Lydia Millet - How the Dead Dream

As he regained strength his mother's mental health seemed to falter again, as though, watching him be restored, she deemed herself released at long last; as though she could resign her duties and retire once more into premature senescence.

He saw her almost daily when he walked his dog. Invariably she was seated at her dining room table, face bent low over a jigsaw puzzle as her reading glasses slid down her nose. She worked on one puzzle after the next with no rest between them, keeping a stockpile at the ready, and when she finished placed each one atop its predecessor in a stack in the closet. Because she made her selections on the advice of a young clerk who worked at a nearby toy store, and content was irrelevant, puzzles featuring water lilies, moon landings and civil war battlefields all came within her purview and passed out of it equally. Because she did not like interruptions to break her concentration, talk was often stilted, and T. would soon leave again, his dog straining at the leash to continue their walk.

He had barely noticed while Beth was living but he had no friends outside business: he had spent all his free time with her and now was left with no one. He took up the habit of playing racquetball thrice weekly with Fulton, who slammed the ball so hard against the walls and the ceiling of the court that a former partner, omitting to don safety goggles, had lost the use of an eye.

He played only partly for the exercise and expedience and partly for entertainment. Fulton, who specialized in mutual funds when he was not investing his wife's family fortune in T.'s projects, could go from zero to screaming fury in ten seconds flat. He delivered angry monologues as he played, expletives often drowned in the deafening ricochet; and his phrases were punctuated with vicious swipes from his powerful but imprecise forehand.

"That-piece-of-shit-had-the-goddamnsweaty- little-balls," he might scream, running and leaping to slash downward with his racquet, "to-say-that-wecould-not- upzone!"

In racquetball no response was needed for Fulton to proceed with his soliloquy, and this rendered the sport relaxing. When Fulton suffered a setback or personal loss-his son was sidelined on the soccer team, his daughter's orthodontist indicted for tax evasion-his rage stayed bottled only long enough to reach the courts, where it was funneled easily. There was no subtlety to Fulton, who was always most alive when fulminating. At Fulton's sure-footed advance, complexity took flight: what did not surrender to his simple will to dominate was plowed under forthwith, and wrongs were crudely and rapidly redressed. The sheer effectiveness of a brute had never been so clear to T.

Observing the investor's unfettered path through life T. felt his distaste tempered by incredulousness. But though he patronized Fulton, often speaking to him as others might to children or the feeble-minded, he also had to stand back and cede his position when confronted by the stampeding bull. Stupid rage commanded the obedience of more even-tempered men in a way impossible to deny or moderate; a Fulton cured of his instinct toward wrath would be a pitiful creature.

Beth had only met Fulton once, over dinner, on a night when Fulton had chosen to adopt a curiously meek stance. It was as though he had known by instinct when to retreat; for his quiet deference to Beth, which T. thought bordered on toadying, had marked him forever in her eyes as a gentle, selfeffacing presence. Later that night, as she and T. prepared for bed, she had remarked innocently that she really liked Fulton. "Does he have just a little bit of a lisp?" she had asked with the lilt of sympathy in her voice, raising the coverlet and sliding beneath. "Poor guy. That must be very hard for him in his job. Face-to-face with so many new people all day."

At the time he was vaguely puzzled by the remark but forgot it in the pleasure of bed; but later it dawned on him that on their way into the restaurant, briefing her on the backgrounds of those she was soon to meet, he had referred to Fulton as a banker. By banker, in this case, he had meant an individual who-on the strength of a Harvard MBA, family connections and very little in the way of native intelligence-made investment decisions for tens if not hundreds of thousands of retired nurses and welders, whose future pensions he placed in the hands of such corporate luminaries as Royal Dutch Shell and Monsanto.

But she had assumed he meant Fulton was a teller.

Fulton did not have a lisp; if Fulton were ever to meet a man with a lisp he would surely ridicule him, most likely with reference to words not contained in a standard dictionary. When it came to details such as social identity and stereotype Fulton was nothing if not a blunt instrument. Indeed Fulton suffered from no articulation disorder save rudeness; at one point during the dinner T. had noticed him talking about his daughter's pony with his mouth full of beef stroganoff. Possibly this was what had given Beth the impression of a speech impediment.

Since the two of them had not met again the illusion of Fulton's harmlessness had never been dispelled. Certainly, if he dwelled on it, he would be forced to concede that Beth's positive impression of Fulton could not have been sustained through multiple encounters: but as such encounters had never occurred he did not have to make the admission to himself openly.

Was it the man's brutishness itself, his triumphant profanity, that was so intriguing? Fulton's awareness of the independent existence of others was vestigial at best. T. had the feeling, in fact, that for Fulton the presence of other people in the world was purely hypothetical. Like the philosopher Bishop Berkeley, whom T. had read with considerable interest in college, Fulton was certain only of his own existence; all others were most likely figments.

On his mother's birthday he took her yellow roses. Once they had been her favorite but she barely looked at them, nodding at his entrance as she fitted a jigsaw piece. Leaning over her shoulder he saw the work in question was titled "The Ages of Man," a vintage puzzle depicting the stages of human evolution from Atistralopithectis to Homo sapiens. An illustration in full color, it pictured many different hominids, historically separated by millions of years, performing daily activities concurrently in what appeared to be a vaguely Native American encampment. Some among their number wore papooses on their backs and squatted in front of teepees.

Putting his face closer he saw an apelike figure labeled CRO MAGNON standing beside a small pile of sticks, thumb and index finger posed lightly on his chin as though lost in thought. Possibly he was discovering fire. Female apes milled uselessly in the background, their hairy breasts hidden behind interposed branches, and in a far corner a Homo erectus raised his cudgel over a frightened rabbit.

He smiled as he looked at it. It was primitive in depicting the primitive. That was it.

As a child he had thought man advanced.

He stood still now, back from his mother, frozen.

As a child he had thought man advanced.

Moving into the kitchen he found a pair of scissors in a disordered drawer; he cut the stems and stuck the roses into a vase. In former days his mother would have leapt to the task, but now she demonstrated no interest. Thorny stems in his grip he popped the lid of the trashcan, which was overflowing; he barely registered the smell of rancid food as he stood there, thorns digging into his thumbs.

That was what had changed, he thought. To love posterity and the great institutions you had to believe in the wisdom of men. You had to love them as a child might, gazing upward.

He recalled himself presently; a thin string of blood crawled down his wrist, tickling, and his nostrils were compressed. Atop the trash lay a limp piece of uncooked chicken, blueish. He coughed briefly, nauseated, and let the garbage lid fall shut again. He dropped the rose stems in the sink; he washed the blood off his hands. Two small punctures, was all.