Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

He rose, his father half-swiveled away from him in his chair, and tossed down a twenty; passed Carol and the morbidly obese man named Boolie, who glared at him with bulging eyes. He felt tamped down into fury, the tension of his rage making him want to burst into a run. As soon as he was away from the restaurant, enough distance behind him, he turned off the road down to the beach again and took off his shoes.

He did run then, along the cool tidal sand: he pounded the wet grit with the tender soles of his feet, a shoe clutched in each hand, until the bottoms of his feet were raw and he was winded and gasping. Then he slowed to a stop.

By nightfall he was on the West Coast again, curled warmly around Beth's smooth back and listening to the whir of his own ceiling fan. There he drifted back to the sand, the beach beside the pink stucco building.

The sand was fall of fathers in bathing suits, sleeping; he was the only one awake, with fathers all around him. He did not wear a bathing suit but a body cast, and none of the sun or the sand reached his skin. In the cast he was cool. He felt no need for movement.

The tide was so far out that the low white line of the waves breaking was barely visible on the horizon. Between him and the sea the sand was hilly with dunes, and yet past it he could still see the wide flat ocean. Everywhere fathers were dreaming in the warm sun, the fathers who had once been little boys, running; the sun that made them gleam. Crabs sidled up to them and wasps landed on their lax bodies.

No, wait. Were the fathers asleep?

Their eyes were wide open. They were there, gold and massive, but they saw nothing.

The fathers lay still, their faces toward the sky: until the wind passed a hand over all of their eyes, closing them.

His first houses went up almost overnight-slab, frame, roof, electrical and plumbing, drywall, finish and landscapingfast and cheap, designed not to last but to become obsolete. Retired people moved in, gathering in the desert from cold northern suburbs. In his downtime he presided.

He strolled alongside the tennis courts, watching the vigorous play of sweating players through the green mesh and idly calculating the probability of atrial fibrillation. When she did not have other obligations Beth accompanied him, and together they sat in the Mercedes and purred along the newly minted neighborhoods as the sun rose, observing the early risers-a gawky racewalker in headphones, dogowners with scoops and bags, brightly dressed matrons walking in twos as they chatted nasally. Beth liked to ride with him, either because she was captured, as he was, by the completion of this beginning, this forecast of greater growth, or because she was content to be in his company. She gazed out her rolled-down window, idly drumming her French-manicured fingers on the shining wood panel of the car door, the breeze slightly moving stray tendrils of her black hair. Pulling around the bottom of a cul-de-sac he admired the smooth action of garage doors rolling upward to disgorge shining sedans; he cast his eyes over sculpted xeriscape bushes in the rock gardens, the well-hidden spigots that watered them. There was no better way to behold this neatly emerging landscape than from behind the clean windshield of the 190, which framed external scenes and kept them at a perfect distance.

There was a tidiness to his circuit, and satisfaction filled him from bottom to top like liquid. His profit was projected and beyond even that profit-the perfect and curtained margin that made liberty-here was a good settlement; here was a small country, planned step by step and now filled with citizens. It was a modest piece in a patchwork, stitched into the vast fabric by roads and cables and aqueducts, by cheap gasoline and abundant rubber and lumber from the northwest, by the dominance of car companies, the willingness to drain lakes and dam rivers, the invention of Freon and computers and urea formaldehyde. This was the apogee of civilization.

And he was, in part, a designer of the lives that would wind down and likely end here-strange position, insignificant he knew to anyone but him. But out of his intention had sprung the last rooms, the final gardens.

If he was harried he liked to force a pause in his day and sit down in the dimness of the community center weight room, seldom used, where he could look through the glass wall at the older women in their water aerobics class. The angle of their swim-capped heads above the water's surface brought him a sense of calm. He thought how the world would feel if it were populated solely by elderly women-a world of forbearance, where all touches were careful. Once they had given birth, raised children, worked, but now all of that was behind them. Now they swam. Their heads cocked, they waited patiently for instructions.

His father never called and finally it was Beth who took his mother aside. He was not there but he heard about it later: the two of them walked together on the cliffs over the beach, on the emerald-green grass that grew under the palms. Beth held his mother's arm, as she often did when they walked, and spoke clearly and carefully. Did she want to sit down? Here was a bench, and it was clean. Sit down. There. Now. This was going to be difficult; this was not easy.

His mother looked at Beth, searching her face for something, then turned away and nodded absently. She came to acceptance slowly: the worst had already passed. In the ensuing months the only sign that she knew the facts of the case was the occasional vague reference, in her speech, to your father's new lifestyle, his new identity.

His father's defection was more forgivable now, in fact, for now his mother was no longer a failed wife and therefore a failed woman but merely a woman who had once been married to a failed man.

At the office, over coffee and donuts, Julie announced she was leaving to work on a worm farm in Guatemala. She had been accepted by the Peace Corps.

"Congratulations," said T.

"Good for you!" said Susan.

"I didn't know you had an interest in worms," said T.

"It's more the people," said Julie. "They're underprivileged. It's about helping them to realize their fall development potential."

"Will you actually be touching them?" asked Susan.

"The people?" asked Julie.

"The worms," said Susan.

"I think you wear rubber gloves," said Judie. "And a dust mask. There can be airborne illnesses, like Legionnaires' disease."

"Isn't that the one where you cough up blood and die?" asked Susan.

"Hardly ever," said Julie.

"Still," said Susan.

T. handed her a coffee made the way she liked it, almost white with cream. "Better you than me."

And yet he thought of her, after she left his employ, recalled her with an impulse that was almost paternal.

Beth took his mother out shopping on a Saturday afternoon. He watched them leave from the steps of his building's lobby. Beth led the older woman carefully to her car-his mother, for some reason, walking unsteadily. He felt grateful, felt pulled toward them, but stayed where he was.

At the time his mother was freshly withdrawn from the driving economy. Upon receiving a citation for weaving across the median-applying lipstick, as it turned out, while gazing into the rearview mirror-she had been forced to attend traffic school, where a drill-sergeant type showed videotapes of the gruesome aftermath of highspeed collisions.

He looked at Beth steadily across the lawn and the light around them was nearly solid, the air immaculate: he felt his arms rising toward her, although he was not moving.

After they pulled away from the curb he realized Angela had forgotten her crucifix. It was a small wooden crucifix that usually hung from his own rearview mirror; she had affixed it there over his protest, because she often rode with him and insisted on having it with her when she did. He did not like his car decorated with such talismans; a car interior should be smooth and well-ordered, not festooned with hopeful signals of the driver's personality. Because then the two went to war, car and driver, and the car always won, with its seamless factory complexion. The driver looked like a child trying desperately to adorn.