Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

He plucked a beer from the refrigerator, uncapped it and tipped it up; when he recalled this afterward it was as though he was still frozen there, fingertips poised against the cool condensation on the bottle's shoulder. The afternoon unfurled before him in an air-conditioned calm. He had research laid out on his coffee table: a small jungle island off the Central American coast. It was a short boat trip from one of the longest coral reefs in the ocean, where lemon sharks cruised in the shallows to the delight of tourists. The water off the beach was warm, clear and shallow for hundreds of feet, and on the mainland nearby were lagoons and rainforests, ancient ruins and a burgeoning service industry.

This perusal, this moment of early planning in serenity when a project was unrealized, had always been delightful to him.

Then the ring of the telephone interrupted his speculation and he heard his mother's voice, faint and shaky. The tone of it made his stomach cramp as he ran out to the lobby and slammed down the stairs to the parking garage, fumbled with the car door. He drove with pins pricking behind his eyelids and his palms slipping against the steering wheel cover, sweating. When he got to the hospital he ran across the parking lot, and out of breath and coughing said their names to a clerk. Finally someone led him to a room, or maybe he got there alone.

His mother sat up in a bed, a bandage on her forehead, one of her arms in a sling. She said a word he could not distinguish and he saw she was fine; he reached out a hand for her, stopped and dazzled by the white light from the window. He was unable to make out her facial expression then and he let his hand drop.

"But you're OK, but how about her?" he asked, turning to the nurse who had led him in. "Where is she?"

The nurse took his arm and led him out again and he forgot everything as he walked behind her: as he followed her back it felt dutiful, though at the same time he was enslaved. He grabbed his hands together and felt their clammy pressure. Nothing was true except the white back with the vertical seam down the middle and the wall beside him. Was she in traction, her eyes bruised and fearing in a bandaged face?

It was not Beth he saw, however: it was a fat-stomached doctor who came at him from the side, seeming to materialize out of the blur of a door. The doctor took him by the shoulder and steered him into an alcove. There a plaster statue of Mary looked down on them with almond-shaped eyes; this was a Catholic hospital, he realized, a feature he had not noticed before despite the name of it, which was the name of a saint.

"I am very sorry to have to tell you," said the doctor, a man with glasses and a receding chin, "that your wife did not make it. We did our best to resuscitate her but it was simply too late."

He heard the doctor's mistake: your wife. He did not correct it. His ears were ringing. He was choking and his knees buckled. His head was squeezed, itched and stung. The doctor and the nurse had him; they led him to a cot in a room and sat him on it, his head bent between his bent legs. There was a rush of sound, dense walls around him but no support for his arms; then his bowels loosened and he had to find a toilet. He was not sure he could make it.

When he came out of the bathroom, hands wet and teeth chattering, they were both still waiting. The teeth chattered out of control; his jaw was not his own. He thought his eyeballs might be jarred loose. It was comical, probably; it was idiotic. He could not prevent it. They took him back to his mother's room, where the nurse pulled up a chair beside her bed for him. But he could not sit down again. He stood holding the metal end of his mother's bed, dizzy but insistent. He waited for his jaw to stop its manic trembling.

"Accident?" he heard himself say finally, part of him.

He saw his mother shake her head.

"She collapsed," said his mother, and began to cry again. "At the wheel. We ran up on the curb and we stopped…"

"We are not one-hundred percent certain yet," said the doctor gently, a hand on his arm again, patting, "and we will have more to tell you later, but I believe the cardiac event may have been caused by a condition called arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia."

"But she's healthy," said T. faintly, without force. His mother nodded eagerly, as though together they could persuade the doctor to change his mind. "She goes to the gym.

"This is a condition that sometimes afflicts young athletes, for instance," said the doctor. "It causes fibrosis of the heart muscle and a susceptibility to fatal cardiac arrhythmias and is rarely diagnosed. Often the first sign we have of a patient's condition, with ARVD, is sudden cardiac death."

He was not sure where to keep his body. Where was it supposed to go? His arms felt very long, but with no hands: where were all the fingers? His cheeks tingled.

At the window was a tree and a wall, he saw, staring. They were several floors off the ground; it could be six, he thought, or two. He noticed the tree. That should be a clue… or maybe not. He imagined the tree floating.

"It's instantaneous. She would not have been aware of what was happening," went on the doctor. "It's very, very rapid. You don't have to worry about suffering. She was already gone by the time the paramedics got there. Probably by the time the car stopped. Would you like to see her? You can see her if you want to."

"Oh," said T. He shook his head, or maybe by accident he was nodding. He felt a chill spike through him, up from the soles of his feet. His face was hot but the middle of him felt icy. He shivered.

"Come with me," said the nurse, and the doctor separated from them at the door.

He followed her white back again and thought he would never not be following it; almost hoped. It would guide him. Keep in line, he thought, stay in line… it was all he could do, all he would ever do.

They turned a corner and another one. People were shapeless as they passed him, wretched. The dreadful homeliness of the race. A laugh, another door opened, and there on the table was a covered woman, paper blanket all the way up to her neck. He moved closer without trying.

He was directly above the face now and something was unnatural about it-the skin was sallow, the fall cheekbones too sharp. He had never seen them so sharp. And the jaw looked weak, as though it had collapsed toward the chest. Unhinged. The certainty came to him, almost as a relief, that the face was shaped wrong, so it could not be her.

He leaned over and touched the cheek, which was not cool but tepid. Lukewarm. Then he felt squeezing and fluttering in his chest, and caved in.

He got home by himself, he never knew how, and lay there in the sheets. After the first night his mother came in, on the edge of his vision like a hair trembling at the corner of a projected screen. She had a broken arm and scraped face, but he barely saw them. Time was foreign for many days, the texture of time and all things alien in their existence, at once strange and dull. He was flattened, pinned on his bed.

He heard his mother explain her condition to him. Once or twice she described the minor accident that had occurred when Beth had lost consciousness. He could not stand to listen.

She sat on the bed and felt concerned-he knew this, though he closed his eyes and could not bring himself to say anything-and twice a day she made him food and brought it in to him on a tray. It rested on the nightstand beside the Mass cards that piled up there, which she also brought to him: apparently Masses were being said for Beth. Then the food was cold and limp and she took it away again. He drank water from time to time, finding a glass in his hand with ice cubes that clicked against it thinly, but nothing else entered him. He had the suspicion that cogs were spinning, the universe beyond his walls was functioning and he was not, but he had no choice. His dog lay on the bed alongside, jumping down periodically to eat from her bowl or when his mother offered to walk her.