How the Dead Dream

by Lydia Millet

  the palms. The empty leg of a crab; the skull of a fish. Small young palm trees had been planted among the old.

  One rule of thumb, a contractor had told him: tourists could never see too many palms.

  The new white sand was full of vines and roots where the native mangrove was trying to find purchase; there were rake marks where the workers had scraped it back. Up ahead the main building, with its white dome and arches; off to the sides the flanks and the cabins. On the second floor, wide verandahs with thatch awnings. The doorways and windows had been roughed in but there was no glass in the windows and the doors had not been hung.

  The buildings were still only shells, but lovely.

  He could come here, maybe have a new life. His beach house, not for business but to be someone else, be different.

  He felt a quick surge of euphoria; then there were pats of rain on his hair and he glanced upward. The cloud cover had lowered suddenly, a dark gray obscuring the distance. He was surprised.

  Ahead the white buildings were backed up against the jungle. The sand was pocked with raindrops, more and more; palm fronds against the sky floated sideways. He zipped his windbreaker and stepped onto the patio. Behind a deep white wall two workmen were bent over electrical outlets, plying duct tape; the tarp beneath their feet was splattered with plaster and a radio played from a rickety stool. They turned and smiled politely when they saw him, wiping their hands on their shirts.

  He shook their hands and asked in broken Spanish for his foreman; they answered in English and pointed him out, in the next room huddled over a circuit breaker.

  A few feet away, through the rough arch, the rain began to fall faster. The sound of it filled his ears and the smell of it

  filled his throat. As he crossed the floor toward the foreman he had a sense of tenuousness: there was a roof over their heads and there were walls, but there was no finishing. It was finishing that imbued buildings with their capacity to give comfort. Here there was no comfort yet; bare bulbs hung from the ceiling and burned with searing imprints.

  They were practically outside. The rain fell harder.

  T. stuck out his hand for a shake but Marlo embraced him. “Tomás,” he said fondly. “We’re just finishing. A storm is coming. A big storm, Tomás. What we do now is, we make sure we protect what we can. Stop the water damage. Then we go home. We got to go help the wife, you know? Help before the storm comes. Most of the men stayed home today. To help the wife and children.”

  “Go ahead,” said T. “Please. Get home.”

  “High winds,” said Marlo, nodding. “High winds.” He motioned to the others, preoccupied.

  “You stay at the Grove, Tomás?” “Always.”

  “Safe there. Very good.”

  They ran out then, Marlo with a plastic poncho on, the workers bareheaded and carrying between them a heavy toolbox. T. noticed they had brought their radio out with them, the cord wrapped carefully around it. They ran to their boats and got in. The palms were dipping and the canvas shelters on the boats whipped and flapped; the water was choppy and opaque.

  Marlo stepped into T.’s boat and the captain started the motor. They huddled on a bench seat beneath the canvas. The deck was slick.

  “Three generators,” said Marlo, nodding, and patted T.’s knee. “Three backups. At the Grove.”

  “I’m not worried,” said T.

  Marlo nodded and said something to the boatman. Soon the two of them were yelling over the motor and T. heard nothing but noise; the prow of the boat lifted high and crashed down again over each wave, jolting him. He held tightly to the wet gunnel.

  At the hotel dock he clambered out and watched them throttle away. When the boat vanished into the gray humid air over the waves he stayed where he was, his soaked feet planted firmly on the wood of the dock. He should have gone with them, should have helped them prepare for the storm. But likely it would pass, and tomorrow would be back to business. Still he was reluctant to go back into the hotel. Better he should stand here, wind-battered and shaking; better to feel this lassitude … his skin and clothes were waterlogged. Water ran down his neck and his nose and the thin windbreaker glued chilly to his arm skin.

  The ocean and sky were one heavy mass without a line between them. His island was nowhere visible.

  Soon he found himself retreating to the restaurant with the other guests, the restaurant with its gleaming copper-trimmed oak bar and rows of glittering bottles and large windows crisscrossed with tape to guard against shattering. Waiters moved among the tables, reassuring; they were used to hurricanes, which battered the coast year after year.

  Rain flooded the swimming pool beyond the windows until water spread out over the pool deck and the lawn beyond. He put his face up to a triangle of taped glass, beside a long row of children who did the same until their parents pulled them back. The pool water was a muddy yellow, afloat with red flowers and brown palm litter and even a few lounge chairs, swirling and hitting each other. Nearby the trees moved and moved, bent low. Loose bark and fronds skittered

  over the ground and caught on trellises and hedges, collecting at the base of low walls. Guests watched warily but tended to sit stiffly at their tables, as though the tables would protect them.

  The televisions showed a weather map and at first the steadiness of the signal kept everything normal. Children ran and capered, restless; they hunched down by the windows until their parents noticed, twirled away from the windows laughing and shrieking. They played hide-and-seek, dashing back and forth across the room to conceal themselves behind potted plants and furniture.

  Presently the signal was lost and the screens went snowy. In the moments afterward there was a pause in the room, almost a pause of fear. Quickly a waiter popped a movie into the VCR, and on every screen ran a movie about American astronauts with square shoulders and piercing blue eyes. Wind shuddered the walls as a great silver moon rose into the blackness of space; the elements outside and the space inside the capsule converged. On went the storm, and with pictures of wives and babies taped to the dashboards of their ship the handsome astronauts gazed out portholes in wonder, beholding an American universe.

  In the late afternoon the wind abated and the rain slowed. Talk rose and there were a few barks of laughter, but then someone pointed out that the wait staff were all behind the bar, pretending to look busy there.

  “The eye,” whispered a woman at the table next to him. “We’re in the eye.”

  In the quiet the wind shrilled and thudded again until it alarmed the children, who stood near their anxious parents holding onto their arms or legs, the small ones settling on laps. He heard glass shatter but did not see it. The taped windows let a white static of water sweep past; it pounded the

  walls and the roof with new force and the windows shook in their frames.

  How was his shell faring, the empty husks on the island? Do not think, he told himself. Useless.

  Anyway he was well insured.

  Everyone else had at least a wife or a husband with them. Only he sat alone. Here was a whole life Beth had missed, a hole where a life should have been. But then, he thought, the universe was made up of holes—was it so terrible to be swept into one? After all. The holes were the black between stars, between constellations. It was holes that were the fabric of the galaxy.

  At the thought he was calm, though someone nearby whimpered at the sounds of breakage and impact and a man in a light pink polo shirt sweated dark stains under his arms.

  The storm blew itself out in the late afternoon and finally the guests wandered out of the restaurant, dispersing; they emerged into the half-light, into a patter of light rain. In twos and threes they walked quietly over the wet tiles and paved paths to their rooms and their cabins.

  He smelled soil and humus and warmth made the air heavy over his shoulders. A few trees were down and lay across tennis courts but most of the buildings looked the same. He kicked a sodden raft of palm fronds from a doorway of a scuba shack near the beach an
d saw the basement had been inundated; above the thatch roof was in tatters, nothing left but the frame.

  Only the gardens had fared poorly. They were flooded and muddy, bushes uprooted, flowerbeds flattened or washed out. And without its sculpted gardens the resort lost its stateliness, its reserve, even its authority. It was a victim now, a shabby and disordered outpost that was barely secure.

  He went back to the crowded lobby to ask about the telephone. Waiters and cleaning staff were leaving in droves, piling into beat-up vans and buses and jeeps to ride the rutted roads home, even to walk. The manager threatened them. But there were reports of devastation in the nearby town of huts and shanties where most of them lived. They had to go. “We will be understaffed throughout the rest of the dinner

  hour,” said the receptionist to T. “We regret this deeply.”

  The power was out, which they said was temporary; the generator would soon come online again. At the door to the lobby a waiter handed out candles.

  No one was available to ferry him to his island; no one could be reached by telephone because the lines were down. He went to his room with his candle and his opened bottle of wine; he lay on the bed with the door open to the wet dusk, the candle guttering. He heard the other guests traipsing by, the snatches of their conversation and the drip of palm fronds.

  Mastery was only a moment in the mind—of other men, of yourself. Like the stock market, a consensus of opinion, a pure abstraction; nothing to the tsunamis, the boiling sun, the plate tectonics. The social compact was abstraction— roads, buildings, and a temporary agreement about behavior. That was it. The matter beneath it all was what lasted, and meanwhile, always, the world of people was on the edge of dissolution.

  Soon, on a flimsy bed between thin walls, he had drained the whole bottle of wine.

  In the morning he waited in line in front of the hotel. It was hard to press himself through the crowds; there was a second wave of staff leaving, those who had worked through the night and were now desperate. Vans and trucks left without

  him again and again. Finally money talked, and he joined a cook and two maids in a beat-up four-wheel-drive taxi.

  The dirt roads were deeply braided with new ditches. Cables lay across them, cars were mired deep in the drying mud, and the taxi driver careened off the road at high speed whenever there was an obstacle, splattering mud that browned out the rear windows and the windshield. T. had to get out and wipe the windshield for him whenever they achieved dry ground and could stop the car without sinking. Then they started up again and the taxi lurched over holes and debris, leaving deep gouges in lawns that were already swamped. When they got to their destination they were still nowhere, because the center of the town was only a series of piles in a field of mud. It looked like a landfill.

  He glanced sidelong at the driver, who was stony. In the back one of the young chambermaids started to cry, and the other put an arm around her shoulders. The cook stared out the window and shook his head.

  Huts were mostly collapsed, wood and plastic and metal piled on the wet ground. Here or there a lone stilt or two leaned forlornly where a building had been. Water ran across the road in what looked like a natural stream, it was so deep and wide. As he got out of the taxi he smelled sewage; people wandered wet and dirty, mothers with their babies on their backs, men shirtless and shoeless and carrying piles of belongings, shovels and jugs of water. Once the beach had been hidden from the road by dwellings but now he could see straight through where these buildings had been, straight out through a hole to the sea. There had been no trees among the shanties, no source of shade but the huts themselves, so now there was emptiness.

  He set off on foot toward Marlo’s house over piles of twisted rebar and cinderblock and streams of sewage, sinking

  into the mud past his ankles until his shoes and socks were boots of caked mud. He stopped to help a group of women lift a piece of cement wall off a chicken coop: the chickens inside were flattened, dirty white pads of feathers and beaks and talons. He wondered where the blood was.

  After a while, a few false turns and circles, he saw the house ahead of him, intact. Everywhere else had been motion, the bustle and hurry of urgency: but Marlo’s house seemed curiously still. In the yard beside it a black goat stood munching flowers, almost in slow motion. For a second he gazed at the goat as though both of them were similarly idle, similarly suspended. Then he broke the stare and started walking again. A fencepost had fallen down and the fence was sagging.

  He knocked on the front door and waited and he knocked again. He was turning away when it finally opened, and a small girl in a red dress was looking up at him.

  “Hola. Yo soy Tomás,” he said, in his rudimentary Spanish. It was hard to know what to speak: some of them preferred English, some Spanish, some spoke English Creole or Maya or a language called Garifuna. “Está Marlo aqui?”

  “Papi,” called the child, turning.

  Marlo stepped out from a door and picked her up; he held her as he spoke to T. He was different. For once he did not smile.

  “Are you—are you OK here?”

  “It is my son,” said Marlo, in a monotone. “He was out on a boat. He has not returned.”

  “He might have had to put in somewhere,” offered T. “Right? One of the atolls, or an island? Waiting till the storm passed?”

  “He was at one of the atolls, where they take the tour boats,” said Marlo. “They radioed in. They found his boat. But it was upside down. And he was not inside.”

  T. did not find words; he was inadequate. “I don’t want to intrude,” he said. “Come in. Please. Have coffee.”

  Marlo’s wife sat with three teenage girls on the couch in their living room. They stood and smiled faintly when he entered, polite and miserable.

  “The other boys, they are all looking for Javi,” said Marlo. “I’m very, very sorry for your situation today,” said T., and Marlo translated. His wife bowed her head slightly and went into the kitchen, where she busied herself at the stove. The girls stood and followed her save the toddler on Marlo’s lap,

  who played with a necklace of red and orange beads. “Is there anything I can do? To help the search?” Marlo shook his head.

  “Let me know. The one thing I can offer is money. If that would help at all. To mobilize a larger search, anything. To help find him.”

  “That is generous, Tomás. But no, no thank you.”

  There was a glaze over Marlo’s eyes; he was kind but not there.

  “I just wanted you to know.”

  “Later, I will talk to Paolo,” said Marlo, and nodded. “He will take you out in the boat. Maybe you want to leave after that, and come back other times. When the storm is cleaned up.”

  “What I want,” said T., directly as he thought it, “is a guide. I want a guide with a good boat to take me up the river, to the preserve where the jaguars live.”

  “Jaguars?” asked Marlo, surprised.

  His wife brought them small cups of coffee on an enamel tray. One of the girls in the kitchen burst into tears and the toddler turned in her father’s lap to gaze at her sister.

  “I am so sorry,” he said again, awkwardly.

  •

  As the boat curved around the end of the island and his beach hove into view he saw the tall trees were down. He was looking at their root balls, straggly brown masses along the sand. He could see at least three thick trunks that had fallen across the white walls, caving them in.

  The white sand was mixed with brown again.

  “It’s totaled,” he said to Paolo the boatman. “I can see from here. I don’t need to go there now. Go ahead, turn the boat. Turn the boat!”

  They cut a wide U and headed back to the mainland. He could not force himself to look over his shoulder.

  At the hotel he gathered his belongings; he had a couple of sweatshirts and a pair of good boots, but no tent or tarp or sleeping bag. He had very little. He lent his hotel room to the family of the maid who had cried in the taxi.
Eight of them would stay in it—an old woman, five children, and the maid and her husband—along with the next-door suite, which he rented for them. They would stay there while the husband and the oldest son rebuilt their own two-room house; they would eat at the hotel restaurant on his tab, because they did not have transportation into town to buy groceries. It would help to assuage his conscience when he left the ruins.

  He called his mother from a satellite phone at a medical clinic and got Vera, who went to look for her. There was a delay with the phone that made conversation desultory.

  “Who is this?” came his mother’s voice, wavering. “It’s T. Remember me?”

  “—I can’t hear them,” he heard her complain to Vera. “It’s staticky. It has an echo on it.”

  Vera took the phone again.

  “She’s having trouble hearing you,” said Vera.

  “We had a hurricane here,” he said, enunciating. “I would have called sooner. There was a storm. It destroyed my new project.”

  “… me to give it back to her?”

  “No, you tell her what I say. OK? There was a big storm.” “… big storm?”

  “There was a hurricane here. I’m going to be out of touch for a couple of weeks. I’m calling now on a satellite phone.”

  “… been going on the walks … little more fragile …” “Tell her I miss her, and I’m thinking about her and

  hoping she’s doing well. Tell her I’ll be home soon.” “Who is this?”

  It was his mother again.

  “It’s me, T. It’s a bad connection. Can you hear me?” “No one there,” said his mother to Vera, fading in waves.

  “You know who it is? It’s one of those crank calls. It’s no one.”

  In Paolo’s small metal motorboat, slapping the waves as they went south toward the mouth of the river, he felt flat but satisfied, equal to what came. Now that the buildings were gone and the telephone lines were down, he could not fly home anyway, not now. Nothing to do but go up the river toward the mountains. Was that where everyone would go, once the coastlines were gone? Higher ground.