Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

That night he took his dog onto the bed with him, a gesture his mother roundly condemned as unsanitary. In the deepest part of the night he woke up and listened to the dog breathe, the regular pace of the breathing. There was no moon, and through the thick drapes his mother had hung on his windows even the light of the city did not penetrate. He lay with his arms and legs frozen, imagining paralysis: he tried to feel the gradual freezing, the numbness that crept up into him. As a child he had done this.

Back then he had liked to play for a short time that he was something else. In the water he was a dead man, in the grass of the yard he was a fallen log. Then he forgot childish things.

The silence of the apartment was unaccustomed now, since his mother had often paced at night, washing and ironing, watching cable television and drinking instant decaffeinated coffee. Always if he woke there was the faint hum of activity beneath him. Before her, what? Now he barely remembered how his nights had been. Before his mother, the dog; before the dog, nothing. But now he was used to company.

He pushed back the covers and moved to the foot of the bed, where he lay next to the dog, along her warm back. His arms were pulled in close to his body and the dog's head was a few inches from his face. Could he sleep here, or would he be distracted?

For a while he was: he smelled the skin of the dog, the hair of the dog: he felt the dog's warmth. But patiently he waited for all this to pass, and tried to match their breathing.

And near morning, waking with goose blimps raised along his arms, he pulled the covers down around both of them.

Then his first golden egg, a swath of empty desert would be converted to subdivisions for retirees, with golf courses and Olympic-size swimming pools and luxury spas and a phalanx of nurses to monitor cardiac rhythms and tend to recovering hip and knee surgeries. Down the road, thanks to economies of scale and various state and federal subsidies, it might become a great citadel-light rail systems, a solar-powered mall. But in California nothing ambitious came without an array of planning difficulties and lawsuits from the liberal fringe, and soon enough there were cases in district court; he excused himself from conference calls with his publicrelations consultants, which droned on and ate into his time on other undertakings.

The project stalled.

Meanwhile he got regular postcards from his mother, who claimed to have met "wonderful people" on the cruise and decided to fly from Yucatan to Guaymas with a claims adjuster from Toledo.

Dear T., read a postcard featuring a sombrero, The weather is beautiful hear. You would not recognize me with my brown sun tan I look just like a native!! My espanol is muy better too.

The court's opinion could easily go against his enterprisehe did not watch the details but this much was quite clearso it was imperative to develop fall-back strategies. He must multiply his options, not wait for the court to decide his future-for when had he ever made of institutions his own enemy? They were his bulwarks, his cathedrals. It was for him only to move on steadily on the assumption that the case and the development were already lost. Plainly nothing could be forfeited through such anticipation, everything gained. He instigated an aggressive search for high-margin properties and stocks and while immersed in the search let other matters gratefully fall away: his mother weeping on the toilet seat abjectly as she stroked the porcelain tresses of the shepherdess, his father who took no pains to hide his lack of conscience.

Setting himself to research he also ignored small matters at the office, failing to notice when Julie the paralegal, absent several days, returned from her sick leave with red-rimmed eyes and a white mark where her engagement ring had been; failing to return a call on his answering machine until the caller called again-his mother's next-door neighbor at the house she had vacated in Darien. A squirrel had become trapped inside and gnawed on the wooden window grilles until it died of starvation.

When his father left a stiff message on the machine, stating that he had completed a mandatory period of residency in Reno, Nevada, and subsequently secured a divorce, he erased the message impatiently.

Some mornings he woke with a nervous premonition of imminence: an event lay in wait. On the day his case was finally decided he had been up half the night researching a stock and even considered cocaine, increasingly popular with the upwardly mobile and visible everywhere. But he was not fully tempted. And then he heard. He had won. The project could move ahead.

That night, exhausted but jubilant after drinks at a bar, he lay back and watched a news segment featuring politicians. The faces on the small screen were interchangeable, not only with each other but with his own: quite possibly they were not only his representatives but his representations. What was a face on television but a code, and what was the difference between these electronic faces but the realignment of line and color to shift among symbols? If he grasped deeply this language of symbols, grasped it beneath the surface, he would course through the currents of authority as they coursed through him like heat or the tremble of cold. That near! He moved in impulse and in fret; shot through with glowing nerves he willed himself on to the rest of what was. The tides shifted beneath him but he was holding fast.

That was what they didn't have, those men of state and industry, he thought before he fell asleep in the flickering blue light. They were hard vectors of self, undisturbed by the vestigial presence of others who were less powerful and therefore eternally unlike them. They did not have what those others had, the softness and the whimsy, the coastingthe others far outside their sphere who imagined and felt and enjoyed everything and ended up going nowhere because they needed nothing more than to be.

Fortunately he was not one of them.

She came with an investor to a cocktail-hour meeting one Friday and in minutes he was converted. Like all conversions his own was sudden. The lights of the restaurant bar bathed them in browns and reds and he watched her laugh. Where there should have been the awkwardness of strangers there was fluency. The investor went home to his wife after a short while, leaving the two of them at the counter, where they stayed and stayed on.

Beth, she had said. She was the investor's assistant. She did not give him her last name. She had erect posture, an effortless dignity and perfect light-brown skin. It was her self-possession that got him, though her features were also lovely. They drank too much as the evening wore on, became lightheaded and carefree: life was an arc in the air, ascending. Everything smaller was treated with a deft and glancing humor, and from the tops of the stools the skin of their knees touched briefly.

In the privacy of the bathroom, where he removed himself for a pause, he felt giddy, liberated and captive both. The bathroom was a confined space but he was hardly confined; nothing was tawdry around him, nothing filthy despite its superficial patina of dirt-or rather he forgave it for its tawdriness. The peeling stickers on the wall, graffiti, wet floors with patches of wet toilet paper adhering-surprising for an upscale establishment but then bathrooms were the main tell when it came to restaurant management, not what came out of the kitchen. All these elements were part of the story, the grounded earth before the flight. This was the instant of exulting, and even the grimy walls could not dull his exhilaration.