Lydia Millet: How the Dead Dream

She stared at him, annoyed, gaping slightly, one hand on a stack of towels. He looked her in the eye, affecting an earnest concern for Perry's well-being. In fact the jocks in question had been easy to convince and now received a mere five a week.

"You're a slick little bastard," she said finally, picking up the towels and turning her back on him. She walked out of the laundry room and slammed the door behind her.

He waited for a few seconds after her leave-taking, drawing deep breaths. Then he summoned his pride, squared his shoulders, and followed.

In the main there was seldom a reckoning, seldom any conflict. In his early adolescence what impressed him most often was the willingness of people to be fleeced-the ease, almost the gratitude with which they surrendered their assets. On his block, at least, where the housewives had expensive hair and his mother was the sole Catholic, his many good works appeared to offer a welcome relief from the mall and the salon. Almost monthly he collected for the United Way, the Boy Scouts of America, the YMCA or sometimes a church group conducting outreach to the poor and unfortunate. He always dedicated a percentage of the take to the cause at hand: so his efforts, if not entirely selfless, yielded what he liked to call a "positive net effect."

And this was the language he used in the confessional, which he visited at intervals to keep his mother happy. His father, once he recovered from a brief but intense bout of spirituality around the time of the wedding, had declined to set foot in the church. This seemed to sadden his mother, and T. felt it was his duty to take up the slack. He was not hesitant to disclose all his activities; for after all, he reasoned, the priest was bound to observe the sanctity of the confessional and must be quite a sound businessman himself, for the local diocese alone had assets in the hundreds of millions. Indeed he was surprised when the priest did not laud him for his strategies.

"I can't believe you're penalizing me. My economic activities have a positive net effect on the community as a whole," he repeated staunchly, when he was set the heavy penance of ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys.

"They would have a greater `net effect' if you refrained from lying and stealing, Thomas," said the priest gently.

T. shook his head. "That's what we call looking at the glass half empty."

When he recalled those years it was in brief flashes; there was no continuous line but only a few vivid moments. His mother back then was different from the mother he left when he went to college. When he got home after school she was always in the house, a steady glowing fixture. She smiled and was interested in him; she had soft pictures of the Virgin on the wall, some of them holding a baby Jesus T. believed might be a stand-in for him.

She wore a large crucifix beneath the hollow of her throat, which T.'s friends from school decried as "weird" and "foreign." Their own churches and mothers were unadorned and in their living rooms there were few pictures of anything but water lilies and fall leaves, flocks of geese flying over farmhouses in rolling country.

But they liked his mother and afforded her a certain respect, for she was pretty and kind and discreet. She welcomed the boys into the kitchen with sodas and lemonade in spring and hot drinks in the winter, and there she drew them into peaceful conversation but never kept them too long. All in all she seemed mainly concerned with her son's happiness.

His father commuted into the city for work and returned quite late at night on weekdays; he was dense and silent in the house on weekends, rarely seeking out others to speak to them. He watched sports and worked in the yard and the garage; he always seemed to be turning away to what occupied him. Later T. remembered mainly the sight of his back.

As he grew up his love became sophisticated. He no longer needed to touch coins or bills; he found his satisfaction in surges of energy, in the stream of contact between machines that processed binary. He learned to like abstract money better than its physical body. The solid house that money built sheltered him and he felt keenly that money was both everything and nothing, at once infinite, open potential and an end in itself.

Money was commerce and the movement of broad arms. It was how, in the great halls of trade and public service, the walls were so thick that sound could not penetrate and the foundations so strong an earthquake could barely move them. There was the honor and austerity of money as he walked through art galleries, as he saw around him the collections of oil paintings by dead men, lit so carefully that warmth seemed to emanate from within-and not because their art was loved or understood but because it could be sold and bought for handsome stems. He gazed upon the paintings steadily and for a moment thought he knew their private beauty as his own, as though it had only ever meant the same thing once, to him and him alone: and as he turned away he felt a hush of air rise in the corridors.

There was the noble trace of money in the half-imagined bodies of the dinosaurs, looming with arched necks in the shadowed halls of natural history museums, the back-lit shapes of toothy deep-sea fish brought up from dark fathoms below; money in the shining link between the Treasury Building and the aircraft that flew across the continent, the trains that ran through mountain towns, the cabins perched among the pines. There was money in the grandeur of the ranks of the imperial armies as they might march across the deserts underneath the skies, in the great thick cables that ran beneath the surging Atlantic, the intricate and freezing satellites that whirred a thousand miles above the surface of the earth, displaying all the ingenuity and subtlety of humankind as their metal veins ran silver in the moon's reflected light. It was the alchemy of money then, the shivering power of its quiet numerals, the wish of money that was such a clear command.

Currency infused all things, from the small to the monolithic. And to be a statesman the first thing needed was not morals, public service, or the power of rhetoric; the first thing needed was money. Because finally there was always a single answer. As there was only one intelligence residing in a self, as trees grew upward toward the sun, as women lived outward and men walked in insulation to the end of their lives: when all was said and done, from place to place and country to country, forget the subtleties of right and wrong, the struggle toward affinity. In the lurch and flux, in all the variation and the same, it was only money that could set a person free.

Of having private gluts of feeling, holding his secrets close, and seeming all the while the whitest of white bread; of being perfectly opaque and seeming transparent; of being merely well-informed and shrewd while seeming like a prodigy-he was guilty of all of these and in all of them excelled.

By the time he left home to attend college in a small town in North Carolina he had amassed sufficient funds for an account with a discount brokerage firm. He attended classes in deference to the wishes of his parents but all the while his real work was day trading. He was always discreet, and few knew of his enterprise; when he had losses he did not reveal them and of course his wins went unheralded also, which gave him on some days an air of quiet satisfaction.

The stiff discipline of discretion was part of his training. It was crucial, he believed, to learn which aspects of his character to make available to sight and which to keep hidden. Honesty was seldom the best policy in social intercourse; and when it was invoked as an ideal, he felt, it merely reflected a childish desire for pure simplicity in matters of personal trade. Those who claimed shriekingly that honesty was a sovereign virtue were in fact merely fearful of the complex.