Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

She spooned up her soup, shaking her head. His own utensils lay untouched on the placemat.

"And you don't like that poor china girl holding the cute baby sheep? Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth."

There was a tinge of hysteria, certainly.

She paused to reach for the salad tongs and he leaned forward and laid a hand on her arm.

"Mother. Listen," he said gently. "Isn't it sort of a stretch? The firebombing of Dresden and my opinion of a toilet ornament?"

She shook her head, frustrated.

"Your generation thinks that wanting means getting. But most of the people in the whole world… for them what they want has nothing to do with their life, with what their life actually is."

"I realize that"

"Here people want something, they get it, and they say that's, you know, happiness. Or success. And those other people, those poor people everywhere.. I mean there's nothing to envy, they live in terrible privation and I pray for them every day, but one thing they have you and your friends will never have."

"What's that?"

"Longing, dear. Longing makes the soul. Without it… "

She gazed at him sadly.

". . the soul has nothing. It just gets forgotten."

What rose in him was tenderness-he was sorry. He wanted to comfort her.

His father called him one day at work. He stepped out of a meeting in his conference room to take the call at his desk.

"Hey, kid."

A forced tone of good cheer.

"Where the hell are you?"

"I'm just driving. Stopped for a cup of coffee. Wanted to let you know I'm doing A-OK."

"You need to call my mother. You've been together thirty years, you can't tell her you're taking off?"

There was a dull buzz on the other end of the line.

"Dad? You hang up?"

"You know, there comes a time…"

His father's voice trailed off.

"She's staying at my house. Call her on the phone there. She's the one you need to talk to."

"Easier said than done, my boy."

"I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's your duty."

There was silence on the line again.

"It's not a mid-life crisis, you know."

"You already had one of those. When you got the hair plugs."

"This is not a mid-life crisis."

"I need for you to call her now. This is between the two of you. Seriously, you don't think you owe it to her? A few words?"

"Did you ever have a dream so real it felt like you were awake?"

"Uh, yeah. I guess."

"What if one day you woke up and you realized your whole life had been a dream like that? Your whole life, from some point where you fell asleep, was only a dream. The kind that tricks you into thinking you're wide awake."

T. was quiet, waiting. He looked around his office, the receiver pressed against his ear, and thought he saw a shade descend on it, roll dimness down the walls. A cloud had moved in front of the sun: his office had a weather all its own, and here he was, suddenly old. With the night coming on.

"My whole life was like that," went on his father, over the static. "From when I left college, from something I did then. I mean I never chose a single thing, when I look back on it. When I married your mother I wasn't really awake. I wasn't awake when she had you. I never woke up once for all these years. It was just not real to me. You know who you were looking at, the whole time you grew up? I was a ghost. I wasn't really there. It was all, I don't know, some other guy's life I stepped into by mistake."

T. felt drunken, his legs heavy beneath the desk. He swiveled in his chair and sadness closed his throat. There they were in his bedroom, when he was a little boy. His father sat on the side of his bed; it was bedtime, and here was his father to read him a story. Usually his mother read the stories, but this time his father had left the television and come upstairs. He almost smelled the new fresh paper of the picture book; he saw his father's large hands turning the pages with deftness, with authority. In the book there was a family of beavers, and they lived in a dam. Inside the dam it was warm and golden, and the beavers ate their dinner at a round wooden table. He remembered the softness of his father's voice.

Not real to his father; a life lived by a stranger. Sitting there on the side of his bed, reading the book about the beavers who were warm in their dam, had been no one.

"Until a month ago. That's when I woke up. It was sudden, like an alarm clock or something. Now I'm awake. It's too bad, but your mother is an innocent bystander. She's a casualty."

T. found he could not speak.

"I'll drop her a line, on down the road."

He barely heard the rest.

As soon as he got home his mother asked, as was her daily custom, whether his father had contacted him. He had fully intended to keep it from her-his father's callousness could hardly fail to do her an injury-but as he crossed the threshold into his apartment he saw, first, all the contents of his kitchen cabinets and drawers spread over the counters around her as she organized them, listening to golden oldies on a tinny clock-radio; and, second, the lettering on her apron, which pictured a slice of bright-red tomato and the words RIPE AND READY.

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 tip 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 tip 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.