Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

The desert had hard days but soft nights, he was learning. Nighttime was when it came into its own.

The third night he went to the grave he began to feel he had to bring something. Yet nothing came to mind, or what came to mind was wrong for her, wrong as the plastic Jesus. The fourth night he placed a small twig on the dirt, a twig with a living leaf, snapped off a hedge at the cemetery's perimeter. The fifth night he moved the twig and then added others, making a nest of them on the mound; the sixth night he dragged a broken branch across the dried grass to add to the clot of brush that was already there.

The seventh night he woke up at three a.m. It had struck him as he slept that her grave was surmounted by a pyre now, with tinder and kindling.

He pulled on his clothes and drove; he parked his car in an empty lot down the street, for they locked the cemetery gates soon after dark. Clouds crossed the moon, silver and streaming.

At the grave he knelt down with a match. It blew out and he lit another, stooped over the wood. He had never built a fire in the woods, never even built a fire in a fireplace since his parents always had a fake log. The tinder burned low without lighting the main fuel, and the sparks died. He gathered a few more twigs and found a bag of lawn litter beside a shed; with this extra kindling the fire crawled till it took.

He was pleased to see what a tall blaze the small pyre made. As it burned higher he breathed in the smell of the smoke and watched cinders rising and floating; after a while he dropped to the dirt and sat down, gazing into the fluid shift of the flames. It was lovely, he thought. He could almost think it was something she had said once, unloosed.

Personally he would choose cremation; he would have chosen it for her, if it had been up to him, for if you were burned then you could go anywhere. On the smoke your particles would be dispersed over foreign countries, the poles and the tropics; who knew where you might end?

He watched with orange searing his eyes and when the fire was embers he stood and stretched his cramped legs. He blinked up at the darkness until the fiery imprints faded; he bent to touch the ashes and lifted his fingers to his month.

On the way to his car he heard sirens in the distance but he was unalarmed. He did not hurry, did not change his pace. At the street the coast was still clear. No cars, only traffic lights in a long line into the distance, shifting silently from red to green.

That he had stood for some time beside the fire and no one had approached him while it burned, that he walked away at his leisure and got into his car, had an effect: he could not say what it was but suddenly he had room around him, as though he could move with lightness.

Authority was not all.

Was it she who had a new freedom, or him? He thought they might have burned off together.

But his hotel room was airless. He sat upright on the bed, alert between the four walls. Why should this city have been the place that produced her, dry and lusterless place? Wide streets and strip malls, flat shining acres of trucks for sale beneath the grueling sun. . but he would not see her mother, though she lived nearby and might have told him something. His was an inquiry into which no other persons could safely be admitted, because once others were let in there was always the risk of distortion. There would be no whole and single unity of remembrance if he went outside for knowledge; he wanted his own Beth to remain, the pillar of what she was.

He could see the dismal afternoon elapsing already, he and the mother seated gawkily on a couch, awkward in the knowledge that they might have been family but now would remain strangers. And her pathetic apartment-it would have to be so now, even if it had once been otherwisewould leave an impression on him that detracted from his other memories of her daughter. Instead he and the mother, in remote locations, would live on in complete separation. In time one would die and the other would never know the difference.

Soon grief ceased to order his time and his old demeanor returned intact. But while the pace of his life was restored the tone of it had altered, though the precise nature of this alteration at first escaped him. In keeping up his routine in business he was now almost dutiful-almost as if the accumulation of capital was nothing more than an obligation kept tip for the sake of honor. Still the obligation was strong, and he held onto it.

First among his new tasks was the purchase of the jungle island in Belize. So inexpensive was this pristine land with its surrounding reefs and atolls that he considered himself welladvised to focus his acquisition program in the tropics, assuming he could gain enough expertise in transnational business and tax practices. There in the sunny lands lay the leisure fantasy of all northern peoples; there despots fell, borders opened, and wealthy tourists streamed. Or in some cases, his contacts informed him, despots did not fall but would cooperate for minimal subsidy; borders still opened; and younger but still wealthy tourists streamed, in disregard of despots.

He went to the island twice a month to meet with local contractors, taking investors with him. His property was a twist of mangrove and deciduous forest in the midst of sea with no fresh water or roads; on the small strip of open shore sand fleas bit relentlessly and pelicans splattered white on the rocks. He stayed a short boat trip away, in a luxurious beachside resort on the mainland.

Once a guide took them out to scuba-dive from a small motorboat, to gauge the asset value of the reefs; he instructed them on the basic functions of valves, how to sink and rise again. Fulton, his investor, declined to enter the water, remaining on the boat with his wetsuit peeled open down to the waist and a cooler of beer at hand. He sat fishing off the bow with a rented pole, catching nothing but refusing to budge from his post.

So T. dove by himself, over the guide's objection. He had not dived before or even snorkeled but it was not hard, beyond the awkwardness of the heavy tank as he rolled backward over the boat's side. He swam peacefully thirty feet below, moving his fins languidly among conch and sea cucumbers, and was glad to be alone there. He found he luxuriated in the perfect seal of his mask, the muted quality of sound.

On the veranda of the hotel restaurant he watched wethaired children run around the pool, laughing as the sun glanced off the water behind them, chasing each other on the slippery tiles until they cannonballed into the deep end shrieking. At his own resort he planned docks for boats and for swimming, and on the end of the swim docks would be circular decks with palm-thatch roofs, white hammocks beneath them suspended around a floating bar. Guests could drink their cocktails standing in the shallows; fish would gather around their legs to feed on the scraps, bits of lemon and maraschino cherry and olive. Sand as blindingly white as snow, which made the shallow water above it look deep turquoise for the brochure photographs, would soon be shipped in and dumped over the native sand, which was colored a natural and dull brown.

But first the shoreline would have to be scraped of vegetation, so he went out to the island to supervise the clearing of the first beachhead. From a small yacht anchored in the shallows he drank coffee and watched workers with power saws cut down and bundle the bushy trees along the waterline. As the limbs fell their small glossy leaves rained down onto the water and the boat captain, seated behind T. with a hand on the tiller, smiled gently and described them to him: red mangrove, black mangrove, white. Buttonwood.

He thought of her then, watching flotillas of leaves drifting and bobbing on the surface, and it was less difficult than before-as though the shock, once absorbed, had spread so thin and wide that it was only the skin of the world.