How the Dead Dream

by Lydia Millet

  world of forbearance, where all touches were careful. Once they had given birth, raised children, worked, but now all of that was behind them. Now they swam. Their heads cocked, they waited patiently for instructions.

  His father never called and finally it was Beth who took his mother aside. He was not there but he heard about it later: the two of them walked together on the cliffs over the beach, on the emerald-green grass that grew under the palms. Beth held his mother’s arm, as she often did when they walked, and spoke clearly and carefully. Did she want to sit down? Here was a bench, and it was clean. Sit down. There. Now. This was going to be difficult; this was not easy.

  His mother looked at Beth, searching her face for something, then turned away and nodded absently. She came to acceptance slowly: the worst had already passed. In the ensuing months the only sign that she knew the facts of the case was the occasional vague reference, in her speech, to your father’s new lifestyle, his new identity.

  His father’s defection was more forgivable now, in fact, for now his mother was no longer a failed wife and therefore a failed woman but merely a woman who had once been married to a failed man.

  At the office, over coffee and donuts, Julie announced she was leaving to work on a worm farm in Guatemala. She had been accepted by the Peace Corps.

  “Congratulations,” said T. “Good for you!” said Susan.

  “I didn’t know you had an interest in worms,” said T. “It’s more the people,” said Julie. “They’re underprivileged.

  It’s about helping them to realize their full development potential.”

  “Will you actually be touching them?” asked Susan.

  “The people?” asked Julie. “The worms,” said Susan.

  “I think you wear rubber gloves,” said Julie. “And a dust mask. There can be airborne illnesses, like Legionnaires’ disease.”

  “Isn’t that the one where you cough up blood and die?” asked Susan.

  “Hardly ever,” said Julie. “Still,” said Susan.

  T. handed her a coffee made the way she liked it, almost white with cream. “Better you than me.”

  And yet he thought of her, after she left his employ, recalled her with an impulse that was almost paternal.

  •

  Beth took his mother out shopping on a Saturday afternoon. He watched them leave from the steps of his building’s lobby. Beth led the older woman carefully to her car—his mother, for some reason, walking unsteadily. He felt grateful, felt pulled toward them, but stayed where he was.

  At the time his mother was freshly withdrawn from the driving economy. Upon receiving a citation for weaving across the median—applying lipstick, as it turned out, while gazing into the rearview mirror—she had been forced to attend traffic school, where a drill-sergeant type showed videotapes of the gruesome aftermath of high-speed collisions.

  He looked at Beth steadily across the lawn and the light around them was nearly solid, the air immaculate: he felt his arms rising toward her, although he was not moving.

  After they pulled away from the curb he realized Angela had forgotten her crucifix. It was a small wooden crucifix that usually hung from his own rearview mirror; she had affixed it there over his protest, because she often rode with him and insisted on having it with her when she did. He did not like his car decorated with such talismans; a car interior should be smooth and well-ordered, not festooned with hopeful signals of the driver’s personality. Because then the two went to war, car and driver, and the car always won, with its seamless factory complexion. The driver looked like a child trying desperately to adorn.

  He plucked a beer from the refrigerator, uncapped it and tipped it up; when he recalled this afterward it was as though he was still frozen there, fingertips poised against the cool condensation on the bottle’s shoulder. The afternoon unfurled before him in an air-conditioned calm. He had research laid out on his coffee table: a small jungle island off the Central American coast. It was a short boat trip from one of the longest coral reefs in the ocean, where lemon sharks cruised in the shallows to the delight of tourists. The water off the beach was warm, clear and shallow for hundreds of feet, and on the mainland nearby were lagoons and rainforests, ancient ruins and a burgeoning service industry.

  This perusal, this moment of early planning in serenity when a project was unrealized, had always been delightful to him.

  Then the ring of the telephone interrupted his speculation and he heard his mother’s voice, faint and shaky. The tone of it made his stomach cramp as he ran out to the lobby and slammed down the stairs to the parking garage, fumbled with the car door. He drove with pins pricking behind his eyelids and his palms slipping against the steering wheel cover, sweating. When he got to the hospital he ran across the

  parking lot, and out of breath and coughing said their names to a clerk. Finally someone led him to a room, or maybe he got there alone.

  His mother sat up in a bed, a bandage on her forehead, one of her arms in a sling. She said a word he could not distinguish and he saw she was fine; he reached out a hand for her, stopped and dazzled by the white light from the window. He was unable to make out her facial expression then and he let his hand drop.

  “But you’re OK, but how about her?” he asked, turning to the nurse who had led him in. “Where is she?”

  The nurse took his arm and led him out again and he forgot everything as he walked behind her: as he followed her back it felt dutiful, though at the same time he was enslaved. He grabbed his hands together and felt their clammy pressure. Nothing was true except the white back with the vertical seam down the middle and the wall beside him. Was she in traction, her eyes bruised and fearing in a bandaged face?

  It was not Beth he saw, however: it was a fat-stomached doctor who came at him from the side, seeming to materialize out of the blur of a door. The doctor took him by the shoulder and steered him into an alcove. There a plaster statue of Mary looked down on them with almond-shaped eyes; this was a Catholic hospital, he realized, a feature he had not noticed before despite the name of it, which was the name of a saint.

  “I am very sorry to have to tell you,” said the doctor, a man with glasses and a receding chin, “that your wife did not make it. We did our best to resuscitate her but it was simply too late.”

  He heard the doctor’s mistake: your wife. He did not correct it. His ears were ringing. He was choking and his knees buckled. His head was squeezed, itched and stung. The

  doctor and the nurse had him; they led him to a cot in a room and sat him on it, his head bent between his bent legs. There was a rush of sound, dense walls around him but no support for his arms; then his bowels loosened and he had to find a toilet. He was not sure he could make it.

  When he came out of the bathroom, hands wet and teeth chattering, they were both still waiting. The teeth chattered out of control; his jaw was not his own. He thought his eyeballs might be jarred loose. It was comical, probably; it was idiotic. He could not prevent it. They took him back to his mother’s room, where the nurse pulled up a chair beside her bed for him. But he could not sit down again. He stood holding the metal end of his mother’s bed, dizzy but insistent. He waited for his jaw to stop its manic trembling.

  “Accident?” he heard himself say finally, part of him. He saw his mother shake her head.

  “She collapsed,” said his mother, and began to cry again. “At the wheel. We ran up on the curb and we stopped …”

  “We are not one-hundred percent certain yet,” said the doctor gently, a hand on his arm again, patting, “and we will have more to tell you later, but I believe the cardiac event may have been caused by a condition called arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia.”

  “But she’s healthy,” said T. faintly, without force. His mother nodded eagerly, as though together they could persuade the doctor to change his mind. “She goes to the gym.”

  “This is a condition that sometimes afflicts young athletes, for instance,” said the doctor. “It causes fibr
osis of the heart muscle and a susceptibility to fatal cardiac arrhythmias and is rarely diagnosed. Often the first sign we have of a patient’s condition, with ARVD, is sudden cardiac death.”

  He was not sure where to keep his body. Where was it supposed to go? His arms felt very long, but with no hands: where were all the fingers? His cheeks tingled.

  At the window was a tree and a wall, he saw, staring. They were several floors off the ground; it could be six, he thought, or two. He noticed the tree. That should be a clue … or maybe not. He imagined the tree floating.

  “It’s instantaneous. She would not have been aware of what was happening,” went on the doctor. “It’s very, very rapid. You don’t have to worry about suffering. She was already gone by the time the paramedics got there. Probably by the time the car stopped. Would you like to see her? You can see her if you want to.”

  “Oh,” said T. He shook his head, or maybe by accident he was nodding. He felt a chill spike through him, up from the soles of his feet. His face was hot but the middle of him felt icy. He shivered.

  “Come with me,” said the nurse, and the doctor separated from them at the door.

  He followed her white back again and thought he would never not be following it; almost hoped. It would guide him. Keep in line, he thought, stay in line … it was all he could do, all he would ever do.

  They turned a corner and another one. People were shapeless as they passed him, wretched. The dreadful homeliness of the race. A laugh, another door opened, and there on the table was a covered woman, paper blanket all the way up to her neck. He moved closer without trying.

  He was directly above the face now and something was unnatural about it—the skin was sallow, the full cheekbones too sharp. He had never seen them so sharp. And the jaw looked weak, as though it had collapsed toward the chest. Unhinged. The certainty came to him, almost as a

  relief, that the face was shaped wrong, so it could not be her.

  He leaned over and touched the cheek, which was not cool but tepid. Lukewarm. Then he felt squeezing and fluttering in his chest, and caved in.

  •

  He got home by himself, he never knew how, and lay there in the sheets. After the first night his mother came in, on the edge of his vision like a hair trembling at the corner of a projected screen. She had a broken arm and scraped face, but he barely saw them. Time was foreign for many days, the texture of time and all things alien in their existence, at once strange and dull. He was flattened, pinned on his bed.

  He heard his mother explain her condition to him. Once or twice she described the minor accident that had occurred when Beth had lost consciousness. He could not stand to listen.

  She sat on the bed and felt concerned—he knew this, though he closed his eyes and could not bring himself to say anything—and twice a day she made him food and brought it in to him on a tray. It rested on the nightstand beside the Mass cards that piled up there, which she also brought to him: apparently Masses were being said for Beth. Then the food was cold and limp and she took it away again. He drank water from time to time, finding a glass in his hand with ice cubes that clicked against it thinly, but nothing else entered him. He had the suspicion that cogs were spinning, the universe beyond his walls was functioning and he was not, but he had no choice. His dog lay on the bed alongside, jumping down periodically to eat from her bowl or when his mother offered to walk her.

  His mother filled and refilled the dog’s bowl; it had been moved from the kitchen to the bedroom and sat dirtily in the corner, brown pebbles of food scattered on newspaper on the floor around it. He stared at the grimy bowl as he stared at all of it.

  Presently the cleaning woman came and his mother talked to her softly in a faraway room. Was she even using words? It was as though the women were speaking in hums, tonal variations with no alphabet.

  When he broke from the weight that held him down, rarely, he was conscious of resentment. Anger rose through him and was trapped at his throat, unable to exit. Once he thought: It should have been her! and pulsed irritation in his mother’s direction, silently. She was older. She had lived more and anyway now she was mostly a shadow; in a bathtub she had forfeited all her rights, all her rights with that stupid gesture. He did not tell her this only because his tongue would not move in his mouth. But sometimes he wished to lash out. She had forgotten the crucifix, she had brought it on them. She might as well have killed her.

  Then the coldness of this and its meanness struck him and pressed him even further down, now in a well of shame as well as self-pity. Sorry sorry sorry, he thought pathetically to his mother in a cracked-open beg of a thought. He forgave her for everything and wished that she would forgive him.

  He sank and he struggled, felt his body lighten when the tear ducts were empty. Then he grew heavy again and collapsed into the mattress, a sinking gray heft. He slept and slept on and learned to despise the surfaces of his room, the walls and the ceiling and the curtains: and his room was only a substitute for the rest of it, which he loathed even more.

  Finally his mother brought in a doctor and the doctor forced him to eat. The doctor gave him a shot, a pill. He

  shook his head when the doctor first sat with him but gave in when his stomach began to ache with a new ferocity. At first he could not get the food down his throat but with repetition he was able to swallow it. He had to sit up against the pillows to eat, and sitting up he saw his legs and feet extending below his torso and his underwear and barely recognized them. They had lost muscle, he thought, they were pale.

  When the doctor had left, and his mother after, he scanned his room languidly and noticed his wallet on the nightstand. He opened it with a dull lassitude, removed a single and traced his fingers over its minuscule ridges. The lines on Washington’s brow impressed him particularly, the curved precision of their alignment. Washington was well presented— better, surely, than he had been in life, with greater authority.

  T. felt a wash of nostalgia.

  He did not possess a lithograph of Beth, of course. But this was what he needed, a dollar bill that preserved a particular aspect, that enshrined a moment of bearing … photographs would present a problem. He could not control them, her expressions in them—how casual they had been, flippant almost, his quick shots, few and far between. All he had was these thoughtless snapshots now, when what he needed was a definitive image, an image that spoke to posterity. An image that embodied acceptance, contentment. If he looked through the photographs for such a representation he would be at the gravest risk. What if the expression was unsure, frightened? This could not be allowed. He could not stand to see that. He had to see her one way and one way only: smiling ruefully and shaking her head.

  Because this attitude, her smiling and shaking her head— almost shrugging—was a powerful reassurance. In a lithograph, of course, the motion of the headshake could not be conveyed, and he would have to settle for a knowing smile, a

  smile at once wise and playful. It would serve to project her contentment over time, her self-containment, not unlike, for example, the Mona Lisa’s.

  Thinking of her as she shook her head, smiling ruefully, he saw that she accepted and even embraced the great levelness of all things.

  One morning his mother told him the burial had already taken place. Beth’s mother had flown in and flown out again; she had taken her daughter’s body back to the desert, where the family came from, and had a funeral there. He would never attend the funeral. He had missed it.

  “It was just a few people,” she said. “Very simple, very brief. The mother was heavily sedated.”

  He thought he would snap. He had the sense of a white snap above his head, the air cracking. He tilted, then was steady again. She was gone. He would have to get up.

  He asked his mother to leave so that he could get dressed. She smiled brightly, her face infused with relief. He was surprised that he noticed it. When she closed the bedroom door behind her he could not move at first, but then he remembered the shoulders
and the arms and the hands and saw Beth put her hand on her hip and shake her head ruefully, resigned but temperate. She let all of it pass, the wide well of grief was subsumed in her rueful acceptance.

  She even laughed!—.

  He stood unsteadily, dizzy, beside the bed. He tottered to the bathroom on wavering knees. The dog stood at the bathroom door, head cocked quizzically. He was sorry the dog had been so neglected. He put out a hand to pet her but she did not move quite near enough for him to reach without stretching. Later, he thought. He dropped his shirt and bent to peel off his pants. Hot water fell on his head.

  Even the clean clothing was heavy when he dressed—he could not choose the elements, only put on what was nearest. He opened a drawer and found the topmost shirt where it lay, and the first pair of pants beside it. Walking too was a slog through thickness. Still he persisted, down the stairs to face his mother in the living room, who smiled uncertainly.

  “Well,” she said. “Be safe and come right home. I’ll make you a sandwich.”

  All sandwiches everywhere were absurd; the very idea of a sandwich was ludicrous. How was it that people did not laugh at them?

  But he did not mention this.

  “It’s OK,” he said with difficulty, pushing the words forward. “I’m OK. You don’t need to wait here. You can go home and rest. I will eat.”

  “You promise?” “I promise.”

  He waited till she left to go out of the apartment himself. He closed the door on the dog’s expectant face.

  “And I’ll walk you later,” he said, when the door was already closed.

  He was overcome by inertia. He turned away from the door without locking it; let anyone steal anything they wanted. If he walked in on the thieves he would only stare at them.

  In the elevator he gazed at the floor buttons, SB B L 2 3 4. Where his car was he did not know. Was his car even here? Tentatively he reached a finger out and touched B.