spots on her cheekbones. Her hands shook, clutching a baking sheet.

  “He didn’t tell me much. I told him he could call you here,” he said, and instantly regretted it. He had asked, but his father had not called. And now he made it worse by telling.

  “Is there another woman?” “I don’t think so.”

  “He didn’t mention anyone? He’s claiming that he’s all alone? He didn’t say where he was going?”

  “No. He only said he was traveling,” said T. faintly, and reluctantly pulled a stool up to the kitchen island. The dog rose from the floor and licked his hand.

  “Traveling where?” “He didn’t say.”

  “So why did he call you, if he didn’t want to tell you anything?”

  “He wanted to tell me he was on a journey of self-discovery. He wanted to let me know he was alive.”

  His mother turned away, put down the baking sheet and picked up a shining triangular implement he did not recognize. No doubt she had purchased it for him. A cake knife, possibly.

  “How nice for him,” she said softly, and tipped the cake knife from one side to the next, watching the glint shifting.

  While he was showering she went out without leaving a note; he waited for a while and then got into bed. At two in the morning a bartender called him. She had polished off a bottle of champagne, passed out in a bougainvillea, and was waiting to be picked up near Venice Beach.

  “I must be allergic,” she said to him, as he drove her home. She was still slurring her words.

  He patted her knee. “Drunk, we call it.”

  She gazed out the window until they pulled into the parking lot beneath his building. Then she stayed sitting, her eyes glassy. He walked around the car and opened her door for her.

  “You’re a good boy,” she said fondly, and stumbled over the door lip. He caught her before she fell.

  Finally he persuaded her to take a vacation. He loaded her suitcases into his car; he bought her a yellow rose, which she pinned to her lapel. Then he drove her to a cruise ship docked in San Diego, bound for Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan, and Cabo. She wore a wide-brimmed hat and a white dress as

  she walked up the gangplank; she waved at him from the rails smiling madly, as though there were streamers descending around her and theme music playing.

  That night he took his dog onto the bed with him, a gesture his mother roundly condemned as unsanitary. In the deepest part of the night he woke up and listened to the dog breathe, the regular pace of the breathing. There was no moon, and through the thick drapes his mother had hung on his windows even the light of the city did not penetrate. He lay with his arms and legs frozen, imagining paralysis: he tried to feel the gradual freezing, the numbness that crept up into him. As a child he had done this.

  Back then he had liked to play for a short time that he was something else. In the water he was a dead man, in the grass of the yard he was a fallen log. Then he forgot childish things.

  The silence of the apartment was unaccustomed now, since his mother had often paced at night, washing and ironing, watching cable television and drinking instant decaffeinated coffee. Always if he woke there was the faint hum of activity beneath him. Before her, what? Now he barely remembered how his nights had been. Before his mother, the dog; before the dog, nothing. But now he was used to company.

  He pushed back the covers and moved to the foot of the bed, where he lay next to the dog, along her warm back. His arms were pulled in close to his body and the dog’s head was a few inches from his face. Could he sleep here, or would he be distracted?

  For a while he was: he smelled the skin of the dog, the hair of the dog: he felt the dog’s warmth. But patiently he waited for all this to pass, and tried to match their breathing.

  And near morning, waking with goose bumps raised along his arms, he pulled the covers down around both of them.

  •

  Then his first golden egg, a swath of empty desert would be converted to subdivisions for retirees, with golf courses and Olympic-size swimming pools and luxury spas and a phalanx of nurses to monitor cardiac rhythms and tend to recovering hip and knee surgeries. Down the road, thanks to economies of scale and various state and federal subsidies, it might become a great citadel—light rail systems, a solar-powered mall. But in California nothing ambitious came without an array of planning difficulties and lawsuits from the liberal fringe, and soon enough there were cases in district court; he excused himself from conference calls with his public-relations consultants, which droned on and ate into his time on other undertakings.

  The project stalled.

  Meanwhile he got regular postcards from his mother, who claimed to have met “wonderful people” on the cruise and decided to fly from Yucatan to Guaymas with a claims adjuster from Toledo.

  Dear T., read a postcard featuring a sombrero, The weather is beautiful hear. You would not recognize me with my brown sun tan I look just like a native!! My espanol is muy better too.

  The court’s opinion could easily go against his enterprise— he did not watch the details but this much was quite clear— so it was imperative to develop fall-back strategies. He must multiply his options, not wait for the court to decide his future—for when had he ever made of institutions his own enemy? They were his bulwarks, his cathedrals. It was for

  him only to move on steadily on the assumption that the case and the development were already lost. Plainly nothing could be forfeited through such anticipation, everything gained. He instigated an aggressive search for high-margin properties and stocks and while immersed in the search let other matters gratefully fall away: his mother weeping on the toilet seat abjectly as she stroked the porcelain tresses of the shepherdess, his father who took no pains to hide his lack of conscience.

  Setting himself to research he also ignored small matters at the office, failing to notice when Julie the paralegal, absent several days, returned from her sick leave with red-rimmed eyes and a white mark where her engagement ring had been; failing to return a call on his answering machine until the caller called again—his mother’s next-door neighbor at the house she had vacated in Darien. A squirrel had become trapped inside and gnawed on the wooden window grilles until it died of starvation.

  When his father left a stiff message on the machine, stating that he had completed a mandatory period of residency in Reno, Nevada, and subsequently secured a divorce, he erased the message impatiently.

  Some mornings he woke with a nervous premonition of imminence: an event lay in wait. On the day his case was finally decided he had been up half the night researching a stock and even considered cocaine, increasingly popular with the upwardly mobile and visible everywhere. But he was not fully tempted. And then he heard. He had won. The project could move ahead.

  That night, exhausted but jubilant after drinks at a bar, he lay back and watched a news segment featuring politicians. The faces on the small screen were interchangeable, not only with each other but with his own: quite possibly they were

  not only his representatives but his representations. What was a face on television but a code, and what was the difference between these electronic faces but the realignment of line and color to shift among symbols? If he grasped deeply this language of symbols, grasped it beneath the surface, he would course through the currents of authority as they coursed through him like heat or the tremble of cold. That near! He moved in impulse and in fret; shot thro
ugh with glowing nerves he willed himself on to the rest of what was. The tides shifted beneath him but he was holding fast.

  That was what they didn’t have, those men of state and industry, he thought before he fell asleep in the flickering blue light. They were hard vectors of self, undisturbed by the vestigial presence of others who were less powerful and therefore eternally unlike them. They did not have what those others had, the softness and the whimsy, the coasting— the others far outside their sphere who imagined and felt and enjoyed everything and ended up going nowhere because they needed nothing more than to be.

  Fortunately he was not one of them.

  •

  She came with an investor to a cocktail-hour meeting one Friday and in minutes he was converted. Like all conversions his own was sudden. The lights of the restaurant bar bathed them in browns and reds and he watched her laugh. Where there should have been the awkwardness of strangers there was fluency. The investor went home to his wife after a short while, leaving the two of them at the counter, where they stayed and stayed on.

  Beth, she had said. She was the investor’s assistant. She did not give him her last name. She had erect posture, an effortless dignity and perfect light-brown skin. It was her self-possession that got him, though her features were also lovely. They drank too much as the evening wore on, became lightheaded and carefree: life was an arc in the air, ascending. Everything smaller was treated with a deft and glancing humor, and from the tops of the stools the skin of their knees touched briefly.

  In the privacy of the bathroom, where he removed himself for a pause, he felt giddy, liberated and captive both. The bathroom was a confined space but he was hardly confined; nothing was tawdry around him, nothing filthy despite its superficial patina of dirt—or rather he forgave it for its tawdriness. The peeling stickers on the wall, graffiti, wet floors with patches of wet toilet paper adhering—surprising for an upscale establishment but then bathrooms were the main tell when it came to restaurant management, not what came out of the kitchen. All these elements were part of the story, the grounded earth before the flight. This was the instant of exulting, and even the grimy walls could not dull his exhilaration.

  The room was a holding pen, a split moment. Outside the room was the rest of his existence. For years he had been detached and now in a stroke of time he was not. He would move, he would touch—no one would think to impede him, they would see him go and be glad—he could be anything. Do not embarrass yourself, he told himself strictly, but could not help smiling. There she was at the bar: their faces met before he got there.

  This was how he lost his autonomy—he had moved along at a steady pace and then he was flung.

  Around midnight she agreed to let him drive her home in her car. She had a low tolerance for alcohol and was slurring her words despite the fact that all she had drunk was watery Mexican beer with slices of lime. But his building was nearer than hers, and once in her car they decided to go there instead. He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other along the back of her seat; she curled in her seat to watch him as he drove. Music coursed through the car and both of them, he was sure, felt the uplift of the new. A bright panic filled him.

  But when they pulled into the parking garage there was his mother—sitting, her suitcases around her, at the base of the stairs that led up to the lobby. She was darkly tanned and smoking a thin cigarette. A few feet away stood a man in a white suit, also tanned and smoking.

  “I can’t believe this,” said T., and turned to Beth, who dipped her head to look past him out his window. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m back!” sang out his mother gaily, and stubbed out her cigarette on the concrete step. She stood up and spread her arms. She had lightened her hair. “And this is?”

  “Beth. Our first date,” said T. “So don’t say anything I’m going to regret. Beth? My mother. She’s been on a cruise.”

  His mother was down the steps and flinging her arms around him in a wild embrace.

  “Not just a cruise. I took buses. I stayed in these fleabag hotels. Chichén Itzá! Where they sacrificed the virgins? Hello, dear. Pleased to meet you. And T.! Do you even recognize your old mother?”

  “You look great,” he said dutifully.

  “This is Terry,” she said. “A friend. Terry is Lebanese!” “Pleased to meet you,” said T., and they shook.

  “I tell you what,” said his mother, “why don’t you just let us in and you kids can retire, or do whatever. We just flew in. We need to crash.”

  He did not recall the word crash in her vocabulary, nor had she called him a “kid” in recent memory.

  “I can’t believe you’re smoking,” he said, as they lugged her cases into the elevators and through his front door.

  “I picked up the habit,” she said. “Filthy, I know. So, have you heard from your father?”

  Less than a minute.

  “I haven’t talked to him,” he answered, evasive. “A letter? Anything?”

  “He hasn’t written to me. Let’s wait another day to discuss him.”

  He drove Beth to her apartment, since the mood was shot. He walked her in and called a cab and kissed her until it came.

  Waiting to fall asleep afterward, his mother and Terry installed awkwardly in the next room, his thoughts of her attained a certain plateau. He thought of how she might walk down a future of clean avenues beside him, how she would confer her elegance on any landscape. He saw that this was selfish, or worse was self-aggrandizing, as though she was an accessory, but he felt more than that selfish impulse, felt something more exalted, frankly, and the thought of her beauty extended throughout his life was nothing short of captivating. It was not only that he would benefit from having her at his side, it was the shock of how the world glowed with it—how she lent her surroundings the style of her presence, its effortless assertion of grace.

  In the desert subdivisions would spread, life radiate outward from the sand as the tone of her flesh shone on the planes of her face, through buildings and cables and gas mains and

  roads. He thought of the cool of night descending over the settlement—were those coyotes howling out there in the dark, beyond the warm lights from thousands of standardized windows? Coyotes. He thought of them rarely but when he did he felt a pulse of identification and regret, curious and painful … In the distance homeowners in the settlement would be able to make out in the night sky the hulking shape of the Panamint mountains, the lights of the naval base winking beneath.

  And in the morning, as the sun rose to the east over the national monument, automated sprinklers would come on and begin their twitching rotations, misting the putting greens and the fairways and the sculpted oases of red-and-yellow birds of paradise and palm, bringing songbirds out of nowhere to perch in the mesquite and palo verde trees lining the courses.

  Hundreds of units were already presold.

  The place would not disappoint; it would be almost heaven for the buyers, whose profiles were already known to him. Aging golfers whose children lived far away and avoided contact, whose fixed pensions were supplemented by a moderate annual influx of dividend and interest income from conservatively managed accounts, whose idea of leisure involved little more than a sunny clime, eighteen holes minimum and a view of pastel-colored fake adobe; these golfers and their wives, most of whom would outlive them, watching the sunset as they sat in the dry air, gentle, quiet, sipping their gin-and-tonics, smelling the barbeque from a few doors down and watching the colors in the western sky deepen. Was it not a decent way for life to end, in the peace of all that slowness? That he would not wish for an end like that himself was irrelevant. The buyers were not him.

  Never pretend to know better, had been the first lesson of real estate. His own preferences were only a private luxury.

  He would drive down the softly curving streets when they were built, he would survey the burg in all its idle readiness before the people moved in, when it was waiting, an infant of a city, clean and unmarked. She
would be with him then, with her consent. The shining hair that hung down her back, the quick smile, the set of her shoulders and deep curve at the small of her back. He found it satisfying to imagine the completion of this, the village in the middle of nowhere and the contours of her person.

  He knew it was her—was not surprised he had held himself aloof from others till now, knowing the perfection of this new sentiment.

  •

  In the morning his mother called down from the landing. “Have you been keeping my mail for me?”

  She held a toothbrush and wore a black lace robe. In the past she had favored white cotton nightgowns that buttoned to the neck and were patterned with sprigs of flowers.

  “In the desk,” he said, inclining his head in the right direction.

  But he had noticed, among her letters, one with a Reno postmark. Fear took hold of him. He had to go.

  He glanced outside and saw that the taxi that would take him to his car was already waiting at the curb. Hastily he left the buttered toast waiting for him on the counter, the poured juice; hastily he left his dog for the day with a last pat on the head; hastily he grabbed his keys from a bowl on a side table. He left.

  All day he worked hard and took very few calls, and it was past seven when he finally finished. He was the last to leave

  the office, something he liked because he could survey it at his leisure, walking around, shuffling his nearly noiseless feet across the carpet. He stood and stared out various windows that offered views past other buildings and onto pieces of the ocean. He saw the blurs of ships like cities in the distance, unmoving on the gray surface. They were large ships, dark ships, solid and far across the waves. Often he saw them through these office windows and the next day they were gone.