How the Dead Dream

by Lydia Millet

  At the grave he knelt down with a match. It blew out and he lit another, stooped over the wood. He had never built a fire in the woods, never even built a fire in a fireplace since his parents always had a fake log. The tinder burned low

  without lighting the main fuel, and the sparks died. He gathered a few more twigs and found a bag of lawn litter beside a shed; with this extra kindling the fire crawled till it took.

  He was pleased to see what a tall blaze the small pyre made. As it burned higher he breathed in the smell of the smoke and watched cinders rising and floating; after a while he dropped to the dirt and sat down, gazing into the fluid shift of the flames. It was lovely, he thought. He could almost think it was something she had said once, unloosed.

  Personally he would choose cremation; he would have chosen it for her, if it had been up to him, for if you were burned then you could go anywhere. On the smoke your particles would be dispersed over foreign countries, the poles and the tropics; who knew where you might end?

  He watched with orange searing his eyes and when the fire was embers he stood and stretched his cramped legs. He blinked up at the darkness until the fiery imprints faded; he bent to touch the ashes and lifted his fingers to his mouth.

  On the way to his car he heard sirens in the distance but he was unalarmed. He did not hurry, did not change his pace. At the street the coast was still clear. No cars, only traffic lights in a long line into the distance, shifting silently from red to green.

  That he had stood for some time beside the fire and no one had approached him while it burned, that he walked away at his leisure and got into his car, had an effect: he could not say what it was but suddenly he had room around him, as though he could move with lightness.

  Authority was not all.

  Was it she who had a new freedom, or him? He thought they might have burned off together.

  But his hotel room was airless. He sat upright on the bed, alert between the four walls. Why should this city have been the place that produced her, dry and lusterless place? Wide streets and strip malls, flat shining acres of trucks for sale beneath the grueling sun … but he would not see her mother, though she lived nearby and might have told him something. His was an inquiry into which no other persons could safely be admitted, because once others were let in there was always the risk of distortion. There would be no whole and single unity of remembrance if he went outside for knowledge; he wanted his own Beth to remain, the pillar of what she was.

  He could see the dismal afternoon elapsing already, he and the mother seated gawkily on a couch, awkward in the knowledge that they might have been family but now would remain strangers. And her pathetic apartment—it would have to be so now, even if it had once been otherwise— would leave an impression on him that detracted from his other memories of her daughter. Instead he and the mother, in remote locations, would live on in complete separation. In time one would die and the other would never know the difference.

  4

  Soon grief ceased to order his time and his old demeanor returned intact. But while the pace of his life was restored the tone of it had altered, though the precise nature of this alteration at first escaped him. In keeping up his routine in business he was now almost dutiful—almost as if the accumulation of capital was nothing more than an obligation kept up for the sake of honor. Still the obligation was strong, and he held onto it.

  First among his new tasks was the purchase of the jungle island in Belize. So inexpensive was this pristine land with its surrounding reefs and atolls that he considered himself well-advised to focus his acquisition program in the tropics, assuming he could gain enough expertise in transnational business and tax practices. There in the sunny lands lay the leisure fantasy of all northern peoples; there despots fell, borders opened, and wealthy tourists streamed. Or in some cases, his contacts informed him, despots did not fall but would cooperate for minimal subsidy; borders still opened; and younger but still wealthy tourists streamed, in disregard of despots.

  He went to the island twice a month to meet with local contractors, taking investors with him. His property was a twist of mangrove and deciduous forest in the midst of sea with no fresh water or roads; on the small strip of open shore sand fleas bit relentlessly and pelicans splattered white on the rocks. He stayed a short boat trip away, in a luxurious beachside resort on the mainland.

  Once a guide took them out to scuba-dive from a small motorboat, to gauge the asset value of the reefs; he instructed them on the basic functions of valves, how to sink and rise again. Fulton, his investor, declined to enter the water, remaining on the boat with his wetsuit peeled open down to the waist and a cooler of beer at hand. He sat fishing off the bow with a rented pole, catching nothing but refusing to budge from his post.

  So T. dove by himself, over the guide’s objection. He had not dived before or even snorkeled but it was not hard, beyond the awkwardness of the heavy tank as he rolled backward over the boat’s side. He swam peacefully thirty feet below, moving his fins languidly among conch and sea cucumbers, and was glad to be alone there. He found he luxuriated in the perfect seal of his mask, the muted quality of sound.

  On the veranda of the hotel restaurant he watched wet-haired children run around the pool, laughing as the sun glanced off the water behind them, chasing each other on the slippery tiles until they cannonballed into the deep end shrieking. At his own resort he planned docks for boats and for swimming, and on the end of the swim docks would be circular decks with palm-thatch roofs, white hammocks beneath them suspended around a floating bar. Guests could drink their cocktails standing in the shallows; fish would gather around their legs to feed on the scraps, bits of lemon

  and maraschino cherry and olive. Sand as blindingly white as snow, which made the shallow water above it look deep turquoise for the brochure photographs, would soon be shipped in and dumped over the native sand, which was colored a natural and dull brown.

  But first the shoreline would have to be scraped of vegetation, so he went out to the island to supervise the clearing of the first beachhead. From a small yacht anchored in the shallows he drank coffee and watched workers with power saws cut down and bundle the bushy trees along the waterline. As the limbs fell their small glossy leaves rained down onto the water and the boat captain, seated behind T. with a hand on the tiller, smiled gently and described them to him: red mangrove, black mangrove, white. Buttonwood.

  He thought of her then, watching flotillas of leaves drifting and bobbing on the surface, and it was less difficult than before—as though the shock, once absorbed, had spread so thin and wide that it was only the skin of the world.

  As he regained strength his mother’s mental health seemed to falter again, as though, watching him be restored, she deemed herself released at long last; as though she could resign her duties and retire once more into premature senescence.

  He saw her almost daily when he walked his dog. Invariably she was seated at her dining room table, face bent low over a jigsaw puzzle as her reading glasses slid down her nose. She worked on one puzzle after the next with no rest between them, keeping a stockpile at the ready, and when she finished placed each one atop its predecessor in a stack in the closet. Because she made her selections on the advice of a young clerk who worked at a nearby toy store, and content was irrelevant, puzzles featuring water lilies, moon landings

  and civil war battlefields all came within her purview and passed out of it equally. Because she did not like interruptions to break her concentration, talk was often stilted, and T. would soon leave again, his dog straining at the leash to continue their walk.

  He had barely noticed while Beth was living but he had no friends outside business: he had spent all his free time with her and now was left with no one. He took up the habit of playing racquetball thrice weekly with Fulton, who slammed the ball so hard against the walls and the ceiling of the court that a former partner, omitting to don safety goggles, had lost the use of an eye.

  He played only part
ly for the exercise and expedience and partly for entertainment. Fulton, who specialized in mutual funds when he was not investing his wife’s family fortune in T.’s projects, could go from zero to screaming fury in ten seconds flat. He delivered angry monologues as he played, expletives often drowned in the deafening ricochet; and his phrases were punctuated with vicious swipes from his powerful but imprecise forehand.

  “That—piece—of—shit—had—the—goddamn— sweaty— little—balls,” he might scream, running and leaping to slash downward with his racquet, “to—say—that—we— could—not—upzone!”

  In racquetball no response was needed for Fulton to proceed with his soliloquy, and this rendered the sport relaxing. When Fulton suffered a setback or personal loss—his son was sidelined on the soccer team, his daughter’s orthodontist indicted for tax evasion—his rage stayed bottled only long enough to reach the courts, where it was funneled easily. There was no subtlety to Fulton, who was always most alive when fulminating. At Fulton’s sure-footed advance, complexity took flight: what did not surrender to his simple will to

  dominate was plowed under forthwith, and wrongs were crudely and rapidly redressed. The sheer effectiveness of a brute had never been so clear to T.

  Observing the investor’s unfettered path through life T. felt his distaste tempered by incredulousness. But though he patronized Fulton, often speaking to him as others might to children or the feeble-minded, he also had to stand back and cede his position when confronted by the stampeding bull. Stupid rage commanded the obedience of more even-tempered men in a way impossible to deny or moderate; a Fulton cured of his instinct toward wrath would be a pitiful creature.

  Beth had only met Fulton once, over dinner, on a night when Fulton had chosen to adopt a curiously meek stance. It was as though he had known by instinct when to retreat; for his quiet deference to Beth, which T. thought bordered on toadying, had marked him forever in her eyes as a gentle, self-effacing presence. Later that night, as she and T. prepared for bed, she had remarked innocently that she really liked Fulton. “Does he have just a little bit of a lisp?” she had asked with the lilt of sympathy in her voice, raising the coverlet and sliding beneath. “Poor guy. That must be very hard for him in his job. Face-to-face with so many new people all day.”

  At the time he was vaguely puzzled by the remark but forgot it in the pleasure of bed; but later it dawned on him that on their way into the restaurant, briefing her on the backgrounds of those she was soon to meet, he had referred to Fulton as a banker. By banker, in this case, he had meant an individual who—on the strength of a Harvard MBA, family connections and very little in the way of native intelligence—made investment decisions for tens if not hundreds of thousands of retired nurses and welders, whose future pensions he placed in the hands of such corporate luminaries as Royal Dutch Shell and Monsanto.

  But she had assumed he meant Fulton was a teller.

  Fulton did not have a lisp; if Fulton were ever to meet a man with a lisp he would surely ridicule him, most likely with reference to words not contained in a standard dictionary. When it came to details such as social identity and stereotype Fulton was nothing if not a blunt instrument. Indeed Fulton suffered from no articulation disorder save rudeness; at one point during the dinner T. had noticed him talking about his daughter’s pony with his mouth full of beef stroganoff. Possibly this was what had given Beth the impression of a speech impediment.

  Since the two of them had not met again the illusion of Fulton’s harmlessness had never been dispelled. Certainly, if he dwelled on it, he would be forced to concede that Beth’s positive impression of Fulton could not have been sustained through multiple encounters: but as such encounters had never occurred he did not have to make the admission to himself openly.

  Was it the man’s brutishness itself, his triumphant profanity, that was so intriguing? Fulton’s awareness of the independent existence of others was vestigial at best. T. had the feeling, in fact, that for Fulton the presence of other people in the world was purely hypothetical. Like the philosopher Bishop Berkeley, whom T. had read with considerable interest in college, Fulton was certain only of his own existence; all others were most likely figments.

  On his mother’s birthday he took her yellow roses. Once they had been her favorite but she barely looked at them, nodding at his entrance as she fitted a jigsaw piece. Leaning over her shoulder he saw the work in question was titled “The Ages of Man,” a vintage puzzle depicting the stages of human evolution from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens. An

  illustration in full color, it pictured many different hominids, historically separated by millions of years, performing daily activities concurrently in what appeared to be a vaguely Native American encampment. Some among their number wore papooses on their backs and squatted in front of teepees.

  Putting his face closer he saw an apelike figure labeled CRO MAGNON standing beside a small pile of sticks, thumb and index finger posed lightly on his chin as though lost in thought. Possibly he was discovering fire. Female apes milled uselessly in the background, their hairy breasts hidden behind interposed branches, and in a far corner a Homo erectus raised his cudgel over a frightened rabbit.

  He smiled as he looked at it. It was primitive in depicting the primitive. That was it.

  As a child he had thought man advanced.

  He stood still now, back from his mother, frozen.

  As a child he had thought man advanced.

  Moving into the kitchen he found a pair of scissors in a disordered drawer; he cut the stems and stuck the roses into a vase. In former days his mother would have leapt to the task, but now she demonstrated no interest. Thorny stems in his grip he popped the lid of the trashcan, which was overflowing; he barely registered the smell of rancid food as he stood there, thorns digging into his thumbs.

  That was what had changed, he thought. To love posterity and the great institutions you had to believe in the wisdom of men. You had to love them as a child might, gazing upward.

  He recalled himself presently; a thin string of blood crawled down his wrist, tickling, and his nostrils were compressed. Atop the trash lay a limp piece of uncooked

  chicken, blueish. He coughed briefly, nauseated, and let the garbage lid fall shut again. He dropped the rose stems in the sink; he washed the blood off his hands. Two small punctures, was all.

  He turned and pulled out the full bag, tied it and carried it, bulging with sharp angles, out the back door. His mother had fallen from her attention to cleanliness, fallen far and quickly.

  Glancing around for her outdoor garbage bin he saw a small shrine on a stucco wall and moved closer. The centerpiece was a photograph of Beth that must have come from one of his own packets of loose snapshots; around it, stuck to the stucco with pushpins, were snatches of poetry, rosaries draped ornamentally, prayer cards and lace and dried flowers. He saw sacred hearts, haloed angels and melancholy Marys, faded and curling and made porous by rain.

  Sorrow.

  The evidence was everywhere: he could not avoid it. At first he had believed only a few men were childish, and raised himself above them. Arrogant, because all men were childish, including him.

  They still had their institutions and those institutions still had their beauty—less grandiose, however, than ruined. He loved them nonetheless, revered them even as they declined. But the beauty they had, did it mean something? Or was it artful like the scrawls of preschoolers—chiefly by accident?

  •

  In his relationship to Fulton he knew he had found a pastime that allowed him the twin guilty pleasures of judgment and observation: his passivity under the onslaught was that of a voyeur.

  When Fulton committed infidelity, for instance, he did so as a paying customer, every Tuesday and Thursday at three. This kept him, he claimed, safe from the fear of detection and perfectly blame-free. When T. inquired as to the workings of this absolution Fulton gaped at him openly, as though T. was the world’s first moron. For he, Fulton, was committing
no act of betrayal; he did not love the prostitute; theirs was a business arrangement.

  T. asked him then if, in fact, he actually loved his wife. He could easily believe that Fulton did not love, prostitute or wife equally. In fact the proposition that he did love had a tinge of absurdity.

  “I married her,” said Fulton. “Same fucking thing.”

  Possibly, T. reflected now and then in the wake of some particularly egregious revelation, Fulton trusted him with the confidences simply because he knew that he, Fulton, represented a primary capital stream to T., one that T. would not dare to put at risk through disloyalty. Or possibly, he suspected at other times, Fulton actually liked him.

  But Fulton barely knew him. As a rule T. revealed little in the way of personal information, since Fulton did not seem to require it. For Fulton communication was a one-way street. And when, on occasion, T. chose to contribute to the conversation with a brief disclosure of his own, Fulton became bored and changed the subject.

  “So my father,” said T. on the way to the racquet club one Wednesday, reclining in the leather passenger seat of Fulton’s Land Cruiser, “used to be an ad executive in Manhattan, but now he mixes drinks at a transvestite bar in Key West.”

  “He turned gay?” “I guess so.”

  “Huh,” said Fulton, hunching down and squinting into the side-view mirror. “Did you see that? Asian woman in the Hyundai almost rear-ended me.”

  “No. Didn’t see.”

  “Asians can’t drive for shit.”

  “Might want to keep that insight to yourself.”

  “It’s not exactly a secret, T. Damn, you’re a rube. Disoriented Orientals. Ring a bell?”

  “If the poor woman had rear-ended this car she would have been killed instantly.”

  “You gotta watch out, T.,” said Fulton, shaking his head. “That stuff’s in the genes. You could turn homo too.”

  “You think so?”

  “Watch out for it. If you feel the urge, rent a copy of Anal Alley and have a jerkoff marathon.”