Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

As a child he had rarely been able to think of sins to confess; in his own view he had committed none. Often he had made up a sin, knowing it was expected of him. And penance was a fairly easy punishment, a good bargain.

The church felt Latino, he reflected, whereas Angela's home church back east had a certain Anglo-Saxon reserve, a certain genteel repression. Here the walls were crowded with paintings of the saints, flowers strewn at their feet; deep colors surrounded them, animals and children, and the blood of the martyrs flowed crimson. He rose from the pew and walked the perimeter, gazing at them. The Virgin of Guadalupe, in green and red; St. Francis, preaching to the birds; St. Michael, St. Elena, St. Jude. On the windows, again and again, the Madonna and child and in the background the light of God, rays emanating from the disk of the sun.

This was what made it what it was, made it clutch the hearts of women and ennobled their silent men in armchairs. This was what made it the first world religion, with its two billion adherents, and rendered dull by comparison the merits of the too-serene Buddhists, the Moslems without graven images, the secularists like him. Of all the stories it alone offered a drama morbid and luscious and sentimentalwounding that suffered in silence, cuckolds and miracles and sadism and murder, forgiving spirits who rose from the tomb and shimmered on through the years. It was a bestselling love story, beautiful sad mother and perfect child, and in the background the absent father, pure energy, who was apparently benevolent despite appearances to the contrary, who was present despite his apparent absence, good despite his apparent cruelty, right despite his apparent wrongness, and beyond that all-knowing.

What a vast permission.

His mother emerged from the confessional, walked in front of the altar and came toward him, her face lightened. From the beginning so little had been asked of his father, he thought, so little asked and even less given.

Beth had wished to be wrapped in a simple cotton shroud. She had not wanted a coffin. He knew this from a conversation they once had in passing, whose relevance he had dismissed out of hand-a conversation that had seemed at the time like a morbid fancy. Her family, he assumed, would not have known of this preference; no doubt she lay embalmed in cherry and velvet.

In the early morning he ushered his dog through his mother's front door and woke her up by mistake; she was sleeping on the living room couch, having taken a sudden dislike to her bed. He apologized for waking her and whispered to her bleary, sleep-dug face that he was leaving on a road trip. He did not say where.

He drove and slept and drove; he reached the desert city shortly before sunset. Even at dusk the air was hot, and to the east he could already see an orange moon rising over the mountains. The cemetery was a flat field with rows of gaudy flowers dotting the brown grass under palm trees and eucalyptus. It took him a long time to find her, and there was no grass or stone yet. Hers was one in a row of new mounds, each with a small nametag on a stake at one end.

Someone had left a bunch of plastic roses near the stake that bore her nametag, bright magenta with a dull green stem protruding, and beside them a small plastic Jesus on a cross. It was a garish Jesus with huge imploring eyes and light-blue tears flowing from them like prison tattoos. Roughly he grabbed the plastic Jesus and the roses and clamped them tinder his arm. All around him were corpses with plastic flowers: would the people buried here want these ugly tokens? Fake flowers defeated the purpose of remembering-fake flowers that lasted forever, making the effort of further visits unnecessary. The field of thousands of them….

On the other hand, plastic was eternal.

Most of these people had died of old age; they might not mind the shorthand of plastic. But she had not been old and so she was not the same as the old, who more deserved to be dead.

He looked around him once, swiftly. There was no one, only a man with a lawnmower in the far distance and the rush of traffic along the road beside him. He strode with the Jesus and roses toward a chain-link fence that marked the sides of a ditch. He hurled them both into it, toward the cavernous mouth of a pipe.

"There," he said aloud.

Now the Jesus lay at the edge of the pipe, face down.

He was about to turn but could not. The sight of the Jesus face-down was abject; it was wrong. He had to get it back.

He would have climbed the fence, but it was too high to step over and too weak to hold his weight if he climbed. Instead he ran along the fence, seeking an opening. There was a desperate urgency to him: every second the Jesus lay in the mud was pressing on him unbearably. He found a tear in the fence and stepped through into the ditch, where his feet went over candy wrappers and bottles until he could lean down and grab the Jesus out of the pipe. Saved! A save.

He held the Jesus tightly. Despite its garishness, or possibly because of it, he was terribly sorry. He would keep the Jesus close, where nothing bad could happen to it.

He was breathing hard and felt afraid of being caught there, someone emerging from the darkness of the pipe and seizing him.

He walked back to the grave and looked at the plastic stake, looked at the ground, barely believing her body was there. He was stepping on it… he would pretend she was not here at all. He could not think of her decomposing. He wished she was thin air. That was what she should be.

The base of the Jesus said MADE IN CHINA.

He took it back to the car with him.

Later at the motel he read a newspaper in bed, the same sentence four or five times before he realized he was failing to read it. What would she say, watching him here? She would see his newspaper open to the business pages; she would think he had already forgotten her; but even as he had this nagging thought he also registered, in the long smallprint columns, a P/E ratio of 45. He had been holding the stock far too long and it was grossly overvalued. Her death had diverted his attention from its meteoric rise-fortunate, since he would have already sold elsewise, having guessed it was peaking long before this.

She would be so injured! — to follow this train of thought. As consolation you thought of the dead and liked to assume them with you in some sense, present in the ether or the fiber of the mind. But then you had to admit that if they were in fact present, abstractly present as you wished to believe, if they were there in the molecules, their spirit in everything… what fresh horrors would they find? If the dead could be spirit must they also read minds?

They must be revered, must be felt in the air; at the same time they could not be let in.

He still relied on the vision of her-shaking her head ruefully, dismissing with her competent assurance the suggestion of a grief that might be inconsolable. Only she could consign her own death to the tumult and natural flurry of event. He could not do it alone. It was crucial to the maintenance of his steadiness. All things were reconcilable, she said; all things had been accounted for.

Each day for the next week he rose at the same time and drove to a nearby diner; ate eggs and toast; then drove back to the hotel, as the heat of the day oppressed, and closeted himself with his television to watch the market, the telephone at his elbow. If he could not work his current projects while he was here at least he could speculate.

In the hour before sunset he always headed back to the cemetery. It was only then, at the close of day, that the desert air settled into gentleness; it was then that a warm wind blew over the sand lots and the baked pavement began to cool, paper and dust skittering in swirls along the roadsides. The sky turned sweet, fleshy colors of orange and pink and the moon rose over the dark line of trees and hills, vaster than it had ever seemed before. He could see the craters in fine detail, the gray hollow rounds where the eyes seemed to be. By the time the stin was finally sinking behind the mountains he was usually pulling slowly along the cemetery road, duncolored, half-visible birds swooping up from the dirt, flapping beside the front wheels of his car before they disappeared.