Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

The room was a holding pen, a split moment. Outside the room was the rest of his existence. For years he had been detached and now in a stroke of time he was not. He would move, he would touch-no one would think to impede him, they would see him go and be glad-he could be anything. Do not embarrass yourself, he told himself strictly, but could not help smiling. There she was at the bar: their faces met before he got there.

This was how he lost his autonomy-he had moved along at a steady pace and then he was flung.

Around midnight she agreed to let him drive her home in her car. She had a low tolerance for alcohol and was slurring her words despite the fact that all she had drunk was watery Mexican beer with slices of lime. But his building was nearer than hers, and once in her car they decided to go there instead. He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other along the back of her seat; she curled in her seat to watch him as he drove. Music coursed through the car and both of them, he was sure, felt the uplift of the new. A bright panic filled him.

But when they pulled into the parking garage there was his mother-sitting, her suitcases around her, at the base of the stairs that led up to the lobby. She was darkly tanned and smoking a thin cigarette. A few feet away stood a man in a white suit, also tanned and smoking.

"I can't believe this," said T., and turned to Beth, who dipped her head to look past him out his window. "I'm sorry," he said.

"I'm back!" sang out his mother gaily, and stubbed out her cigarette on the concrete step. She stood up and spread her arms. She had lightened her hair. "And this is?"

"Beth. Our first date," said T. "So don't say anything I'm going to regret. Beth? My mother. She's been on a cruise.

His mother was down the steps and flinging her arms around him in a wild embrace.

"Not just a cruise. I took buses. I stayed in these fleabag hotels. Chichen Itza! Where they sacrificed the virgins? Hello, dear. Pleased to meet you. And T.! Do you even recognize your old mother?"

"You look great," he said dutifully.

"This is Terry," she said. "A friend. Terry is Lebanese!"

"Pleased to meet you," said T., and they shook.

"I tell you what," said his mother, "why don't you just let its in and you kids can retire, or do whatever. We just flew in. We need to crash."

He did not recall the word crash in her vocabulary, nor had she called him a "kid" in recent memory.

"I can't believe you're smoking," he said, as they lugged her cases into the elevators and through his front door.

"I picked up the habit," she said. "Filthy, I know. So, have you heard from your father?"

Less than a minute.

"I haven't talked to him," he answered, evasive.

"A letter? Anything?"

"He hasn't written to me. Let's wait another day to discuss him."

He drove Beth to her apartment, since the mood was shot. He walked her in and called a cab and kissed her until it came.

Waiting to fall asleep afterward, his mother and Terry installed awkwardly in the next room, his thoughts of her attained a certain plateau. He thought of how she might walk down a future of clean avenues beside him, how she would confer her elegance on any landscape. He saw that this was selfish, or worse was self-aggrandizing, as though she was an accessory, but he felt more than that selfish impulse, felt something more exalted, frankly, and the thought of her beauty extended throughout his life was nothing short of captivating. It was not only that he would benefit from having her at his side, it was the shock of how the world glowed with it-how she lent her surroundings the style of her presence, its effortless assertion of grace.

In the desert subdivisions would spread, life radiate outward from the sand as the tone of her flesh shone on the planes of her face, through buildings and cables and gas mains and roads. He thought of the cool of night descending over the settlement-were those coyotes howling out there in the dark, beyond the warm lights from thousands of standardized windows? Coyotes. He thought of them rarely but when he did he felt a pulse of identification and regret, curious and painful… In the distance homeowners in the settlement would be able to make out in the night sky the hulking shape of the Panamint mountains, the lights of the naval base winking beneath.

And in the morning, as the sun rose to the east over the national monument, automated sprinklers would come on and begin their twitching rotations, misting the putting greens and the fairways and the sculpted oases of red-and-yellow birds of paradise and palm, bringing songbirds out of nowhere to perch in the mesquite and palo verde trees lining the courses.

Hundreds of units were already presold.

The place would not disappoint; it would be almost heaven for the buyers, whose profiles were already known to him. Aging golfers whose children lived far away and avoided contact, whose fixed pensions were supplemented by a moderate annual influx of dividend and interest income from conservatively managed accounts, whose idea of leisure involved little more than a sunny clime, eighteen holes minimum and a view of pastel-colored fake adobe; these golfers and their wives, most of whom would outlive them, watching the sunset as they sat in the dry air, gentle, quiet, sipping their gin-and-tonics, smelling the barbeque from a few doors down and watching the colors in the western sky deepen. Was it not a decent way for life to end, in the peace of all that slowness? That he would not wish for an end like that himself was irrelevant. The buyers were not him.

Never pretend to know better, had been the first lesson of real estate. His own preferences were only a private luxury.

He would drive down the softly curving streets when they were built, he would survey the burg in all its idle readiness before the people moved in, when it was waiting, an infant of a city, clean and unmarked. She would be with him then, with her consent. The shining hair that hung down her back, the quick smile, the set of her shoulders and deep curve at the small of her back. He found it satisfying to imagine the completion of this, the village in the middle of nowhere and the contours of her person.

He knew it was her-was not surprised he had held himself aloof from others till now, knowing the perfection of this new sentiment.

In the morning his mother called down from the landing. "Have you been keeping my mail for me?"

She held a toothbrush and wore a black lace robe. In the past she had favored white cotton nightgowns that buttoned to the neck and were patterned with sprigs of flowers.

"In the desk," he said, inclining his head in the right direction.

But he had noticed, among her letters, one with a Reno postmark. Fear took hold of him. He had to go.

He glanced outside and saw that the taxi that would take him to his car was already waiting at the curb. Hastily he left the buttered toast waiting for him on the counter, the poured juice; hastily he left his dog for the day with a last pat on the head; hastily he grabbed his keys from a bowl on a side table. He left.

All day he worked hard and took very few calls, and it was past seven when he finally finished. He was the last to leave the office, something he liked because he could survey it at his leisure, walking around, shuffling his nearly noiseless feet across the carpet. He stood and stared out various windows that offered views past other buildings and onto pieces of the ocean. He saw the blurs of ships like cities in the distance, unmoving on the gray surface. They were large ships, dark ships, solid and far across the waves. Often he saw them through these office windows and the next day they were gone.