How the Dead Dream

by Lydia Millet

  A small nudge with the pad of his finger, that was all, but Beth could not do it.

  He sobbed once and then caught it. Someone was getting on, an alert little girl with a backpack slung over one shoulder.

  “Hi,” she said, and he nodded. “Lobby, please.”

  He raised his hand to hit L but the arm, crooked and immobile, would not move fast enough. It was almost frozen.

  The elevator began to descend, down through 2, and the girl, impatient, reached out beneath his hand and tapped the button herself.

  “Are you physically handicapped?” she asked. He shook his head.

  “Oh,” said the girl, and nodded wisely. “Retarded.”

  He almost smiled but his face would not obey. The girl looked at him with sympathy, then quickly reached out and took his hand. She had a light, sweaty touch.

  “It’s OK,” she said. “My cousin’s a retard too.” Then the doors opened and she let go and got off.

  He was giddy for a second as the doors closed after her. He could almost take the sensation for happiness. He kept his eyes on the fine horizontal score marks along the stainless steel surface. Out of his sight behind the elevator doors the little girl walked across the lobby; she went out the front door.

  She would have loved you, he thought. Would she have loved you?

  First she was here, then it could never be known.

  At the office a well-dressed young man with wavy hair stood in front of him. He considered turning away again, but even that was too hard. Susan was out of sight. He walked past the young man at the front desk without speaking.

  “Excuse me,” said the man. “Excuse me. You can’t go in there!”

  “My office.”

  “What? Sir, you can’t just go in there.”

  The young man got up and hovered beside him. He wore a strong aftershave.

  “Mine. My office.”

  “Oh. Oh, I—sorry.”

  He could not wait; he passed by. He opened his door and closed it in the young man’s face. The young man was doglike. For some reason neither people nor dogs expected you to close doors in their faces.

  He did not intend rudeness, but it was crucial to raise the barrier speedily. With utmost speed.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” said the young man from the other side. The muffled voice trailed off.

  Blinds were down on the windows. He walked over and raised one. Ocean in front, desk behind. Sturdy. The last time he had sat in the chair, behind the flat expanse of wood, she was living. He had not known the future; now he did. He was different in the full knowledge. He was different but the desk was the same.

  Susan was there. She stood looking at him, her eyes filling.

  “T.,” she said, and came and put her arms around him. He stood woodenly.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It must make it worse when people do this,” and she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Are you actually here to work? Or are you just checking in?”

  “In,” he said, and nodded.

  “OK. Everything’s fine. I needed help, so I hired Robert for Julie’s position.”

  “OK,” he said, nodding again. He went toward the door again.

  “You already leaving? You want me to walk with you?”

  He shrugged but she took his arm anyway and gently led him.

  •

  He went back to work, faded and listless but with the rudiments of function. His mother’s psychiatrist had prescribed him antidepressants, which he was directed not to combine with alcohol. The pills took effect slowly and as a result the days stayed thick for too long, his limbs hard to move.

  But he worked in order to keep up the pace and the focus, worked hard and steadily, and gradually the usual texture of rooms crept back—rooms, buildings, streets and the sky. In the office he watched as elements of the lobby lost their alien particularity. Turning to background again were the file cabinet, the phone, the television with ticker tape running across the bottom. In his own office was a relief map of the Mojave project; he put his hands on the hollow ridges of the mountains and felt the plastic peaks digging into his palms. He closed his eyes and pretended he had a bird’s-eye view. There was no longer excitement in it, it was a dull extension of the already dull routine, but of course he would continue.

  A few weeks later her mother left a message. There were still some of his possessions in her daughter’s apartment and the lease would run out at the end of the month. He did not wish to go—whatever remained there of his he would gladly forget—but he had to, because the mother asked.

  He went over at nighttime, because though night was more difficult than daytime it was also, if he could fall asleep early, more quickly done. In the dark the hardwood floor shone from a streetlamp outside the window; standing in the doorway he flipped a switch and saw there was nothing there but a pile of white cardboard boxes, neatly stacked.

  He was flattened; he did not want to do anything. He stood waiting for the inertia to pass. He waited to be changed but nothing arrived to change him. He felt only restlessness, increasing. Finally he went inside, because time was slow without movement. There was nothing else to be done.

  At the back of an empty closet shelf in her bedroom, his fingers scrabbling in the film of dust over the cracked wood, he found something. He pulled it out to look at it: a white tennis sock, half-tucked into itself. It had the shape of being peeled off in haste, tossed aside. He sniffed it—a very slight smell, maybe worn for a single hour, for one run on the beach. She ran beside the water, where the sand was damp. He breathed in the scent. This was what he had left.

  He held it close to his chest as he left the bedroom. He placed his key with deliberate care on the kitchen counter; he laid the sock gently atop a box and lifted them up.

  His mother liked to walk the narrow residential streets to her new church, the streets with their small overgrown gardens. Sometimes when it was late she asked him to go with her. Once she asked on a mild night; as soon as he stepped out his door he could smell the ocean.

  Both of them were silent as they walked. His mother let her hands trail along the trumpet-shaped flowers that grew on vines along so many picket fences, so many gates. She said in a low voice how she loved the flowers here, the flowers and the trees. Los Angeles was a paradise of exotics, wild with succulents and shrubs and flowers, cornucopias. She gazed down into a bed of twisted aloe and it occurred to him that she had been close to Beth too, yet he had never acknowledged this.

  “You took care of me,” he said. “But no one took care of you.”

  “Of course they did, dear,” said his mother, and reached up to touch the cross at her neck.

  He slung his arm around her shoulders as they walked. “But T., when I’m gone you’ll be all alone,” she said, and

  looked up at him from the crook of his arm. “What are you talking about?”

  “When I’m gone.”

  “You think I’ll never meet another woman, huh?” he asked lightly, and jerked his arm minutely as though threatening a headlock. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “It’s not that, honey. You’re very good-looking. The girls have always run after you, even if you didn’t notice. I’m talking about your soul, T. I’m afraid you’ll always be lonely in your soul. In the core of your being.”

  “Isn’t everyone?”

  “T.! Of course not. That’s why we have Our Lady.” “I’m glad you have the Lady.”

  “But I want to know, T., when I go, that you’re under her protection too. That you’re not outside. In the cold.”

  “You don’t need to worry.”

  “I don’t think it’s enough to be confirmed. I think you have to stay close to the Lady. You have to love her, T.”

  “You want me to go to confession?”

  “I’m not talking about tonight. I’m talking about eternity.”

  “You worried about the IHOP again?”

  She stopped and looked at him, her face very
small. Behind her was a window into a brightly lit kitchen, ducks and chicks in a porcelain row.

  “I want you to be with the angels, T. I want you to be with the saints.”

  He studied her face, the furrowed brow. Without him, he thought—the thought hurt—she had nothing.

  “When I can’t be here anymore, honey … it worries me. I mean I lie awake about this. I want you to be with the Holy Family.”

  “OK. OK. I’ll do my best. You don’t need to worry about me. Please, OK?”

  She consented to turn and resume walking. They moved out of the window light.

  At the church he released her as they went in; she genuflected and he followed suit. He could see no one else save a teenager seated at the far end of a rear pew reading something. His mother lit a votive candle and prayed; T. sat down near the front and leaned forward, his arms on the back of the pew in front of him, resting his forehead. He was tired; he almost dozed, and when he raised his head again another woman had come out of the confessional and walked past him and was speaking sharply to the teenage boy. They left with him gazing idly at them, the boy trailing behind sulkily.

  As a child he had rarely been able to think of sins to confess; in his own view he had committed none. Often he had made up a sin, knowing it was expected of him. And penance was a fairly easy punishment, a good bargain.

  The church felt Latino, he reflected, whereas Angela’s home church back east had a certain Anglo-Saxon reserve, a certain genteel repression. Here the walls were crowded with paintings of the saints, flowers strewn at their feet; deep colors surrounded them, animals and children, and the blood of the martyrs flowed crimson. He rose from the pew and walked the perimeter, gazing at them. The Virgin of Guadalupe, in green and red; St. Francis, preaching to the birds; St. Michael, St. Elena, St. Jude. On the windows, again and again, the Madonna and child and in the background the light of God, rays emanating from the disk of the sun.

  This was what made it what it was, made it clutch the hearts of women and ennobled their silent men in armchairs. This was what made it the first world religion, with its two billion adherents, and rendered dull by comparison the merits of the too-serene Buddhists, the Moslems without graven images, the secularists like him. Of all the stories it alone offered a drama morbid and luscious and sentimental— wounding that suffered in silence, cuckolds and miracles and sadism and murder, forgiving spirits who rose from the tomb and shimmered on through the years. It was a bestselling love story, beautiful sad mother and perfect child, and in the background the absent father, pure energy, who was apparently benevolent despite appearances to the contrary, who was present despite his apparent absence, good despite his apparent cruelty, right despite his apparent wrongness, and beyond that all-knowing.

  What a vast permission.

  His mother emerged from the confessional, walked in front of the altar and came toward him, her face lightened. From the beginning so little had been asked of his father, he thought, so little asked and even less given.

  •

  Beth had wished to be wrapped in a simple cotton shroud. She had not wanted a coffin. He knew this from a conversation they once had in passing, whose relevance he had dismissed out of hand—a conversation that had seemed at the time like a morbid fancy. Her family, he assumed, would not have known of this preference; no doubt she lay embalmed in cherry and velvet.

  In the early morning he ushered his dog through his mother’s front door and woke her up by mistake; she was sleeping on the living room couch, having taken a sudden dislike to her bed. He apologized for waking her and whispered to her bleary, sleep-dug face that he was leaving on a road trip. He did not say where.

  He drove and slept and drove; he reached the desert city shortly before sunset. Even at dusk the air was hot, and to the east he could already see an orange moon rising over the mountains. The cemetery was a flat field with rows of gaudy flowers dotting the brown grass under palm trees and eucalyptus. It took him a long time to find her, and there was no grass or stone yet. Hers was one in a row of new mounds, each with a small nametag on a stake at one end.

  Someone had left a bunch of plastic roses near the stake that bore her nametag, bright magenta with a dull green stem protruding, and beside them a small plastic Jesus on a cross. It was a garish Jesus with huge imploring eyes and light-blue tears flowing from them like prison tattoos. Roughly he grabbed the plastic Jesus and the roses and clamped them under his arm. All around him were corpses with plastic flowers: would the people buried here want these ugly tokens? Fake flowers defeated the purpose of remembering—fake flowers that lasted forever, making the effort of further visits unnecessary. The field of thousands of them … .

  On the other hand, plastic was eternal.

  Most of these people had died of old age; they might not mind the shorthand of plastic. But she had not been old and so she was not the same as the old, who more deserved to be dead.

  He looked around him once, swiftly. There was no one, only a man with a lawnmower in the far distance and the rush of traffic along the road beside him. He strode with the

  Jesus and roses toward a chain-link fence that marked the sides of a ditch. He hurled them both into it, toward the cavernous mouth of a pipe.

  “There,” he said aloud.

  Now the Jesus lay at the edge of the pipe, face down.

  He was about to turn but could not. The sight of the Jesus face-down was abject; it was wrong. He had to get it back.

  He would have climbed the fence, but it was too high to step over and too weak to hold his weight if he climbed. Instead he ran along the fence, seeking an opening. There was a desperate urgency to him: every second the Jesus lay in the mud was pressing on him unbearably. He found a tear in the fence and stepped through into the ditch, where his feet went over candy wrappers and bottles until he could lean down and grab the Jesus out of the pipe. Saved! A save.

  He held the Jesus tightly. Despite its garishness, or possibly because of it, he was terribly sorry. He would keep the Jesus close, where nothing bad could happen to it.

  He was breathing hard and felt afraid of being caught there, someone emerging from the darkness of the pipe and seizing him.

  He walked back to the grave and looked at the plastic stake, looked at the ground, barely believing her body was there. He was stepping on it … he would pretend she was not here at all. He could not think of her decomposing. He wished she was thin air. That was what she should be.

  The base of the Jesus said MADE IN CHINA. He took it back to the car with him.

  Later at the motel he read a newspaper in bed, the same sentence four or five times before he realized he was failing to read it. What would she say, watching him here? She would see his newspaper open to the business pages; she

  would think he had already forgotten her; but even as he had this nagging thought he also registered, in the long smallprint columns, a P/E ratio of 45. He had been holding the stock far too long and it was grossly overvalued. Her death had diverted his attention from its meteoric rise—fortunate, since he would have already sold elsewise, having guessed it was peaking long before this.

  She would be so injured!—to follow this train of thought. As consolation you thought of the dead and liked to assume them with you in some sense, present in the ether or the fiber of the mind. But then you had to admit that if they were in fact present, abstractly present as you wished to believe, if they were there in the molecules, their spirit in everything … what fresh horrors would they find? If the dead could be spirit must they also read minds?

  They must be revered, must be felt in the air; at the same time they could not be let in.

  He still relied on the vision of her—shaking her head ruefully, dismissing with her competent assurance the suggestion of a grief that might be inconsolable. Only she could consign her own death to the tumult and natural flurry of event. He could not do it alone. It was crucial to the maintenance of his steadiness. All things were reconcilable, she said; all thing
s had been accounted for.

  Each day for the next week he rose at the same time and drove to a nearby diner; ate eggs and toast; then drove back to the hotel, as the heat of the day oppressed, and closeted himself with his television to watch the market, the telephone at his elbow. If he could not work his current projects while he was here at least he could speculate.

  In the hour before sunset he always headed back to the cemetery. It was only then, at the close of day, that the desert

  air settled into gentleness; it was then that a warm wind blew over the sand lots and the baked pavement began to cool, paper and dust skittering in swirls along the roadsides. The sky turned sweet, fleshy colors of orange and pink and the moon rose over the dark line of trees and hills, vaster than it had ever seemed before. He could see the craters in fine detail, the gray hollow rounds where the eyes seemed to be. By the time the sun was finally sinking behind the mountains he was usually pulling slowly along the cemetery road, dun-colored, half-visible birds swooping up from the dirt, flapping beside the front wheels of his car before they disappeared.

  The desert had hard days but soft nights, he was learning. Nighttime was when it came into its own.

  The third night he went to the grave he began to feel he had to bring something. Yet nothing came to mind, or what came to mind was wrong for her, wrong as the plastic Jesus. The fourth night he placed a small twig on the dirt, a twig with a living leaf, snapped off a hedge at the cemetery’s perimeter. The fifth night he moved the twig and then added others, making a nest of them on the mound; the sixth night he dragged a broken branch across the dried grass to add to the clot of brush that was already there.

  The seventh night he woke up at three a.m. It had struck him as he slept that her grave was surmounted by a pyre now, with tinder and kindling.

  He pulled on his clothes and drove; he parked his car in an empty lot down the street, for they locked the cemetery gates soon after dark. Clouds crossed the moon, silver and streaming.